Diagnosing Literary Genius: A Cultural History of Psychiatry in Russia, 18801930.

By . Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press.

2002. x +269 pp. 33.50. ISBN 0801876893.
Paul Julius Mobius
wrote pathographies of artists such as Rousseau, Schopenhauer,

and Goethe in part out of a desire to correct unjustied statements that were made
about the illnesses of famous people. By examining how Russian physicians beginning
in 1890 developed the genre inaugurated by Mobius,
Sirotkina attempts to update

the existing body of literature dedicated to the history of psychiatry in Russia. While
acknowledging the contributions made by Tikhon Iudin and Dmitrii Fedotov in
Russia and Julie Vail Brown and Kenneth Dix in the West, Sirotkina argues that this is
a history which has not yet been comprehensively written. She chooses pathographies
as her tool because Russian psychiatrists drew on literary resources more intensely
and in more diverse ways than did their Western counterparts (p. 6) because of the
lack of alternative outlets in public and political life. The study focuses on the period
18801930 as a time when a large number of major transformations took place in the
profession of psychiatry: the achievement of professional standing, a search for new
forms of practice, the introduction of psychotherapy, and the crucial changes that
followed the Revolution. Each chapter is structured around an analysis of the work
of a particular psychiatrist, or psychiatrists, and considers their contribution both to
the growth of psychiatry and to the understanding of the uvre of a Russian author.
In Chapter 1, Gogol, Moralists and Nineteenth-Century Psychiatry, Sirotkina
ably demonstrates how closely psychiatry of the period was tied up with the moral
projects of literary critics and Russian society in general. In 1902, to mark the ftieth
anniversary of the death of Nikolai Gogol, both Nikolai Bazhenov (18561923) and
Vladimir Chizh (18551922) published pathographies which suggested a medical underpinning to the moral evaluation of the writer. While her account of the reputation
enjoyed by Gogol as an artist of wildly contradictory impulses oers no original insights, Sirotkinas survey of the various medical views propounded to account for this
is a welcome contribution. Chizh is shown to have been a major contributor to the
body of pathographical work dedicated to Dostoevsky, the subject of Chapter 2. His
work Dostoevsky as a Psychopathologist (1885) was typical of the impulse psychiatrists
felt to square the circle by establishing a connection between Dostoevskys supposed
interest in abnormality in his ction and his own non-ctional illness. Sirotkina here
skilfully illustrates how interdependent was the work of literary critics and psychiatrists in terms of their analyses of both Gogol and Dostoevsky: one would often use
the work of the other rather than the work of the original authors as the basis for their
claims. And the parallels in the early lives of Dostoevsky and Bazhenov and their
respective brushes with the authorities further underlines the interconnected nature
of the professions. It is also helpful to be reminded that any comments issued on Dostoevsky in the late nineteenth century were unavoidably politicized as a consequence
of the stature of the man. However, precisely in this respect, Sirotkina does not do
enough to distinguish between the opinions oered on Dostoevsky by his countrymen and foreigners such as Cesare Lombroso. The views expressed on the mature
Tolstoy by Turgenev and Lenin, among others, led to a view of the writer as somehow hysterical, and this made him the perfect subject for pathographers. Sirotkina
frames her discussion of the treatment of Tolstoy within a biographical account of the
pioneering psychiatrist Nikolai Osipov (18771934), who showed a particular interest
in Tolstoys My Confession and the unnished Memoirs of a Madman. In her desire
to write a comprehensive history of psychiatry, Sirotkina is occasionally distracted
from her primary focus, as when she supplements details of Osipovs career with an
account of how he was invited to work in a Moscow clinic by Vladimir Serbskii. In
the nal two chapters of this study the lack of a central literary author around whom

the discussion revolves is arguably a similar weakness. Nevertheless, the revelation

of how, in the run-up to the 1905 revolution, psychiatrists reclassied as sane certain
progressive writers who had previously been diagnosed as mad (Maksim Gorky primary among them) provides a fascinating insight into the sciences role in organizing
society.
Overall, although Diagnosing Literary Genius makes only a modest contribution to
our understanding of the reception of major writers such as Gogol and Dostoevsky,
its primary aim of broadening our understanding of the role of psychiatry in literary
history is clearly achieved. The writing of pathographies provided a stage for physicians who wanted to express a world-view and supplement their professional claims
with moral authority. This integration of their special scientic interests within a
wider culture is what makes the study of Russian psychiatry such a rich subject.
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