This article introduces the subject and approach of our forum on Russian, Literature, and the Arts. Our forum is devoted to the rich intersections of Russian literary, film, and theater production with the world of medical knowledge and practice, both institutionalized and not, and all the bodily metrics, functionalities, illnesses, diseases, disorders, and disabilities that medicine encompasses. The articles in our forum approach these intersections from a range of critical and theoretical angles as they both revisit hallowed scholarly conversations within the Medical Humanities and stake out new territory in this field.

Elena Fratto is an Assistant Professor in Princeton’s Slavic department. She is the author of Medical Storyworlds: Health, Illness, and Bodies in Russian and European Literature at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (Columbia UP, 2021) and articles on Formalism and environmental studies. Her current book manuscript is titled Metabolic Modernities.

This article examines illness and the body in the writings and productions of Russian theatrical director Nikolai Evreinov (1879–1953) to show the inherence of medically oriented thinking in his philosophy of theater. I demonstrate the importance of an influence on Evreinov’s concept of theatrotherapy that scholarship has not pursued, even though Evreinov references it explicitly: the nineteenth-century American New Thought movement and its massively influential concept of the “mind cure.” Interpreting Evreinov’s work within the context of the mind cure, which both emerged in resistance to professional medicine and sparked the rise of mainstream professional psychotherapy, reveals that his thought reflects early-twentieth-century shifts toward appreciating the mind’s centrality in human health. Further, by perceiving theater as a vehicle for self-healing and by turning the patient into an actor equipped with the medicine of theater, Evreinov permits patients to gain agency, power, and knowledge over their own health outside of professional medical structures.

Alisa Ballard Lin is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures at The Ohio State University with a courtesy appointment in the Department of Theater, Film, and Media Arts. Her work focuses on the theory, philosophy, and theology of performance in Russia and Eastern Europe.

Vsevolod Ivanov’s understudied novel У (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 У’s 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.

Cate I. Reilly is an Assistant Professor of Literature and Global Cultural Studies in the Program in Literature at Duke University. Her scholarship on Russia, Eastern Europe, and Eurasia of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries brings together literature and theory. Her first book is titled Psychic Empire: Literary Modernism and the Clinical State.

Building on insights from Cinema Studies, Disability Studies, and Deaf Studies, this essay traces the representation of deaf people in late-/post-Soviet Russian cinema through an examination of Dvoe (The Couple, directed by Mikhail Bogin, 1965). In particular, I highlight the intersection of disability’s depiction with that of gender. Hovering over my discussion are these questions: How do such representations signal national/ideological reexaminations of old assumptions regarding the disabled and their new exposure in the culture? How did these reexaminations and visibility advance the cause of disability rights in Soviet Russia, and how did they fall woefully short?

José Alaniz, Professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures and the Department of Cinema and Media Studies (adjunct) at the University of Washington, Seattle, has published three monographs: Komiks: Comic Art in Russia (UP of Mississippi, 2010); Death, Disability and the Superhero: The Silver Age and Beyond (UPM, 2014); and Resurrection: Comics in Post-Soviet Russia (OSU P, 2022).

This essay focuses on contemporary author Lyudmila Ulitskaya’s novel The Kukotsky Case, which has received little attention from Anglophone scholars. The novel, first published in Russian in 2001 and then in English translation in 2016, centers the ethics of women’s health and medical care in the Soviet Union, from the Stalinist period through the collapse. The complex nexus of questions regarding the (im)permissible in reproductive health and maternity forms the major narrative arc. Using a conceptual framework from the modern Medical Humanities, which emphasize writing and storytelling as valuable tools that can facilitate healing, I explore how The Kukotsky Case innovates writing the pregnant body in the Russian literary canon. In contrast to her male predecessors (Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov), whose descriptions of childbearing and mothering have dominated the Russian literary tradition , Ulitskaya merges her own professional background in genetics with her creative powers as a writer so that experiencers of pregnancy can better access and appreciate their own metamorphosis.

Melissa L. Miller is Assistant Professor of Russian at Colby College. Her articles on Chekhov, Tolstoy, and Ulitskaya have appeared in the Russian Review and SEEJ. She is the co-editor of The Russian Medical Humanities: Past, Present, and Future and is currently working on a monograph on midwives in nineteenth and twentieth-century Russian literature and culture.

This article argues that letters are central to Dostoevsky’s reflection on the nature and possibility of intimacy. It traces a progression from anxiety about epistolary intimacy expressed in Dostoevsky’s early fiction to its embrace as the basis for social reintegration in his late correspondence and journalism. Poor Folk (Bednye liudi, 1846) and “Novel in Nine Letters” (“Roman v deviati pis'makh,” 1847) illustrate the disintegration of relationships due to the many hazards of epistolary intimacy, including the potential for deception, unwanted publicity, and the hollowness of merely textual closeness. Dostoevsky’s correspondence seeks to solve the problem of epistolary intimacy that he poses in his fiction. As he matured as a letter writer, Dostoevsky took the epistolary aesthetic of naturalness seriously and attempted to generate intimacy by demanding transparency from himself and his correspondents. The resulting, ostentatiously honest persona became central to his late practice of journalism, undergirding the character of the Diarist and his mission of overcoming Russians’ social isolation in A Writer’s Diary (Dnevnik pisatelia) in 1876 and 1877. In the Diary and in his correspondence with its readers, Dostoevsky sought to create an intimacy that could encompass all the thinking people of Russia. Dostoevsky’s wrestling with epistolary intimacy was thus inseparable from his lifelong project to reimagine interpersonal relations.

Kelsey Rubin-Detlev is Assistant Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Southern California. She is the author of The Epistolary Art of Catherine the Great (Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment, 2019), and she co-translated and co-edited with Andrew Kahn the Selected Letters of Catherine the Great (Oxford UP, 2018). She currently holds an Alexander von Humboldt research fellowship at the Moritz-Stern-Institut in Göttingen, Germany.

This article analyzes Nastas'ia Fillipovna in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Idiot through the lens of sexual trauma theory. It positions Idiot as Dostoevsky’s attempt to raise sexual trauma to the level of theological crisis, confronting how victims’ failure to reclaim subjecthood or articulate trauma challenges the spiritual architecture of his salvation narratives. Drawing on Dostoevsky’s writings, contemporaneous debates on sexual violence, and modern-day trauma theory, this article posits that the Russian author’s well-documented fixation on sexual abuse (Fusso) was driven by his inability to directly address the crime’s devastating after-effects, particularly in the face of zealous state censorship. In contrast to criticism that reads Nastas'ia’s arc as one of a lost soul (Givens) who fails to forgive (Martinsen), the author asserts that Dostoevsky uses her story to grapple with a pain outside the bounds of guilt or innocence. By combining the structural elements and imperiled soul of the rebel with the thematic markers of the klikusha or sexually abused “shrieker,” Nastas'ia forces readers to reckon with earthly healing as a prerequisite to spiritual salvation. The author ultimately argues that sexual trauma was an emerging “idea-force” (Bakhtin) in Russian society, and that the novel’s “collapses of understanding” and predominance of image over speech (Caruth) aim to convey the depths of spiritual rending that can be enacted through social silencing (Forter). The end of the article suggests that Nastas'ia Filippovna is a precursor to Russian women writing on abuse today, as well as a potent counter to modern-day approaches that focus on denouncing perpetrators over hearing victims.

Dr. Melanie Jones is a member of the Faculty at the Bard Microcollege. She works in Mad Studies, specializing in Russophone and Francophone scandal and disease narratives. She is currently writing a monograph on the potentials and limits of using Western trauma theory to analyze post-Soviet and post-colonial mad literatures.