Psychiatry in Late Soviet Literature

Psychiatric incarceration as a form of repression against dissidents belongs to the staples of the history of the Soviet human rights movement. Rebecca Reich’s study contributes to a reexamination of this question from an interdisciplinary perspective, as she navigates skillfully among the literary, historical, and medical realms. Moving beyond the traditional representations of forced hospitalization, she draws a more complex picture by examining the works of dissenting poets and writers whose psychiatric experience was generally not coercive but whose works challenged psychiatric discourse by pointing to its subjectivity and who sought to depathologize dissent through literary discourse.

Central to her work is the argument that in the post-Stalin era, dissent came to be assimilated to madness. Soviet psychiatrists developed an “art of diagnosis” based on a subjective evaluation of dissidents and their works of art along criteria of “normality” influenced by Socialist Realism’s aesthetic norms, and with the help of allegedly objective scientific categories of mental illness designed to potentially encompass any expression of independent thought. To counter what Reich calls the “discursive trap,” whereby any denegation of one’s insanity only further confirmed it in the physician’s eye, dissidents and dissenting writers produced narratives and works in which they called attention to the subjectivity of psychiatric diagnosis and reaffirmed their own sanity by turning their diagnostic gaze back to the state. Countering the claim, central to Marxist-Leninist ideology and Socialist Realism, that consciousness and words could remold reality, dissenting writers used literary devices to re-affirm the divide between art and life. Finally, drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of dialogism, Reich argues that dissidents sought to oppose the monologism, not only of Soviet psychiatric discourse and Soviet law but also of the literary canon of Socialist Realism, by restoring a dialogism and plurality of thought typical of dissent, which they redefined as an alternative norm of sanity.

In the first chapter, Reich examines the aesthetic dimension of the “art of diagnosis” elaborated by the prominent Soviet psychiatrist Andrei Vladimirovich Snezhnevskii, founder of the “Moscow school” of psychiatry. While Snezhnevskii emphasized the role of subjective appreciation and intuition in the psychiatrist’s diagnosis and likened the writing of clinical reports narrating the patient’s “history of disease” to art, the profession also laid claim to scientific objectivity through an impersonal tone and the inscription of each case within a scientific typology of diseases. This subjectivity of psychiatric diagnosis was central to the critique of the anti-psychiatric movement in the West, a most vocal example of which was Michel Foucault’s critique of modern France’s use of psychiatry to discipline and control society. Dissidents likewise drew attention to the political exploitation of the subjective nature of psychiatric diagnosis, but they attributed such excesses to the repressive nature of the Soviet political system, rather than to intrinsic flaws of the discipline as a whole.

Chapter 2 explores the different strategies that the dissident poet and human rights activist Aleksandr Sergeevich Esenin-Vol´pin on the one hand, and Vladimir Konstantinovich Bukovskii and the dissident psychiatrist Semen Fishelevich Gluzman on the other, deployed to counter the “discursive trap” of psychiatric diagnosis. While Esenin-Vol´pin placed his stake on a legal discourse that would remedy the ambiguities of both literary and psychiatric languages, it was precisely his strict adherence to law that psychiatrists judged pathological. Bukovskii and Gluzman, by contrast, advocated engaging with psychiatric discourse and mastering its codes to simulate “normalcy” and thus bolster one’s claims to sanity. To this end, they produced a handbook for dissidents facing psychiatric incarceration, which circulated in samizdat and was published abroad.

In the last three chapters, Reich combines biographical narrative and literary analysis as she focuses on three Soviet authors: Iosif Aleksandrovich Brodskii, Andrei Donatovich Siniavskii, and Venedikt Vasil´evich Erofeev. Their works, she argues, represent a literary response to the state’s pathologization of dissent and a claim to the writer’s diagnostic authority in relation...