Madness and the Mad in Russian Culture by A. Brintlinger , I. Vinitsky (review)

Reviews 555 raised. A book of this type,with itsnecessary focus on the structures of rule, can depict an exaggerated distinction between 'state' and 'society'.When combined with Waldron's emphasis on tsarism's durability, an occasional riskmight emerge of overstating the coherence and strengthof a clearly iden tifiable form of power. The argument that Waldron goes on to elaborate, and the diverse evidence he cites, ismuch richer than his early comment that 'Autocratic power was founded on total control of every aspect of theRussian state and society' (p. n), at least until the i86os, and overall this book takes proper account of the compromises, limitsand frustrations involved in ruling such a large and complex empire. GoverningTsarist Russia can be strongly recommended to undergraduates engaged in any politically-related courses inEuropean orRussian history from the late seventeenth to the early twentieth centuries, or to graduate students seeking an overview of the governing system of imperial Russia. Given the range of scholarship on which it draws, and the light touch which deploys its considerable learning, the book is a very useful and pleasing read for specialists as well. Instituteof Historical Research UniversityofLondon Mark B. Smith Brin?inger, A. and Vinitsky, I. (eds).Madness and the Mad inRussian Culture. University of Toronto Press, Toronto, ON, Buffalo, NY and London, 2007. xi + 331 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. $70.00: ?45.00. This collection of essays on the role and meanings of insanity inRussian culture ranges from the reign of Catherine theGreat to our own century. It considers topics as diverse as melancholy, shell shock, revolutionary insanity, the literary use of madness, suicide, genetics and contemporary Russian cinema. The inter-relation of scientificand non-scientific discourses of insan ity is an abiding theme of the essays as is the familiar tale of psychiatrists batding for public recognition, clinical autonomy and financial support from the statewithin Russia's changing political climates since the Enlightenment. The chapters are arranged under three headings: 'Madness, the State and Society', 'Madness, War, and Revolution' and 'Madness and Creativity', and the volume will be of interest to specialists in both the cultural history of modern Russia and thewider history of science and medicine. As Angela Brindinger points out in the introduction to the collection, the chronological span of the chapters embraces some significant shifts in the cultural perceptions ofmadness. Lia Iangoulova's study of the etymology of thebasic investigative concepts innineteenth-century Russian psychiatry sheds lighton theways inwhich established cultural tropes such as the holy fool or the hysterical woman (uter?chkd) gradually became colonized by a new medical language. Colonized but not displaced. The works ofChekhov and Dostoevskii show that psychiatric notions of insanity could coexist with older cultural notions of the madmen as the authentic voice of spiritual truth. For this 556 SEER, 88, 3, JULY 20IO reason, Brintiinger's central claim in her own chapter 'Writing about Madness: Russian Attitudes toward Psyche and Psychiatry, 1887-1907' that 'in Russia writers and psychiatrists competed over definitions of insanity' (p. 186) betrays a confusion about theways inwhich realist art had long served as a legitimate source of psychiatric enquiry. As Irina Sirotkina's earlier study, Diagnosing LiteraryGenius: a CulturalHistory ofPsychiatry inRussia, 1880-igjo (Baltimore,MD, 2002) has shown, literarymaterial was invoked by psychia tristsas a popular subject of discussion, not because theywere in competition with authors for authority over the content of 'theRussian soul' (p. 186). Rather, literature offered an opportunity to explore case studies thatwere well-known to the public and the talented writer was credited with an ability to capture and represent (although not explain) the psychological forces impelling human behaviour. What the chapters also illustrate to varying degrees is that the scrutiny of individual deviants necessarily invoked etiological paradigms which cast the diagnostic net much wider, involving a scrutinyof broader social pathologies. Degeneration theory,mentioned in a number of the articles, was central to this conceptualization of the deviant as the incarnation of societal ill-health, and yet its implications are nowhere properly explored. Martin Miller's study of the emergence of a construct of revolutionary insanity explores, for example, how radicals were stigmatised in a language psychopathology as a 'collective defence mechanism' (p. 115) on...

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