State of Madness: Psychiatry, Literature, and Dissent After Stalin by Reich Rebecca (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 165 series of acquaintances the author interviewed to frame his representation of the Gulag (Grossman was never arrested himself), helping this text to become both his most ambitious stylistic work and the clearest crystallization of his political-philosophical views. A question arises from Popoff’s references to the poet Semen Lipkin’s memoir about Grossman, Zhizn´ i sud´ba Vasiliia Grossmana (Moscow, 1990). Lipkin was Grossman’s confidant in the post-war years and his text formed an important basis for early scholarship on the author. However, recent research by Iurii Bit-Iunan and David M. Fel´dman, published in Russian as Vasilii Grossman v zerkale literaturnykh intrig (Moscow, 2015) and Vasilii Grossman: literaturnaia biografiia v istoriko-politicheskom kontekste (Moscow, 2016), has questioned some of the detail of Lipkin’s account. Popoff likely decided that, as the memoir of Grossman’s closest friend, Lipkin’s text could not be dismissed. Furthermore, her analysis does not rely too heavily on any one particular source. However, it would have been helpful to note the potential problems of memory and subjectivity inherent to using this, or indeed any, memoir as a source for biography. Nonetheless, Popoff’s work is an engaging contribution to Grossman scholarship likely to appeal to general and expert readers alike. Its contextual approach provides a useful framework with which to introduce Grossman’s work within the historical developments that shaped his writing and ideas. Her readings of the author’s early novels and identification of new source material in regard to the later works are very helpful for those wishing to understand his thought and narrative style in detail. University College, University of Oxford O. T. Jones Reich, Rebecca. State of Madness: Psychiatry, Literature, and Dissent After Stalin. Northern Illinois University Press, Dekalb, IL, 2018. xi + 283 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $60.00. A literary study is only as good as its villain. In the case of Rebecca Reich’s analysis of Soviet punitive psychiatry, dissident writing, and their intersections, the author has found an excellent antagonist in Andrei Snezhnevskii, who ‘at the time of his death in 1987 […] had been memorialized as a consummate clinician’, but ‘just two years later […] was being remembered as the architect of a diagnostic system that facilitated the pathologization of inakomyslie’ (p. 24). Through a series of multifaceted close readings of writings by psychiatrists including Snezhnevskii, Reich demonstrates in her first chapter how ‘the business of a psychiatrist was making accurate diagnoses based on SEER, 98, 1, JANUARY 2020 166 objective facts and methods. Yet within that context was room for a subjective skill that ultimately amounted to an ‘“art [of diagnosis]”’ (p. 27). Starting from this opposition, Reich explores how the state and its psychiatrists, on the one hand, and political dissidents and dissenting writers, on the other, engaged in a rhetorical war from the 1950s to the 1980s. Doctors could hospitalize those ‘inakomyslie’ for expressing beliefs that contradicted Sovietideology,leadingdissentersintoa‘discursivetrap’(p.5).Thepsychiatrists regarded their diagnoses as objectively pure, despite the fact that they were constructed from interviews, as well as from other evidence that required interpretation; indeed, their psychiatric reports betrayed a subjective approach to describing patients’ life histories, symptoms, attitudes toward the state, or even their art. Any arguments that dissenters would make against their own diagnosis could then be deployed as evidence of insanity. The vicious circle of Soviet psychiatry grew tighter around them as the very question of what it meant to be mad was addressed in these various realms of society. But such rhetoric cuts both ways, of course. Dissenters of assorted stripes fought back, as Reich shows in the remaining chapters, by ‘depathologiz[ing] themselves and pathologiz[ing] the state’, by arguing through their writings (artistic or otherwise) that it was society that had taken the dive into madness (p. 60). In chapter two, Reich focuses on political dissidents (Aleksandr Vol´pin, Vladimir Bukovskii, Semen Gluzman) and the strategies they developed to combat the discursive trap. For instance, Vol´pin promoted appealing to legalese and the alleged rights of Soviet citizens over the psychiatric discourse. Reich afterward turns her attention elsewhere, taking up literary figures rather than explicitly political ones. Joseph Brodsky...