Diagnosing Literary Genius

Diagnosing Literary Genius PDF Author: Irina Sirotkina
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 0801876893
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description
Winner of the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Studies in Slavic Languages and Literatures from the Modern Language Association The vital place of literature and the figure of the writer in Russian society and history have been extensively studied, but their role in the evolution of psychiatry is less well known. In Diagnosing Literary Genius: A Cultural History of Psychiatry in Russia, 1880-1930, Irina Sirotkina explores the transformations of Russian psychiatric practice through its relationship to literature. During this period, psychiatrists began to view literature as both an indicator of the nation's mental health and an integral part of its well-being. By aligning themselves with writers, psychiatrists argued that the aim of their science was not dissimilar to the literary project of exploring the human soul and reflecting on the psychological ailments of the age. Through the writing of pathographies (medical biographies), psychiatrists strengthened their social standing, debated political issues under the guise of literary criticism, and asserted moral as well as professional claims. By examining the psychiatric engagement with the works of Fyodor Dostoevsky, Nikolai Gogol, Leo Tolstoy, and the decadents and revolutionaries, Sirotkina provides a rich account of Russia's medical and literary history during this turbulent revolutionary period.

Diagnosing Literary Genius

Diagnosing Literary Genius PDF Author: Irina Sirotkina
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 0801876893
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 284

Get Book Here

Book Description
Winner of the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Studies in Slavic Languages and Literatures from the Modern Language Association The vital place of literature and the figure of the writer in Russian society and history have been extensively studied, but their role in the evolution of psychiatry is less well known. In Diagnosing Literary Genius: A Cultural History of Psychiatry in Russia, 1880-1930, Irina Sirotkina explores the transformations of Russian psychiatric practice through its relationship to literature. During this period, psychiatrists began to view literature as both an indicator of the nation's mental health and an integral part of its well-being. By aligning themselves with writers, psychiatrists argued that the aim of their science was not dissimilar to the literary project of exploring the human soul and reflecting on the psychological ailments of the age. Through the writing of pathographies (medical biographies), psychiatrists strengthened their social standing, debated political issues under the guise of literary criticism, and asserted moral as well as professional claims. By examining the psychiatric engagement with the works of Fyodor Dostoevsky, Nikolai Gogol, Leo Tolstoy, and the decadents and revolutionaries, Sirotkina provides a rich account of Russia's medical and literary history during this turbulent revolutionary period.

The Inkblots

The Inkblots PDF Author: Damion Searls
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1471130436
Category : Self-Help
Languages : en
Pages : 583

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Book Description
SUNDAY TIMES 'BOOKS OF THE YEAR': 'the book develops into a bigger biography of the strange set of images [Rorschach] bequeathed, taking in everything from the origins of abstract art to the invention of the idea of empathy' – James McConnachie, Sunday Times IRISH INDEPENDENT 'BOOKS OF THE YEAR' The captivating, untold story of Hermann Rorschach and his famous inkblot test, which has shaped our view of human personality and become a fixture in popular culture. In 1917, working alone in a remote Swiss asylum, psychiatrist Hermann Rorschach devised an experiment to probe the human mind. He had come to believe that who we are is less a matter of what we say, as Freud thought, than what we see. Rorschach himself was a talented illustrator, and his test, a set of ten carefully designed inkblots, quickly made its way to America, where it took on a life of its own. Co-opted by the military after Pearl Harbor, Rorschach’s test was a fixture at the Nuremberg trials and in the jungles of Vietnam. It became an advertising staple, a cliché in Hollywood and journalism, and an inspiration to everyone from Andy Warhol to Jay-Z. The test was also taken by millions of defendants, job applicants, parents in custody battles and people suffering from mental illness – or simply trying to understand themselves better. And it is still used today. Damion Searls draws on untranslated letters and diaries, and a cache of previously unknown interviews with Rorschach’s family, friends and colleagues, to tell the unlikely story of the test’s creation, its controversial reinvention and its remarkable endurance. Elegant and original, The Inkblots shines a light on the twentieth century’s most visionary synthesis of art and science.

