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The anatomy of the drives: an intellectual history of psychoanalysis in Russia from 1905 to 1930
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Content
The Anatomy of the Drives:
An Intellectual History of Psychoanalysis in Russia from 1905 to 1930
by
Nikita Allgire
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(COMPARATIVE STUDIES IN LITERATURE AND CULTURE
SLAVIC LANGUAGES AND LITERATURES)
August 2023
Copyright 2023 Nikita Allgire
ii
Dedicated to Laura.
iii
Acknowledgements
This dissertation project has been long in the making. It has taken me through several
years of historical study within a protracted time of global pandemic and geopolitical turmoil.
The war between Russia and Ukraine breaking out on 24 February 2022, still ongoing as of this
writing, has thrown the field of Slavic Studies into disarray. Inevitably, this event influenced the
project and, admittedly, prompted much unproductive thinking—about relevancy, and so on,
weighing heavily on its development. The solidarity, however, shown by the field regarding
Ukraine has been inspirational, to say the least. History also shows the importance and necessity
of independent scholarly endeavor, of creativity, despite extraneous conditions. I am very
fortunate to have the means to pursue research with the minimal conditions of bodily safety, and
I hope for a speedy end to war and victory for those struggling, especially scholars.
A recent article in The Guardian by British Russophone journalist, Peter Pomerantsev,
refers to the Russian character as revealing “a predisposition toward morbid feelings” and a
tendency to “sink back into inorganic matter.” The reference is to Alexander Etkind’s first study
of the history of psychoanalysis in Russia, specifically to the work of Sabina Spielrein, a Russian
psychoanalyst from Rostov-on-Don, Russia, the city where I was born. As it happens, I attended
a preschool located on the same street as the daycare center Spielrein established there.
Pomerantsev / Etkind write that Spielrein gave Freud the initial idea for his concept of the death
drive, what he developed as a way to understand the human condition and its motivations, a new
aspect of the psyche informed by the devastation of the First World War. Freud wrote that
underlying the basic drives of human motivation toward pleasure, a more general pull revealed
itself, which Freud glimpsed in the behaviors of demobilized soldiers—the compulsion to repeat
traumatic memories. Seeing reflections of my own research framed in this way has not been very
iv
pleasant, and Pomerantsev seems to suggest that Russians possess a national essence, a
potentially slippery slope into troubled waters. If anything, these recent references to the death
drive mean that war inevitably produces generations and scores of psychologically broken
people, those lucky enough to survive.
In such dim light, I cannot ethically support the material escalation of any side in the
current conflict, and so I dedicate this project to the basic necessity of dialogue between parties,
a negotiated path forward to declaring peace in the region. How such a view (which I hold firmly
as an American, Russian, and a citizen of the world) is named the “naïve position” today is also
baffling to me. If we continue following the logic of escalation, Pomerantsev’s diagnosis of the
Russian character, then, will emphatically apply to all of us, not just Russians, as desiring to
“sink back into inorganic matter.” Not so for my family in Ukraine or Russia. I will say no more
except, let reason prevail (though the Freudian in me remains pessimistic).
There are many people I would like to thank for helping me complete this project. I
appreciate encouragement received during the UC/NCP Interdisciplinary Psychoanalytic
Consortium conference at Lake Arrowhead in 2019, which was a mix of clinicians and scholars
interested in psychoanalysis. Thanks is extended to the kind people at the PsyArt group and their
annual conference on “Psychoanalysis in Literature,” which I attended and where I workshopped
material in 2023, as well as the AATSEEL and ACLA conferences. The helpful librarians at the
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Libraries aided the early stages of research, along with
librarians at the Library of Congress, the Hoover Institute, and the staff at the Trotsky House
Museum in Mexico City. Thank you to Jayson Lantz for many constructive conversations on
themes broached in the dissertation and to Joti Makaspak, Dmitrii Kuznetsov, and Caity
Giustiniano for keeping our Pomodoro writing group on task. Thanks to Seth Alt, Jeffrey Adams,
v
and other member in the psychoanalytic theory reading group, who read drafts of the
dissertation, gave helpful feedback, and provided great (virtual) intellectual company during the
lowliest months of pandemic lockdowns. Anna Titov and Daria Donchenko graciously provided
assistance with the images (respectively, David Černý’s statue of Freud in Prague and of the
Riabushinskii Mansion in Moscow).
Thank you to the faculty and staff at the Departments of Slavic Languages and
Literatures and Comparative Studies in Literature and Culture at the University of Southern
California for providing the material, intellectual, and spiritual support to complete this project.
Professor Thomas Seifrid, who, in role of Doktorvater, patiently read through several iterations
of chapter drafts, gave invaluable advice and guidance. Thanks go to you and the other
committee members, Sally Pratt and Paul Lerner, and, to the honorary member, Susan. Finally,
thank you to my family and friends for their support.
vi
Table of Contents
Dedication: ................................................................................................................................ ii
Acknowledgements: ................................................................................................................. iii
List of Figures: ........................................................................................................................ vii
Note on the Text: ................................................................................................................... viii
Abstract: ................................................................................................................................... ix
Introduction: Anatomies of the Drives ......................................................................................1
Chapter 1: Playing Inside the Abyss: Kaan’s Nisus Formativus
and Nikolai Gumilev’s Veselye brat’ia ..................................................................20
Chapter 2: Character is Fate: Blumenbach’s Bildungstrieb
and Psychoanalytic Influences in Marietta Shaginian’s Svoia sud’ba ..................73
Chapter 3: Reimarus's Kunsttrieb in the Early Marx
and the Spontaneity/Consciousness Paradigm in Gladkov’s Tsement .................114
Chapter 4: Psychoanalysis at the Core of Soviet Philosophical Monism:
“Autogenetic Movement” and Mikhail Bulgakov’s Sobach’e serdtse ................154
Chapter 5: « В Индию Ду ха к у пить билет»:
The Creative Drive and Vsevolod Ivanov’s Novel Y ...........................................203
Chapter 6: “The Fairer the Paper the Fouler the Blot”: Tynianov’s
Podporuchik Kizhe between Russian Formalism and Psychoanalysis ................244
Conclusion: ............................................................................................................................275
Bibliography: .........................................................................................................................301
Appendix A: Timeline of Psychoanalysis in Pre- and Post-Revolutionary Russia ...............313
vii
List of Figures
Figure 1: “Man Hanging Out” by David Černý .........................................................................1
Figure 2: Boris Yeltsin’s Presidential Decree of 1996 ..........................................................293
Figure 3: The Riabushinskii Mansion during the Soviet period ............................................313
Figure 4: The Riabushinskii Mansion in 2023 .......................................................................321
viii
Note on the Text
The dissertation uses the Library of Congress transliteration system to render Russian text
into Roman script and to transliterate most Russian names ( Александр Воронский – Aleksandr
Voronskii), except for well-known names, such as Gorky or Tolstoy. Cyrillic script is maintained
in longer, indented excerpts and shorter passages within the paragraphs. The MLA 9
th
edition is
used throughout for citing sources in-text and in the Bibliography.
ix
Abstract
The thesis examines the arrival of classical psychoanalysis in the Russian / Soviet
context, prior to the period of Stalinism. It argues that what allowed psychoanalysis to pass the
break of the October Revolution and flourish in the 1920s was the notion of the “drives”
(Triebe). This concept helps explain how Freudian thought became distributed between
incompatible schools in the works of Soviet materialist thinkers, expatriate religious
philosophers, and the remarkable work of several modernist artists of the period. It synthesizes
several historical studies on philosophy, psychology, and psychoanalysis in connection to the
concept of the drives. Furthermore, since literature has frequently played the role of
psychological education in Russia, the thesis develops this history alongside discussion of under-
examined literary case studies. These texts explicitly feature psychoanalysts as characters and
psychodynamic concepts as central, thematic motifs—what I name “Russian psychoanalytic
novels.” While publicly critical of the rapid spread of psychoanalysis in the popular imagination,
these authors were nevertheless inspired by psychodynamic lines of thought, in which case
studies read like literary texts themselves. With the arrival of Stalinism, psychoanalysis became a
prohibited practice, as it was further associated with the “Left Opposition” group allying itself
with Trotsky, a vocal supporter of the Freudian movement within the state apparatus.
1
Introduction
Anatomies of the Drives
Увы! не довольно надеть му рмолку, чтобы сделаться твоим Эдипом, о
всероссийский сфинкс!
—Turgenev
If I cannot bend the Higher Powers, I will move the Infernal Regions.
—Virgil (Epigraph to The Interpretation of Dreams)
People do not understand how what is borne in different directions comes to be in
agreement with itself; [for] a framework like that of the bow and the lyre turns back [on
itself].
—Heraclitus
Figure 1: David Černý, “Man Hanging Out” (1996), Prague, Czechia. (Photo credit: Anna
Titov, 2023)
2
In Prague, there is an unusual statue depicting Sigmund Freud hanging by one hand from
a post horizontally projected out of a wall. Installed in the early aughts by the artist David Černý,
the life-sized statue hangs precariously several stories above street level, stretching over a kind
of abyss and cutting a somewhat lonely, if not absurd, figure. This image of Freud is emblematic
for this dissertation. Allegedly, some days after it was unveiled, emergency crews responded to
alarmed callers reporting on a man about to plummet to his death. “Stop!” the Czech policie
must have said. “There is no emergency. Do not call us again.” The good Samaritans who acted
on instinct and reported the statue, mistaking it for a real person, surely had good intentions. It
was their position in relation to the statue, based on a certain image, which provided a false
motivation to raise the alarm.
This dissertation is in large part about motivation and the general question of whether
motivation impels from inside or compels a person from without. It is also primarily about
Russia and certain transformations it underwent at particular junctures in its history having much
to do with motivation as well as large, sometimes fantastical, motivating forces. In the most
general terms, it is about the influence of psychoanalysis on the Russian and Soviet intellectual
scene between the years of the first, “failed” Revolution of 1905 and the consolidation of Stalin’s
power in the 1930s.
In this volatile period, it is perhaps surprising to note that psychoanalysis flourished in
Russia unlike any other place in the world and, what is more, survived the radical upheaval of
the 1917 October Revolution. Seen by some to have been predicted by Dostoevsky in works like
Besy (1872) and Brat’ia Karamazovy (1880), this is an historical event lending itself most aptly
to psychoanalytic interpretation—that of an Oedipal uprising of “brothers” uniting to oust (and
murder) the tsar, or “little father,” in order to possess Mother Russia (Rossiia Matushka). As both
3
Dostoevsky and Freud wrote (the latter very much inspired by the former), such a patricide
would unleash fratricidal violence, as this one did, implying a consistent pattern to revolutions,
in that they tend to devour their own children.
While less interested in such grand gestures of applied psychoanalysis, this dissertation
looks at the history of psychoanalysis in Russia in light of the widespread usage of the concept of
the drives—a technical term from psychoanalysis with a restricted meaning—which also has a
longer pre-history related to notions like the instincts, impulses, and other “energistic” concepts
lying at the frontier between the mental and the somatic.
1
Having a greater pre-history before that
of psychoanalysis proper, but that which, however, finds its apotheosis in psychoanalysis, the
concept of drives is what allowed Freudian thought to pass the break of 1917 and flourish in the
1920s in the Soviet context. The dissertation begins with this claim, which explains how
Freudian thought became distributed between incompatible schools in the works of Soviet
materialist thinkers as well as expatriate religious philosophers. While perhaps a more marginal
concept than what Irina Sirotkina calls the “ubiquitous reflex,” the drives were still a prominent
idea of the time and a detailed study of its presence in the Russian context is perhaps overdue.
My ultimate aim, then, is to re-organize the history of psychoanalysis in Russia by
reading the various moments of this history alongside the articulation and development of the
drives (in German, Triebe; in Russian, vlechenie ( влечение); also translated into English as
1
For an overview definition of “drive” within the properly psychoanalytic tradition, see the entry
“Instinct (or Drive)” in Laplanche and Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis (1988), 214-17;
and the entry “Drive” in Porte, The International Dictionary of Psychoanalysis, 444-48. Within
the larger framework of intellectual history, see the title entry in Cassin and Randall, eds.,
Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon (2014), 230-35. See also a recent
collection proceding from an international conference on the drives within the history of
philosophy, Kisner and Jörg, The Concept of Drvie in Classical German Philosphy: Between
Biology, Anthropology, and Metaphysics (2022).
4
“instinct” and “impulse”). In its various guises, this concept was used to trouble the dualistic
opposition between the mind and body, what was taken up in the 1920s by those Freudo-
Marxists who believed in unconscious motivating forces.
However, there quickly entered a complication that can be read as a kind of historical
irony: at the moment his system was enthusiastically taken up by some Russian and Soviet
intellectuals, Freud’s early phase, with its mechanistic-hydraulic model of the psyche, came to an
end. By the early 1920s, and following the devastation of the First World War, Freud largely
abandoned attempting to resolve the mind/body problem and produced his “second topology” in
The Ego and the Id and Beyond the Pleasure Principle. From then on, Freud shifted his energies
into elaborating interpretations of social phenomena, as in Group Psychology and the Analysis of
the Ego, Totem and Taboo, Moses and Monotheism, and other texts. The reason for this shift was
due to the introduction of the speculative concept of the death drive, which is perhaps the most
salient appearance of drive theory in relation to Russia, as a movement in the opposite
direction—Russia’s influence upon psychoanalysis in Sabina Spielrein’s concept of the
compulsion towards death (vlecheni е k smerti). The thesis claims that it was Spielrein’s article
“Destruction as Cause of Coming into Being” of 1912, which first prompted Freud to reconsider
his drive theory (Spielrein is at the origin of Freud’s “letting go,” as it were, of the handhold of
materialism), freeing him to play with more speculative material of the later period.
The following six chapters connect the drives to the Russian/Soviet context in what can
be divided into three sections, characterized as idealist, materialist, and aesthetic approaches to
the drives. The first two chapters deal with the idealist philosophical legacy of the drives during
the period of the arrival of psychoanalysis to Imperial Russia at about 1905, particularly that of
Schiller’s Spieltrieb and the Bildungstrieb of Goethe. Chapters Three and Four enter after the
5
break of the October Revolution and examine the influence of Reimarus’s Kunsttrieb on Marx’s
conception of labor power and the Spontaneity/Consciousness paradigm of Lenin and the
Bolsheviks, developing the ways in which psychoanalysis contributed to the philosophical
debates between the Mechanists and Dialecticians of the 1920s. Chapters Five and Six look at
Soviet intellectual debates in a different register, that of aesthetics, such as the
psychoanalytically-informed theories of creativity developed by Aleksandr Voronskii, Vladimir
Vysheslavtsev, Aleksandr Gorskii, and others. Chapter Six in particular describes the relation
between psychoanalysis and Russian Formalism in the light of an original onomastic drive.
The chapters to come present the ways the concept of drives itself diachronically
transformed to new articulations and paradigms during a period of intense intellectual and social
activity. By keeping the idea of the drives as the object and destination, I present an
organizational principle that allows to coherently approach psychoanalysis within the
Russian/Soviet context in a novel, yet hopefully non-contrived, way and to productively integrate
previous scholarship on the matter hitherto kept largely apart.
Why Freud?
Upon its entry into Russia, psychoanalysis inevitably came in contact with a prominent
intellectual feature in Russian thought at the beginning of the twentieth century: a maximalist
tendency toward universalizing concepts and synthesis, conveyed by the Russian term for
spiritual community, sobornost’. A curious effect of modernization transpired in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth century that had a particular intensity in Russia. Suddenly,
religious philosophers became preoccupied with the rapid discoveries of empirical science, while
6
materialists impatient with the slow crawl of methodical science, yet buoyed by its seemingly
endless potential of discovery, speculated on the existence and nature of the mystical soul.
Whatever their positions, intellectuals from various camps shared in the search for a
totalizing model of reality—a new scientific monism, as it was called in some philosophical
circles, a resurgence of Hegel’s “Absolute Knowledge,” or, to use a more contemporary term by
E.O. Wilson, of consilience. As a European import into Russia at its period of international
inception (when Freud sent Ferenczi to Hungary, Fromm to Berlin, and Jung to Switzerland),
psychoanalysis offered important intellectual capital for the gamut of thinkers in search of a new,
totalizing paradigm of reality. Thus, I begin with the image of the Freud statue because it depicts
the special way psychoanalytic thought, one may say, hangs suspended by a thread over abyssal
and idealist-like conjurings, while retaining a (more or less) firm grip on material reality.
2
This kind of conceptual “stretching” to connect two separated domains (captured in the
hanging Freud statue above) echoes a spatial metaphor for the mind that Trotsky uses in a letter
written to Ivan Pavlov in 1923, published in Pravda. The Bolshevik leader attempted to convince
Russia’s first Nobel Prize winner of combining his concept of conditioned reflexes with the
concept of the Freudian drives by using a peculiar metaphor of a well for the human psyche:
Фрейдисты похожи на людей, глядящих в глу б окий и довольно му тный
колодезь. Они перестал и верить в то, что этот колодезь есть бездна ( бездна
“ ду ши”). Они видят, или угадывают, дно ( физиологию) и делают даже ряд
2
And while it may seem there is no explicit connection to Russia regarding the sculpture, Prague
serves as the conclusion to one of several threads to the story of Russian psychoanalysis. Nikolai
Evgrafovich Osipov, the first popularizer of psychoanalysis in Russia, would emigrate to Prague
several years after the Bolshevik Revolution to establish the Czech school of psychoanalysis
(Etkind, Eros 4).
7
остроу мны х и интересных, но нау ч но- произвольных догадок о свойствах
дна, определяющих свойство вод ы в колодце. (Trotsky 959)
Here, the Freudians look over the edge of the well of the psyche from the vantage point of
speech, reason, and culture, guessing at the contents lying at the bottom (and correlating activity
above to the circulation and currents of the waters below—i.e., the drives and their vicissitudes);
while Pavlov, toiling in the sediments of bodily reflexes, works upwards from the physiological
base to explain culture, or what he termed “higher nervous activity.” In a paper of the 1920s that
also tried to link the Freudian drives to reflexes, a young Alexander Luria channeled this line of
monistic thought.
Its [psychoanalysis] concept of drive is rigorously monistic, as is its view of the
individual in general. Indeed, drive is not a psychological phenomenon in the
strict sense, since it includes the effects of somatic and nervous stimuli and of the
endocrine system and its chemistry, and often has no clear-cut psychological cast
at all. We should be more inclined to consider drive a concept at the “borderline
between the mental and the somatic” (Freud). The dualism of the old psychology
is thus completely discarded. (22)
In such a way, Trotsky, Luria, and other Freudo-Marxists conceived the drives as being
coterminous with the reflexes, seeing psychoanalytic materialism as able to overcome the
various dualisms that psychological approaches to understanding the human mind generated. For
a short period, psychoanalysis came to represent, not an idealist metaphysics, but a scientifically-
acknowledged study of a certain remainder of the self within a hyper-positivist context, with its
tendency toward mechanical reductionism. Indeed, for several years, there prevailed a “regime of
relevance” (to use Galin Tihanov’s terminology) in which the discoveries of the psychoanalytic
8
method were accepted as descriptions of a motivational device that was psychological in nature.
This entailed that psychoanalysis studied the mind from a monistic, dialectical, and materialistic
point of view. For the debates over psychology, which took place within the “mechanist
controversy” of the 1920s, it became important to think at this level of theoretical abstraction,
one that overcame psychophysical parallelism.
These debates broke out over the specificities of philosophical materialism, which had as
an important component various opposing views on human subjectivity and consciousness. The
October Revolution placed an ideological filter on the debates that ipso facto precluded
attributions of immaterial, idealistic forces acting upon subjectivity and reality, such as the spirit,
God, etc. As an agent within history embedded in the environment, the subject could no longer
be explained as containing a spiritual essence guiding his behavior, or of reality having a
transcendental force behind it which lay at its origins and which guided its fate. The debate over
materialism split according to a mechanist position that saw nature and human behavior as
reducible to empirical, measurable displays of its underlying material substance. This was a view
that quickly ran into problems within the realm of psychology, which became a privileged terrain
on which the debate over materialism occurred. The opposing, dialectical position refuted the
idea that the mental and conscious realm could be completely reduced to the mechanical or
physiological movement of the body, reflexes, or the neurological substrate of the brain, which
could be divided into its constituent parts, measured, and studied, something that Trotsky seemed
to have understood from the quotation above. Some indivisible remainder, as contemporary
theorists may say, always insisted, one that could not be attributed to, again, a transcendental
principle.
9
While consciousness arises from the physiological substrate of the body, it follows its
own laws, which dialectics claims to take into account with the principle of qualitative change,
or in modern parlance, related to that of “emergent” properties. This was also called by the
dialecticians “autogenetic movement,” which this thesis will connect to the Freudian drives. As
Raymond Bauer writes in The New Man in Soviet Psychology: “[T]he argument of the
mechanists and the dialecticians concerning whether force is a construct external to the system or
the system has “self-movement” was repeated in psychology, and with the same result. The new
position was that the system has autogenetic movement, and man is purposive.” (Bauer 98) The
ideas of spontaneity and “autogenic movement” will become important to the role of
psychoanalysis in the 1920s “philosophical debates” (Chapters Three and Four), taking place
between the mechanists and dialecticians, in which figures like Luria above participated.
Scholarship on psychoanalysis and Russia
Much has been written on psychoanalysis within the Russian context, which is made
difficult by the complexity of the matter and the many dimensions to the seemingly simple
endeavor of juxtaposing Russia and psychoanalysis. The multiplicity of sources attests to the fact
that it has been a source of deeply-engaged scholarship in the Slavic field, as well as to the fact
that this wealth of sources has not been satisfactorily ordered and studied. This section will aim
to sketch the dimensions and the main vectors in a kind of conceptual montage and elaborate the
material alongside the organizing principle.
Beginning in the 1940s while psychoanalysis was prohibited under Stalin, several
western studies in anthropology practiced “applied psychoanalysis” upon the so-called Russian
character, most famously by John Rickman and Geoffrey Gorer, whose theoretical methodology
10
was defended by Margaret Mead.
3
Their controversial “swaddling hypothesis” saw the Russian
character structure rooted in educational practices of early childhood and specifically in the then-
common practice of swaddling. This marked the Russian subject with a proclivity toward
authoritarian submission, born out by numerous examples from Russia’s historical record and,
furthermore, glimpsed in the etymological connection between “Slav” and the Latin word for
“slave,” or “sclavus.” Shortly after this study, in an expanded edition of Childhood and Society
(1950), an influential work by German expat psychoanalyst Erik Erikson, the general Russian
character structure was examined from a psychobiographical reading of Maxim Gorky’s life and
literary output. This approach was further developed by Daniel Rancour-Lafferiere in the 1990s
with the concept of “moral masochism,” which he used to illustrate a unique feature of Russian
culture with ample thick-description taken from Russia’s thousand-year written record—its
cultural elevation and celebration of suffering.
4
What these studies show is the close proximity between anthropological readings of the
potential structure of the Russian soul/character/type and literature as the medium through which
larger social tendencies are extrapolated into more or less stable models of a general Russian
type. Chapter One will utilize these resources and sketch the arrival of psychoanalysis into
Russia as it related to the “crisis of psychology” within the larger discourse of philosophy and
3
The original study by Gorer and Rickman was titled The People of Great Russia: A
Psychological Study (1949), reprinted under the title Russian Culture (2001); Mead published a
defense of the original study in “The Swaddling Hypothesis: Its Reception,” American
Anthropologist, 56:3 (1954). In fact, however, another psychoanalytic study was made by the
object-relations theorist Ronald Fairbairn, called “The Sociological Significance of Communism
Considered in the Light of Psychoanalysis” much earlier, in 1935.
4
Rancour-Lafferiere’s The Slave Soul of Russia: Moral Masochism and the Cult of Suffering
(1996) generated many heated replies in the western Slavic field, with predictable reactions of
personal insult from native speakers, glimpsed in various reviews and in the logs of the
SEELANGS listerv.
11
history of science, what was a proliferation of divergent positions on the study of the mind.
According to Foucault, it was the work of Heinrich Kaan, which led to the establishment of
secular categories of mental illness on a different basis than the spiritual problems arising from
committing sin. Kaan is at the origin of the psychogenic paradigm, which connected aberrant
behavior to a disturbance of drives (his term is nisus formativus) by the action of the
imagination, or phantasia morbosa—an overwhelming of the will by imaginary fantasy. The role
of imagination and the disturbance of drives for mental illness was transferred to the new
psychiatric schools that emerged at the end of the nineteenth century, the various schools of
hypnosis and, consequently, psychoanalysis. The chapter will provide a reading of Nikolai
Gumilev’s unfinished fictional text Veselye brat’ia (1918), in which for the first time in Russian
literature the protagonist is presented as a psychoanalyst—“ Человек с высшим образованием,
занимавшийся психоанализом” (Gumilev). The protagonist-analyst, Nikolai Petrovich
Mezentsov, “goes to the people” deep within the Russian heartland at the outskirts of Perm, to
conduct anthropological research for the Fourth Department of the Academy of Science in
Petrograd. What he stumbles upon is a sect of Old Believers, hinted to be the Skoptsy, adepts at
hypnosis conspiring to overturn western science itself. They wish to introduce false data into
scientific journals, sowing chaos into the scientific worldview they believe rests on a set of false
premises (such as the indestructability of matter). One of the members of the sect describes the
ontology of the sect’s philosophical system, which will be developed in connection to
psychoanalysis, hypnosis, and Kaan’s nisus formativus.
Chapter Two continues to develop the history of psychoanalysis before the October
Revolution in connection to the activities of the sanatorium Kriukovo outside of Moscow, which
was run by the leading Russian analysts at the time. It also examines the teleological aspect to
12
Goethe’s Bildungstrieb and the widespread metaphor of “fate,” particularly as it appears in
Marietta Shaginian’s novel Svoia sud’ba (written in 1916; published in 1923). The chapter
described how Shaginian’s close relationship with Emilii Metner, Ivan Il’in, and Andrei Belyi
put her in contact with the growing trend of psychoanalysis, which was one of the factors
underlying the breakup of Symbolism. A bitter argument broke out between Belyi and Metner,
the former under the influence of Rudolph Steiner’s Anthroposophy, the latter by that of
psychoanalysis after being analyzed by Freud in Vienna. The argument revolved around the
figure of Goethe and his use of the Bildungstrieb—a life force that compels the organism to
unfold in a predetermined fashion and to a predetermined end. The Symbolists argued over
Goethe’s belief in such a drive, which received a correction by Kant, who, after initially
accepting it, later rejected the Bildungstrieb because it deigned to overstep the bounds of
knowledge (what I call a firewall) and claim to know the “plan” of organic development, what
must be an imaginary construction. Metner argued that Goethe heeded Kant’s warning and
accused Belyi and the Anthroposophists of repeatedly confusing reality with their imaginary
constructions. In Svoia sud’ba, Shaginian weaves these concepts and her experiences with
Metner and Belyi into a plot taking place at a sanatorium in the mountains of the Caucasus, in
which psychoanalysis and theosophical ideas are pitted against each other. Rejecting both,
Shaginian presents an original psychotherapeutic system that is developed by the fictional
sanatorium director.
Philosophical idealism became increasingly attacked in the new worker’s state following
the Bolshevik Revolution, the leading philosophers and intellectuals of this school being
expelled from the RSFSR in 1922 on the two Philosopher’s Ships. As Eric Laursen writes,
13
In the Soviet Union of the 1920s we can see a ubiquitous “biologizing” of society
and of the human mind; in many fields, people were seen to be controlled by
drives and instincts that could be directed by a guiding force. Two prominent
examples are the work on conditioning by Ivan Pavlov and the work of the Soviet
Freudians. Instinct could be brought under the control of consciousness in the
same way that Pavlov retrained his dogs and the Soviet Freudians sought to
retrain the societal psyche, so that the collective base drives or instincts of society
could be guided by a healthy collective ego. Primitive drives and instincts could
be controlled by conscious understanding and guided in the “appropriate”
direction. (70)
To reiterate, the reason why Marxist-leaning intellectuals gravitated to the idea of the
drives has to do with the problem of connecting a social theory like Marxism to the level of
individual psychology.
5
The drives were also seen as a conceptual tool for deepening the Marxist
understanding of historical progress itself, of grasping how the central dialectic in Marxism-
Leninism—that of the relation of spontaneity (stikhiinost’) to consciousness (soznatel’nost’)—
operated at the level of a singular subject. This binary, traced by the Bolshevik scholar Leopold
Haimson to Lenin’s What Is to Be Done? (1902), established a decades-long paradigm in
American Soviet studies of the ideology of Marxism-Leninism. The paradigm was applied by
5
Frank Brenner has argued that Marxism lacks a theory of individual psychology and elaborates
possible supplements to it by way of psychoanalytic concepts. See his “Psychoanalysis and the
“Empty Place” of Psychology within Marxism.” A similar move took place for the western
Marxists, such as that of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory: “In the thirties, under the
tutelage of the psychoanalyst Erich Fromm, at that time a member of both institutes, the Critical
Theorists turned to psychoanalysis to make up for a fundamental deficiency in Marxian theory,
namely, its lack of a psychology and its almost total disregard for the so-called subjective
dimension” (Whitebook 2).
14
Katerina Clark in her pioneering work on official Soviet literature as the ideological key to the
master plot of the socialist realist novel.
6
Several scholars have questioned how accurate this paradigm of the Bolsheviks’
conception of the singular worker is, which privileges one term over the other and, in the last
analysis, reduces the worker to rational consciousness alone. Along with Reginald Zelnik and
Eric Laursen, Anna Krylova has re-emphasized “the extra-conscious (that is, the ‘spontaneous,’
the instinctual, and the emotional)” by introducing the concept of class instinct (klassovyi
instinct, klassovoe chut’ie) as a neglected aspect in fully comprehending the Bolshevik project
(2). Krylova argues that the spontaneity-consciousness model is derived from earlier political
theory of the Social Democrats, which significantly evolved in a new direction with Lenin’s
writings immediately following the revolution of December 1905. Such a development in
Lenin’s thinking occurred a full three years after What Is to Be Done? and should weaken
Haimson and Clark’s argumentation. Thus, Kyrlova writes:
The “true nature” of the working class that Lenin discovered in the 1905
revolution revealed itself to him not through workers’ conscious revolutionary
initiative, as had been expected, but through an “instinctive urge” (instinktivno
rvetsia) that the workers “felt” (pochuvstvovali) for open revolutionary action.
Lenin granted to his discovery a creative and purposeful dimension. (16)
6
As Clark writes: “The subtext that does shape the master plot is another fundamental idea of
Marxism-Leninism, one that is a somewhat declassé and more abstract version of the class-
struggle account of history. In this version, historical progress occurs not by resolving class
conflict but through the working-out of the so-called spontaneity/consciousness dialectic. In this
dialectical model, “consciousness” is disciplined, and guided by politically aware bodies.
“Spontaneity,” on the other hand, means actions that are not guided by complete political
awareness and are either sporadic, uncoordinated, even anarchic (such as wildcat strikes, mass
uprisings, etc.), or can be attributed to the workings of vast impersonal historical forces rather
than to deliberate actions.” (Clark 15)
15
Lenin’s resort to instinctual drives, feelings, and senses in his analysis of the
revolution of 1905 did not invent the extra-conscious dimension for the Social
Democratic discourse on the worker’s personality. What Lenin did was to
reinscribe the romantic-populist notion of the instinctual and the spontaneous
back into the center of the revolutionary identity and give the extra-conscious
back its history-making capabilities. (18)
Whatever the outcome of the scholarly debate between Krylova and Clark, I read this as a
conflict over the centrality of drive at the very core of the Soviet project, coded here in
explicit psychoanalytic terms (the language used by Krylova almost makes it seem that
Lenin was himself “spontaneously Freudian”!).
Chapter Three argues why that is: the idea of Kunsttrieb by the German natural
philosopher Reimarus (responsible for coining the very term “Triebe”) was highly influential on
the early Marx, who may have encrypted this idea into the concept of labor power, fundamental
to Marxist philosophy. The young Marx was interested in the difference between the activity of
humans and animals, as Reimarus described in his work, by cataloguing dozens of instincts
particular to the animal world in a hierarchy, the top of which was the domain of human drives,
Kunsttrieb, separating human activity from that of animals on a qualitatively different basis.
Marx wrote on Reimarus during researching for his dissertation on Epicurus. Years later, in Das
Kapital, Marx’s thought still arguably bore traces of Reimarus, as when he wrote: “A spider
conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect
in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is
this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality” (284).
16
Here, the power of the imagination, the ability to conceive a plan for action, and then intervene
into natural reality and carry it through, marks the difference between humans and animals.
This is relevant to the dissertation because the period of the early 1920s had a distinct
interest in the unpublished early works of Marx during his time as a Left Hegelian, which the
Soviets studied under the tutelage of the “Old Bolshevik” Riazanov, whose scholarship on the
early Marx and the history of the labor movement would come to influence those of the
Frankfurt School, György Lukács (Riazanov’s employee at the Institute of Red Professors), and
the critical left. Riazanov’s research fed into the conception of two distinct periods in the
development of Marx’s thought, that of the “humanist” Marx of the early period under the
influence of the natural philosopher Reimarus and the later “socially scientific” Marx. The
Marxist connection, via Reimarus, to the long history of the drives will be made in this chapter
via a reading of Fedor Gladkov’s Tsement, the novel that serves as the central case of the
spontaneity-consciousness paradigm of Socialist Realism, as outlined by Clark and critiqued by
Krylova, et. al.
The philosophical debates between the materialists and dialecticians will take center
stage in Chapter Four. The chapter examines reflexological Freudianism or “drive as reflex”—
the attempt to fuse Freudian drive theory with Pavlovian conditioned reflexes in philosophical
discussions following the Revolution. Psychoanalysis came to be a central concern in the heated
mechanist debates in philosophy, and this chapter explores how psychoanalysis was absorbed
into Soviet state-building and philosophical discussions of the 1920s. The crucial difference
between the idea of animal instincts and the psychoanalytic drives will be sketched by
juxtaposing Bulgakov’s Heart of a Dog (1925) with Freud’s infamous case of the Wolf Man.
17
The case of Freud’s first international patient, the Russian Sergei Pankeev,
7
was where Freud
developed the idea of Nachtraglichkeit, or “afterwardness,” his critique of instrumental action.
Psychoanalysis and Russian literature
As psychology itself was historically perceived as a suspect and inferior activity to the
central role of literature in Russia, the dissertation also presents literary case studies (as already
can be surmised) that feature psychoanalysts as characters and psychoanalytic concepts as
central, thematic motifs—what I name “psychoanalytic novels.” The entry “Freudianism” in the
Handbook of Russian Literature discusses the literary-interpretive capacities of psychoanalysis
and a spotlight on Soviet authors who utilized psychodynamic ideas in their work, such as
Zamiatin, Zoshchenko, Olesha, and others (though Gumilev and Shaginian go unmentioned).
The author of the entry claims that “Psychoanalysis may give us a deeper insight into man’s
mental world, but has its limitations. The aesthetic structure of a literary work need not convey
an objective psychoanalytic fact; it transforms the empirical personality of the author. Therefore,
psychoanalysis may misrepresent both author and work” (Oulanoff 160). This description
indicates the transformative potential of literary craft upon the author who practices it, in that the
author who begins a work may not be the same as the one who finishes it. Oulanoff is correct in
pointing out the shortcomings of “psychobiographical” readings of literature, which attempt to
read the text as manifestations of the authorial unconscious, a reductive procedure to be sure.
Yet, from another angle, the composition of a text, one could also say, has “auto-analytic”
effects, and psychoanalysis can provide insight into this process. Furthermore, what happens, as
7
This case study was translated into Russian as “Iz istorii odnogo detskogo nevroza”—the final
volume to be published by the Psychological and Psychoanalytical Library before its forced
closure.
18
the examples in the chapters to come show, when the literary work, its content, contains
references to psychoanalysis and actively mobilizes psychoanalytic ideas? The literary texts this
dissertation examines invite the reader to weigh in on psychoanalysis from a literary perspective.
This sort of discussion of the creative process in literary art was conducted by various
Soviet critics, like Aleksandr Voronskii, during the 1920s. Voronskii explicitly drew from
psychoanalysis to develop his theory of artistic creativity. Chapter Five, on the “creative drive,”
will examine Soviet theories of artistic creativity that utilized psychoanalysis and will provide a
reading of Vsevolod Ivanov’s unpublished novel У (1931),
8
whose protagonist is a
psychoanalyst tasked with converting criminals into New Soviet Men. Ivanov was a close
associate of both Zamiatin and Voronskii, attacked in the press along with Ivanov for their more-
or-less avowed Freudianism, an aspect of their careers this chapter will examine. The structure of
a literary work represents change, the dynamic movement of a character from one state to
another, compelled, motivated, or driven, by some arrangement of circumstances and, in the
novel, represented in emotionally-evocative language. Contemplating this movement and the
artistic arrangement of parts, as Aristotle tells us, can have profound effects on the self.
Finally, Chapter Six examines potential links between Russian Formalism and
psychoanalysis by looking at certain pronouncements by Viktor Shklovskii and the writings of
Roman Jakobson (on the connection between effects of aphasia and Freudian displacement and
condensation) with a reading of Tynianov’s novel Poruchik Kizhe (1928), a text containing many
Freudian elements. I argue that Tynianov was responding in many ways to the debates taking
8
While transliteration of Russian to English demands that the cyrllic “ У” should appear as “U,”
the chapter argues for the importance of keeping the igrek or “foot” at the bottom of the letter as
an important part of novel’s visual symbolism, something noted by other scholars of this text and
a convention which I support. See, Brougher.
19
place over psychoanalysis in the twenties, and his text reflects how its terminology and theory
had become conventionalized by this time. The chapter develops the idea of an “onomastic
drive,” or the idea of “nominative determinism,” the idea that proper names of individuals can
compel them to action.
Each of the chapters to come takes up a Russian novel illustrating different aspects of the
drives, meanwhile contextualizing the history of psychoanalysis in Russia. For a chronological
overview of events and texts referenced in the dissertation, which may assist the less-than-linear
account to come, see Appendix A (“Timeline”).
Like the imperfect maps of the ancients, partly reflecting a geographic reality, partly
filled with areas of mystery and lacunae in the form of imaginary beasts and creatures, we can
think of these varied attempts to describe (and control, ultimately) the mental apparatus in the
same, phantasmatic way. Because they lacked the proper “mapping” of biological knowledge,
especially at the time-period we are examining, what we see is a proliferation of fantastical
constructions—images of “imaginary anatomies.” However, even today’s cognitive and
biological models may commit the mind to reductionist views, and the following pages describe
a similar development made at an earlier historical iteration. By bringing in other examples of
Russian and Soviet usage of psychoanalysis from the first half of the twentieth century, in which
Freud can be seen as hanging on to the hand-hold of materialism, I will be sketching a kind of
“anatomy of the drives.”
20
Section I (Drives and Philosophical Idealism)
Chapter One
Playing Inside the Abyss: Kaan’s Nisus Formativus and Nikolai Gumilev’s Veselye brat’ia
Section I describes the arrival of psychoanalysis into the Russian context by focusing on
the landscape of ideas that predominated in this period. Chapter One sketches the arrival of
psychoanalysis in the Russian, pre-revolutionary cultural context in relation to “the crisis of
psychology,” produced in the wake of positivism and its reductive application of the physical
model of matter to the level of the organism. What escapes this model, and what interested the
scientific community in psychoanalysis, is the role that imaginary fantasy played as a bridge
between the material body and the psyche, what is at the very origins of the psychogenic
paradigm, the idea that physical impairment can arise from the mind. The second part of the
chapter will provide a reading of Nikolai Gumilev’s novel (povest’), Veselye bra’tia (1918),
which combines many of the features to the historical account given below: the protagonist is
described for the first time in Russian literature as a psychoanalyst, who is, however, impotent
against the powers of a clandestine peasant sect, The Happy Brotherhood.
The case of Mister X
In 1913, the Russian psychoanalytic journal Psikhoterapiia opened with a short text by S.
S. Goloushev describing the case of Mister X (g[ospodin]. X), a man suffering from impotence
(impotentsiia) treated by the psychoanalytic method. Among several analytic case studies printed
in the four years of the journal’s existence, this one stands out because of the presence of Russian
peasantry. The patient’s wife initially brought the case to Doctor Goloushev, voicing her concern
21
after five years of marriage, telling the doctor of her husband’s fear of the female sexual organ
and, consequently, his inability to achieve a lasting erection during sex (the doctor noting her
virgo intacta). Hiding the problem, the husband would feign climax by micturating on his wife’s
stomach (Goloushev 287). After much resistance, the patient agreed to see the doctor and,
following several sessions, he revealed a repressed memory. As a ten-year-old boy he had
suffered a psychological trauma (psikhologicheskii insul’t) after a group of peasant
washerwomen molested him as he was taking a bath.
Когда маль чик разделся, женщины стали тро гать его penis и показывать ему
свои поховые органы, принимая сам ы я безст ыдныя поз ы. При этом они
нагле хохотали, от них пахло вонючим потом и вообще впечатление
настолько было отвратитльно и сильно, что мальчик расп лакался и нянька
его тотчас же увела. (ibid. 289)
According to Goloushev, soon after describing this memory of seduction, the man recovered his
sexual function, stating at the conclusion of the analysis that he was cured and living a happy
life, only this time it was with another woman (his wife could no longer put up with her
frustration and had previously left him).
If we are to believe this account, it illustrates an early successful application of
psychoanalysis to a nervous illness, or a “soul sickness” (dushevnaia bolezn’), as it was generally
called in Russian.
9
To conduct analytic treatment, its practitioners subscribed to the principle that
9
It was the German Romantic philosopher Schelling who coined both the terms Geisteskrankheit
and Unbewusst (unconscious) in 1800, linking mental illness to sin and moral failings of the
spirit, which made their way into the sphere of medical psychiatry. Dushevnye bolezni, from the
German Geisteskrankheit, was still the widely used term for mental illness in the atheist Soviet
Union. This was common usage until the introduction of the term psikhicheskie rastroistva as
late as the 1990s.
22
mental illness could be psychogenic in origin, a category of mental illness also called
psychosomatic, or “functional,” which psychoanalysis described and helped to further
popularize. The way to the resolution of the conflict was through the imagination, by recalling to
mind a repressed memory and, crucially, putting it into language. In this way, “catharsis” was
enacted, the patient becoming liberated from an unconsciously held belief that hid behind a
physical or behavioral symptom. Psychotherapy and the methods of its various schools were thus
secular interventions into problems of the mind, what was previously the purview, especially in
Russia, of the Church.
In Gumilev’s novel, Veselye brat’ia (1918),
10
for the first time in Russian literature, the
protagonist is presented as a psychoanalyst—“ Человек с высшим образованием,
занимавшийся психоанализом” (Gumilev 187). As a commentator notes, the novel stands apart
from the rest of the Gumilev’s oeuvre: “ Она слабо связана не только с творчеством поэта, но
и с мифом о нём, неож иданно увлекая Гу м илева не в Африку, а в сердце Росси и, в
пермск у ю л есн у ю Сахару, ку да с томиком Ницше отправляется Мезенцев [sic]” (Zlobin). It
seems that Gumilev displaced his favorite lyrical theme of the exoticized locale into the heart of
Russia itself, a common enough theme of the time, taken up by novels such as Belyi’s
Serebrennyi golub’ (1909), with which it may be in dialogue. The protagonist-analyst, Nikolai
Petrovich Mezentsov, “goes to the people” deep within the Russian heartland at the outskirts of
Perm, to conduct anthropological research for the Fourth Department of the Academy of Science
in Petrograd.
11
In the village, he is thrilled by the sights and sounds of peasants whose language
he can comprehend, yet to whose way of life he is a complete stranger. What this novel shows in
10
The text is, technically speaking, a povest’.
