Thinking differently

About this book

This dissertation examines psychiatric and literary conceptions of insanity in the Soviet Union from the 1950s to the 1980s. The period stands out not only for the development of a self-identified subculture of "thinking differently," as the Russian word for "dissent" [ inakomyslie ] may be literally translated, but also for an emphasis in unsanctioned literature on clinical representations of mental illness and a growing awareness of the state's use of psychiatric hospitalization to suppress dissenting or nonconformist views. Case studies of four writers reveal that the actual or perceived risk of hospitalization did not rule out exploration of madness in work and life; in fact, it made confronting the interaction of psychiatric and literary ideas of insanity more relevant than ever. Aleksandr Vol'pin, a mathematician, poet and human rights activist who was repeatedly hospitalized, cultivated a logic-based system of thought that psychiatrists characterized as evidence of mental illness. The prose writer and critic Andrei Siniayskii populated his works with psychiatric imagery and depicted Socialist Realism as a psychologically manipulative doctrine only to have a kind of diagnostic rhetoric leveled at him during his 1966 trial. Venedikt Erofeev made the "mask" of madness central to his work and authorial persona, yet having confronted psychiatric hospitalization in the 1970s and 1980s, he came to view the simulation of insanity as a morally ambiguous artistic device. The poet Joseph Brodsky, who was hospitalized twice in the 1960s, equated madness with a thrilling yet terrifying state of heightened creative consciousness; it was only in exile that he came to terms with what he saw as the pathological implications of that condition. Rather than bypass the overlap between psychiatric and literary conceptions of insanity, these four writers made probing that overlap part of their work and self-presentation. Their awareness of psychiatry mirrored psychiatrists' awareness of literature, suggesting that madness is defined at the intersection of cultural, political and scientific discourses.