Under Doctors' Eyes: Private Life in Russian Literature In

UNDER DOCTORS’ EYES: PRIVATE LIFE IN RUSSIAN LITERATURE IN THE FIRST HALF OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE DEPARTMENT OF SLAVIC LANGUAGES AND LITERATURES AND THE COMMITTEE ON GRADUATE STUDIES OF STANFORD UNIVERSITY IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Ekaterina Neklyudova December 2012

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution- Noncommercial 3.0 United States License. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/us/

This dissertation is online at: http://purl.stanford.edu/xk765sg1658

ii I certify that I have read this dissertation and that, in my opinion, it is fully adequate in scope and quality as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

Gabriella Safran, Primary Adviser

I certify that I have read this dissertation and that, in my opinion, it is fully adequate in scope and quality as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

Gregory Freidin

I certify that I have read this dissertation and that, in my opinion, it is fully adequate in scope and quality as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

Monika Greenleaf

Approved for the Stanford University Committee on Graduate Studies. Patricia J. Gumport, Vice Provost Graduate Education

This signature page was generated electronically upon submission of this dissertation in electronic format. An original signed hard copy of the signature page is on file in University Archives.

iii Abstract

My dissertation deals with the figure of the doctor in early Russian nineteenth- century prose, which manifests a shift in the way literature depicts human physicality and the characters’ everyday life. My major source is 1820s-1840s prose, mostly published in the literary and cultural journals Biblioteka dlia Chtenia, Syn Otechestva, and others. My sources reflect the impressive expansion in Russian literature and medicine in the first quarter of the nineteenth century.

Using documentary and literary sources, I demonstrate that the artistic representation of physicians in Romantic and Realist prose contributes to the introduction of previously unknown themes into literature: medical perspectives on physical suffering, the private everyday lives of ordinary people, and even the mystical view of other worlds. The combination of medical and mystical discourses in the vocabulary of real doctors in the first half of the nineteenth century gave them the authority to judge human bodies, lives, and, they believed, souls: they seemed to observe from inside and outside at the same time. By including a doctor among their characters, fiction writers thus could use a powerful instrument that let them introduce new topics. As I show, through the mid nineteenth century, the fictional doctors situated at the margin of literary plots performed the role of an important textual device: they served as go-betweens among other characters, mediating, connecting or splitting them. They affected the relationship between characters, the plot's trajectory, and the readers' perception. The situation shifts in mid century; with the gradual separation of doctor from his instrumental function, this character moves to the center of the plot and loses his structural power.

Acknowledgements

I would like to start by expressing my deepest gratitude to my academic advisor Gabriella Safran, whose patient and steady guidance and support has helped me immensely on this journey, from when I was first admitted as a student to the present time. Thank you so much for reading and advising, supporting and mentoring.

I am deeply grateful to Monika Greenleaf, who kindly agreed to be the reader of my dissertation. Thank you so much for all your wonderful and inspiring courses, and for all our conversations, especially those about our beloved Fomenko Theatre!

Many thanks to Grisha Freidin, for serving as a reader, for the most interesting workshops and lectures, and for all the kindness and support during my time at

Stanford.

I would like to thank Lazar Fleishman for all of the poetry classes, and especially for the summertime mini-seminar on Pasternak. I will never forget our readings of “Sestra moia zhizn.”

I am grateful to Zhenya Khassina and Rima Greenhill for giving me the exciting opportunity of teaching Russian. I will always remember the lessons you taught me; for me, you are the models par excellence of Russian instructors.

Greatest thanks also to all the professors whose lectures and seminars I was fortunate to attend – Oksana Bulgakowa, Amir Eshel, Steve Zipperstein, Helen

Brooks, Sepp Gumbrecht, Victor Zhivov, and Alan Timberlake.

I am grateful to Dr. Larry Zaroff, whose class on Medicine and the Arts gave me unique insight into the medical aspect of my research, and allowed me to spend some time with medical students and participate in their experience.

The years that I spent at Stanford were indeed happy ones, and I really enjoyed the company of my fellow students. Thank you, my dear friends, for being with me and for creating a warm and happy atmosphere – Josh, Natalie, Alex, Tom, Dustin,

Irina, Bill, and Luke.

Thanks to Stanford University for accepting me, and to the whole Stanford community, where I spent several great years, not only studying but also raising my kids. I cannot imagine a better place to attend graduate school. I will always remember the Main Quad and Green Library, the Moon Beams and many, many other places. It was good to be there, to study and to live, and I was especially happy to return in

2008, after three years in Europe.

I am deeply thankful to my colleagues at the Research Collection of McMaster

University of Hamilton – Noah Shenker, Rick Stapleton, Bev Bayzat, and Wade

Wykoff. I am very lucky to work there, and am delighted to continue next year.

I am thankful to my friends in the medical profession, the doctors and nurses whose professional opinions proved so important in my studies of their fictional peers.

Thanks to all of my teachers and friends back in Moscow, where I first began to be interested in fictional doctors. Thanks especially to Dmitry Bak, my first academic advisor at RSUH, whose seminars on nineteenth-century Russian journalism made me fall in love with this epoch. I will always remember Galina Belaia, the chair of our department, whose passing is still so hard to accept. And I am deeply thankful to Alexander Ospovat for reading my thesis, and for setting me on the right track.

I would like to say a couple of words about those closest friends who guided and supported me throughout my time in graduate school. Thank you, Ria and Eric,

Rob and Miriam, Emmanuel and Raymond, for making our life in the Netherlands warmer and better. Thanks to my friend and mentor Lena, who was the reason why I started doing Holocaust research, my other major field of study. I am deeply thankful to our dearest friend Nola, who was always with us, listening and reading, and many times helping me with my English texts. This dissertation has benefitted greatly from the invaluable help of my best friend Nastya, with whom I am now collaborating on new research. Thanks to all of our friends who we are so fortunate to have here in

Canada – Anya, Sergei, Masha, Kostya, John, Lily, Kolya, Katya, Olga, Fulvia and

Ivona. Thanks to my San Diego family for their support and encouragement –

Victoria, Max, Zhanna, and Marinka.

I am deeply thankful to Branson for doing a great job of reading, editing and proofreading this text.

My interest in doctors as represented in literature originated from one conversation with my father, and this was one of our many, many conversations that formed me both as a person and as a scholar. Thanks to my Moscow family – my mom

Valentina, for your bravery and love, my dad Sergei, for all our evening conversations, and my sister Masha, for your constant support and trust. And my dearest babushka

Ira, I know how proud you would have been of me if you were with us today.

And I would by no means be here, at the point of finishing this work, without my beloved family and their support and care. My kids, Boris and Joseph, were born during my time at Stanford, and I will always remember that. Thank you, my sweet boys, for being with me. And to Victor I send all my love; without you I would not have come this far. Thank you, my dear.

vii

Table of Contents

Title Page……………………………………………………………………………. i

Signature Page………………………………………………………………………. iii

Abstract……………………………………………………………………………... iv

Acknowledgements…………………………………………………………………. v

Table of Contents…………………………………………………………………… viii

Introduction………………………………………………………………………… 1

Chapter 1: Doctor, Priest, Midwife, and Gravedigger: The Common

Roots……………………………………………………….. 31

Chapter 2: Quacks, Sorcerers, or Prophets: Mesmerists and Magnetizers in

the Russian Literature of the 1820s-1850s………………… 43

Chapter 3: Imposed Clairvoyance: The Russian Romantics

and Hoffmann……………………………………………… 67

Chapter 4: Harrison / Garrison / Warren: A Fictional Doctor-diarist and the

Birth of Medical Fiction……………………………………. 87

Chapter 5: The Sick Writer: The First Public Case Reports and the Birth of

Medical Biography…………………………………………. 104

Chapter 6: The Doctor Acquires His Own Voice:

First-Person Narratives…………………………………….. 123

Chapter 7: Attentive and Inactive: the Types of Doctors in

Russian Literature………………………………………….. 137

viii

Chapter 8: Unmasking Society: Observer, Mediator and

Messenger………………………………………………….. 144

Conclusion………………………………………………………………………… 162

Bibliography………………………………………………………………………. 176

Introduction

In one of Chekhov’s short stories, a man awakens with a hangover and finds that his head, arms, and legs are bandaged. His wife and a doctor are standing by his bedside:

Проснувшись на другой день в полдень, Романсов увидел нечто необычайное. Голова, руки и ноги его были в повязках. Около кровати стояли заплаканная жена и озабоченный доктор.1

Even without knowing what took place before this character woke up, we see that the plot will conclude within the private space of this man’s bedroom, accessible only to his family and the doctor. The bandages, as well as the doctor’s presence, indicate that something is wrong and that the dreamlike sequence preceding this scene happened in reality and not in the man’s imagination. The doctor, in this case, is not a character but is rather a sign of an illness or physical problem and serves as a bridge between the outside world and the domestic sphere of everyday life, allowing us readers to see the interior space of a household. Characteristically, the doctor also appears immediately after the scene in which the protagonist is in an alcoholic delirium, a changed state of mind. Though extremely short, this story demonstrates a number of features that define doctors in fiction during Chekhov’s time as well as long before his epoch.

Although my dissertation belongs to the 1820s-1840s, an epoch that precedes

Chekhov by 50-60 years, I think it is appropriate to start the discussion with an example that shows how several trends are unified in one very small and laconic text.

This figure of a silent and worried doctor alludes to all previous images that we will

1 Anton Chekhov, “Razgovor cheloveka s sobakoi,” In Sobranie Sochinenii v 30 t. Vol. 3 (Moscow: Nauka, 1975), 188

1 encounter in nineteenth-century Russian literature.

How does the doctor introduce himself when appearing for the first time on stage? In exploring this figure, I will focus on different details of his general appearance, outfit, and behavior. Every small detail is significant, including the way a doctor addresses other characters, the clothes that he wears, and the gestures that he uses. For us, in the twenty-first century, medical professionals call to mind shiny metal instruments and white lab coats. In the nineteenth century, however, doctors were characterized by different traits in outfit and behavior. All these small and unseen details form the doctor’s image within the Russian literary tradition. Fictional doctors of the 1820s and 1830s are dressed in black, often show some sort of asymmetry, and speak with a foreign accent. They are extremely unhappy and unlucky in love relationships; however, they win the trust of their friends and patients by listening empathetically and by acting as confidants. Yuri Lotman, in discussing the mechanism of text perception (more specifically, of the Russian classic novel), argues that all elements within the textual space are linked to the precious tradition, and are perceived as such by the readers:

<…> элементы текста – наименования предметов, действий, имена персонажей и т. п. – попадают в структуру данного сюжета, уже будучи отягчены предшествующей социально-культурной и литературной семиотикой <...> Каждая "вещь" в тексте, каждое лицо и имя, то есть все, что сопряжено в культурном сознании с определенным значением, таит в себе в свернутом виде спектр возможных сюжетных ходов. 2

Doctors that originated solely in Russian literature are generally devoid of any professional features but are nonetheless recognizable. By calling a character a

2 Yurii Lotman, “Siuzhetnoe Prostranstvo Russkogo Romana 19 Stoletiia,” in Izbrannye stat’i: V 3 tomakh, Vol, 3 (Tallinn: Alexandra, 1993), 94

“doctor,” the author marks the unavoidable involvement of medicine in the plot, even when this participation is limited to the mere presence of a doctor on stage. The recurring development of similar functions and features associated with this figure, along with the relevant cultural background (in the case of the doctor: folk theater, hagiography, and German Romanticism) serve as hints that, according to Lotman, are the carriers of the cultural memory and the common perception of doctors. As we will see in the subsequent chapter, in the fiction of the 1820s and 1830s, doctors hardly ever treat anyone, and yet one always remembers their presence, as though smelling the vague medical scent that lingers after a doctor’s visit to the home. Among those traits are the doctor’s marked strangeness and foreignness, including his accent and/or extraordinary look; the virtual impossibility of his forming love relationships, and at the same time his ability to be a confidant. Additionally, the doctor’s appearance and behavior demonstrate explicit or implicit links to demonism and witchcraft.

These connections provide doctors with the possibility of seeing hidden and inaccessible things: ranging from medicine’s real benefit of observing private everyday life to its mysterious ability to manipulate patients’ minds and bodies.

Regardless of the moral quality of the doctor – his role can be negative or benign, he can be portrayed in a mysterious, Romantic style or with a certain degree of authenticity – the doctor's presence introduces the notion of the gaze, a specific medical gaze that pierces not just the walls of houses but also human souls. I argue that the presence of a doctor within the plot produces and defines the emergence of everyday life in literature; the doctor’s gaze serves as a tool that opens areas that were previously inaccessible. The doctor thus acquires a unique status among the other

3 characters, which enables him to observe the whole space of the story while preserving his textual marginality. I argue that, in this capacity of a character who sees but does not participate directly, the doctor plays the role of the “third figure,” the character that, according to Mikhail Bakhtin, knows the rules and rituals of everyday life and wants to participate in it but is unable to belong fully. This character is a parvenu, a person with an undefined social status, who seeks the fulfillment of his or her identity within the realm of everyday life. Unlike the main protagonists, the third character sees and hears things that are not directed at him and therefore acts as an omniscient observer.3 The presence of such a figure justifies the emergence of everyday life in literature and sheds light on private spaces for both writers and their audience.

Approaches and Materials

The major source of my research is the prose of 1820s-1840s (mostly published in the Russian literary and cultural journals Biblioteka Dlia Chtenia, Syn

Otechestva, Blagonamerennyi, Moskovskii Telegraf, Otechestvennye zapiski,

Moskvitianin, etc.). My studies are roughly limited to the period preceding the Great

Reforms of the 1860s that mark a fundamental shift in both the literature and society of Russia. From his status as a mere textual function, the doctor develops during this period into a primary character and loses most of his plot-changing abilities. In my choice of the time frame for this study, I am guided by the impressive expansion that took place in the fields of Russian literature and medicine. I base my discussion of the

3 Mikhail Bakhtin, “Formy Vremeni i Khropotopa v Romane,” In Voprosy Literatury i Estetiki (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1975), 277

4 societal transformations pertaining to the establishment of literature as a profession on historical analyses by Reitblat, as well as on the historical development of medicine as a profession.4 I also place my research in the paradigm of cultural studies, along with such monographs as Semiotika povedeniia,5 Te, kto popravliaet fortunu,6 and High

Stakes of Identity.7 All these works combine fictional and documentary sources in studying Russian cultural history and everyday life. For example, Irina Paperno, in her portrait of Nikolai Chernyshevsky, uses such materials as the biography of the writer, his central and marginal writings, and his critical essays, as well as the history of ideas and the collective behavior of raznochintsy.8 Ian Helfant, in his work on gambling, uses “risk theory” as defined by Huizinga and explores gambling anecdotes, fiction, correspondence, gambling mythology, and gossip.9

In my choice of literary materials, I follow the tradition of New Historicism and cultural studies; its founder Stephen Greenblatt recommended that historians and literary critics refrain from the selectivity of sources. That is, when studying a historical epoch or a literary topic, one should not be limited by the traditional historiography or focus exclusively on canonical texts, since such an approach inevitably imposes an evaluative tone on the selection of sources. The New

4 Abram Reitblat, Kak Pushkin vyshel v Genii: Istoriko-sotsiologicheskie Ocherki o Knizhnoj Kul’ture Pushkinskoj Epokhi ( Moscow, 2001); Mark Mirskii, Meditsina Rossii 16-19 Vekov (Moscow, 1996); Konstantin Bogdanov, Vrachi, Patsienty, Chitateli: Patographicheskie Teksty Russkoi Kultury 18-19 vekov ( Moscow: OGI, 2005), Sergei Grombakh, Pushkin i meditsina ego vremeni (Moscow: Meditsina, 1989), Vera Kovrigina, Nemetskaia Sloboda Moskvy I Ee Zhiteli V Kontse 17 – Pervoj Polovine 18 Veka (Moscow: Arkheograficheskii Tsentr, 1998) 5 Irina Paperno, Semiotika Povedeniia: Nikolai Chernyshevsky – Chelovek Epokhi Realizma (Moscow: NLO, 1996) 6 Aleksandr Stroev, “Te, kto popravliaet fortunu”: Avantiuristy Prosveshcheniia (Moscow: NLO, 1998) 7 Ian Helfant, High Stakes of Identity: Gambling in the Life and Literature of Nineteenth-Century Russia (Northwestern: Northwestern University Press, 2002) 8 Paperno, Semiotika Povedeniia 9 Helfant, High Stakes of Identity; Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971)

Historicism does not draw a distinctive line between important and unimportant historical sources, and all contributions to the historical corpus of texts are equally crucial.10 Similarly, mass fiction, as opposed to the canonical texts, shows which mental and collective processes are in place in the society, such as fashion, beliefs, and anxieties,11 and the “cultural unconscious” of the epoch becomes available to a reader.12 Moreover, mass fiction is valuable because it reproduces clichéd plot-lines and literary motifs, as well as embodies the social and cultural stereotypes attributed, in this case, to physicians.13 In line with the New Historicism, I base my survey of literature on mass fiction, such as the novels and short stories of the mass writers, especially those written by doctors. As mentioned above, popular literary journals serve as major sources for my analysis of the artistic reflections of (or on) the medical profession; additional sources include low-cost books and newspaper feuilletons.

Nonfiction writings by doctors constitute yet another source for my dissertation. I explore doctors’ narratives that developed in the 1830s as attempts to

10 See for example: “Literary criticism has a familiar set of terms for the relationship between a work of art and the historical events to which it refers <…> We need to develop terms to describe the ways in which material - here official documents, private papers, newspaper clippings, and so forth - is transferred from one discursive sphere to another and becomes aesthetic property.” (Stephen Greenblatt, “Towards a Poetics of Culture,” In The New Historicism. ed. H. Aram. Veeser. (London: Routledge, 1989), 11) 11 Массовые повествования строятся на принципе жизнеподобия, рудиментах реалистического описания, “миметического письма.” В них социально характерные герои действуют в узнаваемых социальных ситуациях и типовой обстановке, сталкиваясь с проблемами и трудностями, знакомыми и насущными для большинства читателей (Lev Gudkov, Boris Dubin, Vittorio Strada, Literatura i obshchestvo: Vvedenie v sotsiologiiu literatury (Moscow: RGGU, 1998), 49-50 12 Aleksandr Stroev, “Te, kto popravliaet fortunu” 13 <…> черты характера, внешности, поведения и приемы их подачи дублируются в разных произведениях разных авторов столь часто, что само узнавание типажа становится одним из условий адекватного восприятия героя и текста в целом (Aleksandra Zhukovskaia, Natalia Mazur, and Alexei Peskov, “Nemetskie Tipazhi Russkoi Belletristiki (Konets 1820-Nachalo 1840).” Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie 34 (1998): 37).

6 create “medical biographies” of writers:14 these texts consist mostly of the testimonies of family doctors concerning writers, political leaders, and other public figures.15 By the end of the nineteenth century, the focus of such texts shifted to the mental health of writers, and its reflection in their prose. The concept of a “psychopathology of literature” entered the realm of both psychiatry and literary criticism; the literary talent of writers became linked to the lack of stability of their mental condition.16 First of all,

I look at pseudo-medical stories published in Russian journals in the 1830s and demonstrate how they helped medicine to get its own discourse. Second, I explore the

“medical biographies” of writers authored by their doctors as examples of the first- person medical narratives that originated with case histories and later developed into a subgenre of the memoir literature. In particular, I concentrate on a small corpus of testimonial texts created immediately before and after Pushkin's death by his physicians (1837) and on the biographical account of Gogol's death by Dr. Tarasenkov

(1856). And third, I trace back the influence of those notes on subsequent reports of sick or dying writers, as well as on recent medical monographs and articles.

By summarizing the documentary and literary sources, I intend to show how the artistic representation of physicians in Romantic and Realist prose contributed to the introduction of previously unknown themes into literature, such as the notion of physical suffering from a medical point of view, the private everyday lives of ordinary people, and even the mystical view of other worlds. I demonstrate how the

14 Tarasenkov, A. “Poslednie dni zhizni Gogolia.” Otechestvennye Zapiski 12 (1856):397-427 15 For more on medical biographies of the early nineteenth century, see Konstantin Bogdanov, Vrachi, Patsienty, Chitateli; Irina Reyfman, “Death and mutilation at the Dueling Site: Pushkin’s Death as a National Spectacle.” Russian review 60 (2001): 72-88. 16 The topic of psychopathology in literature is elaborated in the following monographs: Irina Sirotkina, Diagnosing Literary Genius: A Cultural History of Psychiatry in Russia, 1880-1930. (Baltimore, MD, USA: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002); Konstantin Bogdanov, Vrachi, Patsienty, Chitateli.

7 combination of medical and mystical discourses within the mentality of real and fictional doctors grants readers of Russian literature the ability to observe the events from inside and outside at the same time. While being instrumental, the doctor’s character constitutes a powerful instrument that moves the hidden mechanisms of the plot. I argue that the doctor’s emergence within Russian Romanticism was caused by the necessity to discuss the themes mentioned above (such as everyday life). While always remaining professional, doctors acquired their true medical identity only in the second half of nineteenth-century Russian literature, when they moved to the center of plot.

The Professionalization of Medicine and Writing

Medicine as a profession experienced an immense leap forward during the nineteenth century. This statement applies not only to Russia but also to other

European countries. As noted by a historian of medicine, “the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw a radical and comprehensive transformation in medicine. Until the nineteenth century, medical ideas and practices had remained fundamentally the same for hundreds of years.” 17 Before these rapid developments, doctors continued to use traditional remedies to assist the body in freeing itself from noxious substances.

The figure of the general medical practitioner in Europe did not exist yet but rather was split between doctors, surgeons, and apothecaries.

In Pre-Petrine Russia, the state of medicine was still in its earliest developmental stage. The functions of medical practitioners were fulfilled by monks,

17 Deborah Brunton, Medicine Transformed: Health,Disease and Society in Europe 1800-1930 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), xi

8 barbers (tsiriulnik), and folk healers, while the use of doctors' services was available exclusively to the royal family. The first known physicians were sent by Queen

Elizabeth to Ivan the Terrible as a sign of appreciation; for many decades, the niche role of court doctors was occupied by foreigners, since no medical schools existed to train medics locally.18 The common people would treat themselves by drinking a shot of vodka mixed with garlic or gunpowder, and then by going to the bania (Russian steam bath).19 In 1654, the first school opened at Aptekarskii Prikaz; it did not provide a formal medical education, but trained practicing physicians (surgeons, nurses).

When Peter conducted his reforms in all fields of knowledge and social structure, it was an attempt to catch up with the progress of thought that had already advanced into the epoch of the Enlightenment. Medicine was reformed together with the whole social infrastructure: in 1716, Peter the Great ordered all military divisions to have their own doctor and doctor’s assistant and organized six major military hospitals. At that time, medical doctors came from abroad, since only surgeons (lekari) were trained at the hospitals by the (foreign) physicians and there was no way to study to be a doctor in Russia.20

After Peter’s reforms, the range of doctors’ activities considerably broadened, and doctors were required to serve in the army; later, all counties (gubernii) were provided with physicians whose work was still considered to be a civil service and whose duty was to treat the people in their areas. As opposed to, for example, English medicine, where the state had little control over medical practitioners, or even to

18 Mark Mirskii, Meditsina Rossii 16-19 Vekov, 12 19 Mark Mirskii, Meditsina Rossii 16-19 Vekov, 22 20 See Mark Mirskii, Meditsina Rossii 16-19 Vekov, Kovrigina, V. Nemetskaia sloboda Moskvy i ee zhiteli.

France, where the government partly “dictated the education of different grades of practitioner, and banned any unqualified healer from practicing medicine,”21 in Russia the state controlled the whole medical infrastructure; all doctors were servants of the court and were directly responsible for their actions to the Tsar. When the protagonist of Lazhechnikov’s “Basurman” fails to cure the Tatar Prince, he is, in effect, executed by the Tsar (who handed him over to the furious Tatar crowd that kills him). In the gradual development of medicine in Russia, all substantial progress was initiated by the state, even in such insignificant matters as the salaries of the local doctors or the transportation of medications from abroad.

As mentioned above, almost all doctors holding a medical degree and practicing in Russia were foreigners (with the exception of a few Russian doctors trained abroad), since no medical schools existed to train medics locally.22 It was only in 1798 that the first Russian medical institution of higher education, the Academy of

Medicine and Surgery, was founded in St. Petersburg and ensured a small but steady supply of local medical specialists. As a result, in the nineteenth century, the number of doctors grew considerably, and doctors entered wider social circles. The turning point of the health care system came in 1834, when the landlords (pomeshchiki) were allowed to keep their own family doctors on allowance, even though this type of service qualified physicians as state workers (see a decree of the Ministry of the

21 Deborah Brunton, Medicine Transformed, 139 22 Though the first school had been opened in Aptekarskii Prikaz in 1654, it did not give a formal medical education, but rather trained practicing physicians (surgeons, nurses). In 1716, Peter the Great ordered all military divisions to have their own doctor and doctor’s assistant (tsiriul’nik) and organized six major military hospitals. Still, the lack of doctors was very visible: in the epoch of Peter, they were still hired from abroad. Only practical training existed in Russia: mostly, the doctors of a lower rank (lekari) were trained at the hospitals by the foreign physicians (Mark Mirskii, Meditsina Rossii 16-19 Vekov; Kovrigina, V. Nemetskaia sloboda Moskvy i ee zhiteli).

Interior Affairs, O dozvolenii pomeshchikam, 1834).23 Prosperous families could afford to hire physicians for their households; more commonly, doctors treated two or three families. This was an important step that allowed medical practitioners to have at least some private practice. Still, they all had their state duties: for example, Dr.

Spasskii, Pushkin’s family physician, held a professorship at the Medical and Surgical

Academy; Dr. Arendt, the head of the consultation at Pushkin's deathbed, was also a chief physician of the Emperor.24 To compare the Russian situation with those of other countries, I note that private practice was widespread for doctors in England, while in

Prussia “around one-third of all practitioners were employed as military or as public health practitioners in the 1830s and 1840s.”25 In Russia, all doctors had to be state servants in order to be able to support themselves. For example, in 1798 the salary of the chief physician of St. Petersburg was 600 roubles per year, his private deputies would get 300 roubles; and the deputy assistants received 150 roubles.26

In the early nineteenth century, the doctor occupied an ambiguous position in

Russian society. He did not belong among the aristocrats since his living depended on salary; but as an educated and skilled professional, he also did not belong to the lower layers of the society. As the famous journalist and censor Nikitenko described the court doctor in 1844, “he is with the court yet he does not belong there (ne tsaredvorets).”27 Although working for money was considered improper by

23 “O dozvolenii pomeshchikam imet' vrachei na sobstvennom soderzhanii, schitaia ikh v gosudarstvennoi sluzhbe.” Zhurnal Ministerstva Vnutrennikh Del 14.12 (1834): XLV-XLVII 24 Sergei Grombakh, Pushkin i meditsina ego vremeni (Moscow: Meditsina, 1989), 58-59 25 Deborah Brunton, Medicine Transformed, 125 26 Viktor Nazarov, “Politsejskie vrachi i organizatsija sudebno-medicinskikh ekspertnykh issledovanij v Sankt Peterburge do obrazovanija stolichnogo vrachebnogo upravlenija.” Sudebno-meditsinskaia ekspertiza 5 (2010):52 27 Aleksandr Nikitenko, Dnevnik v 3 Tomakh. Vol. 2 (Moscow, 1955), 281

11 aristocrats,28 the doctor was the only professional for whom communication with the aristocracy on equal terms was possible. As demonstrated by a number of nineteenth- century letters and memoirs, Pushkin, Lermontov, Odoevskii, Ogarev, and many other writers had doctors among their closest friends.29 This tension became a focal point for writers who cast doctors as their characters, as well as for doctors in real life, who tried to redefine and re-establish their status in Russian society. The foreignness of doctors, the sudden introduction of medicine into the life of the nineteenth-century society, and their equivocal position among the nobility set the stage for their professional self-identification in real life and in fiction.

Still, even in the nineteenth century, when medicine had already progressed into the phase of Pirogov’s school, foreign influence continued to play an essential role in the life of Russia’s medical community. In the first half of the nineteenth century, medics from Europe were still practicing in Russia, especially in times of war.

For instance, in the late 1820s, during the Turkish campaign, the emperor issued a special decree to invite 30 medics from abroad due to their deficit at the front.30 A number of European doctors stayed in Russia, leading to an abundance of assimilated

28 As Alexander Belousov notes, “'Лекарская' профессия считалась делом, недостойным дворянина <…> Однако отталкивала не столько служба врача по гражданскому ведомству, сколько материальное вознаграждение, которое он принимал за свои труды <…> Это прямо противоречило принципам дворянской чести” (Aleksandr Belousov, “Vnuk d’iachka,” In Philologia. Rizhskii Filologicheskii Sbornik. Vyp. 1 Russkaia Literatura v istoriko-kul’turnom kontekste (Riga, 1994), 30 29 See Sergei Grombakh, Pushkin i meditsina ego vremeni; Pavel Sakulin,Iz Istorii Russkogo idealizma. Kniaz' F.V. Odoevskii: Myslitel'-pisatel'. (Moscow, Izdanie Sabashnikovykh, 1913) 30 Высочайшее повеление о вызове на особенных условиях в Российскую службу иностранных врачей, отставных и не служивших (1827). 33 иностранца удостоились в России медицинских званий: поступили на службу в Военное и Морское ведомства. 20 октября 1828 года вызов прекращен по Высочайшему велению (O delakh departamenta meditsinskogo. Zhurnal Ministerstva Vnutrennikh Del 3 (1829): 507)

German, Dutch, English, and other foreign doctors among the medical community.31

As is evident from the fiction of the 1840s, the distinction between “German” and

“Russian” doctors was still explicit.32

Locally trained doctors slowly permeated Russian society in the middle of the nineteenth century. However, most examples of medical literature in the Russian language, ranging from monographs to brochures and pamphlets, were translations from German, English, French, and other European languages. For example, the following is an excerpt of books reviewed in Biblioteka dlia Chteniia of the 1830s to

1840s:

Philosophical discussions about medicine and physicians. The argument of Dr. Hardenne of the Academy of Paris, etc. A loose translation from French by Dr. Von Lang, SPb, 1834. Философические рассуждения о медицине и врачах. Рассуждение Ш.П.Л. Гардана, Д.М., Парижской академии, и проч. Вольный перевод с французского Д. М. Фон-Ланга, СПб, 1834.

On physical phenomena in the process of life. The readings of Magendie. О физических явлениях в процессе жизни. Чтения Мажанди (Lecons sur les phenomenes physiques de la vie, par M. Magendie, Paris, 1836-1837, 2 vol.) Cold water as an everyday medication… A work by Nathaniel Weigersheim, Dr. of surgery and obstetrics. Холодная вода как всегдашнее лекарство... Соч. доктора хирургии и акушерства, Натаниэля Вайгерсгейма

History of the Inductive Sciences from the Earliest to the Present Times. By Dr. W. Whewell История и философия опытных наук доктора Вивеля.

When reviewing recent accomplishments in medicine and science, journal editors

31 Catherine II had a doctor from England, to whom she was deeply attached, and considered him as a close friend. 32 See Evgenii Grebenka, “Doktor.” In Izbrannye proizvedeniia (Kiev: Radzianskii pis'mennik, 1954), 166-319.

13 mostly referred to foreign sources, such as the medical societies of Europe and the

USA.33 Foreign medical knowledge thus prevailed over native learning; and doctors were still from abroad, even if assimilated. All of these factors strongly influenced the image of medicine as it appears in fiction and nonfiction.

The doctor enters the literary stage in the late 1820s, and one of the earliest examples of a doctors' performance is Lazhechnikov's Grimasa moego doktora

(1820). Interestingly, this introduction coincides with two major changes in Russian society: First, medicine transgressed the boundaries of specific state institutions (such as the court, army, and counties) and became available to the Russian gentry. Second, in the world of literature, professionalization occurred as writers started making their living by submitting their prose and poetry to the journals. Before that, in the eighteenth century, writers could not support themselves by writing and publishing.

Literature existed in the courts as a part of an official glorification of the royal family; writers were employed by the state or by wealthy officials.34 Likewise, doctors served only the court and higher aristocracy, while for the Russian middle class a doctor's visit was still a rarity and a luxury. Although, as I mentioned earlier, folk healers and folk literature existed long before professional medicine and literature were born, one can nonetheless argue that neither a reading audience nor a class of patients in the modern sense existed before the 1820s.

Despite a rise in the publishing industry during the second half of the eighteenth century, literature still remained the prerogative of the aristocracy.

Financially, doctors and writers depended on the tastes and preferences of their

33 For example, the Royal Society of Medicine in London, Societe de Royale Medicine de Paris 34 Reitblat, Kak Pushkin vyshel v Genii, 7

14 sponsors (be it pokroviteli or metsenaty). Even in the first half of the nineteenth century, we still see examples of endowing writers with gifts instead of paying fees.35

Another means of support for writers was to be involved in writing for the so-called lubochnaia literatura or translating popular European novels into Russian. In the case of lubochnaia literatura, the texts would be loosely retold and supplied with numerous illustrations.36 The target audience for such writers as Fedor Emin, Matvei Komarov, and Andrei Bolotov consisted mostly of merchants and meshchanstvo.37 However, the institution of literature did not exist before the nineteenth century, as noted by Reitblat, since there were no specially trained censors, very few editors, no literary critics, and a narrow reading audience.38 This situation gradually changed in the beginning of the nineteenth century when editors of the new, Western style emerged. The crucial moment for this transition was the active development of Smirdin's bookshop, in whose domain the journal Biblioteka dlia Chtenia (1834) was born. For the first time, fiction became available to a broad audience, and thus a readership was formed.

Senkovsky, as a chief editor of Biblioteka, formed the journal issues with a deep appreciation of the importance of the texts that would go under the covers of his journal. As opposed to the previous journals and almanacs, the authors of Biblioteka were paid for their contributions (a large sum of 100-300 rubles for the printer's sheet).39 Regardless of the fact that the editorial board of Biblioteka was repeatedly accused of not having their own moral and aesthetic principles, this journal was easily

35 See T. Grits et al., Slovesnost' I kommenrtsiia (Knizhnaia Lavka Smirdina) (Moscow: Agraf, 2001); Melissa Frazier, Romantic Encounters: Writers, Readers, and the Library for Reading (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007) 36 Grits et al., Slovesnost' I kommenrtsiia, 18-19 37 Ibid. 38 Reitblat, Kak Pushkin vyshel v Genii,9-10 39 Reitblat, Kak Pushkin vyshel v Genii, 9

15 the most-read media outlet of the 1830s and 1840s.

In the realm of Russian prose, the doctor is one of the few indicators signifying the transition from high-society salons to the mass reader. While virtually absent from the “salon” stage of literature, the doctor emerged at a time when literature became a mass phenomenon and was being read by a broad audience. The doctor is first of all a hero of the literary journals, lowbrow stories, and feuilletons – and only after that does he turn into a hero of canonical Russian literature (Turgenev’s Bazarov, Gertsen’s

Doctor Krupov, and the Chekhovian doctors). These conditions in which the doctor surfaces define the way he is depicted by artists and perceived by readers.

Literature Review

The representation of the health care profession in literature has been investigated by a number of scholars from different fields: history, literature and medicine, cultural anthropology, and literary criticism. In this section, I provide an overview of only those disciplinary frameworks that contribute to the methodological background for my analysis.

First of all, the fact that literature and medicine have been influencing each other for many years is exemplified by the emergence of Medical Humanities, an influential interdisciplinary field that incorporates both medical and literary scholars.

Although, in my dissertation, this field is presented only in terms of its connection to cultural studies, I consider my research as belonging to this field. In the 1960s, the curriculum for medical students was restructured, and the teaching of literature and the arts was introduced in many U.S. medical schools. This trend was designed to evoke a

16 sense of compassion in young doctors and to promote an individual approach when dealing with patients. Not accidentally, the first adepts of Medical Humanities belonged not only to medicine or literature/arts, but also to the clergy. The students were strongly encouraged to talk about their feelings when dealing with tough and ambiguous situations. Fiction dedicated to medical matters and the doctor’s practice started to be used in support of various ethical arguments. Thus, “The Use of Force,” a short story by William Carlos Williams is used in the discussion of the ethicality of a doctor’s use of violence in situations when the patient’s life is in danger. Bulgakov’s story “Polotentse s petukhom” can be used as an example of a doctor’s experience during his first major surgery, and Chekhov’s stories are used as examples of doctors’ depression in the face of terminal illnesses. Today, such classes constitute an essential part of the curriculum in the majority of medical schools in the U.S.40

Another major contribution to my study of doctors is the corpus of literature dedicated to the notion of seeing in history and literature. While I do not directly engage with Michel Foucault’s books on medicine, psychiatry, sexuality, and culture

(The Birth of the Clinic, The History of Madness, and The History of Sexuality), I consider his work as one of my major sources of inspiration. He provides the framework in which I also situate my dissertation: namely, his statement that historical or cultural or social phenomena can be studied as a literary or philosophical text. As aforementioned, the ultimate goal of my dissertation is to explore how the medical

40 In this paragraph I refer to the major works on literature and medicine, such as Healing Arts in Dialogue: Medicine and Literature , ed. Joanne Trautmann (Southern Illinois University Press, 1981) and George Rousseau, “Literature and Medicine: The State of the Field,” Isis. 72.3 (1981), 406-424. Also, I refer to my own experience of taking a Stanford class on Arts and Medicine, taught by Dr. Larry Zaroff.

