Russian Literature And Psychoanalysis

This is a collection of psychoanalytical essays on a broad spectrum of well-known Russian authors, such as Puskin, Dostoevsky, Gogol, Belyj, Tjutcev, Axmatova, and Nabokov. The volume includes some reprints, among which a contribution by Sigmund Freud on Dostoevsky and Parricide'. The majority of the contributions are original publications by present-day specialists in the field. This is a book which may benefit literary scholars as well as professional psychoanalysts.

This is a collection of psychoanalytical essays on a broad spectrum of well-known Russian authors, such as Puskin, Dostoevsky, Gogol, Belyj, Tjutcev, Axmatova, and Nabokov. The volume includes some reprints, among which a contribution by Sigmund Freud on Dostoevsky and Parricide'. The majority of the contributions are original publications by present-day specialists in the field. This is a book which may benefit literary scholars as well as professional psychoanalysts.

In the Russian modernist era, literature threw itself open to influences from other art forms, most particularly the visual arts. Collaborations between writers, artists, designers, and theatre and cinema directors took place more intensively and productively than ever before or since. Equally striking was the incursion of spatial and visual motifs and structures into verbal texts. Verbal and visual principles of creation joined forces in an attempt to transform and surpass life through art. Yet willed transcendence of the boundaries between art forms gave rise to confrontation and creative tension as well as to harmonious co-operation. This collection of essays by leading British, American and Russian scholars, first published in 2000, draws on a rich variety of material - from Dostoevskii to Siniavskii, from writers' doodles to cabarets, from well-known modernists such as Akhmatova, Malevich, Platonov and Olesha to less well-known figures - to demonstrate the creative power and dynamism of Russian culture 'on the boundaries'.

Freud's lifelong involvement with the Russian national character and culture is examined in James Rice's imaginative combination of history, literary analysis, and psychoanalysis. 'Freud's Russia' opens up the neglected "Eastern Front" of Freud's world--the Russian roots of his parents, colleagues, and patients. He reveals that the psychoanalyst was vitally concerned with the events in Russian history and its nineteenth-century cultural greats. Rice explores how this intense interest contributed to the evolution of psychoanalysis at every critical stage.Freud's mentor Charcot was a physician to the Tsar; his best friends in Paris were gifted Russian doctors; and some of his most valued colleagues (Max Eitingon, Moshe Wulff, Sabina Spielrein, and Lou Andreas-Salome) were also from Russia. These acquaintances intrigued Freud and precipitated his inquiry into the Russian psyche. Rice shows how Freud's major works incorporate elements, overtly and covertly, from his Russia. He describes Freud's most famous case, the Wolf-Man (Sergei Pankeev), and traces how his personality fused, in Freud's imagination, with that of Feodor Dostoevsky. Beyond this, Rice reveals the remarkable influence Dostoevsky had on Freud, surveying Freud's extensive library holdings and sources of biographical information on the Russian novelist.Initially inspired by the Freud-Jung letters that appeared in 1974, 'Freud's Russia' breaks new ground. Its fresh perspective will be of significant interest to psychoanalysts, historians of European culture, biographers of Freud, and students of Dostoevsky in comparative literature. It is a major work in fusing European intellectual history with the founding father of psychoanalysis.

This study explores Freud's influence in Russia during the 20th century, discussing the lives of the Russian Freudians. The author concludes that the oscillations in Russian attitudes toward Freud during Soviet rule reflected shifting tensions within Russian culture at large.

Marxism was not the only Western idea to influence the course of Russian history. In the early decades of this century, psychoanalysis was one of the most important components of Russian intellectual life. Freud himself, writing in 1912, said that "in Russia, there seems to be a veritable epidemic of psychoanalysis." But until Alexander Etkind's Eros of the Impossible, the hidden history of Russian involvement in psychoanalysis has gone largely unnoticed and untold. The early twentieth century was a time when the craving of Russian intellectuals for world culture found a natural outlet in extended sojourns in the West, linking some of the most creative Russian personalities of the day with the best universities, salons, and clinics of Germany, Austria, France, and Switzerland. These ambassadors of the Russian intelligentsia were also Freud's patients, students, and collaborators. They exerted a powerful influence on the formative phase of psychoanalysis throughout Europe, and they carried their ideas back to a receptive Russian culture teeming with new ideas and full of hopes of self-transformation. Fascinated by the potential of psychoanalysis to remake the human personality in the socialist mold, Trotsky and a handful of other Russian leaders sponsored an early form of Soviet psychiatry. But, as the Revolution began to ossify into Stalinism, the early promise of a uniquely Russian approach to psychoanalysis was cut short. An early attempt to merge medicine and politics forms final chapters of Etkind's tale, the telling of which has been made possible by the undoing of the Soviet system. The effervescent Russian contribution to modern psychoanalysis has gone unrecognized too long, but Eros of the Impossible restores this fascinating story to its rightful place in history.

Profiles the careers of Russian authors, scholars, and critics and discusses the history of the Russian treatment of literary genres such as drama, fiction, and essays

Brian James Baer explores the central role played by translation in the construction of modern Russian literature. Peter I's policy of forced Westernization resulted in translation becoming a widely discussed and highly visible practice in Russia, a multi-lingual empire with a polyglot elite. Yet Russia's accumulation of cultural capital through translation occurred at a time when the Romantic obsession with originality was marginalizing translation as mere imitation. The awareness on the part of Russian writers that their literature and, by extension, their cultural identity were “born in translation” produced a sustained and sophisticated critique of Romantic authorship and national identity that has long been obscured by the nationalist focus of traditional literary studies. By offering a re-reading of seminal works of the Russian literary canon that thematize translation, alongside studies of the circulation and reception of specific translated texts, Translation and the Making of Modern Russian Literature models the long overdue integration of translation into literary and cultural studies.