Acknowledgments Note on Translation and Transliteration Introduction: Approaching Russian Madness ANGELA BRINTLINGER PART ONE: MADNESS, THE STATE, AND SOCIETY 1 A Cheerful Empress and Her Gloomy Critics: Catherine the Great and the Eighteenth-Century Melancholy Controversy ILYA VINITSKY 2 The Osvidetel’stvovanie and Ispytanie of Insanity: Psychiatry in Tsarist Russia LIA IANGOULOVA 3 Madness as an Act of Defence of Personality in Dostoevsky’sThe Double ELENA DRYZHAKOVA 4 Vsevolod Garshin, the Russian Intelligentsia, and Fan Hysteria ROBERT D. WESSLING 5 On Hostile Ground: Madness and Madhouse in Joseph Brodsky’s‘Gorbunov and Gorchakov' LEV LOSEFF PART TWO: MADNESS, WAR, AND REVOLUTION 6 The Concept of Revolutionary Insanity in Russian History MARTIN A. MILLER 7 The Politics of Etiology: Shell Shock in the Russian Army, 1914–1918 IRINA SIROTKINA 8 Lives Out of Balance: The ‘Possible World’ of Soviet Suicide during the 1920s KENNETH PINNOW 9 Early Soviet Forensic Psychiatric Approaches to Sex Crime, 1917–1934 DAN HEALEY PART THREE: MADNESS AND CREATIVITY 10 Writing about Madness: Russian Attitudes toward Psyche and Psychiatry, 1887–1907 ANGELA BRINTLINGER 11 ‘Let Them Go Crazy’: Madness in the Works of Chekhov MARGARITA ODESSKAYA 12 The Genetics of Genius: V.P. Efroimson and the Biosocial Mechanisms of Heightened Intellectual Activity YVONNE HOWELL 13 Madwomen without Attics: The Crazy Creatrix and the Procreative Iurodivaia HELENA GOSCILO 14 A ‘New Russian’ Madness? Fedor Mikhailov’s Novel Idiot and Roman Kachanov’s Film Daun Khaus ANDREI ROGACHEVSKII 15 Methods of Madness and Madness as a Method MIKHAIL EPSTEIN Afterword JULIE V. BROWN Bibliography Contributors

"This collection is an important contribution to our understanding of the ways in which the shifting discourse of madness offers a rich and varied lens through which to explore Russia's troubled experience of modernity."

‘“Madness (bezumie) is a language,” Mikhail Epstein writes in his contribution to this wonderfully eclectic and wide-ranging volume. In the Russian literary tradition, that language has enjoyed high status: it was spoken by holy fools, saintly idiots, honest citizens incarcerated in psychiatric hospitals, great poets in their capacity as prophets. In the post-Soviet period, this spectrum broadened to include de-ideologized studies of neurosis, depression, suicide, fan hysteria, shell shock, revolutionary trauma — all of which are discussed here by Russians from inside their own culture as well as by outsiders and bi-culturals. A fascinating book on that most difficult task: making cultural sense out of worlds and psyches designed to work on the far side of reason.’

'"Madness (bezumie) is a language," Mikhail Epstein writes in his contribution to this wonderfully eclectic and wide-ranging volume. In the Russian literary tradition, that language has enjoyed high status: it was spoken by holy fools, saintly idiots, honest citizens incarcerated in psychiatric hospitals, great poets in their capacity as prophets. In the post-Soviet period, this spectrum broadened to include de-ideologized studies of neurosis, depression, suicide, fan hysteria, shell shock, revolutionary trauma - all of which are discussed here by Russians from inside their own culture as well as by outsiders and bi-culturals. A fascinating book on that most difficult task: making cultural sense out of worlds and psyches designed to work on the far side of reason.' -- Caryl Emerson, A. Watson Armour III University Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Princeton University