Work Flows

Work Flows PDF Author: Maya Vinokour
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501773690
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
Work Flows investigates the emergence of "flow" as a crucial metaphor within Russian labor culture since 1870. Maya Vinokour frames concern with fluid channeling as immanent to vertical power structures—whether that verticality derives from the state, as in Stalin's Soviet Union and present-day Russia, or from the proliferation of corporate monopolies, as in the contemporary Anglo-American West. Originating in pre-revolutionary bio-utopianism, the Russian rhetoric of liquids and flow reached an apotheosis during Stalin's First Five-Year Plan and re-emerged in post-Soviet "managed democracy" and Western neoliberalism. The literary, philosophical, and official texts that Work Flows examines give voice to the Stalinist ambition of reforging not merely individual bodies, but space and time themselves. By mobilizing the understudied thematic of fluidity, Vinokour offers insight into the nexus of philosophy, literature, and science that underpinned Stalinism and remains influential today. Work Flows demonstrates that Stalinism is not a historical phenomenon restricted to the period 1922-1953, but a symptom of modernity as it emerged in the twentieth century. Stalinism's legacy extends far beyond the bounds of the former Soviet Union, emerging in seemingly disparate settings like post-Soviet Russia and Silicon Valley.

Bolshevik Sexual Forensics

Bolshevik Sexual Forensics PDF Author: Dan Healey
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501768565
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 263

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Book Description
In an effort to modernize criminal and civil investigations, early Bolsheviks gave forensic doctors—most of whom had been trained under the tsarist regime—new authority over issues of sexuality. Revolutionaries believed that forensic medicine could provide scientific and objective solutions to sexual disorder in the new society. Bolshevik Sexual Forensics explores the institutional history of Russian and Soviet forensic medicine and examines the effects of its authority when confronting sexual disorder. Healey compares sex crime investigations from Petrograd and Sverdlovsk in the 1920s to the numerous publications by forensic doctors and psychiatrists of the prerevolutionary and early Soviet periods to illustrate the role that these specialists played. In addition, Healey presents a fascinating look at how doctors diagnosed and treated hermaphroditism, showing how Soviet physicians revolutionized the standard scientific view in these cases by taking into account individual desire. This study sheds light on unexplored radical and reactionary forces that shaped the Bolshevik "sexual revolution" as lawmakers defined new ways of seeing sexual crime and disorder. Forensic doctors struggled to interpret the replacement of the age of consent with a standard of "sexual maturity," a designation that made female sexuality a collective "resource," not part of an individual's personality. "Innocence," "experience," and virginity played a major role in the expertise doctors furnished in rape and abuse trials. Psychiatrists recoiled from the language of sexual psychology in their investigations of sex criminals. Yet in the clinic, Soviet physicians probed the desires of the two-sexed citizen, whose psychology served as the basis for a distinctly modern approach to the "erasure" of the hermaphrodite. Healey concludes that the vision of men and women as equals after a "sexual revolution" was undermined from the outset of the Soviet experiment. Law and medicine failed to protect women and girls from violence, and Soviet medicine's physiological and biological model of sexual citizenship erased the vision of sexual self-expression, especially for women. This groundbreaking study will appeal to Soviet historians and those interested in gender studies, sexuality, medicine, and forensics.

Picturing Russia’s Men

Picturing Russia’s Men PDF Author: Allison Leigh
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1501341812
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
Winner of the Heldt Prize for Best Book in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Women's and Gender Studies 2021 There was a discontent among Russian men in the nineteenth century that sometimes did not stem from poverty, loss, or the threat of war, but instead arose from trying to negotiate the paradoxical prescriptions for masculinity which characterized the era. Picturing Russia's Men takes a vital new approach to this topic within masculinity and art historical studies by investigating the dissatisfaction that developed from the breakdown in prevailing conceptions of manhood outside of the usual Western European and American contexts. By exploring how Russian painters depicted gender norms as they were evolving over the course of the century, each chapter shows how artworks provide unique insight into not only those qualities that were supposed to predominate, but actually did in lived practice. Drawing on a wide variety of source material, including previously untranslated letters, journals, and contemporary criticism, the book explores the deep structures of masculinity to reveal the conflicting desires and aspirations of men in the period. In so doing, readers are introduced to Russian artists such as Karl Briullov, Pavel Fedotov, Alexander Ivanov, Ivan Kramskoi, and Ilia Repin, all of whom produced masterpieces of realist art in dialogue with paintings made in Western European artistic centers. The result is a more culturally discursive account of art-making in the nineteenth century, one that challenges some of the enduring myths of masculinity and provides a fresh interpretive history of what constitutes modernism in the history of art.

