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

'"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