11
Gumilev’s Veselye brat’ia goes without mention in the reference work Handbook of Russian
Literature (Terras, ed.) under the entry “Freudianism” (Oulanoff).
23
a unique way, and in connection to psychoanalysis (which Belyi despised), is Gumilev’s artistic
approach to comprehending the relationship between the mind and body and the gap that
separates the two. What is more, the secret sect of peasants described in Gumilev’s text (they are
adepts at hypnosis, from which psychoanalysis itself emerges) has discovered a way to overcome
this gap and are on the verge of proclaiming their own absolute system of knowledge. The role
that psychoanalysis plays is to provide a contrast as the newest trend at the time in science
against ancient mysteries that have somehow been retained by the peasant cult, an idea taken to
its apotheosis by the leader of the Happy Brotherhood, a “little pale old man” (belen’kii
starichok) residing in the distant town of Ogurechnoe “between three big roads, none of which
lead to it,” and holding the potential key to healing every psychic division. In this way, the novel
picks up the theme of “the crisis of psychology,” examined further below, and offers a spiritual
solution to mental illness, yet with a sinister undercurrent.
The entire initiating action for Mezentsov’s journey to Ogurechnoe is to enact revenge on
another character, Mitia, for the seduction and death of a woman. The opening chapter describes
Mezentsov’s arrival to a village in Perm for the purpose of collecting folk legends and songs.
When a budding romance in the village between peasants Masha and Vania entices his
anthropological curiosity, Mezentsov begins “to patronize” their love by giving ribbons to Masha
and books to Vania. Things progress idyllically until, that is, a peasant boy named Mitia enters
the scene, putting a “shadow” over Masha and Vania’s union. As their love fades, Mezentsov
cannot understand why Vania ceases to work, now spending all of his time with Mitia, who has
made Vania turn cold toward Masha.
It is revealed that Vania’s change of heart is due to a rumor that Masha has “given
herself” to Mitia. Masha denies this to Mezentsov in a very provocative passage characteristic of
24
Gumilev’s subtle descriptions of hypnosis in the book, which recall Dostoevsky’s “Dvoinik”
and, what will be discussed further, Bekhterev’s description of suggestion:
— Слу шай, я тебе правду ск аж у, я ни в чем не повинна. Долго ходил он
около меня, у л ещивал, глазами сво ими яркими поглядывал. Но я пряталась
от него, и никогда мне и в мысль не приходило недоброе. Только онамедни
шью я у ок ошка, солнце уже за л есочком, никого нет. И только мне вдру г
так стало, как бу дто у в идала я, что др у гая Маша, совсем как я, идет по
оп у шке в березняк. И та меня видит, как я у окошка сиж у, и обе мы не
знаем, какая же из нас настоящая. А из березняка Митя выглядывает и
смеется: иди ко мне, красавица, все равно настоящая- то у окошка сидит. Как
услышала я это, так и подошла. И ничего мне не страшно и не стыдно,
потому что знаю, что я одна за работой, вижу, как игла движется. А той, что
у окна си дит, слышно, как в березняке целу ю т ся, какие слова там говорятся.
Сколько времени прошло так, не знаю. Просн у лась, как лу чину надо было
зажигать, отец верну лся. (Gumilev 186-87)
The hypnotic suggestion is rendered as if it occurs “from within,” as the splitting of Masha’s
subjectivity happens without her conscious recognition, or rather she merely imagines it
happening in a reverie. Mitia only has to look at her, utter a suggestive command, and the
peasant suspends her will and begins to confuse fantasy and reality in a kind of Kaanian
phantasia morbosa (examined further below), an imaginary overtaking of the will. She moves
toward the forest while simultaneously observing herself from outside. Hearing Masha’s dream,
Mezentsov feels the urge to intervene into the couple’s fate with his psychoanalytic knowledge,
in order to convince Vania and Masha that Mitia is manipulating them.
25
Он был взволнован у с лышанным объяснением и чу вствовал, что ему надо
что- то предпринять, чтобы у с трои ть су дьбу влюбленных. Не может быть,
чтобы он, человек с высшим образованием, занимавшийся психоанализом и
прочитавший столько новых романов, не нашел средства разрешить
благопол учно эт у деревенск у ю др аму. Он лег, потому чт о, по привычке
многих горожан, он лу ч ше всего ду мал лежа. (Gumilev 187)
The ineffectuality of psychoanalysis (and knowledge derived from books, rather than experience)
in this situation displays the text’s attitude to this western import into Russia, an opinion of
psychoanalysis that will be repeated in several of the fictional texts in the chapters to come.
Psychoanalysis is thus impotent in the face of the mysteries of Russia’s depths because it is too
passive—a feature of urban life, for Mezentsov thinks best while lying down. The following
morning, Masha’s body is found in the river in the traditional style of Karamzin’s “Bednaia
Liza.” Racked with guilt as the idyllic scene of the village explodes into chaos, Mezentsov vows
to avenge Masha’s death and so joins Mitia on the journey to meet the leader of the Happy
Brotherhood.
Masha’s death cannot be taken as a punishment from God due to her acting upon sexual
temptation. While holding to a Christian worldview, Gumilev’s attitude to sexuality seemed to
have been affected by the Russian Religious Rennaissance of the late nineteenth- and early
twentieth-centuries, which defamiliarized the role of sex in the life of the individual and levelled
a critique at institutionalized religion. For the cultural intelligentsia, Olga Matich has described
how the Symbolist poets and philosophers became obsessed with the question of sexuality,
which Matich sees as a creative striving of these artistic groups to overcome the ubiquitous
26
discourse of degeneration (Matich 4).
12
Sexuality became equated with death in a paradoxical
fusion of mystical and religious ideas that both celebrated Eros, seeing it in every manifestation
of reality, and ascetically recoiled from its actual practice, what produced an almost unbearable
cultural tension. A new group of thinkers revitalized a Christian worldview, such as Vladimir
Solov’ev, who argued for recasting sex within a radically creative conception of human nature,
not as something to be associated with sin, but as a pervasive force to be harnessed in order to
bring about a creative transformation of humanity, that of “godmanhood” or “god-creation”
(bogostroitel’stvo). For these thinkers, the questions of psychology, of the spirit, were
profoundly spiritual, yet they blended these thoughts in surprising ways with the science of the
day.
Anna Lisa Crone’s study of the relationship of psychoanalysis to Russian philosophy
argues that:
[…] there were four major Christian religious thinkers in Russia who considered
all forms of higher human creativity to be a sublimation or transmutation of the
sexual instinct or drive. These were Vladimir Sergeevich Solovyov (1853–1900),
Vasily Vasil’evich Rozanov (1856–1919), Nikolai Aleksandrovich Berdyaev
(1874–1948) and Boris Pavlovich Vysheslavtsev (1876–1954). The first two
advanced a theory of sublimation similar to Freud’s before Freud first articulated
12
In Erotic Utopia: The Decadent Imagination in Russia’s Fin de Siècle, Matich writes:
“Ensconced in an ethos that accentuated physical decline, the subjects of this study sought an
economy of desire that would overcome what became known in European medicine as
degeneration. Most importantly, they sought to immortalize love’s body by defeating death:
mortality was not only a decadent but also a utopian obsession of the fin-de-siècle generation in
Russia. Its most radical members, uniquely committed to the interrogation of sex and the
meaning of love, believed that they could conquer death by resisting nature’s procreative
imperative and rejecting traditional notions of gender. Death, in their view, was the inexorable
product of birth in nature, which inscribes the hour of death into the hour of birth.” (4)
27
his view in 1896, and did so with no knowledge of Freudian psychoanalysis. The
latter two thinkers knew Freud’s works before they left Russia permanently in
1922, and they came to know psychoanalysis even better while in Paris as they
were there at the height of the impact of Freudian thought in the Western world.
(Crone 1)
In On the Meaning of Love (Znachenie liubvi), Solov’ev celebrated the sexual instinct as
one that cannot be denied, but that must be amplified and channeled, as the history of
Christianity falsely put it under repression. Sexuality would bring about a new person, and this
new self would usher in a new world, one following the apocalyptic dissolution of the current
reality. Thus, ideas like impulses, instincts, compulsions, and other notions describing the
movement of an internal, psychological force that could become “disorganized” were rendered in
the Russian cultural context by way of metaphors of the abyss and fate, images that foregrounded
an opaque nucleus at the heart of subjectivity and spiritual, or psychical, life, and which received
a renewed attention in the period in question.
These passages put psychoanalysis into proximity with the themes of imagination,
hypnosis, and sexuality, what I want to develop further in a historical account in order to
characterize the arrival of psychoanalysis into the Russian context.
The psychogenic revolution
According to Michel Foucault, the decisive step of separating mental illness from
religious conceptions of the soul was made by a Viennese physician named Heinrich Kaan (said
to be Ruthenian or even of Russian background), who established the psychiatric paradigm by
linking it to “abnormal” sexual practices. Foucault has described how Kaan drew a foundational
28
demarcating line for the history of madness in his work, Psychopathia Sexualis (1843; to be
distinguished from Krafft-Ebing’s important work of the same title, under whose shadow Kaan’s
precedent-setting study disappeared for many years), written shortly after Kaan’s experience as a
physician to Czar Nikolas I in Russia. One of the last scientific works written in Latin, Kaan’s
original Psychopathia Sexualis made the first distinction between Scriptural categories of sin and
those “disorders of the imagination” that led to the first psychiatric nosology, or categories of
mental illness. These were composed of exactly six types: masturbation, pederasty, bestiality,
lesbian love, necrophilia, and the violation of statues.
Several historians of psychiatry (such as Erna Lesky, Tatjana Buklijas, and Arnold I.
Davidson) have followed Foucault’s suggestion and see Kaan as the first figure to initiate the
paradigmatic transition from mental illness perceived as a result of carnal sins against God to the
modern concepts of mental illness as such—what set the grounds for the nosologies of Emil
Kraeplin in Europe and that of Korsakov and Serbskii in Russia. The editor of Kaan’s volume in
English translation, Benjamin Kahan, points to the importance of Psychopathia Sexualis by
drawing on the historian of science Arnold I. Davidson.
[Davidson] divides the history of sexual perversion into three overlapping stages,
each of which is characterized by its own mode or form of explanation. The first
stage located perversion as a disease of the reproductive or sexual organs. The
second stage saw the neurophysiology and neuroanatomy of the brain as the seat
of perversion. These two stages of explanation shared an epistemology rooted in
pathological anatomy. The third stage, however, decisively broke from the first
two, by taking root in psychology rather than anatomy [My emphasis]. (Kaan 11)
29
Kaan’s focus on the psychological cause of sexual perversions reflects a decisive shift in the
stages outlined by Davidson, emphasizing the unique properties of the third stage, in which,
“The brain and genital system hold themselves in the following way: as two poles that are
engaged in constant action and reciprocal reaction. Thus, in Psychopathia sexualis [sic], the
imagination breaks the will of a man, even if his rational mind rejects and reviles this deed”
(Ibid. 11). It is interesting to note how Kaan highlights both the role of the imagination as
something spontaneously mediating the bodily-genital “abyss” and the seat of reason, and as
something that necessarily overflows its boundaries, overwhelming reason and the will. Kaan
was the first western figure to speak of abnormality by linking mental illness to a disturbance
between the forces of a sexual instinct (what he termed a nisus) and the imagination. Benjamin
Kahan continues:
By providing sexuality with a new structure—imagination—that links all sexual
acts together and that connects bodily instincts to the mind, Kaan suggests that
sexuality produces a difference and a new class of person. By linking the sexual
instinct to the imagination, Kaan forges what Foucault calls ‘a unified field of
sexual abnormality.’ (ibid. 1-2)
By the late nineteenth-century, a variety of schools appeared that aspired to treat mental
illness, whether they were sexual perversions, hysterias, epilepsy, neurasthenia, or other nervous
impairments. It was only in 1872 that the term “psycho-therapeutics” was coined by Daniel Hack
Tuke, the son of an English Quaker who established the first sanatorium in England, the York
Retreat. In his work, Illustrations of the Influence of the Mind Upon the Body in Health and
Disease Designed to Elucidate the Action of the Imagniation (1872), Tuke echoed Kaan’s
30
foundational gesture by highlighting the way the imagination brought about mental illness and
how it could also provide the cure.
In his book, Tuke returned to the spiritualist practices of Franz Mesmer and his school of
animal magnetism, but with a discriminating eye that separated the attribution of extra-wordly
forces from the hypnotic techniques that Mesmer practiced that seemed to have practical healing
effects. Referring to the French Commission on Animal Magnetism (comprised of Benjamin
Franklin and the French chemist Lavoisier), Tuke reversed their famous dismissal of Mesmer’s
results:
[The results were] ascribed solely to the influence of the imagination. Tuke
inverted their intention, and claimed that as their report showed that what animal
magnetism ‘really’ demonstrated was the physical effects of the imagination, a
new science and therapeutics could be founded upon their apparent denunciation
of animal magnetism. For Tuke, mesmerism thus displayed how ‘certain purely
psychical agencies produce certain physical results.’ (Shamdasani 5)
Thus, Tuke’s important move in America ushered in a revival of hypnotic technique in France
(such as that of Bernheim and Charcot, the so-called Nancy and Salpêtrière
schools of psychiatry), which claimed that the imagination could produce unwanted physical
effects and that hypnosis, or La suggestion, as Bernheim called it, taking the term from a country
doctor named Liébault, could intervene into this process. Psychoanalysis was a direct descendent
of these movements.
The Russian context: “dusha” between mind and spirit
31
In the mid-nineteenth century, the Russian intellectual context was markedly different
from the lives of knowledge producers in the scientific centers of Europe, and western theorists
like Foucault have virtually neglected this context in their studies. As psychology was
differentiating itself out of philosophy, one had to contend in Russia with the basic issue that the
teaching of philosophy was formally banned by Tsar Nicholas I in 1850 on religious and political
grounds, as an extension of the “Orthodoxy, Autocracy, Nationality” doctrine and as a reaction
to the Decembrist Revolt of 1825. It should also be mentioned that Kaan also coincidentally
spent a decade in Russia at the St. Petersburg Women’s Hospital and served as personal
physician to Nikolas I, during which he was developing the ideas that led to Psychopathia
Sexualis. The ban on philosophy was a further response to the European revolutions of 1848,
seen as the outcome of so many dangerous western ideas that, in general, included the radical
philosophies of the utopian socialists, mostly French, and the physiological materialists, mostly
German, who proclaimed a new faith in science to explain life’s mysteries.
13
Literature,
beckoned on by social reformists, and particularly by critics like Belinskii, was charged with the
moral responsibility of realistically presenting societal conflict so as to bring awareness to a
13
As David Joravsky writes, “[…] a famous trio of popular materialists, Buchner, Vogt, and
Moleschott, preached that all the bewildering phenomena of nature, human nature included, were
being reduced by science to one single substance or essence, matter in motion” (Russian
Psychology 10). In relation to this trio of materialists, recall a telling scene from Turgenev’s
portrait of the 60s generation, the “nihilists,” in Fathers and Children. Having returned to the
family estate and prompted by his positivist friend Bazarov, Arkady quietly approaches his father
as he reads and replaces from his hands a volume of Pushkin with Buchner’s 1855 work, Kraft
und Stoff (Force and Matter). The unstoppable trend of mechanistic positivism won over the
public, however, less by the nuances and implications of the scientific process than by the much
more visible successes of modern industry afforded by technological innovation. The grand
symbol of technological success is of course the Crystal Palace of the 1851 Paris Great
Exhibition, famously embraced as a promise of calculated utopia by radical critics such as
Chernyshevskii in What is to be Done (1862), while resisted as a soul and will-crushing edifice
in Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground (1864).
32
growing literate public of the need for societal change. By 1863, the reforms enacted by Tsar
Alexander II restored the teaching of philosophy in Russian institutions, yet educational reform,
land reform, and the liberation of serfdom did not pacify the growing radical movement.
In April 1867, a court case with far reaching consequences for the censorship of science
in imperial Russia concluded in favor of the defendant—a decision linking Russian cultural life
to crucial trends in western psychology. After a long legal battle, a merchant by the name of
Gaideburov, moonlighting as a publisher, secured the rights to print in Russian translation the
first and second volumes of Vorlesungen uber die Menschen und Tierseele (translated into
Russian as Dusha cheloveka i zhivotnykh), written by a figure who would later come to be
known as the “father of experimental psychology”—Wilhelm Wundt.
14
Part of the issue is
evident in the title of Wundt’s Russian translation, Dusha cheloveka i zhivotnykh (The Soul of
Man and Animals) which forgoes the more moderate translation of the German Seele into
Russian as psikhika (psyche) or um (mind). The translation opted instead for the commonplace,
though more metaphysically and spiritually suggestive, dusha (soul). In other words, if Wundt’s
book was taking up issues of the soul, it was then not a secular work of science but a religious
one, and thus would be tantamount to sacrilege and should be censored (Joravsky Russian
Psychology 92). The successful public defense of Gaideburov’s publication of Wundt’s work
marks another step in the secularizing process of science in Russia. As the title of Edward Reed’s
14
While the first volume got past the censors, the second volume drew the attention of a new
ecclesiastic censorship unit, which arrested the two volumes and Gaideburov, who was to be
fined and imprisoned for publishing Wundt’s work. (For a concise overview of the complex
structure of Russian censorship committees, see Helen Jacobson’s introduction to Diary of a
Russian Censor: Aleksandr Nikitenko, xvi-xviii.) What was the controversy about? The
ecclesiastic censorship committee saw that Wundt was tarrying upon sacred territory by
attempting an explanation of the soul by way of physiology and material concepts, erasing the
boundary between humans and animals, and examining the psychology of Christianity in a kind
of anthropological study of believers.
33
important study of the history of psychology put it, this was a step for psychology to pass “from
soul to mind,” which in the Russian context was marked by the politically-inflected terms of
“materialism” and, to go a step further, “nihilism.”
Psychogenic illness in Chernyshevskii’s What Is to Be Done?
I would like to pause here to connect the political situation in Russia at this time to a
pertinent literary representation of psychotherapy. A perhaps surprising appearance of the
concept of psychosomatic illness in connection to “overactive imagination” appears in Nikolai
Chernyshevskii’s Chto delat’? (1863), which he composed while imprisoned in the Peter and
Paul Fortress. Chernyshevskii’s novel was the most widely-read piece of radical fiction, the
author’s rejoinder to Turgenev’s Otsy i deti (1862; which so thoroughly attacked the newly-
emerging scientific worldview as nihilist), inspiring political activists and revolutionaries, like
Lenin. Its characters were emulated by a generation of Russians, who followed the charts, hourly
activities, work and life arrangements Chernyshevskii detailed in the book, including the
fantasies and utopian dreams revealed therein. In this text, Chernyshevskii based the character
Kirsanov, who liberates Vera from the control of her family and arranged marriage by marrying
her, on the physiologist Sechenov, a figure who struggled against the physiological reductionism
his own discoveries helped establish in his work Reflexes of the Brain.
15
The interesting example
appears in Chapter 5 (“Novye litsa i razviazka”), after Kirsanov and Vera escape her abusive
family and settle in to their Platonic marriage. Kirsanov continues his medical studies until, one
15
In this regard, see especially Joravsky, Russian Psychology, 53-63, which argues that
Sechenov’s famous Reflexes of the Brain, published the same year as What Is to Be Done?, did
not deny the reality of psychic processes, unlike many of his contemporaries, such as Claud
Bernard.
34
day, he and a group of doctors answer the call to see a hopeless patient on the verge of death,
Katia.
What makes this episode significant is that the entire initiating action of the novel
(zaviazka)—Lopukhov’s (faked) suicide and the final revelation that he has secretly fled to
America, only to return in disguise—revolves around the successful cure of what can be
understood as a psychoneurosis afflicting Katia. In the section before the symptoms are
described, there appears a reference to the famous French experimental physiologist Claude
Bernard, cuing the reader to the physiological reductionism held by the other doctors.
16
Katia’s
father, a millionaire, gathers the coterie of specialists, described as “aces” (tuzy), who examine
the patient like an object but, as Kirsanov already suspects, fail to determine any physical cause
to her illness. They designate her condition with the fictional term atrophia nervorum, a
withering away of the nerves, a completely made-up illness.
17
Kirsanov, however, immediately
sees through to the core of Ekaterina’s strange illness, and beyond the other doctors’ bogus
diagnosis: it repeats many of the elements that troubled Vera. From a private, one-on-one
conversation, he earns Katia’s trust and discovers the responsibility for the illness lies with her
father and his prohibition against Katia’s love for a man known to be a “scoundrel” about town.
Katia is haunted by his “image” (obraz), though her father would rather she die than to be with
him. Underlying the problem of daughter to father is of course a social dilemma that locks the
16
“ Как же не приглашать на консилиу мы такого собрата, известного Клоду Бернару и не
отбывающе го практики?” (Chernyshevskii 474) Bernard made several important discoveries,
like the concept of “internal environment” and organic homeostasis, while his study of the
secretions of the liver paved the way to the founding of endocrinology (Magner 4102-03).
Pavlov considered him to be a personal hero, which reflects Pavlov’s reductive attitude toward
psychology.
17
Coincidentally, Chernyshevskii’s fictional atrophia nervorum closely resembles the
widespread diagnosis of neurasthenia, also called “the American disease,” or “Americanitis,” a
term coined only six years after the novel, in 1869.
35
woman into the cruel socio-economic conditions of the time, critiqued relentlessly by
Chernyshevskii.
Kirsanov takes the rather shocking approach (though it is a careful calculation) of telling
Katia that he will assist her in her wish of committing suicide, on the condition that she
objectively evaluate the feelings for her beloved upon a later meeting. Simultaneously, he
convinces the father to agree to the meeting by reassuring him that his opinion of the man is
entirely correct, but that the father’s prohibition and “moral law” is killing his daughter. Katia
must discover the truth herself, which she will do, since Kirsanov intuits that Katia ultimately
trusts her father’s judgment, unconsciously knows it to be true, and yet, paradoxically, still loves
the other man in what psychoanalysis would see as the classic state of ambivalence. What she
must do is come to realize this herself. In light of Kirsanov’s sensitivity and authority, who
attends the meeting, the other man quickly reveals his foolishness and Katia begins falling in
love with Kirsanov.
That is, until she meets her father’s American business partner—the disguised Lopukhov,
Kirsanov’s long-lost friend. The tidy coincidence is often a criticism of the novel’s low literary
merit, yet taken in a speculative, proto-psychoanalytic way, it shows how coincidence
accompanies the revelation of truth, as attested in psychoanalytic case studies.
The point of this example is to show how at the heart of this paradigmatic novel of
secular utopia and socialist labor is an articulation of a knotted-up drive, disentangled via a risky
psychodynamic intervention. Katia’s neurasthenia, her atrophia nervorum, could never be
dissolved by any rest cure, electroshock therapy, or surgery—powerless interventions against
arresting images. Her illness is “all in her head,” imaginary, which renders it indestructible to the
scalpel. Yet fantasy, as Heinrich Kaan, Tuke and Freud posit, has real material effects, having to
36
do with, as Freud would say, “libidinal cathexes,” or, simply, love. Katia’s desire quickly finds
another object, implying the relentless striving of the drives and their sexual dimension.
Chernyshevskii, however, opines against a Romantic concept of love in the novel, any kind of
love that is deprived of free individual choice. Only by acknowledging her death instinct does
Kirsanov make room to loosen the singular hold of a fatal love on Katia.
The crisis of psychology
With the educational reforms loosening the strictures over the free-flow of ideas, Russia
moved to make the distance up to the West quickly. In 1885, the first psychological laboratory
was founded in Russia, only six years following that of Wilhelm Wundt’s in Leipzig. It was
established in Kazan’ by Vladimir Bekhterev, who would go on to become a celebrated
neurologist and founder of objective psychology, rivaling that of the Pavlovian school of
conditioned reflexes. In the 1890s, Moscow, Kazan’, and St. Petersburg had established
university programs in psychiatry and neurology and, by the end of the decade, the first
psychological journal was released by the Russian philosopher and psychologist, N. Ia. Grot, the
original founder (along with Georgii Chelpanov) of the Moscow Psychological Society.
18
In the 1907 entry “Psikhologiia” of the Brokgaus-Efron Encyclopedia, Grot outlined
various approaches to the study of the psyche: “P. does not represent a completed science in
18
Grot was a rare academic acquaintance of Tolstoy, who got along well with the monumental
figure, and who Tolstoy preferred to the company of the religious philosopher Vladimir
Solovyev, until, that is, Grot asked Tolstoy to contribute to the journal Voprosy filosofii i
psikhologii, to which Tolstoy agreed. He delivered an unexpected, though characteristic,
broadside against the intellectual activities of the educated classes. He accused the journal’s
readers of the “crimes of high culture,” categorically denying that science contributes to
humanity’s progress, among other polemical and didactic statements. See also Sirotkina,
Diagnosing Literary Genius, passim.
37
itself. Never in the field of psychological inquiry has there been such radical disagreement
between directions, parties and personal worldviews as there is today” (Grot 680).
19
With Freud
and psychoanalysis going unmentioned, Grot describes psychology’s inherently fractured nature
due to the way its schools conducted the study of the human mind from seemingly irreconcilable
positions. Reflecting a Kantian orientation (a movement experiencing a great resurgence of
interest at the time), Grot implies how the fundamental basis of psychology must arise from
ontological and epistemological assumptions that concern the “substance” of mind, or spirit (the
Russian word dusha used throughout the entry implies a metaphysical entity as much as a
psychological one), and its relation to the physical life of the organism. “The most important and
fundamental problem P. has is the question of the nature of the common basis of psychical life,
the relationships and links of psychical life to the physical life of the organism” (ibid.).
20
Grot
ultimately asks the perennial philosophical question of how the mind relates to the body, the
answer to which would reveal the relationship between reason (razum), feeling (chuvstvo), and
will (volia), the principle components of the psyche. The picture of psychology that emerges in
this entry appears to be a discipline that is unified only in name, with its object oscillating
between the physical, mental, and metaphysical “spheres,” which merely symbolically unite a
diverse set of problems.
21
The many disparate approaches of the warring schools to mental life
produced not a coherent picture of science when taken in sum, but, in the words of David
19
“ П. как нау ка, не представляет собой законченного состояния. Нико гда еще в области
психологических проблем не был о такой резкой борьбы направлений, партий и личных
миросозерц ании, как в настоящее время […].”
20
Самая важная и основная проблема П. — вопрос о природе общей основы душевной
жизни, об отношении и связи ду шевной жизни с физическ ой жизнью организма.”
21
More from Grot: “ Все психологи, по- видимому, ищу т об ще го лозунга для примирения и
основания ‘ единой науки’ о сознании и ду шевной деятельности человека и живо тных и, не
сраз у н а ходя его, разрабатывают П. каждый по- своему […].” (680)
38
Joravsky, “a wrangle of partial truths” (262). This characterized the general crisis of psychology,
which determined the course of this discipline’s development to, arguably, even today.
22
The psychological firewall
The most basic question of psychology is an epistemological one, how to describe the
mental apparatus as an object of direct experience, one that can never be precisely localized. To
gesture to Kant, who will return in Chapter Two, stepping over the firewall of direct experience
is a speculative endeavor and one that poses many dangers. It is to weigh in on absolute terms, as
mystics, poets, and spiritualists do, contemplating a transcendental realm behind appearances
that could be accessed through practices like verbal incantation, prayer, the creative act, or
philosophical reflection.
The crisis of psychology stems from the problems posed by this limit and what has to be
taken as the opposite movement of theory, the spectacular, nineteenth-century success of
physiology, which applied the discoveries of physics, particularly of the laws of
22
One of the strands within this wrangle was a picture of the mind derived from medical
psychiatry. It is important to distinguish psychiatry from that of psychology proper, both of
which are to some degree inextricably linked, but approach the study of mind from opposite
views, as it were. It would take several years before this was clearly articulated. Writing on the
themes outlined by Grot, in The Historical Meaning of the Crisis in Psychology (Istoricheskii
smysl psikhologicheskogo krizisa, 1927), Alexander Vygotsky emphasizes the importance of
knowledge that comes from studying psychopathology, linking it to the work of Freud. Vygotsky
writes: “In the psychological systems that cultivate the concept of the unconscious […] for
example, the systems of Freud, Adler, and Kretschmer […] the essence and nature of the
phenomena studied by psychology can be revealed in their purest form in the extreme,
pathological forms. We should, consequently, proceed from pathology to the norm and explain
and understand the normal person from pathology, and not the other way around, as has been
done until now. The key to psychology is in pathology, not only because it discovered and
studied the root of the mind earlier than other branches, but because this is the internal nature of
things, and the nature of the scientific knowledge of these things is conditioned by it.” (Vygotsky
292-93) Indeed, for Vygotsky, as for today, the crisis remained.
39
thermodynamics, such as the law of the conservation of energy (the idea that energy can neither
be created nor destroyed, but only changes form), into the scientific study of the mind, yet where
it encountered many problems. Joravsky describes the progression of science that led to the
founding of the mechanistic metaphor of the mind, out of many anatomical explorations of
animal and human bodies:
If asked why an animal jumps when pricked, we commonly say it does so to
escape pain. Thus we implicitly attribute to the beast feeling, purpose, perhaps
even some primitive mind, in the sense of a capacity to plan ahead and to make
decisions. (In certain circumstances we know that an animal can jump in
anticipation of being pricked or can resist jumping when pricked). Whytt’s
experiments made such purposeful language seem absurdly animistic. He took out
a frog’s brain, and found that the beast would still jump when pricked. Even when
he repeatedly sectioned the creature—‘to section’ became an antiseptic verb,
cleansing the experimenter of inappropriate feeling—the legs still made leaping
motions when pricked. As long as the nerves serving the leg muscles were
connected to a piece of spinal cord, the jumping response followed the pricking
stimulus.
It is hard to attribute feeling or purpose, much less mind or soul, to a
frog’s leg and a bit of spinal cord, or to other ‘preparations’ of isolated muscles
and nerves. Vitalistic physiologists argued for the existence of a ‘spinal soul’, but
their efforts turned into verbal shuffles and logic chipping in the mid-nineteenth
century, as more and more neuromuscular automatisms were mapped out by such
methods as Whytt had pioneered. The anal sphincter of a turtle, for example, can
40
hardly be considered soulful or spirited when one sees it do its work for a
decapitated and disemboweled turtle, opening when the colon is filled with water
and shutting after relief, until it is disconnected from the spinal cord and falls
open forever. (7)
With physiology dictating the terms of psychiatry during the headiest days of positivistic
thinking, by describing a material “device” that could be located in the body, mental illness was
seen through a somaticist lens as a bodily disorder. As Henri Ellenberger’s great study of the
history of dynamic psychiatry traces, a back-and-forth movement between these two positions
can be seen as the modern period arrived, with acolytes of mesmerism and animal magnetism
disappearing as rapid advances in physiology produced more precise mappings of reflex and
nervous structures, pushing mentalist concepts ever further beyond the purview of the drive
towards localizability. Physiological models became the dominant paradigm for the treatment of
mental illness, and thus the use of physical methods—such as restraints, electric shock
(Galvanism), massage, hydrotherapy, and surgical interventions, especially into the stomach,
etc.—were applied sometimes indiscriminately to the needs of the mentally ill.
23
Thus, physical intervention for psychiatric ills became more commonplace, until a new
paradigm set in by the rediscovery and reintroduction of hypnotism by Charcot and Bernheim, to
treat maladies that seemingly had no organic basis, nudged the discourse in the other direction.
With seemingly successful application of hypnotism to functional disorders, yet with many
questions remaining, the pendulum, as it were, swung the other way. Edward Shorter calls this
23
The harrowing story of so-called “battlefield abdomens,” the surgical intervention into cases of
neurasthenia in women, coupled with the physical interventions into psychogenic illnesses like
“battle neurosis” of WWI soldiers is described in Edward Shorter’s From Paralysis to Fatigue.
See also Paul Lerner, Hysterical Men for a discussion of early examples of war trauma.
41
contribution to treating mental illness in the late nineteenth century, the formation of the
“psychogenic paradigm.”
24
“[Robert] Sommer defined psychogenesis as referring to those
disorders ‘which may be produced by imagination [Vorstellungen] and treated by the
imagination.’” (Shorter, From Paralysis to Fatigue 242). The imagination, then, seemed to be
the locus from which one had to approach the understanding of how mental illness affected the
body, a “space” in the human worm that forever eludes the surgeon’s scalpel.
The destruction of matter
In his unfinished novel, Gumilev was keenly aware of the problem that separated an
idealist conception of matter from a materialist one, which breaks over one of the defining laws
of physics, what is upheld by the classical mechanics in Ostwald’s energetism, Helmholz’s
thermodynamics, and what went into Freud’s and Marx’s theories—the law of the conservation
of energy. It was Lavoisier, the French chemist writing against the scientific value of Mezmerism
with Benjamin Franklin, who gave the first empirical proof of this law, and it is put into question
by a fascinating peasant character in Veselye brat’ia, found deep in the abyss of the Russian
wilderness.
After the opening events of the novel, Mezentsov travels with a group of peasants to a
mythical town called Ogurechnoe where the leader of the sect lives. Along the way, the
psychoanalyst comes across a bear on the side of the path. On second look, however, it turns out
to be a large man whose name only happens to be Misha, a kind peasant endowed with the
24
From the German center of experimental psychology in Leipzig, Paul Moebius, Robert
Sommer, and Emil Kraeplin were three physicians who enacted the movement away from
“organicism” to “psychicalism.” leading to the important innovation in diagnostic terminology of
Robert Sommer’s coinage of “psychogenesis” in 1894.
42
unique gift of “counting” or “calculating”: “[ К] счет у я сызмальства охот у имею. Еще ходить
не нау ч ился, а считать начал” (Gumilev 194). Due to this gift, the sect of Happy Brothers, so
Mezentsov learns from Misha in private, put this peasant intellectual up to accomplish two
impossible tasks, failing which they will kill him. First, he is to disprove the physical law of the
conservation of energy, that matter can neither be created nor destroyed, and second, he is to
prove that the Earth is in fact the center of the universe around which the sun revolves, and not
the other way around. Taken together, these proofs will mean that the world is indeed created
from nothing and thus it follows that God truly exists.
— Каку ю же вам дали задачу? — сгорая от нетерпения, спросил
Мезенцов.
Миша сокрушенно вздохн у л.
— К химии меня приставили, в химии счет нужен. Про господина
Лав у азье из волили слышать? Уч еный такой, из франц у зов. Так вот, он
доказал, и основательно, что из естества ничего не пропадает, ни единая,
значит, пылиночка. Спичк у сожжешь, так она дымком да пеплом
становится, а если собр ать этот дымок и пепел да сложить умеючи, то вся
спичка, как прежде бу дет без всякого изъяна. Хитро, не правда ли? Я вот ту т
проверял, выходит в то чку. А они говорят: ты счет знаеш ь, докажи, что не
так. Потом у, говорят, если естест во пропадает, то его как бы и нет, а это
значит, что Бог есть. Окаянные, говорю я, да разве Бога химией док а жешь?
Сердцем Его чу вствовать надо. Это ты так, говорят, рассуждаешь, а дру гие
иначе. А нам и о др уги х поду мать надо, чтобы Бога помнили. Разве с ними
сговоришь?
43
— А др у гая задача? — спросил Мезенцов.
— Еще того мудренее. Земля вокру г солнц а вертится, а ты, говорят,
счет знаеш ь, докажи, что наоборот. Коперник и Галилей, говорят, нам не
указка, они в Бога не верили. И что я за Ирод такой им дал с я! Хорошие
господа, уч ены е, може т, министры какие или князья, т рудили сь,
приду м ывали, а я, темный му жик, им яму дол ж ен рьггь. Как я в глаза их
светлые погляж у, ежел и обнару ж у что? Да я со стыда сгорю, как они
скаж у т: «Ну, Михай л о, спасибо тебе, удр у жи л». А не работать нельзя.
Заколют. Вот так и бьюсь шестой год.
— Ну и что же, нашли что- нибу д ь? (Gumilev 195-96)
As he relates, the results of Misha’s experiments point to the fact that the Happy Brotherhood’s
task is not out of the realm of possibility! Misha has successfully replicated the experiment of the
conservation of mass, having collected (somehow) the dispersed matter of a burned match and
made it whole (he supplies matches to the Brotherhood, and is thus a kind of peasant
Prometheus).
He also knows how to take the next crucial step of destroying matter altogether,
disproving the fundamental law of conservation because of a mysterious ancient book. “ А
книжка ничего, она хорошая, старая, старее- то лу ч ше” (Gumilev 198).
25
This quote is a
reference to the spiritualist and idealist Russian philosopher, Lopatin, who liked to repeat:
“ Старинный, значит, хороший тру д” (Popov 160). Gumilev knew Lopatin personally.
25
“ Это как сказать, — нехотя промолвил он. — Найти- то можно. Да только я не стараюсь.
Как начинает выходить, я либо скляночк у оп рокин у, либо бу м ажку с цифрами в огонь
уроню. Как бу дто и нечаянно, а дела, глядишь, нет. Тоже не без понятия. Одно только
утешительн о, что му чители мои не торопятся. Работай, Миша, хоть тридцать лет, а
добейся сво е го. А мне цыганка нагадала, что умр у до седого волоса.” (Gumilev 196)
44
As for Misha, he must be a reference to Mikhail Lomonosov, a peasant genius, if there
ever was one, who miraculously rose in the royal court of Catherine due to his encyclopedic
mind and many scientific discoveries, including writing the first book on Russian versification.
His experiments in chemistry also convinced him of the law of the conservation of mass, years
before Lavoisier.
In this way, the newest scientific methods represented by psychoanalysis are pitted
against the mysteries of ancient knowledge, the understanding of which the peasant sect has
access. However, because a gypsy has prophesied his death at the end of the task, Misha does not
take the final step, perpetually sabotaging his own experiments. In a crisis between two mortal
dangers, Misha provides a bit of lip service to the sect, which threatens him with death, and
forestalls the end of his alchemical experiments because of the prophesy. Mezentsov takes leave
of Misha (who gifts the book to him) having formed a bond, promising to return to check in on
him after Mezentsov’s journey to Ogurechnoe.
Misha’s mounting proof of the existence of God out of the total annihilation of matter
suggests that the indestructible soul indeed does exist, and physiological experiments prove
nothing. Such a pure and undivided soul hides deep within the Russian forest, in the town of
Ogurechnoe, in the figure of the belen’kii starichok. Mitia describes this full subject: “[…]
старичок такой там, весь ху денький да белый. Как у в идел я его, так и обомлел. Потому
каждый чел овек когда опечалится, когда разг невается. А этот, сраз у видно, не печаловался
и не гневался за всю евонн у ю жизнь” (Gumilev 195). According to Mitia’s description that
may be entirely imaginary, the little pale old man has never experienced uncontrollable rage
(gnev), a cardinal sin that looms over Mitia, and thus he is the pure and untainted “Happy
Brother.” In our terms, he has no psychic division and, thus, no unconscious, as he is completely
45
whole, and so cannot be hypnotized or manipulated, what Mitia does to the women characters of
the text (Mitia also carries a sharp knife that might spring at any moment).
When Mitia appears first on the scene, he is described as emerging from a Dionysian
dance and revelry, yet with the peculiar feature of a line cutting across his forehead, signifying
that his psychic realm, too, is still devilishly divided. “ Лицо его еще сияло оживлением
пляски, и только изогну тые брови сдвину л ись, образовав маленьк у ю гневну ю морщинк у,
которая очень его красила” (Gumilev 197). The line on Mitia is both a mark of the hypnotic
influence he has on people (his Mephistophelian characteristics) and implies that the Happy
Brother stands for the lack in Mitia’s own self—is a gnev-less subject. In this incomplete text,
the leader of the Happy Brotherhood is never directly encountered and his wholeness is never put
into question, though the reader has her suspicions early on.
Psychoanalysis arrives in Russia
The same year Grot wrote the entry on psychology, psychoanalysis properly arrived in
Russia in the form of two articles (appearing in the central psychiatric Zhurnal nevropatologii i
psikhiatrii imeni Korsakova)
26
published by the young psychiatrist, Nikolai Evgrafovich Osipov.
In a way similar to the English Tukes, Nikolai was the son of Evgraf Osipov, a prominent
psychiatrist and liberal humanist, whose efforts with Serbskii gained official recognition for
expanding mental healthcare in the zemstvos.
27
Nikolai Osipov’s essays on the work of Freud
26
Named for Sergei Korsakov, the journal would become a platform of another crisis, this time
political, within Russian psychiatry. The Kasso Affair of 1911 within educational institutions
split psychiatry and its practitioners between the radical reformers and reactionaries, positions
represented respectively by Serbskii and Gannushkin.
27
The hospital system in imperial Russia revolved around administrative centers known as
zemstvos, which suffered a great deal of mismanagement, corruption, and under-funding in this
period, particularly in the realm of psychiatric help, a bourgeoining field of specialization.
46
and Jung initiated interest for the scientific and medical community of Tsarist Russia for the
novel psychotherapeutic method and larger theoretical implications of psychoanalysis.
28
This
new and strange discipline offered the possibility of filling an important piece of the puzzle that
Grot’s fractured picture of psychology presented. By describing his new model of the psyche,
Freud gave an account of the unconscious mechanisms behind hypnosis, out of which his theory
arose. As will be further discussed in Chapter Two, the arrival would be met with great fanfare,
to which a satirical character in Marietta Shaginian’s novel Svoia sud’ba (written 1916;
published 1923) exclaims: “The patient lays on the couch and begins to associate out loud, while
the doctor must sit and write everything down exactly. That’s the whole treatment for you! The
results are such that all of medicine gaspsed (akhnula), all of physics gasped, all of anatomy
gasped!” (Shaginian 122)
29
What made everyone exclaim was that psychoanalysis further shifted
the epistemic discourse into a new “regime of relevance.” While remaining a secular study of the
mind that aspired to natural-scientific credentials, concepts like the unconscious, the instinctual
drives, repression, etc. steered the discourse further away from mechanism and organicism and
into psychologism proper. I want to take a moment to characterize certain features of this shift
that returns the discussion to social concerns.
Evgraf Osipov also founded the Pirogov Society, the organization that denounced Russian
autocracy on matters of social welfare, education, and public health leading up to the 1905
Revolution. See Chapter 10 on the Pirogov Society in Frieden, Russian Physicians in an Era of
Reform and Revolution, 1856-1905, fo the history of humanist political interventions into mental
institutions.
28
D. L. Shukurov’s Russki literaturnyi avangard i psikhoanaliz states the year of publication as
1907, which may reflect the date of composition rather than the 1908 publication year of
Osipov’s two articles. Freud’s brochure “On Dreams” (not The Interpretation of Dreams, which
came out in 1913) was technically first translated and published in 1904 but received little notice.
29
“ Больной ложитс я на диван и начинает ассоци ировать всл у х, а докто р должен сидеть с
карандашо м и все точно записывать. Вот тебе и все леченье! Резу льтаты полу чаются
такие, что вся медицина ахн у ла. Вся физика ахну ла. Вся анатомия ахну ла!”
47
The social crisis
There exists a certain conceptual resonance between Russia’s crisis of identity at this
time (its European ambitions and the attendant Eurasian anxiety of place) and the identity of
psychoanalysis as a strange hybrid discipline. In many ways, the history of psychoanalysis in
Russia shares many affinities with other studies on the influence of Freud’s discoveries in other
parts of the world, such as Omnia El Shakry’s recent The Arabic Freud (2017), which traces the
post-WWII influence of psychoanalysis into Egyptian and greater Arabic society and culture. As
I have written, this influence occurred some years earlier in Russia, yet just as in El Shakry’s
account, Russia had to deal with similar residual issues of the introduction of a foreign model of
the self onto its soil—a fin-de-siècle Viennese subjectivity within a questionably non-European
context.
