Degeneration, decadence and disease in the Russian fin de siècle

Degeneration, decadence and disease in the Russian fin de siècle PDF Author: Frederick White
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526102129
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 397

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Book Description
Early in the twentieth century, Russia was experiencing a decadent period of cultural degeneration just as science was developing ways to identify medical conditions which supposedly reflected the health of the entire nation. Leonid Andreev, the leading literary figure of his time, stepped into the breach of this scientific discourse with literary works about degenerates. The spirited social debates on mental illness, morality and sexual deviance which resulted from these works became part of the ongoing battle over the definition and depiction of the irrational, complicated by Andreev’s own publicised bouts with neurasthenia. This book examines the concept of pathology in Russia, the influence of European medical discourse, the development of Russian psychiatry, and the role that it had in popular culture, by investigating the life and works of Andreev. It engages the emergence of psychiatry and the role that art played in the development of this objective science.

Degeneration, decadence and disease in the Russian fin de siècle

Degeneration, decadence and disease in the Russian fin de siècle PDF Author: Frederick White
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526102129
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 397

Get Book

Book Description
Early in the twentieth century, Russia was experiencing a decadent period of cultural degeneration just as science was developing ways to identify medical conditions which supposedly reflected the health of the entire nation. Leonid Andreev, the leading literary figure of his time, stepped into the breach of this scientific discourse with literary works about degenerates. The spirited social debates on mental illness, morality and sexual deviance which resulted from these works became part of the ongoing battle over the definition and depiction of the irrational, complicated by Andreev’s own publicised bouts with neurasthenia. This book examines the concept of pathology in Russia, the influence of European medical discourse, the development of Russian psychiatry, and the role that it had in popular culture, by investigating the life and works of Andreev. It engages the emergence of psychiatry and the role that art played in the development of this objective science.

Degeneration, Decadence and Disease in the Russian fin de siècle

Degeneration, Decadence and Disease in the Russian fin de siècle PDF Author: Frederick White
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 9780719091643
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
Early in the twentieth century, Russia was experiencing a decadent period of cultural degeneration just as science was developing ways to identify medical conditions which supposedly reflected the health of the entire nation. Leonid Andreev, the leading literary figure of his time, stepped into the breach of this scientific discourse with literary works about degenerates. The spirited social debates on mental illness, morality and sexual deviance which resulted from these works became part of the ongoing battle over the definition and depiction of the irrational, complicated by Andreev's own publicised bouts with neurasthenia. This book examines the concept of pathology in Russia, the influence of European medical discourse, the development of Russian psychiatry, and the role that it had on popular culture by investigating the life and works of Andreev. It engages the emergence of psychiatry and the role that art played in the development of this objective science.

Degeneration, Decadence and Disease in the Russian Fin de Siècle

Degeneration, Decadence and Disease in the Russian Fin de Siècle PDF Author: Frederick H. White
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781781707449
Category : Art and mental illness
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
This study demonstrates the implications of scientific discourse on Russian concepts of mental illness and national health. It examines the concept of pathology in Russia, the influence of European medical discourse, the development of Russian psychiatry, and the role that it had on popular culture by investigating the life and works of Leonid Andreev.

The Russian Medical Humanities

The Russian Medical Humanities PDF Author: Melissa L. Miller
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1498592163
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 215

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Book Description
This volume brings together Russian and American experts to explore fundamental issues in the medical humanities. By examining humanities-focused medical education, health and healthcare, and illness and recovery in Russian culture, this volume presents new insight into what it means to understand another’s pain, to heal, and to be human.

The Gulag Doctors

The Gulag Doctors PDF Author: Dan Healey
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300187130
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 363

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Book Description
A pioneering history of medical care in Stalin's Gulag--showing how doctors and nurses cared for inmates in appalling conditions A byword for injustice, suffering, and mass mortality, the Gulag exploited prisoners, compelling them to work harder for better rations in shocking conditions. From 1930 to 1953, eighteen million people passed through this penal-industrial empire. Many inmates, not reaching their quotas, succumbed to exhaustion, emaciation, and illness. It seems paradoxical that any medical care was available in the camps. But it was in fact ubiquitous. By 1939 the Gulag Sanitary Department employed 10,000 doctors, nurses and paramedics--about 40 percent of whom were prisoners. Dan Healey explores the lives of the medical staff who treated inmates in the Gulag. Doctors and nurses faced extremes of repression, supply shortages, and isolation. Yet they still created hospitals, re-fed prisoners, treated diseases, and "saved" a proportion of their patients. They taught apprentices and conducted research too. This groundbreaking account offers an unprecedented view of Stalin's forced-labour camps as experienced by its medical staff.

