In Praise of Madness: the Landmarks of a Cultural Pathology

Neohelicon (2016) 43:357–370 DOI 10.1007/s11059-016-0340-2

In praise of madness: the landmarks of a cultural pathology

Monica Spiridon1

Published online: 5 July 2016 Ó Akade´miai Kiado´, Budapest, Hungary 2016

Abstract This paper looks at the particular relationship between madness and sanity in a dictatorship, speciﬁcally in Soviet Russia, as analyzed in Mikhail Bul- gakov’s Master and Margarita and in Alexander Zinoviev’s The Madhouse. In both cases, albeit in different ways, madness is regarded as a form resistance to communism (Stalin’s and Brezhnev’s), as a particular kind of sanity, and ﬁnally as a creative vocation. The relationship between madness and sanity is seen as reversible and can change depending on different perspectives—which are mostly political in the two novels. As illustrated by the two authors, the modern literary discourse on madness can be metaphorically shaped by the writer, as a generic category which can refer to various forms of resistance and deviation from the established social, political and cultural norms.

Keywords Madness Á Carnival Á Political dissidence Á Mental hospital Á Prison Á Epistemological metaphor

Madness as (self) awareness

What fool doesn’t want to live under communism?! Thinking about this last sentence, I was suddenly struck by the deviousness of the Russian language. From a logical point of view that sentence is equivalent in meaning to the sentence ‘All fools want to live under communism’. But don’t laugh too soon. Logically it does not follow that if you are not a fool, then you don’t want to live under communism. Nor does it follow that if you want to live under communism then you are deﬁnitely a fool. Only one thing follows: if a person

& Monica Spiridon [email protected]

1 University of Bucharest, Bucharest, Romania 123 358 M. Spiridon

is a fool then he wants to live under communism. And according to the law of contraposition in logic, it follows that if a person does not want to live under communism then he is not a fool. And that means something! And notice: the conclusion was arrived at exclusively according to the rules of logic. (Zinoviev 1986,p.8) In a nutshell, the above, from Alexander Zinoviev’s The Madhouse argues that only those who resist communism are normal, which leads to the conclusion that the communist Soviet world is insane. This study looks at the various equations between madness and sanity in a dictatorship, specifically in Soviet Russia, as illustrated by Alexander Zinoviev’s The Madhouse and by Mikhail Buklgakov’s The Master and Margarita. As I seek to demonstrate, both writers imply, albeit in different ways, that madness can be regarded as a form of resistance to communism (be it Stalin’s or Brezhnev’s), as a particular kind of sanity, and finally as a creative vocation. Consequently, the relationship between madness and sanity changes depending on perspective, which is mostly political in the two novels. Madness can only be defined and understood in relation to a specific model of Sanity. Its standards decry mental illness as peripheral, deviant, dangerous and bound to be punished. ‘‘In any case the Reason–Madness nexus constitutes for Western culture one of the dimensions of its originality—maintains Foucault; it already accompanied that culture long before Hieronymus Bosch, and will follow it long after Nietzsche and Artaud.’’ (Foucault 1998, p. XI) From a historical point of view, the clear-cut antithesis between Sanity and Madness is quite recent. It remained highly ambiguous until the end of the classical century ‘‘an epoch in which the exchange between madness and reason modifies its language, and in a radical manner.’’ (Foucault 1998, p. XII) This was the point at which madness first started to be regarded as a disease, and, later, as a punishable offence: ‘‘What is originative is the caesura that establishes the distance between reason and non-reason; reason’s subjugation of non-reason, wresting from it its truth as madness, crime, or disease, derives explicitly from this point.’’ (Foucault 1998,p. IX) Clearly the key issue here is the very definition of sanity, which can itself be regarded as a specific form of madness. The Soviet power had its own definition of sanity, which involved punishing the slightest deviation, by forcibly confining the offenders in psychiatric hospitals, known as Yellow houses. In Soviet Russia, the madhouse/the yellow house was a well-known institution, more or less explicitly mentioned by a number of writers who were able to engage in an open debate around the issue of mental hospitals and their patients. In a dictatorship Madness means first and foremost Difference. In Soviet Russia anyone who showed signs of being different in the smallest way became a lunatic, and was destined for a psychiatric institution or even imprisonment. This is precisely the fate of Zinoviev’s main character JRF (Junior Research Fellow), an independent, maybe a little bit eccentric young man, who finds himself progressively identified by his mates as a politically suspect.