30
This transplantation of ideas, like that of the philosophy of Nietzsche in Russia, tended
to follow the usual path to many other European imports into Russia, of adaptation by
deformation—another addition to Russian intellectuals’ persistent “longing for world culture.”
31
The context in Russia at this time reflected a renewed obsession of the growing numbers
of the literate public with the perennial problems of philosophy and with what became known as
the “sexual question,” a reference to the title of August Forel’s massively popular text. As many
scholars have noted, the period between the 1905 and 1917 revolutions was the terminal phase of
the Silver Age. The period produced an unprecedented flowering in the arts, philosophy, and
religious thought that was marked by a profound crisis of faith, revolts against convention, and
30
See Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna for an engaging study of this particular problem in
European identity.
31
Edith Clowes describes Nietzschean influence into Russia in similar terms, as one of selected
borrowing and distortion. See her monograph The Revolution of Moral Consciousness.
48
radical experiments in living. This was in part why, at the First Congress of Soviet Writers in
1934, Gorky infamously claimed that the decade between 1907-1917 was the most perverse
decade in Russian history. “ Десятилетие 1907—1917 вполне засл уживает имени самого
позорного и бесстыдного десятилетия в истории ру сской интеллигенции” (Gor’kii,
“Doklad” 316). Gorky’s positing of the far limit of 1907 was a statement generally speaking on
the widespread social crisis produced by the extremes of the era of decadence but also in part as
a literary reference to the sensational publication of Mikhail Artsybashev’s Sanin, arguably the
most discussed fictional publication of the time, causing a furor in the press due to its
“pornographic” content, wide emulation by the youth population, and a resulting statistical rise
in suicides.
32
Writing about the aftermath of the 1905 December Revolution, Laura Engelstein makes
the proposal that the cultural response to the failure and repression of this major populist
upheaval led to a temporary, though large-scale avoidance of political questions, echoing the
development of Romanticism in France after the Revolution and Freud’s Vienna in the late
Austro-Hungarian context, as described famously by Schorske.
32
It tells the story of Sanin, a godless philistine and nihilist who lets nothing stand in the way of
his pleasure. He follows a personal ideology that is a mixture of the Nietzschean will-to-power
and Max Stirner’s rational egotism. Saninizm became a byword as wide-spread as
Oblomovshchina, representing the second apotheosis, after Turgenev’s Bazarov and
Dostoevsky’s Stavrogin and Verkhovensky, of the active nihilist-type of the era. Eric Naiman
writes that “In many respects, the early work of Maksim Gor’ky himself, full of sexual contests
of wills, provided a model for Artsybashev’s scandalous novel. The young Gor’ky was
fascinated by sexuality as the raw material of power and trained his microscope on the sexual
lower depths of human existence. If the bosiak (tramp) is the essential, unadorned man, sex is
nature at its most savage, the elemental arena in which the battle for self-affirmation was waged.
By the end of the first decade of his career, Gor’ky had, however, “castrated” his fiction, making
sex yield to political message.” (54)
49
Due to the failure of 1905, the intelligentsia took a line of flight away from emphatic
social activism and political engagement to a new and equally emphatic inward turn (recall that
Lenin and the active revolutionaries had fled Russia to Europe for nearly a decade then). While
political concerns lay dormant, a deep exploration of personhood and, above all, sexuality
became а primary concern of the intelligentsia in what came to be known as the Russian spiritual
renaissance. “When the meager political results of the 1905 revolution created widespread
disappointment, intellectuals, professionals, and the reading public focused on sexual themes, in
compensation for lost civic hopes and as a challenge to the puritanical anti-individualism of the
radical left” (Engelstein 1). Many doctors and lawyers, Engelstein’s focus in her study, viewed
the failure of 1905 as an explosive set to the moral foundations of society, unleashing a plague of
fantasies, a wave of philosophical speculation on the role of sex in individual life, as well as real,
sexual violence.
The peculiar status of professional psychiatrists at this early stage of the discipline’s
consolidation as a legitimized medical practice—generally viewed as inferior to other
professionals as mere caretakers of the mad, or otherwise whose task it was to “adjust” the sick
to a society that should be, ideally, healthy—forced psychiatric practitioners to become
concerned with political questions. With increasing frequency, psychiatrists (and psychoanalysts)
like P.P. Tutyshkin and V.I. Iakovenko retaliated against the conditions of the social reality
surrounding them—and, especially, the rigid powers of reaction following 1905, which was
producing more and more sick individuals and undoing the thankless and laborious work of
psychiatry. As Irina Sirotkina and Julie Brown have demonstrated, this was a professional class
among other professional classes that uniquely displayed a fissure according to political lines,
50
but one whose concerns went beyond political discourse, as it was preoccupied with individual,
mental well-being.
Most psychiatrists no longer argued that the disorders of 1905 had caused mental
illness. Instead, they analyzed the consequences of the political repression which
followed. The incidence of mental illness rose after 1905, they alleged, because of
the terrible disappointment experienced by the population when most of the
reforms promised by the October Manifesto were not realized. (Brown 297)
To release a patient back into a social milieu that aggravated the psychological state of the
subject, these psychiatrists argued, would be a mere temporary amelioration of symptoms, of
building up with one hand what one destroyed with the other.
Psychiatrists thus were sensitive to larger cultural concerns, the negative effects of
spreading industry, communication, and turned their attentions to social theories. Such was the
case of Tutyshkin, a Bolshevik psychoanalyst who ran the “Saburova dacha” in Kharkiv, a
psychiatric hospital known to have hid Bolshevik revolutionaries from authorities and was the
place where a revolutionary cell was born. An apocryphal story about Tutyshkin relates that he
carted a corrupt zemstvo official out of his hospital in a wheelbarrow, and to the applause of the
hospital staff. His talk at the Third Congress of Russian Psychiatrists in 1910 expressed his
despair within the profession of government repression. He saw the country’s mental state as
“mass moral insanity,” whose most visible effects were in the realm of volition, a weakening of
individual and collective will, rising neurasthenia, hysteria, etc. (Brown 298)
A salient event reflecting this political schism in psychiatry also occurred in the debates
between psychiatrists Vladimir Iakovenko and Vladimir Chizh. The progressive ideals of
Iakovenko saw political activism as psychologically healthy and a defense against mental woes,
51
while Chizh, in an article going against Iakovenko’s views in 1907, argued for separating
scientific activity from politics, a seemingly-sober stance that was, however, combined with the
reactionary idea that mental illness arose from wider political freedoms. As an arch-reactionry,
Chizh supported the Black Hundreds, the death penalty (he served as physician during
executions of political prisoners), and was known to repeat the line that “suffering strengthens
people” (Ibid. 295). Bekhterev’s scientific psychological center suffered under Chizh, who in
early 1917 “ordered the closure (on the grounds that it was ‘a hotbed of rebellion’) of the
Psychoneurological Institute—Bekhterev’s dearest child, scientifically speaking” (Iaroshevsky
364). Political pressure between radicalized psychiatrists dealing with the fallout of societial
disintegration had reached a peak.
Enter psychoanalysis
The early influence of Freud in this context was largely contained within the field of
professional psychiatrists, which should come as no surprise, since it was for such an audience
that Freud initially wrote, before the controversial ideas took root among the general currents of
modernism. The appearance of psychoanalysis in Russia was nevertheless substantial, arguably
more prominent than in any other country of the world (outside German-speaking lands) when,
in a 1912 letter to Carl Jung, Freud wrote that “In Russia there seems to be a local epidemic of
psychoanalysis” (W. Maguire 495). At this time of the first internationalization of
psychoanalysis, Freud’s hopes were for a Russian individual to follow in the footsteps of Jung,
who brought psychoanalysis to Switzerland, Ferenczi in Budapest, Abraham in Berlin, and
52
Ernest Jones in London. He found that “apostle” in Nikolai Osipov, placing hopes in him
through a series of letters, and permitting him to translate into Russian his American lectures.
33
As Osipov’s early articles show, psychoanalysis seemed to extend, if not an answer, then
a surprising wealth of new phenomena explained by a theory that offered the potential to inform
a possible answer to the critical questions posed by Grot: What is to be the basis for psychology
in relation to physiology? What first principle could bridge the abyss that seemingly separated
the two, in order to meet the criteria of a secular science of the mind? To Osipov and other
Russian psychoanalysts, the answer was contained in the notion of the unconscious drives. As we
will see, this notion was to become especially influential in the Soviet era and ramified through
the intellectual milieu even when Freud could no longer be mentioned openly.
Osipov in particular attempted to combine psychoanalysis with Nikolai Lossky’s
emerging intuitivist philosophy, in which a conception of the drives also played a central role.
Osipov called his fusion of Lossky and psychoanalysis the “Program of the Study of the
Personality” (Programma issledovanii lichnosti), for which he won an essay contest in 1913.
“ Методоло гической основой программы изу ч ения лично с ти Осипов делает два
направления философи и: инт у итивизм р у сског о философа Н.О. Лосского и
неокантианство немецкого филос офа Г. Риккерта” (Sirotkin and Chirkova). The importance
of Rikkert for Osipov (under whom he completed a course of study) was due to Rikkert’s
elaboration of psychiatry’s particular stance vis-a-vis natural science, what is a fundamental
33
Freud infamously uttered a similar epidemiological statement to Jung on their way to the
United States for their lecture tour to Clark University—“They do not know that we are bringing
them the plague” (Wir bringen ihnen die Pest und sie wissen es nicht; Roudinesco claims that
Lacan had made up the phrasing that went into the anecdote [Roudinesco 457, n. 8]). The
lectures, which are known in English as Five Lectures on Psychoanalysis, mark the first
“official” translation of Freud into Russian by Osipov, following an unofficial and little-known
translation of The Interpretation of Dreams in 1904.
53
feature of the psychogenic paradigm. The psychiatrist, who has no access to direct observation of
the mind, has to work like a historian, he wrote, in order to find the “governing value”
(rukovodiaiushchaia tsennost’) at the origin of a patient’s disposition. For Osipov, who may be
the first psychoanalyst to articulate this idea, a person’s governing value depended on his or her
relationship to the external environment, concentrated into a personally-held image, an imago.
Thus, conflictual drives within the personality exemplify the split nature of subjectivity such that
they become united in a “governing value” derived from the history of the personality. Osipov
distinguished drive proper (vlechenie) from the activity of the will (volia), classifying both as
aspirations, or compulsions (stremlenie). He distinguished between the two in the following way:
“ Стремление, переживаемое мно ю с чу вством принадлежности мне, мы называем волей,
стремление, переживаемое с чу вством данности мне, мы называем влечением” (ibid.).
The rapid absorption into Russia of Freudian terminology acquired a truly wide-spread
hold upon the cultural imaginary only in the 20s, introducing many distortions into the concepts,
as would happen in much of the rest of the modern world. Prince Mirsky, having fled the
October Revolution to England,
34
described his experience of the absorption of psychoanalysis
into the Anglo-Saxon intellectual climate in this way (though these observations could easily be
applied to Russia): “Freud has been accepted as the consecration of all desires and lusts, a sort of
free pass to every kind of freedom or looseness, a complete liberation from all discipline. He has
become the Bible of this intelligentsia” (Osborn 26).
35
For Mirsky, as for many others who
34
Although, Mirsky still considered himself a Marxist and would, with tragic consequences,
return to Stalinist Russia in the thirties.
35
This position resembles that of Nietzsche’s extra-moral Ubermensch and, indeed, Freud’s
popularization in Russia can be compared to Nietzsche’s reception there. However, once again, a
crucial difference is that Nietzsche cannot be said to describe any sort of technics, no “devices”
for his project “god-building.” Nietzsche’s philosophy is not a method, like psychoanalysis, but a
doctrine.
54
recoiled from Freudianism, psychoanalytic knowledge was seen as a destroyer of morality and a
promoter of a sexual license that threatened to banish any form of repression and, in the process,
of any and all “higher,” civilizing forces, like morality.
36
Overall, the history of the reception of psychoanalysis in Russia can be divided into two
decades, preceding and following 1917, each characterized by specific institutional supports and
substantial publishing endeavors. Thus, a kind of fundamental split can be sensed in the presence
of psychoanalysis in Russia, giving it a kind of mobility of application between radically
different ideologies. From 1907-1917, the focus of the first two chapters of this thesis, activity
was centered around the psychiatric journal Psikhoterapiia, in which many of Freud’s and his
circle’s German-language texts were published in translation alongside original contributions by
Goloushev (from the case study above), Osipov, and several other psychiatrists. Doctor N. A.
Vyrubov ran the privately funded Kriukovo sanatorium (the focus of Chapter Two), a treatment
center near the Kriukovo railway station outside of Moscow, where several clinicians applied
psychodynamic methods to Russian patients from 1909 to 1916, and where Blok was rumored to
have convalesced (Ovcharenko 590).
In Freud’s circle there were also several Russian colleagues and close collaborators. Lou-
Andreas Salome, who met Freud in 1911 and entered his circle, was also a confidant of
Nietzsche before his illness; Max Eitingon, a fur merchant-turned-analyst who funded the Berlin
psychoanalytic organization was a valued member of the council on psychoanalysis, formed to
36
This first popular interpretation would reappear during the international student movements of
the 1960s, when Herbert Marcuse’s Frankfurt School-blend of Marx and Freud would be read as
a call for total sexual liberation. Neither during Freud’s lifetime, nor in Marcuse’s version of
Freud, is this the case, however. Some figures misread Marcuse’s critique of 60s consumer
culture as promoting wanton sexual license, while he was in fact describing repressive
desublimation conjured up by the status quo (quite the opposite intention).
55
spread the discipline abroad; and Sabina Spielrein, a former patient of Jung who trained as an
analyst, was an involved participant in the Vienna Circle until her return to Soviet Russia in
1923.
37
Abyss abyssus invocat
“Salaciousness was given to the worm”—so goes a key line of “Ode to Joy” by Friedrich
Schiller, a metaphysical poet and philosopher who arguably had one of the widest influences
upon Russian writers of the nineteenth century.
38
Dmitry Karamazov famously quotes passages
of Schiller’s “Ode to Joy” to his brother Alyosha, emphasizing the creaturely core of human
nature driving the movements of life. In another passage, Dmitry equates himself with one of the
two brothers of Schiller’s play, “The Robbers,” a text that also contains a famous literary
parricide (Simons 24-25).
Before psychoanalysis arrived in Russia, Schiller’s popularity experienced a massive
revival during the period examined here, the reasons for which become clearer in light of the
general oscillation that can be sensed in the history of psychology described below. After
Schiller’s collected works appeared in translation in 1900, he was called the “most popular of
37
Nabokov may have known Max Eitingon, since the latter associated with singer and Soviet
agent Nadezhda Plevitskaia, the figure behind Nabokov’s story “The Assistant Producer” (about
a Soviet plot to capture a White general and take him back to Bolshevik Russia for execution).
There are many suggestions that Eitingon curried the highest favors with the Soviet state and
may have been himself a Soviet agent.
38
Pushkin, Zhukovsky (and his pupil, Tsar Alexander II), Tiutchev, and other poets; but also
social thinkers like Belinsky, Bakunin; and novelists like Lermontov and, especially, Dostoevsky
were impacted by his thought. The influence of Schiller on Dostoevsky was originally described
by Chizhevsky and is detailed further in Gary Saul Morson’s study on the topic.
56
non-Russian writers” by the editor Vengerov during the year when Freud first published The
Interpretation of Dreams in German.
39
Like Dostoevsky, Freud, too, could not escape the influence of Schiller. He described
meeting him in dreams and quoted him some twenty-seven times in his writings.
40
As detailed in
James L. Rice’s Freud’s Russia, the founder of psychoanalysis was also fascinated by
Dostoevsky, who represented “Russia’s introspective depths” (not without some irony), and
Freud in particular closely studied “The Grand Inquisitor” chapter of The Brothers Karamazov
before writing The Future of an Illusion (1927) (Rice, Freud’s Russia 4; 20-22; passim.). One
could add that, as a text influenced by German metaphysics, The Brother Karamazov’s ample
references to Schiller may have attracted Freud’s attention, along with its descriptions of extreme
psychological states, and the way it may have reflected back to Freud the founding gesture of
psychoanalysis—that of the enactment of the Oedipal parricide.
41
Thus, as we trace Freud’s first
impact into Russian culture before the Communist revolution, we remark that the soil was well
prepared for his arrival there.
39
In fact, Schiller would be widely celebrated even in the Soviet period during his 150-year
anniversary of birth (alongside his countryman, Goethe), during a time when Freud’s name was
unofficially banned in the press. It seems that Schiller’s investment into radical politics (as in
“The Robbers,” staged many times in the Soviet Union) paid dividends beyond his dedication to
vitalist idealism in matters of psychology.
40
This is according to the Concordance, the reference guide to Freud’s oeuvre. Freud would
compose The Future of an Illusion after reading the passage of the Grand Inquisitor in The
Brothers Karamazov.
41
Freud himself admitted that the great poets and writers of the past had preceded the
psychologists in uncovering the secrets of the mind. As will be presented throughout this project,
however, the Oedipus story is not necessarily a mythic illustration of universal (male) incest—its
repression and ultimate return—at least not insofar as to be exclusively irreducible to this more
literal reading. The correct way to understand Freud’s Oedipus is by way of the device. It is,
more generally speaking, an illustration of the universal form of the psychological device as
studied by psychoanalysis—the psychological effect produced by a rapid shifting of perspective
that, according to clinical practice, results in a release of energy, surprise, and when controlled
for appropriately, in what Aristotle called catharsis.
57
It is important to emphasize that Schiller was historically understood as a bridge between
the philosophy of Kant and Romanticism. Schiller’s training as a physiologist also greatly
informed his particular philosophy of mind encapsulated in the fundamental idea of the “soul
nerve,” the Nervengeist. The crucial discovery of nerve action during his time positioned Schiller
at the point in the history of science when structural (mechanistic) explanations of bodily
movements began to greatly erode vitalistic concepts within the study of the mind/soul.
Physiological understanding of the time traced the anatomical structures responsible for
movement in the body to the spinal cord where the nerves of the peripheral nervous system
bundle together at the base. Schiller combined this anatomical knowledge with figurative
metaphors to describe how the seat of subjective will shared in this location, with its capabilities
of motivating/operating the workings of bodily motion. He held that the fundamental movement
of the Nervengeist, its motivation, was composed of two drives: “sensuousness” (Stofftrieb), a
force that encounters and registers the physical world through the five senses and within time,
and the less straightforward drive of “form” (Formtrieb), a kind of perpetual pattern or
organizational principle that ordered the sense data into meaningful patterns, images, or forms.
Schiller’s Spieltrieb represented the dialectical harmony of the two drives in a third tendency, a
vital impulse of creativity and play that operated within necessary rules (perhaps bending, though
not breaking them, which would end the “game”) and was expressed by the sensuous material
world.
42
It is within playfulness where Schiller found humanity’s ultimate freedom and by which
he based his aesthetically-inflected ethics and social vision.
43
42
Within the context of Russian literature, see Thomas Karshan’s book on Nabokov and the
author’s “organizational principle” of the notion of play, which Karshan explores with reference
to Schiller.
43
Freud would take the idea of Trieb as a limit concept mediating the sensuous body and the
psyche, what was a commonplace within German Romantic works of Schiller, Schelling,
58
Combining the above discussion of Schiller and Osipov on the drives, the notion of a
kind of passionate Stofftrieb in Gumilev’s text appears in the charismatic (and dangerous) nature
of Mitia, who is described melting into the peasant crowd during a dance (the second in the text)
upon a bridge, while Mezentsov watches from the side. Dance is the space where full
subjectivity emerges, where the rules of the dance (Formtrieb) set up parameters that become
filled in and expressed by the dancer (Stofftrieb) “playing” with the rules and producing
something greater, irreducible either to the rules of dance or the dancer him/herself.
44
Mitia’s
passions, connected to his rage, are reflected in this scene (which may allude to Blok’s poem
“Garmonika, garmonika” of 1907) as he breaks the rules of the peasant dance, and enters before
his turn.
На мост у уже заливалась гармони к а, похожая на голос охрипшего крику на,
и голоса, в свою очередь очень напоминающие гармони к у. Посреди кру га
девок парень в прилипшей к телу потной ру башке танцевал вприсядк у. Он
по- рачьи выпячивал глаза и поводил усами, как человек, исполняющий
тру д ное и ответственное дело. Зрители грызли семечки, и порою шелу ха
падала на т а нцора и прилипала к его спине и волосам. Он этого не замечал.
Митя, подмигивая му жикам и щек оча девок, в одно мгновение, как он один
ум ел это, п ротолкался сквозь толп у, толкну л плясавшего так, что то т
покатился в толпу, и, п ронзительно взвизгну в, п у стился в пляс. Дев у шки
захохотали, потом замолчали, очарованные. А опрокин у т ый только что
Schopenhauer and many others, and attempted to combine it with the latest developments in
neurophysiology at the time, what he first outlines in “Project for a Scientific Psychology”
(1895; unpublished until 1950).
44
As William Butler Yeats asks in “Among School Children”: “How can you separate the dancer
from the dance?”
59
парень уже подходил, вызывающе засу н у в ру ки в карманы и поглядывая
недобрым взглядом. Видно было, что он решил драться. Митя последний
раз подпрыгну л, щелкн у л каблу к ом и остановился, как раз чтобы встретить
врага. Быстро взгляну л он на рачь и глаза и оттопыренные усы и ус м ехн ул ся,
сраз у оц ени в положение. (Gumilev 193)
Mitia’s spontaneous aggression, then, can be thought of as a suspension of his will, that which
“belongs to him,” momentarily eclipsed by the drive that is “given to him,” his spontaneously
aggressive tolchok pushing the other dancer away, unwillingly ceding the dance floor to Mitia
who attracts the peasant women with his own dancing. The spontaneous drive produces a
mirrored response from the rebuffed dancer who seethes with rage (One could say, Mitia
“hypnotically” displaces his rage into the dancer). Mitia’s instant recognition of the dancer
(“srazu otseniv [ego] polozhenie”) is, in the words of Osipov, his ability to intuitively sense the
“rukovodiaiushchaia tsennost’” of the other, simply because it is his own.
— Поку ри м, что ли? — сказал он, деловито открывая коробк у пап и рос.
Парень остановился, озадаченный.
— Спичек вот нет,— продолжал Митя, — да ладно, достанем.
— У меня есть спички, — начал Мезенцов, догадавшийся об его тактике.
— Давай! А ты папир осу- то поглу б же в зу бы возьми, это тебе не козья
ножка! Повернись по ветру, вот тебе и огонь.
— Да ты по стой, — бормотал сби тый с толку парень.
— Чего стоять! Я плясать хочу. А папироса хорошая, ты не ду м ай. Вижу,
первый сорт. (ibid.)
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Mitia may have broken the rules, yet the crowd (bored and throwing seeds at the previous
dancer) is all the more excited by his suspension of them, or rather, re-reads the break as part of
Mitia’s “number” itself.
Mitia is both dancer and poet in this scene, as Gumilev conceived his own vocation in the
most vital terms, one with the power to sense and announce the coming end-of-times.
Гу м илёву была свойственна вера в то, что по эзия в своём предел е способна
изменить мир, а сам он проводник эсхатологического переворота. И если
Ру сь умы кн у ли в хлыстовский кру г, поэт должен влитьс я в него,
закру ж иться вместе со всеми – потерять голову, погибну т ь или выкр икну ть
что из жу ткой тёмненькой кру говерти. У Блока ведь полу чилось: нап исал в
«согласии со стихией» великие «Двенадцать». (Zlobin)
The unconscious abyss
Of the generation after Schiller, the philosopher Schelling also must be mentioned as one
more figure who experienced a surge of popularity during the Silver Age.
45
The first group of
45
Rudolf Bernet’s Force, Drive, Desire: A Philosophy of Psychoanalysis (2020, orig. in French,
2013) takes a wide-ranging view of the ways in which philosophical metaphysics influenced
psychoanalysis and will inform much of this dissertation’s conceptual structure. Bernet’s study
traces the largely hidden history of the diffuse concept of the drives from its origins in the
Aristotelian distinction between substance (ousia) and power (dunamis), through Leibniz’s via
dinamia, Schopenhauer’s Will, Nietzsche’s Dionysian principle, Freudian libido, and
culminating in Lacanian drives of the letter. He finds others who thought of the “dynamizing of
substance” in terms of the limit concept of the drives, as a generalized “striving deprived of
realization.” However, the study leaves out a crucial step in the concept’s development that we
seek to fill in by recourse to the way German Romantic philosophy interacted with Russian
artistic concerns at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries. More
specifically, Bernet overlooks Schelling in his otherwise excellent and comprehensive study.
Teresa Fenichel’s recent book Schelling, Freud, and the Philosophical Foundations of
Psychoanalysis (2018), develops the line that Schelling’s ideas in particular preempted much of
Freud’s theory, especially in that of the notion of the drives.
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poets and philosophers known as the Lovers of Wisdom, the Liubomudry
46
—Odoevskii,
Kireevskii, and other members, including Chaadaev (who was a student of and corresponded
with Schelling)—subscribed to Schelling’s concepts of Nature and Spirit.
47
Chaadaev’s “First
Philosophical Letter,” which earned the ire of Tsar Nicholas I, forcing Chaadaev to sign a
document that declared him officially insane (the official term was umalishennyi), was
republished in Russia in 1906 in Grot’s journal Voprosy Filosofii i Psikhologii, an event attesting
to the fact that a new wave of interest in psychological and spiritual themes was returning to the
intellectual sources of previous generations.
Schelling’s idea of the drives as entities arising out of a primordial abyss of being deeply
influenced Russian Silver Age culture and art. For artists and thinkers of this period like
Solov’ev, Berdiaev, and Rozanov, the abyss became a symbol intimately bound up with
sexuality and the “sexual question” that confronted older models of the family, religious sin, self-
expression, and tended to accompany much millenarian speculation. The idealist Schelling
conceived the drives as part of the ontological process in which God emerged out of Himself at
the origin of the world. Schelling was first to coin the term “unconscious” (Unbewusst), and he
contributed to the foundations of the idea of the total personality, a concept that would inform
Jung’s concept of individuation. He also developed the system of Naturphilosophie that
attempted to reconcile the tensions between matter and spirit, nature and man, by theorizing the
origins of nature from nothingness in terms of the drives.
The appearance of nature from nothing implied that nothing was not a mere emptiness,
but an abyss charged with the chaotic movements of the drives that related to language.
46
Two Russian words exist for philosophy, filosofiia and liubomudriia.
47
On the link between Schelling’s philosophy and Russian lyric poetry of the 19th century, see
Sarah Pratt, Russian Metaphysical Romanticism: The Poetry of Tiutchev and Boratynskii, 15-29.
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The beginning of all beginnings is, of course, the “In the beginning was the word”
from the Gospel according to St. John: prior it, there was nothing, that is, the void
of divine eternity. According to Schelling, however, eternity is not a nondescript
bulk—a lot of things take place in it. Prior to the Word there is the chaotic
psychotic universe of blind drives, of their rotary motion, of their undifferentiated
pulsating, and the Beginning occurs when the Word is pronounced that
“represses,” rejects into the eternal Past, this self-enclosed circuit of drives.
(Žižek, The Abyss 14)
In The Abyss of the Freedom, Žižek describes how the divine Logos is preceded by a movement
of the drives in the primordial abyss. According to this line of thought, the beginning occurs
when one finds the correct word, when the word turns blind drive into desire, and twists the
orientation of the world from closed to open. What is that word, concept, or divine Logos?
Matter from another dimension
Returning to the discussion of psychogenic disorders above, those which elude the
scalpel and “which may be produced by imagination [Vorstellungen] and treated by the
imagination,” Gumilev’s text provides another striking image as a supplement to the peasant
theory of matter and energy. In chapter three, on the way to Ogurechnoe, the company comes
across two mastaki (craftsmen), Filostrat and Evmenid. Telling of their exile from Ogurechnoe—
due to having fallen in love with the daughter “of a very old man” and wanting to “split” her
between them— the brothers discuss their own proof of the existence of God that has to do with
a “fourth dimension” of the imagination. Evmenid describes the theory in a kind of philosophical
introduction (vstuplenie), promising to reveal the rest later. “ Зверю открыты три изме рения
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пространства. Возьмите, к примеру, лошадь на узком мос т ике через канав у. Видит она,
что канава глу б окая, и боится, видит, что мостик узенький, ст у пает осторожно, а когда
берег близк о, идет скорее. Значит, длин у, глу б ину и шири н у чу вству е т” (Gumilev
204). The reference here is to Petr Uspenskii and his widely popular treatise on non-euclidian
geometry in Chetvertoe izmerenie. This volume, written by a philosopher and theososphist,
describes the mathematical theory behind extra-dimensional space, what became very popular
with spiritualist practitioners and philosophers, as it helped to ground their transcendental
idealism in abstract mathematical reasoning. The phenomenon of spirits was explained as contact
with an extra dimension, one “perpendicular” to our own, and Gumilev was an acolyte of
Uspenskii’s thought as well as a reader of Pavel Florenskii’s widely-popular Stolp i utverzhdenie
(Gumilev 512). However, quite unlike what this term means today, the fourth dimension, at least
as explained by Uspenskii, was rigorously defended with ample reference to the mathetacial
literature, like the work of the American mathematician, Charles Howard Hinton.
While animals know three dimensions of space and orient within it, humans know a
fourth dimension, that of inner space, what Evmenid calls the “first order of God.” Man is
capable of making creatures from this inner realm, like sphinxes, winged lions, etc., drawing,
sculpting, and pulling them from this inner space. However, in what seems like a reference to
Plato (“ Мезенцов тщетно ломал голов у, стараясь вспомнить источники, из которых
выросла эта странная теория” [Gumilev 205]), the creative capacity of man’s imagination falls
short of creating real life, causing humans to experience “longing” (toska) for true reality.
Evmenid goes on to claim that God has opened the second order as well:
Только мал о одного измерения, призраки от него родятся, да и то
маловероятные. Затосковал челове к по истине непреложной, и явил ему
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Господь наш Иису с Христос второе измерен ие иного мира, которое есть
любовь. То- то радость пошла по всей земле. С двумя- то измерениями ку да
способнее. И цветочки иначе запахли, и птицы запели по- новому, а человек
стал на земле как добр ый хозяин. Ч у деса совершаться начали замест о
появленья призраков. (Gumilev 204)
From the second dimension of love, reality itself becomes infused with a joyful spirit, producing
miracles within an Edenic world, where man as gardener creates good works of the imaginary-
real. However, seeing the creatures inevitably perish, humans once again grow lonely and seek
the absolute, or “incorruptible” (nezyblemogo):
Опять затос к овал человек, и начал ему открываться Ду х С в ятой, третье
измерение, слово котор ого еще не сказано и неведомо, какое оно бу дет. А
как откроется, так и станет челове к жить в но вых трех из мерениях, а о
старых забудет, как о сне полу ночном. И ничто из того, что его прежде
томило и заботило, уже не затомит и не озаботит. Потому что это и есть
истина. Вот как бы вст у пление, а дальше я подробно обо всем рассказываю.
(Gumilev 205)
The elaboration of ever new dimensions leads to displaced desire for the absolute, and what
seems like Eden turns out to be the present chaos of an unstable binary of imagination and
(erotic) love—love’s division is marked by the two brothers who lust after the daughter of
Ogurechnoe’s leader. Mitia quickly rejects Evmenid’s theory, stating that calculation itself is a
sin, in that it divides God’s unary creation, and God, the grass, the sky, and the girl of
Ogurechnoe, are all one, while the two brothers keep insisting on the number three, reflecting
Christian debates over the doctrine of the trinity that led to the Great Schism between East and
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West Christianity. Evmenid nevertheless insists the characters live in the world of imaginary joy
and miracle within the second order of God, marking the formal place in the text where the
realist elements have dissolved, the psychoanalyst having smoked all of his cigarettes and lost
his tome of Nietzsche. The role of physiology in this matter seems far removed, with new
divisions of spirit emerging as central themes, yet the knife Mitia carries close by serves as a
reminder of the flesh. The scene convinces Mezentsov that “ действительно су ществ у ет тайное
межд унаро д ное общество, поставившее себе целью скомпрометировать всю евр опейск у ю
нау к у, посл едовательно вводя в не е неверные данные. Но для чего, он не решился
спросить.” (Gumilev 203). And so, the company is pulled toward Ogurechnoe and the
“undivided” little pale old man, the one who will heal Mitia’s gnev with his singular presence,
inaugurate the end of man’s eternal toska, and open the final dimension of God with the final
Word.
Mass psychology on the way to Ogurechnoe
As a student of Charcot, Wundt, and Freud’s associate Paul Flechsig, Vladimir Bekhterev
was the figure responsible for importing the new western interest in suggestion (vnushenie) into
the Russian context, after a series of talks he gave in 1897, collected and expanded into the
volume, Suggestion and Its Role in Social Life (Vnushenie i ego rol’ v obshchestvennoi zhizni,
1908, second ed.). Bekheterev was particularly interested in the social aspect of hypnosis, and he
provided a long commentary on the mass suggestion that accompanied the 1905 Revolution and
other phenomena in history. “To Bekhterev, the phenomenon of a large group of people
becoming possessed by a common impulse and merging into a mob, often observed during the
revolution, was empirical evidence of hypnotic influence on a mass scale” (Agursky 257). While
66
psychoanalysis does not appear in his account, Bekhterev describes a fundamental division
between consciousness and what can be seen as the unconscious, by dividing the psyche into the
active, “specific sphere” of consciousness and the passive or “general sphere” of the
unconscious. Suggestion is a variety of psychical influence that is distinguished from reason
(ubezhdenie), in that the former works upon general consciousness, frequently beneath the limit
of awareness.
In his volume, significantly expanded in the 1908 edition, Bekhterev describes the case of
a Russian peasant who was hospitalized in Kyiv due to his hallucinations.
[…] Malevarmy, the founder of a religious sect, who had been forcibly
hospitalized in Kiev as a result of Sikorsky's diagnosis that he suffered from
hallucinations. While praying, Malevarmy experienced extraordinary joy and a
feeling of weightlessness. His mood influenced his followers and attracted others,
and the sect grew large. Malevarmy claimed that he communicated with the
Heavenly Father, and proclaimed himself to be Jesus, reincarnated for the second
coming. Malevarmy taught his followers a prayer that stated that Doomsday was
approaching and that Malevanny would then judge humanity. His followers
staunchly adhered to him. In 1902, members of his sect desecrated a church in the
Ukrainian village of Pavlovka and killed some villagers, for, according to
Malevanny, the Orthodox Church was the seed of evil. (Rozenthal 253)
Bekhterev’s volume is a compendium of instances through history of the phenomenon of mass
suggestion. He posited that the basis of these events, even that of workers strikes and their
charismatic leaders (what would get him in trouble later), operated at the level of the “general
sphere,” which can become “infected,” as a pathological contagion spread, by a powerful idea or
67
image. Thus, Bekhterev, Osipov, and others had to agree that the mind contained a fundamental
split, whether the will was possessed by the self or if the will was given to the self from the
outside (Osipov)— a fundamental splitting of consciousness was being negotiated with, one that
had to be posited to explain the phenomenon of hypnosis.
The negative infection by mass culture is represented in Veselye brat’ia directly before
the novel’s abrupt and inconclusive end. Mezentsov, Mitia, and a third character, Vania, enter a
village near the town of Mamaevo, in which some industry has been constructed (“ Казалось,
работала какая- то паровая машина, мельница или молотилка, работала с перебоями,
визгом, ревом.” [Gumilev 206]). In the middle of a threshing barn, they see a man sitting and
drinking champagne out of a chalice (“ большой золотой ку бок из тех, которые назначаются
призами или дарятся на товарищеских проводах”), a reference to the commemorative cup of
the 1905 coronation of Tsar Nikolas II and the Khodynska Tragedy, an event that Bekhterev
conceived of as a mass suggestion. The man, introducing himself in third person, goes by the
name Pavel Aleksandrovich Shemiaka, the “engineer of communication pathways” ( Инженер
пу тей сообщения). His figure alludes to the fifteenth-century Grand Prince Dmitrii Iur’evich
Shemiaka, being worshipped as an idol by the peasants, who have collected the town’s candles in
the corners, the wax falling on the muzhiki, and marking them with a “mass moral insanity.”
— Павла Александров ича Шемяку не знаете? — и си девший оглянулся
вокру г, как бы ища сочувствия своему негодованию. — Инженера пу тей
сообщения? А Сольвычегодско- М а маевск у ю железну ю дорог у кто вам
построит? Кто изыска ния третьег о дня закончил — птица? Нет, извините, не
птичка, а я. Все теперь у вас бу дет: и книги, чтоб девкам папильотки
закру ч иват ь, и калоши, чтобы падеспань танцевать, граммофоны, вино,
68
сардинки и сифилис. П риобщитесь к ку льт у ре, а мне уж позвольте пог у лят ь.
Позволяете, да? Правда? Ну, бл аг одарю вас! (Gumilev 207-08)
Shemiaka, a figure of coming future industry in the garb of Russia’s distant past, begins
to tempt the travelling companions, with gold, 500-ruble notes, the women of the town—all of
which they refuse. Vania calls him the devil, to which Shemiaka agrees, saying he is Beelzebub
(Vel’zevul), looking around as the peasants agree joyfully that he is in fact Beelzebub.
Quoting Semyon Frank, one of the Vekhi philosophers, Lossky writes in The History of
Russian Philosophy: “‘Evil springs from the unutterable abyss which lies as it were at the
dividing line between God and not god.’ Frank evidently has in mind the conception of the
Ungrund in Jacob Boehme and of ‘nature in God’ in Schelling. In Russian philosophy the same
idea is found in Vladimir Soloviev and Berdyaev” (277). The meeting with Shemiaka, as god-
devil, reveals that the journey is approaching closer to the dividing line between the sacred and
profane. As Shemiaka throws money into the crowd, the group makes their escape.
The meeting with Shemiaka is followed directly by the image of a peasant in the throes of
a “possession,” in which the travelers are implored to intervene, representing the individual toll
of “mass moral insanity.”
То, что у в идел Мезенц ов, и тогда и после казалось ему сном, так это
было необычно и в то же время потрясающе реально. Толпа отхлынула от
лавки, старухи — охая и причитая, старики — крестясь. Больной
приподнялся и схватился обеими ру кам и за сердце, лицо его стало
зеленоватого цвета, как у мертвеца. Казалось, что его поддерживает только
неизмеримость его му ки. А изо рту его, зажи мая стисн утые зубы, ползло
что- то отвратительное стального цвета, в большой палец толщиной. На
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конце, как две бисери н ки, светились малень кие глазки. На мгновение оно
заколебало с ь, словно осматриваясь, потом медленно изогну лось, и конец
скрылся в ухе несчастного.
— Рви, рви! — взвизгн у л Митя и, схватив одной ру кой червя, др у гой
уперся в висок больного. Его му ску л ы натянулись под тонкой р у баш кой,
гу бы сжали с ь от нату ги, но червь волнообразными движениями продолжал
двигаться в его ру ке, как бу дто она была из возду ха. Больной ревел
нечеловеческим ревом, зу бы его х р у стели, но вдру г он со страшным
усили ем уд арил Митю прямо под ложечк у. Митя отскочил, ахн у в. А червь
высвободил хвост, причем он оказ ался слегка раздвоенным, и скрылся в ухе.
Как заметил Мезенцов, он был немногим бол ь ше аршина. (Gumilev 211-12)
As Mezentsov helplessly watches to the side, Mitia’s physical intervention fails to snag the
worm (cherv’) from the peasants’ ear, because it is made of a different “substance,” of ideas
recalling the images of Kaan’s phantasia morbosa, growing in strength from the obscene
presence and worship of Shemiaka. Mitia advises the others to call for a confessor. The peasant’s
speaking in tongues will drown out reading of Scripture, they say. Then call a deaf confessor,
Mitia says, and a “pope,” too. The scene negatively presents the spread of industry and capital
upon the peasantry, though no solution is hinted at for this dilemma, aside from what may lie
ahead in Ogurechnoe. After five chapters, the novel concludes with the trio sleeping in the warm
open field before continuing their Dante-esque “descent” into the abyss of Russia’s wilderness.
70
A loss of will
Perhaps it is too bold to claim that Gumilev’s text is the first instance of what may be
termed the Russian psychoanalytic novel, since the discipline is mentioned only once in the text.
However, as it deals with the western scientific revolution’s impact on Russian thought and
attempts to think of a mythical and integral new science that could potentially replace it, it is a
most appropriate literary supplement to the aims of this chapter, pointing forward to the monistic
line of thought during the early Soviet period. Giving a history of how psychoanalysis arrived
into Russia reveals the fissures that characterized psychology as a discipline at this time, fissures
that this novel playfully confronts and subverts. The novel, then, presents the limits of
psychoanalysis/western reason in light of a secret cabal of peasant occultists (the “Happy
Brotherhood”) who clandestinely develop a new method of peasant “reason,” different from the
methodology of western empirical science and with its own striking ontology, epistemology, and
metaphysics—to rival and undermine the limits of western positivism itself. Yet, will this
theosophy prove to be the active force that replaces the passivity of psychoanalysis critiqued in
this text?
If one is to assume the success of Goloushev’s case study opening this chapter at face
value, it represents a successful application of psychoanalysis (one of the earliest outside of
Freud’s circle) that was able to cure the man of a bodily symptom, not by any physical
interventions, but by the materialist application of attentive listening, the work of speech, and
memory upon a functional disorder of the body. The catharsis seemed to be enabled by a
regression to the past, into the “abyss” of personal history, where an unprocessed event that
could not be made sense of at the time knotted together and produced a “compromise formation,”
a symptom—Mister X’s impotence—asking to be read. Understanding the event could only be
71
done retroactively, by remembering it and working the material through. From Goloushev’s
perspective, there is nothing passive to the images the characterize psychosomatic symptoms.
The extreme social phenomenon of the Skoptsy, heavily suggested between the lines of
Gumilev’s Veselye brat’ia and commented upon by Bekhterev and his notion of mass
suggestion, displays the product of a troubled angst at the idea of ontological incompleteness,
with an irreversible passage to an act. The removal of the genitals paradoxically marks one as
whole within the universe of a spirit in which all tempting flesh has been evacuated, every dark
crevice filled with divine light. Should one have suggested this active measure to Goloushev’s
patient? Gumilev’s text reflects an anxiety of incompleteness, which its own incomplete form
reflects. Gumilev’s novel is a failed attempt to articulate a basis for his worldview, which passes
through several references—Nietzsche, Lavoisier, Bekhterev, and that of Freudian thought.
While fighting against division, Gumilev could not achieve a stable philosophical position that
transmitted the principle of “vseedinstvo” or sobornost’, which Soloviev sought in a political
project of ecumenism, the unification of Christian churches. Thus, his poetic-philosophical
position must be seen as eclectic, one of constant movement, displacement, and travel, or a pafos
stremlenie (Sampson 43).
