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  • Diagnosing Literary Genius. A Cultural History of Psychiatry in Russia, 1880–1930
  • Laura Goering
Irina Sirotkina. Diagnosing Literary Genius. A Cultural History of Psychiatry in Russia, 1880–1930. Baltimore, Maryland, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. ix, 269 pp. $48.00.

In her book Diagnosing Literary Genius. A Cultural History of Psychiatry in Russia, 1880 – 1930, Irina Sirotkina sets out to write a history of Russian "pathography," or medical biography of famous people, arguing that the genre "provided a stage for physicians who wanted to express a world-view, make moral as well as professional claims, and thereby integrate their special interests with a wider culture" (p. 4). This is a fascinating topic, particularly given the central position of literature in Russian intellectual life. Many literary critics have looked at the intersection between Russian literature and psychiatry in connection with individual writers, but there has not yet been a systematic treatment of the subject by a medical historian. Nor has there been a comprehensive history of Russian psychiatry during the period under study, and the book's subtitle points to a second, more ambitious topic: to use the genre of pathography to "[provide] insight into what was perhaps the most eventful period for this profession" (p. 13).

Unfortunately, the two topics often work at cross-purposes. Part of this difficulty is inherent in the subject matter. Because Sirotkina assumes no knowledge of Russian literature or history, she is forced into a pattern of frequent digressions to explain to the reader that Pushkin was an important writer or that Russia in 1905 was experiencing political upheaval. Add to this the necessity of placing Russian psychiatry in the context of both Western scientific developments and Russian historical events, and the author is faced with an almost insurmountable organizational challenge.

Sirotkina bravely tries to solve the problem by organizing the book simultaneously on three planes, with each chapter being dedicated to a writer or school of writers, one or two psychiatrists who wrote their pathographies, and the attendant episode in the history of Russian psychiatry. But because each aspect requires a great deal of explication, the chronology becomes confused and a central organizing principle difficult to discern.

The first chapter—"Gogol, Moralists, and Nineteenth-Century Psychiatry"—is a case in point. Sirotkina argues that turn-of-the-century pathographies by N. N. Bazhenov and especially V. F. Chizh "used medical resources to endorse the popular opinion that art ought to have a social mission" (p. 15). After reviewing Gogol's literary career and the concomitant critical polemics, Sirotkina turns to Chizh, devoting twelve pages in a thirty-page chapter to his life and work, including accounts of his relationship with [End Page 488] Lombroso, Wundt, and Kraepelin, among many others. Throughout the lengthy exposition of Chizh's career, the reader assumes that Sirotkina is providing the background necessary for placing Chizh's work on Gogol in the proper context. Indeed, on some level all of this is relevant, for Chizh's idiosyncratic place in the emergent world of professional psychiatry cannot be properly understood without reference to the scientific and political debates of the time. Yet when Sirotkina finally returns to Gogol, the reader is surprised to find that she devotes less than a single paragraph to the actual 1903 pathography. She concludes the chapter with a brief section on Gogol criticism in the twentieth century, but because her emphasis here is on Chizh's work as an expression of nineteenth-century moralism, she stops short of discussing other important Gogol pathographies, including the psychoanalytical work by I. D. Ermakov that she quotes as the chapter's epigraph. The balance between history of psychiatry and history of literary pathography is heavily weighted in favor of the former, with the latter being shortchanged in this chapter and throughout the book.

Chapters two and three nominally deal with pathographies of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, respectively, but again, the focus frequently shifts to the broader subject of the life and work of individual psychiatrists (N. N. Bazhenov and N. E. Osipov), with wide-ranging digressions on aspects of medical, literary, and cultural history. Ironically, the book's organization is least problematic in chapter four, titled "Decadents...

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