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At the beginning of the story, JRF is an ordinary researcher, a non-conformist youngster, mocking the dress codes and the verbal patterns which are strictly observed in his academic institution—the Soviet Academy of Sciences’ Humanities Institute, widely known in Moscow as the Madhouse: ‘‘The Madhouse, if you want to know, is the building which houses the humanity institutes of the Academy of Sciences. And it is called the Madhouse, not because it has just as many nutcases as Belye Stolby but because is painted in the same color—yellow.’’ (Zinoviev 1986, p. 20) From the informers’ reports submitted to the KGB on JRF we learn that: ‘‘He’s a strange lad in some ways. Even a bit touched.’’ (Zinoviev 1986, p. 156) In what way is he touched? ‘‘He reads detective novels; he gets anti-Soviet books from somewhere or other, and enemy newspapers.’’ (Zinoviev 1986, p. 141) ‘‘He’s got a beard. (…) He’s got a room to himself. He’ll be sitting in a meeting or at a seminar, but his thoughts will be somewhere else entirely. No, I wouldn’t say that he is schizophrenic. Generally speaking he is quiet, inoffensive, never quarrels with anyone. But…’’ (Zinoviev 1986, p. 142) ‘‘He is a dreamer; he’s very capable, but he doesn’t want to write his thesis; he knows two languages…’’ (Zinoviev 1986, p. 151) and so on. This is the very ordinary starting point of a process which eventually turns him into something which, according to the others, ‘‘is alien to our society’’ and subsequently which ‘‘this society needs to take prophylactic measures against’’. (Zinoviev 1986, p. 409) More specifically, ‘‘he got interested in politics and ideology—as some mate notices. He left our Department after all, and went over to the Department of struggle anti-communism. (…) He began to take an interest in sociology, the theory of socialism, in concrete facts of our life which are beyond what would be considered normal (my emphasis), such as cases of self-immolation, attempts on the lives of people, cases of people being locked up in psychiatric hospitals, etc.’’ (Zinoviev 1986, p. 158) As the story goes on, we realize that JRF is not only intelligent and intellectually sharp but also self-reflective. Unusually, his mind hosts several heteronyms, identified by nicknames such as Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Iron, Felix and Beria. Thanks to this multiple schizophrenia, JRF becomes more and more aware of the historic crimes of communism, of the hypocrisy and theatrical dimensions of the so called Bolshevik revolution, of the repressive function of the Soviet power and overall of the absurdity and madness of the very idea of a communist society. Ostracized by his fellow researchers, he is initially temporarily packed off to an academic ‘‘rest house’’ in the hope that he will calm down and to become normal again. Finally he is arrested and confined most probably to a psychiatric hospital: a Madhouse, an universe which is completely cut off from the real world: ‘‘In the serene world of mental illness—Foucault contends—modern man no longer communicates with the madman.’’ (Foucault 1998, p. 10) The yellow colour of the Academy building metaphorically suggests that madness—meaning political dissent—could potentially sprout inside. However in Zinoviev’s novel this is not the case. For all their high moral and intellectual claims, the Russian intelligentsia who work there are all but ‘‘normal’’, which—as the author emphasizes—does not mean opponents but opportunists. Only few, such as JRF’s friend The Teacher, have a certain potential for debate and riposte. In short, 123 360 M. Spiridon

Zinoviev’s main character remains a loner, whose only friends are the political heteronyms which inhabit his own mind. In Bulgakov’s Stalinist Moscow, the issue of Madness and of the mental hospital promptly rears its head from the very beginning. In the first chapter the entities engaged in a turbulent and bizarre dialogue—the writers Berlioz and Bezdomnii and the Devil Woland—stake turns to see each other as lunatics. The same happens in old Yerushalaim as depicted an abyme by the Master’s novel. Yeshua is regarded as a lunatic by the criminals who condemn and murder him, who in turn see themselves as sane, and vice versa. The only one who understands that Yeshua Ha-Notsri is a ‘‘chosen one’’ is Pontius Pilate. He attempts to save him by trying to confine this alleged lunatic to a remote residence near his own palace: During the swallow’s flight, the following thought was taking shape in the procurator’s now bright and clear head: The vagrant philosopher turned out to be mentally ill. (my emphasis) In consequence of which, the procurator does not confirm the death sentence pronounced against Ha-Notsri by the lesser Sinedrion. However, in view of the fact that Ha-Nostsri’s insane, utopian speeches might cause unrest in Yerushalaim; the procurator is removing Yeshua form Yerushalaim and sentencing him to confinement in Strato’s Caesarea on the Mediterranean, the site of the procurator’s residence. (Bulgakov 1996, pp. 20–21) In Bulgakov’s fictional universe the dynamic between sanity and madness is not always easy to grasp. Madness is complex, sophisticated and much more nuanced than in Zinoviev’s novel. For instance, a full suite of offenders—thieves, crooks, criminals, blackmailers, denouncers—end up in Professor Stravinsky’s mental hospital, alongside the Master and Ivan. But this is just because Woland tries to morally cleanse Stalinist Moscow, ridding it of them, if only for a while. Although for a short interval they find they have no place in the Devil’s city, by the end of the novel they are more or less ‘‘normal’’ again—which here simply means ‘‘communist’’. This genuine projective and cultural stuff of madness is more prominent in Master and Margarita than in the Madhouse and it is not to be taken for a clinical reality. An equally complicated situation is noticeable for instance in E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Tomcat Murr. The Kapellmeister Kreisler is unanimously considered bizarre, eccentric and most probably mad, while Prince Hector, seen as normal by almost everybody, is in fact a mad cold-blooded killer. From Master Abraham’s and Kreisler’s point of view, as well as from that of the narrator, Prince Iraeneus’ aristocratic court, its linguistic patterns and dress-codes, its protocol, its cultural pretences, its high standards of ‘‘normality’’, are in fact foolish. A certain suggestion that Master Abraham’s or Kreisler’s madness is at least in part, demonic can be spotted by a careful reading between the lines. (Hoffmann, 1999) In the Master and Margarita the Devil himself, alias Woland, professionally directs the kaleidoscopic dynamics of the relationship between madness and sanity. He is the source of the dramatic gap which opens temporarily in Stalinist Moscow between communist normality and rebellious madness. 123 In praise of madness: the landmarks of a cultural pathology 361