48
The guilt carried by Mezentsov over the death of Masha never receives proper
expatiation, as Gumilev’s text remained unfinished. However, a potential “happy” conclusion
48
“The really central conviction, the driving force that made him translate his antipathy into
direct action, was his conception of his role and his duty as a poet. Gumilev considered poetry
the highest sphere of human endeavor and the poet the highest type of human being, and
believed that, to be worthy of the title of poet, a man had to translate his beliefs into action,
whatever the obstacles and dangers; to express his will; and insofar as possible to impose his will
on the world. In other words, his counterrevolutionary activity was the ultimate expression of
that principle that shaped his life and informed so much of his poetry, what one critic has called
the ‘pathos of endeavor’ (pafos stremleniia).” (Sampson 43)
72
where Mezentsov utilizes something from his western knowledge to destroy what has to be the
ominous and evil figure of the belen’kii starichok can be posited. In his turn, Mezentsov may
influence Mitia’s rejection of the peasant cult leader, who is ultimately responsible for Masha’s
death, by allowing Mitia to see that even this full subject has a “dark side,” is prone to fear and
desire. And perhaps Masha isn’t dead after all, highlighting the misnomer to any “universal
brotherhood.” With Masha and Mitia’s help, Mezentsov liberates the toiling Misha from his
impossible task of finding a peasant theory of everything, as well as discovering a cure for the
epileptic peasant outside the threshing barn. Thus, by saving three+ lives, Mezentsov will pay off
his guilt’s debt with interest. However, pretending to pass beyond the firewall erected by the
limits of this text is a purely imaginary endeavor.
73
Section I (Drives and Philosophical Idealism)
Chapter Two
“Character is Fate”: Goethe’s Bildungstrieb and Psychoanalytic Influences
in Marietta Shaginian’s Svoia sud’ba
Character is fate.
—Heraclitus
Но, господа, кто же может своими же болезнями тщеславиться, да еще ими фор с ить?
—Dostoevsky, “Notes from Underground”
Several issues of the Russian psychoanalytic journal Psikhoterapiia contain
advertisements for a sanatorium called Kriukovo. In proximity to the Kriukovo train station on
the outskirts of Moscow, it was directed by the psychiatrist Nikolai Vyrubov and ran on private
funds from 1909-1914 until war forced it closed (Ovcharenko 193-94). Famous cultural figures
of the time, like Chekhov’s brother Mikhail, the poet Sergei Solov’ev, and the mother of
Aleksandr Blok were rumored to have stayed at Kriukovo. The ad describes many amenities:
spacious and comfortable lodgings, electric lighting, billiards, outdoor gardening, river
swimming, and a nearby church. Technical medical equipment on site is also listed: water-
therapy apparatuses, “Charcot-showers,” acidic-coal and hydroelectric baths, and equipment for
any kind of electro, light, or vibration therapies.
49
What was unique to Kriukovo was that it also included a list of afflictions treated with
psychoanalysis and hypnosis, “nervous diseases” like neurasthenia, psychaesthenia, hysteria,
49
The original sanatoria were established in Germany in the mid-nineteenth century for
treatment of infectious diseases, like tuberculosis. In the United States, William Tuke established
the York Retreat in England in 1796. For a history of sanatoria in Europe and the Americas,
which revolves around the treatment of tuberculosis but also contains an important thread to the
development of psychotherapy, see Shorter, “The Historical Development of Mental Health
Services in Europe.”
74
obsessive compulsions (the “psychoneuroses,” as Freud categorized them), but also psycho-
physiological afflictions like drug addiction, eating disorders, and digestive problems. In 1910,
such a psychoanalytic orientation was quite new, which was also the therapeutic direction upheld
by the Psikhoterapiia journal.
50
The ad for Kriukovo ends with the following disclaimer: “ Д у шевно бол ь ные и
страдающие заразительными болезнями не принимаются” (Psikhoterapiia. 1911 [3]). This is
important to understand the distinction between nervous disorders and those severe mental
illnesses, such as schizophrenia, that posed a distinct problem for psychotherapeutic intervention.
The sanatorium Kriukovo was a site “well known among Moscow intellectuals”
(Sirotkina 104), possibly familiar to Marietta Shaginian, an Armenian-Russian author who was
embarking on a literary career at the time under the influence of Symbolism. For a short while,
she lived in the vicinity with composer Nikolai Metner and his brother, the philosopher and poet,
Emilii. The setting of a sanatorium appears in her first novel Svoia sud’ba (1923; composed in
1916), “which may have been inspired by the Kriukovo sanatorium near Moscow” (Etkind, Eros
129). Svoia sud’ba tells the story of a young psychiatrist gaining practical field experience at a
psychotherapeutic facility located in the North Caucasus, where he meets the German Doctor
Ferster and his daughter Maro.
50
As Irina Sirotkina writes: “This journal opened its first issue with the article
‘Psychotherapeutic Views of S. S. Korsakov,’ in order to demonstrate the journal’s continuity
with the humanitarian traditions of Russian psychiatry. The article, as well as the earlier work by
its author, N. A. Vyrubov, the director of a nervous sanatorium, updated Korsakov’s views in the
light of the concept of psychoneurosis” (Diagnosing 104). In 1914 the journal published its final
issue with a note by Vyrubov, notifying subscribers that the journal must fold due to the outbreak
of the First World War. Osipov’s publishing endeavor called the Psychoanalytic Library
(Psikhoanaliticheskaia biblioteka), which published the sanctioned works of Freud, Jung, and
Adler in Russian translation would also cease activity with the war. See also, Etkind, Eros of the
Impossible, 58, 129-131.
75
What makes Shaginian’s novel significant in light of psychoanalysis, the drives, and the
Russian imperial context is that it addresses the myriad issues affecting the sphere of mental
health within an empire on the verge of collapse and revolution, what was discussed at length in
the previous chapter, re. Schorske, etc. It presents a cross-section of mentally-ill imperial
subjects, a cast of so-called neurasthenics, hysterics, obsessives, erotomaniacs, etc., who come to
the sanatorium for treatment by the renowned German physician Ferster, based loosely on the
German educational philosopher, Friedrich Wilhelm Foerster.
51
The action of the story centers
on a young psychiatrist named Sergei Batiushkov and his supervised medical practicum—to
determine the proper approach to each patient’s malady, by analyzing each personality
(lichnost’) and character structure (kharakter). In connection to the diagnostic distinction at
Kriukovo mentioned above, Batiushkov must determine the cure for a “maniacal” patient by the
name of Iastrebtsov, whose schizophrenic-like split has separated his consciousness from his
own soul. The problem is how to “make whole” (istselit’) Iastrebtsov, before his mania breaks
out.
With its sanatorium setting, Svoia sud’ba can be compared to Thomas Mann’s The Magic
Mountain (1924) and categorized alongside the first literary representations of psychoanalysis,
such as Groddeck’s The Seeker of Souls: A Psychoanalytic Novel (1921) and Svevo’s
Confessions of Zeno (1923), and Shaginian must be given credit for being one of the first to
attempt a literary representation of psychoanalysis earlier than these male authors.
51
Ferster was a fervent critic of German militarism and, later, of National Socialism, and whose
books would be burned alongside Freud’s in the 1930s. His 1907 text, School and Character
(Schule und Charakter), seems to have informed the fictional psychotherapeutic system in
Shaginian’s novel, one which takes shape against the system of psychoanalysis.
76
At the core is an argument for the importance of the formation of character (kharakter),
from the Greek meaning “to engrave,” a psychical form able to withstand the pull of unconscious
impulses, or drives. This chapter will describe the various ways psychoanalysis appears in the
novel and in Shaginian’s personal experience during this time, arguing that Shaginian did not
fully reject Freud’s method, as has been claimed. She was rather cautiously ambivalent toward it,
since it features as an important intervention that helps enact the cure for Iastrebtsov. As such, it
must be seen as a necessary supplement to Ferster’s own method (at least in the first edition) and
it will be the fate of Batiushkov to synthesize Ferster’s therapeutic method with the insights of
psychoanalysis. The chapter will describe why that is by a close reading of the plot and in
connection to biographical factors. Shaginian witnessed several close contacts, such as Emilii
Metner and Ivan Il’in, undergo psychoanalytic treatment while she composed this text and
encrypted their features into the characters and events.
A focus on character is central to Ferster’s method of psychotherapy developed within an
embedded text—Dr. Ferster’s notebook—called “character correction” (nalazhyvanie
kharaktera), a method that rejects the psychoanalytic approach. “[ Фёрстер] мне говорил, что
для диагноз а [ психоанализ] иной раз и полезн о, из ста случаев в дв ух- трех. Сам же его
избегает…” (Shaginian 123). While Ferster’s method rejects psychoanalysis, it fails to intervene
into precisely those 2-3 cases that are central to the novel, what becomes obscured by later
editorial changes to the text. When Shaginian republished Svoia sud’ba in 1954, she made
substantial revisions and replaced several extended passages and smaller details. This later
version contains a much more polemical stance against “Freudianism,” reflecting the Communist
Party’s rejection of psychoanalysis from the early 1930s, yet whose redistribution of parts
drastically changes the logic of the central narrative, obscuring many organic textual links.
77
Chapter Two will focus on the first edition, arguing that psychoanalysis is a necessary
component to the plot’s coherence, lost in later versions.
52
The early version conveys much more ambiguity toward psychoanalysis, reflecting its
potential to cure mental illness, though cautioning against its modishness. This original
ambiguity gets categorically resolved in the 1954 edition, reflecting how Shaginian absorbed a
later Soviet rejection of Freudian thought, with the result of obscuring the plot’s central conflict
and the causality of its resolution. Despite its negative stance on psychoanalysis, the novel’s
1954 edits erase the narrative-structural fact that psychoanalysis plays a role in curing
Iastrebtsov, the central patient resistant to Ferster’s method. The second case is that of
Lapushkin, lost to suicide; the third is Ferster’s daughter, Maro.
This chapter argues that Shaginian was more partial toward Freudian thought in the early
draft. She was aware of at least two cases of its cure, but nevertheless held some reservations
against it, which helped to inform the main conflict of the novel. Furthermore, Etkind’s
suggestion that Iastrebtsov was modelled on Nikolai Yevreinov has to be supplemented with the
evidence that Shaginian likely encrypted features of Emilii Metner and Ivan Il’in, contacts of
Shaginian who underwent personal analysis, into this fictional character.
To the sanatorium
On his journey from Tsarskoe Selo to the Kunachkhirskii Gorge and the land of the
Karachay, the twenty-eight-year-old Sergei Ivanovich Batiushkov shares a coach and lodging
52
A note from the first page of the 1923 edition reads: “ Роман “ Своя Судьба” [sic] закончен в
1916 году и появляется впервые в печати в полном своем объеме. Начатый печатанием в
“ Вестнике Европы,” он был прерван на шестой главе в вид у прекращения вых ода
ж у рнала” (5).
78
with a strange personality, who Batiushkov soon learns is returning for treatment by the same
renowned doctor. The name of the protagonist who relates the events is revealed only in chapter
three, which seems significant, recalling the sad fate of the poet Konstantin Batiushkov, to whom
Pushkin dedicated his “Ne dai mne Bog soiti s uma.” A lengthy conversation is sparked on the
nature of the soul, and the patient proves himself to be a skilled interlocutor, taking the upper
hand in the conversation and quickly surmising Batiushkov’s lack of actual experience, clinical
or otherwise, stating:
Может быть, вы воображаете, что перевидать людей и пересл ушать их
бредни — зна ч ит возыметь некоторый психический опыт? Ошибает есь,
опыт есть нечт о спонтанное.
—То- есть?
—Чего в ду ше нет, о том она вовеки не приобретет опыта. Вы бы
греха не поняли, еслиб не изживали его про себя. Опыт— это значит сделать
нечто в самом себе, а ежели не сделать, то натк у нться. (Svoia sud’ba 13)
Iastrebtsov’s remark and warning is one aimed at both Batiushkov’s lack of experience, as well
as referring to the “talking cure”—the first of several references to psychoanalysis in the novel.
The “ranting” or “babbling” (brednia) evokes what Freud called “the fundamental rule of
psychoanalysis,” the method of free association, which initiated the development of
psychoanalytic technique from hypnotism, precursor to all dynamic therapies of the time.
53
At
53
Dynamic psychiatry, or, simply, psychotherapy, needs to be distinguished from rest cures and
physical interventions like “Charcot showers,” hydro-, electro-, magnetic therapies, etc., which
were widely offered at spas and sanatoria in Europe. On the development of psychotherapy from
hypnotism, see Ellenberger, The Discovery of the Unconscious, “The Emergence of Dynamic
Psychiatry” (ch. 2), pp. 53-109. He writes, “This survey has historical interest because a
continuous chain can be demonstrated between exorcism and magnetism, magnetism and
hypnotism, hypnotism and the great modern dynamic systems” (vi). I emphasize this excerpt
79
this point, however, the inexperienced Batiushkov is not aware of Freudian therapy, but will
become introduced to it in a later chapter via a letter written by his mother [!]. The connection is
also made to the religious dimension and sin, a prominent through-line in the novel that appears
in the injunction “ не гляди на грех,” the title of the eleventh chapter and the moral principle
underwriting Ferster’s method. It is Ferster’s rejection of sex, equivalent to sin, that further
distinguishes his method from that of the speech-centered “pansexualism” of Freud, and
becomes precisely that which makes him fumble the cure with Lapushkin, Iastrebtsov, and
Maro.
54
Iastrebtsov and Batiushkov pass from discussing personal experience to a discussion of
the soul. Is it a material substance, or is it something else in which the psychiatrist intervenes by
way of the cure? What is it that becomes modified during the therapy? Is it a mental structure, a
reflex, behavior? How does one understand the psychosomatic symptom? Iastrebtsov says:
Вы поймете, конечно, основн у ю идею, которая казалась мне наиболее
привлекательной в психологии: единство эксперименталь ной среды. Дело в
том, что нау к а возмож на лишь там, где ее пр едмет определен и всегда
тожествен; законы можно у с танавливать лишь для однородной среды,
because modern psychotherapy historically arises from hypnotism, and, was indeed ultimately
rooted in Freud ‘s rejection, and overcoming, of hypnotism. It was Freud’s patient Anna O., who
coined the term “talking cure” in describing the sessions between herself and Freud, leading
Freud to abandon hypnosis in the 1890s.
54
Freud himself notes this charge against him, repeated many times within the Russian context,
in a preface to the fourth edition of Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality: “It must also be
remembered, however, that some of what this book contains—its insistence on the importance of
sexuality in all human achievements and the attempt that it makes at enlarging the concept of
sexuality—has from the first provided the strongest motives for the resistance against psycho-
analysis. People have gone so far in their search for high-sounding catch words as to talk of the
‘pan-sexualism’ of psycho-analysis and to raise the senseless charge against it of explaining
‘everything’ by sex. We might be astonished at this, if we ourselves could forget the way in
which emotional factors make people confused and forgetful.” (1463)
80
неправда ли? Ну- с, и ду ша — вообще ду ша, психея — представлял а сь мне
такою однородною средою. Исходя из этого, я очень ско ро вывел, что ду ши
у всех людей одинаковые. (Svoia sud’ba 15)
Iastrebtsov sees the soul as a singular, metaphysical substance common to all people ( души у
всех людей одинаковые), to which Batiushkov asks if Iastrebtsov sees the soul as being
composed of physical material (“… вы видите в душе субст анцию?”). Iastrebtsov answers,
“На такой ученический вопрос я вам просто не отвечу.” (Ibid.) By refusing to answer
whether the soul has substance or not, Iastrebtsov dodges the empirical “problem of specificity”
and “localizability” of the soul, as posited for example by Schiller’s concept of Nervengeist,
mocking the very question as “scientistic.”
He goes on to describe the difficulty of grasping this metaphysical substance
intellectually, which is given the name “soul” in order to provide an illusion of stability, the only
stable quality being its infinite variability, a fact that never ceases to amaze him. “ На
протяжении одного дня, иногда одного часа душа смеется, плачет, гневается, любит,
ненавидит, алчет, скучает и тому подобное […]” (Ibid.). Iastrebtsov’s thoughts on the soul’s
plasticity reflect also in his own physiognomy. When Batiushkov first notices the patient’s odd
external features, they strike him as being less than fully formed. “Он был страшно худ. Это
создавало впечатление, будто его оконечностей, нежели следует” (Ibid. 13). This external
characterization foreshadows Iastrebtsov’s inner and outer plasticity, as he absorbs (or takes the
shape of) the characteristics of the person he interacts with and by doing so enacts a hypnotic
influence over them. What is discovered in a parody of a psychoanalytic session at the end of the
novel is that Iastrebtsov is a medium, not a maniac (as first diagnosed by Ferster), unconsciously
heightening the emotional states of the people he interacts with—a critical danger at the
81
sanatorium partly leading to the death of the “erotomaniac” Lapushkin. It is not that Iastrebtsov
has a character structure that is unformed, but that its essence is to take the form of the other.
In these early chapters, Iastrebtsov plants the seed in Batiushkov’s mind of the idea of the
infectious quality of the impulses of other people, that which Batiushkov must detect and
diagnose himself, recalling the paradigm case of Doctor Ragin’s conversations with Gromov in
Chekhov’s “Ward no. 6.” Iastrebtsov represents the psychiatrist-turned-patient, a possible fate
for the young Batiushkov, whose search for professional experience (his Bildung) is rife with
danger, symbolically echoed in the risky mountain roads and abyssal canyons he traverses to the
sanatorium. As a hypnotist, an experimental psychologist who studied under Binet, as well as a
psychiatric patient, the experienced Iastrebtsov presents the main case that Batiushkov must
solve.
Crisis at Musagetes
Prior to the October Revolution, Shaginian had been involved in the Symbolist circle of
Merezhkovskii and Gippius, yet some years before composing Svoia sud’ba, became
increasingly disenchanted by the crisis occurring within the Symbolist movement, polemics
generated out of the debates over mysticism breaking out in print.
55
While studying minerology
55
She would convert to Bolshevism after 1917, but one that was still informed by the Goethean
influence on her early worldview (she published her travel sketch Puteshestvie v Veimar in the
same year as the novel, much later than it was written, in 1923), the Goethian elements were
retained in the 1954 edition. “[…] in the late 1920s Shaginyan was viewed at best as a leftward-
leaning fellow-traveler (levaya poputchitsa), a partly reconstructed member of the intelligentsia
(intelligentka) who had not yet fully expiated the stigma of her idealization of Goethe’s Weimar
as a peak of cultural achievement, or her youthful dalliance with Symbolism and the bizarre god-
building (bogostroitel’stvo) preached by Dmitri Merezhkovskii and Zinaida Gippius” (Shepherd
65). In the previous chapter, I described a similar move by Gumilev, who broke from the
Symbolists by establishing the Acmeist school of poetry. There is some sense that, in Veselye
brat’ia, Gumilev turned to psychology (and psychoanalysis) to explore the limits of a
82
in Moscow in 1912, she drew close to the Metner brothers, Nikolai and Emilii, who ran the
Musagetes publishing house with Belyi and Vyacheslav Ivanov. Between 1912-1914, several
articles by Shaginian appeared in the Musagetes journal Trudy i dni. The topics ranged from a
psychological profile of Rakhmaninoff, an examination of Nietzsche’s idea of the “will to
power,” and a millenarian excursis on “ends” and “endings.” Shaginian worked as a publicist
filling out orders and corresponding with booksellers at Musagetes, an important organ of
Symbolism that published, most famously, Belyi’s Peterburg.
Emilii Metner was rebelling at this time against occultist currents within Symbolism,
which erupted in a feud at Musagetes over the outsized influence of Rudolph Steiner’s
Anthroposophy on Belyi. While Shaginian did not directly participate in these polemics, she
occupied a privileged place to observe them, details of which later wove their way into her novel.
As heated words exchanged between the parties, Shaginian left Russia to study philosophy at
German’s oldest university at Heidelberg. There, she became deeply engaged with the
philosophy of Goethe, who was at the center of the Symbolist debate between Metner and Belyi,
the trip being also a pilgrimage of sorts—what she wrote about in her popular travel sketch
Journey to Weimar (Puteshestvie v Veimar; 1923).
In her Weimar travelogue, published the same year as Svoia sud’ba, Shaginian wrote
about Goethe’s Elective Affinities (Die Wahlverwandtschaften), a text that expressed what she
accepted as an “iron law” of human attraction: “Когда читаешь, понимаешь до конца
категорический императив Канта, понимаешь, что не только ‘ царствие Божие’, но и
закон—вну т ри нас. Действие романа протекает с матема тической необходимост ь ю, как
physiological model of the soul, bringing his own brand of spiritualist philosophy up against
western models of psychology.
83
‘ созвездия над нами’” (Sobr. soch. 125). What struck Shaginian was the idea of a drive, or
compulsion, within human nature that operated according to “mathematical necessity”
(specifically, the double displacement reaction in chemistry applied by Goethe to human
attraction), automatically motivating the individual to act when its object-stimulus appears.
Die Wahlverwandtschaften is a novel of manners, but its title, drawn from the
terminology of eighteenth-century chemistry, seems to indicate a departure from
the social rules that govern manners. Instead, this strange title refers readers to a
scientific law according to which elements with innate “affinities” will choose, or
“elect,” to bond together, even if they must break out of previously formed unions
in order to do so. (Leacock 277)
56
What checks the gravitational pull of affinity, erecting a barrier to its automatic action, is the
equally-internalized “moral law,” or Kantian categorical imperative. This binary, of a drive and
its suppression via moral law, is a central theme of the novel, appearing most emphatically in a
sequence of binary terms—that of experience and knowledge, necessity and freedom, kharakter
and lichnost’, “tragic fate” and “dramaturgical fate,” etc. This chapter will examine the basic
tension that underlies this sequence, as Svoia sud’ba presents two main problems that must be
solved, what can be divided into a daytime and a nighttime conflict.
The first has to do with Iastrebtsov, whom the doctors suspect of harboring a murderous
impulse, a perverse kind of “affinity” that compels Iastrebtsov to potentially select, pursue, and
kill his target. The proper stimulus may appear any time (though, oddly, Ferster allows him a
degree of freedom), which creates much of the narrative tension, as Iastrebtsov hypnotically
affects the other patients and workers, any of whom can turn out to be his first victim. According
56
See Leacock’s article for Walter Benjamin’s views of Goethe’s text.
84
to Etkind, Iastrebtsov bears traces of the famous theater director Nikolai Evreinov, who
developed an acting method in connection with his interest in psychoanalysis that can be seen as
a unique system of theatrical psychotherapy, a precursor by several decades to the “drama
therapy” of D. W. Winnicott in the West.
Yevreinov himself cuts a nasty figure in the novel as Yastrebtsov, a maniacal
patient, the source of all evils in the sanatorium. Expounding in typical symbolist
terminology, he “enhances every temptation in each person,” stages a symbolist
performance in the sanatorium, called “My Dream,” drives one patient to suicide,
and at the end denounces the remarkable Forster [sic]. (Etkind, Eros 124)
The second conflict is the nighttime romance between Ferster’s daughter Maro and
Hansen, a half-Polish, half-Swedish technician at the local lumbermill providing electricity to the
sanatorium. Maro rebels against her father’s moral prohibition to their relationship, since Hansen
is married to Gulia, a half-Polish, half-Karachai woman pregnant with their child. Heightened by
Iastrebtsov’s mediumistic presence, Maro’s attraction proves to be too strong, and Hansen and
Maro unite in a kind of Goethean bond of elective affinities. The threat of death looms over this
relationship as well, however. Batiushkov (now also in love with Maro) suspects Gulia’s
Karachay relatives of plotting a murder for Hansen’s betrayal and struggles to intervene into
their relationship before it is too late. In such ways, Shaginian plays with genre conventions
readily available at the time, setting up scenarios informed by previous texts and subverting
readerly expectations. What is different is the way she utilizes psychological concepts to place a
wedge into the clichés, reflecting the degree to which psychological discourse saturated cultural
production of the time.
85
Fate and the Bildungstrieb
When Andrei Belyi read Shaginian’s novel, he offered praise and wrote that “ это скор ей
х у дожественно- филосо фский диал ог, под которым—целая диссертация” (Shaginian,
Sobranie 770). He was responding, in part, to the negative way Symbolism was inscribed into
the pages of the novel and added, “ кое с че м не согласен.” What Belyi disagreed with was the
way Shaginian delimited the reach of intuitive, occult knowledge into the understanding of the
psyche, which involved her views of Goethe, and perhaps is also a gesture to her siding with
Metner during his and Belyi’s dramatic falling out.
The literary psychotherapy developed in the novel bears the stamp of Goethe’s influence,
particularly that of the Bildungstrieb, a central idea of German Romanticism influencing
Symbolism and that also lay at the foundation of the psychoanalytic concept of the drives. “In
Goethe's work, the word Trieb —which became a core concept in psychoanalysis—assumes the
meaning of instinct, need, and mental impulse, Bildungstrieb being the secret force that animates
living creatures” (Vermorel 686-87). Originally a natural-philosophical concept coined by
Johann Friedrich Blumenbach in the late eighteenth century (Blumenbach also coined the racial
term “Caucasian”), this “secret force” explained how nature generates living form out of inert
matter, “choosing” a direction for development according to a predetermined plan (Bild), a
thoroughly vitalist idea.
57
While the psychoanalytic notion of the drives differs in substantial
ways from the Bildungstrieb, the latter points to their mutual origin in German Romantic
57
In English, Bildgunstrieb has approximate meanings of “formation” and “education,”
capturing the ongoing process of order generating out of disorder, but lacks what the Russian
term obrazovanie captures in closer relation to the German, of being the word for “education”
but also implying the appearance and accretion of a “form,” “image,” and even of a “face” (with
attendant religious connotations). The ancient Greek for “form,” or eidos, is the root of the word
“idea,” “image,” and “form”. Shaginian puts each of these terms in equivalence, that out of the
unknown and abyssal dimension, the image/idea/face/form emerges.
86
thought. Batiushkov’s dilemma, of reading the code of the Bildungstrieb in the behavior of the
sanatorium’s patients, necessitates finding what has been “secretly selected” by their souls,
fixated upon, similar to what Nikolai Osipov (discussed in the previous chapter) meant by the
“organizational principle” that underlies personality structure.
To understand how the concept informed Shaginian’s early career and the formation of
the novel, a detour is needed to further unpack the Bildungstrieb. Before it influenced Goethe,
the Bildungstrieb was accepted by Kant, albeit provisionally, as a productive biological heuristic.
Kant would have rejected any such force pretending to be constitutive of nature,
since a force of this kind would have to operate according to an intellectual plan
or an intention, which he believed could only be found in a rational mind but not
in a-rational, mechanical nature. For Kant […] the Bildungstrieb could only be an
heuristic concept, one that helped the naturalist seek out the mechanistic causes
assumed to be at work. (R. Richards 19-20)
Kant’s influence upon Goethe was an important aspect to the crisis of Symbolism in Russia.
According to scholars, the occultism apparent in some of Goethe’s works, in which many of the
Symbolists took interest, was tempered by the critical philosophy of Kant, who drew careful
conceptual limits to what could and could not be known by the processes of “pure reason”—the
firewall discussed in Chapter One.
In this connection, in 1914, Emilii Metner published a tract called Razmyshlenie o Gete.
This was a critical text that took aim at Rudolph Steiner and the movement of Anthroposophy
over its misuse of the “sage of Weimar,” an argument that involved a certain perspective on
87
Kant’s philosophy.
58
It was precisely the issue over Kant’s connection to Goethe that sparked
Metner’s feud with Andrei Belyi over the latter’s obsession with the occult system of Rudolph
Steiner.
According to Medtner, Goethe’s crucial meeting with Schiller infused his thought
with Kantian criticism. It was a vaccine that saved him at a stage when he risked
being led astray by his empathy with nature. Steiner, Medtner goes on,
misinterprets this encounter when he says that Goethe resisted Kant, when in fact
it was Kantian insight that gave the mature Goethe a foundation on which to
stand. (Ljungrenn, Poetry 126)
Thus, Shaginian’s interest in psychology at this time may have been something that helped her to
think on a more materialist basis and as a defense against the occult currents of mystical
Symbolism. Il’in’s enthusiasm for psychoanalysis and aversion to the Symbolist occult seemed
to be made in the same connection, as it was for a time for Metner. In “Filosofiia i zhizn’,” Il’in
writes of the corrective offered by psychoanalysis to the philosopher: “Наконец, современная
нау ка о душевных болезнях, в лице осторожного и зоркого Зигму н да Фрейда, открывает
психоанализ как метод, которым человек может не тольк о исцелить и очистить свое
бессознател ьное, но и сообщить своему ду ху органическ ую цельность, чу ткость и
58
“[…] в 1914 г. Э. К. Метнер ( брат композитора) напечатал подробный, философски
взвешенны й разбор сочинений Штейнера под названием: « Размы шления о Гете. Книга I.
Разбор взглядов Р. Штейнера в связи с вопросами критицизма, символизма и
окк у льтизма». В том же году вышел направленный против антропософии полемический
тру д Эллиса ( Л. Л. Кобылинского) «Vigilemus!». С у г у бая деликатность ситу ации состояла
в том, что оба автора были ближайшими друзьями А. Белого и вместе с ним основывали
издательство «Му сагет», в котором появились названные книги. В ход редакторской
подготовки тру да Элли са обеспоко е нный поэт вмешивался весьма ак тивно, настаивая на
к у пюрах и исправлениях, но Э. К. Метнер су мел отстоять неприкосновенность те кста.
Доку ментальные свидетельства этой истории сохранен ы.” (Gavriushin)
88
гибкость” (Il’in 61-62). Psychoanalysis was a method to clarify where the mind’s energies went
awry, much as Kant and the neo-Kantian movement breaking out at this time was seen as another
corrective to the speculations engendered by the various philosophical and psychological schools
of the nineteenth century. Il’in and Metner combined the two systems in their resistance to
Symbolism.
Within his categories of knowledge, Kant warned against the attribution of an intellectual
plan, and thus a mind, to nature itself, what he tripped against when initially affirming
Blumenbach’s “monstrous” Bildungstrieb. However, Kant soon corrected his misstep and
thought of the Bildungstrieb as a productive heuristic: one could act as if there was a plan (“[…]
the Bildungstrieb could only be a heuristic concept, one that helped the naturalist seek out the
mechanistic causes assumed to be at work” [R. Richards 20]). What historically resolved this
confusion was the idea of reflexivity, which became a part of evolutionary theory. Reflexivity
posits that random mutations of an organism that facilitate its adaptation to the environment
(according to natural selection) appear to be following a pre-ordained design when viewed from
the point of the fully developed organism. The organism implies a finished and perfected being,
the end of a teleological process, when in reality, evolutionary mutations are always active and
the process is ongoing. Kant’s truly great insight was partly due to his sensitivity and caution in
ascribing agency to nature, to which he still gets credit today. For Steiner, however, an
anthroposophist could dismiss the Kantian guardrail and gain direct access to the pre-ordained
blueprint of life, as he believed Goethe to have accomplished by ignoring Kant’s warning
89
(Ljungrenn, The Russian Mephisto 58). In terms already discussed, Steiner’s insistence on
clairvoyance crossed the Kantian firewall.
59
The idea of Kant’s influence on Goethe is crucial to understand Shaginian’s psychical
structure developed in the novel of a necessary distance between “consciousness” and the “soul,”
mediated by way of “character.” Character is described spatially in the novel as a kind of vessel
which stands between consciousness and the soul: “Между сознанием и ду шой до лжен стоять
характер” (41). Neurosis dissolves character, which becomes spent or weakened, resulting in the
collapse of the distance between the noumenal soul and phenomenal consciousness. Shaginian’s
Ferster is a Kantian figure remaining at the level of phenomenal description, one who does not
descend into the netherworld of the noumenal real.
60
Maro reveals just what organizational
principle is behind Ferster’s method and worldview. “ Мой отец находит, что истинная с у дьба
человека — у Бога, и пока мы ее не трогаем, а только предчу в ств у ем и радуемся ей, она
наша, а чу ть мы захотим взять ее силком, она переходит из Божьих ру к... в злые ру ки”
(52). This religious organizational principle is removed in the 1954 edition of the novel, yet its
structural relationships remains. Compare the passage above with the following editorial
59
Steiner’s anthroposophical worldview promoted educational reforms that aimed at developing
a student’s entire being and faculties in an open environment, a progressive idea of the time that
also blended with Steiner’s belief in reincarnation, communication with the dead, and the
existence of gnomes, among other things.
60
This is presented early in the novel when Batiushkov overhears a story of Ferster’s legendary
therapeutic powers, what can be thought of as the successful cure of a Karachay man, mirroring
the therapeutic failure initiating the action in Veselye brat’ia. Through the wall of an inn,
Batiushkov hears the tale of how a Karachay named Uzdimbei had grown proud after plumbing a
deep chasm by himself, having returned unscathed and been awarded a great sum for his daring
act. Doctor Ferster senses a danger to Uzdimbei’s character and devises a plan to humble
Uzdimbei by dropping his wallet in the vicinity of the sanatorium, which is quickly found by a
little girl near a river. Calling Uzdimbei to him, Ferster compares the ability of the little girl to
Uzdimbei and dislodges Uzdimbei’s dangerous pride by recourse to a universal principle: his
previous success was due not to him, but to Allah’s grace, which spared Uzdimbei’s life. Best
not test Allah.
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changes: “ Да. Мой отец находит, что истинная су дь ба че л овека—в обществе. По ка мы не
выдергиваем ее из судь бы народа, не выду мываем небывальщины, мы живем по-
настоящему, а чу ть начнем со чин ять, она переходит из наших ру к... в чу жие руки”
(Shaginian, Librebook). The movement of history displays that “God’s law” reflected
Shaginian’s own worldview at the time, completely exchanged for a different principle in the
1954 edition, perhaps pointing to a certain flexibility in human organizational principles or
imagos.
In 1916, two years following Emilii Metner’s analysis of the connection between Goethe
and Kant, and which explicitly rejected Steiner’s views on the matter, Belyi published a 340-
page rebuttal titled Rudol’f Shteiner i Gete v mirovozzrenii sovremennosti. Belyi took an
aggressive and attacking posture in the text, surprising many contemporaries. Coming to the
defense of Steiner (whose relationship has been described as a psychoanalytic transference in
Ljungrenn’s biography of the author), Belyi became “possessed” by a kind of spontaneous ire
that, as some perceived, dragged Metner’s name through the mud in a voluminous text taking up
two years of his labor. Belyi’s fiery polemic, calling Metner an “evil animal” (zlobnoe zhivotnoe)
among other things, was defended by E. N. Trubetskoi, who asked Metner to absolve Belyi for
something that, so he argued, was partly outside of Belyi’s control, describing it as a
“polimicheskaia uvlecheniia” (Gavriushin). In response, Metner’s friend, the philosopher (and
later, outspoken ultra-nationalist philosopher) Ivan Il’in, entered the argument. Il’in rejected
Trubetskoi’s suggestion that Belyi was under the influence of some spontaneous force, arguing
rather that he made a conscious effort of his own will to overstep the boundaries of propriety.
61
61
See Ljungrenn’s biography of Metner, The Russian Mephisto, and the chapter “Belyi’s
Encounter with Steiner,” 54-63. Here is part of Il’in’s letter in defense of Metner: “Книге
господина Бу гаев а прису ще именно «Общее стремление» опорочить Э. К. Метнера, и
91
This resulted in an unbearable situation for all parties involved, who returned to their
corners. In her autobiography, Shaginian notes that “ Немног о раньше меня выехал за границу
Э. К. Метнер. Для него этот выезд оказался «навеки»” (Shaginian, “Vospominanie”). What
compelled Metner to leave was, in fact, his desire to receive psychoanalytic treatment with
Freud.
Under these circumstances [the feud with Belyi] Medtner began suffering from
recurrent nightmares and shifting psychosomatic symptoms. It was as though a
war was being fought deep within him. A desperate reconciliatory meeting with
Bely arranged in Munich by Marietta Shaginyan came to nothing. Shortly
thereafter, encouraged by his friend Ivan Ilyin, Medtner went in October 1912 to
Vienna to consult with Freud. He reportedly told Freud about a very disturbing
dream he had had that summer of violent sibling rivalry (a sister tried to strangle
another sister, who was perhaps actually himself). He supposedly went on to
describe the anxiety he had experienced since childhood, the psychic basis of
which he now began to discern. Freud is said to have interpreted this ‘pseudo-
Ménière’s disease’ of his as the unresolved birth pangs of his personality and
победу сво ю в споре он непрерывно ставит в теснейш у ю связь с компрометированием
противника: на протяжении 340 страниц он не у с тает опи с ывать его как бестолкового,
фривольного болт у на ( с. 5, 6, 23, 53, 65, 71, 77, 78, 79, 81, 97, 108, 120, 127, 143, 147,
150,198, 319, 327, 328, 329, 336), непорядочного ( с. 5, 8, 17, 336), развязного (15, 94, 96,
114, 139, 169) и недобр осовестного ( с. 10, 12, 15, 16, 72, 108, 137, 138, 270, 271, 288); как
злобное животное ( с. 4, 60, 70, 71, 78, 80, 81, 127, 138, 147, 198, 312, 316), как сплетника ( с.
79, 166), ли цемера ( с. 78), лжеца ( с. 78, 271, 312, 315), и клеветника ( с. 64, 65, 173). Прямое
опорочение или намек на него дается почти при каждом упомин ани и его имени, и самый
эпитет « у в ажаемый» пол у чает значение явного издевательства. Таки м образом,
«полем ич еское увлечен ие», разраставшееся в течение дв ух с половиною лет, довело
господина Бу гаев а до прямых инсину а ций и сделало его книгу именно отвратительным
памфлетом, приближающимся к пасквилю.” (Gavriushin)
92
urged him to take the initiative and ‘get married’—there were several possible
candidates—and ‘not to despair,’ since there was a cure. (Ljungrenn, Poetry 125)
It has been suggested that Metner’s meeting with Freud in 1912, in which he worked through his
feud with Belyi, may have also left traces in Freud’s case study of the “Wolf Man.” What
compelled Metner to remain abroad, however, was not Freudian psychoanalysis but Jungian
analytic psychology. Shortly after his encounter, Emilii drew away from Freud to begin a close
collaboration with Carl Jung, whose own relationship with Freud ended bitterly in 1913, due in
part to the mysticism Freud perceived in Jung and the stubbornness Jung perceived in Freud. The
split was also due to Jung’s affair with Sabina Spielrein, a Russian-Jewish patient from Rostov-
on-Don who, following her cure, completed training as a psychoanalyst.
62
While he rejected the occultism of Steiner, it appears that an ironic twist of fate drew
Metner toward the mysticism of Jung, who rebelled against Freud’s prohibition on studying
alchemy and other esoteric topics. Metner’s turn toward Jung may be explained by the latter’s
Swiss-German background, complementing Metner’s own German roots on his father’s side.
Metner’s growing interest in national identity may have begun to inform a possible negative
attitude to Freud’s Jewish background as well. For all the work to combat individual mysticism,
a new kind of irrationality and social prejudice was creeping in through the back door, as it
62
Could it be that Shaginian encrypted a knowledge of the scandalous affair between Carl
Gustav Jung and the Russian-Jewish Sabina Spielrein into the novel’s rumored relationship
between the hysterical patient (examined further below) and Karl Frantsevich Ferster? It is
difficult to say definitively, though there is more than a slight chance that Shaginian became
aware of the scandal between Jung and Spielrein through her travels and contacts during this
time. On the relationship between Belyi, Metner, Il’iin, and Shaginian see Etkind, Eros of the
Impossible, 58-70, as well as Ljungrenn, Poetry and Psychiatry, 115-133, where Spielrein is
mentioned in connection with Metner’s translations of Jung into Russian.
93
would for Il’in, though at this point these tendencies were inchoate. Migrating to Switzerland as
war broke out, Metner spent the rest of his life there in proximity to Jung.
63
Il’in, who shared Metner’s interest in psychoanalysis and originally prompted his friend
to see Freud, was struggling with a dissertation on Hegel and his own suicidal ideation. It seems
that Freud helped him to overcome the affliction and complete his Rechtshegelianer project after
Il’in’s seven-week therapy in Vienna, which concluded at the outbreak of the war, also stranding
Il’in abroad.
64
When he returned to Russia, Il’in was overcome with a new obsession. Without
any formal training, he succumbed to “wild psychoanalysis,” diagnosing everyone around him in
63
As Shaginian writes: “[…] застигнутый войной в Дрездене, [Metner] перебрался в Цюрих
и не захотел у е зжать из нейтральной Швейцарии. Позднее он легализировался там,
сделал ся швейцарским подданным, жил оди н оким холостяком, переводя на р у сский язык
трёхтомное сочинение К. Юнга ( одного из последовател е й З. Фрейда), и умер в
одиночестве в больнице, вдали от всех, кто был ему дор ог. Меня война захватила во время
паломничества моего пешком, с рюкза к ом на спине, по городам Гёте, — из Гей дельберга
через Фран к фу рт- на- Майне в Веймар, — и пережила я немало страш ных мин у т, была
интернирована в баден- баден ский концентрационный лагерь и отту да, только благодаря
отчаянным хлопотам моей сестры, жившей в то время у богатой тётк и в Швейцарии и
приславшей мне визу, — тоже вырвалась в Швейцарию.” (Shaginian, “Vospominanie”)
64
Il’in’s Hegel dissertation had a marked influence on Alexander Kojeve’s work on Hegel,
which would have a wide influence in France. According to Ljungrenn, the cases of Il’in and
Sergei Pankeev (the “Wolf Man”) may have also gone into Freud’s “Notes on a Childhood
Neurosis.” Leibin writes on Il’in the following: “ Общение с Фрейдом способствовало
интенсификации его интеллект у а льной деятельности, в рамках которой наметился синтез
философск их и психоаналитическ их идей. Об этом свидетельству е т, в частности, речь,
произнесен ная им при открытии ст у денческо го философского общества в Москве и
опу б ликованная в 1915 году: ‘ Все тайные влечения и желания, не допу скаем ы е на порог
дневного сознания и хоронящиеся, подобно Нибел унгам, в тайниках ночного соз н ания;
все особенн ости личного вку с а, эмпирически приобретенные и ду ховно неочищенные; все
те ранения ду шевной ткани, котор ы е у каждого из нас приобретаются с детства и живу т,
неисцеленные, всю жизнь, разъедая ду ш у и повергая многих в невр астению и
всевозможные болезненные у к лонения, – все это при отсу тствии надлежащей
катартической работы… вторгается в филосо фск у ю работ у и делает ду шу не сп особной к
объективно му нау ч ному знанию. Философия становится тогда игралищем скр ы тых
страстей; она пол у чает значение более или ме нее удачно найденного компромисса межд у
неду гу ющим бессозн ательным и сознательной идеологи ей’.” (Leibin 6)
94
psychoanalytic terms and believing he could reveal the unconscious thoughts of his and Metner’s
enemies. As Ljungrenn describes,
Ilyin believed that he could use Freud’s tools to penetrate the minds of the leading
Symbolist figures. He apparently suspected several of them to be latent
homosexuals. Perhaps, he recognized in them traits of his own of which he had
become aware and was attempting to address. He was married to a philosopher
colleague, Natalya, but at the same time had become involved in a few infatuated
friendships with men. This might explain his documented, mysterious extreme
aversion toward the Symbolist writers as a form of projection or struggle with his
own demons. (Poetry 119)
Il’in’s fate would lead him down the path of becoming a hyper-reactionary nationalist, an
outspoken critic of the Bolsheviks, supporter of militant fascism, and “the metaphysical and
moral justification for political totalitarianism, which he expressed in practical outlines for a
fascist state”—his idea of a “Russian Christian Fascism” (Snyder 91).
65
He became obsessed
with a kind of mythological thinking, an image of Russia’s future intimately linked to an
interpretation of its past, which was disrupted by the Bolshevik’s seizure of power. Inverting
65
For a longer treatment of Il’in’s philosophy from a liberal perspective, see Timothy Snyder,
The Road to Unfreedom. Ljungrenn’s suggestion that Il’in was homosexual connects with some
leftist and psychoanalytic readings of Nazi ideologues as repressed homosexuals. Gorky
promoted this idea in the Soviet Union, which criminalized non-heteronormative sexual practices
in 1933, a legal departure from the 1917 criminal code and the sexually progressive and
relatively tolerant 1920s. In The Authoritarian Personality and other texts, the Marxist
psychoanalysts of the Frankfurt School, such as Reich and Fromm, perceived ultra-nationalism
as arising from sexual repression, linking it to the restriction of the expression of homosexuality.
