Madness and the mad in Russian culture / edited by Angela Brintlinger and Ilya Vinitsky.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Brintlinger, Angela.

Vinitskii, I. IU. (Ilia IUrevich), 1969-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Mental illness--Russia (Federation)--History.

Mental illness.

Mental illness in literature.

Literature and mental illness--Russia (Federation).

Literature and mental illness.

Psychiatry--Russia (Federation)--History.

Psychiatry.

Genius and mental illness--Russia (Federation).

Genius and mental illness.

Mentally ill--Russia (Federation)--Biography.

Mentally ill.

Russia (Federation)--Civilization.

Russia (Federation).

Physical Description:

1 online resource (344 p.)

Place of Publication:

Toronto : University of Toronto Press, c2007.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

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.

Contents:

A cheerful empress and her gloomy critics : Catherine the Great and the eighteenth-century melancholy controversy / Ilya Vinitsky

The Osvidetel'stvovanie and Ispytanie of insanity : psychiatry in Tsarist Russia / Lia Iangoulova

Madness as an act of defence of personality in Dostoevsky's The double / Elena Dryzhakova

Vsevolod Garshin, the Russian intelligentsia, and fan hysteria / Robert D. Wessling

On hostile ground : madness and madhouse in Joseph Brodsky's 'Gorbunov and Gorchakov' / Lev Loseff

The concept of revolutionary insanity in Russian history / Martin A. Miller

The politics of etiology : shell shock in the Russian army, 1914-1918 / Irina Sirotkina

Lives out of balance : the 'possible world' of Soviet suicide during the 1920s / Kenneth Pinnow

Early Soviet forensic psychiatric approaches to sex crime, 1917-1934 / Dan Healey

Writing about madness : Russian attitudes toward psyche and psychiatry, 1887-1907 / Angela Brintlinger

'Let them go crazy' : madness in the works of Chekhov / Margarita Odesskaya

The genetics of genius : V. P. Efroimson and the biosocial mechanisms of heightened intellectual activity / Yvonne Howell

Madwomen without attics : the crazy creatrix and the procreative Iurodivaia / Helena Goscilo

A 'new Russian' madness? : Fedor Mikhailov's novel Idiot and Roman Kachanov's film Daun Khaus / Andrei Rogachevskii

Methods of madness and madness as a method / Mikhail Epstein.

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references: p. [301]-328.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 08. Jul 2019)

ISBN:

1-4875-1068-3

1-4875-2020-4

1-4426-8453-4

OCLC:

1013955040