17 gaze embodied in the figure of the doctor transforms the discourse of Russian literature; Foucault’s initial questions address the very same issues, such as a doctor’s seeing things and being able to pronounce upon them. I owe the way I focus on the doctor’s gaze in the representation of medicine in nineteenth-century Russian literature to Foucault’s notion of seeing and looking, although my work lies more in the realm of the literary tradition and its link to folklore than in the history of the actual medical gaze in Russia. In my dissertation, the notion of the penetrating and sometimes deadly gaze of a doctor comes up several times, especially the gaze of the mesmerist and/or magician that observes and subdues, as well as imposes on his victims the ability to see the unseen. Another important issue is how medicine regards the individual and his or her body. From the reading of symptoms, which was the major trait of eighteenth-century medicine, we arrive at what Foucault calls a “new space opening up <...>: the tangible space of the body, which at the same time is that opaque mass in which secrets, invisible lesions, and the very mystery of origins lie hidden.” 41 The theme of looking into the body, full of secrets, in order to discover the cause of a malady comes up again and again in the sources that I explore in my dissertation: the common interest in the “medical” notes of Pushkin’s death, especially the autopsy note; the remark of Pechorin about Werner, equating a doctor’s knowledge of the human heart with the “veins of a cadaver”; and the awkward proposal of the doctor in Polevoi’s “Emma” to conduct an autopsy of Emma’s heart in order to establish that the cause of her death lay in the physical and not spiritual or moral spheres.

41 Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic, 122

Among the vast number of responses to Foucault’s studies of medicine was one that sprang from the field of Medical Humanities and was generally associated with specialists in English literature. This response first emerged in the form of numerous anthologies of stories and poems on (or near) the medical thematic,42 and later in the form of scholarly works. Along with discussing reading strategies for medical students and doctors (published in the specialized journals, such as Literature and Medicine or the Journal of Medical Humanities, as well as in purely medical periodicals, such as the Lancet and Academic Medicine), there are also works belonging to cultural anthropology, cultural studies, and literary criticism; generally, they are interested in the Victorian epoch’s obsession with illness, treatment, agony, and death.43 Although

Victorian works are part of the curriculum at medical schools, these scholars take a mostly skeptical view of the naive parallels often drawn from such works between the real experiences of medical practitioners and their fictional peers. Instead, such scholars as, for example, Catherine Judd, a specialist in Victorian literature, recommend the approach introduced by Foucault, in his study of the “medicalization of the Western culture.” 44 Her book, called Bedside Seductions (1998), focuses on the figure of the nurse and sees this character through the prism of Victorian memoirs, correspondence, painting, and literature (including Bronte’s Jane Eyre and Eliot’s

42 See for example Medicine in Literature, ed. Joseph Ceccio (New York: Longman, 1978); The Physician in literature, ed. Norman Cousins (Philadelphia: Saunders Press, 1981); Gordon, R., ed. The literary companion to medicine: An anthology of prose and poetry, New York : St. Martin's Press, 1996, c1993; Vital lines: Contemporary fiction about medicine, ed. Jon Mukand (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1990); On doctoring: Stories, poems, essays, ed. R. Reynolds and J. Stone ( New York: Simon & Schuster, c1995) 43 Miriam Bailin, The Sickroom in Victorian Fiction: The Art of Being Il, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Catherine Judd, Bedside Seductions (NY, 1998); Susan Gorsky, “I’ll cry myself sick: Illness in 'Wuthering Heights,'” Literature and Medicine, 18.2 (1999): 173-191; Solomon Posen, The Doctor in Literature. Vol. 2. Private Life (Oxford and Seattle: Radcliffe Publishing, 2006) 44 Judd, Bedside Seductions, 11

Middlemarch). Judd demonstrates how the reform of the nursing system in the mid- nineteenth century changed the common attitude to nurses and the way they were represented. The stereotype of a nurse changed from that of the lazy, unkempt drunkard to the clean, attentive professional; the old “working-class” caretaker was seen as a sexual threat, while the renewed type of the nurse is interpreted as being symbolically pure.45 Like my dissertation, which observes broad literary and cultural phenomena through a specific character, Judd’s work also shows how the figure of nurse is situated on the intersection between the Victorian novel and the medical milieu, in which the literature of that time was developing.

Another book that tackles the spectrum of problems associated with medicine and culture throughout the Victorian epoch is The Sickroom in Victorian Fiction: The

Art of Being Ill by Miriam Bailin, a British literature scholar. This book explores the art of caretaking, both actual and fictional, through literature and the memoirs of women writers who went through the nursing experience. For the Victorian epoch, the position of a caretaker (or a patient) is interpreted as the most enjoyable and natural of ways to establish a normal relationship (usually, between the sick and the nurse).46

Also, as opposed to doctors in Russian fiction, the situation of caring for a sick person often leads to deep emotional and even erotic connections between nurse and patient.

Even when marriage between them is impossible because of social differences, the situation of the sickroom temporally abolishes all obstacles and allows the characters to connect.47 All these works are focused on a particular literary feature that helps

45 Judd, Bedside Seductions, 13 46 Bailin, The Sickroom in Victorian Fiction, 6 47 Bailin, The Sickroom in Victorian Fiction, 23-24

20 them to delve into the culture and mentality of the past.48

Thanks to Foucault as well as to the scholars engaged in the New Historicism, great attention has been paid to everyday life. This development is identified by the historian Martin Jay: “relentless pressure toward greater inclusivity in the study of everyday life, a growing respect for the dignity of petit histoire, and the rescuing of

“low” subjects of whatever kind all conspired to alert us to the importance of historical changes in sensual experience.”49 In literary studies, a number of scholars discuss the history of the senses in literature, in terms of how the representation of seeing, hearing, smelling, and sensing helps readers to decode the cultural unconscious of the past. In my dissertation, the senses are explored through the motif of the vision, or gaze that a fictional doctor possesses, and the way in which this gaze affects the representation and perception of medicine in literature. As Jay proposes in an introduction to a special issue of the AHR dedicated to the study of the senses within the boundaries of contemporary literary criticism and cultural studies, one must take the senses into consideration when dealing with history, literature, or culture:

“Meaning comes to a great extent through the senses, while the senses filter the world through the prior cultural meanings in which we are immersed.”50 The conversation about the senses from a physiological point of view allows us to discover the way the nineteenth-century mentality dealt with notions of progress, of scientific discovery, and of the tension between the new science and religion. My dissertation also

48 See also Arnold Weinstein, “The unruly text and the rule of literature,” Literature and Medicine, 16.1 (1997):1-22; Faith McLellan, “Images of physicians in literature: From quacks to heroes,” The Lancet 348 (1996): 458-460; Jack Coulehan, “Tenderness and steadiness: Emotions in medical practice,” Literature and Medicine 14.2 (1995): 222-236 49 Martin Jay, “In the Realm of the Senses: An Introduction,” American Historical Review 116. 2 (2011): 308 50 Jay, “In the Realm of the Senses: An Introduction,” 307

21 evaluates the interactions between medicine and literature and between the practical sciences and humanities, as well as the way in which the gaze of the medical practitioner transforms both fictional and nonfictional textual space. The following paragraphs review some works that deal with the gaze in literature in order to show another part of the context that frames my research.51

As I show in subsequent chapters of my dissertation, for the nineteenth-century

Russian culture, the separation between practical medical writing and documentary literature for a broader audience is not rendered to modern standards. In the chapter dedicated to case histories left by doctors about famous writers, we observe a particularly close proximity between the two genres. John Crary, in his seminal book on the figure of the observer in the nineteenth-century European literature also insists on regarding art and science together as a “part of a single interlocking field of knowledge and practice.” He focuses on various technological phenomena, including early photography and the Camera Obscura, as well as on the attitude of Goethe to science, as displayed in his work Color Theory.52 Another way of using optical terminology for the sake of literary analysis is demonstrated in the article by Sharon

Lubkemann Allen, who argues that, when European writers set the goal of representing death, they choose either reflective or refractive gazes. 53 In the case of, for example, Dostoevsky’s Goliadkin (“Dvoinik”), the protagonist demonstrates a

51For monographs dedicated to the problems of vision, see for example Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (London and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993); David Howes, Sensual Relations: Engaging the Senses in Culture and Social History (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2003). 52 John Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 1990); 53 Sharon Lubkemann Allen, “Reflection/Refraction of the Dying Light: Narrative Vision in Nineteenth- Century Russian and French Fiction,” Comparative Literature 54. 1 (2002): 2-22

22 refractive gaze, i.e. seeing and being seen by others as a spectacle; in the concluding scene of this story, the hero “faces his own death, his vision vies with that of the realist narrator for authority.”54 The concept of gaze can also be addressed by bringing together the natural and liberal disciplines, such as in the article by Jessica Riskin that addresses the problems of how scientists tried to adapt their discoveries to the sacral postulates, and how the presence (or absence) of the figure of a Divine Designer disturbed even nineteenth-century scholars, such as Darwin. Bringing together medicine/anatomy and theology, Riskin explores how the physiology and structure of the eye was claimed to serve as a proof of God’s existence, from the tradition of

Aquinas, up till the time of Darwin.55

Another example of disparate disciplines coming into contact is the book by

Michael Finke, a Slavic scholar, who creates a biography of Chekhov, and within this framework explores the concept of seeing and being seen in the life and works of this writer. In this case, we see literature approaching a scientific theory, namely, Darwin’s theory of evolution. On the one hand, by using both documentary and fictional sources, he proves that Chekhov deeply disliked being represented and abhorred the idea of autobiographies. On the other hand, Finke shows that “Chekhov’s treatment of seeing and being seen, showing and hiding, is by no means limited to representations of the medical context.”56 Similarly to the doctors (such as Tarasenkov) who created biographies of writers through the prism of their physicality, in the case of Finke,

Chekhov’s biography is turned into a history of ideas given through a specific figure,

54 Lubkemann Allen, “Reflection/Refraction of the Dying Light: Narrative Vision in Nineteenth Century Russian and French Fiction,” 5 55 Jessica Riskin, “The Divine Optician,” The American Historical Review 116.2 (2011): 352 56 Michael Finke, Seeing Chekhov (Ithaca and London, 2005), 59

23 and the phenomenon of seeing and being seen is transposed from fiction to fact and vice versa. The problem of vision can also be regarded from the point of view of art history and literary studies. This constitutes another combination of disciplines that we see in the literature dedicated to the gaze. The Russian literary scholar Ilya Kliger points at parallels between literature and anamorphosis, an optical illusion used by some painters that was effected by incorporating into an otherwise conventional picture an unclear spot, that, seen from a certain point of view, changes the meaning of the whole composition.57 Likewise, he shows how writers use this technique in their narratives by analyzing the “unreadable anamorphic stain” in Balzac’s Magic Skin, where the main intrigue turns into an anamorphic stain, and “, narratively understood, is therefore anamorphic, not enigmatic. It is not located structurally at the end of the story or beyond, but rather imbues and sustains the narrative.”58

Russian studies offer a promising framework for the interdisciplinary analysis of medicine in the context of Russian literature, culture, and everyday life. This framework draws on specialized medical literature, personal recollections of doctors and patients, and medical topics in Russian fiction. Bogdanov, in his monograph

Vrachi, Patsienty, Chitateli, chooses the Foucauldian method for analyzing the

“medical discourse” of Russia, with a special emphasis on the institutional nature of medical structures. His research is neither limited to the sphere of literary criticism nor to the historical paradigm. Rather, he combines facts from different fields to delineate the “pathographic” (patograficheskii) discourse of the Russian society of the

57 Ilya Kliger, “Anamorphic Realism: Veridictory Plots in Balzac, Dostoevsky, and Henry James,” Comparative Literature 59.4 (2007): 294-314 58 Kliger, “Anamorphic Realism: Veridictory Plots in Balzac, Dostoevsky, and Henry James,” 298

24 eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Bogdanov attempts to decode the “consciousness” of Russian society as it applies to medicine. In his study, Bogdanov is mainly concerned with the social and political impact of medicine on the society: his topics include the medical interests of Peter the Great and the social mythology of the cholera pandemics in Russia. The link between medicine and political power is placed in the center of his research and constitutes the main argument of the monograph. His book demonstrates how the institutional and conceptual structure of medicine provides a powerful example of how the Russian society was structured at the beginning of the nineteenth century.59

A similar approach is offered by Irina Sirotkina in her book Diagnosing

Literary Genius (2002), in which she explores how psychiatrists based their scientific inquiry on the lives of famous people. She focuses on the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the obsession of that time with the “psychopathological” aspect of writers’ creativity.60 As with the twentieth-century doctors whose works I analyze in conjunction with medical memoirs and notes about dying writers, the psychiatrists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century saw themselves as experts not only on writers’ mental conditions but also on their poetry and prose. As

Sirotkina notes in the very beginning of her book, this was an attempt of doctors to earn affirmation as specialists in literature and creativity.61 Olga Matich’s Erotic

Utopia (2005) also contemplates the intersection between “literature and medical

59 Konstantin Bogdanov, Vrachi, Patsienty, Chitateli 60 Irina Sirotkina, Diagnosing Literary Genius: A Cultural History of Psychiatry in Russia, 1880-1930, 1 61 Ibid.

25 science in European cultures of the second half of the nineteenth century.”62 More specifically, she is interested in the closeness of the concepts of decadence and degeneration in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, especially when these phenomena began to be regarded from a medical point of view. In my opinion, the pragmatic interest in literature shown by medical practitioners in the twentieth century is reminiscent of how, in nineteenth-century literature, fictional doctors looked at people and made them more visible and understandable for readers, while writers looked at doctors and used their gaze as a powerful plot-building tool. For all of the works listed in this review, the gaze becomes the cornerstone of understanding and interpreting the medical discourse and its relationship with literature. The figure of the doctor and the notion of the gaze open the road for other subjects that some nineteenth-century writers, essayists and journalists were concerned about. Among them, we see the progress of science, the reception of new theories, the struggle with the epidemic illnesses, and the confrontation of imposed medical norms with the vivid beliefs of lay people.

Chapter Outline

This dissertation opens with a brief excursus on the origins of the doctor’s image, and on the literary figures that act both as his ancestors and equals, namely, such ontologically close figures as priest, midwife, and gravedigger. To fully understand the structure and meaning of a fictional doctor, we need to search for the traces of this image within the traditions that introduced the epoch in question, which

62 Olga Matich, Erotic Utopia: The Decadent Imagination in Russia’s Fin de Siècle (Madison, Wis.: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005), 10-11

26 are in this case: folklore, hagiography, and European mass literature. The recurring situations that bring doctor and priest together in folk theatre and hagiography demonstrate the fundamental similarity that materializes in the nineteenth century as a set of specific functions that define the doctor’s role in Russian literature.

The second chapter focuses on a discussion of how the medical gaze arose in conjunction with mesmerism (magnetism), a cultural, medical, and philosophical phenomenon of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. By focusing on the act of looking that an aggressor uses to subdue a victim to his evil will, I demonstrate how deeply the perception of mesmerism is connected to the mythological threat of vampires. As Romanticism is heavily based on mythology and folklore, the images of monstrous doctors, mesmerists, or witches (in the case of Gogol's tales) are generated by superstitions. We start by looking at cases where the hypnotists are seen, through the prism of this mythological anxiety, as vampires freely manipulating the minds and bodies of their victims. I demonstrate how the specific gestures of mesmerism resurface in the actions of Romantic villains in the stories by Odoevskii, Aksakov, and

Gogol.

Furthermore, magnetizers also capture their victims by immersing them in a state of clairvoyance. The third chapter is dedicated to the theme of imposed clairvoyance that links the “mesmerist” tales of the Russian Romantics to the notion of dvoemirie. The parallels between the Russian plots and the German tales by E.T.A.

Hoffman point at the necessity of regarding the Romantic stories through the prism of animal magnetism, an ideology led by Kluge, Vellanskii, and other doctor- philosophers. Mesmerism turns out to be a powerful instrument that draws the hero

27 into the orbit of the supernatural and serves as a means of revealing life's hidden aspects. Paradoxically, this topic also heralds the arrival of the new clinical sciences, and medicine becomes one of the essential components of mesmerism and its representation in literature. The mesmerists in Russian literature are often represented as doctors or as medical practitioners of some sort. Moreover, even when medicine is not directly involved, the very situation of a person delving into the trance state, or being hypnotized by a mesmerist, balances on the border between mystical revelation and a deranged mental condition. By the second part of the nineteenth century, literature about mesmerism was perceived as material for psychiatric case studies.

In the fourth chapter, the manipulative gaze of the mesmerist turns into the gaze of a real doctor who also manipulates the perception of the other; only this time, it transforms the way laymen perceive medicine. At the same time, the medical discourse gradually obtains its own voice by looking at fictional medical case studies.

I focus on a series of translated short stories authored by a mysterious doctor-narrator

(Garrison, Doctor's Notes). Since they were published in Russian journals under a false name, the true author's face never surfaced, and he was always viewed as an unknown doctor. I fill in this gap by exploring the true history of Doctor's Notes in

Europe and Russia. I also show how these fictional case histories justified Russian writers in casting doctors as their protagonists and characters. This extremely popular book taught the literary world how fictional doctors should act, speak, and reflect on their profession.

Continuing with the discovery of the medical voice through analysis of case histories, I dedicate my fifth chapter to medical reports about ill and/or dying writers

28 that establish the dialogue between the textual domains of medicine and Russian literature beginning in the 1830s. The attention paid to the medical reports about

Pushkin's death and the medical biography of Gogol point to significant changes in the literary and medical discourse of Russia. While literature becomes more medicalized, medicine finds itself being drawn into the discussion of literary matters. I trace this tendency, starting with the medical reports of the nineteenth century, and ending with the special interest in literary figures exhibited by the medics of our times.

The confessional mode of medical reports, along with fictionalized case studies, led to the expansion of doctoral first-person narratives in Russian fiction. In the sixth chapter, I show that the presence of the doctor and of medical discourse in such narratives becomes central to the development of the plot as well as emphasizes the behaviors of other characters. Often, the key events of the plot occur because of the doctor’s presence. The descriptions of the settings and characters are given through the eyes of the medic: as a result, the medical component becomes the center of the narrative. The physical health of the protagonist, in particular, becomes a locus of attention, and the prose is imbued with medical terminology.

The seventh chapter of this dissertation is about the structural role of the doctor and his gaze within Russian fiction. The doctor turns out to be responsible for the way the literary plot is structured, and how new settings (such as everyday life) are introduced to the reading public. From exploration of the traditions, I move on to the issue of the doctor’s structure, his role and interaction with other characters. I show that the fictional doctors, up till the epoch of Reforms, play the role of textual devices that, first, connect characters in a certain way, and second, introduce previously taboo

29 topics into fiction. Taking into consideration Bakhtin’s notion of tricksters or “third figures” that are never granted leading roles in literature, I propose to explore the doctor’s professionalism as a manifestation of his special gaze. This gaze originates not inside the plot but rather from the outside, from the author’s point of view. In discussing this, I also refer to Foucault’s notion of the medical gaze that, in my opinion, is the next step in the development of fictional doctors. Also, the idea of

“another person” being present and yet not completely participating in the action corresponds with Freud’s notion of jesting, in which the “third person” becomes the recipient of a joke (while the second person is the object of the joke).63 Likewise, only a doctor who does not participate directly in action can comprehend the true meaning of his surroundings. After the 1850s, doctors become less and less marginalized; they lost their unique structural position and became regular characters. However, as I show in the Conclusion, some traits and features are preserved, and come up again in the post-Reform literature, in medical fiction, and further on, in the literature and culture of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. I close my work with laying out some perspectives on the development of the doctor and his gaze, both in Russian and

Western literature and culture.

63 Sigmund Freud, Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious, trans. James Strachey (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1960), 144

Chapter 1

Doctor, Priest, Midwife, and Gravedigger: The Common Roots

The doctor as a character originates from Russian eighteenth-century mass culture, including folk theater performances as well as lowbrow fiction. The phenomenon of folk theater, much admired and practiced on the streets of Russian cities and towns, grew up both from the European tradition of performing puppet shows on the street, and from the Russian tradition of celebrating half-Christian, half- pagan holidays. The most famous plays were “Lodka,” “Tsar Maximillian,” and

“Petrushka’s Theater;” all of them travestied and ridiculed the traditional plots of fairytales and legends. The characters who participated in the action were masks, each one holding a single assigned function. The doctor arrives on stage to cure one of the wounded or even murdered key characters (Anika-voin, the gravedigger, etc); after introducing himself to the audience, the doctor “treats” the patient by slapping him, and then he is chased away or slapped back by one of his “patients.” These performances were often bound to the pagan rituals associated with season changes; in the “earliest form he took part in the New Year and spring fertility games which involved the death and resurrection of a goat, horse, bull or some anthropomorphic figure. He was a central figure in the cycles of farcical interludes, originally performed between the serious acts of plays in the repertoire of the

Academic theaters in the late 17th and 18th centuries <…> He is a stock character of the two types of puppet theater known in Russia, the theater of rod puppets, the vertep, and Petrushka, both of which were introduced from Western Europe and were already

31 widespread by the 17th century <…> Last… he was found in variants of all the main plays of the repertoire of the folk theater, in particular Tsar Maksimilian and Lodka

(The Ship)”.64

Though belonging to a particular theatrical (and originally foreign) ritual performed by puppet theaters, this folk doctor demonstrates a number of features that later show up in Russian literature, as, for example, the foreignness of doctors

(German, Dutch, English or French). Later this foreign doctor-quack would resurface in, for example, Gogol’s “Inspector General;” Khristian Ivanovich does not speak

Russian and therefore cannot utter a word. He embodies the traditional perception of foreigners: people called them “Germans,” referring to their inability to speak Russian

(nemets - “the mute one”). Also, the devil in Russian literature traditionally resembled in his clothing and appearance a foreigner and particularly, a German, as for example, in Gogol’s “Noch’ pered Rozhdestvom,” in which the devil is described as a “typical

German,”65 or in the satiric sketch (possibly written by Senkovskii) published in the

Library for Reading in 1836:

Шекспир прав! Решительно, в аду не осталось ни одного черта: все рассыпались по земле, и в это время рыщут по Германии. Уверенные... что ни домовых, ни леших нет на свете, что чертей теперь нигде не видно, мы преспокойно принялись за разбор кипы немецких книг, привезенных к санктпетербургскому порту с последней навигацией, и в самой этой кипе вдруг нашли живого черта!66

The notorious similarity between the doctor-quack and chert is visible already from

64 Elisabeth Warner, “The Quack Doctor in the Russian Folk and Popular Theater,” Folklore 93.2 (1982): 166 65 Nikolai Gogol, “Noch’ Pered Rozhdestvom,” In Polnoe Sobranie Sochinenii V 14 t. Vol. 1 (Moscow- Leningrad: Izdatel’stvo AN SSSR, 1940), 202, http://feb-web.ru/feb/gogol/texts/ps0/ps1/ps1-201-.htm 66 “Germanskaia chertovshchina ili Poslednee puteshestvie Satany po Virtembergskomu korolevstvu.” Biblioteka Dlia Chteniia 19 (1836): 81-82.

32 his appearance and nationality. Moreover, when first appearing on stage, the doctor introduces himself boasting of his supernatural abilities that are designed to impress the audience:

Здесь я! Я есть доктор и лекарь, Из-под Каменного мосту аптекарь. Умею лечить, Умею тащить, Умею летать, Умею и с белым светом разлучать! Живые места вырезаю И на место их мертвые вставляю, Кровь мечу, Баб лечу, Глаза выкалываю, Титьки подкалываю, Всякое дело умею. Какое заставишь?

The set of qualities listed in this self-introduction later comes up in Russian literature: the common perception places doctors on the same page with sorcerers, demons, and wizards, with abilities that would include flying, curing patients or “parting people with this world.” The redundancy of traits of the quack is split into different types of doctors that would include gifted professionals who would easily cure all diseases; villains who would abuse their power and hurt the patients; and quacks who would pretend to be skilled physicians.

Another example that contributes to the literary image of the doctor is a segment from the thirteenth-century Chronicle. When Kievan Prince Sviatosha decides to retire to the monastery and become a monk, his faithful doctor, Petr

Sirianin, follows him into this voluntary seclusion. When a severe illness occurs to

Sviatosha, everybody expects his imminent death, since Sviatosha refuses to undergo

33 any medical treatment. Then Petr sacrifices his life for the health of his master; he succumbs to the same illness and dies in three days in his master’s place. The chronicler notes that Sviatosha survives his illness and lives for another 30 years at the monastery. 67 Likewise the mask of theatrical quack propels the development of different types of doctors; the situation of a doctor’s self-sacrifice also comes up in different stories, such as Vladislavlev’s Doctor Venevin, Polevoi’s “Emma,” and

Lazhechnikov’s Basurman. In all these cases the doctor has to give up his own life in order to save the patient. This self-destructive action converts the character from doctor into saint, and at the same time abolishes his professional quality.

These examples demonstrate that, despite their evident differences, the doctor- quack and doctor-saint are endowed with life-changing power, i.e. the very trait that would distinguish doctors as literary characters in the future. When discussing the

Romantic hero in Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, Lotman points out that the very same character can combine a set of qualities that vary from savior to villain, and yet remain the same.68 The doctors of nineteenth century literature indeed originate from two types of predecessors, the common trait of which is their influence on other characters.

Propp’s theory of functions in fairytale affirms that while characters and setting are greatly variable, the number of actions in the stories is strictly limited. Similarly, in the

67 Когда же Святоша сообщил, что через три месяца покинет этот мир, Петр сильно опечалился и, желая спасти князя, попросил его: «Повеждь мне, рабу своему, язву смертную, да ще аз тя не изоврачюю, да будет глава моа за главу твою и душа моа за душу твою». Однако Святоша отказался от помощи врача: «Врачевания же в животе не требовах, мертвии бо живота не имут видети, не врачеви могут въскресити». И тогда Петр решил умереть и лечь в гроб, который приготовил себе Святоша; он сказал князю: «Ты живи еще, а мене здесь положи». Врач Петр Сирианин умер на 3-й день, а Святоша прожил в монастыре еще 30 лет (Mark Mirskii, “Meditsina v Srednie Veka na Rusi,” Stat’i po Istorii, http://historical-articles.blogspot.ca/2011/07/blog- post_3701.html 68 Lotman, “Siuzhetnoe Prostranstvo Russkogo Romana 19 stoletiia,” 98

34 case of the doctor-quack and doctor-saint, actions can vary, while the mask of character, along with his textual function remains the same, as I will show in the chapter dedicated to imposed clairvoyance, where the doctor’s intentions are sometimes evil or sometimes benign.

Another trait that both brings folk play and hagiography together as well as comes up in the nineteenth-century fiction is the sacred space that hosts the developing action. While the Kievan chronicle refers to the space of early Christianity in Russia, the folk play demonstrates the situation of carnival that turns hierarchy upside down and switches roles. As I mentioned before, the plays and particularly the figure of the doctor originate from pagan rituals associated with certain holidays and changes of season. The cast onstage is divided into two separate groups, one of which holds fixed roles (the warrior fights, the Tsar orders, the messenger brings the characters to the

Tsar), while the second one allows the roles and actions to be interchangeable. When the warrior dies, the gravedigger resurrects him by the smack, and as a response gets a slap from the revived warrior. The doctor is summoned to “cure” the undertaker by his cane, and afterwards is chased away from the stage. In some versions of

“Petrushka’s Theater” the doctor either kills the patient or himself gets killed by

Petrushka. In the finale of “Tsar Maximillian” the priests arrive to conduct the wedding ceremony between the Tsar and the “goddess;” their “sermon” consists of a squabble between the priest and his deacon (whose roles are inverted and travestied) and their vain attempts to remember the words of a prayer. This triad soon turns into dyad, with the gravedigger falling out, since his presence proves to be non-productive.

While this character sometimes acquires his part in the narrative (as in Pushkin’s

“Grobovshchik” or Odoevskii’s “Zapiski grobovshchika”), this role is gradually marginalized.

The figures of the undertaker and, respectively, the midwife belong to a number of ritualized and magical occupations, since they are linked to key moments of life that in traditional culture are marked by a variety of rituals. 69 This is especially visible in the sequence of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, when the doctor is summoned to

Levin's house during Kitty's labor; however, he never intervenes and even emphasizes the formality of his presence. Such an attitude is preserved even in later literature, such as Bulgakov’s “Zapiski iunogo vracha” (1925-1926), which reminds one of the remnants of old beliefs that accompanied the process of labor.70 The special status of these professions is seen in the half-humorous, half-philosophical sketch “Domik na

Nikitskoi” (Teleskop, 1834) that hosts a midwife and an undertaker under one roof:

Повивальная бабка и гробовщик! Не они ли стоят по обоим концам этого земного жилища, называемого жизнью <…> Кто минует пелен и гроба? Кто обойдется без повивальной бабушки и гробовщика? <…> Сизый домик... выражает собой всю целость этой жизни человеческой с ее бесконечными мыслями, подвигами, чувствами, переворотами, со всем ее огромным содержанием! В одно окно этого домика входит человек теплым жизнью младенцем, из другого выходит холодным покойником.71

The text ironically implies that the little grey house symbolizes life – from beginning

69 See Tatiana Vlaskina, “Mifologicheskii tekst rodin,” In Rodiny, Deti, Povitukhi v Traditsiiakh Narodnoj Kultury, Moscow: RGGU, 2001, 61-78 70 Глаза у акушерок засверкали от воспоминаний. Мы долго у огня сидели за чаем, и я слушал как зачарованный. О том, что, когда приходится вести роженицу из деревни к нам в больницу, Пелагея Иванна свои сани всегда сзади пускает: не передумали бы по дороге, не вернули бы бабу в руки бабки. О том, как однажды роженицу при неправильном положении, чтобы младенчик повернулся, кверху ногами к потолку подвешивали. (Mikhail Bulgakov, “T’ma Egipetskaia, In Zapiski Iunogo Vracha, Directmedia, 117, http://books.google.ca/books?id=qpDxvFmdtDkC&dq) 71 Z. Domik na Nikitskoi. Telegraf 19 (1834): 56-57.

36 to end. A series of amusing scenes show different situations, in which the services of an undertaker and a midwife are always confused, prompting the reader to muse on the ultimate proximity of those professions. These professionals symbolize and are incorporated into the rituals of the circle of life. Not accidentally, the sketch is concluded with an apocalyptic scene, in which the gravedigger and midwife turn out to be the last people on Earth. The only reason they are still alive is their magical association with the starting and ending points of human life.

As opposed to the midwife and undertaker, the doctor and priest, in spite of their sacral or magic background, are not singularly associated with birth or death, though they often find themselves present at those moments. The similarity between doctor and priest is manifested on different levels, including literature, history, culture, and naïve conceptions. From a historical perspective, many Russian doctors originated from clerical families, a group of extremely low social rank. In Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, Bazarov boldly reminds his friend that he is a “doctor’s son and deacon’s grandson,” thus detaching himself from the nobility. In reality, the distance between

Bazarov’s ancestors and his present milieu was indeed huge: even in the beginning of the nineteenth century a landlord could set dogs on a church procession, whip a priest, or expel a priest’s family from their own house.72 Medical education and practice provided the sons of priests with some hope of raising their status in society and securing a steady salary. By building up the whole scheme – the young man setting aside his father’s occupation, becoming a fervent materialist, and pursuing a different career – the writers open and develop a rich theme of a gap between generations of

72 Aleksandr Belousov, “Obraz seminarista v russkoi kul’ture i ego literaturnaia istoriia,” In Traditsiia v folklore i literature (Saint Petersburg: SpGU, 2000), 2

37 fathers and sons. In Fathers and Sons the generational conflict exists not only as a gap between Bazarov and his father, but also as a never mentioned conflict between his father-doctor and grandfather-priest. Herzen explores such a confrontation when creating a biography for his stock character, doctor Krupov. In the story named after its protagonist, Krupov writes about his father – a deacon who furiously opposed his son’s dream to become a doctor. Krupov’s wish to pursue the medical career could be realized only after his father’s death.

For Romanticism and early Realism, the ontological proximity between doctor and priest shows up through the specific situations that demonstrate the confidential conversations between doctors and their patients and/or friends; in this case, medical professionals assume the role of priests within the literary texts. The art of empathetic listening turns the relationship between an old Russian German doctor and his sixty- year-old lady friend into a confidential rapport that involves mutual dependency, nonverbal contact, and the doctor’s assumption of priestly functions:

Такого рода была привязанность Натальи Дмитриевны к доктору. Видеть его каждый день против себя, по другую стороны стола, в больших креслах, сложа одну ногу на другую и подпирая палкою с серебряным набалдашником подбородок, было для нее необходимостью. <…> Она не уснет покойно, если отходя в свою спальню, не услышит привычного: Спите же с Богом! 73

Natalia Dmitrievna perceives the doctor as a family physician AND a priest: his quiet presence, his listening, and, importantly, his goodnight blessing rises well above the usual medical duties. The lady sees the world through the eyes of the doctor, notes his reactions in the course of her conversations with other people, and entrusts him with

73 Maria Zhukova, Vechera na Karpovke. Vol. 1. (St. Petersburg.: tip. A. Smirdina, 1838), 10; my emphasis

38 her most intimate secrets; and so their confidential relationship changes into the mutual symbiosis that allows people to see the world through each other’s eyes.

In some cases, the doctor and the priest show opposing approaches to providing the necessary help and therefore are in conflict. The origins of such plot twists are present in the chronicle that I mentioned in the beginning of the chapter.

When in the chronicle Doctor Peter Sirianin offers his skillful yet material treatment,

Sviatosha refuses, because for him, his illness cannot be treated by any medical skills.

On the contrary, the Prince repeatedly cures his doctor by praying for his health. The conflict between doctor and priest is paralleled with the conflict between materialism and religion, science and nature. In Polevoi’s “Emma,” the doctor’s excessive reliance on science (and not an instinctive faith) prevents him from saving the heroine from emotional and afterwards, physical breakdown. As opposed to the doctor’s bookish knowledge, the monk Paisii manages to provide consolation to Emma by surrounding her with instinctive, spiritual wisdom. His medical mentality clouds the doctor’s empathic judgment, and he never succeeds in finding a way to help the girl overcome her emotional drama. The Kievan chronicle introduces the notion of a doctor’s self- sacrifice as the only possible method of treatment. Similarly to Sirianin’s voluntary succumbing to the illness, Emma, as the Prince’s healer, also succeeds in his cure but has to give up her own life. In the finale of “Emma,” the girl dies, and soon afterwards war sweeps down the Prince’s family, and his house is devastated and looted. The successful treatment of the Prince as well as his future prosperity become irrelevant; we are brought back to the notion of the priest overcoming the doctor. The only thing that matters in the end is the fulfillment of Emma’s last wish that the priest

39 pronounced after her death – to be buried in the Prince’s family grave.

In the first half of the nineteenth century, the confrontation between science and religion epitomized in these two figures is usually resolved with the priest prevailing over the doctor. In Lazhechnikov’s “Grimasa Moego Doktora” (1830), the doctor boldly takes up the unachievable task of curing the mentally ill woman and incorporating her back into society. Doctor Mosel commits a crime by seducing his former patient and then forging a certificate of her mental health. The church, personified by the priest who marries them, gravely warns the doctor that God cannot be deceived. As the various events of the plot demonstrate, the doctor uses all his skill in vain, since the consequences turn out to be tragic. His almost-cured wife dies soon after childbirth; their daughter inherits her mother’s mental condition; the Russian officer treated by the doctor is soon killed in a campaign; and finally, the narrator sees the doctor’s house being looted, destroyed, and haunted by his ghost. The priest foresees that the initial sin will eventually deprive the doctor and his family of any future, the thing that the doctor himself cannot deduce by his professional knowledge.

In fact, the priest devalues the doctor’s skills by being responsible for the highest morality. A similar thing happens to Bazarov when he slips into unconsciousness on his deathbed and a priest is summoned to administer the last rites. Turgenev is very precise in giving a detailed description of how Bazarov opens his eye and glances in horror, and how flowers continue to bloom over his grave. While conscious, Bazarov prevails over his acquaintances by staying in control all the time, up until the point when nature and death overcome him.