It remains that Hitler viciously persecuted this group, while at the same time many antifascists of
sexual diversity had to hide their orientation from authoritarian leftists. See Laurie Marhoefer,
Sex and the Weimar Republic: German Homosexual Emancipation and the Rise of the Nazis and
Harry Oosterhuis, “The ‘Jews’ of the Antifascist Left,” Journal of Homosexuality 29 (2-3).
95
Tolstoy’s ethical stance, Il’in promoted the moral principle of “violent resistance to (Bolshevik)
evil.”
As for Shaginian, she linked up with Metner in Switzerland, the last time she would see
her friend, collaborator, and founding editor of the Musagetes, which closed with the pressure of
war in 1917.
66
From Switzerland, Shaginian returned to Russia via the South to Rostov-on-Don
(the home of Spielrein, who would herself return to Russia several years later, in 1923), where
she settled to work in journalism and to complete Svoia sud’ba.
These interactions show a complex web of interactions that tie together intellectual
concerns with personal vendettas, details of which may be too remote to fully unravel. The
takeaway is that the feud between Metner and Belyi over Kant’s influence on Goethe may have
compelled Shaginian to veer further away from the toxic environment that the Symbolist
movement had created around itself, leading her on a new search of intellectual models, turning
to Goethe, and shortly thereafter to embrace Marxism. Svoia sud’ba is a text that should be
considered as an intermediary step in Shaginian’s career from Symbolism to Marxism.
Crisis at the fictional sanatorium
Many of the chapters in the novel involve the application of Fersterian therapy, called
“character correction” or “character building” (nalazhivanie kharaktera), upon a cast of patients
that provides an overview of mental disorders of the time, but some of whom defy any specific
nosology and appearing as typical, though heightened emotional responses to life’s difficulties.
“Ту т были несовсем больные люди и люди с сильно выр а женной болезнью. Были
66
Musagetes would be resurrected by Metner in the late 1920s, to publish his three-volume
translation into Russian of the collected works of Jung.
96
у гнетенные и неестественно- оживленные, пассивные и деятельные” (Svoia sud’ba 46).
Upon his arrival, Batiushkov is given the task of observing the patients and drawing up a report
on their characteristics, which are representative of real and fictional diagnoses of the time.
67
There is the erotomaniac Lapushkin, the hysterical actress Eliasshtam; the elderly Merkulova,
who suffers from a “hatred of contingency”; a student and railroad mechanic (puteets) Tikhonov,
suffering from “expectation of misfortune”; the writer Cherepennikov, suffering from
“insensitivity” (beschuvstvie); the lawyer Tkachenko, who suffers from an obsessive “dialectical
illness,” etc. (46-48) Iastrebtsov makes up the final patient, afflicted with a reflexive phobia of
his own soul. The psychotherapeutic practice is described at length in the fifth chapter, which
contains Ferster’s entire system as an embedded text.
68
Ferster promotes the ideal of a fundamental law, a therapeutic categorical imperative
lying at the foundation of his “character correction,” what must be closely followed at the
sanatorium. As a theory with systematically worked out particulars, it is no such thing; rather, the
emphasis falls on the continued and habitual application of activity. “Ту т в ообще не годится
теоретизировать, а надо видеть и работать. Зару бин [another doctor at the sanatorium] стал у
меня чу десным работником, заразившись самым процессом дела, а не принципами” (38).
Thus, there is a tension in the text between principle and process, with the former naturally
arising out of the latter.
69
67
The 1954 version changes this chapter significantly. Instead of being entrusted to write up a
description (spisok) of the patients, Batiushkov is given one by Ferster.
68
The most profound modification between the two editions is the German Romanticist contents
of Doctor Ferster’s notebook being entirely replaced with an anti-Freudian tirade.
69
The verb “nalazhivat’,” which can mean “putting in order,” “straightening out,” or
“organizing” and the emphasis on “character” recalls Adler’s theory of individual psychology
(Adler, a former Freudian, split with the psychoanalytic movement in 1914). Individual
psychology was popular in Russia at this time and continued to be so into the twenties because of
its emphasis on will and strengthening of character, a notion that would become important
97
The Greek letter psi ( Ψ) is the symbolic emblem to this conception of the psyche. Being
filled with unwanted impressions and experiences directed to it by consciousness may produce
defects in its material, caused by lying, cheating, immorality, bad habits, etc. The cure for this is
constant daily activity, like the craft of jewelry by the “erotoman” Lapushkin.
У меня принцип: лечит ь у эротиков глаза и ру ки. Я даю напряженн у ю и главное
трепетн у ю, — трепетн у ю ( он подчеркну л) р або т у. Все половое возбуждение их
уходит в таку ю работ у, вдобавок не спазмати чески, а волнообразно. Вы себе
представить не можете, как это у к репляет нервы и очищает воображенье. Лет пять
назад я применял свето в ое полыхание, нечто вроде вспышек поляризационного
микроскопа. Но это по ртило больным глаза и оставляло ру ки не зан ятыми. Сей ч ас
у меня введены два мастерства — гравировальное; и мастерство Бенвен у т о
Челлини, — ювелирное. Только у меня боль ные сочинять не смеют, они копиру ю т.
Всего чаще классические образцы. (50)
Here, the etymological link between kharakter and the Greek “to engrave” is made clear. In the
context of the time’s positivistic discourse, it is interesting to note that Ferster exchanges a
directly physiological intervention (passive light therapy) for the activity of labor, which
concentrates and externalizes the body’s nervous energy. This is a different orientation toward
the physical body that implies an undercurrent of hygienics, a discourse becoming prominent
then, though one far from being non-physiological. Activity directed toward the outer world
develops an integrity to the structure of character, mending its existential holes and fissures.
because of the Marxist-Leninist emphasis on voluntaristic “consciousness” overcoming
“spontaneity.”
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Zarubin, a sarcastic but well-meaning doctor at the sanatorium, describes patients who
have weak character, but who have gone through the treatment of character-building.
Ведь каждый из них—маленьнк ий иродец в собственном царстве. Мы их со
всею старательностью этого царства лишаем и выпу скаем невесть ку да и
невесть на каку ю надо бность. Ног у или ру ку лечить,—это еще понятно, а
ду шу... Мн е вот всегда кажется, что излеченная ду ша непременно чем-
нибу д ь пахнет, гу мм и- арабиком, что ли, или синдетиконом. Вы этого не
замечали? (30)
The smell that Zarubin associates with the healing of souls stems from the labor conducted by
the patients during their therapy—gum arabic being used as a binder for paint and glazing
pottery.
70
Ferster is adamant, however, that the craft must be mindless, in order to displace the
patients’ interiorized psychosomatic symptoms into an external material substance. This point is
crucial: some medium needs to be present to absorb the deeper and unlocalizable impulses of the
soul. This is what psychoanalysis attempts to do with language, by gaining a symbolic distance
to the directly experienced and unprocessed psychic content through speech. Ferster’s patients
are by rule allowed only to speak when it relates to their work, never to write, or to think
excessively. In this way, the irksome passivity of psychoanalysis is overcome by an activity
therapy, which absorbs the unconscious impulses of the patients. Yet Ferster’s therapy has little
effect on Iastrebtsov and Lapushkin.
70
Furthermore, along with gum arabic evoking an association with Islam, which appears
throughout the novel in connection with the Turkic Muslim Karachay.
99
Psychoanalysis at the fictional sanatorium
At the Kunachkhirskii sanatorium of Svoia sud’ba, the Freudian method is seldom used.
71
Quoting Ferster, Zarubin describes psychoanalysis in the following way: “ Карл Францевич
лежачье ассоциирование называет расшатыванием слабо г о зу ба” (123).
—Да по- мо ему это леж а чье ассоци ирование —это ду шевный разврат!
—Ну, не ск ажите! — усмехн улся он: — был у меня оди н неврастеник
знакомый, так он за это лежанье всей душой у ц епился. И бу мажки свои
записанные хранил и твердо был уверен, что этаким способом он второго
Зарат у стру напишет. (ibid.)
Contrasting Zarubin’s characterization as “soul perversion,” psychoanalysis is registered in the
novel in a fanatical letter from Batiushkov’s mother:
Оказывается, твой Фёрстер идет вразрез с ходом мысли. Ход мысли давно
уже доказ а л, что вся психопатология — чеп уха, за исключением
психического анализа. Дело в том, что ну жно непременно ложиться и
ассоциировать. Больной ложится на диван и начинает ас социировать вслу х,
а доктор должен сидет ь с карандашом и все точно записывать. Вот тебе и
все леченье! Резу льтаты полу чают ся такие, что вся медиц ина ахн у ла. Вся
физика ахн у ла. Вся ан атомия ахнула! (122)
After Batiushkov reads his mother’s letter describing an article attacking Ferster and promoting
the progress of psychoanalysis (the letter is handed to him by Maro while Batiushkov is reading
Goethe’s autobiography Dichtung und Warheit [in the text, Pravda i vymysel, 117]), he vows
71
The 1954 version changes the location to Ichkhorskii Gorge and references to the Karachay
are replaced by the more generic term for mountain people, goriani. Batiushkov is also twenty-
five years old in the second edition instead of twenty-eight.
100
never to show it to Ferster: “ Я подн ялся к себе, успокоенн ый, су ну л письм о в комод и запер
его. Бу дь у меня семь замков, я запер бы его семью замк ами.” (124) This will have
unintended consequences for Ferster, preventing him from acquiring knowledge of a campaign
initiated against him by enemies in the capital. Thus, by defending Ferster and hiding his
mother’s letter, Batiushkov inadvertenly hastens his master’s downfall.
In addition to the daytime/nighttime conflicts of Iastrebtsov’s mania and Maro’s affair,
there is a third (“noontide”) conflict revealed late in the novel, threatening the entire operation of
the sanatorium. The relationship between Maro and Hansen redoubles an event preceding
Batiushkov’s arrival, a rumor started by a psychoanalyst at the sanatorium, Mstislav
Rostislavovich, a former employee jealous of Ferster’s popularity. Told by Zarubin to
Batiushkov, Mstislav spread a rumor of a secret affair between a hysterical patient and Ferster,
whose own “homely” wife, Varvara Il’inishna, was seen as a poor match for the “brilliant”
Doctor.
72
The analyst—a drunk, gambler, and provocateur, according to Zarubin—sent letters
describing the affair to the guardians of the patient and directly to Varvara Il’inishna, who fires
Mstislav upon receiving the message. While Ferster is also prevented from knowing about this
scandal, it happens that Maro directly observes the events as a child (paralleling Lapushkin’s
observation of his parents’ affair, examined below), internalizing the scandal, her kharakter
becoming “engraved” by it—what will make her repeat it with her relationship to Hansen.
With its focus on sexuality, psychoanalysis is therefore Ferster’s weak spot, his “weak
tooth” (“ Автор статьи по- мое м у Мстиславка, не иной кто, как он, собачий сын. И ведь
72
“ Дрянь номер первый была следующая: как это можно, чтоб красивый му жчина во
цвете лет мог своей развалине- жене, вдобавок и ума овечьего, — сохранить вер ность. Вы
профессор ш у, Варвару Ильинишну, видели? Ничего про неё дурного не скаж у, но разве
это подру га Фёрстеру? В молодости, может быть, ну там «очи черны е, очи жгу ч ие,” а
сейчас ведь это опара, совершеннейшая опара.” (Svoia sud’ba 32)
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знает, подлец, ку да уяз в ит ь!” [Svoia sud’ba 123]). It is never directly revealed whether the
rumor of Ferster’s affair was indeed false, and the reader must take Ferster’s fidelity as an article
of faith (his and Varvara’s relationship is so pure, in fact, that it seems they had sex only once,
producing Maro). Zarubin can only reference how Varvara Il’inishna defended the honor of
Ferster at the time of receiving Mstislav’s letter, denying its contents, since her and Ferster are
forever linked under “God’s law” (zakon Bozh’ego). Varvara Il’inishna will never question her
husband’s actions, will not let doubt enter her world. The description of “God’s law,” which
binds Ferster and Varvara Il’inishna, is also ultimately what underlies Ferster’s method, that
which determines the fate of each character.
In a later chapter, the psychoanalyst Mstislav Rostislavovich arrives from the capital
equipped with false teeth (from an overindulgence in the “talking cure”) as a delegate to assess
the activities of Ferster’s sanatorium. This catches Ferster by surprise, since Batiushkov
“repressed” the contents of his mother’s letter, which hinted at the campaign against Ferster.
However, it is also psychoanalysis that helps to uncover the nature of Iastrebtsov’s illness. In a
kind of parody of a psychoanalytic séance, Iastrebtsov reveals his deeper psychic structure to
Batiushkov, an interaction that happens in reverse, however, with the psychiatrist taking the
place of the patient.
During a storm and lying prostrate with a fever on his bed, Batiushkov unexpectedly
receives Iastrebstov, who enters the room and sits on a chair next to the couch. After a moment
of tense silence, they have a conversation on the nature of personality, and Iastrebtsov’s hypnotic
influence and power of suggestion heighten Batiushkov’s analytic powers. This allows
Batiushkov to make an important discovery, of the crucial difference between kharakter and
lichnost’ and the role that destiny plays for each psychical component. After the psychoanalytic
102
session with Iastrebtsov, Batiushkov reflects on their conversation and the futility of trying to
fully comprehend human nature (“ безнадежность этой попытки: до конца определить, что
такое человек”):
Но вдру г см ешная в своей простоте мысль осенила меня: нау ка р асп ознает
предмет по его действиям, — а разве действенное выявле ние человек а — не
в су дьбе че ловеческой? С у дьба! Вот единственный ключ к тайне личности.
Я лег на постель и стал ду м ать. Но, во- первых, мы ничего не знаем и о
су дь бе. Вон как по разному понимает ее, например, трагик и драмат ур г. Для
трагика су дьба валится откуда- то сверху —предопределение, рок, фа т у м.
Чем был виноват Эдип? А он погиб. Для драмат у рга судь ба —это характер;
у него злые творят зло и пожинают зло, добрые творят добро; су дьбы
ревнивца, ск у пого, ду рака, мошен ника, кроткого, правдивого—все
вытекаю т из свойств их характеров; человек носит су дь бу в себе самом и
ник у д а от нее не скроется. Как же, наконец, ну жно понимать су дьбу? (Svoia
sud’ba 54)
This passage describes an “active expression of the person” (deistvennoe vyiavlenie
cheloveka) appearing in one’s destiny. In this view, the structure of the psyche is once
again a self-divided entity stretching between the “persona” (the external egoic “mask” of
character, or kharakter), oriented to the outside world, and the interior “personality”
(lichnost’), compelling the self from within. The latter is the psychical agency responsible
for selecting the object of the drive emerging from it, the agency of elective affinity—
proximate to the Freudian “Id.” To each of these psychical agencies, lichnost’ and
kharakter, Batiushkov ascribes two different destinies, a “tragic” and “dramatic” fate.
103
Нет, не разобраться мне в этом! Или уж предположить, что у каждого из нас
есть две судьбы, «трагическая» и «драматическая», — судьба нашей
личности и нашего характера? Ли чность в бездонной глу б ине. Мы не знаем
ее, а только носим; в этой глу бине — кто проследил ее вину или ее право?
Ее прост у п к и не ведомы нам. Не она ли свершила когда- то первородный
грех? Не он а ли претенду ет на святость и бессмертие? И ее трагическая
су дь ба избывается нами явно или тайно, но с неизбежной строгостью
течения небесных светил. Мы едва ощу щаем течение этой су дьбы,
зак у танные счастливым облаком нашей второй, нашей явной,
«драматической» судьбы. Благо инстинкту ж и зни, формующему в нас
характер! Мы заслонились характером от трагической бездны. Характер
прядет вокруг нас пау т ину свободных посту п ков и происшествий,
сознательных или осознанных... (54-55)
A series of binary terms is established that can be represented in the table below:
Kharakter Lichnost’
Dramatic fate Tragic fate
Knowledge Unconsciousness
Freedom Determinism
Surface (accretion) Depth (abyss)
Pure, “lawful” acts Sin (sexuality)
Finality Immortality and infinity
Goal-oriented future Historical past
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However, what is the original principle? Is there something that precedes the
sequence of binary terms? The notion of the Bildungstrieb, in its Blumenbachian guise,
would seem to fall on the side of Kharakter, as the “Bild” component of the term, the
“image,” or “plan,” implies a pre-ordained blueprint that the immortal impulse of the
Trieb expresses. Which one comes first, then, is it “Bild” or “Trieb,” the plan determining
action, or the action determining the plan? For Kant, again, there is nothing substantial
that can be said about Trieb, but one can act “as if” we can have knowledge in it. What
does psychoanalysis add to this?
Freud and the “primal process”
Freud had a term for this “secret selection” and called it the “primal process,”
which appears in the choice of “primal object” within a “primal scene.” The primal scene
is an experience of early childhood that the subject has fixated upon without fully
understanding it, but which colors the subject’s subsequent activity. In the process of
analysis, as the primal scene is reconstructed in speech, the subject becomes aware of the
“misunderstanding” that holds it together, and through this awareness becomes liberated
from its repetitive hold. Or, so the theory of psychoanalysis goes.
The novel provides a poignant example of the misunderstanding, which
underwrites the primal scene, which appears as an image haunting Lapushkin, the
erotomaniac. This scene foregrounds Shaginian’s changing, negative attitude toward the
theosophical movement.
In another embedded text (chapters eleven and twelve), a suicide note of
Lapushkin is discovered, which describes the primal scene of his childhood with artistry
105
that impresses the doctors, Maro (who reads the text aloud), and a visiting priest. Titled
“Ne gliadi na grekh,” the account serves the function of a confession that describes the
path Lapushkin walked on the way to his illness of “erotomania.” The cathartic
symbolization that would have theoretically freed him from his illness is ultimately
blocked by Ferster’s method, however. If Ferster would have learned of the details before
Lapushkin’s suicide, he could have intervened in time (Ferster relaxes his prohibition
against creative expression after this event, allowing the patients to put on a play).
As a child, Lapushkin witnessed a fight between his parents over his father’s
affair with another woman, which resulted in a pregnancy and a stillborn child. When the
mother’s theosophist cousin visits the family with his dog, the occultist receives a
message by way of his clairvoyant pet that some dark force is unceremoniously buried
beneath a mound of dirt on the Lapushkin property.
73
This is the place in the text where
Shaginian critiques the mysticism of the Symbolists. The superstitious mother, undone by
paranoid suspicion and the theosophist uncle, accuses the mistress of having buried the
child in the family’s own backyard. The father (defending his reputation) digs up the
kurgan and, finding nothing, leaves an “abyss” in its place. “ Нас стращали падением
ту да, где нет «ни дна, ни покрышки», по зловещему предостережению няни” (Svoia
sud’ba 92). Tempted by the prohibition to go near it (as in Oblomov’s dream), Lapushkin
does and falls inside, marking his future impulsive acts with this primal scene.
73
“ Я немедленно разразился ревом, выполз из- под дивана и кину лся к моей матер и. Отец
постоял возле, иронически, но вежливо покривил гу бы и вышел из комнат ы. Еслиб не эта
сценка, ку рган, вероятно, остался бы нетрон утым на все бу д у щие времена, а дя дя Андрон
Иванович снова у дали л ся бы в свои комнаты за чтение ж у рнала Revue spiritique et
theosophique.” (91)
106
Я не стан у описывать, как медлен но, шаг за шагом, на пу ти мое м вставали
соблазны, и как я подчинялся им, все больше и больше падая в своих глазах.
Пу ть моего подчинения им был все такой же: сперва чу вство у в еренн ости и
власти над событием, потом желание попробовать, —вк у с ить от древа, — и,
наконец, свершение со бытия, демонически о в ладевающего вами и
становящегося господи н ом положения. В юно с ти был у меня товарищ,
математик. Когда я поделился с ним своим печальным душевным опытом,
он прибег к аналогии из физическ ого мира. По его мнени ю, у всякого
ду шевного события есть своя сфера тяготения, и бродить мыслью возле
события — значит подвергаться опасности подпасть под его тяготение. Но я
перевел это на свой собственный язык; и уже гораздо позднее, в страшн у ю
пору мо ей жизни, когда у меня уж е не было дру зей, а родные стыдились
родства со мною,— я определил это заповедью «не гляди на грех».” (ibid.
99)
The pages describing the other temptations of the erotomaniac are torn out. The company
discusses Lapushkin’s final words, “do not stare at sin,” the priest echoing the sentiment with a
pair of spectacles arming the eyes. The priest agrees to read the sacraments during Lapushkin’s
(who is Jewish) burial, in order to absolve his soul. Word of this act, at the time punishable by
the Orthodox Church, is received by Mstislavovich who will use the transgression against
Ferster. Furthermore, the example of Lapushkin provides a case in which psychoanalysis and its
hermeneutical procedure would have been useful. If Ferster, or Batiushkov, would have
remained open to the patient’s history, which could have only come about through the “passive”
process of analysis and its focus on speech, rather than blind labor, Lapushkin’s death could have
107
been prevented. This implies perhaps that Shaginian was much more ambivalent to its status in
this early draft. What Lapushkin’s narrative transmits more overtly is a negative view of occult
(Symbolist) elements in the figure of the theosophist uncle, influencing figures in Shaginian’s
circle like Belyi.
Stains at the Kriukovo sanatorium
As described in the previous chapter, psychoanalysis entered Russia through its
psychiatric practitioners, but quickly spread to other fields merging with larger cultural currents.
The early appearance of psychoanalysis in Russia was registered in Vienna when, in a 1912 letter
to Jung, Freud wrote: “In Russia there seems to be a local epidemic of psychoanalysis” (Maguire
495).
74
This “fad” was remarked on by Lenin several years later when he wrote: “ Теори я
Фрейда сей час тоже своего рода модная причу д а” (Tsetkin 71). For Freud’s part, he was
referring to the work of Nikolai Osipov, whom Freud personally met to give permission to
translate his own works into Russian.
To develop further the Kantian point, as a student Nikolai Osipov had studied under
Dilthey, a neo-Kantian philosopher who was an important critic of scientific positivism.
75
While
studying in Berlin, Osipov was influenced by Dilthey’s idea that human beings exhibit a general
need to construct a comprehensive interpretation of reality, a Weltanschauung, that produces a
74
Freud infamously uttered a similar “epidemiological” statement to Jung on their way to the
United States for their lecture tour to Clark University: “They do not know that we are bringing
them the plague.” The lectures produced from this American visit, known in English as Five
Lectures on Psychoanalysis, mark the first “official” translation of Freud into Russian by Nikolai
Osipov. It follows what is technically Freud’s first appearance to the Russian-reading public, an
“unofficial” translation of The Interpretation of Dreams in 1904.
75
Along with Wilhelm Windelband and Heinrich Rikkert, Dilthey was a central influence on
Osipov’s epistemological orientation within psychiatry.
108
sense of meaning out of the bare facts of life and leads to a guiding principle of action within the
world. Combining this with Windelband’s important distinction in psychiatry between the
nomothetic and ideographic sciences and Rickert’s notion of individualization, Osipov
constructed his own psychiatric theory.
In 1911 Osipov opened the meetings of the Moscow Psychiatric Circle, Little
Fridays, with a talk titled “On the Logic and Methodology of Psychiatry.” The
talk, in his own words, was a “paraphrase of Rickert’s doctrine.” Osipov claimed
that psychiatry, though based on the natural sciences, is a clinical discipline that
studies the patient as an individual. The psychiatrist should seek “the core value
that determines the actual state of the patient.” (Sirotkina, Diagnosing 93)
Dilthey’s Kantian “principle of action” became part of Osipov’s search for the organizational
principle of the patient examined in the last chapter, an idea aligned with the psychoanalytic
drives and their logic.
76
Furthermore, Osipov’s view of psychoanalysis—that the dynamic
formations of the unconscious gave the analyst a glimpse into the abyss—maintained that the
new discipline heeded the Kantian warning of the danger in overstepping the boundaries of
knowledge.
There is one last figure who worked at Kriukovo that helps to tie Osipov’s Kantian search
for a rukovodiaiushchaia tsennost’ to the “blind” activity method practiced by Ferster, which
encounters an internal limit in the maniacal Iastrebtsov.
By chance, Hermann Rorschach lived in Russia while working at Kriukovo from
December 1913 to sometime in 1914. Kriukovo was the location where Rorschach developed
76
For a book-length treatment on psychoanalytic epistemology, see Dany Nobus, Knowing
Nothing, Staying Stupid, which develops the “abductive logic” of psychoanalysis, situated
between inference and deduction (30, passim).
109
some of the ideas underlying the inkblot test, partly inspired by the active cultural scene in
Russia (Searls 91-98).
What, then, guarantees the success of finding the valued principle of a patient? It is a
crucial question that reaches beyond the external observation of behavior, which is frequently
deceptive, something noted in Shaginian’s text: “ Во- первых, долож у я вам, душевно- больные
все вру т. Вы с ними год провозитесь и не узнаете, где у них коготок спрятан” (Svoia sud’ba
30). If the deception within the observed can be compared to the randomized shapes of the
inkblot, which take on meaningful form with the viewer’s unconscious projection onto them,
then how can the therapist escape such a hall of mirrors?
77
(The dushevno-bol’noi Iastrebtsov is
impenetrable but he always tells the truth, the truth about the other. His words and actions are a
surface in which the doctors reflect and recognize only themselves, overlooking Iastrebstov’s
true nature.) In other words, how can we see the blot for what it really is—a meaningless stain?
The problem of patient observation is given in the text by Maro, who, under the influence
of Iastrebtsov, has been falling deeper in love with Hansen. Batiushkov becomes intrigued when
he overhears their conversation concerning the phenomenon of reflection and a hypothetical,
noumenal (to use a Kantian term) point of origin to living substance:
Можно спросить, что это за шту к а?
—Отражен ный мир? Да мы все отражены, в тысяче зеркал. Разве
пространство и время не зеркала? Весь видимый мир си мметричен, а
симметрия и есть отражение. Павел Петрович [Iastrebtsov] говорит, что
симметрия есть даже в мировом процессе, и в наших мыслях. Кто- то создал
77
It may not be a stretch to say that literary criticism may fall victim to projection. For a
psychoanalytically-informed perspective, see Daniel Rancour-Laferriere’s book-length treatment
of the subject in Self-Analysis in Literary Study: Exploring Hidden Agendas.
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одн у точку, и она отразилась, и отражение ее отразилось еще раз, и так оно
пошло гу ля ть по мир у до этих самых пор.
—Ну, а еще что говорит Павел Пе трович? — осторожно спросил я.
Маро броси л а на меня быстрый вз гляд и обхватила колени ру кам и.
—Еще что? А вы мне что за это подарите, есл и я скаж у?
—Снимок подарю с...с глетчером.
Ладно. Еще он говорит, что ду ши наши тоску ю т по первой своей,
неотраженной, су щности. И, тоску я, снова отражаются, —в снах. А потому
наши сны, отражения отражений, ближе к нашему первоначальному
су ществованию, чем мы сами,—все равно, как промокательная бу мага в
зеркале.
— Ну?
—Ну и все. Давайте снимок! (Svoia sud’ba 129)
Maro describes the original “point” preceding the bad infinity of reflection as something
incomprehensible (or meaningless to begin with) like a blot, recalling Iastrebtsov’s earlier
conversation with Batiushkov and the plasticity of the soul, its “odnorodnaia sreda” (15). To
make a nominalizing play on the Russian verb “promokat’,” from which the adjective
“promokatel’naia” derives, perhaps it is an originary “promok” on the blotting paper of the self,
flowing past boundaries and standing for an overwhelming, originary intensity. The linguistic
“bezobrazie” of the promok, captures the “thing” at the bottom of the abyss that, according to
Ferster’s therapy of character building, requires a necessary distance. The promok calls the
subject to approach the edge of mortality, as this object of compulsion is simultaneously life’s
origin. Without the mediating guardrail of character, the many subjects in the novel risk coming
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too close to the pull of this abyssal intensity.
78
The novel represents this primordial thing in the
materialized body of the mountainous environs, as a melting glacier that has carved the
Kunachkhirskii gorge. Earlier, Batiushkov and Hansen descend to glimpse the formless entity.
Он сп у с кал с я из ущелья взду тым, зеркальным п у зырем. От темного неба,
затяну того ту ча ми, или от пу стынных склонов, здесь уже не покрытых ничем,
кроме бу рого лошадин ого шавеля,— но глетчер показался мне ту склым и
су м рач ным, и непомерно взду тым, как бы дышащим, поднимая сво ю зеркальную
чеш у ю. Нам стало холодно, и мы заторопились домой. (Shaginian 68)
Batiushkov takes a picture (snimok) of Hansen near the glacier, giving it to Maro in exchange for
her explanation of reflecting essences. Following her own psychical unravelling and
“hystericization” from the consequences of her affair, Maro’s choice to acquiesce to her father’s
prohibition (appropriate to Russian heroines like Pushkin’s Tatiana) reestablishes both her
character structure and a minimal distance to this subjective point of intensity, her “soul.” Maro’s
duty leads to her returned psychical health, and the photograph of Hansen will become her only
memento of their affair.
Conclusion
As a pre-revolutionary novel in which the discourse of Marxism had not saturated social
reality and Shaginian’s worldview (though whose emphasis on work preempts features of
Marxist ideology, elaborated further in the later edition), the 1923 publication stands at the cusp
of the disappearance of spiritualist discussions on the idea of the soul. The structure of the soul is
78
The patients at the sanatorium are frequently described with cold and wet fingers, noses, and
other body parts that have frozen over from too much proximity to this Thing.
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creatively detailed in the novel, a picture made sharper by the system’s contrast to
psychoanalysis. Ferster fails to intervene to prevent the death of Lapushkin, since he prohibits
“passive” production of words at the sanatorium (what he himself cannot seem to do in his
incomplete “notes on technique”), which may have alleviated Lapushkin’s condition if another
had read the “active” words of his memoir. Ferster’s method remains incomplete and it will be
Batiushkov’s “fate” to fill in its missing pieces. He will do so by combining Ferster’s approach
with the one outlined by his mother in her letter—psychoanalysis. While resistant to it, the early
edition shows that Shaginian was not wholly dismissive of psychoanalysis because it is the
passage through which Iastrebtsov is cured. The novel also reflects Shaginian’s interaction with
the thought of Goethe and his usage of Kant, perhaps an obscure issue, but one directly relating
to the breakup of Russian Symbolism, a crisis that drew both Shaginian and psychoanalysis into
its gravitational pull.
On January 18, 1923, two months before a third stroke would paralyze half his body,
depriving him of speech, Lenin received several volumes of newly published books (Lewin
xxiv). Among those selected by Krupskaia from the library was Shaginian’s Svoia sud’ba
(Lenin, Biograficheskaia 505). It is quite interesting for the purposes of this dissertation to
consider Shaginian positing Freudians securing a place of institutional power at this time, which
casts a long shadow over the Kunachkhirskii sanatorium. One can only speculate what Lenin
would have thought of this, though his remark that “ Теория Фрейда сейчас тоже своего рода
модная причу д а” seemed to register the growing influence of psychoanalysis at this time
(Tsetkin 71). At the Second Psychoneurological Congress in Petrograd in January of 1924 (also
the month and year of Lenin’s death) a special resolution was proposed. Aron Zalkind motioned
to allow for psychoanalysis to be included in the state’s new Marxist psychology. His resolution
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was accepted by the Congress (Miller, “Freudian Theory” 635, f.n. 22), marking the first
government in the world to officially adopt psychoanalysis as state policy.
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Section II (Drives and Philosophical Materialism)
Chapter Three
Reimarus's Kunsttrieb in the Early Marx and the Spontaneity/Consciousness
Paradigm in Gladkov’s Tsement
In the previous chapter on Shaginian’s One’s Own Fate, I discussed how the concept of
the drives connected to the growing popularity of psychoanalysis within the social and
psychological crises overtaking the Russian Empire. The central thematic conflict in this novel
related to mastering the influence of unwanted impulses for the cast of neurotic patients at the
sanatorium, most powerfully represented in the figure of Iastrebstov, whose cure is secured by
way of a psychoanalytic session. Connecting features of Shaginian’s artistic biography, the
chapter examined how Shaginian’s contact with Emilii Metner and Ivan Il’in, both of whom
were analyzed by Freud, informed her separation from the mysticism of the Symbolist
movement, which was breaking apart at the time. This happened in light of the feud between
Metner and Andrei Belyi over their exclusive views on certain arguments within idealist
philosophy. While mysticism, revisionist Christian faith, psychoanalysis, and the power of the
aesthetic co-exist within the novel, it is a text that reflects Shaginian’s first steps toward an
entirely new orientation, a new ideological “image” that, as if overnight, dramatically shifted the
terrain of debate–what would become her Marxist materialism.
While some of the original psychoanalysts, such as Nikolai Osipov, fled Russia following
the October Revolution, a new generation of analysts with socialist political views would take
their place. Moreover, several of the highest Party members held psychoanalysis in high regard
and promoted its development, as psychoanalysis in the new Soviet state received official
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government sanction, a topic developed in this chapter. Thus, the following two chapters of
Section II will describe how psychoanalysis survived the break of 1917 after the Soviets placed,
as it were, an ideological filter upon idealist philosophy, something additionally legally marked
by the separation of church and state in 1918. In such a context, a new set of psychoanalytic
practitioners and intellectuals influenced by Freudian concepts adapted the theory and practice to
the needs of the new regime.
This chapter will use Fedor Gladkov’s novel Tsement (1924) as the case study presenting
a complication to the spontaneity/consciousness complex described in Katerina Clark’s
foundational study of The Soviet Novel. I will problematize Katerina Clark’s paradigm, in which
Tsement serves as the centerpiece illustrating the “structuring force” to Socialist Realism, with
the way that drives imply the idea of “spontaneous,” versus “conscious” labor. While conscious
labor is fairly straightforward, as the application of a preordained plan to the activity of work, the
notion of “spontaneous labor” can be typically understood as work taking place in nature or,
from the psychoanalytic point of view, as the production of a dream (the “dream work”) taking
place in the psyche, something occurring automatically, spontaneously, and yet that which can
still be called productive, or generative. Clark draws a too-emphatic line of demarcation between
consciousness and spontaneity, which is not warranted, not only by the writings of Lenin, but
also in the wider view of Marx’s textual output, which must take into consideration his early
philosophical work, what was being rediscovered precisely at this time. The chapter will connect
the spontaneity-consciousness paradigm more thoroughly to Marx’s idea of labor power, which
can be traced to the writings of Heinrich Reimarus and his concept of the Kunsttrieb. For the first
time, Marx’s early works were being researched in the 1920s by David Riazanov at the newly-
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founded Marx-Engels institute in Moscow, established in 1919, where these ideas were
discussed.
Once more on fate and image
The idea of fate broached in the previous chapter in relation to Shaginian links to the
historian’s dilemma of thinking through the Soviet project as naturally leading to the Stalinist
“Thermidor.” Was there something inherently totalitarian in Lenin’s thinking, which can also be
gleaned in Marx’s writings? The terms of this debate arise out of western scholars’ examination
of Chto delat’ (1902), named after Chernyshevskii’s novel, in which Lenin posits the necessity
of a vanguard party to lead the socialist struggle to victory, setting up the binary of “spontaneity”
of the masses and the theoretical and strategic “consciousness” of the party, without which the
masses can only reach the level of “trade-union consciousness,” for example. This interpretation
of reality held by the Bolshevik Party had the added element of forceful takeover of power to
erect the “dictatorship of the proletariat,” a view leading to the 1903 break in the Russian Social
Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP) between the Bolsheviks and the Menshevik “gradualists”
(who would use democratic means to establish socialism).
These political factors, while remaining behind the scenes, were to reemerge when social
unrest erupted in the capital. On February 23, 1917, on International Women’s Day, 200,000
striking workers filled the streets of Petrograd. On March 2, in light of mass mutiny of Russian
forces who got wind of Kerensky’s call for “the destruction of the medieval regime,” Tsar
Nikolas II officially abdicated. The RSDLP entered leadership positions relatively peacefully
during Russia’s first “bourgeois” revolution, along with other political groups, as most of the
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imperial military forces were engaged at the front, while those near the major cities supported the
reforms along with the masses.
There were perhaps two figures relevant to the history of psychoanalysis directly
following this event, both of whom served in Kerensky’s Provisional Government: Pitirim
Sorokin and Grigorii Zilboorg. The latter studied medicine in Kyiv one year ahead of Mikhail
Bulgakov, but would specialize in psychiatry, instead of surgery, under Bekhterev at the
Petrograd Psycho-Neurological Institute (Zilboorg 50). After February, Zilboorg acted in the role
of secretary to Kuz’ma Gvozdev, the Menshevik Minister of Labor under Kerensky, emigrating
to the United States in 1919 after the Bolshevik takeover, where he began training in
psychoanalysis at Columbia University (he was analyzed by Franz Alexander in Berlin).
79
Zilboorg wrote the first comprehensive history of psychiatry in English, basing it on
Kannabikh’s work of the 1920s.
80
He also produced unsanctioned translations into English of
Leonid Andreev’s play “He Who Gets Slapped” (Tot, kto poluchaet poshchechiny; staged
successfully several times in 1920s New York)
81
and of Evgenii Zamiatin’s science-fiction novel
My (1921) from a smuggled manuscript given to Zilboorg by the publisher E.P. Dutton in 1924
(Ibid. 149-50).
82
79
Zilboorg later became an infamous therapist to several Hollywood actors decades later during
his time in Los Angeles. See his biography, written by his daughter, Caroline Zilboorg, The Life
of Grigory Zilboorg, 1890-1940: Psyche, Psychiatry, and Psychoanalysis (2021).
80
See Miller’s article, “The Origins and Development of Russian Psychoanlysis, 1909-1930,”
which begins with a reference to Zilboorg’s American lectures on the history of psychiatry.
81
Andreev dedicated his play to Sergei Sergeevich Goloushev, whose psychoanalytic case study
in the journal Psikhoterapiia opened Chapter One of this thesis.
82
This got Zamiatin into trouble by the end of that decade in the campaign headed by RAPP
against Zamiatin and Pil’niak. For a textological history of Zamiatin’s We comparing several
versions of the manuscript, see Cooke, “A Typeset of “We””.
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The second figure, the anti-Bolshevik Pitirim Sorokin, secretary to Kerensky, aimed the
following barbed passage in a diary entry shortly after the October takeover (November 13,
1917) at those who suddenly became overtaken by the “music of the revolution,” as Blok
represented in the poem Dvenadsat’, like Shaginian:
Как много развелось их, крайних левых, прочих большевиков. Всм а триваясь
в фиг у ры доморощенн ых Сент- Жю ст ов. Как они все «непримиримы»! Как
великолепны их жесты! С каким презрением они плюют с высоты своего
большевистского величия на «социал- патриотов», бабу ш к у, Кропоткина,
Минора Плеханова и др. Однако, странно… Как много среди них зна к ом ых
фиг у р, н едавно еще очень, очень маленьких, махоньких, до революции
стоявших в степени родства «седьмой воды на киселе». Была, например,
Лариса Рейснер. Милая барышня, писавшая бездарные стихи, мечтавшая о
«ледяной красоте». Издавала «Бог е му» и «Р у дина», жу рналы для
подвыпивш их ст у денто в- академистов и молодых вдову шек. Ни одного
атома революции днем с огнем нельзя было отыскать в этих жу рналах. И
вдру г? Оказывается и она теперь ходит в большевиках. Да еще как,
посл у ш али, да почитали бы ее на страницах «Новой жиз ни», ее
литерат у рн ую гимнаст ик у Далькроза по част и негодности бу рж уазн ого
иск у сства и величия пролетарской красоты. Прямо страх берет. Читая,
можно поду мать, что чу ть ли не сам а Шар ло та Корде пишет под
псевдонимо м Ларисы Р е йснер. А вот еще ху дожник Бен у а. Писал в свое
время фель етоны в «Ре чи». О революции ни пером, ни кистью за всю жизнь
не заикн у лся. и вдру г… тоже большевик или полу большивик.
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Корректнейший, галантнейший, бурж у а знейший, очаровательнейший А.
Бен у а — интернационалист, защитник пролетариата!.. Ч удеса да и только.
Сколько беспринципных маклеро в вскарабкались теперь на колесницу
революции, надели про л етарск у ю бл у з у, н аск оро зазу бри л и фразы об
империализме, бурж уазии и пролетариате и словоблу дствуют теперь,
согласно требу е мой мо де. И гремят теперь эти маклера. Оплевываю т все
святое рево люции, марают все, что есть ценного в ней и один у м ышленно, а
дру гие — бессознатель н о гу бят великое дело и роют революции яму. Но
истина: — Мчатся ту чи, вьются тучи. / Невидимкою лу на,/ освещает снег
лет у чий, Му тно небо… ночь му тна! Неу жели же не придет новый Христос,
чтобы изгнать из храма революции этих торгашей, маклеров и скоморохов
социализма? (Sorokin “Maklery”)
Quoting Pushkin’s “Besy,” Sorokin judged harshly those who had, as it were, an overnight
“conversion” to Bolshevism and its attendant materialist philosophy. As a professor of Sociology
in the United States (and 55th President of the American Sociological Association), Sorokin
would go on to develop an original psychological model of personality in 1947 that took its cue
from psychoanalysis.
83
His main contribution was to connect the concept of “love” to the central
place of psychological motivation, rejecting Freud’s libidinal drive theory as hopelessly
incomplete. In some ways, this can be compared with Gumilev’s vision in Veselye brat’ia,
whose peasant characters reject the laws of Western thermodynamics by proving that matter can
be created and destroyed. Undoing this most basic principle of physics reveals the existence of a
fourth and fifth dimension of ultimate reality, that of the already-present dimension of
83
See his Society, Culture, and Personality (1947).
120
imagination (hypnotically manipulated by the peasant boy Mitya), and the coming revelation of a
fifth, and final, dimension of Christian love. The new dimension of love is what the Western-
minded psychoanalyst Mezentsov is poised to experience, though he never reaches the rumored
belen’kii starichok and his daughter in this incomplete text.
84
The plot reflects the view that
psychoanalysis was itself an incomplete theory, as it lacks this essential element, for Gumilev.
The spiritual purity of Ferster, who in some sense “heals through love” in Shaginian’s Svoia
sud’ba, is not dissimilar in that regard.
85
The concept of love itself was critiqued in the late
1920s by Maiakovskii, who uses Freud’s energistic metaphor, in the play Klop: “She had
suffered an acute attack of ‘love’- the name given to a disease of ancient times when sexual
energy, which should be rationally distributed over one’s entire lifetime, is suddenly
concentrated into one inflammation lasting a week, leading to absurd and incredible behavior”
(Proctor, “Reason”).
What made the Soviets receptive to the Freudian system was precisely the fact that it
lacked a “transcendent” explanatory principle, of love, God, etc. This qualified it, such was the
hope of Freud (whose “energetics” subscribed to the basic laws of physics and reason), as a
positive, though peculiar, science, and those Marxist intellectuals of the 1920s partial to
psychoanalysis saw Freud’s system, despite its murky concept of the unconscious, as reflecting
materialist and dialectical bona fides. For now, I note that Sorokin’s passage above highlights
how quickly an “acute attack” of “revolutionary Romanticism” overtook many of the previously
84
See Victoria Smolkin, A Sacred Space Is Never Empty: A History of Soviet Atheism, for a
study of the role of religion and “militant atheism under Lenin and Stalin.”
85
For a psychoanalytic and anthropological view of the concept of love in Russia, which has its
origins in the Orthodox cult of Mary, see Daniel Rancour-Laferriere’s Imagining Mary: A
Psychoanalytic Perspective on Devotion to the Virgin Mother of God.
