Unseemly Selves: Russian Realism and Early Psychiatry

Abstract

In this dissertation, I focus on early (or proto-) psychiatry and Realist literature between the 1840s and the 1880s. Rather than tracing their mutual influence, I consider them both as reactions to the cultural debate between metaphysics and materialism, which raged throughout the nineteenth century in Russia. Building on affect theory and theories of the grotesque as a literary mode and an affective category, I examine how characters in both disciplines were depicted as having inaccessible interiorities. I begin by presenting and examining an archive of early psychiatric case histories, in which patients are depicted as having illegible emotional lives. Early psychiatric theory considered the affective divide between the mentally ill and the rest of society to be unbridgeable. Psychiatrists then presented themselves as specialist interpreters and thus had to contend with the limits of their own capacity to read and write about their patients’ affective lives. In my literary analysis, I focus on four canonical Realist novels: Ivan Goncharov’s Oblomov, Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin’s The Golovlevs, and Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. These novelists also underlined the limits of character legibility and created affectively grotesque characters. By reading these Realist novels through the lens of grotesque affectivity, I uncover in these novels a tendency towards opacity rather than legibility. This trend defies the expectations of clarity in psychological prose that are widely shared by readers and critics. I propose instead that pervasive illegibility of character is a previously unidentified trait of Russian Realism, and I use the work of these four authors as its most vivid example.