The inspiration for the Master’s novel about Pontius Pilate, which puts forward a reinterpretation of biblical events, comes from Woland. In what follows, the writer and his potential Soviet editor are mutually suspicious of each other’s sanity: [The editor] kept looking at me as if an abscess had blown up on my cheek, looked off into the corner, and even giggled with embarrassment. The questions he asked me seemed insane (my emphasis). He said nothing about the novel itself but asked me who I was, where I came from, whether I’ve been writing for a long time, and why nothing had been heard of me before. And then he asked what I thought it was a totally idiotic question: who had given me the idea of writing a novel on such a strange subject (my emphasis). (Bulgakov 1996, p. 119) It is because of his bizarre novel that the Master is ostracized by the muscovite literary world, deemed insane and, finally confined to a mental hospital, which he will never leave, as he is well aware: ‘‘I am incurable, the guest replied calmly. When Stravinsky says that he’ll bring me back to life, I don’t believe him.’’ (Bulgakov 1996, p. 125) One of the key issues of modern madness is, as Foucault substantiates, the difference between madness allowed to roam free and madness confined. Foucault charts the journey of the lunatic from liberty and discourse to confinement and silence, and highlights how this is related to the use of power. The process starts in the epoch when madness was an ‘‘undifferentiated experience’’ (Foucault 1998,p. IX), a time when the mad roamed the countryside in ‘‘an easy wandering existence’’ (Foucault 1998, p. 8) Reading the two Russian novels in question we realize that, at least in the Soviet world, madness which is allowed to roam free is contagious and can infect or corrupt the others. This is the case in Zinoviev’s novel. JRF’s unusual self-awareness is progressively enhanced by his encounter with the occasional free ‘‘nutcase’’—such as the two he nicknames The Terrorist and The Denouncer—who come into the Institute and whom it is his official duty to look after: ‘‘Average nutcase. There are lots like him wandering around here. At first he bombarded the Institute with letters and manuscripts. Then he made an appearance himself. He came to me. (…)It happened that dealing with nutcases was more or less my official duty.’’ (Zinoviev 1986, p. 140) In turn, JRF, as a lunatic at large, is a potential disseminator of illness. In the institute, at the rest house or elsewhere, he is trying to increase the levels of awareness of his colleagues, fellow citizens, neighbours or occasional mistresses. Up to a point, Bulgakov’s Master is also a free madman, although a very special one. He actively tries not to contaminate Margarita and urges her to leave him and to become normal again. He is sensible and self-aware enough to realize that as a peripheral, marginalized individual, and that confinement is his only option. As for Margarita, she herself has a genuine vocation for madness, since she abhors normality. We learn that, by contemporary Soviet standards, she has every possible reason to consider herself happy. She is a beautiful woman, happily married to a handsome, sensible, loving and prosperous man. And above all she was