In other examples, the doctor incorporates the priest’s features and functions in

40 a dual capacity. The way in which doctors gain direct access to the intimate aspects of everyday life and to extreme situations of human weakness and grief makes them similar to priests. Among many other traits accumulated by the Russian fictional doctor, we see the comic demonism of a folk doctor-clown who boasts about his ability to kill or to cure, or the clumsiness and awkwardness of a priest as parodied in the folk play. On the other hand, the pattern that showed up in the aforementioned hagiographic plot is also visible in plots that depict the doctor (or healer) as the one who sacrifices himself for the sake of saving patient’s life. Another point of common reference for both doctors and priests is the issue of discretion that in principle constitutes an essential part of their professional obligations. The theme of medical ethics is seen through the prism of confession’s sacredness, and the doctor is obliged to preserve the privacy of his patients, just as a priest cannot give out the details of anyone’s confession. Because of this intersection of sacred and professional ethics, some plots with a doctor’s participation are based on the breaking of this “priestly” stereotype of medical discretion, hence provoking interest in readers. This pattern repeats itself in a number of plots, such as Pavlov’s “Maskarad,” with the doctor divulging a secret of his friend and patient; and in Lermontov’s “Geroi nashego vremeni,” with Werner using his knowledge of his patients’ situations to initiate the intrigue between Pechorin and Mary. In Dostoevsky’s Dvoinik the parallel between doctor and priest is bared by incorporating it directly into the thoughts of his protagonist. Mr. Goliadkin feels an urge to confess his worries to his family doctor, since the “doctor seems to be like a priest.” However, the doctor refuses to assume a confessor’s role and reacts to Goliadkin’s outburst with a mixture of suspicion and

41 miscomprehension. Furthermore, in the finale of Dvoinik we see the doctor through the eyes of a deluded Goliadkin as a vampire-like monster. The analogy between doctor and priest proves to be deceiving: the doctor not only exposes his secrets to the public but also uses the private knowledge to confine and destroy Goliadkin. The exposure of secrets acquired in the course of medical practice becomes not just a shocking diversion from the Hippocratic Oath, but also a powerful instrument of the plot structure.

The pair of doctor and priest often constitutes an opposition, in which a paradoxical situation is formed; the sympathies of the writer tend to incline towards the priest, thus demonstrating that medicine as a healing technique or as a branch of science constantly loses to religion and priesthood. The scheme suggested by the

Kievan chronicle still works in the beginning of the nineteenth century. As I will show, doctors’ manipulations of patients’ bodies, and especially surgical and postmortem procedures, are interpreted as offensive interventions into sacral and prohibited knowledge. At the same time, the fictional doctor absorbs and incorporates the literary and cultural traits of a priest, and their differences reveal hidden similarities. The connection with both sacral and profane aspects of life as well as the ambivalent associations with saints and demons will resurface again and again in the motifs, functions, and situations that literature associates with doctors.

Chapter 2

Quacks, Sorcerers, or Prophets: Mesmerists and Magnetizers in the Russian Literature of the 1820s-1850s.

Не раз слыхал я таинственные рассказы, читал мистические книги, где эта темная и никем не измеренная сила человеческой природы играла страшную роль. Ее загадочные явления, одной стороной своей принадлежащие к сфере фактической, осязаемой жизни, а другою уходящие так глубоко в темную область мира невидимого, манили к себе мое воображение... но мысль — испытать их на себе, возбуждала во мне всегда глубокое, непреодолимое отвращение. 74

This epigraph reflects the ambivalent reaction of the protagonist of

Akhsharumov’s “Dvoinik” (1850), when approached with the offer of undergoing a séance of magnetism. This story refers to the situation in Europe and in Russia during the first half of the nineteenth century, when many people were preoccupied with the search for a new religion that would both accept the old beliefs and incorporate the new achievements of science. The epoch heralded a new philosophy that was caused by “a demand for an integral synthesis, analogous to that provided by religion.” 75 In this situation, such a synthesis occurs through the notion of the gaze that is embodied in the figure of the mesmerist, magician, or doctor. These characters constitute, in reality, the “eye” through which, as if through a spyglass, readers can perceive the true meaning of the text between the lines.

In this chapter, the scope of the doctor’s gaze will be explored through the concepts of magnetism, hypnotism, and black magic. I go through a number of stories

74 Nikolai Akhsharumov, “Dvoinik.” In Dvoinik - povest'. Igrok - povest'. (St. Petersburg.: Tip. Evdokimova, 1895),18 75 Vasilii Zenkovsky, A History of Russian Philosophy,Vol.1 (London – NY: Routledge, 2003),108

43 demonstrating the complexity of mesmerism’s perception, with the magnetizers being depicted as evil sorcerers, magic healers, or prophetic philosophers. I argue that the influence of this practice can be shown in a number of fictional pieces both related and not related to magnetism, including such canonical literature as Gogol’s Portrait or

Vii. I explore these patterns first in the context of the Gothic tradition that stems from

European horror fiction, and second, in the context of folk literature and folk beliefs that address our inner fears and anxieties. Another aspect of seeing and looking is reflected in the notion of the omniscient gaze of the clairvoyant that makes the doctor- mesmerist a medium between man and God and helps to establish a sacral union between all creatures. In the conclusion, I demonstrate how the omniscient gaze of the doctor as a sorcerer, magnetizer, or prophet precedes the baring gaze of the medical practitioner of a later epoch (1850s-1860s) that sees into the physical body of the patient and disregards his or her personality.

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, philosophers and doctors strove together to grasp the connection between spirit and body, man and nature.76 In the Russia of that time, distinctions between scientists, philosophers, and physicians did not exist yet, and such concepts as extrasensory influence, hypnotism or somnambulism (the transformed state of mind involving clairvoyance and sleepwalking) were present within the common space of thought, and later came up through such practical occupations as medicine or such abstract fields as philosophy and spiritualism.

Franz Anton Mesmer (1734-1815) was a doctor and the founder of

76 Bogdanov, Vrachi, Patsienty, Chitateli,178

“magnetism,” a healing practice that later was transformed into hypnotism. Born in

Germany, he studied at the university in Vienna and published his doctoral dissertation there. Mesmer practiced his sessions in Austria and France; by the end of his life he lived in Germany. The fact that he emerged from the field of medicine was not accidental, since the concept of cosmic influence on the human body existed even before his time and was also elaborated by medical scientists. Before Mesmer’s time, the British physician, Richard Mead wrote about the gravitational influence of celestial bodies on human beings. Relying on concepts developed by Galen and

Ptolemy, Mead published his 1704 work De Imperio Solis ac Lunae in Corpora humana, & Morbis inde oriundis (On the Influence of the Sun and Moon upon Human

Bodies and the Diseases Arising Therefrom). In this opus, Mead argued that “ust as the moon caused the sea to swell and recede with the tides <…> there was a corresponding monthly periodicity in the volume of the bodily humors, including venous and arterial blood. These fluctuations of blood could potentially lead to the superfluous amounts within the body and thus to disease, which could be solved by bloodletting--a course of treatment usually followed by Mead.”77 Mesmer used Mead's ideas as a foundation of his theory; he changed some definitions, such as “animal gravitation” to “animal magnetism,” and suggested that all physical processes in our bodies are governed by an invisible “fluid” that flows through the whole universe as well as through the bodies of all living things. While claiming that any disease originates from “obstacles” encountered by this flow, Mesmer established a system of

77 Anna Marie Roos, “Luminaries in Medicine: Richard Mead, James Gibbs, and Solar and Lunar Effects on the Human Body in Early Modern England,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 74.3 (2000): 433-457

45 treatment, the goal of which was to smooth the obstacles by imposing a magnetic influence on his patients. In Austria, Mesmer practiced one-on-one sessions, and some elements of his technique were later recognized and adopted by specialists in hypnosis techniques:

To transfer this healing current, Mesmer would sit with patients' legs squeezed between his knees, press their thumbs in his hands, stare intensely into their eyes, and stroke their limbs to manipulate their internal ether. He claimed to have cured many ailments in this fashion, and to have restored the sight of a court pianist who had been blind since the age of three.78

In 1778, Austrian physicians accused Mesmer of fraud, and he moved to

France to expand the possibilities of his practice by launching collective sessions of treatment that involved a specially designed container, the “baquet.” 79 Patients were asked to sit around the baquet holding or touching metal rods and ropes by the injured parts of their bodies as well as each other so that the magnetic fluid could be equally distributed among all participants of the séance. During the sessions patients

(especially, women) would fall into hypnotic trances, hysterical fits, and convulsions.

Mesmer identified these conditions as “crises” that constituted the essential part of the treatment process. The popularity of Mesmer’s séances, and especially the rumors about patients’ “crises,” caused disturbances in certain circles of French society as well as among more conventional doctors. In 1784, the French Academy of Sciences appointed a Committee that included such prominent scientists as Lavoisier,

Guillotine, and Franklin, to find out if Mesmer’s technique could be identified as medically effective. The commission conducted thorough research; while admitting

78 Christopher Turner, “Mesmeromania, or The Tale of a Tub,” Cabinet 21 (2006) http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/21/turner.php 79 Turner, http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/21/turner.php .

46 the presence of certain therapeutic effects of Mesmer's sessions, they renounced the whole idea of the magnetic fluid. As a result, mesmerism was discredited and claimed to be medically irrelevant. Soon after the publication of the Commission’s report,

Mesmer left France and settled in a German village where he served as a country doctor in complete seclusion till his death in 1815.

After such a blow, mesmerism never returned to the public in the form of the initial concepts as formulated by Mesmer. By the turn of the nineteenth century, his essential idea of the universal fluid was transformed into the notion of a “sixth sense” that a person experiences while being stimulated by the mesmeric trance, with the figure of mesmerist transformed from a skilled professional to a bearer of extrasensory powers. From now on, mesmerism no longer constituted a movement lead by a single charismatic leader; it broke into three separate branches. The first fraction situated itself within the realm of conventional medicine, with mesmerism being seen an effective way of treatment. In the nineteenth century, doctors used magnetic trance to anesthetise their patients before surgeries and amputations; others regarded mesmerism as a powerful tool for curing a variety of diseases, including rheumatism, toothaches, paralysis, and headaches.80 The second fraction of mesmerists concentrated on the illustrative aspect of magnetism, and organized famous performances that impressed the public by demonstrations of the hypnotic possibilities.

The third and the most significant group consisted of Mesmer’s direct disciples and followers (Deleuze, Ennemoser, Kluge, Kieser, Wolfarth, and Nees von Esenbeck)

80 Carlos S Alvarado, “Mesmerism Online: A Bibliographic Review,” Australian Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis 36.2 (2008): 117-119

47 who defined magnetism not as a medical tool but as a spiritual practice.81 As opposed to the original theory that claimed the power of the mesmerist to be material (though invisible), the new proponents considered magnetism as a way of a non-material interaction between man and nature.82 According to Chevalier de Barbarin, the magnetic trance was regarded as achieving intimacy with God, “the highest magnetizer.” 83 The ideas of Mesmer formed a perfect union with the Nature

Philosophy established by German writer and philosopher Schelling, and eventually people began to associate spiritual mesmerism with the concepts of Nature

Philosophy. According to Schelling, the natural (physical) component of life had to be regarded as being inseparable from the “ideal,” spiritual side of a human being.

Mesmerists always proclaimed this unity of sacral and profane, of body and spirit.

That is why mesmerism did not always clash with the medical theories of that time.

The spiritual branch of mesmerism also had much in common with the Masonic movement, starting with Mesmer himself (who was a member of the Wahrheit und

Freiheit Masonic lodge in Austria, and then of the Loge des Philadelphes in France), and ending with the aforementioned followers, such as the Marquis de Puysegur, a famous mesmerist and a leader of the first mesmeric Lodge of Harmony, established in

Paris in the 1770s.84

In Russian memoirs and correspondence, mesmerism emerged in the epoch of

Catherine the Great; this phenomenon is mentioned by Bolotov, the famous

81 Liane Bryson, “Romantic Science: Hoffmann’s Use of the Natural Sciences in the Der goldne Topf,” Monatshefte 91.2 (1999): 241-255. 82 Bogdanov, Vrachi, Patsienty, Chitateli,187 83 Bryson, “Romantic Science,” 244. 84 Melvin A. Gravitz, “Mesmerism and Masonry: Early Historical Interactions,” American Journal of Clinical Hypnosis 39:4 (1997):267

48 eighteenth-century writer and agronomist. In his memoirs, Bolotov wrote that magnetism in Russia was introduced from abroad, and gained considerable popularity; however, when the Empress found out about the practice of a foreign mesmerist, she deeply resented this practice:

<Императрица велела> господину магнитезатору сказать, чтоб он ремесло свое покинул или готовился бы ехать в такое место, где позабудет свое магнетизирование и сомнамбулизм.85

Derzhavin also identified mesmerism as a fashionable theme discussed by the educated circles; in his ironic ode of 1780 “Na schast'e” (On Happiness), he referred to the mesmerist practice:

В те дни людского просвещенья, Как нет кикиморов явленья, Как ты лишь всем чудотворишь: Девиц и дам магнетизируешь, Из камней золото варишь, В глаза патриотизма плюешь, Катаешь кубарем весь мир <…>86

As Derzhavin later commented, this stance was aimed at the “vanity and instability of everyday life,” and therefore contained a mixture of old and new superstitions. 87

Instead of believing in swamp witches (kikimory) people now are obsessed with magnetism and alchemy. In the later notes to this poem, Derzhavin explained that “in

1786 magnetism was highly favored in St. Petersburg. M-me K. was engaged in this

85 Bogdanov, Vrachi, Patsienty, Chitateli, 183-184 86 Gavriil Derzhavin. Sochineniia Derzhavina. Tom pervyi, izdanie vtoroe (Saint-Petersburg: Izdanie A. Smirdina, 1851),173 87 Derzhavin, Sochineniia Derzhavina, 179

49 new discovery, and prophesied in a mysterious trance in front of everyone.”88

As in Germany and France, Russian mesmerism had been in decline for several decades when new interest was again stirred up by the Nature philosophers,

Schelling's followers.89 For the Russian elite, mesmerism was popularized and, partly, revised by the German surgeon Doctor Kluge, one of Mesmer’s followers. His book on animal magnetism90 was translated and published by Dr. Vellanskii in 1818.91 An educated physician and university professor, Vellanskii held great influence over the development of philosophical ideas in Russia; according to the testimonies of his disciples, his lectures “excited his hearers up to the point of ‘self-forgetfulness’, even

‘ecstasy’.” 92 The circle of “wisdom-lovers” acknowledged him as a leader of Russian

Schellingians, and several writers, influenced by Vellanskii, addressed mesmerism in their prose.93 Again, magnetism started to be widely discussed by the reading public.

In one of early Pushkin’s drafts of Eugene Onegin, mesmerism is mentioned as one of the fashionable themes used by Onegin to animate small talk:

И мог он с ними в с<амом деле> Вести [ученый разговор] И [даже] мужественный спор О Бейроне, о Манюэле О магнетизме, о Парни Об генерале Жомини.94

88 Derzhavin, Sochineniia Derzhavina 179 89 Grombakh, Pushkin i meditsina ego vremeni (Moscow: Meditsina, 1989),136 90 Ferdinand Kluge, Versuch einer Darstellung des animalischen Magnetismus als Heilmittel, Berlin, 1811. 91 Danilo Vellanskii, Zhivotnyj magnetizm, predstavlennyj v istoricheskom, prakticheskom i teoreticheskom soderzhanii. Pervye dve chasti perevedeny iz nemeckogo sochinenija prof. Kluge, a tret'ju sochinil Danilo Vellanskij (Saint Petersburg: Tipografiia Vospitatel’nogo Doma, 1818), 119 92 Evgenii Bobrov, Filosofiya v Rossii (Kazan: Tipo-litografiia Imperatorskogo Universiteta, 1902), 67 93 Polevoi, whose “Emma” revolves around different perceptions of mesmerism, is known to highly esteem Vellanskii’s writings; Count Odoevskii, one of the most faithful proponents of magnetism, exchanged letters with Vellanskii in 1824. 94 Aleksandr Pushkin, “Evgenii Onegin: Drugie redakcii i variant,” In Polnoe sobranie sochinenij: V 16 t. Vol. 6 (Moscow-Leningrad: Izd-vo AN SSSR, 1937)

In fiction, characters are eager to talk about supernatural matters: for example,

Polevoi engages two Russian Germans in an entertaining conversation about magnetism in a similar tone as they would talk about politics or recent scientific discoveries:

Доктор с жаром вел между тем с дедушкою разговор о сомнамбулизме и магнетизме, искусственном магнетизировании, естественной поляризации и духовной эксцентризации. Общество этих людей казалось таким дружеским, веселым, радостным.95

Despite the decree of 1816 allowing only certified physicians to practice magnetism in

Russia, a number of people without any medical background continued magnetizing their friends and acquaintances.96 In memoirs and correspondence one sees numerous remarks about encounters with magnetism, such as the sessions of Anna Turchaninova that were reported to have successfully treated physical malformations magnetically.97

The attitude of the general public toward mesmerism was rather more negative than positive, and intensive interest was always mixed with a sense of fear or even disgust. Thus, Pushkin and his friend Dr. Fuks once discussed magnetism, clairvoyance, and superstitions, and in this conversation, according to the testimony of

Dr. Fuks’s wife, Pushkin expressed his beliefs in magnetism and tried to convince semi-seriously, semi-jokingly his materialist friends in the verity of this practice:

Верьте магнетизму и бойтесь его волшебной силы; вы еще не знаете, какие он чудеса делает над женщинами?.. Женщина, любившая даже

95 Nikolai Polevoi, “Emma,” In Izbrannye proizvedeniia i pisma,(Leningrad: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1986), 318 96 According to M. Murav'ev-Apostol, N. Raevsky (senior) cured a lot of people by means of magnetism (Grombakh, Pushkin i meditsina ego vremeni, 137-138) 97 Bogdanov, Vrachi, Patsienty, chitateli, 190-191

самою страстною любовью, при такой же взаимной любви остается добродетельною; но были случаи, что эта же самая женщина, вовсе не любивши, как бы невольно со страхом исполняет все желания мужчины, даже до самоотвержения. Вот это-то и есть сила магнетизма.98

Mesmerism’s perception in Russia and in Europe was fragmentary and mainly focused on the performance aspects. The visual side of mesmerism was the first to get into Russian fiction; the spiritual and philosophical aspects were also present on a smaller scale. The tradition of depicting doctors/hypnotists in Russian fiction goes back to two cultural sources, of which the first one originates from German

Romanticism (primarily Hoffmann's tales), while the second one belongs to the universal legion of human anxieties of witches and vampires. In fact, these two traditions are historically intertwined. The association with black magic and witchcraft is visible in Hoffmann’s “The Magnetizer” that indicatively regards magnetism as a powerful tool of dominance, which in the hands of an evil person turns into a dangerous weapon. Hoffmann’s knowledge of mesmerism was not superficial: he knew its adepts and personally attended séances in Germany.99

Though the controversy over mesmerism and its perception was clear even to contemporaries, for a certain time this practice existed along with the conventional fields of medicine (such as surgery). In literature, these techniques were perceived in the context of beliefs and superstitions as well as of the new religion offered by the followers of Schelling. The curiosity that propelled the layman to go through magnetic experiences clashed with the disgust and fear of the mesmerist’s power. This fear or

98 Razgovory Pushkina, ed. S. Gessen and L. Modzalevskij. Reprintnoe vosproizvedenie izdanija 1929 goda (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1991), 195 99 Bryson, “Romantic Science,” 242

52 awe originating from the aura emanated by the figure of the mesmerist are commonly interpreted as mystic powers or dark witchcraft. Later, in the 1850s-1860s, Romantic clichés linked to the notions of mesmerism became easy targets of ridicule. As

Bazarov mockingly notes in Turgenev’s Ottsy i deti, the female gaze cannot be enigmatic, since the anatomy of the eye is well-known to the positivist view of the pathologist. By saying this, Bazarov implies that the mystic component of man’s existence and perception (the lady’s enigmatic gaze) becomes irrelevant, and is replaced by a different discourse that observes a person exclusively from the point of view of his or her physicality.

One of the scariest manifestations of the magnetizer's power is his gaze that pierces the walls and the minds of innocent victims and subdues them to his evil will.

Pogorelskii opens his unfinished story “Magnetizer” (1834) with small talk between an elderly couple and Pasha, their young daughter. When hearing her parents chatting about mesmerism, Pasha suddenly “shudders as if remembering something scary and ugly”100 and then describes the scene that she witnessed when attending to the bedside of a young woman suffering from violent convulsions. When all medical remedies had failed, an Italian marquis, a casual guest in the house, cured the patient by a “single touch of his hand.” However, after this occurrence Pasha was haunted by the recurring reminiscence of the marquis's gaze briefly being aimed at her:

Маркиз вдруг поворотил голову ко мне... из черных, пламенных глаз своих он бросил на меня взор... мне показалось, что взор этот осуществился и в виде огненной стрелы вонзился в мое сердце. Я почувствовала невольный страх; я почувствовала, что ноги мои

100 Antonii Pogorelskii, “Magnetizer,” “Im Werden Verlag,” Nekommercheskoe elektronnoe izdanie, (Muenchen, 2006), http://imwerden.de/pdf/pogorelsky_magnetiser.pdf

подгибаются, и чрез силу могла выйти из комнаты.101

Although Pogorelskii never finished his story, this brief sketch held all possible clues of how the plot will develop into a horror story about the mesmerist being “insidious and foreign, making passes over the body and manipulating the mind of a young and passive female.”102 Pogorelskii specialized in remaking German Romantic stories, and this vignette mimics E.T.A. Hoffmann’s “The Mesmerist,” a horror story of the seduction and destruction of a whole family by a wicked mesmerist. Hoffmann builds his story on the opposition between the saint-like looks of the mesmerist Alban as he appears before other character and his evil personality that the heroine discovers.

Similarly to Pogorelskii's marquis, Hoffmann's Alban starts off with seemingly good deeds that in reality constitute the preparation for the upcoming major crime. This atrocity is fulfilled through the gaze, and in Pogorelskii’s story, the marquis’s gaze warns the reader of imminent disaster. Such a situation is in a sense atypical for

Russian literature, since, as opposed to Victorian literature, gender confrontation is absent due to the fact that both members of the “mesmerist-patient” couple are in most cases men. Even so, the figure of the (doctor)-mesmerist, as opposed to a doctor without mesmeric abilities, is loaded with eroticism, thus confirming the connection between the Russian and European traditions of mesmerism’s depiction in literature.

Even if the object of the mesmeric passes is male, one still experiences sexual tension emanating from the mesmeric power.

The mood of uneasiness invariably darkens the figure of the doctor-mesmerist

101 Ibid. 102 Martin Willis, Catherine Wynne, Victorian Literary Mesmerism (NY-Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006), 8

54 even if his participation does not involve any acts of direct mischief. One of the most demonstrative examples is Akhsharumov’s “Dvoinik,” (1850) a literary remake of

Dostoevsky’s story of the same name. Akhsharumov’s story was published in 1850, under the pseudonym of Chernov.103 Akhsharumov borrowed all key figures from

Dostoevsky’s “Dvoinik” but considerably changed the development and conclusion of the plot. In this story, the protagonist decides to consult his doctor because of a moral dilemma that makes him nervous and restless. The doctor explains his emotional tumult by the fact that his nature is torn between two different poles, and that the only cure is to separate them from each other. Such a goal, says he, can be accomplished by means of a magnetic séance:

Подстрекаемый любопытством, я спросил его, если нужно будет употребить это средство, то кто же будет моим гипнотизером? - Я, отвечал Мориц твердым голосом, в тоне которого звучало сознание собственной силы. Я поглядел ему в глаза. Они были черные, большие, глубоко вдавшиеся, и сверкали ярко под густыми, сдвинутыми бровями. На лице этого человека, несмотря на пожилые лета, незаметно было ни изнурения, ни безобразной полноты. Его сложение, сухое и плотное, его высокий, бледный лоб, - все говорило ясно моему вопросительному взгляду, что он не шутит и не хвастает, приписывая себе эту высокую способность, и что, судя по наружным признакам, по крайней мере он может быть действительно тем, за кого выдает себя.104

After the vain attempt to break free from the power of the hypnotist’s haunting gaze,

Alexei Petrovich relents and subjects himself to the doctor's theories and experiments.

The author (and his narrator) implies that the so-called voluntary participation of

Alexei in the doctor’s treatment turns out to be a decision enforced by the mesmeric art that “tied the hands” of the protagonist. Alexei refuses to be magnetized; however,

103 Tatiana Grigorieva, “Dvoinik – Podrazhanie ili Pereosmyslenie?” In Literaturovedenie XXI Veka: Teksty I konteksty Russkoi Literatury. Materialy tret'ej mezhdunarodnoi konferentsii molodykh uchenykh-filologov. (Saint-Petersburg-Muenchen, 2001), 101 104 Akhsharumov, “Dvoinik,” 18

55 he allows the doctor to “galvanize” him – i.e. to be stimulated by electrical currents.

Though not “mesmerizing” the hero directly, the doctor still uses the notion of currents that refers back to the mesmeric concept of fluids. Instead of animal magnetism, the mesmerist gets hold of his victim by means of an insidious mechanism. This mysterious machine, in the context of magnetism, refers to Hoffmann’s plots (The

Sand Man, The Golden Pot) that demonstrate the power of machines as an effective component of mesmeric influence on the individual. In the course of this session, a strong electrical impulse shocks Alexei’s body, and splits him into two separate beings, his unethical ego and his penitent double. The guilt and remorse that the hero used to experience beforehand are now personified in his alter ego, and his main personality changes. Eventually, Alexei Petrovich kills his double because he bothers him and thus completely frees himself of any ethical obligations (“the best part of his soul”, as he admits later).

In Dostoevsky's tale, the presence of the gaze and the magnetic universe is less explicit and therefore not as medicine-related as in Akhsharumov’s “Double.”

Symbolically framing the plot, the encounters between the hero and his doctor occur at the beginning and the conclusion of the story. The first meeting results in the weird conversation between them, and Goliadkin’s weeping on the doctor's shoulder. In the second encounter, Goliadkin is declared mad and in the chilling scene, the doctor takes him away. At that moment, Goliadkin’s vision of the world is completely distorted, his place is taken by his Double, and the doctor appears to be transformed into a monster.

Dostoevsky is careful to list all of the doctor’s well-known features that Goliadkin recognizes, being at the same time scared to death:

Направо и налево чернелись леса; было глухо и пусто. Вдруг он обмер: два огненные глаза смотрели на него в темноте, и зловещею, адскою радостию блестели эти два глаза. Это не Крестьян Иванович! Кто это? Или это он? Он! Это Крестьян Иванович, но только не прежний, это другой Крестьян Иванович! Это ужасный Крестьян Иванович!... 105

In both “Doubles” by Dostoevsky and Akhsharumov, the heroes experience the complete loss of their identity. Dostoevsky’s double replaces his original, and the demonic doctor restrains Goliadkin, while in Akhsharumov’s story, the protagonist eventually kills his double, but after that loses his own narrative and becomes the object of his doctor’s psychiatric discourse. Akhsharumov’s choice to involve a doctor-mesmerist rather than a general practitioner in his version of “Double” is indicative in the sense that, in the conclusion of Dostoevsky’s story, the doctor also acts in the capacity of a person representing the psychiatric discourse. The first encounter between Goliadkin and his doctor can also be regarded as an implicit magnetic séance, in which the doctor changes his patient’s view of the surroundings.

The theme of the well-known face becoming momentarily ugly and yet unchanged comes up in Hoffmann’s “The Magnetizer,” when one of the victims suddenly sees the “true” face of her benefactor, Alban. She later emphasizes that though the features did not change, his eyes inflicted great terror. Because of the doctor’s influence (and Akhsharumov will say that explicitly) the protagonist also delves into a state of trance leading not to bliss and clarity but to madness and oblivion. In both cases, the heroes are consumed, first, by their alter egos, and second, by doctors whose care proves to be only an illusion; in reality, they turn their patients

105 Fedor Dostoevsky, “Dvoinik.” In Sobranie Sochinenii. Vol. 1. (Moscow: GIHL, 1956) , 375.

57 into the text, the objectives of their medical interest. The controlling gaze of the mesmerist in both stories leads to a scientific discourse that disregards the human personality in favor of medical symptoms.

Akhsharumov’s story, along with Grech’s Chernaia Zhenshchina and Polevoi’s

“Emma” are among the few examples of the explicit inclusion of mesmerism in its technical definition into literary plots. Paradoxically, mesmerism as a concept of

Russian literature is virtually absent. Being scattered over some books (mostly marginal ones, as Grech’s novel), these references borrow all necessary elements of their mesmerist plots from German literature. And yet, in the Romantic literature a series of implicit references to specific gestures and abilities indicate the existing influence of mesmerism on the depiction of supernatural events and actions. For example, when talking about wizards and sorcerers manipulating their victims, writers often mention passes between object’s head and heart as well as intense eye contact.

While eye contact as a means of manipulation is found in the traditional literature, the combination of those techniques (passes AND eye contact) points at methods used by hypnotists in the process of establishing rapport with a patient. Regarding the

Romantics (especially Odoevskii) one can declare that their knowledge of mesmerism certainly could have prompted them to incorporate mesmeric gestures into their descriptions of magical acts. Odoevskii knew the proponents of mesmerism, sided with some of their ideas, and corresponded with Doctor Vellanskii in 1824. In his short story “Improvisator,” a novella from his Hoffmanian series of tales “Russian Nights,”

Odoevskii frames the act of magic into the mesmerist paradigm, and his wizard transfers the supernatural gift by pressing his hands against the young poet’s head and

58 heart:

С этими словами Сегелиель положил одну руку на голову поэта, а другую на его сердце, и самым торжественным голосом проговорил <…>106

Similarly to Mesmer’s transference of healing currents into a patient’s body, the young man also acquires the doctor’s gift through magnetic contact. Similarly, in Aksakov’s

“Walter Eisenberg,” the vicious heroine establishes rapport by grabbing his head and looking straight into his eyes. In “Kosmorama,” a later story by Odoevskii, the moment of receiving the uncanny ability, clairvoyance, is also fulfilled by implicit parallels between magic and mesmerism. Like Mesmer’s patients who were entranced by magnetized objects (such as trees or specially designed buckets) that were regarded as transferees of magnetic currents, the protagonist begins to see the unseen world after touching a magical cosmorama. In the same story, the ghoulish count nearly burns the hero alive by taking him by the hand and looking straight into his eyes.

The process of bewitching and subduing the protagonist of Aksakov's Walter

Eisenberg (1836) is also committed through the intense look and subduing touch of the mysterious Cecilia and of her adopted father Doctor Eichenwald. The motive of a powerful gaze emerges from the very beginning, through the figure of Doctor

Eichenwald who constantly watches the protagonist from around the corner and somehow controls Cecilia:

Доктор Эйхенвальд, это странное существо, которого никак не мог понять Вальтер, который знал и предупреждал малейшие желания Цецилии, хотя бы был и не вместе с нею <...>.107

106 Vladimir Odoevskii, “Improvizator.” Poslednii Kvartet Betkhovena. Moscow: Moskovskiu rabochii, 1987, 69 107 Konstantin Aksakov, “Walter Eizenberg,” In Russkaia Romanticheskaia Povest'. Moscow:

The comparison between Aksakov’s novella and Hoffmann's “Der Sandman” (1816) clarifies the role of Doctor Eichenwald that originates both from Hoffmann’s evil alchemist Coppelius and mad scientist Spallanzani. Hoffmann’s automaton Olympia is a prototype of Aksakov’s evil medium Cecilia, and Eichenwald’s power over her is a reflection of the puppeteer’s dark power that replaces the inanimate doll with a human being. Like Hoffmann’s story, Aksakov is preoccupied with the question of seeing, of real and fake feelings, of the human ability to create and to imagine, and of the mesmerist’s uncontrollable power. This power is concentrated in one act of gazing and seeing in both factual and figurative meanings. Hoffmann’s protagonist is deluded by the small spyglass bought from Coppola, the doppelganger of Coppelius, the terror of his childhood. This spyglass also possesses magnetic power and bewitches the hero when he looks through this device at Olympia from a distance. Similarly, Aksakov’s

Walter is deluded by Cecilia because of the mesmeric charms of her indisputable beauty. To break this illusion for their readers (but not for the heroes), both writers involve the figures of the protagonists’ friends, side observers who serve as eye- openers and point at some peculiarities in the behavior of the mechanical girls. At the moment when a side observer looks at Olympia or at Cecilia, he raises the curtain of their magnetic charm, and the beautiful girls turn into soulless mechanical dolls. The difference lies in the interpretation of magnetic influence over the innocent victim: while Hoffmann is preoccupied with the notion of operating the automata by means of both mechanisms and hypnosis, Aksakov refers directly to mesmerism, and indirectly to the image of the vampire who stares at his victim, thus drawing him or her into his

Sovetskaia Rossiia, 1980,513

60 orbit:

Слушай же, - сказала она, взяв его за голову и сжав обоими руками. Вальтеру показалось, что огонь прожег его череп. - Слушай же, ничтожное существо: я тебя ненавижу; сама природа поставила нас в мир друг против друга и создала нас врагами. Давно уж возбудил ты мое мщение: теперь я достигла своей цели; да, ты теперь будешь мучиться: счастия нет для тебя, тебе не выдастся ни одной сладкой минуты; я тебя ненавижу, но ты мой!108

Aksakov transforms Olympia’s artificial gaze into Cecilia's hypnotic power, with her eyes becoming the instrument of manipulation. Hoffmann’s evil and benign magicians use optical instruments and mechanical dolls for their needs, while Russian Romantics prefer to bind the mysteries to an unexplainable force that cannot be measured or understood. Cecilia's eyes turn into the mirror in which the protagonist sees himself, and this fake reflection gradually replaces his real personality. Hoffmann’s obsession with technical devices and their influences, for Russian Romantics, changes to a concentration on the natural (or supernatural) power of the mesmerist and his or her powerful gaze.

The essential component of the effect that literature about mesmerism has on its reader lies in the utter impossibility to “comprehend” the nature of this force.

Aksakov never explains why the magic of Doctor Eichenwald and Cecilia is so powerful and deadly for the young man, nor why they choose him as their victim.

These questions are intentionally left unanswered, and the unexplained power of a magnetizer/sorcerer acts as a cornerstone in a number of mystery stories, including

Gogol's tales. He was strongly preoccupied with the phenomenon of nonphysical power being translated into a staring and scary gaze. Though never admitting a

108 Aksakov, “Walter Eizenberg,” 515

61 specific interest in mesmerism, Gogol builds such tales as “Portrait” or “Vii” on this notion. The intense and petrifying gaze of the evil portrait haunts the young artist so much that he starts imagining that the eyes are cut out from the living person. In the dreams or visions of Chartkov, the portrait comes back to life, walks around the room, and, as a vampire, attempts to suck him dry:

С неподвижным страхом глядел он на него и видел, как прямо вперились в него живые человеческие глаза. Холодный пот выступил на лице его; он хотел отойти, но чувствовал, что ноги его как будто приросли к земле. И видит он: это уже не сон: черты старика двинулись, и губы его стали вытягиваться к нему, как будто бы хотели его высосать... С воплем отчаянья отскочил он — и проснулся.109

Similarly to Aksakov’s novella, the picture acquires the life of a living person and turns him into an object, in this case, of the artist’s observation. The eyes of the old man consume, seduce, and destroy the young man, but the explanation, though given by the end of the story, does not fulfill the readers’ expectations. The horrifying stare of the portrait, as well as its further fate remains unclear: “The eyes hold the clues, but the interpretation remains opaque. The hesitation remains, and the reader finds himself in the fantastic.” 110 As in Aksakov's tale, the more inexplicable the mechanism of the dark force is, the more impressive and haunting it becomes in the context of a

Romantic story.

Gogol recurrently explores the power of the magnetizing gaze in “Vii,” a story that revolves around the notion of different kinds of vision. While it is unclear if Vii was Gogol’s invention or if he really originated from Slavic demonology, the nature of

109 Gogol, Portrait 110 Richards, Sylvie. The Eye and the Portrait: The Fantastic in Poe, Hawthorne, and Gogol. Studies in Short Fiction 20.4 (1983): 315

62 the horror is made more explicit as the threat radiates from the demon.111 According to Gogol’s interpretation, Vii is a demon with immensely long eyelids that cover his eyes. His power is in disabling the protection of amulets, talismans, and incantations.

