General Information

Author/Creator

Reich, Rebecca, author.

Language

English.

Published

DeKalb : Northern Illinois University Press, 2018.

Physical Description

x, 283 pages ; 24 cm

Contents/Summary

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. Dissents 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 disource 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. This bold interdisciplinary study situates literature's encounter with psychiatry at the center of a wider struggle over authority and power--back cover.

Subjects

Subject

Literature and mental illness > Soviet Union.

Psychiatry > Soviet Union > History.

Mental illness > Soviet Union.

Involuntary treatment > Soviet Union.

Dissenters > Soviet Union.

Psychiatry > Political aspects > Soviet Union.

Psychiatry > History.

Psychiatry in Literature.

Bibliographic Information

Responsibility

Rebecca Reich.

Content

Introduction -- 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 -- Conclusion.

ISBN

9780875807751

0875807755

Holdings

Item Type	Current Location	Collection	Call Number	Volume Info	Shelving Location	Public Note
Book	OSA Archivum Library	Reference collection	362.196/8900947 REI		Reference	-

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