Literary Insanity and Psychiatric Literacy: Youth, Mental Health, and Contemporary Russian Fiction

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AbstractIn the first post‐Soviet decade, Russian mental health professionals sounded the alarm about a looming psychiatric crisis affecting the nation’s youth. Some twenty years later, a spate of literary works seemingly marked the fictional apotheosis of these anxieties. Although critics have identified and reflected upon the significance of the “insanity cluster” in prose published around 2017, the youth of the protagonists has remained largely unconsidered. This essay focuses on three literary works that emerged at the intersection of two recent turns in contemporary Russian culture: the adolescent and the psychotherapeutic. These works featuring young, psychologically disturbed protagonists emphasize the corporeal aspects of mental illness. The characters strive to overcome the psyche or soul through empirically observable, bodily phenomena, such as violence against themselves and others, or sexual promiscuity. All three works unmask the harmful consequences of externalizing psychic abnormalities, of their teenage heroes’ belief that scarring one’s own body or that of another sentient being can ameliorate the symptoms of schizophrenia or other mental disturbances. With their complex and nuanced literary exploration of the interplay between “consciousness” and “flesh,” the three novels provide a fictional retort to narrowly mechanistic understandings of the psychology and behavior of youth.