123 362 M. Spiridon spared all the servitudes, the miseries, the humiliation of everyday life in a communist regime: ‘‘Margarita Nikolayevna had plenty of money. Margarita Nikolayevna could by anything that took her fancy. Margarita Nikolayevna never touched a primus stove. Margarita Nikolayevna was ignorant of the horrors of life in a communal apartment.’’ (Bulgakov 1996, p. 185) However she is not happy—pure madness, compared to the ‘‘normal’’ aspirations of her fellow Soviet compatriots: ‘‘Gods, my gods! What did this woman want? What did this woman want, whose eyes always burned with an incomprehensible fire? I do not know. I have no idea.’’ (Bulgakov 1996, pp. 185–86) What she actually craves is to worship the Master and his rogue novel; to pull down the symbolic fortress of the official literary world, the MASOLIT apartment building (The Soviet Writers’ Union); to turn into a witch and to be the hostess of Satan’s Great Ball; finally to follow the Master in the eternal refuge granted to him by his transcendental protectors, Yeshua and the Devil. Both Bulgakov and Zinoviev closely follow the evolutions of their characters on the path towards madness and Being Different, which ends in confinement in an alternative world. Before his confinement in a yellow house, or even in prison, Zinoviev’s JRF goes through a preliminary step: the rest house where his confinement as well as his freedom is limited. Bulgakov is keenly interested in the various dynamics of a contamination accelerated by outside intervention. The simple presence of the Devil in the Stalinist world drives a vast array of characters to Professor Stravinsky’s mental hospital. But they are not there to stay. The medical staff try their hardest to fully brainwash them, to help them forget the devilish madness temporarily bestowed upon them, and to return them to fit back into normal life. Some of them do not fully succeed. This is particularly the case for the poet Ivan Bezdomnii who is not only driven mad by his contact with Satan, but is also thoroughly enlightened by his conversations with the Master. He is finally ‘‘cured’’ and returns to normality as a respectable research historian, who is aware that he has suffered from a serious illness earlier in his life: Everything is clear to Ivan Nikolayevich, he knows and understands everything. He knows that in his youth he was the victim of hypnotists- criminals and that he had to go in for treatment and was cured. But he also knows that there are things that he cannot cope with. For example, he cannot cope with the spring full moon. As soon as it draws near, Ivan Nikolayevich becomes restless, anxious, loses his appetite, has trouble sleeping, and waits for the moon to ripen and when the full moon comes nothing can keep Ivan Nikolayevich at home. (Bulgakov 1996, p. 333) The full moon helps Ivan remember the story of his temporary madness and enhances his nostalgia: … the professor returns home utterly ill. His wife pretends not to notice his condition and hurries him off to bed. But she herself stays up and sits by the lamp with a book, gazing at him with bitter eyes as he sleeps. She knows that

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at dawn Ivan Nikolayevich will wake up with a tortured scream and that he will start crying and toss about. That is why she keeps a hypodermic syringe soaking in alcohol on the cloth beneath the lamp. (Bulgakov 1996, p. 334) As for the Master, he knows that between normal Soviet life and real freedom there is no room for his lunacy. However he does try to bridge the gap at one point, setting his devilish novel on ﬁre, trying to get rid of it as a living proof of his mental illness. Satan also acknowledges that there is no proper place for the Master outside the contrasting worlds of communist society and the mental institution. In his ﬁnal conversations with Azzazello and with Yeshua he tries to resolve this conundrum. The mad novelist is thus offered a peaceful refuge, in between two worlds, in a transcendental, but not divine realm of beauty and Creation. From this dilemma we see that the only alternative to madness, dictatorship and political alienation is art and the universe of Creation.

Madness as creation

Both Zinoviev and Bulgakov seem to subscribe to this hypothesis, as shown by the symbolic debates they both include on the subject—one that many other writers, not least Thomas Mann, have looked at—effective equating creativity with schizophrenia. In Zinoviev’s novels, not only in The Madhouse but also in Yawning Heights, his universally acclaimed satire of communism, the schizophrenic is the paradigmatic type of the dissident and of the creative lunatic. In Bulgakov’s novel schizophrenia is the Master’s clinical diagnosis and also, temporarily, Ivan’s. Adrian Leverkuhn, Thomas Mann’s genial composer who works with the Devil to produce rogue masterpieces, is, in turn, schizophrenic. It follows that, as part of a sophisticated relationship, madness can be equated with creativity and, thus, the lunatic with The Artist. Zinoviev’s JRF is not an Artist yet, although others agree that he is an unusually gifted writer. He is even able to ‘‘rewrite’’, i.e. to imagine and even to forge, others’ lost manuscripts, which he then comments on. He is also commissioned by his Institute to deal with other potential revisionists hanging around, before he is conﬁned to Belye Stolby, the famous Stalinist mental hospital: And nothing can stop them – neither the permanent immobile lift which is always needing repair not the ever-present danger of lapsing into revisionism and being expedited into short order to Belye Stolby. I had to read their essays, write a review of them, talk with them, answer their letters, give consultations. And also provide assessments for Belye Stolby. I ought to admit (and I am proud of it!) that not once did I write in any of my assessment that the author of this treatise was psychically abnormal. (Zinoviev 1986, pp. 30–31) JRF’s mind has a strong potential to create alter egos and to engage in lively debates with them:

