Diagnosing Literary Genius: A Cultural History of Psychiatry in Russia, 1880-1930 by Irina Sirotkina (review)

Abstract

MLRy 100.3, 2005 887 Diagnosing Literary Genius: A Cultural History of Psychiatry in Russia, 1880-1930. By Irina Sirotkina. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press. 2002. X+ 269PP. ?33.50. ISBN 0-801-87689-3. Paul Julius Mobius wrote pathographies of artists such as Rousseau, Schopenhauer, and Goethe in part out of a desire to correct unjustified statements that were made about the illnesses of famous people. By examining how Russian physicians beginning in 1890 developed the genre inaugurated by Mobius, Sirotkina attempts to update the existing body of literature dedicated to the history of psychiatry in Russia. While acknowledging the contributions made by Tikhon ludin and Dmitrii Fedotov in Russia and Julie Vail Brown and Kenneth Dix in the West, Sirotkina argues that this is a history which has not yet been comprehensively written. She chooses pathographies as her tool because 'Russian psychiatrists drew on literary resources more intensely and in more diverse ways than did their Western counterparts' (p. 6) because of the lack of alternative outlets in public and political life. The study focuses on the period 1880-1930 as a time when a large number of major transformations took place in the profession of psychiatry: the achievement of professional standing, a search for new forms of practice, the introduction of psychotherapy, and the crucial changes that followed the Revolution. Each chapter is structured around an analysis of the work of a particular psychiatrist, or psychiatrists, and considers their contribution both to the growth of psychiatry and to the understanding of the oeuvre of a Russian author. In Chapter 1, 'Gogol, Moralists and Nineteenth-Century Psychiatry', Sirotkina ably demonstrates how closely psychiatry of the period was tied up with the moral projects of literary critics and Russian society in general. In 1902, to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Nikolai Gogol, both Nikolai Bazhenov (1856-1923) and Vladimir Chizh (185 5-1922) published pathographies which suggested a medical underpinning to the moral evaluation of the writer. While her account of the reputation enjoyed by Gogol as an artist of wildly contradictory impulses offersno original in? sights, Sirotkina's survey of the various medical views propounded to account forthis is a welcome contribution. Chizh is shown to have been a major contributor to the body of pathographical work dedicated to Dostoevsky, the subject of Chapter 2. His work Dostoevsky as a Psychopathologist (1885) was typical of the impulse psychiatrists feltto square the circle by establishing a connection between Dostoevsky's supposed interest in abnormality in his fiction and his own non-fictional illness. Sirotkina here skilfully illustrates how interdependent was the work of literary critics and psychia? trists in terms of their analyses of both Gogol and Dostoevsky: one would often use the work of the other rather than the work of the original authors as the basis fortheir claims. And the parallels in the early lives of Dostoevsky and Bazhenov and their respective brushes with the authorities furtherunderlines the interconnected nature ofthe professions. It is also helpful to be reminded that any comments issued on Dos? toevsky in the late nineteenth century were unavoidably politicized as a consequence of the stature of the man. However, precisely in this respect, Sirotkina does not do enough to distinguish between the opinions offered on Dostoevsky by his countrymen and foreigners such as Cesare Lombroso. The views expressed on the mature Tolstoy by Turgenev and Lenin, among others, led to a view of the writer as some? how 'hysterical', and this made him the perfect subject for pathographers. Sirotkina frames her discussion of the treatment of Tolstoy within a biographical account of the pioneering psychiatrist Nikolai Osipov (1877-1934), who showed a particular interest in Tolstoy's My Confession and the unfinished Memoirs of a Madman. In her desire to write a comprehensive history of psychiatry, Sirotkina is occasionally distracted from her primary focus, as when she supplements details of Osipov's career with an account of how he was invited to work in a Moscow clinic by Vladimir Serbskii. In the final two chapters of this study the lack of a central literary author around whom 888 Reviews the discussion revolves is arguably a similar weakness...