Febris Erotica: Lovesickness in the Russian Literary Imagination

Notes

Notes Preface 1 N. G. Chernyshevsky, What Is to Be Done? trans. Michael R. Katz (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989), 396. 2 The mezzotint version of the painting I use dates from 1802. The very fact that an engraving of this work was made testifies to its popularity at the time. 3 The catalog of the Wellcome Library describes the work as follows: “A bewildered doctor checking the pulse of lovesick young woman, her concerned mother comforts her, in the background Cupid is grinning and points to one of his arrows.” The mezzotint lettering reads: “The love sick maid, or the doctor puzzled. ‘She never told her love.’ La fille malade d’amour, ou le médecin embarrassé. ‘Elle ne parloit jamais de son amour.’” Colored mezzotint by W. Ward, 1802, after J. Opie, Wellcome Library, London . Another print in the same collection bears the inscription “The doctor puzzled.” Engraving by S. Freeman after J. Opie, date unknown. 4 Other examples dealing with the nineteenth century include Irina Sirotkina’s Diagnosing Literary Genius: A Cultural History of Psychiatry in Russia, 1880–1930 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002); Sabine Merten’s Die Entstehung des Realismus aus der Poetik der Medizin: Die Russische Literatur der 40er bis 60er Jahre des 19. Jahrhunderts (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2003); and, most recent, Michael C. Finke’s Seeing Chekhov: Life and Art (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2005). In addition, Irina Paperno’s Suicide as a Cultural Institution in Dostoevsky’s Russia (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997), which examines the phenomenon of suicide as an object of literary, journalistic, legal, religious, and, importantly, scientific inquiries and discursive practices, modeled for me the interdisciplinary study of nineteenthcentury Russian culture. 2 0 1 5 For example, a standard term for “mental illnesses” is dushevnye bolezni, “maladies of the soul.” See D. N. Ushakov, Tolkovyi slovar’ russkogo iazyka (Moscow: Sovetskaia entsiklopediia, 1934–40), s.v. “dushevnyi.” This term was in use in the nineteenth century, as testified, for example, by Fedor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment (Prestuplenie i nakazanie, 1866), Vsevolod Garshin’s “Red Flower” (“Krasnyi tsvetok,” 1883) and Anton Chekhov’s “Ward Number Six” (“Palata nomer 6,” 1892). In my translations, I usually render these adjectives as “psychic” or “spiritual,” depending on the context. 6 See Vladimir Dal, Tolkovyi slovar’ zhivogo velikorusskogo iazyka (Moscow: Russkii iazyk, 1956), s.v. “nrav.” Introduction: Cases in History 1 Peter Dronke, in his Medieval Latin and the Rise of European Love-Lyric, 2 vols. (London : Oxford University Press, 1965–66), cites ancient Egyptian poetry found on papyruses from 1300 b.c.e. that introduces language of love-as-illness and the belovedas -healer (1:9–10). Massimo Ciavolella, too, suggests that lovesickness may be a universal topos and gives as an example Amnon and Tamar’s story in the Old Testament (2 Sam.:13). Massimo Ciavolella, La “Malattia d’Amore” dall’Antichità al Medioevo (Rome: Bulzoni Editore, 1976), 40. 2 See in particular Ciavolella, La “Malattia d’Amore.” My discussion of the early development of the lovesickness doctrine in the West is greatly indebted to this study. 3 The humoral theory is presented in most detail in the Hippocratic tract Nature of Man. 4 In another study of lovesickness, Ciavolella describes medieval doctors’ take on the Hippocratic tradition: “Love is a desire that arises when there is an excess of humours (especially blood) . . . , when, that is to say, the body is in a hot and humid condition .” Massimo Ciavolella, “Mediaeval Medicine and Arcite’s Love Sickness,” Florilegium : Papers on Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages 1 (1979): 225. 5 In his Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), Robert Burton outlines the polemics over the status of lovesickness and himself sides with those writers who classified it as a form of melancholy. Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (New York: New York Review Books, 2001), pt. 3, 57. Apparently, in the classical and medieval medical tradition there was no consensus on this issue. Both views, however, agree that, while being connected with melancholy, lovesickness possessed its distinctive symptomatology. See also Daniel L. Heiple, “The ‘Accidens Amoris’ in Lyric Poetry,” Neophilologus 67, no.1 (1983): 55–64, esp. 58; and Carol Falvo Heffernan,The Melancholy Muse: Chaucer, Shakespeare and Early Medicine (Pittsburgh, Pa.: Duquesne University Press, 1995), 48. 6 W. H. S. Jones briefly lists the most explicit references to Hippocrates in Plato’s dialogues . See his introduction to Hippocrates, trans. W. H. S. Jones...