RUSSIAN ROULETTE: SPECULATION AND THE MEDICAL HUMANITIES IN VSEVOLOD IVANOV'S NOVEL y

Vsevolod Ivanov's understudied novel y (1933) grasps the development of a non-Freudian psychic economy that grew from German psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin's research on mental illness at the beginning of the twentieth century. The novel's economic postulations are as much a reflection of Stalin's planned economy as they are a commentary about the new kind of psychological metrics, which contained analogous possibilities for inflation, deflation, and speculation in the process of "psychic reconstruction" (psikhicheskaia peredelka) needed to make the New Soviet Man. In this article, I rely on Ivanov's work as a provocation for a new kind of reading within the Medical Humanities. I show that Vs emphasis on psychiatric subject matter says less about the validity of a particular psychiatric diagnosis than it does about the national, ideological, and scientifico-historical conditions that governed psychiatry's formation and conditioned its entry into medicine. While this approach may yield a fresh take on Ivanov's little-known and untranslated novel, it also makes a larger bid for treating the Russian Medical Humanities as an opportunity to explore how changing national boundaries, networks of scientific exchange, and models of disciplinarity are inseparable-not incidental-to the formation of medical concepts, themselves indebted to processes of narration.

Duke Scholars

Author Catherine Reilly Literature