The moment when Khoma Brut looks into Vii’s eyes, the magical defense of his incantations is destroyed, and all evil creatures are able to see him. As in the case of

“Portrait” or Hoffmann’s “The Magnetizer,” the power of the demon’s gaze is unmatched and cannot be overcome by a human being. The threat of the immobilizing glance also radiates from the figure of pannochka, a witch and a vampire. She takes the form of an old woman, an old witch (or Baba Iaga), as well as a canine appearance

(similarly to the first arrival of Mephistopheles in Goethe’s Faust, when the devil shows up as a black poodle). Pannochka’s vampirism, together with staring and immobilizing refers indirectly to Slavic demonology, as well as to the perception of magnetism in literature. In Aksakov’s tale, Cecilia looks straight into Walter’s eyes and gradually liquefies him, abolishing his personality by her mesmerizing gaze:

Что мог сказать Вальтер? Он изнемог от силы впечатления. Цецилия пристально смотрела на него, и он, неподвижный, но мог отвести глаз от ее взора; казалось, он весь перелился в зрение; казалось, там только сосредоточена вся жизнь его. И вдруг ему стало страшно и грустно: перед ним все подернулось туманом; ему казалось, что он перешел в глаза Цецилии и что это чудный какой-то мир; со всех сторон блещут искры: оп плавает в какой-то черной влаге, плещется, играет ею и вдруг исчезает, и оп тонет, тонет; ему сделалось так страшно и сладко вместе. Потом что-то мелькает перед ним и опять скрывается, а он все тонет, тонет... 112

111 In Mify Narodov Mira, Viacheslav Ivanov and Vladimir Toporov point at parallels between Vii and other epic characters in the mythology of Ossetia (Viacheslav Ivanov and Vladimir Toporov, “Vii.” In Mify Narodov Mira: Encyclopedia . Edited by S. Tokarev. Vol. 1. Moscow: Sovetskaia Entsiklopediia, 1987, 235-236). However, Elena Levkievskaia thinks that by linking Vii with the Ukrainian tradition, Gogol successfully created the mystification (Elena Levkievskaia, “K voprosu ob odnoj mistifikacii, ili Gogolevskij Vij pri svete ukrainskoj mifologii.” Studia mythologica Slavica. Ljubljana.1 (1998): 307- 315). 112 Aksakov, “Walter Eizenberg,” 515

Similarly, in Gogol’s “Vii” Khoma Brut experiences a horrifying yet sweet feeling of melting, of disintegration, when being ridden by the witch. The old woman first hypnotizes and then rides him to another world, with no moon but some kind of sun, and a seductive mermaid in the lake. The young man is drawn into a strange trance- like state that allows him to see and to hear things.

The supernatural powers of pannochka and Cecilia draw the protagonists into the world of sprits that gradually replaces reality for them. Because of the recurring hallucinations of Cecilia’s voice that Walter eventually hears everywhere, he retreats to his studio and paints a cheerful picture of running and playing girls. To flee from

Cecilia’s bewitchment, the artist places himself into the picture and thus transfers his soul there, and dies. After the encounter with the witch, Khoma Brut is also haunted by the living dead and evil spirits in the unearthly space of the country church. This bewitched space also becomes for him the only inescapable reality. In Aksakov’s tale,

Walter ends his mortal life in order to save Akshi’s soul and continue his spiritual being inside the picture. However, Cecilia and the doctor manage to obtain and destroy the painting thus enforcing their power over the protagonist once more. As in case of Akhsharumov’s doctor who takes over leadership in the narrative even after the hero’s death, Walter’s escape is not final, since the eyes of the mesmerists can still reach him.

In a Freudian essay dedicated to the concept of the voracious look, a psychoanalyst of the 1930s draws parallels between “the snake’s eyes, the basilisk’s

64 eye, and similarly the ‘true’ hypnotist” 113 and points at people’s primary fear to be consumed by the look:

“Now the magic glance… is always supposed to ‘stare’. Moreover, in libidinal looking in general the motor function plays a greater part than in ordinary looking. The process is more active: the world does not approach the eye but the person looking makes an onslaught with his eye upon the world, in order to ‘devour’ it.”114

The look of the mesmerist, witch, or vampire immobilizes the object in order to incapacitate, to deprive the victim of his or her personality. Along with the general psychological fear of the fixed gaze, we should refer to the mythological tradition that lists a number of creatures, with whom humans should not establish any kind of eye contact, such as the Basilisk, Medusa Gorgon, or Vii. The very same terror is present in vampire tales, in which the perpetrator first seduces the object, then strips him or her of personality and finally, consumes the victim. The threat emanating from mesmerist is similar, and the danger is even more imminent, since the magnetizer destroys not only the body of victim, but also the spirit. The examples listed above demonstrate how the mesmerist and/or doctor, endowed with specific abilities, dominates the minds, souls, and, most importantly, the narratives of the other characters. This penetration of a gaze into the depth of person’s psyche represents the deepest human fears translated into the “magnetizing” plots.

As we see from the aforementioned examples, the image of the mesmerist is deeply embedded into various plots, and is usually linked to the notion of a magical influence of some unnamed force over an individual. Hand movements between the

113 Otto Fenichel, “The scoptophilic instinct and identification.” In Visual Culture: The Reader (London: SAGE, 1999), 328 114 Fenichel, The scoptophilic instinct and identification, 331

65 head and heart, and the intense gaze point at mesmeric origins, even when this technique is never explicitly referred to. Another important moment is the mythological nature of this image that traces back to the stripping, killing gaze of demons, as demonstrated by Fenichel’s essay. The gaze here acts as a weapon but also as a warning of danger for humans attempting access to the supernatural. In many cases, this contact leads to a fundamental change in the protagonist’s visual and auditory capabilities, thus pushing him or her into the state of clairvoyance.

Chapter 3

Imposed Clairvoyance: The Russian Romantics and Hoffmann

The mesmerist, aggressor, or magician seizes his or her victims or patients, manipulates their actions, and often destroys them. The special mesmerizing gaze becomes a dangerous and powerful tool that immobilizes and robs a person of his or her will. As we have seen in the example of Aksakov’s “Walter Eisenberg,” the individual cannot have any defense against this power and suffers utter defeat.

However, this defeat is not the only threat that emanates from the figure of the mesmerist or, in the broader sense, from the notion of the gaze. In addition to subduing a person to someone’s evil will, the gaze also forces its object into the perception of other worlds. Initially being presented as a gift or a blessing, this gift later transforms into a burden that a regular person is utterly unable to endure. The bearer of this gaze serves as a mediator between the visible and invisible worlds, which results not only in being an outsider, but also in drawing other people into this orbit and isolating them from friends and society. Such isolation most likely will mean loneliness, madness, exile, or death.

The deadliness of clairvoyance, of supernatural abilities, is repeatedly explored by different Romantic stories, such as “Samandra” by Odoevskii or “Blazhenstvo bezumiia” by Polevoi. Odoevskii continually returns to the phenomenon of knowledge being too excessive or vision being too sharp -- abilities acting as a destructive force for the human personality. When the young improviser Kipriano asks the famous

67 doctor-magician to turn him into a fluent professional in conducting public poetic improvisations, he allows himself to be drawn into a mysterious state, in which the doctor enables him to see and to comprehend everything. The doctor warns the young man that the ability is irreversible and effective immediately. Gaining the poetic ability to perceive invisible matters refers to Pushkin's “The Prophet” written 10 years before

Odoevskii's novella. In this poem, the protagonist is also granted a supernatural gaze and hearing that secures him an absolute poetic gift:

Моих ушей коснулся он, И их наполнил шум и звон: И внял я неба содроганье, И горний ангелов полет, И гад морских подводный ход, И дольней лозы прозябанье.115

Pushkin’s hero undergoes an initiation into the world of poetry, in which the regular vision and hearing as well as his body become irrelevant, while the spirit obtains all of the tools necessary for the creation of the sacred logos. Similarly to characters that experienced the influence of the mesmerist, the protagonist of “The Prophet” discovers supernatural abilities that allow him to see things unseen and hear things unheard. In Odoevskii’s “Improvisator,” the protagonist also goes through an initiation that results in the opposite; the poet is confronted with things that are physically and frightfully real. The protagonist perceives people’s insides, hears the growth of trees and the crawling of insects; instead of the beautiful appearance of his beloved,

Kipriano sees her heart, veins, and intestines. Moreover, he does not believe in the sacredness of inspiration anymore, since he starts seeing poetry as a skeleton or as a

115 Aleksandr Pushkin, “Prorok,” Sobranie Sochinenii v 10 t., http://rvb.ru/pushkin/01text/01versus/0423_36/1826/0420.htm

68 series of fixed and easily operated structures. “The Prophet” culminates in the introduction of the hero into the symbolical world of poetry; in Odoevskii’s

“Improvisator,” the young poet is, by contrast, excluded from the symbolical space of literature and is brought face to face with the world of science and medicine. The

Romantic poet cannot handle the scientific knowledge of the recently discovered world of microorganisms and microbes.116 Odoevskii is mostly inspired by Hoffmann, who was obsessed with the notion of the invisible world of microbes, and even casted

Leeuwenhoek, the actual inventor of microscope, as one of the key characters (and wizards) of his Meister Floh (1822). The materialist knowledge gained from the doctor's magic gift propels Kipriano to move from the poetic into the medical space, and to assume a medical discourse. The view of the insides of a beautiful girl precedes

Bazarov's interest in the anatomic details of the eye instead of the enigmatic lady’s gaze.

Several years after the “Improvisator,” Odoevskii discusses the question of mesmerism as a way of forcing an unwilling individual into a state of clairvoyance. In the unfinished mystical story “Kosmorama” (1840) magnetic abilities are represented as a shamanic disease discovered by means of touching a magical device, which refers to Mesmer's baquet or other “magnetized” objects. Mesmer, however, is never mentioned; though when trying to deal with his newly discovered abilities, the protagonist reads the works of the proponents of spiritual mesmerism, such as

Puysegur, Kieser, and Wolfart. Similarly to other stories, Odoevskii draws his

116 These two examples also point at one of the central mesmeric ideas, namely the conception of God as the highest Mesmerist, which I have mentioned in my previous chapter. If seen through the prism of mesmerism, the heroes of “The Prophet” and “Improvisator” thus undergo drastic mental transformations as a result of the mesmeric influences that originated from supernatural forces.

69 inspiration from Hoffman's Nutcracker, as well as The Golden Pot, tales that introduce the notion of two worlds’ coexistence (dvoemirie). In the Nutcracker, the heroine encounters two embodiments of Padre Drosselmeier, of which the first is a common relative, while another represents the world of spirits. Being constantly on the border between two worlds, “he is at home in neither sphere <...> He almost assumes the role of fate <...>”117 Likewise, Anselm in The Golden Pot becomes a seer of two worlds, of which one constitutes the dull and common life of a student, while the other is embodied in the figure of Salamander, concealed from mortal eyes by the modest figure of the archivist Lindhorst. Anselm is constantly challenged to turn from external reality to the spiritual world, and his obedience finally grants him a pass to Atlantis, a blessed realm, with a divine girl at his side. Importantly, all comings and goings between the two worlds happen by adjusting the way of Anselm's looking at his surroundings. When being tempted by the possibility of earthly happiness, he ceases to see the magic around him, while his faith and remorse open his eyes to the spiritual world.

While the influence of The Golden Pot on the Russian Romantics will be discussed later in this chapter, I would like to emphasize that all connections between the two worlds are fulfilled through the act of looking. The theme of looking and seeing is already encoded into the title of Odoevskii’s story, because the cosmorama was a popular optical device in 19th century, and in a sense preceded the emergence of animated films. It looked like a box, with a series of panoramic pictures that could be moved by specially designed handles. The gaze of a viewer was also affected by a

117 Horst Daemmrich, The Shattered Self: E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Tragic Vision, (Wayne State University Press, Detroit, 1973), 58

70 complicated systems of mirrors that gave the impression of three-dimensional pictures.

In “Kosmorama,” the protagonist looks into a box that turns out to be magical, and begins to see everything through the prism of double light. The box predicts events that he as a child is unable to interpret (the divorce of his uncle and aunt, his aunt's adultery), as well as his own future affair with a married woman. As in the case of

Hoffmann's Drosselmeier and Lindhorst, Vladimir's family doctor also exists in two incarnations, and both of them are actively involved in helping their protégés in discovering the gift of clairvoyance. While doctor Bin gives the magical cosmorama to him as a child, and takes care of him as an adult, his ghostly double warns him of the danger, and shares the truth that lies behind the human relationship. As opposed to

Hoffmann's characters, Odoevskii's doctor is not aware of the presence of his double and regards Vladimir's visions as medical symptoms, thus representing the tension between two opposing tendencies, the old beliefs and the new science. While in

Hoffmann's tales this tension is polarized between different people and societies

(Anselm vs. Liese, Alpanus vs. Professor Mosch Terpin), Odoevskii chooses the doctor as the only medium between here and there, and at the same time regards him as a proponent of materialism.

Hoffmann constituted the main source of inspiration for the Romantic writers who were elaborating the theme of imposed clairvoyance in their fiction. Broad interest in his tales flourished soon after the first translations were published in Russia.

The set of ideas that came up in Hoffmann’s tales corresponded with the philosophical movement of the Nature philosophers; and the interest in Hoffmann on the part of

Russian Platonists who admired the “philosophy of nature [or Naturphilosophie] of

71 the German author Schelling was most singular and seemingly had long-range consequences.”118 Hoffmann knew many of Mesmer’s first disciples personally and repeatedly attended therapy sessions in Bamberg. Moreover, when working on his

“mesmerist” story (“Der Magnetiseur”), Hoffmann sent a manuscript of this story to

Doctor Speyer, “another physician who used mesmerism, and asked him to judge his treatment of medical matters in the manuscript. Dr. David Ferdinand Koreff (1783-

1851), a physician and poet in Berlin as well as a leader of the mesmerist movement in

Germany, was a close friend; he and Hoffmann were members of a group who referred to themselves as the Serapion Brotherhood, and he later served as the model for

Vinzenz in Die Serapionsbrüder.”119 For Russian writers, Hoffmann constituted a model of how to describe uncanny phenomena and how to translate the spiritual experience into writing.

Odoevskii was Hoffmann’s primary follower – both writers had a strong inclination towards music and art, and both placed their heroes into an ambivalent and blurry space identified by Russian literary scholars as dvoemirie. 120 This definition refers to the coexistence of the real and poetic (imaginary, magical, spiritual) worlds in someone’s life. In Romantic literature, such an encounter usually happens when a person somehow becomes aware of the supernatural things in his or her life, and then becomes drawn into the orbit of the fantasy world. Depending on his or her attitude, the hero benefits from that encounter by gaining special knowledge or suffers loss

118 James McGlathery, “Mysticism and Sexuality E.T.A. Hoffmann. Part One.” In European University Studies, Series 1. German Language and Literature 450 (Las Vegas; Berne; Frankfurt/Main: Lang, 1981), 20 119 Bryson, “Romantic Science,” 242 120 See for example Yuri Mann, Russkaia literatura 19 veka. Epokha romantizma. (Moscow, 2007).

72 because of a lack of faith. In Hoffmann's tales, especially in “The Golden Pot,” “The

Sandman,” and “The Nutcracker and the Mouse King,” the protagonists are confronted by the necessity of choice between believing in the hidden world or disregarding its existence. Maria, a seven-year-old girl, does not have any difficulties in seeing and recognizing the presence of the mysterious creatures and their kingdom, while the adults fail to believe her (except for Padre Drosselmeier, who serves as a medium between the different worlds). Belief is crucial to the prevalence of dvoemirie in the plot; scepticism either abolishes this phenomenon from the life of a character, and consequently, from the plot, or causes great disturbances in the life of the doubting person. When Anselm, the hero of “The Golden Pot” starts doubting the supernatural powers of his employer, archivist/Salamander, he immediately commits a grave mistake in his work and is punished by Salamander. In “The Little Zaches,” Fabian, the protagonist's friend, is punished for his skepticism by the traveling wizard Prosper

Alpanus by being unable to dress appropriately (all his costumes shrink and make him look ridiculous), up until the moment when he has to admit the existence of wizards and fairies. Moreover, the central idea of the plot is based upon the notion of the vision, which is imposed on unsuspecting people by some supernatural force. The court and the university are enchanted by the charms of the Fairy Rosabelverde and therefore, do not see the ugliness of Little Zaches, whereas the hero clearly observes the true appearance of the midget. In the final farewell party, everyone sees the magical acts done by Alpanus except for Professor of Natural History Mosch Terpin whose strong skepticism prevents him from seeing things “as they are.” In a thorough study of Hoffmann's The Golden Pot, Bryson puts the initiation of Anselm into the

73 perspective set by Kluge, and proposes to view his gradual immersion into the magical world as deepening of a trance state. The final reunion with Serpentina and entrance into the blessed realm of Atlantis is the last stage of magnetic sleep, “the state of general clarity,” in which the subject is able to achieve “a knowledge of the sacred harmony of all beings.”121

The imagery of Odoevskii, Polevoi, Pogorel'skii, and many other Russian

Romantics all originated from Hoffmann's tales. Dvoemirie comes up in different disguises, sometimes in the form of a legend or a fairytale, or in a form of a mystic story, or in the classic Romantic form of a strange coexistence of the ordinary and unruly, which usually contributes to mesmerism. In Odoevskii's tales, dvoemirie has a distinct affiliation with the ideas articulated by Kluge and other ideologists of that time. This theme comes up in the majority of his works, including “Silfida,”

“Salamandra,” “Improvizator,” and “Kosmorama.” The story that incorporates all of the mesmerist concepts of the interaction between this world and the other was

Segeliel (1832-1838), his unfinished novel that was partially published but for most part remains in manuscripts.122 Sakulin, a primary biographer and researcher of

Odoevskii, partly retells the plot. In this story, a fallen angel is sent by Lucifer to Earth to live the life of a regular man. By making the protagonist a spirit in a man's body,

Odoevskii, from the very beginning, introduces the double space of the dvoemirie.

While the intentions of Lucifer are unquestionably evil, Segeliel makes many attempts to do good for people. Sakulin notes the evident closeness between the interests of

121 Bryson, “Romantic Science,” 252 122 Сегелиель, или Дон-Кихот XIX столетия. Сказка для старых детей (отрывок из I части). Подпись: К. В. О.; дата: 1832. — Сборник на 1838 год. СПб. 1838, с. 89—106.

Odoevskii and his hero, such as his multidisciplinary skills in math, music, and writing.123 Through Segeliel's story, Odoevskii frames mankind’s history within a mystical paradigm of dvoemirie, and the hero goes through different historical epochs, different social environments, and different embodiments, including the life of a common chinovnik. In the later novella “Improvizator” he also appears in the figure of Doctor Segeliel, whose genealogy traces back to the fallen angel from the novel.

Significantly, at a certain point in the novel, Lucifer addresses Segeliel as “Doctor,” thus building up parallels between him and Doctor Faustus.124 In “Improvizator”

Segeliel preserves his secret affiliation with the other world, and yet this time he is filled with a bitterness towards mankind for his unfulfilled wishes, and every good deed is followed by an evil one.125

The imposed state of clairvoyance is the factor that defines the place of the mesmerist in Russian literature. While the staring gaze of the magnetizer / demon / sorcerer attracts the attention of people and brings up deep fears and desires, in literature, again, we see that this figure is needed for the revelation of something hidden under the surface of real life. One needs the mesmerist's persona to introduce the realm of the supernatural in the lives of regular people. Because of this, the figure

123 Thus, Odoevskii wrote in the diary: “На меня нападают еще за то, что я вдруг занимаюсь многими предметами — и философией, и музыкой, и химией, и медициной, и живописью... может быть, я занимаюсь своей мне собственно принадлежащей наукой, у которой пока нет имени — виноват ли я, что некоторые части моей безымянной науки похожи на на вашу химию, на вашу музыку, на вашу философию, и проч. Мне кажется, что каждый человек должен иметь в таком роде свою науку... Я не знаю, чему же учился человек, который не знает, что находится под его собственной кожей, который не может записать на бумаге музыкальной мысли, перевести на бумагу местоположение, которое ему хочется удержать в памяти — это все вспомогательные знания, механическое подспорье, необходимое для совершенствования своей главной науки, которые относятся к ней как очинка пера, умение составлять буквы — относится к сочинению.” (Sakulin Iz Istorii Russkogo idealizma, 65) 124 Sakulin Iz Istorii Russkogo idealizma, 56 125 Sakulin Iz Istorii Russkogo idealizma, 250

75 of the mesmerist / doctor endowed with the supernatural abilities is always supplemented by a person who would witness those possibilities from the side, as well as translate the experience into the appropriate wording. All cases explored so far always imply special vision mediated by the bearer of a special gaze / mesmerist / doctor (namely, through immersing the person into a trance-like state) to a friend, patient, victim, or disciple (as in the case of Kemskii and Alimari in Grech’s Chetnaia

Zhenshchina). This special knowledge is self-contained and therefore inaccessible, and the object of his influence must go through this experience to announce that to the world. Notably, many of these initiates later transfer that experience to paper, as in

Akhsharumov’s “Dvoinik,” Odoevskii’s “Kosmorama” or Aksakov’s “Walter

Eisenberg” (in the last case, the young man converts his experience into a picture).

Importantly, assuming the state of the magnetizer leads the victim to utter destruction. Even the ending of Hoffmann’s The Golden Pot can be interpreted as

Anselm’s gradual immersion into madness and later, physical death.126 Aksakov’s

Walter draws the picture that embodies the world of good spirits for him but does not survive its completion; Polevoi’s Emma finds herself in the position of magnetizer, and this weakens and utterly destroys her health; the hero of Gogol’s “Vii,” after seeing the eyes of the monster, dies, because he steps into the world of spirits and cannot live anymore. The survivors of magnetizers’ experiments in general become mad or are considered as such by the society (as is Dostoevsky’s and Akhsharumov’s

“Doubles” as well as Odoevskii’s “Improvizator” and “Kosmorama”).

126 James McGlathery, “The Suicide Motif In E. T. A. Hoffmann's Der Goldne Topf." Monatshefte 58.2 (1966): 115-123

Gradually, these mystical or mesmerist tales begin to be reinterpreted within the psychiatric framework. Even Odoevskii’s tales, especially “Silfida” and

“Salamandra,” evolve around the issue of clairvoyance, of seeing things; he constantly explores the theme of balancing on the verge between the blessed state of a mystic and of diagnosable mental illness. Notably, Belinskii’s reaction to mystical, Romantic elements in the prose of 1840 was strictly negative, and in his reviews, he equated the mystical and medical spheres.

При том же мы имеем глубокое и твердое убеждение что такие пружины для возбуждешя интереса в читателях уже давно устарели и ни на кого не могут действовать. Теперь внимание толпы может покорять только сознательно разумное, только разумно действительное, а волшебство и видения людей с расстроенными нервами принадлежат к ведению медицины, а не искусства. 127

I think that such a reaction demonstrates not just the fundamental ideological changes in Russian literature and philosophy, but also points at the ultimate connections of mysticism and medicine that go through mesmerism as the mediating ideology. The medicalization of discourse that we observe in Belinskii’s response precedes the thematic shift in literature itself. When Dostoevsky's “Dvoinik” came out in 1846, it was also criticized for focusing on the outdated matter of dvoemirie, though the presence of the double was the only trace of this mystical subject.128 Thus, Belinskii mentioned “Dvoinik” twice, first identifying Goliadkin as being “crazy because of his obsession with social ambitions”, and second, discrediting the literary value of

Dostoevsky’s story because of the overly strong concentration on “medical matters”:

Фантастическое в наше время может иметь место только в домах

127 Vissarion Belinskii, Sochineniia, Part 9 (Moscow, 1860), 53 128 Grigorieva, “Dvoinik – Podrazhanie ili Pereosmyslenie?”, 91

умалишенных, а не в литературе, и находиться в заведывании врачей, а не поэтов. По всем этим причинам, «Двойник» может заинтересовать только немногих дилетантов искусства, для которых литературные произведения составляют предмет не одного наслаждения, но и изучения.129

The opposition between naslazhdenie (entertainment) and izuchenie (study) constitutes a key point in the whole history of literature and medicine. Before that, these fields of study are not separated, and can coexist within a single literary piece or philosophical work. Starting in the late 1840s, these differentiate into self-contained disciplines that still remain close, as we will see in the next chapters of my dissertation. The remnant of interest in mesmeric matters is visible in Akhsharumov’s

“Dvoinik.” As pointed out by Grigorieva, after the publication of Dostoevsky’s

“Dvoinik,” the whole tradition of framing the plot by a medical matter became popular in mass fiction. Stories with madness as the keypoint of their plots multiplied after that.130 In this sense, Akhsharumov did not just mimic Dostoevsky but rather followed this newly developing tradition. While borrowing the key characters from the initial story, Akhsharumov’s story lacks any psychological depth but rather is a regular adventure piece, presented within the medical framework.

Gradually, the influence of the mesmerist’s staring gaze, and especially the results of such an influence (the somnambulism, clairvoyance or seeing non-material things) are more and more reinterpreted within the medical (or even psychiatric) paradigm. Already in the examples mentioned above we see a tendency to reinterpret the mystical plot in a psychiatric way. The story of Akhsharumov published in 1850 is perceived as an anachronism, since the mystical component does not concern the

129 Vissarion Belinsky, “Vzgliad na russkuiu literaturu 1846,” Sovremennik 1(1847), III 130 Grigorieva, “Dvoinik – Podrazhanie ili Pereosmyslenie?” 95

78 audience anymore, while the medical case history, on the contrary, becomes an object of interest. The medical history of Gogol’s illness is published in a literary journal, and a doctor’s accounts of Pushkin’s death become a fashionable topic of conversation.

The staring or clairvoyant gaze used by writers to discover the possibilities of talking about non-material worlds changes into the strictly medical gaze looking at literature from the other side, from the side of medicine.

After the French Revolution, “mesmerism escaped the control of its founder to become enmeshed with a wide range of mystical, spiritual, and metaphysical doctrines. The magnetic fluid <…> was transformed by mystics into a divine afflatus, by spirituals into ethereal specters, and by metaphysicians into an impalpable force designated as the will <…> No longer merely a palliative for physical ills or a remedy for moral degeneration, mesmerism now promised to endow man with a sixth sense that would expand his cognitive consciousness.”131 In Russia, the process took a similar form, and along with the rebirth of freemasonry (suppressed by Catherine the

Great but supported by Paul and Alexander I), people experienced a need to find spiritual satisfaction outside of the realm of Church, in everyday life: “It is not a matter of knowledge of God, or of a ‘sense’ of God, but of activity in God, specifically, the transfiguration of life.”132 Zenkovsky explains mysticism's popularity as due in part to the introduction of philosophy courses at Russian universities and institutes that led to the awakening of “hopes which went far beyond the limits of its possibilities; men expected from it not so much answers to the theoretical problems of

131 Maria Tatar, Spellbound: Studies on Mesmerism and Literature (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1978), xiii 132 Zenkovsky, A History of Russian Philosophy, 108

79 the mind as solutions to the problems of life. This was not an elimination of theoretical problems, but a demand for an integral synthesis, analogous to that provided by religion.” 133 Mesmerism was perceived by educated people as the possibility of

“freeing the soul of the material world,” as formulated by Labzin, one of central figures of Russian mysticism.134

As in all other manifestations of fictional mesmerism, spiritual magnetism also expresses itself within the concept of special vision, a gaze that sees farther, and beyond general human abilities. Here the professional definition of a doctor as a character mostly loses its relevance; however, his medical characteristics do not disappear completely. Bogdanov in his book on medicine and philosophy in Russia points out that the first prose dealing with magnetism situates itself outside of the medical paradigm and rather is caused by the common interest in supernatural phenomena. However, he also notes that even Odoevskii, a person whose writings approached spiritual matters more frequently than all other Russian writers, does not introduce the notion of mesmerism as a way of communicating with spirits, while in

Europe and the United States magnetism preceded the practice of spiritual séances.135 I think that these statements are only partly true. I agree that the Russian literature of the

1830s and 1840s refrains from interpreting the mesmeric trance as the experience of communication with the dead; but I think that the internal connection between the mesmeric and medical gazes nevertheless persists in Russian literature, as we see in the works of Odoevskii and other Romantic writers that bring clairvoyance and

133 Zenkovsky, A History of Russian Philosophy, 108 134 Zenkovsky, A History of Russian Philosophy, 110 135 Bogdanov, Vrachi, Patsienty, chitateli, 192-193

80 madness together. The mesmeric gaze of a doctor, witch, or a magician becomes a textual device and a way to introduce supernatural elements into the story.

Some examples analyzed in this and the previous chapter contain hidden or evident references to spiritual mesmerism. Grech’s novel Chernaia Zhenshchina

(1834) is completely dedicated to this ideology; characteristically, mesmerism is inscribed into the Christian paradigm as one of mystical trends of that time. The protagonist of the book, beginning from his childhood and ending with his mature years, goes through a series of ordeals that build his character and strengthen his faith.

The miraculous events that he witnesses all border on the supernatural, and all are linked to mesmerism and magnetically induced clairvoyance. The figure of the mesmerist Alimari, Kemskii's older friend and mentor, corresponds to Labzin's idea of inner Christianity embracing the human race, and particularly selected persons, such as Alimari. While technically not being a doctor, Alimari possesses the important features of fictional medics, and even demonstrates therapeutic skills when appearing in the novel for the first time, and later, during the war, assisting the wounded and the desperate protagonist. Having lost his wife and children in an earthquake, Alimari gains ultimate wisdom and special vision that considerably broadens the limits of man’s possibilities. His figure, as seen by Kemskii, emanates mystery and mysticism; later, as in the case of other literary physicians, Alimari becomes his confidant. The themes that come up in conjunction with this concept are clairvoyance, somnambulism, mediating, and prophesying. The mesmerist becomes a prophet, a proponent of the new philosophy that embraces man and nature in a sacral unity. And consequently, mesmerism becomes a form of new religion.

The concept of clairvoyance and special vision lies at the foundation of

Grech’s novel, and the whole plot is built upon the notion of imagined things becoming real. As opposed to other mystical stories (such as Hoffmann’s tales) all things discovered by mystical connections between people turn out to be true. Thus, the vision of a black woman that haunts Kemskii throughout his whole life turns out to be a real desperate woman who emerges by the end of story. His wife and daughter, who he regards as dead, both turn out to be alive, and this fact can also be logically explained. Grech presents mesmerism not just as special vision but as the only way to see the world as is. The somnambulist girl reveals to Kemskii the true state of things, though at this point he is unable to decipher this message. Later, one realizes that she was talking about Kemskii’s lost wife:

"Это чудесные действия ясновидения! - сказал он < Алимари > тихо Кемскому по-русски. - Подойдите сюда". Не отнимая левой руки от предсердия больной, он правою взял за руку князя. "И это не он! - сказала больная. - Но этот печален, грустен; утешься, друг мой! Видишь ли - там, там, откуда восходит солнце, откуда веет прохладный ветер, там она, видишь, вот она - в черной мантии, на коленях. Не плачь, сестра моя! <…> Жестокие судороги исказили прекрасное лицо. Алимари, опустив руку Кемского, начал опять водить по лицу и по груди несчастной. Она умолкла, успокоилась и, как казалось, крепко заснула.136

The fact that Alimari knows and can practice mesmerism is conveyed to the reader from the very first pages of the novel; however, he refrains from demonstrating it merely for the sake of curiosity, since he regards magnetism as “a mysterious power of a human being.” Kemskii has to grow up, to endure suffering, and only then he is able to see the mesmeric séance that constitutes the symbolic center of Chernaia

136 Grech, Nikolai, Chernaia Zhenshchina, http://az.lib.ru/g/grech_n_i/text_0020.shtml

Zhenshchina. While on a ship, Alimari is begged to help an unconscious girl,whose fiancée has been murdered by French soldiers:

Там на койке, спущенной к самому полу, лежала в беспамятстве молодая женщина; смертная бледность покрывала лицо ее <…> Алимари подошел к ней, вперил свои взоры в закрытые глаза ее - она вздрогнула, и вскоре потом улыбка пролетела по ее устам. "Паоло!" - сказала она тихим голосом. "Паоло! - произнес с горестью старик отец ее. - Это имя жениха ее, убитого французами." <…> Алимари наклонился к ней, разогнул ее руки, опустил их вдоль тела и начал водить своими руками по лицу ее, потом, расширяя мало-помалу круги, делаемые руками, опускал их к предсердию. Страдалица поутихла. На лице ее водворилось спокойствие, и она через несколько секунд спросила: "Кто ты, светлый утешитель? Лицо твое мне знакомо. <…> 137

As with other mystery tales of magnetism, we observe the state of imposed clairvoyance in this scene, only shown in a positive light. The mesmerist cannot predict things without being in contact with the medium, as in case of Hoffmann’s or

Odoevskii’s stories. And importantly, all predictions and premonitions refer to real life, and not to the realm of dreams or spirits, as one might think when reading Grech’s novel. In my opinion, the reality of these things again refers to the upcoming change of paradigm, when all miraculous survivals are logically explained, as happens in case of in “Chernaia Zhenshchina.” The materialistic discourse that will become dominant in the 1850s and afterward is visible through the layer of Romanticism in literature of the 1830s.

The uniqueness of Chernaia Zhenshchina lies in the ultimately positive attitude toward the impact of mesmerism on human life. In many other cases, as perceived from within a religious paradigm, this practice ultimately destroys the individual as a part of society, marginalizes him or her, and sometimes even kills. Polevoi, whose

137 Grech, Nikolai, Chernaia Zhenshchina, http://az.lib.ru/g/grech_n_i/text_0020.shtml

83 interests, as mentioned before, lie in magnetism, employs this practice as a cornerstone for his sentimental story “Emma.” Here, mesmerism is also equated with religion by the German doctor, who builds constant parallels between Emma and Saint Mary and repeatedly blesses her.138 However, the narrator ridicules the doctor’s mysticism and belief in Mesmer by picturing an atmosphere of small talk in which the doctor piles up mesmerist terminology and therefore is presented in a comic light. Mesmer’s system of healing proves to be vicious, since it cures the patient but destroys Emma. The doctor’s education and wit cannot be compared to the inner wisdom of the priest, who is the only person providing real support for Emma. Mesmerism’s connection to

Christianity turns out to be false, and the patient’s recovery deceives his family and friends, since soon after Emma’s death he goes to war, from which he never returns.

In fiction that embraces the topic of spiritual mesmerism, the therapeutic element loses its primary importance and is replaced with the interaction between this world and the spiritual, ghostly world. What remains is an act of seeing, which involves the perception of the unseen world, and communication with spirits. The function of mesmerism is epitomized in this act: the gaze that stares and consumes; the gaze that sees beyond this world and translates such experiences to the people; and most importantly, the gaze that sees and transfers the seeing ability to willing or unwilling patients, acquaintances, and victims. In a sense, to delineate this function we

138 Девушка! -- вскричал доктор, схватив руку Эммы,-- так же робко говорила некогда одна девушка, тебе подобная, когда высокая тайна совершалась в мире. Душа невинности есть рай чудес высоких и непостижимых. Горе вкусившему плод с древа познания! Не ему, нет! не ему западет в душу луч небесный. Только невинному, чистому, как младенцу, предоставлено уничтожать предведения мудрых, и только в неведущую душу нисходит благодать! О, великий Месмер! какую тайну узнаю я теперь! -- Он благословил Эмму, поднял глаза к небу и отвернулся утереть слезу. (Nikolai Polevoi, “Emma,” 315-316)

84 do not need to focus on, for example, the writer’s attitude towards mesmerism. Be it positive or negative, this gaze always looks, sees, and draws the surrounding persons into its orbit.

Vampire connotations exist in almost all examples that I have analyzed in this chapter. Imposed clairvoyance, imposed somnambulism, diminishes the personality to the point of complete annihilation. Such a disappearance leads to a change of discourse that the Doubles of Dostoevsky and Akhsharumov illustrate best of all. The distance between them is measured in a fundamental shift in style and discourse, when the popularized case history replaces psychological prose. Akhsharumov’s version transforms the protagonist’s first-person narrative into a case history, with the doctor's introduction, epilogue, and medical titles for all subchapters. In the postscript to the

“diary” the doctor medically reinterprets strange events in psychiatric terms, pointing at the mental instability of the diarist. And thus, the medical component becomes more important for the writer than the mystical atmosphere. As noted by a specialist of

Akhsharumov’s writing, “In this case, the editor has to ensure that the diary serves as the material for the story about a madman. This genre is seen as interesting for the readers and meant to be published. Such a technique corresponds to the already existing tradition of the madman’s story.”139

The first-person narrator turns out to be a patient, an object of the doctor’s curiosity – a curiosity that provokes a medical experiment on the hero’s mind and body. Although the doctor’s plotline fades out in the middle of the narrative (after the emergence of the double), his omnipotent presence is reinforced in the conclusion that

139 Grigorieva, “Dvoinik – Podrazhanie ili Pereosmyslenie?” 101

85 overpowers the hero, who by that time is already dead. Fiction about spirits and ghosts thus develops into a study of illnesses and symptoms, namely, a popularized case history.

