Madness And the Mad in Russian Culture

'-Madness (bezumie) is a language,- Mikhail Epstein writes in his contribution to this wonderfully eclectic and wide-ranging volume. In the Russian literary tradition, that language has enjoyed high status: it was spoken by holy fools, saintly idiots, honest citizens incarcerated in psychiatric hospitals, great poets in their capacity as prophets. In the post-Soviet period, this spectrum broadened to include de-ideologized studies of neurosis, depression, suicide, fan hysteria, shell shock, revolutionary trauma - all of which are discussed here by Russians from inside their own culture as well as by outsiders and bi-culturals. A fascinating book on that most difficult task: making cultural sense out of worlds and psyches designed to work on the far side of reason.' -Caryl Emerson, A. Watson Armour III University Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Princeton UniversityVinitsky, Ilya is the author of 'Madness And the Mad in Russian Culture ', published 2007 under ISBN 9780802091406 and ISBN 0802091407.