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pious and politically-neutral intelligentsia, figures like Marietta Shaginian and, his more exact
target of criticism, Larisa Reisner.
Indeed, Sorokin’s attack on the revolutionary intelligentsia mentions Larisa Reisner, who
had ties to psychoanalysis via her father, Mikhail Reisner. She is worthy of pausing over briefly
because of her close relationship to Gumilev. Studying law like her father, she completed a
course of study at Bekhterev’s Psycho-Neurological Institute at the same time as Zilboorg. After
1917, she experienced a profound transformation, joining the Bolshevik Party in spring of 1918
(Porter 101). After working under Lunacharskii’s cultural enlightenment project, she married
Bolshevik commander Fedor Raskol’nikov, becoming a commissar during the civil war period,
fighting at the Eastern Front, and coordinating missions along the Volga, after which she split
with Raskol’nikov and married Karl Radek. Her activity, legendary beauty, and connections with
the highest party members afforded her a large flat in the center of Moscow filled with luxury
goods from abroad (Ibid. 99). In her widely-read memoir, Evgeniia Ginzburg (negatively)
characterized Larisa as striving to forge a new “type of Russian revolutionary woman” within
radical “circles in which the cult of power reigned supreme” (Ginzburg, Krutoi 108). She
tragically died in 1926 from contracting typhus after drinking a spoiled glass of milk.
Coincidentally, before her marriage to Raskol’nikov, Larisa had a creative and romantic
relationship with Nikolai Gumilev, while he was married to Akhmatova, precisely at the time he
composed Veselye brat’ia. It was perhaps this connection to the Reisners that exposed the
Acmeist Gumilev to Freudian thought and to depict, and critique, psychoanalysis within his
unfinished Veselye brat’ia.
However, being a decade older than Reisner and Shaginian, was it Gumilev’s age and
experience that steeled him against competing ideological currents? In light of the discussion
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over Anthroposophy, Gumilev’s rejection of Symbolism’s theosophical direction and,
furthermore, his perhaps more vehement rejection of Marxism, shows a different ideological path
taken at this time. His celebrated metaphysical constancy related to an uncompromising artistic
vision and deeply-held religious convictions, seeing little sympathy from the atheistic Marxist
camp, which explains Gumilev’s refusal to “derzhat’ nos po vetru,” or to change with the tides.
In reality, and as an artist, Gumilev never had a systematically worked-out philosophical
approach. He was an eclectic thinker, which in socialist circles was short of a slur. He knew what
he didn’t like, at least that much can be said. As a steadfast monarchist, decorated soldier in the
First World War, and Orthodox believer like Sorokin, Gumilev despised Bolshevik ideology,
particularly Lenin’s decision to withdraw Russia from the war—a political condition of the
Party’s coming to power and a major disagreement between the other Social Democrats. One can
surmise what he thought of the 1918 Decree on Separation of Church and State ( Декрет об
отделении церкви от г осу дарства и школы от церкви), drafted by Larisa’s father, Mikhail
Resiner, and ratified early that year. The poet was arrested in 1921 after refusing to recant public
criticism of the Bolsheviks. Learning of his death from abroad, Larisa Reisner regretted a lost
opportunity to intervene in time to save him.
86
86
The Cheka executed Gumilev in August of 1921. Here is a passage of L. Reisner’s letter to
Gumilev, shortly before her journey to the front with the Red Army in the spring of 1918: “ В
сл учае мое й смерти все письма верну т ся к Вам. И с ними то странное чу вство, которое нас
связывало и такое похожее на любовь. И моя нежность — к людям, к уму, поэзии и
некоторым вещам, которая благодаря Вам окрепла, отбросила свою собственн ую тень
среди др уг их людей — стала творчеством. Мне часто казалось, чт о Вы когда- то должны
еще раз со мной встретиться, еще раз говорить, еще раз все взять и оставить. Этого не
может быть, не могло быть. Но бу дьте благосл овенны Вы, Ваши стихи и пост у пк и.
Встречайте чудеса, творите их сами. Мой мил ы й, мой возлюбленный. И бу дьте чище и
лу ч ше, чем прежде, потому что дей ствительно есть Бог.” (Reisner, “Perepiska”)
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It could be argued that the February and October Revolutions dislodged the intellectuals’
neglect of political matters under the reactionary conditions following 1905, described by
Engelstein in her study, reversing the course of their creative fixation on individual,
psychological interiority into external, social conditions. Shaginian’s Svoia sud’ba, so rich in
psychological themes, yet virtually absent of socio-political commentary, would be a case in
point. However, it is too simple to say that psychological concerns disappeared at the time of
political crisis. Recall that the psychiatric profession in Imperial Russia was a professional class
that was thoroughly politicized, fighting for conditions to ensure public welfare. Tutyshkin was
an analyst, as well as a Bolshevik who had direct ties with the radical left, while the moderate
Osipov’s concept of sotsial’naia tsennost’ connected mental health to social worth, making
somewhat of a conceptual effort to straddle the psychological-political divide. Furthermore, the
event of the Kasso Affair of 1911 within educational institutions split psychiatry and its
practitioners between the reformers and reactionaries, positions represented respectively by
Serbskii and Gannushkin. The fact that Serbskii had to resign from his post at the Moscow
Psychiatric Clinic, after which Osipov followed him, highlights that, despite their protestations,
political power was still stacked against progressive psychiatrists. This professional class
remained deadlocked but painfully aware of the crisis unfolding in the empire. It would take
radical means to shift the terrain in the backward empire of “combined and uneven
development,” means that were on offer by the Bolsheviks at a price political gradualists were
not willing to pay.
This brings the discussion to socialist leanings within Freud’s circle, which will open the
way to characterizing psychoanalytic elements within the leadership of the new Soviet
government.
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Politics in Freud’s circle
Within Freud’s circle, there were several members of the younger generation of analysts,
particularly Alfred Adler and Wilhelm Reich, who held socialist views. Adler’s system of
individual psychology with its concept of a drive for power broke from the influence of Freud
and his focus on the sexual instinct. The two would bitterly part ways in 1911, three years before
Jung’s split with Freud, never to meet again. Instead of Freud’s pansexualistic sexual economics
theory, Adler posited a striving for dominance and fight for recognition as the ultimate forces
moving human beings. As a Social Democrat, Adler also supported the reformist agenda of the
Second International, with which the Bolsheviks broke ties in 1902. His article “Bolshevism and
Psychology” (Bolschewismus Seelenkunde, 1918) linked the research topic most central to him,
of the aggression instinct and striving for power, to the violent political methods of the
Bolsheviks. Rather than Christian love, the secular Jewish Adler grounded his critique by way of
the socialist ideal of community, what alone was capable of overcoming the drive for power.
The years of capitalism with their unfettered greed for dominance have aroused
rapaciousness in the human soul. No wonder that our psychological apparatus marches
under the banner of the striving for power. Science, shortsighted and too ready to justify
everything, explained in terms of pop-psychology, the lust for power as innate and
immutable qualities of man's psyche. [...] The same modern psychology, however, also
has shown us that the traits of dominance, jealousy, and striving for power over others,
with all their ugly side effects, are not innate and immutable. [...] Only in socialism did
the feeling of community remain as the ultimate goal and end as demanded by
unhampered human fellowship. [...] The reign of the Bolshevists [sic] is like that of all
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other governments founded on the possession of power. With that their fate had been
cast. [...] The animal in the individual awakens. It is no different than under the coercive
regime of the Czars; depravity is inflamed and spreads senseless violence across the land.
[...] Driving a resisting multitude of people into an artificial socialist form of government
is akin to destroying a costly vase out of impatience [...]. Bolshevism is a suicide of the
social conscience. It is Hercules who throttled his mother and not the snakes. What a
waste of spirit, strength, and human blood! Is it necessary that what is obvious has to be
said? We do not seek the concrete form; we want spirit and the new word of socialism.
Here it is: developing and furthering the feeling of community! (Adler 72-74)
Earlier in Vienna, Raisa Timofeevna Epshtein, Adler’s wife from a Russian-Jewish family,
hosted Trotsky and other Russian revolutionaries at the Adlers’ home. Trotsky claimed it was
Adol’f Ioffe, originally a Menshevik switching to the more radical faction, who introduced him
to Adler’s ideas of individual psychology, sparking Trotsky’s interest in psychoanalysis that
would carry over into the 1920 and 30s.
87
Wilhelm Reich was the radical Marxist in Freud’s inner circle, taking the most active
interest in the particulars of Marxist philosophy as a later member of the other critical circle of
the Frankfurt School.
88
For his controversial views on psychoanalytic theory and socialist
87
With Stalin’s increasing attack on the Left Opposition in the late 20s, Ioffe committed suicide,
leaving a letter to Trotsky by his bedside. He admitted Trotsky’s interpretations of historical
events were always correct, yet chastised Trotsky for lacking “the inflexibility and firmness of
Lenin, that determination to stick to the path recognized as right, even if wholly isolated.”
Trotsky’s daughter, Larisa Volkova, underwent analysis for alleged incestuous fantasies with a
Russian-speaking analyst in Berlin in 1930. Sadly, she too committed suicide (see Deutscher,
Trotskii v izgnanii 214, and Etkind, Eros of the Impossible 383, n. 100).
88
“In the thirties, under the tutelage of the psychoanalyst Erich Fromm, at that time a member of
both institutes, the Critical Theorists turned to psychoanalysis to make up for a fundamental
deficiency in Marxian theory, namely, its lack of a psychology and its almost total disregard for
the so-called subjective dimension. (Whitebook 2)
126
politics, he would be expelled by both the Socialist Democratic Party and the International
Psychoanalytic Association. His books, intricate psychological studies of the effects of
repression upon sexuality, perpetuated by society and reproduced in the family unit, led to the
influential description of a fascist characterological structure—the infamous “authoritarian
personality” and the F-scale used to measure it. For such psychoanalytic preoccupations with
sexuality, as a lens through which to read larger social forces (a system he took in some
fantastical directions far beyond classical psychoanalysis), Reich’s books would be burned in
1930s by Nazis in Germany, Austria, and in 1956 by the U.S. Government.
89
In the late 1920s,
however, he travelled to Moscow where he gave a series of lectures on the compatibility of
psychoanalytic thought with Marxist materialism. He was too late to make much of an impact (to
be examined in a later chapter), as by that time Stalin’s rooting out of Trotsky’s Left Opposition
was sweeping psychoanalysis away with it.
Freud himself is sometimes unfairly regarded as having largely neglected politics or the
plight of the poor. Following the defeat of the Central Powers in World War I, he partook in
efforts to expand free mental health programs to the population suffering from war-time
conditions in “Red Vienna,” a term characterizing the socialist political reform in the city,
something that fed into the Bolsheviks’ hopes of revolution spreading in Europe.
90
Freud
announced a need for such public clinics during the first meeting of the psychoanalytic
organization following the conclusion of the war. Reflecting on the origins of psychoanalysis,
however, he lamented that the method’s protracted length demanded modification if it was to
89
On this latter historical event, see Jerome Greenfield, Wilhelm Reich vs. the U.S.A. (1974).
90
See Gardner and Stephens, Red Vienna and the Golden Age of Psychology, 1918-1938 (1992)
and Helmut Gruber, Red Vienna: Experiment in Working Class Culture, 1919-1934 (1992).
127
prove useful to larger society.
91
It would be Ernst Simmel, an analyst pioneering the treatment of
war neuroses, who devised a more expedient method of analysis given at public ambulatoria, a
short-form technique that combined hypnosis with free association.
92
Bolsheviks and psychoanalysis
In September 1921 during the height of the famine, David Riazanov, a librarian and
historian of the workers’ movement, was given personal permission and 50,000 rubles in gold by
Lenin and the Politburo for travel to Vienna. He was ordered to purchase two personal libraries
of socialist and anarchist history, valuable for their extensive holdings spanning many decades of
European organizational literature. A famous Viennese lawyer named Wilhelm Pappenheim
who, with lawyer Theodore Mautner, possessed “the most complete library on socialism in
Europe.” Having spent the 50,000 on another collection, Riazanov wired for an additional 75,000
to purchase Mautner and Pappenheim’s collection of 20,000 volumes, a sum granted to him by
Lenin.
93
The two collections were transferred to Moscow and went into making the primary
holdings of the Marx-Engels Institute, an archive considered by scholars as “the golden pantry of
history” (zolotaia kladovaia istorii), after the famed gold room in the Hermitage. It was also
91
See Elizabeth Ann Danto, Freud’s Free Clinics: Psychoanalysis and Social Justice, 1918-
1938 and her article on the correspondence between Reich and Freud on activist politics and
psychoanalysis in “An Anxious Attachment: Letters from Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Reich.”
92
Simmel’s work likely informed the public operations in the mid-1920s of the Moscow Institute
of Psychoanalysis housed in the Riabushisnkii mansion.
93
The Politburo of the Central Committee issued the following decision on September 23, 1921:
“ Деньги на пок у пк у би блиотек Грюнберга и Мау т нера в размере 75 тысяч золотом
перевести на имя Стомонякова с обязательством экономи ч ного их расходования и
непосредст венного перевода соответству ю щих су м м непосредственно владел ьцам
библиотек под личной ответственностью т. Стомонякова” (“Protokol no. 62-a”)
Stomoniakov was the appointed trader and handler of funds coming from Soviet Russia to Berlin
with whom Riazanov coordinated the purchase.
128
called “Ali Baba’s cave” when it was discovered by western scholars with the opening of the
Soviet State Archives in 1992 (Beecher and Fomichev 119-20). The coincidental link is that
Wilhelm Pappenheim just so happened to be the younger brother of Bertha Pappenheim, or Anna
O., Brauer and Freud’s first “hysterical” patient, the foundational nervous case that allowed
Freud to elaborate the system of psychoanalysis.
94
Following her treatment, which she recanted
many years later (though one could argue that it had its effects), Martha would go on to have a
brilliant career as a radical feminist revolutionary, agitating for women’s voting and reproductive
rights.
While Lenin is known to have only sounded off a single time on psychoanalysis, noting
its modishness, this indirect connection may inform a different opinion on why he did so.
Nevertheless, the evidence is well established that there was great interest in psychoanalysis after
October 1917, where “The discussion of “Freudism” during the 1920s is best characterized as an
attempt to ideologize psychoanalytic theory” (Miller, “The Reception of Psychoanalysis” 883).
Part of the value was certainly ideological, but it also had to do with the subjective model
implied by psychodynamic theory. The idea of the psychoneuroses served as a counterpressure to
various reductive biologisms of the time, like degeneration, eugenics theories, and following the
war, the dismissive view of malingering that conceived soldiers who were otherwise suffering
from, what would be called today PTSD (the “war neuroses”). These frequently racist and
mechanistic worldviews dismissed so many humans as permanently broken, irredeemable
machines. While it is common to think the 1920s as a reductive era, this perspective overlooks
just what kind of thinking was found to be anathema and very much out of fashion for this
94
Brauer provided the alias for Bertha in the case study developed by him and Freud by
transposing her initials one letter over (B.P. A. O.).
129
Marxist utopian project. Such thinking was rejected in favor of a definite transformative
potential, found in voluntarism and in the power of (re)education as a possible way forward. I
believe it is largely because of these reasons that psychoanalysis became state sponsored by the
Bolsheviks, owing to several high-ranking Party members giving it direct support.
It was likely Trotsky’s interest that secured psychoanalysis a temporary place in the
Soviet state. His materialist views allowed for the existence of the unconscious as the “other
side” of consciousness, and he attempted to describe it in various places (his description of
psychoanalysis in terms of the well metaphor for the psyche in his letter to Pavlov, for example).
In the following passage, for example, Trotsky gives an intriguing description of the
unconscious, this time before the October Revolution and in a review of the fiction of Leonid
Andreev, author of the famous story “The Abyss” (Bezdna):
Бессознательное не любит света и шу ма. Оно говорит полны м голосом лишь в
атмосфере одиночества и молчания. Когда внешняя ( социальная) жизнь личного
“ Я” напрягает каждый фибр, как часов у ю спи раль, натягивает каждый нерв, ка к
стр у н у, тогда Бессозн ательное дремлет, урча время от времени голосом несытого
пса. Оно ждет, когда “ Я” устанет от внешнего шу ма и с сомнением заглянет вну т рь
себя. (“O Леониде Андрееве” 144)
The image of the tension between the conscious “I” and the external world recalls La Metrie’s
classic description of the psyche as a watch spring, a thoroughly mechanical metaphor. Trotsky’s
description, however, also depicts the paradoxical synthesis of mechanism and instinctual,
organic presence (a dog, pes), recalling Heraclitus’s picture of life (bios) as the tense pressure
that finds balance in the harmony of opposites—in the harp during times of peace, and the bow
during war.
130
Along with Trotsky, Otto and Vera Schmidt were perhaps the second-most important
state actors to have supported psychoanalysis within the highest government positions. Otto
Schmidt was already a legendary scientist and arctic explorer by the time Lunacharskii appointed
him as editor of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia and the head of the State Publishing House
(Gosizdat). In the entry for “spirit” or “psyche” (dukh), which Schmidt composed, in the Great
Soviet Encyclopedia for the year 1931 (when the volume for “D” was published), he attempted a
materialist definition of the psyche that attacked idealist philosophy within psychology, worth
quoting at length:
В дальнейшем движении бу рж уазн ой философии идеалистическое у ч ение о
ду хе развивалось как в рационалистических ( Лейбниц), так равно и в
эмпирическ их системах ( Беркли). По Лейбницу, все су щее—духовно в
широком см ысле: в основе тел лежат ду ховные силовые су бстанции или
монады. Каждая монад а—особый замкн у тый мир, в к- ром отражается вся
вселенная. В более узком смысле ду ховными Лейбниц называет су щ ества,
наделенные кроме перцепции, способностью апперцепции или
самосознан ия. Чистый ду х, по Лейбницу, бог. (Schmidt 646-47)
Psychoanalysis for Schmidt was a natural science, and he seemed to have subscribed to its
descriptions of the mind. Schmidt’s publishing arm at Gosizdat, which operated out of the state-
appropriated Riabushinskii Mansion in Moscow from 1919-1921, also published Moisha Wulff
and Ivan Ermakov’s Psychological and Psychoanalytic Library, Russian translations of nearly
every major psychoanalytic monograph published up to that time.
95
Otto’s wife, Vera Schmidt,
95
These efforts extended Osipov’s pre-revolutionary publishing endeavors (Osipov had
emigrated after the revolution). Ermakov also served as the director of the Moscow
Psychoanalytic Institute, a highly active organization, which, after its closure was, curiously, the
131
born in Odessa, whose work has recently gathered attention in developmental psychology along
with Sabina Spielrein’s, ran the experimental psychoanalytic “kindergarten” (detskii dom) called
International Solidarity (Mezhdunarodnaia solidarnost’). It operated through the Moscow
Psychoanalytic Institute, which moved in to the Riabushinskii Mansion in 1921 after Gosizdat
vacated for a bigger operational space. In 1923, the Schmidts travelled to Vienna, where they
met Freud, Rank, Abraham, and other analysts of the International Psychoanalytic Association
(IPA), which then recognized the Russian Psychoanalytic Society (RPSAO) as a member
organization (Gainotti 982; Ovcharenko 71).
Vera Schmidt with Sabina Spielrein, who moved to Moscow from Rostov-on-Don at this
time, ran International Solidarity kindergarten, Moisha Wulff directed the psychoanalytic
outpatient clinic, and Ivan Ermakov headed the publishing endeavors and directed the training
institute within the Moscow Psychoanalytic Institute. “The Russian Psychoanalytic Institute was,
after those of Berlin and Vienna, the main centre of psychoanalytic training and activity”
(Angelini 372).
Vera Schmidt’s work of the 20s is fascinating in several regards. The children who were
educated at International Solidarity, such as the Schmidt’s young son, were raised in an
environment of close supervision, yet an open attitude. The rules that each pedagogue had to
follow seemed very progressive for the time:
Согласно уст ав у, воспитательницы должны были соблюдать ряд требований, на
которых строилась работа в детском доме- лаборатории:
future home of Gorky (it is now the Gorky museum in Moscow). The home was the very site
where one evening Stalin infamously repeated (for it was Yuri Olesha who coined the winged
phrase) that authors were the “engineers of human souls.” This latter fact should prompt one to
where Russians, even the Georgian Stalin, truly believed the study of psychology to take place—
within literature.
132
1. Никаких наказании, с детьми нельзя разговаривать стр огим голосом;
2. Быть предельно сдер жанными в прису т ствии детей;
3. Строго запрещены бурные проявления любви, нежности и ласки со стороны
взрослых: горячие поцелу и, нежные объятия;
4. Отсу тствие субъективной оценки детей: он а сл у ж ит для у д овлетворения
тщеславия и чу вства собственного достоинства взрослых, а ребенок ей не
понимает;
5. Оцениваться должны резу льтаты действия ребенка, а не он сам: например,
построенныий им дом пол у чает оценку «красивыий » или «некрасивыий»;
6. Не ру гать зачинщика, если дети подрались, а нарисовать картину боли, которую
он причинил др у го м у р ебенк у (Mordas and Mul’ginova 854)
The pedagogical rules remind one of the contemporary Montessori method, though lacking the
mystical idealism of Rudolph Steiner that ultimately undergirds that system. Instead, there is a
materialist approach, in which the intensities of “love” should be, as Maiakovskii may say,
expressed evenly across one’s life, or a material medium. Reisner and Spielrein’s activities were
overseen by Krupskaia, who directed children’s education in Soviet Russia and who
categorically rejected Freud’s method.
96
The expression of children’s sexuality, free of shame,
promoted by the Soviet psychoanalysts, was one of the reasons the institution was ordered closed
in 1924 amid some scandal.
97
96
Krupskaia promoted the idea that Lenin rejected psychoanalysis. For an excellent study of
pedagogical practice in the Soviet Union, though which surprisingly gives no mention of the
Riabushinskii analysts, see Lisa A. Kirchenbaum’s Small Comrades: Revolutionizing Childhood
in Soviet Russia, 1917-1932 (2000).
97
As Angelini writes, “Children enjoyed maximum freedom of movement and their toilet
training was not constrained by any rigid or artificial control. The same level of open-
mindedness was shown towards their sexual manifestations and curiosity. It was probably this
133
Larisa’s father, Mikhail Reisner, was a constitutional lawyer and professor of law, who
defended his dissertation in Warsaw under Aleksandr Blok’s father, A. L. Blok. After stays in
Paris and Heidelberg, he taught law at the Psychoneurological Institute in Petrograd and helped
finance and edit the Symbolist journal Rudin with his daughter before the revolution. After
October, he became a Bolshevik, published on “proletariat intuitive rights” (proletarskie
intuitivnye prava), and was the principle compiler (sostavitel’) of the First Soviet Constitution.
He was also the figure behind the legislation on the separation of church and state mentioned
above (Ovcharenko 134-36; Miller, “Freudian Theory” 629). In 1924, Reisner published “Freud
and his School on Religion” (Freid i ego shkola o religii) in the journal Pechat’ i revolutsiia.
With a professional interest in the topic of religion, the focus of the article, Reisner dedicated a
lengthy portion of the text to the implications of Freudian ideas upon the phenomenon of
religious belief, done in a comparative mode with the views of Marx and Engels.
98
The
shortcomings of the latter consisted, for Reisner, in their explanation of religious belief in terms
of socioeconomic factors, keeping the psychological dimension apart from their discussion. “By
this Reisner meant that, from a Marxist perspective, there still was no method of interpreting
either the meaning of religious fantasies and symbols or the sources of their appeal to masses of
people over the centuries” (Miller, “Freudian Theory” 630). For Reisner, the source of these
latter aspect of Vera Schmidt’s pedagogical project that provoked a reaction on the authorities’
part. It is an established fact that spiteful accusations of pornography and sexual abuse caused,
after various upheavals, the closing down of the Psychoanalytic School in 1924” (371). The
school remained open until well into 1925 after official word came in. Historians give different
views of the reasons for its closure and of the scandal. Three volumes of Vera’s diaries and
scientific observations of the period were published around 2010, along with a monograph she
wrote after the kindergarten closed in 1927, Uchenie Freida, unpublished at the time but kept by
her family.
98
Though Freud commented in various writings on this most complex phenomenon, Reisner’s
broaching the topic preceded Freud’s own, final monograph on religion in Moses and
Monotheism (1939) by many years.
134
beliefs may be found in an examination of individual psychology, rather than on the macroscopic
level of society. While the “opium of the masses” falls short of capturing the extent of Marx’s
critique of religion, which expanded on the work of Feuerbach and Bruno Bauer, materialism’s
incapacity to explicate faith in humans within a subjective dimension revealed that a materialist
psychology was sorely needed. The new approach developed in Freud’s writings was to see
religion as manifesting a “sublimated” and “displaced” energy that had its origins in sexuality.
The religious mentality hid a complicated set of emotions that were acquired during development
and in relation to figures of authority, such as those of the family. Unresolved conflicts became
sublimated in rituals and a structured symbolic system, where they could be controlled and
expressed. The system was enforced by the institution of the church and so conflicts rooted in
sexual development were resolved in a symbolic identification process, reinforcing the powers of
those religious institutions. Such was the main substance of Reisner’s article. He suggested
further that reason would make these processes of identification more transparent, and would be
capable, via the instrument of psychoanalysis and the social and historical theory of Marxism, to
create a new model of social identification that reflected the struggles of the working class.
Reisner understood the value in social cohesion that religious convictions brought to people, and
he sensed the need of creating a new mythology, one that would take its cue from the history of
labor, Russia’s successful revolution and culture, and a “scientifically” interpreted image of the
future.
99
Traces of this new mythology were already present, but it still needed time to gestate,
and the question is raised as to what this new culture would look like.
99
Max Eastman’s critique of Marxism as a form of religious thought, may have inspired the
article, though Reisner does not seem to know of Eastman’s writing in German. Eastman was the
unofficial literary agent and translator of Trotsky’s work abroad. In “The Critique of the
Hegelian Foundations of the Dialectic,” Georges Battaile mentions Eastman in the following
135
Several of the figures above with connections to psychoanalysis worked at the state-
directed arm for developing revolutionary culture, the People’s Commissariat of Education
(Narkompros). It was headed by Anatolii Lunacharskii, a philosophical Machist and
“empiriomonist,” what was a prominent strand of thought within the unfinished theory of
dialectical materialism at the time. Aside from his work in the first Bolshevik radical educational
institutions in Italy with Gorky and Krupskaia (the Party Schools) before 1917, where the seeds
to the culture of the 1920s were laid, he was a prolific thinker who wrote articles like the
contribution to the 1908 collection Filosofiia marksizma on the law of the economy of forces.
100
One relevant connection, which will allow a transition to comment on Tsement, is that of
Aleksandr Voronskii, who was also a close associate of Lunacharskii, the Schmidts (Otto
directed Gosizdat) Trotsky, Reisner, and other colleagues at the Narkompros. As the editor of the
thick journal Krasnaia nov’, Voronskii published some of the first articles on psychoanalysis
after the revolution to a lay public and produced his own article dealing with psychoanalysis and
the creative process, titled “Freidizm i iskusstvo.” Voronskii likely became influenced by the
trend of psychoanalysis through Trotsky and the Schmidts, and the concept of a dynamic
unconscious was partly responsible for the development of his aesthetic theory of artistic
creation, discussed in detail in Chapter Five.
way: “The Marxist conception of the dialectic has often been challenged. Finally, Max Eastman
considered it to be a form of religious thought” (Bataille 105).
100
Malevich, who was employed in the seventeenth section of Lunacharskii’s ministry, wrote the
following, an application of Machist energetics to aesthetics: “[ В] сякoе действо совершается
чрез энерги ю тела, а всякое тело стремится к сохранности своей энергии, а потому всякое
мое действ о должно совершаться экономическим пу тем. Так движется все творчество
человека.”
136
In his role as editor of Krasnaia nov’, Voronskii was supported by Lenin and Trotsky (his
“most consistent supporter in the party” [R. Maguire, Art xiii]), and Voronskii would join the
Left Opposition in support of Trotsky as the twenties ran on, leading to his removal from
publishing and, after Lunacharskii’s death in 1933, eventually to his political execution a decade
later. Before all this, Voronskii was busy running Krasnaia nov’, and during this time he heavily
edited the first edition of Tsement by Fedor Gladkov, which was published in the journal in
several installments. Thus, perhaps through his influence, some traces of Freudian thought can be
sensed. The Stalinist authorities later promoted Tsement to an exemplar of Socialist Realism,
though after Gladkov rewrote it, and kept rewriting it, until the end of his life. How the concept
of “drive” entered Soviet consciousness can be seen by considering this important early work of
Soviet literature.
Making Cement
The only trace of psychoanalysis, or psychiatry more generally, in Gladkov’s novel
appears in the unfortunate conclusion to the narrative arc of Dasha, Gleb’s wife, and Polya, a
worker in the town. At the conclusion of Dasha’s storyline, she walks away from life in the
factory town to join Polya, a victim of rape, at a sanatorium. Dasha herself had been raped by
Bad’in previously.
101
Contemplating her fate, Dasha thinks:
Значит, ну жно одно: партия и работа для партии. Личного нет. Что такое его
любовь, скрытая в незр имой глу бине? Что такое его вопросы и мысли,
101
The Soviet cultural trope of “rape” has been analysed by Naiman in connection to the widely-
public legal case of “Chubarov Alley,” coded in pre-1917 language that recalls Artsybashev’s
story “Bezdna” and Pil’niak’s writing: “In Pil’niak’s world the Russian Revolution is akin to a
rape of the West and of Civilization— by the “life of the species.” Raped, the West is forced to
bring a strange being into the world and to love it” (Sex in Public, 62, passim).
137
ноющие под черепом? Все это — отрыжка пр оклятого прошлого. Все это —
от отца, от юности, от интеллигентской романтики. Все это должно быть
вытравлено до самых истоков. Все эти больные клеточки мозга надо убит ь.
Есть только одно — партия. (6: 64)
Note the play on words in the term for conscious reflection (otryzhka), meaning “reflection”
(otrazhenie), implying an almost frivolous activity of self contemplation. The novel’s ideological
attitude toward the mental sphere is likewise generally negative in the text, as attention to
personal consciousness, feelings, and memories are coded as part of the past world, destroyed by
revolution and war. The sense one gets with this text is that the mind is something extraneous, a
burden even, as emotions get in the way of action. Language itself can only confuse matters, and
words, as Bad’in says to Dasha, have only destructive power, enough to “lick whole mountains
away,” yet are impotent to produce anything of substance themselves. This piece of advice bears
out for Dasha while she is captured by Cossack royalists, while another character is killed for her
fear and talking “like a hen.”
In some sense, the picture of mind that emerges in this text is a continuation of elements
in Shaginian’s sanatorium and Ferster’s activity therapy, in that labor (rabota) that is mindless,
but consistent, can have healing properties. A similar orientation was popularized by the
rehabilitation centers of the bezprizorniki, homeless orphans, many of them taken to criminality,
so-called “defective children.” A focus on labor was the very successful pedagogical-therapeutic
approach taken by Anton Makarenko, in Pedagogicheskaia poema (1935), his account of
running an orphanage, the Gorky Colony, near Poltava in the 1920s. The method was a radical
application of trade labor (trud) to the process of rehabilitation and education (vospitanie).
138
Tsement’s picture of mind is one that is a function of labor, having little to do with the
concepts of mind from the past. This would become a feature of Soviet psychology, a focus on
labor that, just like Dasha’s passage above, combines thinking and action into one behavior—
that of activity. Bauer characterizes this attitude in psychological matters:
If there were a single problem around which the history of Soviet psychology
could be written, it would be the role of subjective factors in behavior. The old
introspectionist psychology which was driven out in the early years of the
Revolution was concerned almost exclusively with the study of man’s subjective
reaction to his experiences. It was rejected because it reflected a contemplative
approach to life, setting off thought from action, and because it was tainted with
concepts like freedom of will and therefore was antideterministic. In short, it was
“unscientific.” This reaction was to a large measure a result of the general upsurge
of objective, behavioral psychologies throughout the world, but it was abetted
also by the materialist basis of Marxist philosophy. (Bauer 67)
The idea that work, or labor, is the fundamental activity of human beings has a long tradition
going back to Scripture. However, for the officially atheist Soviet Union, labor derived its value
from the thinking of Marx.
102
102
For educational reformers, like Krupskaia and Lunacharskii, the focus on labor as a healthy
mental orientation was connected to the educational movement of Stanislav Shatskii, a
progressive Soviet educator, who in late empire days, imported the American educational system
to Russia. His system resisted indoctrination, denied primacy of class, and emphasized reason,
the first feature of which was muted as his ideas were developed in the Soviet times. He drew on
John Dewey’s “activity-based” approach, who on invitation by Kruspkaia visited the Soviet
Union in 1928. Shatsky’s own labor colony was based on Chicago Hull House, and emphasized
labor-based method of education, culture, art.
139
The historian Erik van Rey has argued that behind the essential Marxist concept of
“productive forces” of labor, that which characterizes human activity in the world and
determines the movement of history in the “relations” or “mode” of production, are the drives.
In Marx’s eyes the essential forces or senses function as Triebe. People are
motivated to engage in production by these drives, instincts, or impulses. In
Marx’s blunt words, ‘industry’ is the ‘opened book of the human essential forces,
the human psychology turned into sensuous reality [sinnlich vorliegende]’. This
passage is extraordinarily important as it indicates that even when Marx was
beginning to conceptualize humanity in terms of productive forces he stuck to the
idea that productive activity was fuelled by psychological drives. (283)
This is an extremely provocative reading of the early works of Marx, which goes against
the grain of traditional Marxist thought and the Soviet ideological reading, and ultimately
links Marx’s early thought to the work of Heinrich Reimarus. Marx’s influence by
Reimarus meant that productive forces had a psychological cast.
Thus, I will read Tsement, not as exemplifying a spontaneity/consciousness distinction,
passing from one to the other as the main organizing principle of the emplotment to the novel,
but rather read it as reflecting “consciousness” in “spontaneity,” of revealing the logic of
unconscious drives. This will come about by reading the Kunsttrieb into the early Marx, in which
Gleb is an embodiment of “productive forces” without, yet, an established mode of “relations of
production”. He has not yet been infused with the image of the party, which combines into one
movement thought with action, what became essential to Soviet psychology in the concept of
activity. This bears out in several ways in Tsement, such as its deep suspicion of language, which
accompanies self-reflection and divides thought from action. Language brings in hesitation,
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indecision. Thus, bureaucracy is bogged down in too much language and Gleb’s success in
transcending its rules and establishing the factory is a victory of the synthesis of thought and
action. Thought and action must not be divided by self-reflection, which is a selfish activity.
Like in Ferster’s therapy, one must not think, but do, but do in such a way that aligns
with one’s convictions. This activity goes against the grain of the basic conceptions of
psychoanalysis, bringing in hesitancy and doubt to one’s actions. Erich Fromm, writing many
years later, addressed this issue.
The fundamental misunderstanding on which this interpretation rests is the
assumption that historical materialism is a psychological theory which deals with
man's drives and passions. But, in fact, historical materialism is not at all a
psychological theory; it claims that the way man produces determines his thinking
and his desires, and not that his main desires are those for maximal material gain.
Economy in this context refers not to a psychic drive, but to the mode of
production; not to a subjective, psychological, but to an objective, economic-
sociological factor. The only quasi-psychological premise in the theory lies in the
assumption that man needs food, shelter. (Fromm 10)
The idea of spontaneity and consciousness connects to the way the Marxists conceived of
labor and forces of production. Recall what Marx wrote in Capital:
A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to
shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes
the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his
structure in imagination before he erects it in reality (284).
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Here, the power of the imagination, the ability to conceive a plan for action, to take the self and
the environment as objects of reflection, and then intervene into natural reality and carry a
project through, marks the difference between humans and animals. While according to the neo-
Kantians, no such plan existed within nature itself, but one could act “as if” it existed, in order to
get moving. This kind of self-suggestion is powerful. For the spread of leftist views, a powerful
mythology had to develop that could move the masses, in other words a mass suggestion, in the
terms we have been developing. What could such a powerful myth be? It was captured in the
powerfully suggestive image of the revolt, of the violent overthrow of oppressors and liberation
of the narod. This was such a potent image, and in the Russian context, writers like Gorky had
given it salient expression, as in the novel Mat’.
The paradigmatic distinction that constitutes the Marxist theory of subjectivity, that of
“Spontaneity and Consciousness,” which fed into the development of the Socialist Realist
doctrine in literature of the 1930s is at issue here. This formulation of the later Marx was
revealed to have an interesting legacy in connection to the “drives” explored in this chapter. As
some scholars have noted, Karl Marx was engaged with the concept of the passions in the early
period of his thinking and may have encrypted notions of compulsions and drives into his
concept of so-called “productive forces,” as well as the theory of labor that would come to
characterize his later thought. The work of the German natural philosopher Hermann Samuel
Reimarus on the animal instincts (in his Drives of Animals of 1760) was of particular interest for
the young Marx as he was writing his dissertation, “The Difference Between the Democritean
and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature.” Reimarus was in fact first to posit the concept Trieb, or
drive, applied to the animal world: “In what was gradually to emerge as the basic explanatory
category in psychology, Reimarus argued that there were innate drives in animals (including
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human beings) that interacted with sensations” (Bellamy). He developed ten classes and fifty-
seven subclasses of drives, the highest of these being the Kunsttrieb, the drive of creativity or
“skillful drive,” which manifested in the work of bees, spiders, and other animals by way of an
innate compulsion to spontaneously generate material forms.
Reimarus saw the Kunsttrieb as the most developed variety of instinct because it
exhibited a feature of selection on the part of animal behavior, “incorporating an element of
choice,” something that heavily influenced the thinking of Marx’s early intellectual activity.
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The point is that the primacy of drives were crucial for Marx as he developed his idea of labor,
having roots in Marx’s early productive period of 1841-1846, one that, coincidentally, was only
beginning to be explored in the 1920s, important in light of Soviet attempts to develop a
thorough materialist philosophy (Van Ree, 276). Within the history of Marxist studies, the
publication of works like The German Ideology, The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts
of 1844, and other early writings of Marx, never before seen by the public and influencing many
of the theorists of Marxism in the 1920s (like Bukharin), was a project undertaken at the Marx-
Engels Institute in Moscow by its founder, David Riazanov. This was precisely during the time
when psychoanalysis was influential in the Soviet Union, between the years 1921 and 1931,
displaying a marked interest in theorized compulsive forces.
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103
For an overview of interpretations taking subjective, emotional factors as important elements
underpinning Marx’s notion of “productive forces,” see Erik Van Ree “Productive Forces, the
Passions and Natural Philosophy”, who writes that “There is a powerful intuition in the literature
that something is inherently problematic about the idea of the primacy of the productive forces
and that Marx must have realized that” (275); this and the following page contain a scholarly
review of the how the notion has been understood.
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Riazanov was chiefly responsible for collecting the entire works of Marx, editing, and
publishing many installments of the first volumes in the Soviet Union (today, called the first
Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe, an effort restarted in the past several years in Germany). Earlier in
his career, Riazanov had introduced the concept of “permanent revolution,” so central to
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In Russian, proizvoditel’nye sily “express the active relationship between human beings
and nature” (vyrazhaiut aktivnoe otnoshenie liudei k prirode). Productive forces are also the
central aspect/side (vedushchaia storona) of the means of production (sposoby proizvodstva) that
are foundational to social development. Each stage in the evolution of Productive Forces has as
its corresponding expression Relationships of Production, which appear as social forms of
relation. The Relationships of Production are, in a sense, the material expression of Productive
Forces. As the Productive Forces develop, they come to clash with the crystalized Relationships
of Production, which become a limit (or the “chains”) to the development of the Productive
Forces. Thus, in post-war Soviet Russia as depicted by Gladkov, the relationships of production
were suspended. According to Erik van Ree, Marx “regarded productive forces as material
articulations of the human passions; to him, humanity represented an impassioned productive
force. In arguing that productive force was empowered by the human will and by humanity’s
life-changing passions, he in effect cast the passions as the deepest motive force of human
history” (274). Van Ree gathers together several “subjectivist readings of Marxist productivism”
within the long philosophical history of philosophical materialism, that of Althusser, G. A.
Cohen, Michael Quante, Robert Tucker and Andrew Chitty, Alvin Gouldner, and Antonio Negri.
He explains how the passionate underpinning of Productive Forces derive from Marx’s early
work between 1841-1846, such as The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, which
were published in the Soviet Union between 1927 and 1932.
Marx was especially sympathetic to those natural philosophers who regarded
nature as self-creative; as he saw it, atoms and matter were at once productive of
Trotsky’s conception of political organization, and spent time at the Frankfurt School in the early
1920s.
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consciousness and structural complexity, and the embodiment of deep-seated
living passions. In a close parallel, Marx cast the human productive forces as the
creative driving force of human history and as the instrument of the human
passions, i.e. of the desire to consolidate, beautify and expand human life. In
several philosophies of nature with which he familiarized himself, Marx found
confirmation of this intuition that the passions represented the most deep-seated
motive force of human history. (276)
Thus, a kind of puzzle emerges as to the understanding of Productive Forces, which on the one
hand emerge as if from outside of the system (of human species activity, “directing” the
movement of history), while on the other are internal to the system, the immanent, central tool of
its power.
I described a coincidental link with the endeavor to bring Marx’s early works together
with psychoanalysis, by the work of Riazanov who purchased a socialist library from the brother
of Freud’s first patient. Gladkov’s novel Tsement, edited by the psychoanalytically-informed
critic Voronskii, was the case study to flesh out these issues. Gleb’s return from the
revolutionary war finds him amidst the ruins of a cement factory and under the influence of a
spontaneous compulsion for labor, reflecting the materially-productive force of Reimarus’s
Kunsttrieb.
Tsement takes a major cue from literary modernist tropes developed by the Symbolists
and the “ornamental prose” of Belyi, who, as the last chapter showed, negotiated with concepts
at the border of the mind/body in his work. Its publication history displays a curious vacillation
within Gladkov’s biography. Jeered upon his literary premier in Moscow in 1919 for writing a
short story that embraced an outdated nineteenth-century realism, it can be read as the author’s
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hard swing into modernist trends in vogue at the time. However, Gladkov would swing too far.
The following editions of Tsement (the novel was republished some 36 times until Gladkov’s
death in 1958) saw the author orienting to many critical attacks from RAPP and other groups,
smoothing over the novel of markers highlighting the stikhiinost’ of the characters’ behavior.
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What could not be smoothed over is what Katerina Clark has termed the “modal schizophrenia”
of this Socialist Realist text, not to the fact that the narrative is split between Dasha and Gleb, but
the fact that it is primarily a juxtaposition of essentially two different stories, one of construction
and one of reconstruction, operating according to two different logics.
The problem of Tsement is that within the post-war context of the new Soviet state,
neither a market existed for the sale of the commodity of cement nor a centralized plan to put this
cement to good use. Rehabilitating the cement factory, the central issue of the novel, would then
seem to serve no rational, or “conscious,” purpose. As Clark writes,
The problem is not so much that Gleb stands outside the hierarchical structure and
its practices but that his initiative from below is not matched (as it was in later
production novels) by any prominent guiding force from above. In other words,
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According to Eric Laursen, who cites the scholarship of Robert I. Busch and Irina Smirnova,
the later editions drastically lessened the “spontaneous” elements of the novel: “When Soviet
laws to aid in the “withering away” of the family were reversed in the 1930s, Dasha was made to
focus more on the nuclear family and less on society as a whole. Instead of being elected chair of
the presidium, she is elected only a member and no longer makes an important proposal. She
becomes less defiant, hostile, and physically threatening with Gleb, replacing “comrade” with
“dear” (rodnoi, milyi). She no longer has sex with others, nor does she push Gleb into a
relationship with Polia. She becomes a better housekeeper, cooking and cleaning for Gleb.