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Today my egos rebelled: ‘‘We’ve had enough’’, they roared with one voice, ‘‘of going around being called Second or Third or Tenth or Twentieth! We wand to play first fiddle!’’ From now on I’m going to be Iron Felix’’ said my second ego.’’ I’m going to be the General Secretary’’ squeaked my Seventh ego.’’ I’ll be Stalin’’ grunted my Fiftieth ego.’’ And I’ll be Lenin’’ yelled my Fiftieth ego.’’ And I’ll be Marx…’’ ‘‘I’ll be…’’ I’ll be… (Zinoviev 1986, p. 53) Sometimes JRF’s arguments with his impressive range of alter-egos look like dreams. The dream is a convenient way for anyone to create potential worlds, alternatives to the social-political order, and to escape from its real-world oppressive confinement. The reader of Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus can never decide whether Adrian Leverkuhn’s encounter with the Devil happens in reality or is the fruit of the schizophrenic artist’s dreams. In Bulgakov’s novel even vulgar and ‘‘piggish’’ people, like Margarita’s neighbour, can be the victims of occasional episodes of lunacy, dreaming of an escape from Stalinist Moscow during full moon nights: ‘‘He sees a respectable- looking, middle-aged man with a beard and a pince-nez and slightly piggish features sitting on a bench. He is a resident of the gothic house and Ivan Nikolayevich always finds him in the same dreamy pose, his gaze directed to the moon. Ivan Nikolayevich knows that after admiring the moon, the man on the bench will turn his gaze to the bay window and stare at it as if eh expects it to burst open any minute and have something unusual appear on the windowsill. ‘‘Gods, gods!’’ Ivan Nikolayevich will start whispering from his hiding place behind the fence, his inflamed eyes still fastened on the mysterious stranger,’’ ‘‘there is another victim of the moon…Yes, another one like me.’’ (Bulgakov 1996, p. 333) The writer Ivan Nikolayevich Bezdomnii, the acclaimed poet, member of MASOLIT, is a very particular kind of creator. In the beginning he is an officially acclaimed poet, a hyper-integrated pro-Soviet citizen, although he produces some very bad writing. Following his devil-induced schizophrenia, and his forcible incarceration in professor Stravinsky’s mental hospital, he comes under the beneficial influence of the Master. After a series of successive revelations, he becomes self-aware and distances himself from his state-commissioned poetry: Tell me yourself, are your poems any good? ‘‘Horrible!’’ Ivan blurted out boldly and frankly.’’ ‘‘Don’t write any more!’’ the newcomer implored.’’ I promise you, I swear I won’t!’’ was Ivan’s solemn reply. (Bulgakov 1996, p. 111) Back to ‘‘normal’’ life, the former poet, who now understands that Soviet ‘‘normality’’ is not compatible with good quality Art, becomes a serious history researcher. But how do novelists such as Bulgakov, Zinoviev or Mann generally asses quality in creation? And, particularly, what kind of Art stimulates their fictional lunatics?

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In their fictional universes good art tends to originate in a kind of para-, meta-or trans-world, sometimes ‘‘such stuff as dreams are made of’’, but always a potential world which can act as an alternative to reality. (Pavel 1986, pp. 43–50) JRF’s alter egos are maleficent forces from beyond this world who stimulate his dissenting madness and boost his creative schizophrenia. In Bulgakov’s and Mann’s work madness is a transcendental, demonic creativity. Every line of the Master’s Pilate novel is inspired by Satan and given the stamp of approval by Yeshua, two entities that, for the ‘‘normal’’ inhabitants of Moscow and Yerushalaim, embody actual lunacy. His novel is thus no less than a rogue version of the Bible or, indeed, a diabolical response to the Bible. As a self-proclaimed witness and guarantor of the historical Truth of the Bible, Woland pushes the Master to create an Original, which gives the existing Bible an apocryphal status. Adrian Leverkuhn, Mann’s fictional artist, buys from Mephistopheles a form of diabolical time travel to produce three masterpieces: Gesta Romanorum, Apocalip- sis cum Figuris, and The Lament of Doctor Faustus. In more than one respect, all three are deviant from canonic norms. Rubber stamped and inspired by the Devil, the genius composer tries to navigate against traditional, consecrated patterns - evangelical as well as musical. The most significant of the three is Apocalipsis cum Figuris, which tries to discredit and to rewrite the famous Apocalypse of St John. (Mann 1999,p.417) The artistic madness created by Mann is ambiguous. The narrator of the novel, Serenus Zeitblom, sees Mephistopheles as a product of Adrian’s troubled mind. Not least, to the artist himself admits on several occasions that the diabolic encounter could be the consequence of a bout of illness or the occasional high fever. In any case, and even if the Devil really does visit the rebellious composer’s home, Thomas Mann suggests that the seed of Leverkuhn’s creative madness lies within himself, as is also the case with the Master. From this point of view, the lunatic becomes The Chosen. In his study ‘‘Methods of Madness and Madness as a Method’’, the Russian-born theorist Mikhail Epstein, who is always interested in the humanities’ methodolog- ical response to the challenges of the twenty-first century (Epstein 2012), comes up with a particular interpretation of artistic madness, which he identifies as a ‘‘critical not a clinical diagnosis of an author.’’ (Epstein 2007, p. 263) Referring to case studies such as Holderlin’s and Batiushkov’s mental illness, among others, this approach mainly tries to establish a (self-reflexive) reading methodology. (Epstein 2007, p. 282).