Chapter 4 Harrison / Garrison / Warren: A Fictional Doctor-Diarist and the Birth of Medical Fiction

Formulating a diagnosis, like constructing a text, can be a complicated task, involving experience, intuition, and interpretation. Both processes culminate in a narrative: the case history, the medical chart entry, a grand rounds presentation, a story. Faith McLellan, “Physician-writers” 140

In 1834, the recently founded Library for Reading published a medical case history taken from the New York Times, in which a wounded American soldier became the object of a bizarre medical experiment. Due to the fact that the wound in his belly did not close completely, his doctor inserted a thin pipe to observe how the food was digested inside the man’s stomach. The author claims that the doctor lived in the house of this man for years and conducted experiments at his leisure, while the object of his interest recovered, returned to work, and even got married. The story concludes with the argument that “this case predicts an abundance of speculators who will drill holes in their stomachs, so that academies of medicine could observe their contents for money!”141 While the authenticity of this bizarre report is indeed doubtful, the use of curious medical cases reflects the process of popularization of medicine as well as its incorporation into literary journals. The Library for Reading pursued the goal of establishing connections with other geographical regions of Russia and keeping the readers updated about recent discoveries in all fields of science. The editors were especially meticulous in choosing the materials for the “miscellany” rubric that

140 McLellan, "Literature and medicine: Physician-writers," 564. 141 “Nabliudenie v zheludke odnogo amerikantsa.” Biblioteka dlia chteniia 4 (1834):5-11

87 consisted of a mixture of anecdotes and serious mini-articles, of which medical texts constituted a high percentage, starting from the very first issues of the Library. And while approximately half of these texts consisted of reports from the European

Academies of Science, anecdotes and curious case studies also constituted an essential element of this rubric. The story about a man with a hole in his stomach certainly relates to the range of curiosities, but it attracted public interest towards medicine, even though the attitude towards this profession is far from humble in this sketch.

The medical case history is a traditional form of transferring doctors’

experience; these texts uniquely preserve the act of communication between a doctor

and his or her patient as well as the results of medical observations. 142 The records

that remain after the treatment is over are the “surviving artifacts of the interaction

between physicians and their patients in which individual personality, cultural

assumptions, social status, bureaucratic expediency, and the reality of power

relationships are expressed. Converting complex clinical perceptions of illness into

written narratives involves both selection and interpretation; and although intended

by clinicians to lay bare the course of illness and therapy, much else is often

revealed.”143 Case histories, starting from the second half of the nineteenth century,

keep a unified structure that includes anamnesis (the patient’s condition before the

outbreak of illness), physical examination, diagnosis, treatment, and discharge notes.

While the case histories of today are strictly formalized and deprived of any signs of

a patient’s individuality, in the nineteenth century medical practitioners did not

142 Nancy M. Theriot, “Negotiating Illness: Doctors, Patients, and Families in the Nineteenth Century,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Studies 37.4 (2001): 350 143 Guenther Risse, and John Warner, “Reconstructing Clinical Activities: Patient Records in Medical History,” Social History of Medicine 5 (1992):189-190

always record case histories, and these records were not kept until the late nineteenth

century). 144 That is why in the reconstruction of the state of medicine in the past,

physicians’ personal notes are considered to be as important as more formal case

histories.145 The nineteenth century marks the transition of medical case reports

from personalized accounts to technical descriptions of cases: “It is not only clinical

instrumentation—deployment of the newly invented thermometer, ophthalmoscope,

and stethoscope—that diminishes the patient's account to the status of a remnant

within the case report. Nineteenth-century case reports are sectorized into accounts

reflecting the procedural order of the clinical encounter.”146 The tendency to create a

story that would be more “abrupt, clipped, rhetorically hygienic, emotionally

disengaged, and parsimonious of circumstantial and descriptive detail”147 clashes

with the insufficiency of professional language during the Romantic period. In cases

that deal with unusual, unexplained phenomena, the case history approach seems to

be the only relevant option to “comprehend and manage the odd.”148

In Russia, the first case histories were registered as early as the seventeenth century. When treating the Tsars and their families all doctors had to comply with strict rules and report their actions to Aptekarskii Prikaz; however, there was no

144 For more about the history of medical records, see Hanna B. Rubins, “The Case History in the Historical Perspective: Time for an Overhaul?” Journal of General Internal Medicine 9.4 (1994): 219- 221 145 Together with other medical documents such as physicians’ diaries, professional journals, letters, notes, essays, and books, patient files are important artifacts left behind by past generations; they are unique constructions that allow us to observe the social and technical structure of contemporary healing. (Risse and Warner, “Reconstructing Clinical Activities,” 185). 146 Brian Hurwitz, “Form and Representation in Clinical Case Reports,” Literature and Medicine 25.2 (2005): 228 147 Rick Rylance, “The Theater and the Granary: Observations on Nineteenth-Century Medical Narratives,” Literature and Medicine 25. 2 (2005): 261 148 Meegan Kennedy, “The Ghost in the Clinic: Gothic Medicine and Curious Fiction in Samuel Warren's Diary of a Late Physician,” Victorian Literature and Culture 32 (2004): 338

89 specific formalization of the way the case history had to look, even in hospitals. 149 In the 1880s, the Department of Medicine issued a decree that ordered doctors to compile

“case histories according to the rules of medical science, namely, that they must contain all the possible history of the illness that includes anamnesis, diagnosis, the course of illness and the discharge summary.”150 The case histories (skorbnye listy) had to be written in Latin; doctors would put them together after the discharge or death of a patient. They had to contain all the necessary information about the course of the illness and the methods of treatment.151 Doctors used case histories for a number of situations, including medical education, professional discussions, and broad discussions of general health and medical instruction for laymen.

Case histories constituted a substantial part of medical periodicals published in

Russia, beginning in 1792. The first medical journals (such as Vrachebnye vedomosti,

1792-1794 and Drug Zdraviia, 1833-1869) were aimed at the professional medical community as well as a broad reading audience and mostly focused on the history of medicine in Russia and on general hygienic facts. Additionally, medical topics were infiltrating literary journals due to the general interest in “curious” cases that seemed unusual. Medicine-related stories appearing in the Library for Reading “assume the role they have, in truth, always had—and continue to have in the age of television—as

149 See N. Zagoskin, Vrachi i Vrachebnoe delo v Starinnoi Rossii (Kazan’: Tip. Imperatorskogo Universiteta, 1891), 61 150 O tom, chtoby skorbnye listy zakljuchali v# sebe svedenija, trebuemyja Medicinskoju naukoju. Sbornik cirkuljarov i rasporjazhenij ministerstva vnutrennih del, otnosjawihsja do gg. gubernatorov, vice-gubernatorov, sovetnikov gubernskih pravlenij, kanceljarij gg. gubernatorov, gubernskih tipografij, stroitel'nyh i vrachebnyh otdelenij s 1858 po 1894 god. Sostavil knjaz' V.P. Urusov. (Moscow: Gubernskaja tipografija, 1894), 360. 151 Aleksandr Over, Materialy dlja istorii Moskovskih bol'nits Grazhdanskogo vedomstva. (Мoscow, 1859).

90 popular entertainment.”152 Along with the recent discoveries of world medicine, the journal published such stories as how a gentleman accidentally swallowed a small snake that grew in his stomach and was lured out with milk,153 or the anecdote I cited at the beginning of this chapter. The “serious” medical cases were mixed with such anecdotes, thus pointing at a common attitude towards medicine was probably similar to the curiosity of visitors at the Kustkamera, Tsar Peter’s museum of oddities in St.

Petersburg.

In this chapter, I explore how the strong mesmerist influence of the medical gaze is transformed into the authoritative medical voice and how the new genre of popularized medical history comes about. I trace the history of a seminal source that in my opinion triggered the awakening of the doctor’s own voice in Russian fiction and nonfiction. In 1831, Samuel Warren’s stories, published in several Russian journals marked the introduction of medicine’s own voice within the space of Russian literature. In spite of Warren’s popularity, he received scarce attention from scholars of

Victorian literature and was hardly mentioned in Russian criticism.154 Since in Russia

Warren’s stories were published under a false name, his true face never surfaced in

152 Rylance, “The Theater and the Granary,” 264. 153 “Zmei v chelovecheskom zheludke.” Biblioteka dlia chteniia 4.4 (1834): 65-67 154 Only two articles (besides literary encyclopedias) provide us with some idea of Warren’s life and work. M. Kennedy’s The Ghost in the Clinic: Gothic Medicine and Curious Fiction in Samuel Warren's Diary of a Late Physician. (Victorian Literature and Culture 32 (2004): 327-351) is a good analysis of Warren’s stories in the context of Victorian medicine. C. P. B. Dunlop’s article overviews Warren’s biography and contains helpful information on the publication history of Warren’s stories in England and abroad. (C.R.B. Dunlop, ”Samuel Warren: A Victorian Law and Literature Practitioner.” Cardozo Studies in Law and Literature 12.2 (2000): 265-291.) Warren’s Passages are mentioned by Grombakh in his Pushkin i meditsina ego vremeni (Moscow: Meditsina, 1989), Sakulin’s Iz Istorii Russkogo idealizma. Kniaz' F.V. Odoevskii: Myslitel'-pisatel'. (Moscow, Izdanie Sabashnikovykh, 1913. Vol. 1, Part 2), and Bogdanov, K., Vrachi, Patsienty, Chitateli: Patographicheskie Teksty Russkoi Kultury 18-19 vekov (Moscow: OGI, 2005). Russian scholars, however, call Warren by his pseudonym and do not refer to his real name.

91 nineteenth-century criticism or in later publications, and for contemporary readers he appeared to be an unknown doctor contemplating his professional experience. First of all, I fill in this lacuna by reconstructing the intriguing history of Warren’s book in

Europe and Russia, with special attention to the confusion that lead to the misinterpretations of his real name. I also show how this bibliographical puzzle gives insight into a game with writers' identities that was being played in Russia and

England during the 1830s. The polemics around Warren’s Passages that involved questions of real authorship and medical authority demonstrate the way medicine overlapped with literature in the first half of the nineteenth century. My second goal is to show how the form of case histories that Warren adopted in his Passages affected

Russian writers and influenced their use of medical themes in their plots. I argue that the appearance of Warren’s “late physician” as a major character justified the possibility for Russian writers to cast doctors as their protagonists and characters.

Warren’s book probably taught the literary world how fictional doctors should act, speak, and reflect on their profession.

In 1831, Telescope published “Gosudarstvennyi Chelovek,” a medical story, taken from the well-known British journal Blackwood’s Magazine. This novella, presented as a true testimony, focused on the life of a British public figure from an insider’s point of view. The doctor-narrator shares the experience of a long-term relationship with his patient and friend, whose life is ruined by vanity that ultimately causes the protagonist’s slip into madness and eventually suicide. The story does not relate to medicine directly, but rather uses the doctor in the role of a witness that possesses a unique possibility to take a “behind the scenes” look that illuminates the

92 celebrity figure. Importantly, the doctor insists on his story being “truthful in all respects. It is a mirror that reflects with the strictest truth recurring scenes that I encountered during my medical practice.”155 The editors of Telescope prompt the audience to accept this text as the real diary of a real doctor:

Дневник сей, печатавшийся в Blackwood's magazine, одном из известнейших английских журналов, возбудил всеобщее внимание истиною представляемых в нем сцен. Многие английские фамилии подали даже официальные жалобы на сочинителя, доказывая, что он разглашает домашние тайны, к коим доступ дала ему практика, и тем нарушает законы, предписываемые нравственностью, преступает совесть врача. Как бы то ни было, краски, употребляемые им, действительно имеют всю яркость истины.156

The reader is furthermore offered explanations that confirm the authenticity of the doctor’s story by a footnote that offers at least two real politicians that could serve as the protagonist’s prototypes.157 Judging from the subsequent publications of Doctor’s

Notes we can assume that the initial story was successful among readers. The stories continued to appear, first in Telescope (1831-1836), and then in the Library for

Reading; in 1835, all the recent publications of Doctor’s Notes were collected and published by Grech as a book.158 Despite the immediate popularity, this book was forgotten afterward, and the question of its origins, as well as of its influence on the contemporary Russian prose of the first half of the nineteenth century, was scarcely mentioned by any historians of literature.

The anonymity of the publication speaks to the issue of authorship (or, rather

155 “Gosudarstvennyj chelovek: Iz zapisok medika,” Teleskop 5.20 (1831): 474 156 Ibid. 157 “Можно догадываться, что первая часть этой картины относится к Каннингу, а последняя к Лорду Кастельрингу.” (Ibid.) 158 Zapiski doktora. Soch. Garrisona. (Sankt-Peterburg: tip. N. Grecha, 1835)

93 its absence) in the early years of European nineteenth-century journalism.159 The majority of texts in the Library for Reading were either unsigned or marked by anagrams and initials. Starting from 1835, the name of “Dr. Garrison” appeared both under the journal publications of Doctor’s Stories, as well as on the title page of the book that contained the full collection of these stories.160 This name came out of nowhere, with no indications of the doctor-narrator’s name; he remained anonymous, as well as the majority of his patients. This discrepancy was noticed by Grombakh, the historian of medicine, who pointed out that in Pushkin’s book collection, the description of Doctor’s Notes provided by Modzalevskii does not match the description listed by European catalogs of the 1830s or 1840s.161 And indeed, Doctor’s

Notes, or, in the original, Passages from the Diary of a Late Physician, were not authored by a real physician but belonged to Samuel Warren, a Victorian writer and barrister, who actively collaborated with Blackwood's Magazine and anonymously published there a series of “case histories” (1830 through 1837). Warren’s stories were tremendously popular both during their anonymous life in Blackwood’s Magazine as well as when they were issued in hardcover.162 Passages went through at least five legal editions and countless pirated editions and translations.163

159 See Peter Murphy, “Impersonation and Authorship in Romantic Britain,” ELH 59. 3 (1992): 625- 649; Melissa Frazier, Romantic Encounters: Writers, Readers, and the Library for Reading (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007) 160 Sobaka-prizrak (из Memoires d'un medecin, par le docteur Harisson), Literaturnye pribavlenija k Russkomu Invalidu 22 (1835). In the subsequent publications of Doctor’s Stories in BDCh (1836- 1837), the stories are signed by “Garrison”; same name is printed on the front page of book that contains the collection of Doctor’s Stories. 161 Grombakh, Pushkin i meditsina ego vremeni, 96-97. Pushkin had an English original of Doctor’s Stories signed by “Harrison,” and in this version, the book was titled Passages from the Diary of a Late Physician. 162 Kennedy, “The Ghost in the Clinic, 328 163 Dunlop, ”Samuel Warren,” 273

The issue of authorship was linked to Warren’s stories from the very first publication in Blackwood’s Magazine. In the introductory note, Warren insisted that the stories belonged to his “late friend,” and that all he himself did was simply to remove the names, places, and other references from the text. Similar games with authorship and anonymity constituted a common aspect of literary experiments conducted on the pages of the British Blackwood's or the Russian Library for Reading.

Senkovskii, the editor of the Library for Reading, used at least seven pennames; he also invented the majority of his correspondents in the first issues of the Library.164

The idea of a masked author was also a cornerstone of Blackwood’s, a journal founded by a group of young people who concealed their names and even created a fictive editor, “Christopher North,” who corresponded with his bogus readers.165 Warren played this game according to the rules of the epoch by inventing “the late doctor,” on whose reality he continually insisted. The mystification provoked heated disputes among the real physicians. In the most influential British medical journal, The Lancet, annoyed doctors reprimanded the author of Passages for revealing the private details of patients’ lives. In response, Warren teased his opponents by denying that Passages were written by Dr. Paris, Dr. Gooch, Dr. Armstrong or Dr. Ballie.166 In his correspondence with a publisher of the journal, the writer boasted of his ability to conceal his identity:

“One of the most eminent hospital surgeons in London was called in on Saturday night to consult my case; and he happened to see lying on my desk in my sitting-room a MS. heading of Passages <…> “Why, good God, said he, “are you the writer of these remarkable papers? I was taken so by surprise that I

164 Frazier, Romantic Encounters, 47 165 Murphy, “Impersonation and Authorship in Romantic Britain,” 632 166 Kennedy, “The Ghost in the Clinic, 328-329

acknowledged it. “Well,” he cried, “I hear of them among my patients wherever I go, and I have been asked a thousand times by whom they were written, and always gave the credit of them to Dr. Paris!!!”167

Not surprisingly, Warren never identified himself or his fictional doctor as “Garrison”

(or Harrison). This name appeared independently in the first French edition of

Passages that came out in 1833 in Paris. In Russia, Warren’s stories were translated sometimes from English, sometimes from French, which was more accessible to

Russians at that time.168 In the Russian transcription, the name “Harrison” turns into

“Garrison”; and therefore, the publication of Warren’s last story, “The Destroyer /

Obol’stitel’” (1837) in the Library for Reading, is signed by “Doctor Garrison.” As

Warren would have wished, for his French and Russian readers the personas of the real writer and his fictional narrator were blended into one imaginary figure.

The answer to the most puzzling question of how the name Harrison / Garrison became associated with Warren’s Passages lies in a coincidence that fits into the atmosphere of anonymity, false identities, and misleading clues, hallmarks of the

European literature of the 1820s and early 1830s. In 1829, a book entitled Tales of a

Physician was published in London.169 Like Warren's Passages, it consisted of a number of medical stories narrated by a retired doctor, under the same genre of case

167 Margaret Oliphant, William Blackwood and His Sons: Their Magazine and Friends. Vol. 2. (Edinburgh and London: Blackwood and Sons, 1897), 34 168 This fact was noted by Belinskii in one of his reviews of the translations that came out under the same cover in the early 1830s: “Я думаю еще, что одно из необходимейших условий такого рода книги, как «Библиотека романов» Ротгана должно состоять в том, чтобы все переводы были сделаны с подлинников. Но у Ротгана все переведено с французского. Неужели он не мог найти в Петербурге переводчиков с английского?.. Странно!” (Vissarion Belinskij, Sochinenija v Chetyreh tomah. Vtoroe udeshevlennoe izdanie Pavlenkova. Vol. 1 (SPB, 1900), 616-617) 169 W.H. Harrison, Tales of a Physician (London, 1829).

96 histories with short descriptive titles.170 This book, called Tales of a Physician was written by W.H. Harrison, who produced a number of stories and poems.171 Both of these two authors – S. Warren and W.H. Harrison – wrote in the early 1830s; both were associated with British journalism, and, importantly, both used doctors as the narrators of their stories. These two books with strikingly similar titles – Tales of a

Physician by W.H. Harrison and Passages From the Diary of a Late Physician by

Samuel Warren – turned, in translation, into one book, with the contents taken from

Warren's Passages but with the name coming from W.H. Harrison.172 In this utter confusion, a new author’s identity was born; this mistake crept into the catalogs of libraries worldwide, where the French translation of Warren's Passages is still thought to be authored by W.H. Harrison.173

By casting a doctor as an omniscient narrator and by creating a fictional universe that revolves around medicine, sickness, and dying, Warren and W.H.

Harrison brought attention to once inaccessible matters of physicality. In the first half of the nineteenth century, Victorian England still did not welcome doctors as protagonists of novels, due, as McCarthy points out, to the “anomalous social and professional status of medicine” in Victorian society. To attract readers' attention and

170 Such as “The Forger”, “Duelling,” and “The Broken Heart” (in case of Warren) and “Remorse,” “The Old Maid”, and “The Stranger Guest” (in case of W.H. Harrison) 171 W.H. Harrison, The Humorist: A Companion to the Christmas Fireside, London: R. Ackermann, 1832 172 While information about W. H. Harrison is very scarce, we can tell for sure that he was a real person, a journalist, an editor of the Friendship's Offering from 1837 to 1841, and the first publisher of John Ruskin (E.T. Cook, The Life of John Ruskin (New York: Haskell, 1968)) 173 This confusion is especially visible in the French reviews of Warren's Passages and later pieces. Thus, in the book English Novel in France, the researcher mistakenly identifies the author of the French translation of Passages as “W.H. Harrison” and cites his English original. Samuel Warren, however, is also mentioned in the other chapter in relation to his other works.(more, quotations). In the catalog of Russian State Library, the author of Warren’s Zapiski doktora is defined as “Harrison, William Henry.”

97 to “be taken seriously, a fictional doctor had to be purged, so to speak, of any association with mere trade and, distantly, with barbers and barber-surgeons.”174 For instance, when Harriet Martineau published her novel Deerbrook (1839), the critics harshly reprimanded her for casting a doctor as a protagonist.175 Warren, whose

Passages came out eight years earlier, also had to defend his choice of protagonist by pretending that his doctor was a real person, thus changing the status of his text from fictional into documentary.

Each story in Passages constitutes a self-sufficient narrative where elements of the case history (which was not completely formalized at that time) naturally coexist with deeply personal notes. Warren insists on mimicking the style of a real medical report (such as he might have read in specialized journals like the Lancet), as well as on presenting life as the medical practitioner sees it. His goal is to make us believe in the authenticity of his doctor’s notes, an effect that he attains with explicit gesturing

“toward the conventions of the clinical case history. [The doctor] ticks off a series of symptoms indicating his physical examination of the patient, offers his diagnosis, and follows up with his treatment.”176 To increase the “medical” naturalism, the narrator does not hesitate to introduce such delicate and taboo topics as the physical manifestations of madness, syphilis, or death. In the story “A Man About Town” the doctor graphically describes how the body of his patient is mangled and destroyed by syphilis. In another story, a girl becomes catatonic because of a violent

174 Patrick McCarthy, “Lydgate, "The New, Young Surgeon" of Middlemarch,” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 10.4 (1970): 807 175 Valerie Sanders, “No Ordinary Case of a Village Apothecary”: The Doctor as Hero in Harriet Martineau’s “Deerbrook” <1839>”. Notes and Queries 30 (1983): 293-294 176 Kennedy, “The Ghost in the Clinic,” 329

98 thunderstorm.177

The doctor does not limit his “case histories” to medical issues but rather explores the morality of his patients in tough times when they have to make hard decisions. For example, the story “The Merchant's Clerk” (“Kontorshchik”) is a moralizing example of how the cruelty of a parsimonious father destroys the lives not only of his daughter and her husband, but also of himself. The doctor observes how fate punishes all the participants in this tragedy (79-80). In another story, in order to prevent a duel between two former friends, the seconds charge the guns with blank cartridges. However, this measure does not prevent a bloody conclusion, when one of duelists stabs another with a dagger (“The Dueling” / “Duel,” 1834). The doctor is left to contemplate this barbaric tradition and the rage that clouds people’s eyes and compels them to murder. The brutal naturalism of these scenes alternates with enigmatic cases, such as “The Spectral Dog” (“Sobaka-prizrak”), where a man is haunted by the ghostly vision of a dog that he sees and hears but cannot touch

(“Sobaka-prizrak,” 1835). The Romantic aspect of medical practice comes up in

“Strashnaia groza,” where the catatonic victim of the thunderstorm suddenly regains consciousness only to say to her fiancée, “Prepare!” and to die immediately after that.

Although sticking to a materialist point of view, the doctor does not provide any scientific explanations for these cases, and suggests that the reader judge and decipher those puzzles. These mysterious cases, as Kennedy implies, place Warren’s book in the tradition of “curious medicine,” an immensely popular genre that flourished in

177 Thunderstruck / Strashnaia groza 1833

99 eighteenth-century England.178 The adepts of curious medicine were first of all interested in exposing strange and anomalous cases (such as physical malformations in people), as well as discussing mysterious occurrences that happened in medical practice. This tradition was reflected in literature that “stretches from Mary Shelley’s

Frankenstein through Charles Reade’s Hard Cash, Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr.

Hyde, Stoker’s Dracula […] Gothic medicine, with its interest in psychology and the sublime, looks specifically to the ghost in the clinic for its effects …”179 Passages turns out to be a mixture of brutal medical Realism and Gothic mysticism, and thus constitutes a transition from the Gothic tradition to the mid-nineteenth-century

Positivism of Eliot’s Middlemarch or Trollope’s Doctor Thorne.

When comparing the original Passages with the Russian translation, we see that though the key points of the plots are preserved, a number of significant nuances are completely different. Thus, “The Statesman” (or, in the Russian version,

Gosudarstvennyi chelovek) in the original version is presented as a series of diary entries that cover 20 years of the patient’s life. Following the already existing

European tradition of diary writing, Warren stylistically imitates a real diary by inserting dates and addressing the story of his friend in a passionate and emotional tone. In the Russian version, the diary form is abandoned, and the narrative tends to be more consistent and smooth. The doctor observes the life of his friend and patient from a professional’s authoritative point of view, interrupting the narrative with long digressions about the moral errors of his patient. Originally “The Statesman” concludes with doctor’s terrified exclamations: “Oh God! – Oh, Horror! – Oh, my

178 Kennedy, “The Ghost in the Clinic,” 327 179 Kennedy, “The Ghost in the Clinic,” 345

100 unhappy soul! – Despair! – Hark – what do I hear? Do I hear aright… Have I seen aright – or is it all a dream? Shall I wake tomorrow, and find it false?” While there is no direct reference to the protagonist’s death, these exclamations are probably the doctor’s reaction at the terrible news about his friend. 180 The Russian translation turns this evident presentation of grief and shock into a moralizing passage that refers directly to the patient's suicide:

На другой день журналы сообщили мне ужасное известие о его самоубийстве. Я уверен, что, пришедши на минуту в чувство, он не мог без ужаса видеть печальные развалины своего ума и решился лучше убить, чем пережить себя. Несчастный!... Пусть сии, описанные мной, подробности, послужат уроком и наставлением!181

The wording of the Russian translation evokes the criticism that Warren received in his own country for the “violent exclamations” that, in the readers’ opinions, looked absurd in a doctor’s journal.182 This emotional passage “allows the critic to hold

[Warren] to a higher standard of realism, restraint and good judgment: although a common man might utter such tripe, no ‘physician’ would realistically write it.”183

In other translations of Passages the effect is quite the opposite, and Romantic elements are added to the original stories. For example, “Rich and Poor” culminates in the horrifying scene of a child who unknowingly is playing with his father’s corpse.

However, in a concluding paragraph the doctor assures the readers that he stayed with the widow to help her and to plan her future by providing her with some allowance

180 Warren, Samuel. Passages From the Diary of a Late Physician (Leipzig, B. Tauchnitz jun., 1844), 376 181 “Gosudarstvennyi chelovek,” 536 182 “The Works of Samuel Warren, D.C.L., F.R.S. [Review],” London Quarterly Review 5 (Jan. 1856): 469. 183 Kennedy, “The Ghost in the Clinic,” 343

101 and work. In the Russian translation, this conclusion is absent, probably because of being too low and practical for the final scene. In another story, “The Thunderstruck”

(or, in the Russian version, “Strashnaia groza”), the doctor preserves the privacy of his patient’s fiancée by leaving only the first letter of his name. The Russian translator gives this young man the name Frederique.

The original text of Passages imitates the style of real case histories by omitting names, removing references to the actual locations, and preserving the form of real-time documentary notes, with all their immediate reactions and exclamations.

Russian translators, on the contrary, personify the narrator and the character by

“deciphering” names and locations. The original text and its translations pursue opposing goals: while Warren mimics the style of professional medical notes, Russian translators are drawn toward a moralizing and didactic style; they also transform it into a linear narrative (as in case of “The Statesman”). The translators’ choices indicate that they feel that the formal characteristics of medical reports still cannot be used in fiction. Their additions and corrections correspond with the needs of a Russian society that was not ready for fiction based on the more formalized case history, with its anonymity, specific medical terminology, and abruptness.

Judging by the number of publications as well as by the response in criticism and fiction, the effect of Doctor's Notes on Russian fiction was significant. For the first time, an allegedly real doctor was claiming his own right to write, to announce his life, experiences, and feelings to the world. Now the Russian reader knew what a doctor's thoughts are when he observes the unlucky course of an illness or loses a patient. The fact of sharing the private facts of his patients' life with the public makes

102 his narrative both shocking and attractive for readers. The idea of a skilled and intelligent professional who comments on his milieu attracted other writers as a convenient first-person narrator. In the early 1830s Vladimir Odoevskii planned to write a series of Doctor's Notes but later changed his mind and used an undertaker instead in Zapiski Grobovshchika (1838-1839), which came out soon after the publication of the collection of Doctor’s Notes.184 As in the case of a doctor who sees a cross-section of a society in the course of his practice, the undertaker is also a person whom every family eventually encounters. The figures of the doctor and the undertaker are united in many plots of naïve and folk literature. However, as Sakulin points out, the figure of an undertaker turned out not to be as impressive as the figure of the doctor, since the situations of medical practice are much more diverse and productive.185 As a result of the popularity of Passages, we see a considerable increase in the number of first-person doctoral narratives. The grim details of the doctor’s experiences are adopted by some writers who cast medics as their first-person narrators. Russian writers endow their doctors with the traits that distinguished

Warren’s late physician, such as a passionate nature and a tragic vision of life.

Together with the real case histories that I will discuss further, Passages became a model for the writers that inscribed the medical gaze into Russian fiction.

184 Sakulin Iz Istorii Russkogo idealizma,136-139. 185 Sakulin Iz Istorii Russkogo idealizma, ibid.

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Chapter 5

The Sick Writer: The First Public Case Reports and the Birth of Medical

Biography

The expansion of medical topics in Russian fiction and particularly the development of the doctor’s first-person narratives were triggered by such quasi- medical case histories as Warren’s Passages, as well as by real medical reports that became an essential part of the Russian literary universe. Irina Reyfman, in her seminal article “Death and Mutilation at the Dueling Site: Pushkin’s Death as a

National Spectacle” demonstrates the effect that Pushkin’s death agony had on subsequent descriptions of duels and physical sufferings in Russian fiction and nonfiction.186 Reyfman shows that after the common discussions of Pushkin’s death, the literary code of duels’ descriptions changed from the idealistic to the realistic and graphic. The scrupulousness accompanying descriptions of both real and imaginary duels contributes to the shocking details of Pushkin’s suffering that were documented in the “notes” left by his doctors, Scholz, Spasskii, and Dahl.187 Reyfman’s argument is supported by Bogdanov, who points to the considerable broadening of medical discourse in the 1840s that was probably caused by the popularization of medicine.188

Another important source, the memoirs of Dr. Tarasenkov about Gogol’s death, also produced a volume of “psychopathological” literature that emerged in the 1880s in

186 Irina Reyfman, Death and mutilation, 72-88. 187 All three notes were gathered and published by Shchegolev in Duel' i smert' Pushkina: s prilozheniem novykh materialov iz niderlandskikh arkhivov (St. Petersburg: Akademicheskii proekt, 1999). Shchegolev’s book was first published in 1916, and then in 1922 and 1928 188 Bogdanov, Vrachi, Patsienty, chitateli, 213

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Russia. According to Irina Sirotkina, because of the exposure of Gogol’s psychiatric condition to the common public, a new paradigm emerged in which “Gogol’s death provided an opportunity to reinterpret his life,” and doctors took the liberty of evaluating writers from their ‘doctoral’ point of view.189 I propose to look at the stages that precede the period covered by these seminal works, i.e. how doctors gained the right to voice their opinions in front of the public. The fact that the shocking details of

Pushkin’s death agony became public brings medicine closer to literature, and allows medical professionals to participate in the life of the reading society on an equal level, and not as second-class servants. The interest in the writer's body produced a new subgenre of medical biography, or, to use Bogdanov’s terminology, pathography.190 I will demonstrate how these notes became a point of reference for both writers (who cast doctors in the role of narrators) and real physicians (who used these accounts to illustrate the state of medicine during a given epoch). Finally, I show how actual case reports transformed the whole discourse of literature and how doctors were endowed with their own right to control first-person narratives and to create their own stories.

For this chapter, I use the most famous case histories that later informed both literary and medical discourses in Russia and abroad. I argue that this discourse shapes the figure of the doctor as an authoritative reader of fiction, as a critic, and eventually, as a writer. Additionally, it reveals the body of the writer initially as a spectacle, and subsequently as a model, as seen through the prism of the medical gaze. From the perspective of twentieth-century medical writings, canonical writers – Pushkin,

Lermontov, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Chekhov – become objects of interest for

189 See Sirotkina, Diagnosing Literary Genius, 19. 190 See Bogdanov, Vrachi, Patsienty, Chitateli, 10ff.

105 medics. Their creative works are viewed by twentieth-century Russian doctors in the context of their physiology; doctors claim that medical interpretations give reasonable explanations for the dark spots of writers’ biographies.

As established by Pushkin scholars, no official case history of Pushkin's wound and death agony was ever recorded, though his last days were witnessed by a number of the prominent doctors of that time.191 Of the seven doctors who attended Pushkin’s deathbed (Drs. Scholz, Sandler, Arendt, Solomon, Andreevskii, Spasskii, and Dahl), three left notes that, according to medical historians, were structured improperly and hence, belong more to the genre of memoirs than to that of medical histories.

Moreover, according to Shubin and Davidov, even the graphic and detailed “autopsy note” written by Dahl did not fit the format of an official report, but rather constituted a voluntary observation.192

The three notes left by the doctors demonstrate different angles of the drama as well as different stages of dying. While keeping in mind the traditional structure of the case history (patient’s complaints, anamnesis, diagnosis, treatment, and prognosis), we see that these parts are scattered among the three notes, though some of them are completely absent. For example, Dr. Scholz is the first physician who provides readers with an initial observation of Pushkin’s condition. The doctor examines the patient and records Pushkin's sensations when he was hit by a bullet.193 The second part of the traditional case history (anamnesis vitae) is absent from the notes completely. Due to

191 Boris Shubin, Dopolnenie k portretam (Moscow: Znanie, 1985), 6. 192 Shubin, , Dopolnenie k portretam , 99, Mikhail Davidov, “Duel i smert’ A.S. Pushkina glazami sovremennogo khirurga” Ural 1 (2006) http://magazines.russ.ru/ural/2006/1/da10.html 193 Shubin justly notes that at this moment Pushkin does not complain much about the pain, but mentions nauseating sensations (Shubin, Dopolnenie k portretam, 8)

106 censorship concerns, the doctors do not mention the cause of Pushkin’s condition -- a gap filled by twentieth-century doctors who reconstructed Pushkin’s anamnesis by addressing his physical and emotional life from childhood up to the duel.194 The

“diagnosis” section is present in all three notes, but again, it remains vague for ethical reasons. For example, Scholz does not conceal from his patient that his wound is dangerous and probably fatal but leaves it for other doctors to make their final conclusions. Spasskii focuses exclusively on the visible symptoms (paleness, coldness of the hands and feet, barely distinguishable pulse).195 Dahl also concentrates on the external manifestations of Pushkin’s suffering but adds his own professional observations:

Собственно, от боли страдал он, по словам его, не столько, как от чрезмерной тоски, что нужно приписать воспалению брюшной полости, а может быть, еще более воспалению больших венозных жил.196

The next section, treatment, resurfaces in all three notes: Scholz treats the wound and applies a bandage; Spasskii and Dahl follow Arendt’s prescriptions: change ice packs, apply leeches, and manage his pain with opium. Finally, the prognosis is laid out in the notes of Spasskii and Dahl as they witness Pushkin’s decline. According to Zhukovskii’s testimonial, the verdict was pronounced by Dr. Arendt the morning before Pushkin died:

Арендт сказал мне решительно, что все кончено и ему не пережить дня.197 Although the factual elements of a traditional case history are present in all

194 See Shubin, Dopolnenie k portretam , Grombakh, Pushkin i meditsina ego vremeni, Shoel Uderman, Izbrannye ocherki otechestvennoi khirurgii 19 stoletiia (Leningrad: Meditsina, 1970), Davidov, “Duel i smert’ A.S. Pushkina glazami sovremennogo khirurga” 195 Shchegolev, Duel' i smert' Pushkina, 188-189. 196 Shchegolev, Duel' i smert' Pushkina,192 197 Shchegolev, Duel' i smert' Pushkina,177

107 three notes, they certainly lack the obligatory “objectivity and impartiality of physician's notes about the development of the disease, test results, and its treatment.”198 Even the term skorbnyi list (“a page of sorrow”), the nineteenth-century term for a medical case history, contains a suggestion of personality (as opposed to the more neutral istoriia bolezni). Shubin points out that the idiom skorbnyi list is a better match for the reports of Pushkin’s doctors as the word skorb’ signifies the highest degree of sorrow.199 Even the neutral note of Dr. Scholz empathetically records all of

Pushkin’s phrases, emphasizing them with a special “Gothic” font.200 Spasskii's personal response is reflected in his citations of poems, in his emphatic accounts of

Pushkin's suffering, and even in his communications with his other patients.201 Dahl makes his note extremely passionate and personal; he voluntarily stays at Pushkin’s bedside and takes upon himself different roles, including those of confessor, friend, and physician. The notes of Pushkin’s doctors initiate this tradition of “sorrowful” case histories of famous writers. The combination of two important factors – sorrow and empathy – produces texts that linger on the border between case histories and personal memoirs.

