Diagnosing Literary Genius: A Cultural History of Psychiatry in Russia, 1880-1930, and: Posmertnaia diagnostika genialnosti: Eduard Bagritskii, Andrei Belyi, Vladimir Maiakovskii v kollektsii Instituta mozga: Materialy iz arkhiva G. I. Poliakova (review)

Specialists in the new sciences of the mind focused much of their attention in the late 19th and early 20th centuries on classifying mental abnormalities. This was an international endeavor, everywhere tinged by politics and culture, and, as a growing body of fascinating literature demonstrates, Russians were energetic participants. In some respects the efforts of Russian psychiatrists, neuropathologists, and psychologists paralleled those of their counterparts in other societies; in Russia during that era of revolutionary ferment, however, literary culture, medical science, and politics interacted in particularly interesting and distinctive ways.

Among recent works analyzing the volatile mix are monographs by Irina Sirotkina and Monika Spivak, each of whom examines efforts by Russian mental scientists to "diagnose genius." That both authors use these same words in their titles suggests the nature and the presumed importance of the project. Medical scientists and practitioners disagreed as to whether "genius" was a beneficial or a worrisome attribute, but there was near universal agreement that it represented a deviation from normality requiring investigation using the tools of medical science. The methodologies applied to the task varied over time and in accordance with the professional training of the specialists involved. So did the extra-scientific goals of the endeavor. Despite the commonalities suggested by the similar titles of these two books, they are quite different. They utilize different kinds of data and focus their gaze on very different dimensions of the larger project. Sirotkina has written a cultural history of Russian psychiatry, focusing in particular upon psychiatric analyses of literary geniuses. Spivak provides us with an account of the establishment of the Soviet Institute of the Brain, examining in detail its largely covert efforts to study deceased geniuses. The books complement each other nicely, and together offer readers a penetrating glance at some of the intersections between science, culture, and politics in late imperial and early Soviet Russia.

The late-19th-century obsession with medical classifications of "genius," as well as other "abnormal" mental states, was part and parcel of developments that transformed the international discourse concerning deviance in general. An earlier generation of reform-minded experts had insisted that most of society's misfits could be rehabilitated or cured, and had enthusiastically urged their societies to support new approaches they promised would enable deviants to become productive members of society. Governments and private philanthropic groups responded by pouring large sums of money into the construction of asylums, penitentiaries, and reformatories, within which miraculous transformations were supposed to occur. Among the most optimistic of the specialists were mid-19th-century psychiatrists, who boasted that, given proper conditions, they could achieve cure rates of nearly 100 percent.

Russia's earliest psychiatrists shared this belief in the curability of insanity. Initially they took the position that people from all social backgrounds were susceptible to mental disorders; however, they argued that individuals exposed to abstract and complicated ideas were at particular risk. Excessive intellectual stimulation was said to produce mental exhaustion (even for "geniuses"). It could even lead to insanity, particularly when the exposure was intense and began at an early age. ¹

That generation of psychiatrists located most of the causes of insanity in the social environment. Although their theories contained the seeds of a radical critique of modernization and of the...