Pisatel′ i samoubiistvo, and: Samoubiistvo kak kul′turnyi institut, and: Suicide as a Cultural Institution in Dostoevsky’s Russia (review)

Students of Russian suicide confront a distinct set of challenges when it comes to the reconstruction and interpretation of subjective experience. However, their responses to these challenges contribute to the broader methodological debate among scholars working on different facets of Russian/Soviet life, including peasant resistance, working-class culture, and so-called popular "moods." At issue is the positivistic assumption that statistics, questionnaires, svodki, and other forms of social knowledge capture individual experience and make it accessible to the researcher at a later time. Given their subject matter, the works reviewed here are well positioned to comment on the relationship between scholars and their objects of study. Suicide raises fundamental questions regarding the autonomy of the individual and is linked closely to the special knowledge claims of the modern human sciences.¹

Irina Paperno's Samoubiistvo kak kul'turnyi institut is a fascinating study that deserves a readership beyond Russian studies. Paperno leads the reader through the process of how social "facts" are constructed and concludes that suicide is what a culture makes it. The particular culture at the center of her analysis is "Dostoevsky's Russia," or Russia during the tumultuous reform period of the 1860s and 1870s.² Paperno vividly demonstrates that discussions of suicide drew upon, and in some instances transformed, a European discourse that relied heavily on metaphor and grappled with the meaning of human existence. By focusing on the discourse, and acknowledging limitations in our ability to reconstruct subjective experience, she brings us closer to understanding late 19th-century Russian culture and its shaping by language as well as human agency.

Grigorii Chkhartishvili's Pisatel' i samoubiistvo represents a contrast in terms of methods and objectives. Whereas Paperno analyzes the discourse of 19th-century suicide, Chkhartishvili recapitulates it. He conceives of Pisatel' i samoubiistvo as a philosophical "essay" on the existential problems posed by the act of self-negation. Chkhartishvili catalogues and examines the subjective experiences of writer-suicides in the hope of revealing underlying patterns or general truths regarding the motivations and causes of self-destructive behavior.³ In the end, Chkhartishvili finds no universal typology for suicide and instead emphasizes the sovereignty of the individual. Any moral judgment or true understanding of the suicide is ultimately the province of God or some other higher being.

In terms of their approaches to the problem of subjectivity these two works reflect a broader methodological split within the field of Russian studies. Paperno's monograph is representative of the trend towards a methodology that questions whether the individual's voice can ever be separated from the structures of language and culture.⁴ Samoubiistvo kak kul'turnyi institut demonstrates that the meaning contained in the printed materials is the result of a complex interaction between the broader culture and the individual. Using textual and episodic "fragments," Paperno examines this reciprocal process to conclude that the subject is embedded within the broader culture and cannot be understood in isolation.

Central to Paperno's analysis is the concept of "suicide as a cultural institution." By "cultural institution" Paperno has in mind the tendency of a culture to appropriate certain forms of human behavior and to imbue them with a "metaphysical and social significance" that may or may not reflect the intentions of the actor (6). She describes the process through which a variety of investigators—philosophers and artists, doctors and sociologists, theologians and psychologists—made suicide "into a kind of laboratory for the construction of meaning and for the resolution of fundamental questions: freedom of will, immortality, the relationship between body and soul, the interaction of man and God or of...