The Slavonic Studies community at the 海角社区 is very pleased to announce the publication of Rebecca Reich鈥檚 new book, .
Dr Reich is University Lecturer in Russian Literature and Culture at 海角社区, with a primary focus on the twentieth century. Her book State of Madness: Psychiatry, Literature, and Dissent After Stalin examines the politically fraught interaction of psychiatric and literary discourses in the years after Joseph Stalin鈥檚 death.
State psychiatrists deployed set narratives of mental illness to pathologize dissenting politics and art in this period of听Soviet history. Dissidents such as Aleksandr Vol鈥檖in, Vladimir Bukovskii, and Semen Gluzman responded by highlighting a pernicious overlap between those narratives and their life stories. The state, they suggested in their own psychiatrically themed texts, had crafted an idealized view of reality that itself resembled a pathological work of art. Reich's book explores this encounter between literature and听psychiatry through听close readings of听the unsanctioned poetry and prose of听such听writers as Joseph Brodsky, Andrei Siniavskii, and Venedikt Erofeev, which听engaged with psychiatric discourse to probe where creativity ended and insanity began.
鈥楻eich demonstrates the truly insidious nature听of state-sponsored psychiatric discourse and practice after Stalin,鈥� notes Angela听Brintlinger, Professor of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures at the Ohio State University. 鈥楻ather than a simple indictment, however, she accesses important primary and secondary sources to explore the complexity of defining 鈥榤adness鈥� in this conformist society.鈥�
Dr Reich is also the Consultant Editor for Russia and East-Central Europe at the Times Literary Supplement.听From 2003 to 2008 she was Arts Editor and Books Editor of The Moscow Times.
