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

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/us/

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

© 2012 by Ekaterina Neklyudova. All Rights Reserved.

Re-distributed by Stanford University under license with the author.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.

ii

I certify that I have read this dissertation and that, in my opinion, it is fully adequatein 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 adequatein 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 adequatein 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 inUniversity Archives.

iii

iv

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.

v

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.

vi

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,

vii

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.

viii

Table of Contents

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

Copyright Page……………………………………………………………………… ii

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

ix

Chapter 8: Unmasking Society: Observer, Mediator and

Messenger………………………………………………….. 144

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

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

1

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

2

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

3

“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

4

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

5

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)

6

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).

7

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.

8

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

9

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.

10

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).

11

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

12

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)

13

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.

14

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

15

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

16

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

17

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.

18

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

19

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

20

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

21

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

22

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

23

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

24

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 “<the truth>, 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

25

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.

26

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

27

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

28

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

29

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

30

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

31

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 <the doctor> 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 18

th 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

32

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.

33

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

34

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

35

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

36

“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.

37

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

38

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

39

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

40

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

41

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

42

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.

43

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

44

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

45

“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 “<j>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

46

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

.

47

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

48

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

49

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

50

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)

51

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

52

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

53

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

54

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

55

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

56

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:

57

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.

58

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

59

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:

60

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

61

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

62

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

63

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

64

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

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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

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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.

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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

68

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

69

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.

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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

71

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

72

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).

73

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

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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.

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

80

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

81

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.

82

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

83

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

84

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)

85

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

86

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.

87

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

88

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

89

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

90

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).

91

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.

92

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

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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)

94

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

95

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

96

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).

97

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.”

98

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

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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

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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

101

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

102

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

103

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.

106

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)

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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

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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)

109

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.

111

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.

112

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

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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

114

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

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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

116

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,

117

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”

118

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

119

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).

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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

121

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

122

(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

124

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

125

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

126

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

127

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).

128

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

129

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

130

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

131

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

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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

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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

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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.

135

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

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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

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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, 20

th,

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

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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

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presented to the inexperienced eye of Pavel Petrovich:

Впрочем, он <Pavel Petrovich. – EN> 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

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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

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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).

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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

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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

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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

147

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

148

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

149

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

150

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.

151

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

152

“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

153

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)

154

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

155

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

156

“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

157

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

158

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

159

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.

160

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

161

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.

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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.

163

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

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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

165

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.

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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.

167

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.)

168

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

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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

170

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).

171

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.

172

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)

173

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

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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.

175

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.

176

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