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1 / T H E A N A T O M Y O F F E E L I N G A N D T H E M I N D - B O D Y P R O B L E M I N R U S S I A N S E N T I M E N T A L I S M “Sense and Sensibility” in Western Science and Russian Literature I N N I K O L A I K A R A M Z I N ’ S L E T T E R S O F A R U S S I A N T R A V E L E R ( P I S ’ M A R U S skogo puteshestvennika, 1791–95)—a semi-fictional travel narrative constructed as a series of letters written by a young Russian nobleman traveling in the West to his friends in Russia—the narrator jokingly reports a case of “love malady” he had observed.1 His travel companion and friend, the young Danish Doctor B* (Bekker), during their stay in a Swiss inn became infatuated with a beautiful “lady from Yverdon.” The lady left the inn the morning following the contraction of the ailment, and the young Dane, the narrator comments, is immediately “cured.”2 The story with the lady from Yverdon, however, was not over. Later, after Doctor Bekker and the Russian traveler had parted, the Dane sent his friend a letter, in which he recounts that he had managed to find his “Yverdon beauty” (whose name, interestingly, turns out to be “Iuliia,” evoking Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s heroine) and visit her. In the course of his visit, however, Doctor Bekker discovers that she has a fiancé and that her favorable acceptance of his attention was mere flirtation. After this encounter Doctor Bekker does fall ill as a result of traveling through a night blizzard, as if literalizing the love malady metaphor playfully used by the narrator. In the letter to his Russian friend, the young doctor prefaces the account of his unfortunate romantic experience with the observation, “Yes, my friend! I studied anatomy and medicine, and I know that the heart is indeed the source of life, although the reverent Doctor Megadidactos, together with 2 3 the respectable Micrologos, sought the soul and the vital principle in that miraculous—and hidden from our eyes—entwining of the nerves.”3 This scientific-philosophical and clearly polemical pronouncement introducing the account of a private amorous episode may seem misplaced and even comical . The young Dane himself quickly brushes it aside in a self-mocking gesture saying, “But I am afraid I digress from my subject and therefore, leaving the venerable Megadidactos and the respectable Micrologos aside for now, I’ll tell you frankly that the beautiful lady from Yverdon awakened such feelings in me as I cannot describe at this moment.”4 Nonetheless, Doctor Bekker’s introductory statement exemplifies some concerns critical to the philosophy and aesthetics of Sentimentalism in general—and Russian Sentimentalism in particular. The movement that advocated sensibility as its highest value was preoccupied not merely with its primary manifestation—strong emotions—but also with their physical localization. It was important not only to show the gamut of human emotions and their moral (and sometimes social) implications but also to assign them an organic seat, to ground them in the body. The Danish doctor thus uses his experience of lovesickness in order to comment on some of the most pressing philosophical preoccupations of his time—a tendency that will mark the use of this literary convention in Russian literature for at least another century.5 In the Sentimentalist period, then, the lovesickness topos becomes part of a philosophical debate on human nature and, particularly, on the question of the relationship between mind and body.· · · From early on, central to theories of lovesickness was the assumption that body and soul are profoundly interconnected. A marginal work of the Hippocratic corpus, On Humors, notes the somatic manifestations of many basic emotions: “Fears, shame, pain, pleasure, passion, and so forth: to each of these the appropriate member of the body responds by its action. Instances are sweats, palpitation of the heart and so forth.”6 The Hippocratic humoral doctrine, which determined the early development of the medical theory of lovesickness, assumed the mutual dependence of body and psyche: an imbalance of the organism’s humors could easily result not only in physical but also in psychic...

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