Madness as a show and carnival

In Foucault’s work, madness is a complex, multifaceted phenomenon, with both tragic and a comic aspects. In his Introduction Jose Barchilon argues: ‘‘Most of the time, for the sake of clarity, we examine madness through one of its facets; as M. Foucault animates one facet of the problem after the other, he always keeps them related to each other. The end of the middle Ages emphasized the comic, but just as often the tragic aspect of madness, as in Tristan and Iseult, for example. The 123 366 M. Spiridon

Renaissance, with Erasmus’s Praise of Folly, demonstrated how fascinating imagination and some of its vagaries were to the thinkers of that day.’’ (Foucault 1998, pp. v–vi) In his letter to Thomas Moore, included in The Praise of Folly, Erasmus of Rotterdam also insists on the millenarian tradition of comic folly in literature: ‘‘But I would have them whom the lightness or foolery of the argument may offend to consider that mine is not the first of this kind, but the same thing that has been often practiced even by great authors: when Homer, so many ages since, did the like with the battle of frogs and mice; Virgil, with the gnat and puddings; Ovid, with the nut; when Polycrates and his corrector Isocrates extolled tyranny; Glauco, injustice; Favorinus, deformity and the quartan ague; Synescius, baldness; Lucian, the fly and flattery; when Seneca made such sport with Claudius’ canonizations; Plutarch, with his dialogue between Ulysses and Gryllus; Lucian and Apuleius, with the ass; and some other, I know not who, with the hog that made his last will and testament, of which also even St. Jerome makes mention. And therefore if they please, let them suppose I played at tables for my diversion, or if they had rather have it so, that I rode on a hobbyhorse.’’ (Erasmus 1958,p.3) In view of this series of representations, Thomas Pavel agrees the comic side of Madness is its original literary representation, dating back to the Hispanic world of Cervantes. According to Pavel, although the lamentable condition of the lunatic is tragic per se, it becomes ridiculous in relation to society: ‘‘In such an unsuitable en- vironment hostile to their dreams they frequently feel uncomfortable. The misfortune of the character—which is tragic—is however tainted by a sort of comic complicity between the outcast and his afflicting surroundings.’’1 (Pavel 2003,p.345) A contrast between tragic and comic is at work in both Zinoviev’s and Bulgakov’s novels, although in different ways. The Russian authors juggle with it in creating their characters, above all into reveal hidden, unpalatable dimensions of ‘‘sane’’ Soviet society. The revelations of the diabolic retinue in Woland’s Muscow show are in this comic vein: ‘‘Today and Every day at the Variety Theatre, an added attraction: Professor Woland performs black magic with an expose´ in full’’, claims eye- catching promotional poster. (Bulgakov 1996, p. 87) The full expose´ reveals, in the full glare of the footlights, a vast array of vices thus far concealed by the outwardly respectable pillars of Moscow’s communist establishment. Also notable are the remarkably ludic dimensions of both Margarita’s and Natasha’s rescue from the ‘‘normal’’ world. As they turn into witches the two ladies recruit for the occasion one of Margarita’s neighbours, Nikolay Ivanovitch, transformed into a fat hog and used by Natasha as her vehicle to the Sabbath: ‘‘She was flying astride a fat hog, which was clutching a briefcase in his front hooves and beating the air furiously with his back ones. A pince-nez, which has fallen off the hog’s nose, gleamed off and on in the moonlight as it dangled from a string at a hog’s side, and a hat kept falling over they hog’s eyes.’’ (Bulgakov 1996, pp. 207–208)

1 «Ils se sentent souvent fort a l’aise dans une ambiance si de´favorable a leurs aspirations. Le malheur du personnage—qui tient de la trage´die—est de la sorte pimente d’une sorte de complicite´ comique entre l’exclu et le milieu qui le torture«. 123 In praise of madness: the landmarks of a cultural pathology 367