Degeneration, decadence and disease in the Russian fin de siècle

Degeneration, decadence and disease in the Russian fin de siècle PDF Author: Frederick White
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526102129
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 397

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Book Description
Early in the twentieth century, Russia was experiencing a decadent period of cultural degeneration just as science was developing ways to identify medical conditions which supposedly reflected the health of the entire nation. Leonid Andreev, the leading literary figure of his time, stepped into the breach of this scientific discourse with literary works about degenerates. The spirited social debates on mental illness, morality and sexual deviance which resulted from these works became part of the ongoing battle over the definition and depiction of the irrational, complicated by Andreev’s own publicised bouts with neurasthenia. This book examines the concept of pathology in Russia, the influence of European medical discourse, the development of Russian psychiatry, and the role that it had in popular culture, by investigating the life and works of Andreev. It engages the emergence of psychiatry and the role that art played in the development of this objective science.

The Russian Medical Humanities

The Russian Medical Humanities PDF Author: Melissa L. Miller
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1498592163
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 215

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Book Description
For the first time in English, The Russian Medical Humanities: Past and Present argues that the medical humanities is a vibrant and emerging field in Post-Soviet Russia. In a unique collaboration that brings together diverse experts from both Russia and America, this volume showcases the Russian medical humanities as an interdisciplinary project that combines insights from philosophy, bioethics, anthropology, history, and literature in order to provide more compassionate medical care to patients in the twenty-first century. The chapters in this volume explore past and present humanistic trends in Russian medical training, as well as examine how Russian authors and cultural figures, some physician-writers, some without professional background in medicine of any kind, have positioned healthy and ailing bodies in their creative work. This volume’s contributors, who range from literary scholars, educators, translators and poets to medical historians, librarians, museum curators, and social workers, provide empathetic insight into the experience of medical encounters which all cultures grapple with. Their work will prove useful not only to current and future health practitioners, but also to a broader audience of readers who are seeking to make compassionate and informed decisions about healthcare for their loved ones and for themselves.

Literary Biographies in The Lives of Remarkable People Series in Russia

Literary Biographies in The Lives of Remarkable People Series in Russia PDF Author: Carol Ueland
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1793618305
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 351

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Book Description
The legendary Russian biography series, The Lives of Remarkable People, has played a significant role in Russian culture from its inception in 1890 until today. The longest running biography series in world literature, it spans three centuries and widely divergent political and cultural epochs: Imperial, Soviet, and Post-Soviet Russia. The authors argue that the treatment of biographical figures in the series is a case study for continuities and changes in Russian national identity over time. Biography in Russia and elsewhere remains a most influential literary genre and the distinctive approach and branding of the series has made it the economic engine of its publisher, Molodaia gvardiia. The centrality of biographies of major literary figures in the series reflects their heightened importance in Russian culture. The contributors examine the ways that biographies of Russia's foremost writers shaped the literary canon while mirroring the political and social realities of both the subjects’ and their biographers' times. Starting with Alexander Pushkin and ending with Joseph Brodsky, the authors analyze the interplay of research and imagination in biographical narrative, the changing perceptions of what constitutes literary greatness, and the subversive possibilities of biography during eras of political censorship.

Translation and the Making of Modern Russian Literature

Translation and the Making of Modern Russian Literature PDF Author: Brian James Baer
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1628927992
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
Explores the complex role played by translation in the development of modern Russian literature and Russian national identity.

Nijinsky's Feeling Mind

Nijinsky's Feeling Mind PDF Author: Nicole Svobodny
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1793653542
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 387

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Book Description
Nijinsky's Feeling Mind: The Dancer Writes, The Writer Dances is the first in-depth literary study of Vaslav Nijinsky's life-writing. Through close textual analysis combined with intellectual biography and literary theory, Nicole Svobodny puts the spotlight on Nijinsky as reader. She elucidates Nijinsky's riffs on Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Nietzsche, equating these intertextual connections to "marking" a dance, whereby the dancer uses a reduction strategy situated between thinking and doing. By exploring the intersections of bodily movement with verbal language, this book addresses broader questions of how we sense and make sense of our worlds. Drawing on archival research, along with studies in psychology and philosophy, Svobodny emphasizes the modernist contexts from which the dancer-writer emerged at the end of World War I. Nijinsky began his life-writing—a book he titled Feeling—the day after the Paris Peace Conference opened, and the same day he performed his "last dance." Nijinsky's Feeling Mind begins with the dancer on stage and concludes as he invites readers into his private room. Illuminating the structure, plot, medium, and mode of Feeling, this study calls on readers to grapple with a paradox: the more the dancer insists on his writing as a live performance, the more he points to the material object that entombs it.