Border Crossing

Border Crossing PDF Author: Alexander Burry
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 1474411436
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
Each time a border is crossed there are cultural, political, and social issues to be considered. Applying the metaphor of the 'border crossing' from one temporal or spatial territory into another, Border Crossing: Russian Literature into Film examines the way classic Russian texts have been altered to suit new cinematic environments. In these essays, international scholars examine how political and economic circumstances, from a shifting Soviet political landscape to the perceived demands of American and European markets, have played a crucial role in dictating how filmmakers transpose their cinematic hypertext into a new environment. Rather than focus on the degree of accuracy or fidelity with which these films address their originating texts, this innovative collection explores the role of ideological, political, and other cultural pressures that can affect the transformation of literary narratives into cinematic offerings.

Designing Russian Cinema

Designing Russian Cinema PDF Author: Eleanor Rees
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350246379
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description
This book highlights the significant role that production artists played when Russian cinema was still in its infancy. It uncovers Russian cinema's connections with other art forms, examining how production artists drew on both aesthetic traditions and modernist experiments in architecture, painting and theatre as they explored the new medium of cinema and its potential to engender new models of perception and forms of audience engagement. Drawing on set design sketches, archival documents and film-makers' memoirs, Eleanor Rees reveals how less-canonical films such as Behind the Screen (Kulisy ekrana, 1919) and Palace and Fortress (Dvorets i krepost ́, 1923), were remarkable from a design perspective, and also provides new readings of well-known films, such as Children of the Age (Deti veka, 1915) and Strike (Stachka, 1925). Rees brings to light information on significant but understudied figures such as Vladimir Egorov and Sergei Kozlovskii, and highlights the involvement of well-known figures such as Lev Kuleshov and Aleksandr Rodchenko. Unlike the majority of late Imperial directors and camera operators, many early-Russian production artists continued to work in cinema in the Soviet era and to draw on practices forged before the 1917 Revolution. In spanning the entire silent era, this book highlights the often overlooked continuities between the late-Imperial and early-Soviet periods of cinema, thus questioning traditional historical periodisations.

Love for Sale

Love for Sale PDF Author: Colleen Lucey
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 150175887X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 182

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Book Description
Love for Sale is the first study to examine the ubiquity of commercial sex in Russian literary and artistic production from the nineteenth century through the fin de siècle. Colleen Lucey offers a compelling account of how the figure of the sex worker captivated the public's imagination through depictions in fiction and fine art, bringing to light how imperial Russians grappled with the issue of sexual commerce. Studying a wide range of media—from little-known engravings that circulated in newspapers to works of canonical fiction—Lucey shows how writers and artists used the topic of prostitution both to comment on women's shifting social roles at the end of tsarist rule and to express anxieties about the incursion of capitalist transactions in relations of the heart. Each of the book's chapters focus on a type of commercial sex, looking at how the street walker, brothel worker, demimondaine, kept woman, impoverished bride, and madam traded in sex as a means to acquire capital. Lucey argues that prostitution became a focal point for imperial Russians because it signaled both the promises of modernity and the anxieties associated with Westernization. Love for Sale integrates historical analysis, literary criticism, and feminist theory and conveys how nineteenth-century beliefs about the "fallen woman" drew from medical, judicial, and religious discourse on female sexuality. Lucey invites readers to draw a connection between rhetoric of the nineteenth century and today's debate on sex workers' rights, highlighting recent controversies concerning Russian sex workers to show how imperial discourse is recycled in the twenty-first century.

Decadence, Degeneration, and the End

Decadence, Degeneration, and the End PDF Author: Marja Härmänmaa
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137470860
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
Art and literature during the European fin-de-siècle period often manifested themes of degeneration and decay, both of bodies and civilizations, as well as illness, bizarre sexuality, and general morbidity. This collection explores these topics in relation to artists and writers as diverse as Oscar Wilde, August Strindberg, and Aubrey Beardsley.

Photographic Literacy

Photographic Literacy PDF Author: Katherine M. H. Reischl
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501730495
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 570

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Book Description
Photography, introduced to Russia in 1839, was nothing short of a sensation. Its rapid proliferation challenged the other arts, including painting and literature, as well as the very integrity of the self. If Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky greeted the camera with skepticism in the nineteenth century, numerous twentieth-century authors welcomed it with a warm embrace. As Katherine M. H. Reischl shows in Photographic Literacy, authors as varied as Leonid Andreev, Ilya Ehrenburg, and Alexander Solzhenitsyn picked up the camera and reshaped not only their writing practices but also the sphere of literacy itself. For these authors, a single photograph or a photograph as illustration is never an endpoint; their authorial practices continually transform and animate the frozen moment. But just as authors used images to shape the reception of their work and selves, Russian photographers—including Sergei Prokudin-Gorsky and Alexander Rodchenko—used text to shape the reception of their visual work. From the diary to print, the literary word imbues that photographic moment with a personal life story, and frames and reframes it in the writing of history. In this primer on photographic literacy, Reischl argues for the central place that photography has played in the formation of the Russian literary imagination over the course of roughly seventy years. From image to text and back again, she traces the visual consciousness of modern Russian literature as captured through the lens of the Russian author-photographer.