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4.9 - The Madman

from History 4 - Heroes

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 December 2024

By
Rebecca Reich
Edited by
Simon Franklin ,
Rebecca Reich  and
Emma Widdis
Simon Franklin
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
Rebecca Reich
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
Emma Widdis
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
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Summary

The figure of the madman has been invoked in Russian literature from the medieval period to the present day. This chapter investigates the evolution of that tradition with an emphasis on the period from Joseph Stalin’s death in 1953 to the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991. It identifies four strains of literary madness: the divine madman, exemplified by the holy fool who tests society’s virtue and speaks truth to power; the creative madman, whose irrational behaviour stems from poetic inspiration and the generative power of the word; the rational madman, who follows a logical system to pathological extremes or inverts that paradigm by revolting against reason; and the political madman, whose sanity is often pathologised by a society that itself has lost its mind. Together, these paradigms of madness constitute an intertextual web of allusions and character types that have been embodied and amended over time.

Keywords

post-Stalinist literaturelate Soviet literaturepost-Soviet literatureSoviet dissidentsdissentmadnessinsanitypsychiatryholy foolishnessMoscow Conceptualism
Type
Chapter
Information
The New Cambridge History of Russian Literature , pp. 824 - 841
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2024

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References

Further Reading

Brintlinger, Angela, and Vinitsky, Ilya (eds.), Madness and the Mad in Russian Culture (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007).Google Scholar
Ivanov, Sergey A., Holy Fools in Byzantium and Beyond, trans. Simon Franklin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Murav, Harriet, Holy Foolishness: Dostoevsky’s Novels and the Poetics of Cultural Critique (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992).Google Scholar
Ready, Oliver, Persisting in Folly: Russian Writers in Search of Wisdom, 1963–2013 (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2017).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Reich, Rebecca, State of Madness: Psychiatry, Literature, and Dissent after Stalin (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2018).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rosenshield, Gary, Pushkin and the Genres of Madness: The Masterpieces of 1833 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003).Google Scholar
Sirotkina, Irina, Diagnosing Literary Genius: A Cultural History of Psychiatry in Russia, 1880–1930 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002).Google Scholar
White, Frederick H., Degeneration, Decadence and Disease in the Russian Fin de Siècle: Neurasthenia in the Life and Work of Leonid Andreev (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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