PRZHEVALSKY, NM 4 Proclivities. These Current

PRZHEVALSKY, N. M. 4 proclivities. These current events sank Cossack landowner, Przhevalsky finished into his mind, and the former plays no school at Smo!ensk in 1855 and entered slight role in thenovelist's depiction of the military service, becoming an officer in evolution of French society from the early the following year. In the summer of 1866 years of theThird Republic down to 1919. he met Robert Koecher, a young Pole of At the same time Proust was conscious of German ancestry who was to be the first of the complex, Protean quality of homo- his traveling companions. Each of sexuality itself, of the nuances and contra- Przhevalsky's expeditions into Central dictions that invalidate any formulawhich Asia was planned with the presence of a movement apologists were promoting as young male traveling companion between the politically correct understanding of sixteenand twenty-two. On theseprotkgks the matter in their effort to reform public he lavished expensive gifts, he sponsored opinion. Sometimes Proust created homo- their educations, and arranged for them to sexualstereotypesin order to shatter them, be commissioned as army officers; in re- utilizing the artist's freedom to project an turn they had to shun women, share his image and then reshape it. Internalized tent, and give him unquestioning obedi- self-hatred was not alien to his personal- ence. In the village of ~loboda(today ity, and from time to time it irrupts into Przheval'skoe) in the northern part of the the novel. But the total picture of homo- government of Smolensk he acquired a sexuality combines great structural and remote country estate where he was sur- expressive beauty with unprecedented rounded by a retinue of male visitors. insights into human nature, and the over- Throughout his life he basked in an all- all artistry of the novel resisted the ten- male ambience from which the presence dency of a still intolerant Western society of women was rigorously excluded. His to relegate the work to the "memory hole" biographers ascribe his loathing of the of literary oblivion. Proust was thus a coarseness and debauchery of the towns in trailblazer who made the literary treat- which he resided to the cultured side of his ment and analysis of homosexuality pos- personality; more likely he had little use sible, and reached an audience that would for the interests and preoccupations of the never have read a medical study or a heterosexual men who would otherwise movement brochure. In the emancipation have been his boon companions. of homosexuality from post-medieval Przhevalsky led four major expe- taboos, Marcel Proust played acentral and ditions: in 1870-73 to Mongolia, China, incomparable role. and Tibet, in 1876-77 to Central Asia (Lobnor and Dzhungar), in 1879-80 to BIBLIOGRAPHY. Henri Bonnet, Les Tibet, and in 1883-85 a second to Tibet. At amours et la sexualitd de Marcel Proust, Paris: A.-G. Nizet, 1985; George D. the start of a fifth expedition in the fall of Painter, Marcel Proust: A Biography, 2 1888 he died not far from Lake Issyk-Kul', vols., London: Chatto & Windus, where today his grave and museum are 1959-65; J. E. Rivers, Proust eS the Art of found in the city of Przheval'sk. Love: The Aesthetics of Sexuality in the Duringhis lifetime Przhevalskyfs Life, Times, d Art of Marcel Proust, New York: Columbia University Press, travels and the books in which he recorded 1980. them captured the imagination of a world- Warren Iohansson wide audience. His books were translated into English at a time when the classics of nineteenth-century Russian literaturewere barely glimpsed in Great Britain and the United States. He discovered species of Russian army officer, geographer, wild plants and animals that still bear his and explorer. Descended from a small name: poplar, rose, and rhododendron; -$ PRZHEVALSKY, N. M. gerbil, carp, and lizard; but above all Equus subjects. There is an assumption on the przewalskii, the only species of horse that part of the public-and often of psychia- survived undomesticated into modern trists themselves-that anything with times and caused a major revision of the which psychiatry deals falls into the cate- evolutionary history of the animal. gory of the pathological. The profession of WithFyodorEklon, whom hemet psychiatry has not always been interested in the summer of 1875, he had a liaison in the phenomenon of homosexuality, that lasteduntil the summer of 1883, when and when it has considered the subject its the youth summoned up the courage to approach has not been detached and tell him that he was to be married and that impartial, but reflected prevailing social he could not accompany him on the next attitudes, derived as these were from expedition to Tibet. This confession led to the cultural and religious beliefs of the a bitter scene and rupture, as Przhevalsky community. never forgave the women who deprived Origins of Psychiatry's Concern him of the male companionship that he with Homosexuality. It was only in the needed. But in the winter of 1881-82 he last third of the nineteenth century that met a distillery clerk, Pyotr Kozlov, who psychiatry began td study what it called proved to be "the youngmanwho hadbeen "sexual inversion," and it did so not spon- eluding him all his life: alert, submissive, taneously, but at the prompting of the loyal and handsome." Kozlov not only earliest spokesmen for the emerging accompanied his protector on his last and homosexual liberation movement, Karl most important journeys, but after his Heinrich Ulrichs and Kkoly MQriaKert- death went on to a distinguished career of beny. Thus it was not the psychiatrist's his own as explorer, archeologist, and own insight, or the data collected from author of travel books. He also fulfilled the patients under observation, that enabled dream that his mentor's premature death such authors as Karl Friedrich Otto prevented him from attaining: to visit Westphal and Richard Freiherr von Krafft- the forbidden city of Lhasa and meet the Ebing to reach the formulations which Dalai Lama. they published in their pioneering papers, Przhevalsky was a hunter and it was the claim of homophile writers that explorer who revived an almost archaic there were human beings without attrac- homosexual personality type: that of the tion to members of the opposite sex, but leader who willingly faces hardship and with a paradoxical inborn attraction to danger with only other males as compan- members of the same sex which they ions, and a younger male as his beloved experienced as perfectly natural and con- protCgC. sonant with their inner selves. However, the character of the BIBLIOGRAPHY. Donald Rayfield, The patient universe from which the earliest Dream of Lhasa: The Life of Nikolay Przhevalsky, Explorer of Central Asia, cases were drawn-mainly individuals Columbus, OH: Ohio State University observed in prisons, psychiatric wards, and Press, 1977. insane asylums-led the psychiatrists to Warren lohansson hold that sexual inversion was, if not an illness itself, at least a symptom of a psy- chopathic personality. At first homosexu- PSYCHIATRY ality was thought to be an extremely rare The discipline of psychiatry ad- condition: in fact the book published in dresses the problem of mental illness and 1885 by Julien Chevalier, De l'inversion its treatment, in contrast with psychol- de l'instinct sexuel, listed the total num- ogy, which is the academic study of men- ber of known cases in the entire world- tal processes and functions in human , 35! At that time the paper which Vladimir .

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