Conditions in the children's home are also better, so her decision to put Niurka there becomes
less negative. These changes have a profound impact on the depiction of Gleb. He is no longer
reduced to begging and pleading, and he is less jealous and violent. Instinct is therefore less
powerful and consciousness much easier to acquire; he must still master his sexual jealousy, but
this is much easier, since it is now totally unfounded. His fate is no longer in Dasha's hands; he
himself can change and thereby regain his wife and home.” (Laursen 69, f.n. 19)
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Gladkov has dispensed with the convention of the mentor / disciple pattern: Gleb
has no mentors to temper his willfulness and teach him self-control. Several
protagonists assume this function at times (his wife, Dasha; the Cheka head,
Chibis; even Badin!), but not consistently or with palpable effect. (Clark 82)
Yet Gleb is still driven on. What is that force that keeps him going? Something outside the
system of rules, in fact, against them and their explicit orders, drives Gleb to get the wheels of
production turning, in that production itself is a natural state of being human. Therefore, one may
say that Gleb follows the Kunsttrieb, the creative drive, of production for production’s sake. Or,
rather, he becomes a producer of production.
Clark has described the inspiration to Gladkov’s novel as coming from an account of
Iustin Zhuk, an anarchist soldier and worker from Schlusselberg, who restarted the factory there
after returning from the war, an achievement which Zinov’ev celebrated in a front page obituary
in Pravda. Clark also sees Gleb as reproducing the mythical folk image of the bogatyr’, a
warrior-hero who represents an unrelenting will, symbolized by the recurrent motif of hands,
fists, and arms that occur throughout the novel, alongside a suspicion of language and orality.
Furthermore the passage to consciousness in the early version is completely different
from later iterations, and impulses threaten to erupt at every turn. The text I will refer to is the
first, 1925 version published in six issues of Krasnaia Nov’, which was also heavily edited by
Aleksandr Voronskii. The final part of the chapter will focus on the journal issues 4-6, which
deal more centrally with Gleb’s reconstruction and opening of the factory, whereas the first half
of the novel is more properly of pure construction itself, of the unsanctioned brambsberg of
Railes for which the character Shram gets expelled from the Party. While Gleb’s wish comes true
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in the conclusion of the novel when the opening of the factory is sanctioned, it is never explained
how he receives permission from Promburo to do so.
Thus, a fairly straightforward psychoanalytic reading of Tsement presents itself, which
displays Gleb, the demobilized soldier and factory worker, not passing from “spontaneity” to
“consciousness,” but rather experiencing a psychical regression in the span of the novel. In a
Freudian light, Gleb’s narrative arc could arguably be described as passing from a failed genital
organization (marked by his non-relationship to Dasha and the death of their daughter, Niurka) to
the stage of anality, characterized by aggression, obsession with dirt/cleanliness, and other
features. The genital organization of the story, that of a Romance, largely occurs for Dasha’s
narrative line in relation to Bad’in, the commissar. Gleb, however, has regressed, and so his
actions in the second half of the novel are aimed to overcome the “paternal” barrier, the Party’s
prohibition against restarting the factory. However, in the second half, the Party is not
represented in the character of Bad’in, but rather by Prombiuro, the Party organization that
stands above Bad’in’s office, rendering Bad’in into a brother within the psychical economy of
the text.
A mythical image of production haunts the text, which would be repeated in later
Socialist Realist texts as a model. When Gleb first enters the “machine shrine” of the factory he
is overwhelmed by a kind of Kaanian phantasia morbosa, the magnification of an imaginary
fantasy of a spiritual presence, of some slumbering idol (Gleb is himself repeatedly called the
“son of an idol,” idolova syn), what will make Gleb lose consciousness in ecstasy later in the
novel.
Длинными тоннелями Глеб вошел в машинное отделение. Ту т — гу стой
небесный свет и строгий храм машин. Пол выложен цветными плитками,
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шахматной мозаикой. И черные, с позолотой и серебром, идолами ст оят
дизеля. Они твердо и четко стоят длинными рядами в кварталах, со всем
готовые к работе: толкни — и они запляшу т, заиграют зеркальным
металлом. Казалось, что возду х стру ится горячими волнами навстречу
Глеб у. И маховики стоят и летят. Здесь, как и прежде, все нарядно, чисто, и
в каждой детали машин дышит теп л ом любовная человеческая забот а. По-
прежнему блистает пол восковым изразцом, и пыль недымится на окнах;
стекла ( их — множество) дрожат голу быми и янтарными изломами света.
Здесь упрямо жил чел овек, и от человека жили и напрягались ожиданием
машины. (1: 78)
The makhoviki, or the flywheels, which store kinetic energy, are rendered here in paradoxical
language, as both statically present in their being and simultaneously given to flight of becoming,
as two breasts that will feed the production. The quality of the language used to describe this
primordial womb is apparently maternal, anthropomorphizing the various machine parts into a
mother’s body. However, the space is described more as a giant’s lavatory, with its checkered
tile scrubbed clean, with various plumbing releasing hot jets of steam that the character enjoys
smelling and feeling on his face, and where the machine parts themselves “strain with
anticipation,” etc. The anal imagery, including the gold of this treasure house, is quite
predominant.
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Gleb’s anal fixation is what prevents his genital union with Dasha, a more “advanced”
character. Her attraction to Bad’in, whose sexual gestures are relentless and only partially
106
In “Character and Anal Eroticism” (1908), Freud connected the adult obsession with gold to a
child’s fascination with feces.
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diverted by Dasha, is what characterizes Bad’in as the quintessential phallic presence of the text.
Eric Naiman describes Bad’in in the role of textual phallus:
To appreciate the change in attitudes about privacy in the mid-1920s we can
return to Tsement and workers’ responses to it. A central figure in the novel is the
chairman of the local executive committee, Bad’in, who is at once Sanin and an
ideal Bolshevik, at least insofar as the performance of his official duties is
concerned. Bad’in’s personal creed is indebted to both Nietzsche and
Artsybashev: he acts as he desires and is not averse to raping subordinates. He
says to Dasha when she resists his vigorous advances: “I don’t see any shame in
what I’m doing. We are a handsome and strong couple, and it’s not fitting that we
pretend and utter sententious phrases. [. . .] You know that I never yield in battle,
and what I want, I take.” Bad’in’s sexual prowess overwhelms women; surrender
to his sexual advances is “inevitable.” As she struggles against him, Dasha feels
that “his blood was streaming into her body through his arms, lips, and nostrils,
and in answer to these strong pulsations a wave of feminine weakness passed
languorously through her veins, a wave of confused pleasure and fear.” Although
she tries to resist Bad’in’s assault, Dasha appreciates his raw power;
simultaneously she considers him both a personal threat and her salvation from
the forces of counterrevolution. Accompanying Dasha on a journey through
dangerous territory, Bad’in becomes a biological and political phallus, engorged
with power in all its manifestations. (95)
The surprise of Tsement, this paragon of anti-capitalist literature, is Gladkov’s successful
description of a fetishistic structure inherent in Gleb’s singular fixation on the factory. Gleb
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never cares just what the factory produces—cement—or to what project it will contribute, so
long as the diesel tanks turn the flywheel perpetually, the central image of drive in the novel that
is of such blinding intensity, containing so much pleasure, that Gleb faints (disappears, burns up)
when he approaches this externalized core of his very being. The factory is not an object of
desire, but rather is the site of a “headless drive,” a pure intensity without a goal that sucks in
precious resources and produces nothing of “concrete” value.
Just before the climactic confrontation between Gleb and Bad’in, workers complain to
Engineer Kleist, keeper of the factory-temple:
— Бросьте, Герман Гер м анович, чу дить. Завод не может быть пу щен, точно вы не
знаете. Для чего им со бственно завод? Ведь смешно, Герман Германович...
Предположим, что завод п у щен, и проду к ция пост у пила на склады. Что же дальше?
Рынок? Но его ведь нет. Раньше нашим цементом питался главным образом
заграничный рынок. А теперь? Строительство? Но ведь строительства тоже нет и
не может быть, потом у что нет ни капитала, ни производительных сил. (KN 6:104)
The subjective embodiment in the novel of such impotent cement, as simply present in its being
and potential, is Niurka, another product of Gleb’s efforts, who tragically displays her parents’
neglect of the products of their labor. Gleb’s idea fixe is once again not to produce anything, but
to (re)produce production itself, linear desire being eclipsed by circular drive.
Furthermore, no account is given of the use to which the cement will be put. This is how
the bureaucracy views Gleb’s project, which has no role in its organizational plans and as such
categorically cannot exist. To the claim “We are making cement!” the state would say “And who
said that you could make cement?” This is the view of Gleb’s antagonist, Bad’in, who represents
the office of Ispolkom, taking direction on factory production from Sovnarkhoz.
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Gleb’s transformation to consciousness as someone who first fails to understand the
strange language of bureaucracy:
И вид у них — деловито- холодный, и смотрят они на Глеб а с ту склым вопросом
( так на него смотрят и в Совнархозе), а на его вопросы отвечают сначала немым
изу м лением, а потом странными словами в полу голое, сквозь дым папиросы и
задумчивое безделье, и слов этих Глеб не понимал, а понимал только одно слово,
которое он возненавидел давно:
— Промбюро... (KN 5: 80)
Gleb’s fantasy world of the factory is troubled by the reality of this strange bureaucratic
language.
Ну жно было узнать самому, что такое — Промбюро, которое было неотразимым
заслоном для Совнархоза и заводоу п равлени я. Эта тяже лая глыба стояла на его
дороге, и вопросы его у пирались в гру зные ее грани без ответно. Ре шил: ехать и
изу ч ить на месте. Если ну жно крыть — не возвращаясь, направить лыжи в Мос к ву,
к Ленину, в ВСНХ, в СТО — рассказать, разоблачить, разбить башку, сделать
скандал, поднять всех на ноги, а своего добиться: завод н адо пу ст ить — пу ст ить во
что бы то ни стало. (5:82)
It is curious how Prombiuro is described as a glyba, a mountain that must be overcome, which is
reflected in Dasha’s singular law or “iron rule” of language learned from the soldier Efim:
“ Вникай. Язык не поднимет горы, а слизн у ть может целые горы... (3:65).” Gleb’s
monumental task of convincing Prombiuro to the necessity of opening the cement factory,
however, is completely elided. In all of the exhausting descriptions of activity in Party offices, no
scene is ever given in which Gleb attains documents from Prombiuro. Only the following hints at
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his success before the meeting with Bad’in, said by Gleb in his sudden reappearance back to the
factory town from his journey: “ В Промбюро я провел все наряды. Привез с собо й топливо”
(ibid. 5: 107). In a telling scene supposed to reflect Gleb’s newly-attained mastery of the
system’s rules and language, Gleb confronts Bad’in as to why the Ispolkom ordered the cement
factory closed.
— Об этом я знаю. Из Главцемент а полу чена в Совнархозе телеграмма о
прекращении работ впредь до выяснения вопроса о целесообразности пу ска завода.
— Я знаю, чья это работа, товарищ Бадьин. Но в Совнархоз была послана из
Промбюро телеграмма предсовнархоз у, чтоб принять все меры к организации
работ. Там этот вопрос обсу ждался, и док у менты у меня на ру ках.
Голос у Шр амма был чу жой и хри плый.
— Есть Промбюро, но есть и Главцемент. (6:110)
Shram, previously taking fuel for the Railes brambsberg against the orders of Prombiuro, is
punished for by exclusion from the Party by operating outside the system’s rules (“ Эт о дело
наше, а не Промбюро, и мы его выполним без санкции Промбюро.” [KN 3: 105]). Gleb
serves as the positive example, revealing by a slight of bureaucratic legerdemain a contradiction
between the orders of Glavtsement and Prombiuro, two offices given to planning national labor
activity, with one prohibiting unsanctioned organization (Glavtsement) while the other
(Prombiuro) allowing it. Yet what steps led to Prombiuro “accepting all measures for organizing
labor” are never given, which seems crucially important for Gleb’s attainment of
“consciousness.” At this point, Gleb’s own body gives a spontaneous impulse that reflects his
repressed rage and the “unconscious” operation of the factory, as if an organ begins to move
against the will of the whole. “Гл еб сорвал шлем и бросил его на стол. Щека около носа
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дергалась в неу д ержимой су дорог е” (KN 4:110). Gleb reveals the papers from Prombiuro
giving the green light to his efforts in writing.
Он рванул крючки на гимнастерк е, вытащил пачк у бу м а г и бросил на стол.
— Вот вам все док у менты. Нас били Промбюром, и мы обратно бьем этим
Промбюром. (ibid.)
Since the documents magically appear, they present an unsatisfactory narrative deus ex machina.
Furthermore, th е exchange between Bad’in and Gleb, downplayed in later versions of the novel,
reveals disorganization at the heart of the Party (it is two-headed, announcing contradictory
orders), what could not be allowed in later years.
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Section II (Drives and Philosophical Materialism)
Chapter 4
Psychoanalysis at the Core of Soviet Philosophical Monism:
“Autogenetic Movement” and Mikhail Bulgakov’s Sobach’e serdtse (1925)
Who would try to assist an impending lunar eclipse?
—Dayan
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Lenin’s toe
When Lenin suffered his first stroke, some believed that his illness was of a
psychological nature—a case of nerves resulting from his industriousness, a nearly-unstoppable
drive for work that became legendary even during his lifetime. A second and then a third stroke
confirmed that something else was afoot. Shortly after the third stroke in March 1923, Lenin lost
his capacity to speak and, in January the following year, he died. The impact of his death
initiated the process of the creation of Lenin’s cult of personality, when, on the third day
following his death, a peculiar event occurred. A team of surgeons removed Lenin’s brain from
his cranium, his heart, and Fanny Kaplan’s bullet from an earlier unsuccessful assassination
attempt. The brain was carried to the newly created Institute of V. I. Lenin, where for several
weeks it was displayed to the public along with his personal artifacts. The brain was presented as
an ideal specimen for study, soon occupying the central place in the Moscow Brain Pantheon, a
107
Soviet Dialectician, quoted in Yakhot, The Suppression of Philosophy in the USSR: The
1920s & 1930s, p. 8.
155
special collection of this most knowledgeable organ.
108
It was believed Lenin’s brain contained
the structure at the root of his revolutionary activity—genius (it was assumed Lenin’s brain
“contained” lots of it).
109
This pseudo-medical quality of individual behavior was elevated to a
key characteristic of the New Soviet Man. What the physiologists immediately identified within
this paradigm-setting object of study par excellence, however, were massive swaths of burned-
out neuronal tissue, damage so extensive that the organ weighed some 250 grams less than the
average brain, prompting the authorities to adjust the official average of (Soviet) human brains to
approximately Lenin’s weight.
110
As Monika Spivak has written in Mozg otpravite po adresu, those who rooted personality
in brain structure paradoxically conceived the empirical material in a most phantasmatic way
(Spivak 20-37). By searching for genius in the brain, they posited the existence of a kind of
extended and localizable object hidden inside. The intriguing paradox was that, even if they were
correct to think the brain was the necessary substructure of the mind, they confused and
confounded mental states with brain states, and merely reified this organ into an object of
fantasy. Actual brain structure became in some sense irrelevant and, furthermore, according to
108
This was originally the idea of Bekhterev, of whom it was said that, if anyone knew the mind
of God, it was Bekhterev. The Pantheon later included Maiakovskii’s, Belyi’s, and Bekheterv’s
own brain (perhaps proving Russell’s paradox of a set containing itself).
109
The search for genius is described as the central preoccupation of Russian psychiatry and
larger culture in Irina Sirotkina’s excellent study Diagnosing Literary Genius. a Cultural History
of Psychiatry in Russia, 1880-1930.
110
As Monika Spivak notes, Maiakovskii’s brain was about 400 grams heavier than the average
(See Mozg otpravite po adresu). The “red psychoanalyst” Zalkind sang praises to Lenin’s brain
in a mixture of physiological and psychoanalytic terminology. He named a new issledovatel’skii
refleks gleaned in Lenin’s behavior and described a kind of “drive for labor,” what can be seen as
an Arbeitstrieb, to bank off both Reimarus and Marx, as sources to Lenin’s genius. The damaged
condition of Lenin’s brain was direct evidence of his sacrifice for the people.
156
Spivak, destroyed by Soviet researchers who cut Lenin’s brain into 10,000 slices using a device
called a diotome.
This sad object ended up displaying their own (impossible) fantasy of genius. Karl
Jaspers called such a general tendency of reductionism a “brain mythology,” and Lenin’s brain’s
(hidden) genius is a prime example of such a sacred object of myth. Psychoanalysis, while of
course not the study of the brain directly, is designed to describe how such a process of fantasy
unfolds, and how something like the big toe, in fact, can be just as fascinating, noble, and worthy
of worship, and can contain as much Schein, a kind of aesthetic pleasure, as the stupid piece of
flesh that is the brain. As the situation in the Soviet Union showed, however, psychoanalysis had
to contend with that piece of flesh, had to reconcile itself with it, to show the impossible and to
master it, which of course it failed to do.
This chapter will examine how psychoanalysis became bound up in the philosophical
debates of the 20s between the Mechanists and Dialecticians, which was significant in that
interest in psychoanalysis displayed its credentials as a science and as giving materialist
knowledge to the new state. The conversation that began in psychiatric circles over the
implementation of psychoanalytic theory into clinical practice began to move into philosophical
circles, where many of the same general questions were being asked. The philosopher Liubov’
Aksel’rod (known by the moniker Ortodoks), who, while on the side of the Mechanists,
described the crux of the problem in the following thought experiment.
Imagine, she wrote, that the fondest dreams of neurophysiologists have been
realized, that the expert could get inside the active brain of a conscious person and
discern every neural process. Such a triumph of biochemistry would be irrelevant
to psychology, for the neural processes alone would tell the observer nothing
157
about the feelings and thoughts of a person whose brain was under observation.
(Joravsky, Russian Psychology 231)
Thus, the mind exists on a qualitatively different level than the body, and the tension between
descriptions of underlying physiological processes and the non-reductive experience of the
subject produced, as it were, two incompatible languages—a “dualist” position that kept
reasserting itself for the goal of consilience of the materialist monists.
Psychoanalysis of the Wolf Man and Russian monist thinking
In 1925, Moisha Wulff translated Freud’s case study of the “Wolf Man” into Russian as
“Iz istorii odnogo detskogo nevroza” (From a History of Infantile Neurosis). Freud’s original
publication of the first international psychoanalytic patient, the Russian aristocrat Sergei
Pankeev, has been seen as a kind of propaganda for psychoanalysis, a first test case applied to a
non-German speaker to display the method’s effectiveness (Abraham and Torok, lii). It was
partly used to prove the primacy of infantile sexuality for the etiology of the neuroses—a
controversial bulwark against the theoretical deviations of Adler and Jung who opposed the
concept. James Rice has described the case as “the most influential in the psychoanalytic
literature” and Strachey as “the most elaborate and no doubt the most important of all Freud’s
case histories.” It also developed Freud’s important reflexive idea of “afterwardness”
(Nachträglichkeit), the process by which meaning appears only retroactively, as traumatic events
acquired earlier do not “register” in consciousness until a later time. While it is difficult to know
the actual response it had on the wider public in Soviet Russia upon publication, containing as it
did a scandalous account of a Russian aristocrat’s sexual pathology, it is interesting to consider
the fact that it was the final volume of the Psychotherapeutic Library (Ivan Ermakov’s publishing
158
endeavor to translate Freud’s works in the 1920s), and perhaps contributed to the series’ abrupt
cancellation in 1925.
Finding no physiological cause to his symptoms, Pankeev’s Petersburg physician referred
the case of nerves (i.e., the problems were psychosomatic in nature) to Freud in Vienna, where
Pankeev underwent a four-year long analysis (1910-1914). According to Freud, the patient
suffered from an obsessional neurosis rooted in a suppressed idea, producing the typical response
of the neurotic patient—his “fleeing into illness” (begstvo v bolezn’).
111
In Freud’s Vienna, Russia was seen as an Orientalized place of mystery and exoticism, of
simultaneous backwardness and brilliance, of both brutality and profound sense of brotherhood.
Russia was the privileged place of Freudian ambivalence, a surface of maximum tension filled
with people Freud said were closer to the unconscious than his Western European counterparts.
Freud imported, for example, the notorious tsarist censorship of the press into his idea of
imperfect psychical censorship, which shows, by way of its distorting mechanisms, how the
unconscious knows no negation (despite the black bars over televised genitals, to use an
illustration, attention is drawn precisely to those points). The Soviet legacy of censorship clearly
follows this tradition.
111
This is how Freud described Pankeev’s symptoms. “We shall be prepared to hear that during
his later illness he suffered from disturbances of his intestinal function which were very
obstinate, though various circumstances caused them to fluctuate in intensity. When he came
under my treatment he had become accustomed to the enemas, which were given him by an
attendant; spontaneous evacuations did not occur for months at a time, unless a sudden
excitement from some particular direction intervened, as a result of which normal activity of the
bowels might set in for a few days. His principal subject of complaint was that for him the world
was hidden in a veil, or that he was cut off from the world by a veil. This veil was torn only at
one moment—when, after an enema, the contents of the bowel left the intestinal canal; and he
then felt well and normal again.” (217) As James Rice and several other scholars note, in the
exchanges between doctor and patient over such a protracted period, Freud may have been
exposed to a heavy dose of Russian culture that influenced the formation of psychoanalysis
itself.
159
In relation to his experiences with Pankeev, Freud wrote to Jung that the Russians in
general exhibited a national predilection toward synthesis and noted that its national spirit
possessed a higher tolerance for ambiguity.
Freud noted his patient’s extraordinary ambivalence and “completely unbridled
instinctual life,” attributing to him “a constitution which deserves the name archaic.”
Only in such cases, he wrote, “do we succeed in descending into the deepest and most
primitive strata of mental development and in gaining solutions for the problems of later
formations.” (Rice, “Russian Stereotypes” 30).
In some sense, Freud’s description of Russian character is contradictory, and points to a
paradoxical feature of totalizing thinking—the further you go in the direction of totality, the
more material reality reasserts itself, from the side as it were, until a pin prick inevitably
collapses the entire system.
112
This type of absolutizing quality of thought certainly appeared in the 1920s Soviet
debates over Marxist philosophy, which attempted to think a so-called “materialist monism,” a
central concern of this chapter due to the role psychoanalysis had in these debates.
113
This was to
be a kind of “theory of everything” (in physics, the TOE), that of consilience. The chapter will
describe how psychoanalysis appeared in the philosophical debates of the 20s, as the missing
element in the monist conception of human nature, one that was itself split between
consciousness and unconscious, a psychic structure that fit the criteria of the dialectical
112
This “negative capability” was described by Keats as an important quality of the poetic mind.
A similar point, though from the opposite direction, is made by Lotman and Uspenskii in their
seminal essay, “The Role of Dual Models in the Dynamics of Russian Culture.” They show how
such tensions and inevitable ruptures appear in the history of, what can be seen as, the dynamics
of the Russian national potlatch.
113
Bakhtin’s concept of monologic speech is a response to, and critique of, precisely this attempt
in the 1920s within philosophy and natural sciences to establish a total system of knowledge.
160
movement of matter at the qualitatively different level of the mind, called “autogenetic
movement.”
This chapter will also look at the work of Aleksandr Gorskii, a Cosmist philosopher who
gets little mention within accounts of these debates. What is interesting about Gorskii is his
attempt to combine Freud’s idea of “autoerotic reflection” with Lenin’s theory of reflection,
which transferred the fundamental reflective quality of matter into consciousness. The previous
chapter showed how self-reflection in Gladkov’s Tsement, part and parcel of realist
psychological prose, began to be negatively perceived. The same ideological view appeared in
philosophical discussions. Between the two sides of the Mechanists and Dialecticians, and within
the Freudo-Marxists, Gorskii’s writings contain a special twist that greatly resonates with the
psychoanalytic project. By describing a mechanism he calls an izgib, which I translate as
“torsion” or “flexure,” Gorskii develops a materialist theory of consciousness that is monistic
(though not monologic), dialectical, and takes into account the mind’s creative capacities to
overcome itself, to transform, which through the process of “autoerotic reflection” also
negotiates with a necessary element of chance. In the Soviet debates over psychology, what this
represented was the relatively free-range of ideas that developed before the arrival of Stalinism,
when psychoanalysis, along with both the Mechanist and the Dialectical schools, Zalkind’s
pedology, and Isaak Spielrein’s (the brother of Sabina, the psychoanalyst) industrial psychology,
became prohibited.
These complex and abstract concepts will be illustrated with a parallel reading of
Bulgakov’s Sobach’e serdste, which artistically approaches many of the features of the
philosophical debates, their close relationship to political matters, and the inherent limits to
monism. The goal of producing a new type of human, an ideal if there ever was one, is satirized
161
in Bulgakov’s tale [povest’]. Written the same year as Wolff’s translation,
114
this text can be
conceived as an artistic complement to the psychoanalytic study, remarking in this way on the
literary quality of both texts, as when Freud said, “…it still strikes me myself as strange that the
case histories I write should read like short stories…” (Studies on Hysteria, 160). Bulgakov’s
text presents another variation on a theme from Faust to Frankenstein of the creation of a
homunculus bringing death to its creator, and the scientist Preobrazhenskii has been described as
a Promethean figure in search for that little extra bit in material substance that produces vital
movement and, consequently, a mind (Zholkovsky 91). Preobrazhenskii’s scientific approach
reflects a drive for ultimate knowledge represented in the novel as a forever-expanding sphere of
light, which devours the darkness of ignorance. However, due to his own ideological position, at
odds with the new Bolshevik ideology that suddenly installs itself in his very home, he is blinded
to the clue of that something extra appearing before his eyes—the essence of life, or “heart of a
dog,” figuratively represented in the text as a burning flame, which he refuses to “grasp” despite
its insistence. This extra element, rejected by Preobrazhenskii, appears spontaneously and
suggests that, were one to master it, not only could one produce mind, but such a godly figure
would wield contingency, chance, and fate. Preobrazhenskii may know all, but he does not know
what is beyond all, which another figure in Bulgakov’s oeuvre does—Woland. Preobrazhenskii
can thus be put in a line of development within Bulgakov’s literary career, between the zoologist
Persikov of Rokovye iaitsa (1924), whose knowledge leads to the runaway growth of reptile eggs
114
Despite several attempts during Bulgakov’s life, the text remained unpublished until the
1980s. However, two manuscript copies were confiscated from his apartment along with three
filled diaries (from the years 1921-23), which would be published later as Zapiski na
manzhetakh.
162
(another metaphor for the “bad infinity” of knowledge) and the impossible knowledge of the
chance-wielding Woland in Master i Margarita.
The “citadel of idealism” within the crisis of psychology
Psychology is the arena where minds reflect upon minds, imbuing the object of study
with the preoccupations of the researcher or the social values of a specific time and place.
Nowhere has psychology, a discipline that has historically strove for the status of empirical,
objective science, become more influenced by extra-scientific values than in Soviet Russia,
where it, as inevitably all science did, became thoroughly politicized.
115
Psychology would in
fact become a tool of political coercion and the silencing of dissenters as the decades of Soviet
rule continued.
116
In the 1920s, however, within certain parameters the discourse was largely free
to explore the possibilities available to it, and psychoanalysis offered something unique.
At the end of 1923, Bernard Bykhovskii’s “O metodologicheskikh osnovaniiakh
psikhoanaliticheskogo ucheniia Freida” (On the Methodological Foundations of Freud’s
Psychoanalytic Theory) appeared in the widely-read philosophy journal Pod znamenem
marksizma. According to Martin Miller, Bykhovskii was the figure responsible for taking
115
For further details of the political intersections with psychology, see chapter one,
“Psychology and Society,” in Bauer, The New Man in Soviet Psychology, pp. 1-12.
116
See the Conclusion Chapter of this study for more on this topic. Arguably, the seeds to this
development were laid shortly after 1917. Such were the attacks by the Bolsheviks against a
leader of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, Maria Spiridonova, whose faction’s alliance with the
Bolsheviks collapsed after the revolution. In November 1918, while still regarded as a hero by
masses of people, the Moscow Revolutionary Tribunal “contrived a scheme to resolve the
predicament—confinement to a sanatorium” (Bloch and Reddaway 49). Spiridonova was forced
to take a one year leave where she would be looked over by armed guards, her fabricated
neurasthenia monitored by specialists. There were precedents earlier in Russian history of such
political use of psychiatry, as in the 1836 case of Piotr Chaadaev, whose reformist Philosophical
Letters led to his arrest and what can be seen as an early psychiatric institutionalization.
163
psychoanalysis out of its specialized sphere within medical psychiatry, though it should also be
mentioned that the article came out on the heels of Freud’s widely popular Introductory Lectures
on Psychoanalysis, translated as Lektsii po vvedeniiu v psikhoanaliz and published in two
volumes in 1922-1923.
117
Ernest Jones’s biography of Freud did not fail to mention this event:
“The Verlag was by now having to negotiate an immense number of translations of Freud’s
works into various languages. Two thousand copies of the Russian translation of the Introductory
Lectures were sold in Moscow in a single month” (Jones 97).
118
This fact is significant because
Soviet debates on psychoanalysis began shortly after this mainstream event, and Bykhovskii’s
article may have been written with this work freshly in mind and as a partial response to it. In
any case, he quotes it extensively.
In the article, Bykhovskii attempted to “find the red thread” and to “snatch (vylushchit’)
the healthy core of psychoanalysis.” The point was to connect it to Marxism by doing two things:
to show what in psychoanalytic knowledge was materialist in nature (he pointed to the category
of drives) and to connect this with Bekhterev’s conception of mental reflexes (reflexology),
showing the two systems as being coterminous (Bykhovskii 177). “Psikhoanaliz stoit na toi zhe
monisticheskoi pozitsii, chto i refleksologiia.” (Ibid. 164). After a lengthy exposition of Freudian
concepts, he makes the bold claim that the Freudian “ego drives” (those of self-preservation and
pleasure-seeking) are to be subsumed under Bekhterev’s reflexes of higher nervous activity.
“ Наконец, психоанализу не чу ждо подведение […] влечении под схему рефл екса […]
117
Freud’s definition of drives, above, came from this text. The previous chapters of this
dissertation offered evidence that psychoanalysis had influence outside of medical circles before
the October Revolution.
118
This is quite a substantial number. Compare this statistic with that of the sales of Weininger’s
immensely popular Sex and Character, which sold 39,000 copies between 1908-12 (Naiman 39).
This averages to about 800 copies a month over a four-year period, compared to 2,000 copies of
Freud’s text sold within a single month.
164
Фрейдовское ‘ я’ носит в у ч ении Б е хтерева наименожание ‘ личного комплекса
сочетательных рефлек сов.’” (Ibid. 166).
119
Bykhovskii argues that “psychoanalysis as a theory
could potentially contribute to a deeper understanding of man and society in the specific context
of a socialist future” (Miller, Freud and the Bolsheviks 72), meaning it could be harnessed for
state-building.
What is significant is the way he characterizes the so-called “crisis of psychology,” which
transmits much of the emotional key in which the debates over psychoanalysis and philosophy
would be held. He begins his article with a militaristic description of the “last hideout”
(poslednie ubezhishche) of idealism within the study of the human mind, as a besieged fortress
soon to be conquered by materialism.
120
The militaristic metaphor is not to be missed here, and
one of the attractive things about psychoanalysis for Bykhovskii is that it had made many
enemies from the bourgeois scientific world of psychology. He writes that the development of
other scientific disciplines had been fairly straightforward. Even without knowing it, the natural
sciences had been “firmly self-determined” (prochno samoopredelilis’) as following the
philosophical principles of Marxist materialism. They need only to recognize this fact within
their unexamined philosophical assumptions (a task that proved more fatally challenging than he
thought). The discipline of psychology, he writes, is rife with idealistic conceptions since
idealism also concerns itself with basic questions of consciousness (his term is poznanie)—of
ideas and their formation. He writes that metaphysical idealism had long been in agony from
attacks by materialism, ultimately taking flight into the underexamined corners of the troubled
119
This references earlier published work that would become more widely popularized in
Bekhterev’s text Obshchie osnovy refleksologii cheloveka (1928).
120
For Soviet materialist philosophy, Lenin’s critique of idealism in his Materialism and
Empiriocriticism (1909) was the foundational basis on which to build.
165
discipline of psychology, filled as it was with vying schools, disagreements, and eclecticisms,
and where it remained in hiding. However, unlike Bukharin, who protested against psychology’s
rapprochement with materialism, calling it a “dangerous” science due to its fatal infection with
idealism, Bykhovskii, along with several other Party higher ups, philosophers, and scientists, saw
the materialist potential in the psychological.
121
Thus, the false core of idealism itself to be
routed rested within the disciplinary boundaries of psychology—the terrain of which was
witnessing a battle between two forces for the “citadel of idealism” (158).
122
One can note the difference between Bykhovskii’s 1923 account of the crisis of
psychology and Grot’s description of the same crisis in the Brokgaus-Efron Encyclopedia of
1907. A new level of expediency and militantism was added to the incomplete nature of a theory
of psychology.
What type of psychology would be chosen, or if something entirely new would need
development, became a central topic in the 1920s, as the decade began with an attack on
subjective psychology. The great Chelpanov (trained by Wundt himself in his system of
introspective psychology) and who established the world-renowned Moscow Experimental
Psychology Laboratory before the war, was removed in 1923 from the very post he founded.
Publication of Bykhovskii’s article on Freudian links with Bekhterev’s thought in late 1923 must
also have had an impact on discussions taking place at the Second Psychoneurological Congress
in Petrograd in January of 1924 (also the month and year of Lenin’s death).
121
Sea Gianotti and Schivulli, “The Pioneer Educational Work of Vera Schmidt and Sabina
Spielrein in the Context of the Development of Psychoanalysis in Russia (1921-1925).”
122
For the history of the early 1920s, in which not only psychology, but philosophy departments,
came under attacks of irrelevance for the new society and threatened with closure, see Joravsky,
Bauer, and Yakhot’s work.
166
At this time, there were three competing theories of Marxist psychology: that of
Kornilov’s dialectical “reactology,” Blonskii’s educational psychology, and Zalkind’s synthesis
of Pavlov and Freud. Kornilov announced his version of a “dialecticized” Soviet psychology at
the Congress, replacing Chelpanov’s subjective psychological system (and securing employment
in his former teacher’s place). “In Kornilov’s opinion the most important consequence of the
application of the dialectic to psychology was the acceptance of the irreducibility of the psychic
to the physiological and the recognition of the role of subjective factors in human behaviour.
According to Kornilov Marxist psychology must ‘provide an organic synthesis of the objective
and subjective in human behaviour’” (Payne 42). This was central to the task of a monistic
materialist psychology. Zalkind gave a presentation on the materialist merits of psychoanalysis
and its link with Pavlovian reflex theory. A special resolution was proposed; Zalkind motioned
to allow for psychoanalysis to be included in the state’s new Marxist psychology and his
resolution was accepted by the Congress (Miller, “Freudian Theory” 635, f.n. 22). With the
official decision made, Kornilov’s reactology and Zalkind’s version of psychoanalysis
(refleksologirovannyi freidizm) was there to stay for the time being, and state funds would be
allocated to see their development.
123
Autogenetic movement in the philosophical debates
The philosophical debates over materialist monism took place between the Mechanists
and Dialecticians (or Deborinists, who rallied around the neo-Hegelian Party philosopher, Abram
123
Zalkind, it turned out, would go on to replace Kornilov in 1930, though several years after he
disowned psychoanalysis. The rise of his school of Pedology met a grim end during the high tide
of Stalinism. He died of a heart attack in 1936, shortly after receiving vehement public criticism
for Pedology.
167
Deborin). These debates involved the young discipline of psychology, seen as a privileged field
in which the ramifications of the worked-out assumptions in materialist philosophy would have
direct application, especially in a society where remaking the human being as “a new socio-
biological type,” in the words of Trotsky, was paramount.
124
The concept of “autogenetic
movement” was at the crux of these arguments over psychology. Put forward by the
Dialecticians, the idea was to counter the “vulgar” way many (though not all) Mechanist
philosophers conceived the human mind—a phenomenon reducible to the workings of the body,
in physical, chemical, and other materio-causal dimensions. However, there seemed to be a little
bit of something extra needed to produce consciousness.
The idea of autogenetic movement, posited by the Dialecticians who secured political
victory over the Mechanists at the end of the 20s, reflected that consciousness exists on a plane
that may be derived from the material substrate, yet is qualitatively different, at a “higher stage
of development” and, in the words of the objective psychology, as “higher nervous activity.”
125
In this sense, psychology as a discipline became justified as it approached those specific laws
appropriate to the psyche.
The philosophical debates of the 20s centered on several issues, one of which was the
importance afforded to Hegel’s dialectic (particularly in his Logic) in the development of
124
This term, “socio-biological,” repeated by Luria and others, highlights the absence of
psychology in Trotsky’s words, or rather, its disappearance behind the dash between the social
and biological. One can take this to mean that the psychological is something particularly flat,
like a piece of paper, or a letter, which highlights the primacy of language to the psychological
dimension.
125
This term was used by Bekhterev and his system of psycho-reflexology (simply reflexology
after 1917), but also by several other objective psychologists. Vygotsky’s writings reflect this
more advanced dialectical view, especially in the introduction of his text, “The Historical Idea of
the Crisis of Psychological Science” (see vol. 3 of his Collected Works in English), which
examines the history of psychology in its development out of mechanistic philosophical
assumptions, among other things.
168
Marxism. Accusations of reductionism, idealism, and irrelevance flew in both directions. The
Mechanist Aksel’rod sided with her teacher Plekhanov and Engels’s view, as outlined in
Dialectics of Nature and Anti-Dühring (published in Soviet Russia in 1925), that a fundamental
break existed between Marxist and Hegelian dialectics, which explained the basic division
between idealist and materialist philosophy, Marx’s “flipping Hegel on his head” by distributing
Abstract Spirit into social relations of labor. As the Mechanist group contained members of the
scientific community working on concrete problems, Aksel’rod also accused Deborin and
company of practicing “abstract philosophy,” their return to Hegel being evidence of the growing
distance of their work from materialist shores of actual scientific problems of the day.
126
Lenin
also emphasized the popular view that praxis and theory should be united in a single movement.
The Dialecticians defended their activity as precisely important for questions of psychology (and
the philosophy of mind), which had to confront the issue of consciousness and the mysterious
process of its relation to the material substrate and social environment. Aksel’rod, being perhaps
the most sophisticated Mechanist, who generally-speaking “dissolved” consciousness into
notions like the reflex, understood the stakes of the problem and the limits of many Mechanist
views (reflecting also the artificial placing of this eclectic group into a monolithic category). The
important question boiled down to the most basic division: what does dialectical materialism
mean by the term material, crucial to make the distinction with idealism?
127
126
Eliminating the Mechanists, who were allied with Bukharin’s “Right Deviation” in politics,
the “Left Deviation” Dialecticians celebrated a brief victory. That is, until Stalin used
Aksel’rod’s same arguments against the Dialecticians in his “battle on two fronts” in Soviet
philosophy. Yehoshua Yakhot disentangles the particulars in his important study, The
Suppression of Philosophy in the USSR (the 1920s and 1950s), describing the process in which
academic philosophy eventually became the main ideological cudgel of Stalinism.
127
Marxist materialism was traced back to the work of Spinoza, a link confirmed by Plekhanov,
Engels, and other originators of Marxism, including Marx himself. Spinoza’s distinction between
substance and matter was the origin of the materialist line and its basic rejection of teleology
169
This was the knot at the heart of philosophical debates taking place in the Soviet 1920s—
the question of “autogenetic movement” and the issues of its emergence and relationship to
contingency for materialist philosophy. What the Dialecticians pushed against was the exclusive
adoption for psychology of the concept of “equilibrium,” what was apparent in the reductionism
of the Mechanists.
If a fundamental principle of materialism was the dynamic quality of matter, its constant
state of flux and change—its state of contradiction, in Hegelian terms—what was the source of
this movement? Answer: the system moved itself—i.e., it was purposive. The Dialecticians
affirmed the concept of equilibrium as a basic quality of matter, but matter at the higher stage of
consciousness also possessed autogenetic movement. This immediately produces a problem.
While autogenetic movement implied purposiveness, teleological thinking was de facto an
idealist dead end. How to understand such a contradiction, a purposeful idea that is non-idealist,
non-teleological? This can be seen as another definition of ideology. Here, one also runs into the
distinction between dialectical materialism and historical materialism, the latter of which makes
a well-known series of historical predictions. The political stakes of this became increasingly
important:
128
The use of the concept of equilibrium, and the entire passive conception of human nature
that is implied in the earlier theories was linked with “right opportunism” in politics and
within its critique of idealism. As Spinoza’s 250
th
death anniversary was celebrated in 1927,
Aksel’rod made another surprising turn. She meticulously showed how Spinoza’s Jewish
upbringing informed his natural philosophy, which implied a fundamental blurring of the line
between idealism and materialism as such, creating a scandal. See pp. 135-53 in Yakhot for the
fine-grained particulars of the role Spinoza played for Hegel and Marx in these debates.
128
The political results of these ideas for scientific practice was the rejection of the growing field
of genetics and elevation of the epigenetic theory of Lysenkoism. See Jorvasky, Soviet Marxism
and Natural Science: 1917-1932.
170
with political conservatism in general. The mechanistic model of man was said to be a fit
model for the capitalists to use. They would like to think of the working class as robots
entirely under their control! (Bauer 98)
Thus, materialism as applied to governing is the ideology of a non-idealist idea, one that, with
Stalin, emphasized voluntarism as the means to enact the inevitable historical prediction.
Mastering the essence of this most obscure quality of matter, which meant mastering chance and
contingency, was the impossible task of Soviet psychology, an issue that produced its central
crisis, to return to the discussion of Chapter One. As Vygotskii wrote in the conclusion to his
1927 text, The Historical Meaning of the Crisis of Psychology:
In the future society psychology will be in actuality the science of the new man. Without
that perspective Marxism and the history of science would not be complete. But that
science of the new man will still be psychology; we now hold in our hands the thread
leading to it. Never mind that that psychology will resemble present-day psychology as
little as — in Spinoza’s words — the constellation Canis resembles the dog, a barking
animal. (Vygotskii Collected Works)
With the rising cult of Lenin and the mythologizing of the October Revolution, Stalin was the
figure who drew a new picture, as it were, over the materially-fixed constellation of historical
time. This would entail erasing some of the stars that did not fit the image of Stalin’s plan, which
stubbornly insisted on shining through. However, this metaphor is not quite right. Stalin’s
approach could be seen less as one of censorship, which it was, of course, rather than censorship
being but a feature of a general drive of subtraction. Stalin was in some sense a figure of
authority who removed words and images (and people) from the text of Soviet life, as a sculptor
removes raw material from rock, less a constructor than eliminator, or carver, who utilizes a
171
subtractive process whereby material is “eliminated from the outside in.” For Stalin lacked any
true creativity himself and relied on others to “spontaneously” generate the material he would
pare down. This is the proper way of conceiving the phenomenon of Stalinism and also a reason
to consider sculpture as the most total form of art characterizing the period.
However, before all this, before the “total art of Stalinism,” to use Boris Groys’s
formulation, psychoanalysis was brought into the conversation as a new discipline
“spontaneously” following dialectical principles, despite its bourgeois origins, and admitting
contingency via an always-opaque point to consciousness, the unconscious.
