Irina Sirotkina Livres

The exploration of psychiatry's evolution in Russia between 1880 and 1930 reveals its deep connection to literature. Irina Sirotkina illustrates how psychiatrists viewed literary works as reflections of national mental health, aligning their practices with the exploration of the human condition. Through pathographies, they enhanced their social status and engaged in political discourse, using literary criticism as a platform. By analyzing the works of notable authors like Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, Sirotkina offers a nuanced perspective on the intertwined history of medicine and literature during a transformative era.

This book turns to history to show just how significant movement and the sense of movement were to pioneers of modernism at the turn of the 20th century. It makes this history vivid through a picture of movement in the lives of an extraordinary generation of Russian artists, writers, theatre people and dancers bridging the last years of the tsars and the Revolution. Readers will gain a new perspective on the relation between art and life in the period 1890-1920 in great innovators like the poets Mayakovsky and Andrei Bely, the theatre director Meyerhold, the dancer Isadora Duncan and the young men and women in Russia inspired by her lead, and esoteric figures like Gurdjieff. Movement, and the turn to the body as a source of natural knowledge, was at the centre of idealistic creativity and hopes for a new age, for a 'new man', and this was true both for those who looked forward to the technology of the future and those who looked back to the harmony of Ancient Greece. The book weaves history and analysis into a colourful, thoughtful affirmation of movement in the expressive life.