TY  - BOOK
AU  - Reich,Rebecca
TI  - State of Madness: Psychiatry, Literature, and Dissent After Stalin 
T2  - NIU Series in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies
SN  - 9781501757600
AV  - PN56.M45 R457 2018
U1  - 362.2/04220947 23
PY  - 2020///]
CY  - Ithaca, NY : 
PB  - Cornell University Press, 
KW  - Dissenters
KW  - Soviet Union
KW  - Involuntary treatment
KW  - Literature and mental illness
KW  - Mental illness
KW  - Psychiatry
KW  - Political aspects
KW  - History
KW  - Psychology & Psychiatry
KW  - Soviet & East European History
KW  - HISTORY / Russia & the Former Soviet Union
KW  - bisacsh
KW  - Joseph Brodsky, Andrei Siniavskii, Venedikt Erofeev, Hans Christian Andersen, Emporer's New Clothes, psychiatry and literature, Soviet psychiatrists, unsanctioned prose, unsanctioned poetry
N1  - Frontmatter --; Contents --; Acknowledgments --; Author’s Note --; Introduction --; CHAPTER 1 Soviet Psychiatry and the Art of Diagnosis --; CHAPTER 2 Thinking Differently: The Case of the Dissidents --; CHAPTER 3 Dialogue of Selves: The Case of Joseph Brodsky --; CHAPTER 4 Creative Madness: The Case of Andrei Siniavskii --; CHAPTER 5 Madness as Mask: The Case of Venedikt Erofeev --; CONCLUSION --; Abbreviations --; Notes --; Bibliography --; Index; restricted access
N2  - What madness meant was a fiercely contested question in Soviet society. State of Madness examines the politically fraught collision between psychiatric and literary discourses in the years after Joseph Stalin's death. State psychiatrists deployed set narratives of mental illness to pathologize dissenting politics and art. Dissidents such as Aleksandr Vol'pin, Vladimir Bukovskii, and Semen Gluzman responded by highlighting a pernicious overlap between those narratives and their life stories. The state, they suggested in their own psychiatrically themed texts, had crafted an idealized view of reality that itself resembled a pathological work of art. In their unsanctioned poetry and prose, the writers Joseph Brodsky, Andrei Siniavskii, and Venedikt Erofeev similarly engaged with psychiatric discourse to probe where creativity ended and insanity began. Together, these dissenters cast themselves as psychiatrists to a sick society. By challenging psychiatry's right to declare them or what they wrote insane, dissenters exposed as a self-serving fiction the state's renewed claims to rationality and modernity in the post-Stalin years. They were, as they observed, like the child who breaks the spell of collective delusion in Hans Christian Andersen's story "The Emperor's New Clothes." In a society where normality means insisting that the naked monarch is clothed, it is the truth-teller who is pathologized. Situating literature's encounter with psychiatry at the center of a wider struggle over authority and power, this bold interdisciplinary study will appeal to literary specialists; historians of culture, science, and medicine; and scholars and students of the Soviet Union and its legacy for Russia today.  
UR  - https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501757600
UR  - https://www.degruyter.com/isbn/9781501757600
UR  - https://www.degruyter.com/document/cover/isbn/9781501757600/original
ER  -