Madness and the Mad in Russian Culture / / Ilya Vinitsky, Angela Brintlinger.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter UTP eBook-Package Backlist 2000-2015
• TeilnehmendeR: Brintlinger, Angela,; Vinitsky, Ilya,
• Place / Publishing House: Toronto : : University of Toronto Press, , [2016]; ©2006
• Year of Publication: 2016
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource

The problem of madness has preoccupied Russian thinkers since the beginning of Russia?s troubled history and has been dealt with repeatedly in literature, art, film, and opera, as well as medical, political, and philosophical essays. Madness has been treated not only as a medical or psychological matter, but also as a metaphysical one, encompassing problems of suffering, imagination, history, sex, social and world order, evil, retribution, death, and the afterlife.Madness and the Mad in Russian Culture represents a joint effort by American, British, and Russian scholars ? historians, literary scholars, sociologists, cultural theorists, and philosophers ? to understand the rich history of madness in the political, literary, and cultural spheres of Russia. Editors Angela Brintlinger and Ilya Vinitsky have brought together essays that cover over 250 years and address a wide variety of ideas related to madness ? from the involvement of state and social structures in questions of mental health, to the attitudes of major Russian authors and cultural figures towards insanity and how those attitudes both shape and are shaped by the history, culture, and politics of Russia.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Note on Translation and Transliteration -- Introduction: Approaching Russian Madness / Brintlinger, Angela -- PART ONE. Madness, the State, and Society -- 1. A Cheerful Empress and Her Gloomy Critics: Catherine the Great and the Eighteenth-Century Melancholy Controversy / Vinitsky, Ilya -- 2. The Osvidetel'stvovanie and Ispytanie of Insanity: Psychiatry in Tsarist Russia / Iangoulova, Lia -- 3. Madness as an Act of Defence of Personality in Dostoevsky's The Double / Dryzhakova, Elena -- 4. Vsevolod Garshin, the Russian Intelligentsia, and Fan Hysteria / Wessling, Robert D. -- 5. On Hostile Ground: Madness and Madhouse in Joseph Brodsky's 'Gorbunov and Gorchakov' / Loseff, Lev -- PART TWO. Madness, War, and Revolution -- 6. The Concept of Revolutionary Insanity in Russian History / Miller, Martin A. -- 7. The Politics of Etiology: Shell Shock in the Russian Army, 1914-1918 / Sirotkina, Irina -- 8. Lives Out of Balance: The 'Possible World' of Soviet Suicide during the 1920s / Pinnow, Kenneth -- 9. Early Soviet Forensic Psychiatric Approaches to Sex Crime, 1917-1934 / Healey, Dan -- PART THREE. Madness and Creativity -- 10. Writing about Madness: Russian Attitudes toward Psyche and Psychiatry, 1887-1907 / Brintlinger, Angela -- 11. 'Let Them Go Crazy': Madness in the Works of Chekhov / Odesskaya, Margarita -- 12. The Genetics of Genius: V.P. Efroimson and the Biosocial Mechanisms of Heightened Intellectual Activity / Howell, Yvonne -- 13. Madwomen without Attics: The Crazy Creatrix and the Procreative Iurodivaia / Goscilo, Helena -- 14. A 'New Russian' Madness? Fedor Mikhailov's Novel Idiot and Roman Kachanov's Film Daun Khaus / Rogachevskii, Andrei -- 15. Methods of Madness and Madness as a Method / Epstein, Mikhail -- Afterword / Brown, Julie V. -- Bibliography -- Contributors