The poet Bezdomnii dramatically jumps from one extreme to the other, from comic to tragic, as underlined in the title of the Chapter, ‘‘Ivan is split in two’’. (Bulgakov 1996, p. 95) On the one hand, at the beginning of the novel, his pursuit of the Devil across Moscow, culminating in his incursion to the writers’ restaurant Griboedov, is fully comical and written in a buff register. His hilarious appearance is definitely seen by the others a symptom of madness and he is promptly packed off to Stravinsky’s clinic. Once there, the narrator gives a hilarious account of his attempts to be taken seriously by the medical staff and to have Woland and his retinue arrested by the police. On the other hand, once in the mental hospital, Ivan becomes a troubled case, anxiously calling on the nurse Praskovia Feodorovna to soothe him, and crying bitterly in the twilight like a baby. As for the Master, he is generally tragic and the subject of Margarita’s lamentations, although in one instance, as first seen by Ivan in the clinic, and by the diabolical retinue after Satan’s ball, he does appear ridiculous. Very often, the comic dimension of madness is developed by both novelists into well-orchestrated theatrical performances. In Zinoviev’s novel, JRF is just a spectator of the script A Sexual Tragedy, written and directed by his alter-egos, namely Lenin, Stalin, Marx, Iron Felix and Beria. Since the collective drama is a comedy, generously spiced with music composed by Marx and pointing to the morally insane dimension of the communist fauna, its title is antiphrastic. In Bulgakov’s Moscow, Satan appears as a professional illusionist who cleverly involves his audience in shows which blur the border between fantasy and reality. The stars of almost all this performances are the duo Behemoth-the-cat and Koroviov/Fagot, always ready to show off, pulling down absurd interdicts and barriers, denouncing fake respectability, upending the corrupt, ‘‘sane’’ communist order. Only at the end, as they leave Moscow, that the demonic crew returns to their real serious and frightening aspect: ‘‘Night was thickening, flying alongside the riders, grabbing at their cloaks and pulling them off, unmasking all illusions. And whenever Margarita, buffeted by the cool breeze, opened her yes, she saw the changes that were taking place in the appearances of all who were flying to their destination. And when the crimson fool moon rose up to meet them from behind the edge of the forest, all illusions vanished and the magical, mutable clothing fell into the swamp and drowned into the mist.’’ (Bulgakov 1996, p. 321) Also notably in Hoffmann’s novel, Kreisler and Master Abraham, both artists and alleged lunatics, both directors of the performances which are always running at Prince Iraeneus’ aulic court, are witty and funny. At the same time, their ferocious enemy, prince Hector, is genuinely gloomy and dismal. In the same vein, Leverkuhn’s music inspired by the Devil is a potential setting for a puppet show. All these examples confirm a generally accepted truth of the equivalence between art and free play. Of the authors we looked at, Bulgakov is the only one who develops his Moscow performance show into a well-orchestrated Carnival which wreaks havoc and temporary turns the Russian urban world upside down. As defined by Mikhail Bakhtin the category of ‘‘carnival’’ is a multilayered epistemological metaphor and a double edged sword: a complex collective performance which has a constructive as well as a destructive facet. (Bakhtin 1984, pp. 33–35). 123 368 M. Spiridon

In The Master and Margarita, the carnival is the Devil’s means of challenging the aberrant communist order, an authoritarian model of politics, civilization, ideology and culture, and its norms, and to pull it apart, albeit temporarily. Overrun by the carnivalesque forces, the city becomes a vast living theatre. Bulgakov’s plot is a clever and ingenious ‘‘mise en sce`ne’’. Almost all the incidents in the novel are living performances, in the theatrical meaning of the word: the destruction of Dramalit, the Russian writers’ house; the Witches’ Sabbath by the river; the feuds between the police and the Behemoth-Koroviov duo in Sadovaia Street; the Entertainment Commission who can’t stop singing; the disembodied talking suit, and so on. By the end, Woland himself directs a magniﬁcent Great Satan’s Ball, giving purpose and momentum to the carnival he has set in motion in Moscow. This destruction seems the outcome of a paroxysm of insanity, like an outburst of furious madness, and this is the ofﬁcially explanation reached by the political authorities and the secret police. In fact, the comic collective madness sparked by Satan has a therapeutic role in as much as it undermines the malignant Stalinist order. After this episode, Moscow will never be the same again.

The shifting border

According to Foucault, in the past the dividing line between normality and madness, between sane and insane was permeable, ambiguous and, in any case, society wasn’t interested in a clear cut dichotomy between the two. In his work he talks about a ‘‘zero point in the course of madness at which madness is an undifferentiated experience, a not yet divided experience of division itself.’’(Foucault 1998, p. IX) However, as he goes on to explain, by the end of the eighteenth century, the age of enlightenment and of reason, this initial ambiguity disappears. Following the emerging scientific discourse about madness—psychiatry—the dialogue between the mad and the sanel is replaced by silence: In the serene world of mental illness, modern man no longer communicates with the madman. the constitution of madness as a mental illness, at the end of the eighteenth century, affords the evidence of a broken dialogue, posits the separation as already effected, and thrusts into oblivion all those stammered, imperfect words without fixed syntax in which the exchange between madness and reason was made. The language of psychiatry which is a monologue of reason about madness has been established only on the basis of this silence. (Foucault 1998, pp. X–XI) Foucault underlines that madness fits in with a range of ‘‘epistemic’’ paradigms, as different from each other as the social, intellectual and cultural systems he calls epistemes. He also argues that in our time the epistemic meaning and interpretation of madness sees it as irreversible, and involves a silent lunatic. Returning to the literary tradition of representing madness, in Thomas Pavel’s view, the fictional paradigm of Quixote embodies a kind of madman who is unable to reintegrate into the normal life: ‘‘In the case of Quixote the gap between the main character and his surrounding world is an initial datum of his story, an 123 In praise of madness: the landmarks of a cultural pathology 369 overwhelming predicament that cannot be explained or really solved.’’ (Pavel 2003, p. 344…)2 This irreversible gap is the consequence of the peculiar Spanish interpretation of the Christian commandment on humility: ‘‘They face the decided No! Of the normal world and, since there is no alternative, they stay where they are, despite their status of proscribed people.’’3 In different words, the character willingly assumes his peripheral existence which for the others has an obvious shade of ridiculous and of comic. (Pavel 2003, pp. 344–345) In Zinoviev’s and in Bulgakov’s communist worlds the relationship between reversible and irreversible is more complicated. The allegedly mad intelligentsia of Brezhnev’s world frequently move back and forth across this dividing line. Significant numbers of the Soviet academic intellectuals spent various lengths of time in yellow houses—see the often mentioned Belye Stolby—and did nonetheless return to sane society. That is why JFR is officially tasked with dealing with the lunatics hanging around academic humanities institutes. Zinoviev doesn’t give hint to this, but we have every reason to believe that, after his spell in a mental hospital, JRF himself will be able to return to Moscow, although not as a junior research fellow or as a doctoral candidate. At least theoretically, Zinoviev reintroduces the possibility of crossing back from madness to sanity. The fate of these moving characters is variable in the Stalinist world. After the demonic carnival comes to Moscow, a large number of its inhabitants, from the corrupt Variety theatre staff, the Entertainment Commission clerks, the adminis- trator of the Sadovaia apartment block to, above all, Ivan Bezdomnii, become easy victims of Lunacy (or, as the secret police formally explain afterwards, victims of a criminal band of hypnotists) ending up in professor Stravinsky’s mental hospital. After a short spell in the ‘‘yellow house’’ they return to normal life, completely cured, albeit with some recurring dream-like memories of their satanic experiences. As the great Satanic show comes to an end in Moscow, the Master and Margarita Nikolayevna plead with Woland to give them back their semi-idyllic life in their small apartment—‘‘two rooms, private entrance and a sink’’ as the Master puts it (Bulgakov 1996, p. 115)—but their attempt to fit back into normality fails. They leave Moscow and the real world forever together with the demonic retinue. Located beyond the boundaries of the hostility and stigmatization of the Soviet world, the new home that both Yeshua and Woland have made for them offers eternal peace and the potential of a creative repose.