198 Shubin, Dopolnenie k portretam, 6. 199 Shubin, Dopolnenie k portretam, 6 200 See Shchegolev, Duel' i smert' Pushkina, 185 201 Panaev records the following anecdote in his memoirs: "Он получил Анну на шею и вслед за тем взял отпуск, чтобы блеснуть этим знаком отличия на родине, но простудился и слег в постелю. Доктор департамента Спасский, лечивший его, заехал к нему от раненого и умирающего Пушкина. Сваррацкому было плохо. Он приподнялся на постели, схватил руку доктора и произнес, бросая грустный взгляд на Анну, лежавшую на столике у его постели: - Скажите мне, есть ли какая-нибудь надежда, доктор? Могу ли я выздороветь? - Никакой, - отвечал Спасский, - да что ж такое? все мы умрем, батюшка. Вон и Пушкин умирает... Слышите ли, Пушкин?! Так уж нам с вами можно умереть. Сваррацкий со стоном опустил голову на подушку и умер в один день и почти в один час с Пушкиным. Спасский по этому случаю заметил: - Вишь, счастливец! Умереть в один час с таким человеком, как Пушкин. Это не всякому удастся." (Ivan Panaev, Literaturnye vospominanija (Moscow: Pravda, 1988), 82)

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Although not belonging to the category of formal case histories, the notes of

Pushkin’s doctors should be seen as medical reports that reflect the process of treating the patient from the point of view of the medical professional. Importantly, twentieth- century doctors treat these texts exactly as case histories by using them as first-hand illustrations of the medical techniques of the past. But medicine is not the only topic that strikes us upon our encounter with these notes. All three notes gesture towards literature and cannot perceive Pushkin without his connection to the literary world. All three doctors are conscious of their most important mission of recording the poet’s last minutes once realizing that there is no cure. Even Dr. Scholz, who does not attempt to beautify his style of writing, apparently records all the words that Pushkin uttered, including some that later became part of the canon, Pushkin’s quiet farewell to his books (“proshchaite druz’ia!”). Spasskii’s narrative, though medical and mostly dedicated to his patient's interactions with doctors and their prescriptions, is written for the non-medical reader, since it lacks all the specific professional information that doctors usually provide in case histories (descriptions of medical procedures, drugs, etc.). Spasskii’s note is framed by two quotations: one from the scene of the duel from

Eugene Onegin and another one from Zhukovskii’s poem on Pushkin’s death. And yet,

Spasskii leaves literary connotations out of his main narrative, thus drawing a border between fact and fiction.

The role of Vladimir Dahl differs from Spasskii and Scholz: he attends the dying Pushkin more as a friend, and his medical help is voluntary. Dahl does not hesitate to build direct parallels between Pushkin's condition and a passage from

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Eugene Onegin right inside the text, nor does he separate it from medical issues. 202

Strikingly, the note of Dahl, who knew Pushkin socially, contains more medical details than the notes of the other two doctors.203 While Spasskii does not go into the graphic medical details of the treatment, Dahl describes all treatments that the doctors imposed upon Pushkin (castor oil, leeches, opium). Dahl is the only person who is present at

Pushkin's bedside as a friend and a doctor, and the tension between his professional duty and personal empathy produces a heartbreaking dilemma. As a friend, Dahl wishes to believe in the possibility of Pushkin's recovery; however, as a doctor, he realizes that the impact caused by the bullet is irreversible. Dahl describes the intimacy that arose between him and Pushkin in terms of “brotherhood,” when

Pushkin addressed him as “brother” and shifted from the polite vy to the more intimate ty. Dahl is astonished by the realization that this unexpected brotherhood with Pushkin is intended for the “other world” while he witnesses the “soul that strives to tear away from the body.”204 Besides a personal note, Dahl also left two other reports that are very graphic and specific. One document describes an autopsy conducted by Spasskii; another is a medical explanation of Pushkin’s cause of death.205 Both notes are heavy with technical terms (such as Latin terminology ossis iliaci dextri) and are obviously intended for professionals. The poet’s suffering body turns into a decomposing cadaver, in which the intestines and bones are exposed.

202 В продолжение долгой, томительной ночи глядел я с душевным сокрушением на эту таинственную борьбу жизни и смерти, — и не мог отбиться от трех слов из “Онегина”, трех страшных слов, которые неотвязчиво раздавались в ушах, в голове моей, — слова: Ну, что ж? — убит! О! сколько силы и красноречия в трех словах этих! (Shchegolev, Duel' i smert' Pushkina, 193). 203 See Grombakh, Pushkin i meditsina ego vremeni, 65; Shubin, Dopolnenie k portretam, 83-86 204 Shchegolev, Duel' i smert' Pushkina,193. 205 Shubin Dopolnenie k portretam, 98-99.

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The history of Pushkin’s duel, agony, and death represents an unprecedented occasion of baring the most private aspects of life to the public. According to

Zhukovskii’s testimony, even during Pushkin’s last days his house was filled with people, including strangers, who wanted to know the news about his condition. 206 The doctors’ notes formed the essence of the canon of Pushkin’s death agony and they determined its function while the witnesses to this event were still alive. First of all, as

Shchegolev has proved, Zhukovskii, in his famous letter to Sergey Lvovich Pushkin, used the notes of all three doctors, though he treated them loosely, even changing and reinterpreting Pushkin’s original words, as recorded by Scholz.207 Second, medical details mentioned in the doctors' notes became public soon after Pushkin's death. As

Reyfman shows on the basis of diverse correspondence that circulated after the duel,

Dahl shared the results of the autopsy with friends and acquaintances.208 Third, judging by the style and structure of the notes left by Spasskii and Dahl, they were intended for publication.209 Similar publications (such as Tarasenkov’s notes on

206 "С утра 28 числа, в которое разнеслась по городу весть, что Пушкин умирает, горницы его были полны приходящих для осведомления о нем, некоторых присылали спрашивать об нем, другие и люди всех состояний, знакомые и незнакомые – приходили сами. <…> Число приходящих сделалось наконец так велико, что дверь прихожей (которая вела в кабинет, где лежал умирающий) беспрестанно отворялась и затворялась, это беспокоило страждущего<…> С этой минуты буфет и с крыльцом были набиты народом; в столовую входили только знакомые; на лицах выражалось простодушное участие, очень многие плакали. (Shchegolev, Duel' i smert' Pushkina , 175) 207 Shchegolev, Duel' i smert' Pushkina , 150-151. Zhukovskii made several versions of his letter – the ones that he prepared for publication in Sovremennik (1837), were completely devoid of any references to the duel, while in the later publication in Russkii Arkhiv in 1864, the letter was finally published in its unabridged form (Shchegolev, Duel' i smert' Pushkina , 147). Because of this initial censoring motif, Zhukovskii was obliged to change many important details, including medical ones. 208 Reyfman, “Death and Mutilation at the Dueling Site,” 80. See also an excerpt from A. Turgenev's diary where Spasskii shares his note with him and Zhukovskii: “К Жуковскому: там Спасский прочел мне записку свою о последних минутах Пушкина» (Shchegolev, Duel' i smert' Pushkina, 274) 209 The note of Dr. Spasskii was first published in Bibliograficheskie zapiski 18 (1859) 555-559, Dahl’s notes were first published in Meditsinskaia gazeta (1860), and then reprinted in a number of non- medical editions, such as Vestnik Evropy (1888), Polnoe Sobranie Sochinenii Pushkina (1880), etc.

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Gogol’s death) appear later, while for the epoch in question, parts of correspondence and diaries would be circulated among friends and family. The extremely private, anonymous information that is usually circulated among medics, relatives, and officials, became widely accessible for a vast number of people.

The rapt and almost morbid attention of the reading public to the physical aspect of the poet’s suffering created a new movement in literature and nonfiction, when previously taboo topics (like the medical description of duels) became not only a possible but also a necessary element.210 After their spread and the publication of doctors’ stories, the concept of physical agony in literature and in nonfiction received additional confirmation: the figure of the dying Pushkin became the ideal model of suffering. The transformation of a medical case into a spectacle (or an object of reading) was not unique, as it emerged from a combination of different traditions.

First, the “curious” medical cases that were widespread in Europe in the eighteenth century (and probably discussed in Russia as well) usually revealed strange medical phenomena or prominent patients and were made available to the public. Hurwitz points out that “the patient is framed as a spectacle, and secrets are revealed in a text narrated by a physician who finds himself agog at the sight of the case.”211 Second,

Pushkin’s suffering body ceased to be situated inside the private space of his home and was now observed nationwide within the framework of his literary heritage and was regarded as the logical endpoint of his biography. Such a vision is present in the notes

210 Thus, the accounts of duels, instead of vaguely mentioning the wounds of combatants, become filled with the physiological details of suffering. As Reifman notes, “these accounts, written after 1842 (that is, after the report of Pushkin’s post-duelling agony had entered the national consciousness) were in sharp contrast with the contemporary, 1817, factual and understated, accounts of the duel” (Reyfman, “Death and mutilation at the Dueling Site,” 83). 211 Hurwitz, “Form and Representation in Clinical Case Reports,” 226

112 of Dahl and Spasskii in the form of the parallels between Eugene Onegin and

Pushkin’s duel. The public suffering of Pushkin can be compared to what Kantorowicz notes about the perception of the death of a royal persona, in that “kingship itself comes to mean Death and nothing else but Death <…> The king who ‘never dies’ here has been replaced by the king that always dies and suffers death more cruelly than other mortals.”212 The writer also seemed to acquire such a status that shows him being more vulnerable than others and at the same time exhibiting more tolerance of physical suffering. The poet’s life and death was now observed not just by his family and friends but by his readers and admirers. This lack of privacy during his death agony became an inseparable part of the developing canon of Pushkin’s heritage.

The attempts of doctors to reinterpret the lives of famous writers came up again in the memoirs of Aleksei Tarasenkov (1856). A young doctor, he happened to be appointed as Gogol’s attending physician at the onset of the writer’s terminal illness.

Due to the fact that Gogol’s illness lasted for months (as opposed to Pushkin’s decline and death that lasted only days), Tarasenkov builds his narrative as a full-sized history of the writers’s illness, in contrast to the notes of Dahl, Spasskii, and Scholz that draw on their momentary impressions and immediate emotions. Stylistically, “Poslednie dni zhizni Gogolia” is closer to the genre of a specialized medical biography that

Bogdanov identifies as a “pathography”.213 The doctor adopts a common technique of biographers by supplementing his personal recollections with available materials such as letters, testimonies, and rumors. He combines medical observations with literary

212 Ernst Kantorowicz, The King's Two Bodies: A Study In Mediaeval Political Theology (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997), 30. 213 Bogdanov, Vrachi, Patsienty, Chitateli, 25

113 musings, and his own impressions with facts that he did not witness personally. The text also contains elements of a traditional case history. For example, Tarasenkov talks about anamnesis by describing how Gogol’s physical and emotional health was gradually deteriorating; he makes personal observations of his patient’s appearance and behavior when writing about their first meeting. The doctor goes into every detail of Gogol’s treatment, as well as his illness and death, and makes an attempt to explain the cause of death (that constitutes a diagnosis, or postmortem analysis, an essential part of the case history). Tarasenkov is aware of this mixture of personal and professional elements in his text. In the extensive endnotes attached to the main narrative, he reflects on the role of his memoirs for future biographers and identifies his target reader as “the physician, the psychologist, and just a thinking person:”214

Много суждений было произнесено о Гоголе, но до сих пор рассматривались более сочинения его, нежели он сам <…> Последние дни такого загадочного художника, как Гоголь, не должны быть закрыты тому, кто хочет проследить всю его жизнь для составления полной и верной его биографии. О предсмертном его состоянии написано весьма мало; даже немногим известно, при каких условиях и от какой болезни произошла его кончина.215

Almost twenty years after Pushkin’s death, the moral dilemma of the privacy and publicity of a writer’s life was no longer relevant. As is evident even from this brief quotation, the details of Gogol’s death agony should be included in the official biography. All details of Gogol's physical suffering are presented on the assumption that the reader wants this information. In Tarasenkov’s narrative, Gogol appears in his natural domestic environment, with all of the ups and downs of his temper, including

214 Tarasenkov, “Poslednie dni zhizni Gogolia,” 417 215 Tarasenkov, “Poslednie dni zhizni Gogolia,” 397

114 mood swings, weird actions, and depression. Tarasenkov mercilessly leads his readers through the process of the physical and mental deterioration of Gogol, thus denigrating him to the level of an ordinary (but, as in case of Pushkin, more intensely suffering) patient.

Throughout the text, Tarasenkov continues to combine the elements of biography and case history. His reconstruction of the previous years of Gogol’s life

(that he could not have witnessed) can be interpreted both as a medical study of a preexisting condition as well as an exposition of the biographical data that usually constitute an essential component of a writer’s story. However, the closer he comes to the moment of Gogol’s final days, the more his writing moves away from general comments and draws closer to the form of a medical report. The doctor inserts detailed passages dedicated to medical procedures; he does not omit the administering of an enema or the swaddling of the agonized body of the writer with a damp blanket. At that point, Tarasenkov confronts his colleagues, whose cruel and mindless behavior worsens the sufferings of the patient and speeds up his death. In the posthumous publication of Tarasenkov’s notes, one sees direct accusations against Gogol’s doctors, whom he could not oppose because of his young age and inferior rank.216

Обращение их было неумолимое; они распоряжались, как с сумасшедшим, кричали перед ним, как перед трупом. Клименков приставал к нему, мял, ворочал, поливал на голову какой-то едкий спирт, и когда больной от этого стонал, доктор спрашивал, продолжая поливать: «Что болит, Н. В.? А? Говорите же!» Но тот стонал и не отвечал. <…> В таком положении оставил я страдальца, чтобы опять не столкнуться с медиком-палачом, убежденным в том, что он спасает человека.217

216 In the first publication, all accusations were removed due to censorship issues. 217 Aleksei Tarasenkov, “Poslednie dni zhizni N. V. Gogolja,” In N. V. Gogol' v vospominaniiah sovremennikov, ed. Mashinskogo. Moscow: GIKHL, 1952, 524. Gogol has predicted his horrible end in

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Tarasenkov concludes his memoirs with his own reflections that draw on both testimonials and his personal experience of his relationship with Gogol. While admitting that he was not able to establish a specific verdict or diagnosis, the doctor sees himself not as an active participant but rather as a witness who conveys his experience for future generations of doctors or critics.218 At the same time, the medical knowledge of Gogol’s mental and physical condition entitles Tarasenkov to judge the writer’s literary biography as well. Gogol’s corporeal suffering stands next to the corpus of manuscripts that he destroys in a fit of madness:

<…> он не пожелал идти на суд Божий и в то же время оставить земную память о себе, часть себя – свои произведения... 219

When treating a writer, doctors viewed their patient’s conditions through the prism of their fiction, and this perspective allows the regular medical report to overcome its own limits and objectives. The developing subgenre of fictionalized and/or popularized medical cases authored by doctors influenced both fiction and nonfiction. The physical aspect of Pushkin’s death agony became a shocking and yet attractive point of reference for the consequent descriptions of duels after 1837.220

Likewise, Tarasenkov’s memoirs initiated a new psychiatric discourse that viewed the

“damaged” personalities of Gogol, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and other writers through the prism of “psychopathologic research”.221 Judging by memoirs, testimonies,

the last entry of “Zapiski sumasshedshego,” where the protagonist complains about being treated by the cold showers in the asylum. Greatest thanks to Monika Greenleaf for reminding me of this parallel. 218 Чтоб доставить другим возможность делать свои заключения, я представил описание состояния, в котором находился Гоголь в последние дни своей жизни, присоединив некоторые известные мне факты из его прежней жизни (Tarasenkov, “Poslednie dni zhizni Gogolia,”424). 219 Tarasenkov, “Poslednie dni zhizni Gogolia,”426 220 Reyfman, “Death and mutilation at the Dueling Site,” 76 221 See Ivan Sikorskii, “Izobrazhenie dushevnobolnykh v tvorchestve Gogolia,” In Pamiati Gogolia (Kiev, 1902); Dr. Kachenovskii, Bolezn’ Gogolia. Kriticheskoe issledovanie (St. Petersburg: Svet,

116 correspondence, and literary works, psychiatrists were seeking a link between the writer’s personality disorder and his or her literary genius.222 The popularity of medical topics in literature inspired medical professionals of the early twentieth century to explore the health conditions of the writers of the past.223

In the twentieth century, medical reports (such as the notes of Dahl, Spasskii and Tarasenkov) became a point of reference in the academic study of the medical techniques of the past. Such are the cases of Pushkin’s wound and dying, Lermontov’s duel, Gogol’s mental condition, Dostoevsky’s epilepsy, and Chekhov’s consumption.224 In modern studies, the writer’s biography received an additional

“medical” dimension, in which medical facts supplemented the literary heritage and allowed for reinterpretation of writers’ lives. In the twentieth century, doctors analyzed the illnesses of famous people from the point of view of contemporary medicine and used these documents to seek the flaws in the old medical techniques. Pushkin’s death agony became the subject of articles and monographs due to the presence of intimate insight into the poet’s life as well as into the level of medical skills in the late 1830s.

Physicians discussed the relevance of the treatments conducted by Pushkin’s doctors, and even disputed the diagnoses of Dahl and Spasskii by providing counterarguments

1906) 222 See for example: «Если в прошлом веке, даже такие великие художники, как Гете, могли игнорировать душевные болезни, пользоваться сумасшествием как случайным обстоятельством в общем ходе своих романов и драм, то современные романисты уже не имеют права не замечать патологических душевных явлений, или отводить им ничтожную роль (Vladimir Chizh, “Turgenev kak psikhopatolog,” Voprosy filosofii i psikhologii 4.49 (1899): 625) 223 Another story that was widely discussed in the first half of nineteenth century was Mozart’s death. Some arguments are summarized in Albert Borowitz, “Salieri And the ‘Murder’ of Mozart.” Musical Quarterly (1973) LIX (2): 263-284. 224 Uderman, Izbrannye ocherki otechestvennoi khirurgii, Grombakh, Pushkin i meditsina ego vremeni, Shubin, Dopolnenie k portretam, Davidov, “Duel i smert’ A.S. Pushkina glazami sovremennogo khirurga”

117 as seen by the contemporary medicine. Furthermore, Pushkin’s body became a dummy, an example of a typical patient of the first half of the nineteenth century.

Thus, Uderman’s Izbrannye ocherki istorii otechestvennoi khirurgii XIX stoletiia reviews the quality of Russian surgery by using as illustrative material the treatments of Kutuzov, Bagration, and Pushkin. Uderman strictly follows all important details of these persons’ anamneses, describing their childhoods, their previous illnesses, and their physical constitutions. When discussing Pushkin’s case, Uderman measures the bullet’s trajectory, draws schematic pictures to illustrate the location of the bullet in

Pushkin’s intestines, and figures out the precise timing of Pushkin’s ride back home from the spot of duel. 225 Uderman even disputes Dahl’s arguments, pronouncing them inconclusive.226 But generally both Shubin and Uderman pursue the goal of clearing

Pushkin’s doctors of the frequent accusations of lack of professionalism and speed.227

In a recent article, Dr. Mikhail Davidov even speculates on how Pushkin would have been treated if he were to be placed in the present time:

При огнестрельном ранении нижнего этажа брюшной полости и таза, подобном ранению А.С. Пушкина, необходимо оказать первую медицинскую помощь на месте происшествия <…> немедленно транспортировать пострадавшего в хирургическое отделение на санитарной машине в лежачем положении на щите, вводя в пути препараты — заменители плазмы крови и противошоковые средства. <…> После короткой предоперационной подготовки нужно оперировать больного под общим обезболиванием (наркозом) <…> При выполнении в полном объеме указанных мероприятий … шансы на выздоровление составили бы не менее 80%, ибо летальность при подобных огнестрельных ранениях ныне составляет 17,2 — 17,5 %. Но Александр Сергеевич Пушкин жил в другое время, и спасти жизнь

225 Uderman, Izbrannye ocherki otechestvennoi khirurgii, 210 226 <... > версия В. И. Даля о ранении бедренной вены (“вероятно”) – поздний домысел его (Uderman, Izbrannye ocherki otechestvennoi khirurgii, 224). 227 The unjust accusation towards Arendt, Spasskii, and other doctors was a frequent theme among Russian doctors, especially in the 1930s. For more information, see Uderman, Izbrannye ocherki otechestvennoi khirurgii, 243-244

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гениального поэта при том уровне развития медицины, который существовал в 30-х годах ХIХ столетия, было практически невозможно.228

Additionally, when exploring case histories, twentieth-century doctors tended to intrude into the field of literature and give their naive explanations of the fiction, ideas, or particular moments of their patients’ lives. Pushkin’s genius became an object of medical analysis that claimed to show a deeper understanding of, for example,

Eugene Onegin.229 The colorful imagery in Gogol’s “Ukrainian” tales was defined as a product of the manic phase in his bipolar disease.230 Numerous monographs dedicated to Chekhov analyzed the veracity of his depiction of illnesses.231 Finally, the lives of

Pushkin and Lermontov are used by doctors as universal examples of nineteenth- century Russian medicine. Grombakh in his monograph Pushkin i meditsina ego vremeni analyzes the depiction of illnesses in Pushkin’s poems and prose, goes through the list of medical books at his private library, reviews the state of medicine in the 1820s-1830s, and lists the doctors who knew Pushkin or just lived in his time.

Another book also follows the life of a poet from a medical perspective. In the book

Meditsinskaia karta Lermontova, Nakhapetov collects the anamnesis of Lermontov’s life and provides readers with short biographies of the doctors who were Lermontov’s

228 Davidov, “Duel i smert’ A.S. Pushkina glazami sovremennogo khirurga” 229 See for example Uderman: “С годами память у Пушкина, особенно ассоциативная, настолько развилась и достигла такого совершенства, что одна даже какая-нибудь бытовая деталь способна была вызвать и вызывала разветвленную и сложную цепь представлений. Подтверждением сказанного может служить Евгений Онегин” (Uderman, Izbrannye ocherki otechestvennoi khirurgii, 203). 230 Если пересмотреть весь творческий путь Гоголя с учетом фаз его болезни, то выясняется, что все самые лучшие свои произведения или лучшие части произведений писатель сочинил, пребывая в гипоманиакальном или (значительно реже) маниакальном состоянии. И в самом деле, такие чудные, дивные, волшебно-сказочные картины природы — описание степи в “Тарасе Бальбе”, Днепра в “Страшной мести” — можно было бы создать, находясь в совершенно нереальном, неземном состоянии — так они прекрасны и фантастичны! (Mikhail Davidov, “Taina smerti Gogolia,” Ural 1 (2005), http://magazines.russ.ru/ural/2005/1/da14.html). 231 See for example : Evgenii Meve, Meditsina v tvorchestve i zhizni A. P. Chekhova (Kiev, 1989) and Isai Geizer, Chekhov i Meditsina (Moscow: Gosmedizdat, 1954).

119 contemporaries.232 Although intended for narrow medical circles, these monographs contribute to the history of literature, just as the medical reports on the wounded

Pushkin have become a public legacy, an essential part of the poet’s biography. After

1837 Pushkin embodied the universal wounded and dying person, whose physical suffering is reproduced many times in literature, art, and medical writings.

Likewise, although Tarasenkov never realized it himself, when he proposed that he was providing medical information for Gogol’s biographer, he was laying the foundation for “literature’s psychopathogy.” Following a psychiatric study by Cesare

Lombroso, Gogol’s anxiety and taphophobia (the fear of being buried alive) as reflected in his fiction, memoirs, and correspondence, became a classic example of a psychiatric condition.233 According to Irina Sirotkina, because of the exposure of

Gogol’s psychiatric condition to the general public, a new paradigm emerged in which

“Gogol’s death provided an opportunity to reinterpret his life,” and the doctors took the liberty of evaluating writers from their ‘doctoral’ point of view. 234 Likewise,

Dostoevsky represents a model of an epileptic whose experience is reflected in literature and thus should be analyzed from a clinical point of view.235 Later, studies on “psychopathology in literature” were regularly published in Klinicheskii Arkhiv

Genialnosti i Odarennosti from 1925 to 1930. In this series of scientific articles, the histories of writers’ illnesses were treated solely as interesting medical cases.236

232 Boris Nakhapetov, Meditsinskaia Karta Lermontova (Moscow: Gelios, 2008) 233 See for example Cesare Lomroso, The man of Genius (London: Walter Scott, 1891) 234 See Irina Sirotkina, Diagnosing Literary Genius, 19. 235 Ibid. 236 By the end of the nineteenth century, the practice of applying psychiatric analysis to famous writers was well established. Chizh was one of the most famous psychiatrists who wrote a series of articles dedicated to Chekhov, Turgenev, and Pushkin. Later, in 1925 Dr. Segalin started publishing the special journal called Klinicheskii arkhiv genialnosti i odarennosti (Sverdlovsk, 1925) that studied

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The history of the duo “the sick writer and the doctor” would be incomplete without Dr. Aptekman, a psychiatrist who belonged to the team that treated Gleb

Uspenskii. This delusional writer was institutionalized at the Kolmov Hospital (1892-

1902), where Aptekman was practicing as a resident. Soon, the relationship between

Uspenskii and Aptekman overcame the medical subordination of patient to doctor, and they became friends. A young doctor at that time, Aptekman formed a deep attachment to the writer, whose works he adored. The title of Aptekman’s memoirs refers to the term skorbnyi list (Stranitsa iz skorbnogo lista G.I. Uspenskogo237), and changes the status of the text from merely personal recollections to the results of medical observation. The term skorbnyi may be interpreted as a descriptive epithet that refers to the whole story of Uspenskii’s last years. As in the case of Tarasenkov who could not recognize in his patient the writer that he admired, Aptekman reports his utter astonishment when observing the striking difference between the mentally deranged

Uspenskii and the Uspenskii who wrote all his works while still sane. The impossibility of real dialogue with the writer brings Tarasenkov and Aptekman together. Both try to fill this lacuna by gathering testimonies from the writers’ families as well as by analyzing their works in order to trace the origins of their mental conditions.

The reduction of a public figure to a mere patient obliterates the writer’s identity and turns him into a nameless and helpless patient. At the same time, the acute suffering bestows an aura of martyrdom on the writer. The picture of Pushkin’s agony

the link between insanity and artistic geniality. This phenomenon is described by Irina Sirotkina (Diagnosing Literary Genius: A Cultural History of Psychiatry in Russia, 1880-1930. Baltimore, MD, USA: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002). 237 Osip Aptekman, Gleb Ivanovich Uspenskij, Moscow, 1922

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(especially in Dahl’s account) brings up straightforward parallels with Christ’s passion: his acceptance of fate, his intense and unmanageable pain, and his selfless thoughts about his loved ones. At the same time, the scrupulously detailed descriptions of medical procedures, like, for example, a picture of the naked Gogol being treated by suppository pills, humiliates and equates him with common people. The chilling passages in Aptekman’s memoirs about Uspeskii’s mental decline present the writer as a madman, whose identity slowly deteriorates – as would happen to any patient suffering from this disorder. The sick writer is exceptional because of his talent and at the same time he is on the same level with all of us.

Should we consider the notes of Tarasenkov, Pushkin’s doctors, and Aptekman as medical case histories or as personal recollections? In terms of style and intonation, these texts are more personal than professional; Dr. Tarasenkov identified the audience of his memoirs as non-medical, and likewise, Pushkin’s doctors did not pursue professional goals when recording their testimonies. Treating a writer gave well- educated doctors access to the writer’s private life and allowed them to show their patient from a specific angle of a regular suffering person. In the popularized and fictional case studies, writers’ everyday life becomes an object of art; doctors’ notes about writers turn the artistic biography into the object of medicine, a part of everyday life. As a result, the medical gaze receives its justification, and doctors feel entitled to voice their opinions more and more. When viewed by twentieth-century doctors, these medical yet personal notes were observed as unique illustrative materials that helped them to reconstruct the medicine of the past.

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Chapter 6

The Doctor Acquires His Own Voice: First-Person Narratives

The personal intonation of doctors’ case histories in fiction and in real life produces a new literary technique that propels the doctors to use their own voices.

Starting in the late 1830s, writers’ perceptions of doctors began to change, and fictional medics were transformed from peripheral characters to first-person narrators.

These doctor-narrators prefigure the emergence of medical fiction that dealt exclusively with doctors' experiences. By the 1840s Russian literature slowly but steadily produced fictional stories that took the shape of doctor’s narratives. According to Bogdanov, one observes the general “medicalization” of Russian literature of the

1840s, with the depiction of illnesses being transformed from vague descriptions into more vivid pictures of death and dying; Bogdanov links this tendency in literature to the popularization of medicine in Russian periodicals in general. While I agree with his argument, I think that one should also take into consideration the major influence of the popularized case studies that were discussed in the previous chapters.238 I argue that the shocking details of Pushkin’s dying and the fictional suffering of Warren’s

“late doctor’s” patients placed doctors in a category of professionals that, according to

Warren’s credo, “command such interesting, extensive, and instructive materials as the experience of most members of the medical profession teems with,” so that one should regret that doctors “made so few contributions to the stock of polite and popular

238 Bogdanov, Vrachi, Patsienty, Chitateli, 213

123 literature.”239 Because of the unique details of personal life that medical biography provided (as in the case of Tarasenkov’s memoirs or even the notes of Pushkin’s doctors) the narrator’s voice became eligible to be a translator of the medical gaze into literature. The form of the case history remained the preferred framework for writers that chose to cast their narrators as doctors, even when the text was not centered on themes of illness and/or sickness. As a result, the medical discourse that, for literature, existed only as a marginal interest, embraced the plot and granted characters meanings that helped to discover the well-known and yet undiscovered-by-fiction aspects of life.

The influence of the popularized medical reports, together with the illness- centered plots, produced stories that project the action through the prism of medical discourse, with doctor’s gaze aimed at a subject’s physicality and everyday life. In

Zhukova’s series of short stories (Vechera na Karpovke, 1838) a group of friends congregates at an old woman’s house to tell stories, of which some are real, while others are obviously invented. The series of conversations concludes with a novella

“The Last Evening” (Poslednii Vecher) told by her family doctor. Similarly to

Warren’s Late Physician, Zhukova’s doctor mimics the rules of a published case history by changing names and removing references (prior to the publications of case histories, real doctors are obliged to remove all mentions of their patients’ names).

Furthermore, although being emotional and informal, Karl Ivanovich’s narrative includes all the necessary elements of the medical report: he describes his patient’s condition (initial examination), takes care of her (treatment), and one day she tells him her life story and the circumstances that ultimately caused her illness (anamnesis). As

239 Samuel Warren, “Introduction to the Passages from the Diary of a Late Physician.” Blackwood's Magazine 27 (1830): 322

124 a result we have a twofold situation, in which the Romantic cliché of a fallen woman who repents and receives forgiveness through the birth of her child goes along with a medical discourse that shows the doctor as unable to save his patient.

Another interesting example of the encounter between the Romantic and medical discourses is Pavlov’s “Maskarad” (1839). In this story, these two tendencies are harmonized. On the one hand, the murky narrative keeps the readers in suspense till the very end, by offering vague hints instead of direct facts. On the other hand, the doctor’s narrative is focused on the drama that unfolds around the unexpected illness of the main heroine and thus places the story within the medical realm. The rules of

Romantic story are thus followed, and practically nothing becomes clear by the end of the narrative. The doctor never identifies the disease that claimed the heroine’s life, does not explain who the author of the letter was, nor does he state whether she indeed had an affair with a mysterious lover. At the same time, if one looks at the doctor’s narrative as a veiled case history, all the obscurity fades away and we receive a very simple picture of a cheerful family, whose happiness is destroyed by the intervention of an untreatable disease. When telling his story, the doctor also follows the main points of a medical report, including the anamnesis (Levin’s married life), the doctor’s examination of the patient (the scene that shows the reader the inevitability of consumption), the treatment, and finally, the prognosis (in this case, death of patient).

All these elements are clearly visible through the veil of the Romantic narrative.

Sometimes doctors’ first-person narratives are not dedicated to any medical matters but nevertheless are structured around the notion of the observing medical gaze. In Likhachev’s Mechtatel’ (1854), as in Zhukova's series, a group of people

125 gathers for a chat. The doctor is one of the regular participants in these meetings; the main narrator introduces him as the most cynical and misanthropic person that he has ever known. During the meetings, the doctor prefers not to participate actively in the conversations. Once, however, when the discussion turns to the influence of books on young people, the doctor loses his temper and argues that excessive reading causes permanent physical and mental harm to contemporary youth. To illustrate his point, the doctor tells a long story of his close friend:

Пожалуй, я расскажу вам один случай в этом роде, который некогда очень близко касался меня самого, и который очень много подействовал на мой характер <...> Это не более, чем отрывок из частной жизни знакомого мне человека, отрывок грустный, но справедливый, который может служить небольшим фактом при теперешнем вашем разговоре.240

Remarkably, the doctor’s narrative does not contain any references to his profession

(except for the vague notes about his medical training and practice). Nevertheless, I argue that the influence of medical discourse is visible even without these references.

The doctor follows the objectives of the popularized case history, which are often used

“to shape and facilitate patients' story-telling as part of the diagnosis process,” and “to make a point.”241 In Mechtatel the goal of doctor’s narrative is to expose the physiological and psychological complications that occurred due to the fact of excessive reading. The doctor talks about a social illness that affects young people who read and daydream too much, and, as a result, become unable to function normally in society. Second, the doctor predicts the tragic fate of his friends by means of his professional rationality and not by supernatural inspiration. In the absence of

240 V. Likhachev, “Mechtatel' (rasskaz doktora).” Moskvitianin 12–14 (1854): 193 241 Nancy M. Theriot, “Negotiating Illness: Doctors, Patients, and Families in the Nineteenth Century,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Studies 37.4 (2001): 352

126 any medical components, medical discourse can still be present when the plot is observed from the doctor's point of view. As in previous examples, the doctor also incorporates all elements of the case history. The structured mind of the narrator sets the scene and the tone; in the doctor's wording, the title Mechtatel’ refers to a diagnosis.

Similarly, another first-person medical narrative by Vakhnovskaia (Iz vospominanii lekaria, 1859) unfolds around the life of a young girl whose physical and moral constitution is compromised by a poor upbringing and education. Being completely disillusioned and unable to deal with her marital and parental obligations, the young patient falls victim to tuberculosis. In its structure, Vakhnovskaia's story resembles Tarasenkov's memoirs, as it also describes how psychological problems gradually cause the heroine to give up and succumb to a fatal illness. As in

Tarasenkov's text, the doctor becomes the heroine's attending physician by accident; both texts reconstruct the anamnesis, describe attempts at treatment, and mourn over their failure. Again, strict medical knowledge destroys any hopes for recovery when the doctor notices that

В ней не было еще болезни, но постоянное, усиленное раздражение нервов, в котором она находилась в продолжение всей своей жизни расположило ее к изнурительной лихорадке; первое моральное потрясение могло бы развить в ней эту болезнь, если она не успеет заранее укрепиться физически. Я знал все это и дрожал за нее и боялся ошибиться в последних своих надеждах.242

The doctor’s narrative is preceded by the introduction of a woman who is the

242 S. Vakhnovskaia, “Iz vospominanii lekaria,” In Rasskazy i ocherki (Moscow: Tip. Bakhmeteva, 1859), 251. See also a quotation from Tarasenkov’s memoirs: “Впрочем, в это время болезнь его выражалась только одной слабостью и в ней не было заметно ничего важного; самая слабость видимо происходила от чрезвычайного изнурения и мрачного настроения духа.” (Tarasenkov, Poslednie dni zhizni Gogolia, 407).

127 addressee of the story. Being unwell, she summons the doctor, and the appearance of her daughter reminds him of his former patient. To warn the mother of the dangers of excessive reading, which he believes to cause first psychological and then physical disease, the doctor records his story and passes it to her. His story exemplifies a case history that illustrates the doctor’s point. In this instance, the doctor’s role is not just that of a witness, but also that of a bellwether, exposing an immanent threat to the

Russian society.

