Nerves, Brain, or Heart? The Physiology of Emotions and the Mind-Body Problem in Russian Sentimentalism

Abstract

L Nikolai Karamzin's Letters of a Russian Traveler (1791-95), the narrator jokingly reports a case of love malady (liubovnaia bolezn') he had observed. His travel companion and friend, the young Danish Doctor B* [Bekker], during their stay in a Swiss inn, became infatuated with a beautiful from Yverdon. The lady left the inn the morning following the contraction of the ailment, and the young Dane, the narrator comments, was immediately cured.' The story with the Lady from Yverdon, however, was not over. Later, after Doctor Bekker and the Russian traveler part, the Dane sends his friend a letter in which he recounts that he managed to find his beauty (whose name, interestingly, turns out to be Iuliia, evoking Rousseau's heroine). In the course of his visit, however, Doctor Bekker discovers that she has a fiance and that her favorable acceptance of his attention was mere flirtation. In the letter to his Russian friend, the young doctor prefaces the account of his unfortunate romantic experience with the observation, Yes, my friend! I studied anatomy and medicine, and I know that the heart is indeed the source of life, although the reverent Doctor Megadidactos, together with the respectable Micrologos, sought the soul and the vital principle in that miraculous-and hidden from our eyes-entwining of the nerves.2 This scientific-philosophical and clearly polemical pronouncement introducing the account of a private amorous episode may seem misplaced and even comical. The young Dane himself quickly brushes it aside in a self-mocking gesture, saying, But I am afraid I digress from my subject and therefore, leaving the venerable Megadidactos and the respectable Mikrologos aside for now, I'll tell you frankly that the beautiful lady from Yverdon awakened such feelings in me as I cannot describe at this moment.3 Nonetheless,