Title State of Madness : Psychiatry, Literature, and Dissent After Stalin / Rebecca Reich

Published Baltimore, Maryland : Project Muse, 2018 Dekalb [Illinois] : NIU Press, [2018]

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Description 1 online resource (1 PDF (x, 283 pages)) Series NIU Series in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies NIU series in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian studies. Contents Soviet psychiatry and the art of diagnosis -- Thinking differently : the case of the dissidents -- Dialogue of selves : the case of Joseph Brodsky -- Creative madness : the case of Andrei Siniavskii -- Madness as mask : the case of Venedikt Erofeev Summary What madness meant was a fiercely contested question in Soviet society. State of Madness examines the politically fraught collision between psychiatric and literary discourses in the years after Joseph Stalin's death. State psychiatrists deployed set narratives of mental illness to pathologize dissenting politics and art. Dissidents such as Aleksandr Vol'pin, Vladimir Bukovskii, and Semen Gluzman responded by highlighting a pernicious overlap between those narratives and their life stories. The state, they suggested in their own psychiatrically themed texts, had crafted an idealized view of reality that itself resembled a pathological work of art. In their unsanctioned poetry and prose, the writers Joseph Brodsky, Andrei Siniavskii, and Venedikt Erofeev similarly engaged with psychiatric discourse to probe where creativity ended and insanity began. Together, these dissenters cast themselves as psychiatrists to a sick society. By challenging psychiatry's right to declare them or what they wrote insane, dissenters exposed as a self-serving fiction the state's renewed claims to rationality and modernity in the post-Stalin years. They were, as they observed, like the child who breaks the spell of collective delusion in Hans Christian Andersen's story "The Emperor's New Clothes." In a society where normality means insisting that the naked monarch is clothed, it is the truth-teller who is pathologized. Situating literature's encounter with psychiatry at the center of a wider struggle over authority and power, this bold interdisciplinary study will appeal to literary specialists; historians of culture, science, and medicine; and scholars and students of the Soviet Union and its legacy for Russia today Analysis Joseph Brodsky, Andrei Siniavskii, Venedikt Erofeev, Hans Christian Andersen, Emporer's New Clothes, psychiatry and literature, Soviet psychiatrists, unsanctioned prose, unsanctioned poetry Bibliography Includes bibliographical references (pages 261-275) and index Notes Print version record Subject Psychiatry -- Political aspects -- Soviet Union Dissenters -- Soviet Union Involuntary treatment -- Soviet Union Mental illness -- Soviet Union Psychiatry -- Soviet Union -- History Literature and mental illness -- Soviet Union Psychiatry -- history History, 20th Century Psychiatry in Literature Dissenters Involuntary treatment Literature and mental illness Mental illness Psychiatry Psychiatry -- Political aspects SUBJECT USSR Subject Soviet Union Sowjetunion Genre/Form Electronic books History Form Electronic book ISBN 9781609092337 1609092333 9781501757600 1501757601

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