As with the real doctors who were always aware of the fatality of Pushkin’s wound, fictional doctors are painfully conscious of the deficiencies of their treatment in the face of consumption. Warren’s late physician, as well as the doctor from

“Maskarad,” cannot afford to hope when the clinical signs indicate otherwise. The first-person narrative illuminates the pain of such knowledge in both doctors:

His eye spoke eloquently; but, alas! it shone with the fierce and unnatural luster of consumption, as though, I have often thought in such cases, the conscious soul was glowing with the reflected light of its kindred element, - eternity. I knew it was impossible for him to survive many days, from unequivocal symptoms of what is called, in common language, a galloping consumption.243

<…> прямо передо мной, для меня одного все блестели глаза и играл румянец.<…> Горько было признаться, что робеешь, когда так на тебя надеются. Язык мой был добрее моей науки, он отказывался служить немилосердной Предусмотрительности<…> Как ему постигнуть вдруг возможность такого несчастья? как подумать, что моя робость основательна? Ведь впереди столько еще средств, накопленных человеческой мудростью, столько еще будет людей, слез, денег!.. 244

The authority given to the doctor allows him to share his “medical” point of view that

243 Samuel Warren, “A Scholar’s Deathbed,” In Passages from the Diary of a Late Physician (Leipzig: Bernh. Tauchnitz Jun., 1844), 44 244 Nikolai Pavlov, “Maskarad,” Povesti i Stikhi (Moscow: GIKHL, 1957), 158-159

128 is full of empathy but completely devoid of any illusions. While the exteriors of

“Maskarad” are presented as masks, in everyday life the individuals are left face to face with their illnesses and sufferings. The narrative of the doctor adds different angles to the Romantic discourse that is still evident. The story can be viewed as a mystery, or as a family drama, or even as a case history. Likewise, in Zhukova’s

“Poslednii vecher,” the voice of the doctor is the only one that connects the domain of imagined stories to that of real life. His narrative suddenly casts light on the unnoticed participants in the “evenings,” emphasizes the individuality of the hostess, and brings a happy conclusion to the whole series of novellas by uncovering the love of the young protagonists.

Notably, in all these stories doctors are not granted independence but rather are introduced by other characters, whose point of view is also subjective. While this practice is not limited to doctors, and many writers also use this technique to present their narrators (such as Pushkin’s Belkin in Povesti Belkina, Lermontov’s narrators in

Geroi Nashego Vremeni, Gogol’s Rudyi Panko, and so on), doctors are markedly deprived of an independent voice. Inside their own narratives, they are allowed to manage and design their stories, but they can never transgress the text’s “frame.” In the text’s frame that indicates the story’s genre and code, the doctor is not the subject but the object of the narrative: he is seen from the outside either by another character or by the main narrator. 245 This position illuminates the doctor’s appearance and personality but at the same time leaves him more vulnerable, since the narrative has power over him. Pavlov’s doctor is half-mockingly introduced by another narrator;

245 Yuri Lotman, Struktura Khudozhestvennogo Teksta (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1970), 265

129

Zhukova’s doctor is also presented positively yet ironically; the doctors in the stories by Vakhnovskaia and Likhachev are also introduced by someone else. In all aforementioned examples, the narratives are focused on doctors’ untidy and somewhat ridiculous appearances, thus denigrating them in the eyes of readers:

Это был человек лет 55, немного неуклюжий, толстый, но не слишком здорового вида: рябоватое, широкое лицо его было несколько бледно, черты плоски, маленькие, водянистые глазки, окаймленные красными подпалинами, беспрестанно моргали под рыжеватыми ресницами; того же цвета волосы редкими прядями торчали на голове кое-где. Он сидел, опустивши глаза, на кончике стула.246

Его значительная наружность представляла странные противоречия: белый галстук, единственный в маскараде, и серые растрепанные бакенбарды; глубокие морщины на лбу и тонкие черные брови; остатки волос на затылке и на висках, кое-где седые, кое-где черные, в таком состоянии упадка, что видно было - нечего или некогда о них хлопотать, и красные щеки, признак вечного аппетита у докторов <…> 247

These brief yet memorable introductions of new characters set the stage for their presence and actions, including the way we perceive their first-person narratives.

Although granting them the right of voicing their opinions and feelings, writers keep reminding their readers that the doctors still remain instrumental in the hands of their creators, and that the story still does not belong to them.

Such a twofold status for doctors, lacking independence from another narrator, changes with Herzen’s choice to use a doctor as his voice in Doctor Krupov (1847) and his later essays. While the novel Kto vinovat presents doctor Krupov through the eyes of the ironic narrator and thus follows the usual pattern, in Doctor Krupov the

246 Vakhnovskaia, “Iz vospominanii lekaria,” 166-167 247 Pavlov, “Maskarad,” 128

130 doctor-protagonist directly voices Herzen’s ideas about the vices of Russian society.248

Krupov demonstrates that Russia is imbued with madness and sickness and that all human relationships are distorted and false, and in so doing confronts and opposes the previously fashionable image of Gothic doctors. Doktor Krupov plays with paradoxes by marking healthy individuals mad, while insisting on the “sanity” of the mentally retarded Levka. In the course of the story, Krupov gradually broadens his scope and goes from the individual level to the notion of universal madness in certain historical epochs, such as the Middle Ages and particularly the Inquisition:

Кто не видит ясные признаки безумия в средних веках - тот вовсе незнаком с психиатрией. В средних веках все безумно. Если и выходит что-нибудь путное, то совершенно противуположно желанию. Ни одного здорового понятия не осталось в средневековых головах, все перепуталось. Проповедовали любовь - и жили в ненависти, проповедовали мир - и лили реками кровь.249

Krupov points at the lack of foresight in historians who tend to explain all events logically, while one has to look at human history from a pathological point of view and thus let medical practitioners participate in the process of reviewing historical events. This idea suddenly resonates with statements of Dr. Tarasenkov; in the beginning of his memoirs he argues that Gogol’s biography is incomplete without the medical investigation into the writer’s physical and mental condition.250 And here again, we see that the observational gaze of a doctor pierces into the very core of things.

As with other writers, Herzen also explores the form of the medical case

248 Belousov, Obraz seminarista v russkoj kul'ture, 8 249 Aleksandr Herzen, “Doktor Krupov,” In Sobranie sochinenii. Vol. 1 (Moscow: GIHL, 1955), 377 250 Tarasenkov, “Poslednie dni zhizni Gogolia,” 397

131 history, but, as opposed to the previous examples, he imitates the style and language of medical documents:

Субъект 29. Мещанка Матрена Бучкина. Сложение сангвиническое, наклонность к толщине, лет тридцати, замужем. Субъект этот находится у меня в услужении в должности кухарка, а потому я изучал его довольно внимательно в главных психических и многих физиологических отправлениях. Alienatio mentale, не подлежащее никакому сомнению; все умственные отправления поражены <…>251

As opposed to the emotional description of his childhood friend Levka, the doctor maintains the strict tone of a case report that strikes the reader with the horrible picture of his cook’s everyday life, in which the “subject” is abused by her husband, a ruthless drunkard, and nevertheless stays by his side and supplies him with alcohol. Her pathological attachment to the husband is not justified by anything but marital duty, which Krupov regards as a delusion. This case powerfully combines the seemingly detached “doctoral” tone of Krupov with the harsh reality in which his “subject 29” lives; the dark and hopeless story ends with the death of her child. All of the experiences of Doctor Krupov are mercilessly real, partly because, as opposed to previous doctoral narratives, they are not separated from us by the main narrator. By identifying with his character, Herzen creates a professional whose authenticity is more believable as his image combines empathy, sarcasm, anger, and philosophical and materialist views, and thus is closer to that of a “real” doctor. Furthermore, he revisits this figure of a sarcastic and philosophical doctor in other texts, such as

“Consolatio” (1849), in which the narrator overhears two tourists in Paris discussing the concepts of Rousseau. In a series of essays, “Skuki radi” (1868) and “Doktor,

251 Herzen, “Doktor Krupov,” 377

132 umiraiushchii i mertvye” (1870), Herzen “records” his conversations with the doctor- philosopher by using the model of a “black doctor” created by De Vigny in Stello

(1832), constructed as a series of dialogues between the Byronic young man and his physician.252 Similarly, Herzen builds his stories as a dialogue between two sides of the author’s ego, where the doctor entertains the protagonist with stories from his life and practice. As in Stello, the doctor disappears as an apparition by the end of the last story; his presence becomes unnecessary as the historical events of 1869 in France bring a new revolution and new “powers and people.”253

As I have demonstrated, all of these examples deal with a doctor’s narrative that is either autonomous or incorporated into the main story. N. Akhsharumov’s

Dvoinik (1850) creates the opposite situation: the protagonist’s first-person narrative turns out to be a part of his own “case history.” This story loosely follows

Dostoevsky’s Dvoinik (1846), a story that was analyzed in previous chapters: the protagonist at a certain moment experiences a split in his personality and then meets his double as well as betrays his true love for a richer bride. Furthermore, the stories go in different directions. As opposed to Dostoevsky, where the doctor remains a marginalized yet important character, Akhsharumov concentrates on medical and psychiatric matters. The book is designed as the journal of a madman; and before the start of the actual narrative, the reader is notified about a diary that was found by some unknown person. He consults his friend, Dr. M. (apparently, the same doctor who acts

252 The image of Vigny’s Black Doctor was powerful not only for Herzen but also for Lermontov, in his pair of Pechorin and Dr. Werner. One sees a number of parallels between Stello and Geroi Nashego Vremeni: in the appearances of both doctors, in their manner of communicating with friends, and in their metaphorical ways of voicing their ideas. 253 Aleksandr Herzen, “Doktor, Umiraiushchii i Mertvye,” In Sobranie sochinenii, Vol 8, (Moscow: GIHL, 1955), 525

133 within the main narrative), and the doctor gives the title to the whole story and provides the unorganized text with a proper structure by dividing it into chapters and calling them “illness,” “crisis,” and “amputation” (the last term refers to the final separation between the protagonist and his double, and at the same time, between him and his conscience). In an epilogue, the publisher places a medical conclusion by Dr.

M., who gives his professional explanations about the nature of diarist’s visions. While the doctor powers the frame of the story, the main body of the text belongs to his patient (as we realize only after the end of the story). The medical titles that originate from the traditional case history influence our perception of the text and load it with an ironic subtext. While the protagonist repeatedly cites his doubts about the possibilities of medicine, the doctor claims that the topic of medicine is a leading one in this text:

Я поглядел на него в недоумении. Как же так? – произнес я сомнительно, - зачем все эти медицинские термины? Мне помнится, в содержании журнала, о них не говорится ни слова. – «Об этом вы уж не беспокойтесь, - отвечал доктор, - во всем, что касается медицины, вы можете смело положиться на меня». – Литература до медицины совсем не касается, хотел я отвечать: но я имел к универсальным познаниям доктора М. доверенность такую неограниченную, и потому не решился спорить с ним долее.254

The first-person narrative of a patient whose illness develops in the process of writing is perceived by a prospective reader as a series of clinical symptoms rather than as a mystical story, since “it turns out that mental illness is more appropriate for publication than the common private diary <...> This technique reflects the literary tradition that has already formed by that time – the story of a madman.”255 The unusual angle of narrative that presents the history of madness from the delusional

254 Akhsharumov, “Dvoinik,” 4 255 Grigorieva, “Dvoinik – Podrazhanie ili Pereosmyslenie?” 101.

134 perspective goes along with the tradition of depicting madness from the sick person’s point of view (Gogol's “Zapiski sumasshedshego”).

From the doctors of Pavlov and Zhukova to the physicians of Herzen, we see

Russian writers experimenting with the possibility of telling the story from a medical point of view. To introduce the physician into the realm of prose, and moreover, to grant him the right of his own voice, writers explored ways of marking their speech with the specific “medical” elements. The case history proved to be the most convenient model that helped doctors to make this transition from the world of medicine into the world of literature. Starting from the time when the first medical reports about ill writers became public and Warren’s English stories were published, we see attempts to use the case history as a literary form. The elements of case history can be incorporated directly into a text (as in Doktor Krupov), become a frame that turns the story into a clinical case (as in Akhsharumov’s Dvoinik), or simply shape the doctor’s narratives in the way that a case history is usually shaped (as in the stories by

Pavlov, Zhukova, Likhachev, and Vakhnovskaia). Since “converting complex clinical perceptions of illness into written narratives involves both selection and interpretation,” the themes that authors choose in connection with doctors are indicative of the marriage between writing and medicine that we witness in the 19th century Russian literature. 256

The form of the case history turns out to be both compelling and challenging as it evoked in writers and their audiences the forces of the “grotesque, the freakish, the macabre, the melodramatic, the voyeuristic” that “can create an alarming turbulence in

256 Risse, and Warner, “Reconstructing Clinical Activities,” 189-190

135 this purportedly generous and humane understanding.”257 The presence of the doctor guiding them through this unknown and forbidding world makes readers feel that they share their life and practice. The figure of the doctor is always a dominating one that a) has definite knowledge about the physical conditions of the other characters; b) is allowed to speak openly about unattractive physiological issues; and c) has enough confidence in the narrative to show the reader through the plot. In the realm of case history – the formal text that ultimately belongs to a medical society – the doctor feels comfortable and authoritative enough to be the author and the main character in the story. The doctors that were listed in this chapter have no doubts about their right to be what they are and to express themselves in literature. They are assured just by the possession of their medical gaze, and the professional fiascos that they experience do not corrupt this confidence. Like the mesmerists that I have described earlier, doctors as first-person narrators (both in fictional and documentary literature) transform the way the readers see the world by imposing their own professional and medical point of view. Once the gaze moves from professional and semi-professional texts to fiction, one can declare that the medical and literary discourses have blended, and from now on will appear together, affecting the style of writing as well as the reader’s response.

After doctors are assured of their possibilities within the field of case histories, they take a step to overcome the boundaries of their discipline and to begin publishing their notes, and later, to become writers in their own right.

257 Rylance, The Theater and the Granary, 272

136

Chapter 7

Attentive and Inactive: the Types of Doctors in Russian Literature

The previous chapters showed that the theme of medicine in Russian literature is linked, first, to the figure of the doctor, and second, to the concept of the medical gaze. Medicine is associated with the field of magic (as in the case of mesmerism and mysticism) and balances on the border between normal and abnormal. As the examples of demonic doctors demonstrate, the figure of the mesmerist is defined by its ability to stare and to manipulate, both physically and emotionally. While belonging primarily to the category of marginal characters, doctors gradually get hold of plotlines by acquiring the right of being first-person narrators.

When a doctor steps into the plot, his emergence signals the readers’ understanding of a doctor’s sphere of competency. For the audiences of the 21st, 20th, and even 19th centuries, the presence of such medicine-related elements as doctor, nurse, hospital, or clinic, would be brought about by the necessity to talk about treatment or to discuss the life of the medical community (i.e., to somehow introduce any kind of medical issue into the plot). And this is true, for example, in mid- nineteenth-century Victorian novels, in which doctors show up due to someone’s illness, or accident, or the narrator’s interest in medicine. Thus, Dr. John Graham

Bretton visits the school where the main character Lucy is employed, and later, she gets sick and stays at his house for treatment (Villette, 1853, by Charlotte Bronte).

Samuel Warren’s “late physician” focuses mainly on his medical experience and practice (Passages from the Diary of a Late Physician (1831-1837)). Harriet

137

Martineau’s Doctor Hope appears in the very first scenes of the novel as a private practitioner for the protagonist’s family (Deerbrook (1839)); and Doctor Lydgate arrives at Middlemarch with high hopes of reforming the medical system of the town

(Middlemarch (1869) by George Eliot).

In Russian literature, medicine serves as an excuse to incorporate a doctor, and can easily be dismissed as a matter that the reader cannot comprehend anyway. The direct link between a doctor’s activity and his professional characteristics that we have seen in Victorian literature is either missing or subtly marked. Thus, a story about a doctor’s unhappy love (Vladislavlev, “Doktor Venevin,” 1838) is consistently melodramatic, with the exception of scenes showing the doctor in action. The style of these passages intentionally lacks any respect towards either medicine or the doctor’s skills:

Через несколько приемов первое лекарство было оставлено. Явились пиявки, ланцет, шпанские мухи, желтые капли, белые порошки, розовая микстура — словом вся медицинская дрянь.258

This satiric segment of text presents a sharp contrast with the story’s message that almost sanctifies the doctor and his deeds. The mocking tone is used by a narrator who observes and judges the doctor from a layman’s point of view. The layman does not care about medical tools and methods, and instead, retreats to a purely visual description that distinguishes the drugs by their colors (the Formalists would identify this as ostranenie). Such a naïve bystander’s interpretation of the visual aspect of medicine heralds the response that Bazarov gets when a magnified infusorian is

258 V. Vladislavlev, “Doktor Venevin.” In Povesti i rasskazy (St. Petersburg, 1838), 208-209

138 presented to the inexperienced eye of Pavel Petrovich:

Впрочем, он иногда просил позволения присутствовать при опытах Базарова, а раз даже приблизил свое раздушенное и вымытое отличным снадобьем лицо к микроскопу, для того чтобы посмотреть, как прозрачная инфузория глотала зеленую пылинку и хлопотливо пережевывала ее какими-то очень проворными кулачками, находившимися у ней в горле.259

The layman’s view strips away the science, and the act of scientific or medical exploration therefore loses its primary meaning, turning into a mere spectacle viewed by an uninvolved person. The gaze of Pavel Petrovich draws the line that separates the actual process of scientific thinking from the artistic perception. At the same time, this gaze unifies those two tendencies, and brings them together forming, a single space where literature and medicine do not oppose each other, but rather coexist.

Writers often incorporate doctors into their plots but omit the description of their professional activities. When a witty doctor is summoned by one of protagonists to be present at a duel, the only medical thing done by this character is feeling the pulse of a fainting heroine (Bestuzhev, “Ispytanie,” 1830). Doctor Werner’s medical qualities are precisely described by Pechorin as “and indeed, his patients bored him”

(Lermontov, Geroi Nashego Vremeni). The Romantic doctors that appear in the tales of

Odoevskii and Aksakov are only distantly related to medicine, being rather wizards than physicians. The doctor invented by Dostoevsky in “Dvoinik” (1848) possesses visible medical attire and items but, in terms of professional actions, is absolutely static.

259 Ivan Turgenev, Otssy i deti, (Moscow, “Azbuka,” 1972), 210

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One has to understand how to define physicians in the context of medicine, but in a situation where that context is virtually absent from the literature of the first half of the nineteenth-century. When reviewing the set of scenes that involve a doctor’s relationship with the rest of characters, one notices that these roles turn out to be connected to medicine on a deep, subconscious level. The observation and close analysis of these roles not only links the doctor to his profession but also points to the attitude that the society had towards medicine. The most frequent role of the fictional doctor is that of friend and confidant for a protagonist; a doctor’s protégé can be male or female, and this friendship always flows on a friendly but never sexual basis.

In this case, the doctor possesses the quality of a convenient and inactive listener, thus provoking an openness that abolishes the social subordination between him and a higher rank person. Even within the strict hierarchy of the medieval household, the opinions of Doctor Lontsius (Bestuzhev-Marlinskii, “Revel’skii turnir,” 1825) are considered and esteemed by the wealthy and prosperous knight Burtnek. The doctor in

Pavlov’s “Maskarad,” once being chosen as a confidant, acquires the authoritative voice that effectively changes the countess’s attitude to the person with whom she is in love. Lermontov canonizes the equality between a doctor and the main hero in Geroi

Nashego Vremeni through the words of Pechorin that define Doctor Werner as a good acquaintance, prijatel, as opposed to a friend, drug. Pechorin argues that, in real friendship, one side is always enslaved, with no possibility of parity. Mutual respect and a certain distance (at least, in the beginning of “Kniazhna Meri”) are the only conditions that allow characters to trust each other.

In some cases the doctor-confidant acts a father figure, a role caused by the

140 considerable age gap between doctor and protégé. They can be actual relatives (father

– son/daughter), as in Lazhechnikov’s “Grimasa moego doktora,” or adopted parents

(as in Lazhechnikov’s Basurman or Aksakov’s “Walter Eisenberg”). Even more often, doctors assume a paternal role, thus psychologically prevailing over their friends or patients. In denigrating situations of women’s utter poverty, sickness, and misery

(Vakhovskaia’s “Iz vospominanii lekaria” (1859), Zhukova’s “Poslednii vecher”

(1839), and Polevoi’s “Emma.”), doctors turn out to be the only companions able to protect their female friends / patients in a non-humiliating way. Male protagonists also fall under doctors’ influence by choosing them as elderly friends endowed with life’s wisdom. Thus, in Odoevskii’s “Kosmorama,” (1840) the young protagonist sees his old acquaintance Doctor Bin as a kind “uncle,” and in response, receives the doctor’s protection from the moral blows of society. In Herzen’s Kto vinovat, Doctor Krupov treats Krutsiferskii as his son by insistently getting involved in the circumstances of his life. This “fatherly” role is extended even to Krutsifeskii’s small child, who perceives the doctor as his “grandfather.” The situation of a doctor’s being in a close connection with his protégé and constantly observing his or her life with the medical gaze serves as a productive tool that moves the plot forward; doctors’ feelings that become too personal cloud their medical ability to be objective in making professional decisions. Due to excessive psychological connections to other characters, doctors fail to protect them against the greater evils of fatal diseases or personal failures, a trait that eventually acts as a plot accelerator.

In the rare cases that a doctor is young, this factor challenges him to play the role of a young lover – a capacity that eventually leads to the loss of his life or of his

141 beloved. For Vladislavlev’s Doctor Venevin (1838) and for the pharmacist’s wife from

Sollogub’s “Aptekarsha” (1841), love utterly causes their physical demise and death.

Maria, a protagonist of Zhukova’s “Medallion,” (1838), is literally killed by her love for Doctor Velskii, since she dies of shock when accidently seeing him after many years of separation. In the canonical Ottsy i deti, Bazarov does not survive his love for

Odintsova.

Finally, the doctor happens to be one of the most convenient stock characters acting in crime stories. Writers are interested in casting doctors as villains in detective stories (an image mostly borrowed from Western European literature260). This role also comes up within the time frame considered by the present study. One example of such a doctor-villain is the aforementioned Hoffmanian magnetizer, such as Aksakov’s doctor Eichenwald or Odoevskii’s Dr. Segeliel. Another type of villain includes doctors who actively abuse their professional confidentiality and commit crimes and evil deeds. In Bilevich’s “Mechta i sushchestvennost” (1849) and Potekhin’s “Vrach- spetsialist” (1865), doctors constantly try to win their patients’ trust solely for the sake of financial benefit. In Pisemskii’s Meshchane (1877), the evil doctor marries his patient and then sends her to an asylum in order to steal her property. (Though this story belongs to a different literary period, it shows how the image develops in the framework of the tradition.)

All of these roles directly relate to the self-introduction of the folk doctor that I cited in the beginning of this chapter: they talk a lot, they can be very active, but

260 The motif of the doctor who uses his profession to commit crimes and murders is elaborated in an article by Evgeny Soshkin “Serijnyi ubijtsa i konets detektivnogo seriala (zhanr kak dilemma)” (an unpublished manuscript).

142 not in their real professional quality. Having noted that, one needs to add that these roles – confidant, father figure, unhappy lover, and villain are tied to the very essence of a doctor’s relationship with the world. The confidential style of a doctor’s relationship with his friends and patients (especially with women), in conjunction with the clerical origin, suggests that the doctor adopts the role and function of the priest and therefore that medical actions are not necessary anymore.

As mentioned above, doctors in Russian literature are qualified by the absence of necessary components, such as professional actions and attributes or leading roles.

Such marginality, however, does not imply an absence of action or the doctors’ inability to manipulate other characters, change the course of the plot, or even cause deep inner influences on the very structure of the composition of the story. This structural position is the sign that characterizes doctors’ medical influence more strongly than any other medical attributes. I will next examine different angles of the doctor’s status in the composition of selected stories.

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Chapter 8

Unmasking Society: Observer, Mediator and Messenger

In some plays originating from the period of Ancient Greek drama the action consists of Episodes, in which the characters come onstage and perform, and

Stasimons, in which the chorus summarizes the previous episode or predicts the forthcoming. Consequently, all major events, such as battles, murders, and encounters always happen offstage, with the news delivered by a messenger, whose function is to mediate between characters and different scenes. Sometimes the messenger is also included in the system of relationships between characters, as in Sophocles’ Oedipus

Rex, where the messenger is an old shepherd who had saved Oedipus as a child and who later helps Oedipus to discover the bitter truth about his origins. But in other cases, such as Aeschylus’s The Persians, the messenger is introduced only to fulfill specifically technical functions (such as mediating or presenting the news on stage).

Because of the spatial separation between the different characters in Greek drama, the messenger is practically an instrument of dialogue, while the cast of characters are not supposed to interact directly with each other.

I argue that the fictional doctor in nineteenth-century Russian literature partially appropriates this task by mediating between characters as well as provoking their encounters. In some examples, the doctor literally serves as a messenger by transferring notes between characters (as Lermontov’s Werner, who mediates between

Pechorin and Vera` or Krupov, who acts as a go-between for all of the characters in

Herzen’s Kto vinovat). The doctor can connect characters by giving out the secrets of his practice, as in Pavlov’s “Maskarad”, where the secret story of Levin becomes

144 public because of the doctor’s mediation between the heroine and Levin as well as between Levin and his wife. The doctor initiates the intrigue in Polevoi’s “Emma” by introducing the girl to the Prince’s mother and by serving as a negotiator between the two families. Dr. Lontsius (Bestuzhev, “Revelskii turnir”) ensures the happy conclusion of the relationship between two young people by mediating between them and the girl’s father. In Zhukova’s novella “Poslednii Vecher,” the old doctor reveals the secret of the young couple to secure their happiness. In the farce “Nuzhda pliashet, nuzhda skachet, nuzhda pesenki poet,” the doctor helps a couple to resolve their marital crisis by blackmailing the wife and convincing the husband and thus saving their relationship. In the Romantic novella “Walter Eisenberg,” the atrocious doctor

Eichenwald introduces the young protagonist Walter to his “relative” Cecilia, a girl that captivates the young man by means of her devilish powers.

In the chapters dedicated to mesmerism and imposed clairvoyance I have already discussed how in Odoevskii’s “Kosmorama” (1840) the doctor passes to the protagonist the supernatural ability to communicate with spirits. Two incarnations of doctor appear before Vladimir at the same time:

В темной глубине косморамы я явственно различил самого себя и возле меня - доктора Бина; но он был совсем не тот, хотя сохранял ту же одежду. В его глазах, которые мне казались столь простодушными, я видел выражение глубокой скорби; все смешное в комнате принимало в очаровательном стекле вид величественный; там он держал меня за руку, говорил мне что-то невнятное, и я с почтением его слушал.261

In terms of functions, both incarnations are needed to mediate between the protagonist and the rest of the world. In the ghostly universe of the cosmorama and the

261 Vladimir Odoevskii, “Kosmorama,” In Russkaia Goticheskaia Povest’, ed, N. Budur (Moscow: Terra-Knizhnyi klub, 1999), 205

145 protagonist’s visions, doctor Bin plays the role of Virgil, a guide who delivers his disciple into the world of spirits and of the hero’s hidden desires, wishes, and fears. In real life, the doctor serves as a messenger between the protagonist and the rest of characters. The doctor delivers all significant information about the people surrounding Vladimir, as well as breaks the news about the deaths of the women that the protagonist loved. In the conclusion of this unfinished piece, because of his ominous ability to inflict disasters upon “everything that’s alive,” the hero retires from society into voluntary seclusion. The only person who does not abandon Vladimir and, importantly, does not suffer from this deadly influence is Doctor Bin, the initial bearer of his dark gift. By taking over the doctor’s supernatural ability, Vladimir acquires the qualities of the medium himself, and, as opposed to the doctor, is unable to combine the existence of this ability with a normal life among other people.

In Russian fiction, the physician is the first to enter the private rooms of a house without being one of its inhabitants. The doctor is one of the first characters to introduce the idea of everyday life as a visible and legitimate subject of the narrative.

Being a mediator, the doctor mainly observes his surrounding with the special gaze aimed at the core of human existence. This gaze looks into the human body, perceives the physical and emotional condition of the patient, and finds out things that go beyond a doctor’s professional qualifications. The doctor’s involvement in everyday life has at least two consequences, both of which relate to his cultural image as well as to the compositional power of this character. First, the act of participation in other people’s lives is associated with mechanized intrusion or even surgical dissection.

Second, in order to move the plot forward, the doctor always transgresses the limits set

146 by the Hippocratic Oath. As a result, the situation, the intrigue, or the inner qualities of other characters are unmasked, an action that constitutes the cornerstone of the doctor’s role in the plot.

With a mechanized approach, the doctor reveals his inability to grasp simple human emotions and the nature of human suffering. For example, the doctor convinces

Emma to be an instrument of healing, genuinely hoping that once the Prince recovers,

Emma will be accepted into his family and become his wife. When this does not happen, and the girl dies of an unreciprocated feeling, Emma's grandfather holds the doctor (and not the Prince) responsible for her death:

– Ты чувствуешь? ты, бесчеловечный! – вскричал дедушка Эммы. – Не ты ли вырвал ее у меня, веселую, здоровую, милую, и теперь отдаешь мне труп ее, не ты ли, говорун заморский, людомор! – Я не ожидал таких упреков от вас, м<илостивый> г<осударь>, не ожидал, – возразил доктор. – Можете говорить что угодно, но не укорять меня в незнании или небрежности. Извольте посмотреть мои журналы болезни; я готов анатомировать тело вашей внучки и доказать, что болезнь ее была неизлечима, заключалась в ее сердце... 262

The well-meaning action of the doctor is transformed into a surgical extraction of the heroine from the natural habitat of her family. The doctor’s opposing remark does not defend him but rather confirms the image of the soulless людомор (someone who starves people), since he uses medical terminology in an inappropriate time and place, offering to desecrate Emma’s body by an autopsy. Because of the doctor’s scientific wisdom and genius he is able to achieve the goal (i.e., to cure the madman), but a

“side effect” kills Emma, the instrument of his cure. Medical erudition prevents the doctor from seeing things as they are from a humane point of view. The medical

262 Polevoi, “Emma,” 365-366

147 interpretation of Emma’s suffering blocks from the doctor’s view the “real” spiritual cause: he points at the heart as a physical locus of the girl’s suffering, while the narrator of the story implies that the illness and death occurred for moral reasons.

Emma’s inability to survive the new environment of high society is paralleled with the fate of a flower planted in foreign soil. The fact that doctor is a mesmerist clashes with his own medical background; in the moment of Emma’s death he denies the reason implied by the narrator and names a physical cause as the only explanation.

Mesmerism is suddenly excluded from doctor’s point of view.

In Pavlov’s “Maskarad” the doctor’s gestures and movements look so unnatural that in, the narrative, his professional medical gesture is shown as being separated from his body. Feeling for a pulse, in the majority of texts, is the only trace of a doctor’s professional faculties and is designed to convince readers of the authenticity of the character. However, in Pavlov’s “Maskarad,” this movement is interpreted as being inappropriate, since the doctor mistakenly refers to the health of agitated lady, while the real reason for her outburst lies in her emotional condition:

Что вы, графиня, что с вами? успокойтесь! -- говорил остолбенелый доктор, а между тем правая рука его, точно отделенная от туловища и послушная давнишней привычке, старалась высвободиться сама собою, чтобы, по всему вероятию, освидетельствовать пульс расстроенной женщины, где непременно должна была заключаться тайна непостижимых слез. Всякий торопится объяснить по-своему, отчего люди плачут и смеются: у всякого есть своя особенная, любимая и единственная причина, которой приписывает он все разнообразные явления на человеческом лице: один -- деньгам, другой -- душе, третий -- пульсу. 263

263 Nikolai Pavlov, “Maskarad,” in Russkaia svetskaia povest’ pervoi poloviny XIX veka (Moscow: Sovetskaia Rossiia, 1990), 180

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The doctor’s misinterpretation of lady’s behavior happens not because of his specific thoughts, but is due rather to his unconscious professional reaction that turns the confessional scene into a medical procedure, and the gap between the doctor’s professional and emotional reactions is so wide that his intention to feel for a pulse is shown as if part of an automatic mechanism. Furthermore, medicine prevents the doctor from understanding the true emotions of the countess. To act as a human being, the doctor has to detach himself from his occupation and then stick to his own personal emotions:

Он вышел из своего раздумья, он был уже не холодный врач с полезными советами, с притуплёнными чувствами и с вечной диетой,-- нет, его умные, важные черты, клоки его серых волос получили другое значение.264

The professional identity turns out to be just an outfit that can easily be discarded by the character, thus revealing his true self. Moreover, the medical background also constitutes the obstacle, the wall that fences the doctor off simple personal relationships, preventing him from marrying or having a proper family.

If we look beyond the time limits of my research into the second half of the nineteenth century, the epithet of “professional” becomes a synonym of soullessness; while recognizing and diagnosing the sickness, the doctor fails to see the underlying emotional reasons for the condition. For example, an extremely professional and successful doctor from Chekhov’s story “Tsvety zapozdalye” (1882) bombards the family of his patient with medical terminology but does not notice his patient’s love for him:

264 Pavlov, “Maskarad,” 180

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И доктор, высоко держа голову и в упор глядя на Марусю, начал толковать об исходах воспаления легких. Говорил он мерно, отчеканивая каждое слово, не возвышая и не понижая голоса. Его слушали более чем охотно, с наслаждением, но, к сожалению, этот сухой человек не умел популяризировать и не считал нужным подтасовываться под чужие мозги. Он упомянул несколько раз слово «абсцесс», «творожистое перерождение» и вообще говорил очень хорошо и красиво, но очень непонятно. Прочел целую лекцию, пересыпанную медицинскими терминами, и не сказал ни одной фразы, которую поняли бы слушатели.265

The doctor is isolated from the world by the prism of his profession, and when he finally allows himself to experience human emotions it is too late– both for him and for the girl that eventually dies of consumption. The preciseness of the medical (or scientific) gaze is transformed into a destructive delusion that distorts the natural point of view. Chekhov's doctor happens to be positively trapped between the necessities to conform to his profession while still remaining a humane person.

Returning to Pavlov's “Maskarad,” I would like to stress the importance of the doctor’s transgression of his professional oath that transforms the story from a cheerful sketch of a masquerade into a fully loaded drama, including a history of love, trust, betrayal, and death (and thus, initiating the plot). The opposition between the inanimate and living medical curiosities is equated with the autopsied corpse versus the spiritual, animated life reflected in the distant sounds of the masquerade. The doctor’s narrative enables the transition between the picture of the masquerade that serves as the plot’s frame and the dynamic action of Levin’s life story:

Отголосок громкой музыки… отдавался в этой мрачной и злобной комнате, где приготовлялись анатомическим ножом слова вскрывать чужую душу, где хотели добраться до всего, что есть привлекательного в чужом несчастии, где копился какой-то заговор против живого света… и

265 Anton Chekhov, “Tsvety zapozdalye,” In Sobranie Sochinenii v 12 t. Vol. 1 (Moscow: GIKHL, 1962), 361.

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беспечной веселости.266

As soon as the countess retreats with the doctor, the readers observe the dissection of the protagonist’s soul as well as the text itself. Through the doctor’s personality, the word becomes an instrument of the autopsy that cuts open human secrets and demonstrates them to the world. The medicalization of the narrative happens through the very language associated with the doctor (and not because of his actions and medical topics). The striking contrast between the doctor’s persona, his meekness and kindness, and the mechanical characteristics of his gestures (the hand being separated from the body) in the narrative demonstrate that the doctor is not to be perceived as an ordinary character, whose role is defined by the qualities listed under his personality.

The doctor's unconscious intervention into someone’s life, here equated with the autopsy, reveals the true function of a fictional doctor: he turns into a textual device used by the author to reveal the secrets of everyday life and to transform the plot.

The doctor’s influence on the plot originates from the act of seeing and, consequently, revealing hidden things. Odoevskii’s “Kosmorama” shows how these clairvoyant skills interfere not only with the doctor’s life but also with the lives of those that surround him. The ability of doctor Bin to see non-material things and to give insight into the world of ghosts and sprits affects the lives of the protagonist and of all of the people he ever loved. The doctor’s prophetic gaze acquired from Doctor Bin turns out to be the killing gaze of the basilisk or Medusa Gorgon that destroys every good creature – “when I look at the flower, it withers.”267 Similarly, in Odoevskii’s

266 Pavlov, “Maskarad,” 183 267 Odoevskii, “Cosmorama,” 237

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“Improvisator,” as I have noted earlier, the doctor-magician casts a spell on the protagonist, and as a result, the young poet’s inspiration is replaced with a mechanical, x-ray view of people and nature. I suggest that we regard those stories as examples of how a medical gaze, like a laser beam, pierces the walls of characters’ houses, and especially, of their private spaces, and turns their everyday lives into objects of the doctor’s curiosity.