Conclusion: madness as a metaphor

Over time, cultural critique has looked at a number of possible approaches to madness: clinical, political, social and cultural. The aforementioned Russian novels support the conclusion that madness is bound to a socio-historical and cultural

2 «[In Quijote] La coupure entre le protagoniste et le monde environnant este une donneé initiale du rećit, une reálite´ accablante qui n’est susceptible ni d’explication ni de ve´ritable re´solution«. 3 «Le monde leur dit non, mais comme il n’y a pas d‘alternative, ils s’y installent quand meˆme en de´pit de l’exclusion dont ils font l’objet». 123 370 M. Spiridon context and that real as well as fictional individuals experience insanity ‘‘in conformity with the explanatory paradigms that their era uses to understand madness.’’ (Thiher 1999, p. 162) In specific contexts, madness is used as an acronym for a wide range of diverse phenomena which cannot be easily explained or which we try to get rid of because they do not fit in with our norms or with ‘‘the socio-historical patterns of our normate figures’’. (Donnelly 2012,p.9) For the two Russian writers, madness is above all a type of symbolic expression, used at particular point in history both by individuals and the community. In short, they juggle with madness as an epistemological metaphor. In Susan Sontag’s opinion, for instance, illness has always been used as a symbolic category. Beyond her punctual demonstrations, Sontag insists on the metaphoric potential of the very idea of illness. (Sontag 1978, pp. 13–14) The modern literary discourse on madness can also be metaphorically guided by writers, as a generic category able to refer to various forms of resistance and deviation from the established social, political and cultural norms.

References

Bakhtin, M. (1984). Rabelais and his world. Bloomington: Indiana, Indiana University Press. Bulgakov, M. (1996). The Master and Margarita (D. Burgin & K. T. O’Connor, Trans.). New York: Random House. Donnelly, T. (2012). Vogue diagnoses: The functions of madness in twentieth century American literature. Dissertation presented the Department of English and the Graduate School of the University of Oregon. Epstein, M. (2007). Methods of madness and madness as a method. In A. Brittlinger & I. Vinitsky (Eds.), Madness and the mad in Russian culture (pp. 263–282). Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Epstein, M. (2012). The transformative humanities: A manifesto. New York; London: Bloomsbury Academic. Erasmus, D. (1958). In Praise of Folly (J. Wilson Trans.). Grand Rapids, MI: University of Michigan Press. Foucault, M. (1998). Madness and civilization. A history of insanity in the age of reason (R. Howard Trans.). New York: Vintage Books. Hoffmann, E. T. A. (1999). The life and opinions of the Tomcat Murr. London: Penguin. Mann, T. (1999). The life of the German composer Adrian Leverkuhn as told by a friend. New York: Vintage Books. Pavel, T. (1986). Fictional worlds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Pavel, T. (2003). La pense´e du roman. Paris: Gallimard. Sontag, S. (1978). Illness as metaphor. New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux. Thiher, A. (1999). Revels in madness: Insanity in medicine and literature. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Zinoviev, A. (1986). The madhouse (M. Kirkwood Trans.). London: Victor Gollancz LTD.

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