To continue the theme of the doctor’s mediating between characters and revealing hidden matters, we return to Pavlov’s “Maskarad” again, in order to explore this story as demonstrating how the doctor’s presence emphasizes the theme of pretence, of preferring masks to real faces or their true essence. The doctor in the masquerade is markedly different from the rest of the crowd: he does not participate in it either by action or by his outfit (i.e., does not wear a mask nor dance, etc.).

However, his appearance marks a global change in the tradition – first the discourse is

Romantic, and then the introduction of a simple family history into the masquerade environment is equated by the omniscient narrator with the act of autopsy. The break between the Romantic tradition and physiological discourse occurs in the beginning of the doctor’s story, with a gentle accompaniment of faint music that is heard from the ballroom, a sound associated with the passing epoch of Romanticism. The young countess is surrounded by decorated masks, more acceptable for her milieu than the world of medicine and suffering. This veil is torn by a story that shows that everything is a pretense and simulation: marital infidelity behind a façade of virtuousness, with the Byronic pallor of Levin being just a symptom of consumption. By the end of the doctor’s narrative, the countess, while still being under the influence of the Romantic

152 discourse, thinks that she sees the ghost of Levin’s wife, yet she actually sees a mirror’s reflection of Levin. The imagined, masquerade reality is unmasked while the image of Levin fades and loses its enigmatic charm:

Встала, подошла к зеркалу, взглянулась, подняла глаза в потолок и сказала вслух: “У него должно быть чахотка.”268

In the final paragraphs, Pavlov makes sure not to mention the farewell between the doctor and the countess; he simply disappears. In the opening sequence, he also emerges suddenly; he intrudes into the crowd (novoe litso vorvalos). Although his appearance is concrete and physical (we see his old suit, his unkempt hair, his kind face), this character remains quite vague. In essence, he is a function, an instrument used by the author to unmask polite society and to shift the discourse from Romantic to realistic. A similar situation occurs in Krupov’s “Skuki radi,” as well as in the book by Vigny, a French novelist (Stello; A Session with Doctor Noir (1832)). In both pieces the doctors serve to voice the authors’ ideas, and therefore they can reappear and disappear at the writers’ leisure.269

The doctor as an unmasking character comes up in Geroi Nashego Vremeni

(1838-40) and provides the reader with the additional dimension of intrigue unfolding in “Kniazhna Meri.” While being excluded from the main conflict between the protagonist, Meri, and Grushnitskii, Doctor Werner is an active initiator of the scheme that Pechorin later hails and supports, and that eventually leads to the duel,

268 Pavlov, “Maskarad,” 206 269 Such was the first consultation with Doctor Noir <…> Who is this Stello? Who is this Doctor Noir? I myself hardly know. Doesn’t Stello seem something like feeling? And Doctor Noir like reason? What I do believe is that if my heart and my head had been disputing the same question, they would not have spoken differently. (Alfred de Vigny, Stello: A Session with Doctor Noir, trans. Irving Massey (Montreal: McGill University Press, 1963), 183)

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Grushnitskii's death, and Meri's despair. In my opinion, Werner belongs to the same type of doctor, whose omniscient and pitiless gaze dissects the lives of others and reveals private matters to the public. Not accidentally, when introducing the doctor in his diary, Pechorin once again draws parallels between the doctor’s attitude to the world and the autopsy by noticing that “Werner studied the strings of the human heart as the veins of a cadaver.”270 Although this phrase is uttered humorously by a subjective narrator, it nevertheless implies, first, that Werner is a materialist and sees things in a distorted way, similarly to other fictional doctors, because “never was he able to use this knowledge.” Second, Werner does not just study the “interiors” of society but also reveals them to the public. And third, the doctor acts in the role of a technical device that cuts through the texture of the everyday lives of the common people. The quiet presence of this character triggers all of the vital turns of the plot:

Werner acts as Pechorin’s informer, supplying him with the necessary information about the inhabitants of the resort in the Caucasus. Werner helps Pechorin to set off the intrigue by informing him about Meri's interest in Pechorin and Grushnitskii, sharing shockingly private facts about the girl (talking about her stature, her virginity), and helping Pechorin to annoy Meri and to make her fall in love with the protagonist:

<...> Княжна сказала, что она уверена, что этот молодой человек в солдатской шинели разжалован в солдаты за дуэль... – Надеюсь, вы ее оставили в этом приятном заблуждении... – Разумеется. – Завязка есть! — закричал я в восхищении: — об развязке этой комедии мы похлопочем. Явно судьба заботится о том, чтоб мне не было скучно. – Я предчувствую, — сказал доктор, — что бедный Грушницкий будет вашей жертвой…271

270 Mikhail Lermontov, “Geroi nashego vremeni,” In Sobranie sochinenii, Vol. 4 (Leningrad: Nauka, Leningr. otd-nie, 1981), 244 271 Lermontov, “Geroi nashego vremeni,” 245

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Importantly, the word comedy appears in Kniazhna Meri twice and both times marks the doctor's participation in the plot designed by Pechorin. By referring to the word

комедия, Lermontov reminds us that Werner’s participation was not limited to mere observation and witty jokes, but rather constitutes a structural frame for Pechorin’s scheme. Werner realizes his guilt as well as the way in which Pechorin used him: in the final scene between them, the former friends (or priiateli) barely speak and do not shake hands. After Werner passes the letter and leaves the stage, the action stops:

Когда дым рассеялся, Грушницкого на площадке не было. Только прах легким столбом еще вился на краю обрыва. Все в один голос вскрикнули.

– Finita la comedia! – сказал я доктору.

Он не отвечал и с ужасом отвернулся.272

The rupture in the texture of everyday life that Werner made by means of witty words becomes a stage for comic and then, tragic events. The gaze of the physician does not heal anyone but rather destroys the fragile balance established by the rules of society.

The secrets of everyday life are seen as a threat, since they set into action uncontrollable things – mutual abuses that culminate in the duel. The violation of medical ethics serves as a plot-building technique that realizes unrealized possibilities:

Pechorin did not have any specific plans as to how to distract himself, but the conversation with Werner set the plot in motion. Similarly, Levin’s secret in Pavlov’s

“Maskarad” could have remained between Levin and the doctor, but it came out and was turned into the story. The encounter between Emma and the Prince in Polevoi’s

272 Lermontov, “Geroi nashego vremeni,” 298

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“Emma” could have ended after he was restrained if the doctor had not convinced both parties to proceed with the magnetic treatment. If Dr. Krupov had not brought

Krutsiferskii into Negrov’s house, nothing would have happened (Herzen, Kto vinovat). The intervention of a doctor, as an instrument of autopsy, bares the interiors and turns private into public, thus creating a new story.

I suggest that the major function of doctor in Russian fiction is unmasking, technique that fulfills author’s intentions. The medical gaze turns into window that observes interiors. Doctor’s point of view, together with medical terminology, is the only way to speak about private matters, to see the people without their “fashionable masks.” Krupov in Herzen’s Kto vinovat directly voices this medical ability:

Знаете, наша должность медика ведет нас не в гостиную, не в залу, а в кабинет да в спальню. Я много видел на своем веку людей и не одного не пропускал, чтоб не рассмотреть его на все корки. Вы ведь все людей видите в ливреях да в маскарадных платьях — а мы за кулисы ходим; насмотрелся я на семейные картины; стыдиться-то тут некого, люди тут нараспашку, без церемонии.273

This quotation summarizes all of the elements of the doctor’s unique experience within his patients’ household. He sees the true face of a man, without a mask, naraspashku. The doctor is confident that his gaze is matchless and that his skills cannot be compared to the knowledge of any other person. His knowledge embraces not just human physicality but also the global understanding of humankind. Being aware of such universal knowledge, Lermontov’s Doctor Werner does not hesitate to shock polite society by daring to see, for example, women through the prism of their medical characteristics:

273 Aleksandr Herzen, “Kto Vinovat?” In Sobranie sochinenii, Vol. 1 (Moscow: GIHL, 1955), 177

156

Княгиня — женщина 45 лет, у нее прекрасный желудок, но кровь испорчена: на щеках красные пятна. Последнюю половину жизни она провела в Москве, а тут на покое растолстела. <...> Княгиня лечится от ревматизма, а дочь бог знает от чего: я велел обеим пить по два стакана в день кислосерной воды и купаться два раза в неделю в разводной ванне.274

This notorious remark strips two ladies of society of the “fancy masquerade costumes” that Krupov mentions in Kto vinovat; Shevyrev, one of the first critics of Lermontov's novel, accused the writer in a personal attack on the Moscow society.275 A very similar transformation is conducted by the doctor in Zhukova’s sequence of short stories

Vechera na Karpovke (1838-39). As mentioned before, these stories are a series of meetings between several people entertaining each other with anecdotes. After hearing about the misfortunes of a woman who tragically lost her husband and was forcibly separated from her child, the doctor disputes the verisimilitude of this story by lowering the Romantic register and providing a naturalistic version of this story's conclusion:

За мной прислали к приезжей даме <...> у ней сделались спазмы, кажется, строго что она обкушалась с дороги Невской лососинки <...> Дама лежала на диване; безобразный мопс бросился на меня с лаем; служанка обмахивала мух над головой дамы... Дама показалась мне очень полновесной, и, несмотря на страдания, лицо ее было красно...276

Afterwards, the doctor juxtaposes the imaginary ending of the story with the real one: in the real life, the heroine is not left in eternal misery, and her child is not taken from her. The doctor's remark provides the reader with comic relief after a Romantic story

274 Lermontov, Geroi nashego vremeni, 246 275 See Sergei Shevyrev, “Geroi Nashego Vremeni.” Moskvitianin 2 (1841): 222-223; V. Manuilov, “Kommentarii,” In Mikhail Lermontov, Geroi Nashego Vremeni. St.Petersburg: Akademicheskii Proekt, 1996. 306 276 Maria Zhukova, “Poslednii Vecher,” 436-427

157 about an unhappy love.277 The doctor is the one who draws the line between fact and fiction, and, as in case of Pavlov’s doctor in the masquerade, he reveals characters from a physical point of view that eradicates their social status.

Writers use unmasking as a tool to speed up the action, to reveal secrets, and to maintain transparency when looking at people’s private lives. Bakhtin, in his article on time and chronotope in the novel, points to the specific category of “third” persons, such as prostitutes and courtesans, servants, pimps, doctors, and notaries who possess the privilege of observing strangers’ everyday lives from an insider’s point of view. In this sense, Apuleius’s The Golden Ass, represents the ideal example of a hero who, because of his animal appearance, becomes a witness of the most secret and obscene scenes at different households. Bakhtin notes that through the eyes of Lucius, life appears to be turned inside out, and instead of the façade we see the bedrooms.278

Lucius peeps into obscenities, the most private and forbidden spectacles. Fictional doctors of nineteenth-century Russian literature belong to this class of “third” characters. Their professional and social status allows them to be present, as we have already seen, at private scenes and to observe them. This process of observation concerns not only their medical activity, but mostly tackles the relationship between the main characters of the plot. The doctor’s observant gaze, like x-rays, peers into the texture of everyday life and turns it into a theatrical spectacle. We witness doctors

277 Я взял руку больной, у ней был жар, лихорадочка, маленькое раздражение... <...> Между тем, как мы говорили, двери отворились; мальчик, черноглазый, румяный, кудрявый, как Амур, вбежал в комнату и остановился, когда моська бросилась на него. За ним вошла дама, стройная и прекрасная; несмотря на бледность, она показалась мне немножко слишком полною; больная моя вскочила и забыла болезнь <...> за нею шел прекрасный, молодой мужчина и черноглазый мальчик называл его папой» (Zhukova, Poslednii vecher, 428). 278 Mikhail Bakhtin, “Formy Vremeni i Khropotopa v Romane,” In Voprosy Literatury i Estetiki (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1975), 277

158 being marginalized: Doctor Velskii observes the dancing crowd at the ball from the corner; Pavlov’s doctor pictures a scene, in which husband and wife are situated in two opposite corners of the hallway, and do not see each other, while he can see both of them. The spooky doctor surprises young Walter in “Walter Eisenberg” by always stepping out from dark corners where he is not supposed to be. Lazhechnikov’s story

“Grimasa moego doctora” concludes with the vision of the doctor’s dead face haunting the narrator from behind a window. This situation is reproduced again and again in many plots, and this supports the idea that the doctor’s marginal position in the plot’s structure happens not because of his ambiguous social status, but mostly because of the structural logic of these narratives.

The aforementioned examples emphasize spatial distance between doctors and their milieu. When marginalized, the doctor turns into a meta-character who views the action from the outside. This detached doctor hovers over the scenery and observes people’s lives as a theatrical spectacle with his panoramic gaze, and at the same time peers through the walls like an x-ray. As I showed before, the doctor’s actions speed up, change, or reverse the course of plot, and this fact, together with the doctor’s

“external” position, brings him closer to the author’s figure than to any other character in the plot. This explains the doctor’s special status when his opinion proves to be the keenest, his vision the sharpest, and his words in many senses the most authoritative.

For example, Dr. Lontsius, a friend and confidant of the mighty knight Burtnek, receives an exceptional right to speak out his opinions openly in front of persons of higher rank. As opposed to servants, who may talk to their masters only in privacy, the doctor is free to dispute Burtnek’s words in front of others.

159

Надо примолвить, что он <доктор> своим плавким нравом и забавным умом сделался необходимым человеком в доме Буртнека. Никто лучше его не разнимал индейки за обедом, никто лучше не откупоривал бутылки рейнвейна, и барон только от одного Лонциуса слушал правду, не взбесившись. Ребят забавлял он, представляя на тени пальцами разные штучки и делая зайца из платка. Старой тетушке щупал пульс и хвалил старину, а племянницу заставлял краснеть от удовольствия, подшучивая насчет кого-то милого. 279

As I mentioned before, the doctor often assumes the role of close friend but rarely participates in the action. In this sense, the roles listed above (confidant, messenger, medium, catalyst) all belong to the sphere of meta-narrative. The doctor outgrows the limits of a regular character and turns into a textual device that links different elements of the narrative (connecting characters, speeding up the action of the plot, revealing secrets…). This “technical” quality of the doctor’s status within the narrative, his above-the-text position, also proves his proximity to author’s point of view.

To return to the notion of private life as seen by Bakhtinian “third figures,” we should remind ourselves that when the doctor plays the aforementioned roles, he fulfills the task of a character who effectively unmasks the people surrounding him as well as the situations that occur to him. This figure, endowed with professional characteristics for the first time in Russian literature, remains visibly inactive but invisibly destroys the walls that surround people’s everyday lives. Similarly to Lucius, who sees private things and reveals them to the public, the doctor also acts as a window through which nineteenth-century readers could observe the personal lives of other people. Because of the short (yet distinct) distance between the doctor and implied narrator, Werner could openly discuss the physical constitution of Meri and

279 Aleksandr Bestuzhev (Marlinskii), “Revel'skii turnir.” Ispytanie. Povesti i rasskazy. (Moscow.: Pravda, 1991), 58

160 her mother, and doctor Karl Ivanovich could nonchalantly talk about his female patients. In later epochs, doctors would sometimes merge with the author’s point of view, and Herzen would pronounce his ideas through the figure of Doctor Krupov. In his writings, the small problems of domestic everyday life are outgrown by the much more global vices of society, which he discusses as “Doctor Krupov,” and later, in

“Apopharismata.” But these writings belong to a considerably different literary epoch; in these cases, medicine becomes more auxiliary than in Romanticism. The positivist epoch starts using doctors as characters with fixed employment, outfit, gestures, and lexicon. The circle of professionals broadens, and the notion of working ceases to be the sole prerogative of doctors. At the same time, writers begin to notice medics by giving them leading roles in the plot. When moved from the margins to the center, the doctor loses the role of metatextual device and becomes a regular member of the cast.

Additionally, everyday life now can be freely discussed in fiction, and therefore, the doctor is no longer needed as a mediator of this knowledge. He had fulfilled his mission, and turned private life into a spectacle.

161

Conclusion

The cast and structure of typical nineteenth-century Russian mass fiction stories can be outlined by two satirical sketches. The first (anonymous) text of 1839280 introduces a series of model drafts that would help prospective writers to develop their own stories. The narrator offers four novellas written in the then-fashionable styles

(enigmatic story, satire, “bivouac tale,” and Gothic horror story). The readers are provided with the initial twist of the story and a list of characters. In the first story, a doctor appears in conversation with a deceived husband; he advises the man to take his wife to the mineral springs in order to “cure” her illness. In the second excerpt, a group of officers asks a military doctor to share an anecdote with them; while the doctor protractedly sniffs tobacco and prepares for the narrative, the author sardonically questions the audience, “would you like to hear him?” and then ends the story. Forty years later in 1880, Chekhov wrote a satirical sketch, which briefly lists people and events that appear in “typical” Russian fiction. The doctor’s position is secondary; he is preceded on the list by almost all other characters, and is followed only by the old servant and the faithful dog:

Доктор с озабоченным лицом, подающий надежду на кризис; часто имеет палку с набалдашником и лысину. А где доктор, там ревматизм от трудов праведных, мигрень, воспаление мозга, уход за раненным на дуэли и неизбежный совет ехать на воды.281 These examples belong to the sphere of meta-literature; they outline the structural

280 “Otryvki iz povestej v novejshem, sovremennom vkuse.” Syn Otechestva 9 (1839). 281 Anton Chekhov, “Chto chashche Vsego Vstrechaetsia v Romanakh, Povestiakh i t. p.” In Polnoe Sobranie Sochinenii i Pisem: V 30 T. Sochinenija: V 18 t., Vol.1 (Moskva: Nauka, 1974—1982), 17— 18.

162 position of doctors in relation to plots as well as to other characters. These texts demonstrate that doctors are often held responsible for the vital points of the plot. In the first example, the doctor serves as a storyteller, and this hints at the possibility of the story being told from a medical point of view. In Chekhov’s excerpt, though the doctor is marginalized, the narrator insists on significant shifts of action that the doctor’s presence induces in the other participants: because of the doctor’s emergence we witness an illness, a crisis, a duel, a trip to the mineral springs, a struggle, and most likely a death by consumption. By casting the doctor in this imaginary story, Chekhov reviews the tendencies of a previous literary era, and summarizes all of a doctor’s functions in the capacity of a textual device. Interestingly, his own fictional doctors, though being at the plot’s center, also belong to the transitional or mediating type of figure that served to introduce medical prose into Russian literature.

What happened to fictional doctors between these two publications? In the

1850s and subsequent decades the image of the doctor changed, and instead of a character as a structural device we see doctors assuming major roles in plots. The next generation of fictional doctors comes forward, and such doctors become more practical, more active, within the plot than their predecessors. As in all transitional periods, within a body of literature there are a number of texts (such as the aforementioned one by Chekhov) that both connect and separate different cultural and historical epochs. In the case of literary doctors, we can identify Turgenev’s Ottsy i deti (published in 1862) as just such a transitional work, a novel that marks a significant change in the social structure of Russian society. The action starts in the

163 time of the Great Reforms, a couple of years before the abolition of serfdom in Russia.

The text involves a number of political and philosophical disputes, clashes between old and new generations, and a (mostly) satiric representation of nihilists. Moreover, the novel involves people of science and medicine, and the figures of doctors in particular as both primary and secondary characters. First of all, Bazarov is a medical student preparing to be a doctor like his father, Bazarov-senior. Besides Bazarov and his father, the novel also contains three other doctors who appear briefly on stage.

After the duel between Bazarov and Pavel Kirsanov, the doctor is summoned; then

Bazarov contracts his fatal illness because a local doctor does not have “adskii kamen’” (silver nitrate) – a very simple form of antiseptic that was available at that time. And last, when trying to save Bazarov, Odintsova brings in a German doctor with her. Characteristically, the presence of all these secondary doctors is either needless (the doctor that visits Pavel Petrovich after the duel only approves Bazarov’s treatment of his wound; the doctors summoned for Bazarov’s illness are helpless) or harmful (as in case of the doctor who did not have silver nitrate at his clinic). Also, these doctors appear at crucial moments of the plot, such as the duel (the confrontation between two worlds), the autopsy when Bazarov contracts typhus, and finally, his death agony. It so happens that these marginal characters predefine and also mark the turning points. The importance of the doctors constitutes a reference to their fictional predecessors, characters that served as textual functions and catalysts of plot.

The appearance and character of Bazarov’s father, an old doctor, belongs to the later Russian fiction that takes over in the second half of nineteenth century and persists into the twentieth. Though paradoxically in the novel Bazarov-senior

164 represents the old school, old times, and traditional military medicine, I argue that his appearance anticipates Chekhov and his empathetic depiction of doctors. The old doctor Bazarov comes from the same literary space as Chekhov’s physicians, with their misery, weakness, and inability to prevent the disaster. In the genealogy of fictional doctors, this character does not precede but rather follows Bazarov-junior and connects the novel to the epoch when doctors become living people and not merely structural elements within plots.

Moreover, the younger Bazarov also exemplifies the medical literary genealogy, as he demonstrates a number of traits that we have analyzed in the previous chapters. Interestingly, in the first part of the novel he is perceived more as a scientist than as a doctor. The person that repeatedly identifies him as a medic is Bazarov’s opponent, Pavel Petrovich, and these references are mostly scornful and condescending:

У нас еще будет схватка с этим лекарем, я это предчувствую <…>282

Это все ему в голову синьор этот вбил, нигилист этот. Ненавижу я этого лекаришку; по-моему, он просто шарлатан; я уверен, что со всеми своими лягушками он и в физике недалеко ушел.283

Not accidentally, Kirsanov uses the word sharlatan thus denigrating Bazarov’s scientific knowledge and equating the word lekar with “quack.” But Kirsanov is not the only one that uses this word; Bazarov also identifies himself as lekar when speaking sardonically about his social and professional status, and thus placing the medical profession between himself and the rest of the gentry. However, if the

282 Turgenev, Otssy i deti, 47 283 Ibid, 45.

165 situation calls for actual medical treatment (even if the treatment is quite subtle),

Bazarov immediately turns into the solemn “doctor” (for example, after the duel with

Kirsanov or in conversation with Fenichka). These moments transform the observer into active practitioner.

Throughout the whole story, the tension between Bazarov’s frantic activity and the way all his efforts run into the narrator’s point of view creates a bizarre image of an energetic person whose actions inevitably lead to destruction. Though insisting on his low descent, he is nonetheless unable to establish proper contact with the peasants; while claiming to be strong and detached, he cannot cope with his attitude towards

Odintsova; though active as a scholar, he is passive for the viewers, and his work is seen through the slighting layman’s eye. Finally, Bazarov dies because of his involvement in practical medicine, as performing the autopsy turns out to be fatal for him. The novel’s finale drew wide criticism, such as Herzen’s review that reproached

Turgenev for letting Bazarov die of typhus:

Худшая услуга, которую Тургенев оказал Базарову, состоит в том, что, не зная, как с ним сладить, он его казнил тифом. Это такая ultima ratio, против которой никто не устоит. Уцелей Базаров от тифа, он наверное развился бы вон из базаровщины, по крайней мере в науку, которую он любил и ценил в физиологии и которая не меняет своих приемов, лягушка ли, или человек, эмбриология ли, или история у нее в переделе.284

Such a reaction signifies the gap between the character’s structure and his

(dis)similarity with the historical prototypes of the mid-nineteenth century. In my opinion, the main reason for such an abrupt finale lies in the realm of structure and not of ideas. If viewed through the tradition of the doctor’s fictional depiction, Ottsy i deti

284 Alexander Herzen, “Eshche raz Bazarov,” In Sochineniia v 9 tomakh, Vol 8 (Moscow: GIKHL, 1984), 114.

166 can be regarded as an experiment. It contains, as I have just shown, the remnants of a previous epoch, namely the marginal doctors, whose presence is almost unnoticed and yet fundamentally affects the plot. Bazarov’s figure, as I have said before, is a transitional one; his textual functions somehow refer to the earlier epoch that I have focused on in previous chapters. He acts as an observer of the society; he is unhappy and unlucky in personal relationships; he indirectly facilitates the intimacy between his friend and Katya, Odintsova’s sister. And yet Bazarov is also a man of the new epoch, as his character is not marginal; the plot is in fact centered on his personal features and qualities. Herzen was quite intentionally criticizing Turgenev for creating a set of qualities and not a living person.285 Bazarov is constantly torn between two literary identities: that of a fictional doctor (and therefore a textual function), and that of the psychologically portrayed hero of the time. The death of this character marks the fundamental change in the paradigm, when the structural role of doctors plays out to its logical conclusion and is not needed anymore.

Other fictional doctors of the mid-century also lose their ability to act as a

“window” to the private spaces of everyday life and start acting as other characters do, being involved in relationships, getting married, moving to the plot’s center. Still, the fictional doctors preserve the features that I described in my dissertation, such as unhappiness in love and marriage, an unclear past, and in some cases, demonic traits.

Thus, in Grebenka’s Doctor (1844), the young hero establishes his practice and marries a beautiful girl; however, he soon learns of her adultery and even the secret

285 “Его <Тургенева> герои превращались мало-помалу из живых людей, какими они были раньше, в носителей мысли, скрытой за кулисами.” (Alexandr Herzen, “Novaia faza russkoi literatury” In Sochineniia v 9 tomakh, Vol 8 (Moscow: GIKHL, 1984), 216.)

167 birth of her illegitimate child. The wife destroys his life, robs him, and drives him out of his own place. The doctor resorts to drinking and finally freezes to death in the street. This theme of the toxicity of marriage for both a doctor and his wife/fiancée appeared repeatedly during the period in question as well as in later times. The misfortunes of Grebenka’s doctor are of a social and psychological nature, and they resemble the misfortunes of the young doctor in Middlemarch by George Eliot. In this novel, Doctor Lydgate arrives in the small town with an abundance of ideas, hoping to improve local medical care. However, his marriage destroys him: not only has he married a girl whose moral qualities are no match for his, she also drives him to bankruptcy and forces him to abandon all his dreams about science and civic improvement.

The doctor is not alone in suffering the lethal influence of romantic or erotic relationships; their spouses and girlfriends also fall victim to such unions. Within the period that I have been exploring, this pattern is visible in Polevoi’s “Emma,”

Lazhechnikov’s “Grimasa moego doktora,” and also in Zhukova’s “Medal’on,” a story belonging to the Vechera na Karpovke series. In “Medal’on,” the doctor sees, after a long interval, a woman who used to be in love with him. And at the moment when they meet again, she dies of an aneurism. In the later period, the relationships of doctors with women were even more distorted and toxic than previously. For example, in Meshchane by Pisemskii (1877), doctor Perekhvatov insinuates himself into a family, planning to marry a rich widow and then to declare her mad in order to take possession of her money; Potekhin’s doctor-“specialist” (Vrach-spetsialist, 1865) strives to marry his unattractive patient while having an affair with her sister. In

168

Turgenev’s Mesiats v derevne (1850), Doctor Shpigeskii, for the prize of a new team of horses, convinces a young girl to accept the proposal of an elderly man – a marriage that will probably make the girl unhappy and lead her to despair. Finally, a later play by an actor and vaudeville writer of the 1910s (Lisenko-Konych, Doktor-otravitel’,

1910) represents a bridge to the crime stories of the later twentieth century, depicting a doctor poisoning his patients. In this play, the doctor consipres with his former lover to murder her unloving husband and vicious stepchildren. While his intentions are to

“free” his lover from her unfortunate family situation, his actions lead to her death and then his own. Even with the emerging attributes of positivism and the birth of medical fiction, fictional doctors preserve their genetic traits that refer us back to their literary and mythological roots. While the link between the doctor’s bachelorhood and demonic nature is more visible in the epoch of Romanticism (when doctors were portrayed as magicians and sorcerers possessing x-ray vision), minor traces of this link also appear in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries and, according to the quote from Lotman at the very beginning of my work, indicate the presence of possibilities encompassed in these figures that may (or may not) be realized in plot. The toxic influence of doctors on their milieu is of the same nature as the witchcraft of

Odoevskii’s doctors.286

As I have demonstrated above, in the beginning of the nineteenth century, the doctor functioned in literature only as a fictional character and not as a writer or critic.

By the second half of the nineteenth century, the genre of medical fiction emerged, starting with popularized doctor’s notes (as analyzed in this dissertation) and

286 Yurii Lotman, “Siuzhetnoe Prostranstvo Russkogo Romana 19 Stoletiia,” 94

169 progressing to full-fledged medically-oriented prose. The tradition of using case histories as a form of fiction writing continued with a series of medical “diaries”, in which real doctors entered the literary universe by means of semi-fictional, semi- documentary situations that may or may not have corresponded to their actual practice.

The form of a series of short stories that Warren used in his Passages was employed once again: Seventy years after the first publication of Zapiski doktora in Teleskop,

Fedor Roshchinin, one of the first zemskii doctors and the founder of a number of local hospitals287, published the series of short stories Iz zapisnoi knizhki doktora (1903).

The protagonist of the stories is Dr. Tipin, whose name is formed from the word tipovoi (“typical”), thus signifying a normal and average medical practitioner.

Similarly to Warren’s “Late Doctor,” Dr. Tipin also encounters the strange and mystical in the course of his practice: he experiences divination, has clairvoyant dreams, and even preaches a Christian belief in the atheist family. The doctor bears the distinctive mark of a medium who receives his information not only by means of medical investigation but also with the help of supernatural powers (a quality that refers us back to Odoevskii’s fictional doctors).288

This technique was taken over by Mikhail Bulgakov, who described his own experience of serving as a country doctor (“Zapiski iunogo vracha,” 1925-1926) in a remote Russian village, telling the story of a young doctor’s survival under impossible conditions. As opposed to the previous examples, the doctor is not merely present in the plot but is actively involved in the medical practice. By centering the narrative on

287 “Fedor Roshchinin,” Russkii Biograficheskii Slovar (Setevaia Versiia), accessed August 3, 2012, http://www.rulex.ru/01170226.htm 288 Fedor Roshchinin, Iz zapisnoi knizhki doctora (Saint Petersburg, 1902).

170 the medical practice itself, the doctors create for their audience an effect of immediate presence. The protagonist of Bulgakov’s stories shares his fears and anxieties in the face of the trials that he has to endure; his trepidation at conducting his first surgeries; his anger and frustration at being unable to save the patient; and the constant fatigue of a man who remains the only medical practitioner in an area of many kilometers. This time, the medical gaze radiating from inside this professional society opens the doors for visitors, revealing the thoughts and anxieties of the medical practitioners themselves. At the same time this gaze is also aimed at medicine, and thus, after radiating from the medical space, it is refracted and returns back to its origins.

In addition to the semi-documentary, semi-fictional notes and stories composed by real doctors, yet another genre emerged: fiction that originates from the medical mentality and yet is much larger in scope than the notes of a doctor’s everyday life.

Chekhov’s stories are traditionally treated as “doctor’s stories” and constitute part of the academic curricula in medical schools; and yet, they cannot be treated merely as testimonies of the state of medicine in late nineteenth-century Russia. Such a pragmatic approach to literature equating the fictional images with the real medical cases can be observed in some literary criticism written by Russian doctors of the twentieth century, who even diagnose the cause of Kovrin’s death in “Chernyi monakh.”289 Such a “medicalized” approach is discussed and criticized from a literature scholar’s point of view by Chudakov, who warns against introducing direct

289 Механизм смертельного легочного кровотечения у туберкулезного больного, несомненно, связан с повышением артериального давления на почве нервного стресса. (Boris Shubin, Doktor A.P. Chekhov (Moscow: Znanie, 1982), 107.

171 parallels between real medicine and Chekhov’s imagery.290

In Chekhov’s stories, the doctor’s positive knowledge is compromised, his gaze is distorted and unable to distinguish true meaning anymore, and his professional abilities are shown as drastically weakened. Paradoxically, Chekhov’s doctors are more connected to their Romantic peers than the doctors of 1850s and 1860s; many of the texts dedicated to medicine are as surrealist in their view of reality as the Romantic stories that I explored in the chapters on mesmerism. The old “demonic” traits are preserved in the way they are, again, unhappy in relationships with women and in family life: in “Poprygun’ia,” the doctor and his wife are emotionally and mentally separated from each other, and the wife realizes the grandeur of doctor’s talents only after he dies. In “Tsvety zapozdalye,” (1882) the patient falls in love with her physician who is unable to recognize her feelings; the realization comes, again, only when the girl succumbs to a terminal illness. In “Vragi,” (1887) the doctor loses his son, with no hope of having more children in the future; he and his wife are too old and sick. The figure of Chekhov’s doctor is a weak one: his physicians (as well as his other professionals) are in an unfriendly milieu that either does not understand them or actively suppresses their activities and aspirations. As opposed to the doctors of

Romanticism, there is no award for being alone; no friendship or trusting relationship.

The best example is the story “Sledovatel’” (1887), in which the doctor and the police

290 Подход к творчеству писателя с узкопрофессиональных позиций приводит авторов к предвзятости и искажению пропорций. Создается впечатление, что картины различного рода патологий занимают едва ли не главное место в творчестве писателя. (Aleksandr Chudakov, “Chekhovskie obrazy i... diagnostika.” Voprosy Literatury 4 (1962):214). Chudakov writes about two books on Chekhov: Evgenii Meve, Meditsina v tvorchestve i zhizni A. P. Chekhova (Kiev, 1989) and Isai Geizer, Chekhov i Meditsina (Moscow: Gosmedizdat, 1954)

172 investigator argue about the presence of supernatural elements in their lives. Insisting on a mystical interpretation, the investigator tells the story of a woman who predicted the day and time of her own death. However, the doctor-materialist proves to him that the explanation is simple – the woman committed suicide. The doctor solves the riddle but fails to recognize that the investigator has told him his own story, and that the truth so callously exposed has broken his opponent’s heart.

The theme of the medical gaze extends furthermore into twentieth-century literature that casts doctors in numerous capacities, of which, in my opinion, the most relevant descendants are the doctors in detective stories, as the detectives, the villains, or, in some cases, the false leads (when suspicion is focused on the figure of the doctor). Starting from Conan Doyle’s Dr. Watson, doctors act as the essential part of crime investigations, giving their professional expertise that helps with the process of deduction. Medical knowledge helps to decipher the riddles, such as traces of poison or a victim’s cause of death. Medical knowledge and skills can also work the other way, when the knowledge of poisons prompts a doctor to commit a crime, as in

Lisenko-Konych’s “Doktor-otravitel’;” the theme of a doctor’s abuse of his patients in favor of scientific experiments would develop in the cinema of 1920s and following, in which the figures of mad scientists became cliché, especially after the horrendous period of medical history of the Holocaust. With the humane aspect reduced to nothingness, the medical gaze turns into a merciless weapon that disregards the spirit and individuality in favor of the body, which is perceived as a mere vehicle for vicious experimentation. In such meaninglessness, this pitiless medical gaze of the twentieth century is comparable to Romanticism’s obsession with the consuming look of the

173 mesmerist / sorcerer /hypnotizer – that is indeed reduced to the function of looking (as in Gogol’s “Portrait”).

Finally, with the growing common interest in professional communities, the doctor became one of the most attractive protagonists in books and, most prominently, in TV series that show medical practitioners functioning in their natural environment, i.e. hospitals and clinics. Approaching our own time, we see that fictional doctors are the most “professionalized” characters, in contrast with the epoch of Russian literature considered in this study. We see them within their working space performing their professional duties. Although the intrigue usually concerns characters’ personal lives, nevertheless doctors are seen conducting tests and surgeries, with more or less physical manifestations of illnesses. TV shows, such as House MD, Scrubs, Gray’s

Anatomy, ER, and the Russian show Interns cast doctors as protagonists and as characters, both primary and secondary. If we compare this situation with nineteenth- century literature (Russian or European generally), we see a quite opposite correlation of forces. Instead of one or two doctors surrounded by laymen, medical practitioners fill the plot and turn the story into a completely professional space. In House MD the characters’ speech is saturated with the professional lexicon that the ordinary audience is not able (and not supposed) to comprehend. Looking back at the material explored in my dissertation, I would repeat the words of the cultural anthropologist that I quoted in relation to the case studies, that medicine “becomes and continues to be the popular entertainment.”291

Thus, after living through the latent stage of being a textual device, the medical

291 Rylance, “The Theater and the Granary,” 264.

174 gaze gradually overcame and transgressed the limits of fictional stories and started its own life: first, in the notes of popularized doctors’ notes about writers, then in medical fiction, and subsequently in medical studies of writers’ physical and mental conditions.

Similarly to Gogol’s Nose, this textual device emancipated and started living its own life and even evaluating the former host, fiction, from which it originated. And unlike a bizarre Gogolian character, the gaze never returns to its master but rather outlives it and continues its bold and independent existence within different genres of culture.

175

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