Heinrich Kaan’s nisus formativus
Before further discussing the Soviet psychoanalytic debates in the 1920s, I want to
reiterate how, in the history of ideas, Reimarus’s concept of the Kunsttrieb spawned three
separate movements. The first was Blumenbach’s teleological concept of the Bildungstrieb in
matters of natural philosophy and the then-nascent field of biology, an idea Kant saw as a helpful
hermeneutic procedure, yet wanted to restrain its full acceptance, due to a notion of a “plan” or
“idea” of a creator (the Bild) underlying it. There is instead a constant source of “power” which
we cannot know anything about directly, but rather may infer from the ways it displaces material
reality. The second inheritor of the legacy of Reimarus was Heinrich Kaan, briefly described in
Chapter One. Kaan’s contribution was to take a major step by partly secularizing the notion of
sin and establishing the psychiatric paradigm and its basis in sexual deviation. By elevating the
imagination as the disturbing causal factor of mental illness, that which disrupts the sexual drive,
or nisus formativus, described in his work Psychopathia Sexualis, Kaan opened the way to the
psychiatric paradigm of modernity. The third was Marx’s notion of labor power or productive
172
forces, a quintessentially social category of explanation in part derived from Reimarus’s
Kunsttrieb, and that also negotiated with a crucial aleatory element (argued for in Marx’s
dissertation on Epicurus). I read Reimarus as the origin point to these bio-psycho-social
distinctions (of the drives) at this time.
Heinrich Kaan’s concept of the nisus formativus is productive to connect to the debates
taking place in the 1920s in the Soviet Union . It is, in some sense, equivalent to Blumenbach’s
Bildungstrieb as well as Schiller’s Formtrieb, except as a concept of force transplanted to the
specific domain of psycho-sexual deviation (pathology), as its foundational elaboration,
according to Foucault. The term translates from the Latin as “drive form,” or Bildungstrieb, if we
take the polysemy of the German “Bild” to mean “form,” or a final “image” toward which
development occurs. Nisus means also “to lean, rely, strive,” and is related to “nictare,” to wink.
Aristotle used it to describe the virtue of civic responsibility, as an inner compulsion toward such
engaged, social actions.
129
Through the nisus formativus, Kaan imported the drives into
psychiatry, in a way making a cut between the religious terrain of the church, with its focus on
sin, and what would become later the secularized field of psychiatry.
130
129
See also Volkmar Sigusch, who writes about Freud’s unspoken relation to this history in “The
Sexologist Albert Moll—between Sigmund Freud and Magnus Hirschfeld”: “He [Freud] did not
mention any of the works of his predecessors—neither the medical thesis produced by the
physician Hermann Joseph Löwenstein in 1823, nor the monograph by the physician Joseph
Häussler published in 1826. He also did not mention the first Psychopathia sexualis by the
Austrian physician Heinrich Kaan (1816–93), who came up with a theory that linked a
functional-hydraulic idea of the sexual drive called nisus with fantasy, especially a
furious phantasia morbosa, which predisposed humans to sexual excess. Freud also did not
mention the works by the French psychiatrist Paul Moreau de Tours (1844–1908) and the
Russian physician Benjamin Tarnowsky (1837–1906).
130
Recall the Russian publication troubles under Nikolas I and Aleksandr II of, respectively, the
banning of philosophical books and, once philosophy became teachable institutionally, the
scandals surrounding the publication of Wundt’s psychological works. Coincidentally, Kaan was
a personal physician to the Tsar Nikolas I.
173
Kaan’s system has been described by Davidson, a historian of science, with the metaphor
of the bow, as in a bow and arrow: “The brain and genital system hold themselves in the
following way: as two poles that are engaged in constant action and reciprocal reaction. Thus, in
Psychopathia Sexualis, the imagination breaks the will of a man, even if his rational mind rejects
and reviles this deed” (9). It is interesting how Kaan highlights both the role of the imagination,
or, in Russian, voobrazhenie, as something spontaneously mediating the bodily and interior
“abyss” and the hallowed seat of reason, as something that overflows its boundaries,
overwhelming reason and the will. “By providing sexuality with a new structure—imagination—
that links all sexual acts together and that connects bodily instincts to the mind, Kaan suggests
that sexuality produces a difference and a new class of person. By linking the sexual instinct to
the imagination, Kaan forges what Foucault calls ‘a unified field of sexual abnormality’” (ibid.
1-2). The idea of the imagination as overproductive and overdetermined is important. Freud
inherited this conceptual framework and epistemological horizon, as discussed in the previous
chapters.
131
For Kaan, as for Freud, the imagination works both ways. Rooted in the genitals and
sexuality, the imagination can overpower consciousness and reason; while the will, arising from
consciousness and leaning on the “rational” strictures of authority, can suppress, or “repress” the
imaginary forces.
132
131
However, in his work, Freud “[…] did not mention the first Psychopathia sexualis by the
Austrian physician Heinrich Kaan (1816–93), who came up with a theory that linked a
functional-hydraulic idea of the sexual drive called nisus with fantasy, especially a
furious phantasia morbosa, which predisposed humans to sexual excess” (Sigusch).
132
In Freud’s first topology—the unconscious, preconscious, and conscious system—the seat of
authority that is the preconscious has little in the way of rationality behind it, housing aggressive
drives that berate consciousness with impossible demands. The first topology reflects the
proximity of authority to the unconscious, what later would become the superego and the id.
174
“Heremeneutics of the bow” and the drives
At the early origins of philosophy, Heraclitus (the pre-Socratic “father of dialectics”)
posited the bow as a signifying visualization of the correspondence of opposites that points
beyond dualism. It is no coincidence that the Ancient Greek word bios denotes both “life” and,
as a homophonic pun, a “bow.” The same idea was referred to by the Russian expat philosopher
Boris Vysheslavtsev in his text The Philosophical Poverty of Marxism:
133
“‘The name of the bow
is life and its deed is death,’ Heraclitus says, utilizing the fact that ‘bios’ signifies both ‘bow’ and
‘life’” (Vysheslavtsev).
134
The structure of the bow as a synthesis of opposite elements by way of
a mediating third (the string, which is neither an “interior” or an “exterior” point in the structure)
is an image that will be a recurring motif in this chapter, as a kind of symbol of the monistic
tendency of the Soviet 1920s within psychology and, by extension, in literature.
The bow as a mythopoetic analogy (or psychological “device”) of the ancients for
“human self-understanding and self-becoming” is, according to James B. Harrod, also a “techno-
mythic” way of reading texts.
The essence of the bow and arrow is a tacit hermeneutic; it may be seen as a description
of the structure, dynamics, and telos of the self, or human nature: filled with potential
energy, a balanced tension of opposites, tolerant of strain, flexible, resilient, providing
kinetic energy, straight yet flexible, propelled toward a goal—the well-made bow of the
self. Such a self-understanding, such an ontological metaphor of the self, which may
133
The title (and content) of this pamphlet is a rebuttal to Marx’s famous essay, “The Poverty of
Philosophy” (1847), itself a rebuttal, or “Answer to the Philosophy of Poverty by M. Proudhon.”
134
“‘ Имя лу ка есть жизнь, а его дело есть смерть,’ говорит Гераклит, пользу ясь тем, что
‘ биос’ означает и ‘лу к,’ и ‘ жизнь’” (Vysheslavtsev). Significantly, Vysheslavtsev had a
lifelong interest in psychoanalysis, producing a pamphlet on the philosophical notion of
creativity (expressivity), which he saw in connection to the psychoanalytic drives. This text will
be taken up in Chapter Five.
175
seem obvious or trivial today, must have been a breath-taking insight, impossible until
the actual invention of the bow itself. (427)
Sobach’e serdtse contains an appropriate passage on which to apply such a “hermeneutic of the
bow.” It can be seen in the operation replacing the dog Sharik’s seminal vesicles and pituitary
gland (gipofiz) with those of the petty criminal Chugunkin (who has died from a stab wound to
the heart).
135
Here is the description of the surgery:
Филипп Филиппович залез в глу б ину и в несколько поворотов вырвал из тела
Шарика его семенные железы с какими- то обрывками. […] В ру ках у профессо ра и
ассистента запрыгали, завились короткие влажные струны. Дробно защелкали
кривые игл ы в зажимах. Семенные железы вшили на ме сто Шариковых. […]
Борменталь подал ему склянк у, в к оторой болтался на витке в жидко с ти белый
комочек. « Не имеет равных в Ев ропе, ей- бог у...» – сму т но поду мал Борменталь.
Одной ру кой Филипп Филиппович выхватил болтающийся комочек, а др у гой –
ножницами – выстриг такой же комочек в глубине где- то межд у распяленными
полу шариями. Шарик ов комочек он вышвырн у л на тарелк у, а новый заложил в
мозг вместе с ниткой и своими короткими пальцами, ставшими, точно чу дом,
тонкими и гибкими, у х итрился янтарной ни тью его там замотать. (156)
Here, the God-like Preobrazhenskii fashions a new bow by “binding” Chugunkin’s content (his
soul, as it were, separated in two) into Sharik’s bodily dog form, to be gradually transformed into
Sharikov. The two poles of the soul, the “profane” seminal vesicles and “holy” gipofiz, are
magically (tochno chudom) sutured to the body by an amber-colored thread (iantarnoi nit’iu).
135
It is interesting to consider that the pituitary gland was one of the candidates that Descartes
saw for a possible “seat of the soul,” though he ultimately rejected it in favor of the pineal gland,
the only organelle in the brain that does not exhibit bilateral symmetry, and is thus “whole.”
176
This extraordinary thread, wielded by the Moirai of Greek myth, is comparable to Kaan’s
description of the mysterious movement of imagination that breaks the will of man, that which
“connects bodily instincts to the mind” and “suggests that sexuality produces a difference and a
new class of person” (Davidson 2). Sharikov is, of course, the pathological subject in the text,
with a perverse characterological structure, who fully enjoys each of his strange (to
Preobrazhenskii) symptoms.
136
Within the symbolic coordinates of the new Soviet state,
however, this Homo sovieticus (called in the text a chelovechek) fits in perfectly—procuring
documents, employment, etc. without the slightest friction. Bulgakov seems to suggest that the
new world is itself a perversion, a “formless mess” (bezobrazie), literally meaning “without a
face,” “form,” Bild, etc. It is no such thing, however, and Bulgakov’s literary genius is that he
also perfectly represents a stable mythological core to the new society. It is just that from
Preobrazhenskii’s position there is a stubborn refusal to acknowledge it, to accept its name, hear
its song, or see its light. Yet these things are real traces that keep on insisting. Thus, it is
Preobrazhenskii who is the pathological one, obsessively fixating on a pure point in space he
believes is detachable from everyday concerns, repressing facts of the world that insist all around
him.
137
136
Recall also the other perverse figures, the two customers received by Preobrazhensky in his
cabinet—the permanently priapic patient and the “lecherous old woman” (Fusso 387). Do they
not make the ideal, complementary couple in this world? One hopes that they would meet. The
world of the novel, however, erects a permanent barrier between possible reconciliation /
coupling. Preobrazhensky is this barrier, mediating any possible relationship. His character erects
walls, separations, posits categories, organizes. As such, he is a purely Aristotelian figure,
obsessed with the categories of the world, who cannot come to terms with the Platonic form that
appears before him.
137
The question becomes, is there a position from which once can get past a relative point of
view. As Burgin writes on Bulgakov’s text: “To interpret Heart of a Dog solely as a political
parable is to oversimplify the novel in two important ways. First, by emphasizing the allegorical
significance of the Professor's experiment at the expense of his highly individualistic personality
and creativity this interpretation reduces a complex literary character—a potentially tragic hero,
177
Further elaborating the drives, they too can be conceived as an element harnessed within
the tension of the bow, as seen in how the drives inform the structure of the dream for Freud. The
psychical apparatus (the Ψ, or the “psy complex,” as Freud called it) has the status of a bow,
which structurally orients Freud’s description of the drives as “between the mental and the
somatic.” Freud describes this as being composed of four basic elements—an origin, thrust, aim,
and goal, and Lacan makes the same connection when he states, “What the drive integrates at the
outset in its very existence is a dialectic of the bow, I would even say of archery. In this way we
can situate its place in the psychical economy” (Lacan 177). A major difference between such a
metaphor from classical antiquity and the mechanistic conception of the psyche (from
Lammetrie’s quip that “man is a machine” to Pavlov’s reduction of the psyche to reflexes) is that
the vibration of the string in the bow, this connection to sound, and thus to speech, or song,
seems to capture something beyond mechanical causality, one of integral expressivity.
According to Joravsky, Pavlov sarcastically dismissed the problem of higher nervous
functioning, or psychology, as “the poetry of the problem,” and he was not exactly wrong.
In the following passage, Freud makes an important distinction between what could be
seen as Pavlovian reflexes, the result of an external stimulus applied to the organism, and the
constant thrust of the drives:
By a [drive] is provisionally to be understood the psychical representative of an
endosomatic, continuously flowing source of stimulation, as contrasted with a
“stimulus,” which is set up by single excitations coming from without. The
in fact—to a unidimensional allegorical symbol. Such an explanation of the text overlooks
Bulgakov's multi-faceted attitude toward his hero, who serves as an autobiographical spokesman
for his political and social satire and as a tragic, Romantic hero in the Frankenstein tradition.”
(Burgin 494)
178
concept of [drive] is thus one of those lying on the frontier between the mental
and the physical. The simplest and likeliest assumption as to the nature of the
instincts would seem to be that in itself an instinct is without quality, and, so far
as mental life is concerned, is only to be regarded as a measure of the demand
made upon the mind for work. What distinguishes the instincts from one another
and endows them with specific qualities is their relation to their somatic sources
and to their aims. The source of an instinct is a process of excitation occurring in
an organ and the immediate aim of the instinct lies in the removal of this organic
stimulus. (Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, 34)
Here, Freud describes the drives as a demand made upon the organism, which must be
expressed in order to bring the internal tension produced by this force to equilibrium, a legacy of
Helmholz’s energetism, a source shared by Freud with the Soviet monists like Lunacharskii and
Voronskii. The drives as Freud first defined them in their connection to images send what Freud
calls “psychical representatives” in the dream to consciousness. This psychical representative can
be thought of as an image composed, like a montage, of the “day’s residues,” and “selected” by
the unconscious as particularly meaningful. To call this “primary process” the drive would be
incorrect, since it is already mediated as, once again, a psychical representative of the drives, yet
is in a very emotionally-palpable way itself expressive. It is the original “promok,” to return to
Maro’s designation from Shaginian’s novel (of the original ontological origin of reality, which
appears as a mediated phenomenon perceived by the senses). The primary process undergoes a
“secondary revision” in the “secondary process,” as the analysand articulates the dream contents
into speech. Listening with the “third ear,” the analyst picks up less on the dream content than on
the distortions in the production of the dream narrative, according to the combinatory
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mechanisms of condensation and displacement, allowing a brief glimpse in the gaps of speech to
the pulse of the unconscious.
Thick and thin psychology
The literary field has presented the problem, one could say, of the philosophy of science
in a figurative way that may be illuminating to the history of psychoanalysis. The Russian
nineteenth-century realist tradition is familiar with a kind of “division of labor” and would
frequently depict various characters as embodiments of various philosophical viewpoints.
Likewise, having two doctors represent the mind-body division is a seldom mentioned, though
common, literary device of modernist literature, for which psychology was the privileged
science. Such a trope appears in potentially the most famous modernist literary work on illness,
Thomas Mann’s Der Zauberberg (1924). The doctors Behrens and Krokowski represent the two
perspectives: Behrens is a physiologist and surgeon who makes use of an X-Ray and scalpel to
infiltrate the body, while Krokowski is a hypnotist and a (Jungian) psychoanalyst, making use of
language as a tool of healing.
138
In the previous chapter, I described a similar kind of division
appearing in Shaginian’s Svoia sud’ba, and this will be repeated in the next chapter’s analysis of
Vsevolod Ivanov’s novel У.
Recall also the two psychiatrists of One State in Zamiatin’s My, the “paper-thin doctor”
who encourages D-503’s dream interpretations (he turns out to be a secret agent of the
138
Krokowski, however, jeopardizes his materialist credentials by ultimately succumbing to the
lure of spiritualism and the occult. The Freudians, distancing themselves from Jungian analytic
psychology, to this day emphasize the founder’s tentative nature to his speculations, always on
guard against the risk of mysticism. Hence, we recall the image opening this thesis, of the Prague
statue having a “handhold on materialism” while hanging over the abyss. Typically for the
Freudians, Jung is considered to have fallen in…
180
resistance) and the shorter, thick-set psychiatrist who develops the psycho-surgical technique that
extirpates free will from the mind. Sobach’e serdtse follows a similar literary model of featuring
two doctors placed on either side of the mind-body division.
What is surprising is that behind its literary critique of the limits of constructing the new
Soviet man, Sobach’e serdtse features an almost total lack of explicit reference to the realm of
the psyche. The reader is given only one mention of psychology in the entire novel. It comes
from Preobrazhenskii’s assistant, Doctor Bormental’, whose surname may suggest the psychical
inclinations of this character—“the one who wrestles with the mental” (Bor-mental’, from
mentalitet and perhaps recalling the Dukhobory religious sect, who make battle, or literally
“wrestle,” with the spirit [dukh]).
139
As Sharik transforms into human-like form, Bormental’,
taking detailed observational notes, remarks upon the following:
Смеялся в кабинете. Ул ыбка его неприятна и как бы иск у сственна. Затем он
почесал затылок, огляделся, и я записал новое отчетливо произнесен ное слово
“бу ржу и”. Ру гался. Р угань эта методическая, беспрерывная и, по- видимому,
совершенно бессмысл е нная. Он носит несколько фонографический характер: как
бу дто это существо где- то раньше слышало бранные слова, автоматически,
подсознательно занесло их в свой мозг и теперь изрыгает их пачками. А впрочем, я
не психиатр, черт меня возьми. [ital. mine] (162)
Bulgakov is commenting on the reflexive nature of proletariat habits automatically mimicking
official speech. Yet, here we see the only explicit reference to “psychiatry” (ia ne psikhiatr) in
the novel and, what is more, implicit traces of the psychoanalytic approach, such as the word-
139
For a literary analysis of Professor Preobrazhensky’s name, see Diana Burgin, “Bulgakov’s
Early Tragedy of the Scientist Creator,” 502.
181
association tests conducted by Jung and, in the Soviet Union, by Luria. Just what kind of
knowledge would have afforded Bormental’ insight into Sharikov’s outward behavior? What
could explain Sharikov’s obscene and automatic verbiage, descriptions of chains of association,
compulsions to repeat, the reference to the subconscious, and self-suggestion?
140
Are these not
all references to the operational field of speech in psychoanalysis?
141
Indeed, it is psychoanalysis
which historically had given due to what others, like Bormental’, dismissed as meaningless,
though whose frustration belies just how meaningless such verbal signs are. There is a
convergence between a psychoanalytic-like attention to language and the automatic / conditioned
/ habitual nature of reflexes in the novel, which shows the proximity of nerve and word that
characterizes this period and what was described above by Bykhovskii, Luria, and Zalkind.
Throughout the 1920s, Luria was conducting an extension of the research on word-
association tests initiated by Jung in Switzerland. This was done during his most active interest
in psychoanalysis. A little-known fact is that Luria is partly responsible for developing the
polygraph machine and lie-detector test, which emerged from this research.
142
Hannah Proctor
describes Luria’s claims of the unacknowledged debt that forensic psychologists and authorities
140
The term used is the subconscious, podsoznatel’noe, which is not the same thing as the
unconscious, bessoznatel’noe. The former, subconscious, is historically a Jungian term, while
unconscious, having nothing to do with any notions of “under” or “beneath” is the classical
Freudian one. Trotsky’s usage, as will be seen with his use of bessoznatel’noe, is interesting in
this regard.
141
It is as if Sharikov does not speak language but rather language speaks him (a case of the tail
wagging the dog), an automatic feature of the unconscious that psychoanalysts claim to capture
in clinical experience.
142
See the translation of Luria’s 1932 text, The Nature of Human Conflicts, which connects the
therapeutic power of psychoanalysis to religious confession. Hannah Proctor’s Psychologies in
Revolution: Alexander Luria’s “Romantic Science” and Soviet Social History describes Luria’s
claims that his research on word-associations in the 1920s produced the first version of the
polygraph, or lie-detector machine. He sounds off on the unacknowledged debt that forensic
psychologists and authorities in the United States owed him for this invention, which was
adopted in the Soviet Union only in the 1970s and 80s (Proctor 59-66).
182
in the United States owed him for this invention, which was adopted in the Soviet Union only in
the 1970s and 80s (Proctor, Psychologies 59-66). Did Bulgakov know about Luria’s
experiments, from which he could have possibly taken the details above, the name and
patronymic for Sharikov—Poligraf Poligrafovich? Did Luria give birth to these associations?
Marietta Chudakova’s biography of Bulgakov does not mention this connection, unfortunately.
While the novel has no explicit connection to psychoanalysis beyond the implications of
the above details, it provides a striking literary take on the terms of the debates within Soviet
psychology in which psychoanalysis played an important, though seldomly examined, role.
Psychoanalysis beyond the Mechanists and Dialecticians
In The Capitalist Unconscious, Frederick Jameson describes a fundamental distinction
within epistemology, which can be applied to the context of the 1920s and the issue of
“autogenetic movement.” Citing Althusser and the epistemological problem of causality, he
sketches two possible systems of causality that prove to be mutually exclusive: 1) two or more
parts that interact and combine “horizontally” with each other in order to comprise a whole—the
various permutations of operationalism making up a mechanical model, and 2) the whole
qualitative system implied in the concept of expression, which presupposes that the whole is not
reducible to any of its parts but contains an inner compulsion, or essence, gleaned throughout
each part, and which moves the whole—the expressive conception. Thus, the mechanical and the
expressive form the two poles of causality. By way of the concept of expressivity, both Jameson
and Althusser return to a central idea of Leibniz, endowing this most idealist of philosophers,
lampooned in Voltaire’s Candide, with a fundamental distinction that any true materialism must
overcome. The philosopher of the monad was first to formulate a conceptual model that pointed
183
a way out of the mechanistic deadlocks of Enlightenment rationality and its Newtonian “billiard
ball” model of causality in the psyche. What is known as “Leibniz’s gap” describes the
epistemological hole within the problem of consciousness, which arises from the bodily
substrate, yet operates according to its own expressive laws. Within the empiriomonist camp of
Bogdanov, Lunacharskii, and Gorky, Leibniz was seen as a central figure having established the
holistic model of monistic expressivity that addressed consciousness, were one only to discard
his idealism. For the philosophical debates of the 1920s, expressivity of consciousness became
known as the quality of “autogenetic movement,” defended by the Dialecticians. The
Mechanists, denying this abstraction, reduced consciousness to physical laws, what was called
the “equilibrium” of bodily energy.
Sobach’e serdtse contains a brilliant scene illustrating Leibniz’s gap. Recall that Sharik’s
transformation takes place at the level (and as a result) of a physiological intervention into the
organism. During a decisive moment in the novel, Preobrazhenskii examines a jar in the light of
his cabinet containing Sharik’s brain (the dog’s pituitary gland, gipofiz), and for a split second he
wavers, struggling to grasp that which he cannot discern in the piece of flesh.
Наконец отложил сигару в пепель ницу, подошел к шкафу, сплошь
состоящему из стекла, и весь кабинет осветил тремя сильнейшими огнями с
потолка. Из шкафа, с третьей стеклянной полки Филипп Филиппович выну л
узк у ю банк у и стал, нахму рившись, рассматр и вать ее на свет огней. В
прозрачной и тяжелой жидкости плавал, не па дая на дно, малый беленький
комочек, извлеченный из недр шариковского мозга. Пожимая плечами,
кривя гу бы и хмыкая, Филипп Филиппович пожирал его глазами, как бу дто
184
в белом нет он у щем комке хотел р а зглядеть причину уд и в ит ельны х событий,
переверн у в ших вверх дном жизнь в пречистенской квартире. (187)
Preobrazhenskii gazes with near-religious intensity into Leibniz’s gap, in order to discern the
cause (prichinu) of the chaotic events that unfolded, and it is as if a wall is raised before
Preobrazhenskii in this moment, blocking his usual penetrating reason from progressing forward.
What Preobrazhenskii fails to see with his penetrating vision are the psychological motivations
for Sharikov’s behavior within the material substance of flesh. Determining the qualitative
movement of consciousness from its material substrate is as impossible as finding and localizing
“genius” in the folds of Lenin’s brain (genius, one could say, is actively and dynamically
distributed across its entire structure). Directly following this scene, Preobrazhenskii and
Bormenthal’ reverse engineer Sharikov back to plain old Sharik, the dog, and (between
themselves) call their experiment a failure. Thus, Sobach’e serdtse is a choice artistic
representation of the tendency toward materialist monism, and its deadlocks. Let us turn to the
historical details of the period now.
The idea of monism for the Soviet 1920s emerged with Plekhanov’s “The Development
of the Monist View of History” (1895), which was followed by Bogdanov’s system of
Empiriomonism, infamously critiqued by Lenin’s 1909 whirlwind attack on idealist philosophy
in Materialism and Empiriocriticism. An admittedly sloppy text (by materialist philosophers of
the 20s, who took issue with Lenin’s “theory of reflection”
143
), the latter slowly became
143
Lenin’s theory of reflection bypassed complexities of the philosophy of perception and
simply stated that reality directly corresponded to the conscious perception of it. As Bauer
writes, “According to the Leninist theory of reflection consciousness is developed in man’s
purposive action on the world which exists externally of him. Thus, consciousness does not
evolve from the ‘immanent laws’ of its internal dynamics (Hegel’s position), but it develops in
interaction with the ‘real’ world. Man learns by acting, by testing his knowledge in practice.
185
unimpeachable with the rise of the cult of Lenin, beginning with his death and venerated bodily
relics. At issue was much of what has been described in the introductory chapter, the central task
of a monistic system—to develop an account of every phenomenon in reality within a single
system, or language.
O. Minin, an early Mechanist philosopher, considered not only psychology suspect, but
also the entire discipline of philosophy (excluding Marxism, of course, which was seen by him
as a positive science), against which he penned an article “Philosophy Overboard.” The
Dialecticians stepped in to defend their practice, since dialectical materialism had many under-
theorized aspects, and could not be considered complete in its development. Psychology was
foregrounded in these debates because of attitudes about psychology as a standalone discipline
(For example, Chelpanov’s experimental psychology lab was housed under the department of
philosophy) and how the crisis of psychology implicated philosophy. Several prominent figures
like Bekhterev and Pavlov dismissed (subjective) psychology as a discipline altogether,
subsuming it under the “ubiquitous reflex” of their respective physiological systems, what they
called “objective psychology.”
144
Furthermore, what also prompted the debates themselves was the spreading popularity of
the Theory of the New Biology (Teoriia novoi biologii), a set of ideas initiated by Emannuil
Enchman, an odd figure whose views of sexuality resulted in his call for distributing “sexual
passports,” famously satirized in the utopian society of Zamiatin’s My. Enchman and
“Enchmenizm” had a wide following in the student population of the new Communist
academies, setting many of the materialist philosophers the task of disproving his ideas, with
Therefore, it is argued, one must study man in action to understand his consciousness.” (135; see
also pages 105 and 136)
144
See Sirotkina’s article “The Ubiquitous Reflex and Its Critics in Post-Revolutionary Russia.”
186
politicized accusations of “Menshevising thought” also levelled at Enchman (Bauer 82). Zalkind,
in his speech on psychoanalysis at the 1924 Congress, began with an attack against Enchman, as
promoting a reactionary theory that introduced biological determinants into a self-determined
Soviet society.
In an ironic twist of history, at the moment when his early system is enthusiastically
taken up by Russian and Soviet intellectuals like Luria and Zalkind, with the utopian dreams of
monism, Freud’s early psycho-biological phase comes to an end. The theory of drives
dramatically shifts in 1920 with the introduction of the speculative concept of the death drive—
an idea credited by Freud (who modifies it greatly) to the Russian psychoanalyst Sabina
Spielrein.
145
Freud abandons attempting to solve the mind/body problem, and thus monism, by
the 1920s with the introduction of his second topology in The Ego and the Id and with the
introduction of the death drive in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. The latter text was translated
into Russian by Luria and Vygotsky, both writing a lengthy introduction, though none of the
intellectuals aside from Gorskii seemed to pick up on the ramifications of the theory, as many
psychoanalysts rejected it as well. Freud’s statements that the life and death drives (Eros and
Thanatos) are his “mythology” are to this effect: they do not describe biological drives but rather
textual devices and textual effects—interventions of interpretation and hermeneutics, of a special
kind. Frederick Jameson writes, “What is this to say but that the instincts, indeed, the libido
itself, no matter how energetically boiling, cannot be conceived independently of their
representations, in short, […] no matter how archaic they may be, the instincts are already of the
145
To return to our second claim from the introduction: it is Spielrein who causes Freud to recast
his drive theory, and thus to leave biology for good (Spielrein is at the origin of Freud’s “letting
go,” as it were, of the handhold of materialism and his succumbing to wild speculation), leading
him to forsake his initial structural model for his so-called second topology, and thus to leave
biology for philosophical speculation.
187
order of the signifier?” (Jameson 364-65) From then on, Freud puts his energies into elaborating
psychic devices, a way of minding Leibniz’s gap.
However, back in the Soviet Union, Freud’s early work was received positively. In
“Psychoanalysis as a System of Monistic Psychology” (1925), Alexander Luria conceived
psychoanalysis as the missing piece to the monistic puzzle of Marxist materialism.
146
What he
initially found most stimulating about psychoanalytic theory in his article was the dynamic
notion of the drives.
Its concept of drive is rigorously monistic, as is its view of the individual in
general. Indeed, a drive is not a psychological phenomenon in the strict sense,
since it includes the effects of somatic and nervous stimuli and of the endocrine
system and its chemistry, and often has no clear-cut psychological cast at all. We
should be more inclined to consider drive a concept at the “borderline between the
mental and the somatic” (Freud). The dualism of the old psychology is thus
completely discarded. (Luria “Psychoanalysis” 22)
Luria conceived the drives as a mediating concept between mind and body that is oriented to the
outside world and to what he also calls in this essay a “biosocial” activity, an idea that roots
psychoanalysis in a somatic, physiological basis. This dovetailed with his concern over a
146
This was originally a speech delivered to the Moscow Psychoanalytic Society in 1924, which
was published in Kornilov’s Psikhologiia i Marksizm (1925). Earlier, in 1922, he established a
psychoanalytic discussion group in Kazan’, receiving a congratulatory letter from Freud himself,
who addressed Luria as “Herr President” (Angelini 374). After meeting Otto and Vera Schmidt
in 1923, he merged his organization with the Russian Psychoanalytic Society in Moscow, for
which he served as secretary (Proctor 157-62). Before this article, Luria, along with his
collaborator Lev Vygotsky, produced a translation of Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle
(1920, orig.) in 1925, for which the duo wrote a lengthy introduction, though Luria did not seem
to register the implications of the death drive for psychoanalysis.
188
psychology that considers the entire personality. His striving toward a monistic understanding of
materialism was shared with other Marxist thinkers.
The positive appraisals of psychoanalysis initiated by Reisner, Zalkind, Var’iash,
Bykhovskii, Malis, Luria, and Vygotskii, quickly received negative criticisms by the anti-
Freudian camp of Iurinets, Fridman, Sapir, and Voloshinov.
147
When Iurinets published a
critique of Bykhovskii in “Freidizm i marksizm,” he claimed psychoanalysis was symptomatic of
an “ad-hoc Wagner period” that had “imperceptibly slid into the Marxist camp” (Miller,
“Freudian Theory” 632). His article against Bykhovskii was published in the fall of 1924 in Pod
znamenem marksizma and was followed next year by a three-part critique on the use of Freud in
relation to social psychology (“Freid i psikhologiia,” in the journal Pechat’ i revoliutsiia). This
critique, which aligned Freudian thought with that of Bergson, the greatest exemplar of idealist
philosophy of the day, received a response by Reisner in “Sotsial’naia psikhologiia i uchenie
Freida.”
In 1926, the Dialectician I. D. Sapir published a systematic and comprehensive critique of
Freudian theory, its tenuous connections to societal factors in psychic life, and the impossibility
of the existence of an unconscious for the theory of materialism (Pod znamenem marksizma). It,
too, bore the same title as Iurinets’s critique, “Freidizm i marksizm.”
148
As Martin Miller writes,
147
Somewhere in between the two was the Soviet literary editor Voronskii, who utilized
psychoanalysis to develop a theory of artistic creativity, but who wrote negatively about it in the
journal he edited, Krasnaia nov’. As Angelini writes, “Generally speaking, the concept of
psychoanalysis proposed by these scholars was not only divorced from the clinical field, practice
being virtually impossible in the prevailing political context, but was often forced and
ideologically biased. However, psychoanalytical ideas, with their innovative power, did become
widespread, and were not restricted to Moscow.” (Angelini 373)
148
Quite clearly, Sapir was not updated on the theoretical ramifications that Marx’s early works
would have, likely due to the isolated nature of Riazanov’s activities in the Marx-Lenin Institute.
What I mean is that the writings of Marx in the 1840s, being compiled by Riazanov, revealed, as
189
The rising tide of opposition to psychoanalysis was mentioned in Moshe Wulff’s
report from the Russian Psychoanalytic Society in 1926. Freud himself noted the
demise of his many followers in Russia in a letter early in 1927. He made the
point, in discussing the situation in Russia, that “our science is not able to be put
into the service of any party,” although this was precisely what the “Freudo-
Marxists,” as they were called, felt compelled to prove under the difficult
conditions of this debate over psychoanalysis. (“The Origins” 131)
Wilhelm Reich received a cool welcome when he visited Moscow from August to September
1929, though he managed to give a series of talks on the connection of Marxist thought and
psychoanalysis. The central concern for Reich was the issue of the family unit and its
reformulation under communism. As Jameson describes in an article dealing with the problem
synthesizing Freud and Marx, the family relationship is at the core of the issue:
Frankfurt School Freudo-Marxism ended up as an analysis of the threats to
“democracy” from right-wing extremism which was easily transferred, in the
1960’s, to the Left; but the original Freudo-Marxian synthesis—that of Wilhelm
Reich in the 1920’s—evolved as an urgent response to what we would today call
the problems of cultural revolution, and addressed the sense that political
revolution cannot be fulfilled until the very character structures inherited from the
older, pre-revolutionary society, and reinforced by its instinctual taboos, have
been utterly transformed in their turn. (“Imaginary” 346)
they did to western scholars of the Frankfurt School a few short years later, psychological
concepts such as “alienation” that were of a psychological, if not an unconscious, cast.
190
Jameson makes the point that psychoanalysis provided a technique which could illuminate and
reflect back the ways in which we “are spoken” by linguistic structures inherited traditionally by
way of familial influence, who teach us to speak the language of society, and which in a
revolutionary society impede the construction of, what has to be taken as, a sui generis world
never witnessed before. When Wilhelm Reich visited Moscow at the end of the 1920s, he argued
for the importance of psychoanalysis for Soviet Russia in precisely these terms: that the new
society is nevertheless haunted by the internalized speech of an “obsolete” other and that
psychoanalysis is the method to free the individual’s unconscious from repressive social
mechanisms—the unconscious determination stemming from older “instinctual taboos” housed
within the structures of language.
This idea of language, so crucial for psychoanalysis, will be developed in the next
chapter, when Voloshinov’s critique of Freud from a Marxist theory of language is examined.
Suffice it to say for now that Voloshinov’s linguistic approach to psychoanalysis was the most
sophisticated critique of Freudianism at the time, which understood the importance of language
to the psyche.
By January 1930, at the First All-Union Congress on Human Behavior, psychology as a
discipline was secured as a result of the philosophical debates, which defended the irreducibility
of the psyche to physiology. Yet psychoanalysis would not take part in state’s new direction in
psychology. Zalkind, previously supportive of Freudianism, had by then rejected the theory.
Freudian psychology, said Zalkind, the keynote speaker at the First Congress on
Human Behavior, could not serve the needs of Soviet society because it is
oriented toward the past. The Freudian, he continued, can tell why a person is the
way he is, but can give you little hope in making him what he should be.
191
Furthermore, Freudianism puts too much emphasis on internal, unconscious
processes, and too little on conscious processes and man’s relationship to society.
(Bauer 99)
By 1932, the prevailing attacks from the Dialecticians had made psychoanalysis an impossible
profession, and Luria also would recant publicly his Freudian interests, criticizing
“psychoanalysis in terms consistent with the prevailing discourse for being individualized,
pessimistic and irrational, and attacked Freud for straying from his clinical experiences”
(Proctor, Psychologies 157).
Sketching this history of psychoanalysis in the philosophical and psychological debates,
one philosopher who has received no comment by historians of psychoanalysis in Russia is
Aleksandr Gorskii, whose speculative, though illuminating, ideas forge another link between
dialectics, monism, and psychoanalysis in this period.
Gorskii’s distortions
Aleksandr Konstantinovich Gorskii, a little-known philosopher of the 1920s, who had
connections with the movement of Cosmism and empiriomonism, attempted to uncover the
secret to artistic inspiration in his text Ogromnyi ocherk. By delving into the processes of
creativity, he elaborates his own combinatory logic of fantasy, what Gorskii terms “autoerotic
reflection” or “mirroring” (avtoeroticheskaia zerkal’nost’), directly developed from Freud’s
theory of drives and what needs to be understood as a unique and original contribution. The idea
of autogenetic movement can be productively compared to Gorskii’s autoerotic reflexivity. His
writing on the theory of drives as they pertain to the productions of aesthetic works aims to
overcome the division between science and art and deserves mention in this study because this
192
text preempts some developments of later psychoanalytic theory (such as Lacan’s mirror stage)
and reveals how intellectuals were possessed with problems of motivation and artistic
expressivity in the 1920s, as we will see in the next chapter on theories of creativity by
Voronskii, Voloshinov, and Vysheslavtsev, each of whom directly engaged psychoanalytic
concepts.
While employed at the Communist Academy of Sciences, Gorskii produced a strange text
called Ogromnyi ocherk, published in 1924. He offers one of the most interesting readings of
classical psychoanalytic theory in connection with aesthetics, where Gorskii, once again inspired
by the prevalent monistic line of thought, attempts to address the synthesis of science and art.
From a basis in “electromonism,” he begins with a sustained “libidinal-economic” reading of the
drives as a “constant pulsion” arising out of the body’s interior—comparing them to Blok’s
“silovye linii” as an energy and vibration.
149
Provoking the reader to apply his ideas to practice,
Gorskii initiates his study by commenting on several excerpts from Chekhov’s notebooks in the
author’s late and unsuccessful attempts to compose a novel in which the plot and other details of
this desired-for text remained unclear. According to Gorskii, Chekhov was troubled by the
persistent image of an unknown woman. Reading into his drafts and uneven attempts to initiate
the novel, Gorskii writes:
Стержень з а ду манного романа, ось, вокру г которой должна вращаться тема,
сюжет, фабула и множ ество возможных аксессу а ров,—со бственно некий
образ женщины. Образ ли? И что такое образ? Лица ее мы не видим—и
149
Groskii writes: “ Бл агодаря вековой размычке межд у ‘ наукой и иск у сством’ нау к а об
иск у сстве, эстетика, попала межд у дв ух ст ул ьев, оторва л ась от одного берега, не пристала
к др у го м у и беспомощ но барахтается в прова л е, выезжая на словесн ых описаниях, не
предполагая возможности экспери м ента.” (192)
193
автор не ви дит, и о лице ему нечего сказать, кроме затертых фраз. Видна
только су дорожно вздымающаяся гру дь—вернее только линии су дороги,
су дорожно искривленной волны, кот ор у ю было бы нетру д но начертить
графически. Упру гий п одъем и спад в мелкой нервной зыби. Это автор
дневника действительно видит, что- то вну т ри ну дит его у в иденное
запечатлеть на бу м а ге. (187)
For the artist, the psychical instrument asks to be operated in such a way as to direct its
energies at some designated target, in order for psychical abstraction to manifest in material
form, the interior world displacing external reality by a movement, encrypting the pattern of the
self into the other. Gorskii’s intervention is to direct the process by emphasizing a clarity of
vision necessitated by the task (an “aim”), a perspective that has to be restricted in order to
utilize the psychical material optimally.
150
He describes how to do this, how to “expand the circle
of vibration (volnenii).”
Всегда и везде одним и тем же способом. Водру ж ением—поставлением
впереди себя некоторых, хотя бы ту манных еще, как бы дымом ок утанных
зрительных чертежей, схем ( образов), столь привлекательных,
притязательных для организма, что он, мгновенно кидаясь им навстречу,
одолевает внешнюю якобы непроницаему ю ср еду, проницает ее,
150
The topic of an “aim,” or, literally, the “compulsion toward an aim” (tseleustremlennost’) was
popularized by the psychological system of Iaroslav Martsinovskii (not to be confused with the
epidemiologist Martsinovskii). This was known as the “psychotherapy of worldview”
(psikhoterapiia mirosozertsanii) and was based on the religious re-education of the patient by
way of the products of culture and higher ethical values. In this way, the patient builds a
worldview that establishes a stable life goal, integrating him or her into larger society. This
recalls Ferster’s principled system in Shaginian’s novel, Svoia sud’ba. Zalkind critiques
Martsinovskii’s method of “suggestive therapy” as religious, inherently teleological and,
therefore, idealistic, in Zhizn’ organizma i vnushenie (1927), 101-02.
194
пронизывает излу чениями токов та кой тонкости и силы, что они образу ют
прочные пространственные связи, силовые линии, как бы ту го натяну тые
стр у ны напряженной, как арфа “ ду ши” ( ду ша, по определению еще древнего
му зыканта- философа Аристоксена, и есть не что иное, как напряженность,
ритмическая настроенность телесных вибраций). (194)
His reference to Chekhov presents an example of a malfunction to a psychical
mechanism of artistic creativity that misfired for the author in midst of a late creative project, but
that nevertheless produced waves of aborted drafts that pointed to some unconscious material or
blockage before his death. Gorskii evokes Aristoxenus’s metaphor for the psyche as a tightly
wound stringed instrument, which needs to be properly tuned in order to produce the visions
necessary for the artist.
Gorskii attempts to explain how to do this by evoking the “laws of movement of the flow
of images” (zakony dvizheniia potoka obrazov), and he derives these laws by reference to
Freud’s dream theory and psychosexual stages of development (similarly to what piqued the
interest in the texts of Malis, Luria, Bykhovskii, and Reisner).
Законы движения потока образов, вихрей воо б ражения, заправляющих
поэтическим творчеством, однородны с законами сновидения,
сновидческ оr о воображения. Как раз в этой последней о б ласти изу ч ения
процесса сн овидения сделаны наукой, главным образом
психоаналитической школой, за последние 30 лет огромные завоевания, так
что теперь можно сказ ать: “Уж проходят караваны через те скалы, где
носились лишь ту маны, да цари орлы”. Эта сфера, искони облюбованная
мифотворцами и мист иками разн ых видов, подверглась систематическому
195
нашествию и обследованию трезвы х работников нау ки. Правда, рабо та их
еще не доведена до конца. Но, исходя из добытых ими резу льтатов, мы
можем сей час наметить основные принципы, управляющие образованием
зрительных форм снов идческоr о в осприятия.
Три, тесно связанные межд у собо ю, принципа:
1. Автоэротическая зеркальность.
2. Вну т рителесность пространства.
3. Органопроекция. (195)
Gorskii is almost verbatim repeating Freud’s words from Introductory Lectures to
Psychoanalysis, in which the latter posits the psychoanalyst displacing the role of mystic and
poet and the incomplete nature of psychoanalytic theory. Gorskii dwells at length on the
psychoanalytic notion of primary narcissism, as Freud initiates his theory of drives from the first
object that the child attaches its libidinal energies: the self. That the objects of the libido are
always in part connected with the earliest narcissistic objects is considered to be one of Freud’s
major breakthroughs in the theory of drives. The self-love and feeling of omnipotence of the
child, confirmed by the affection of the mother, go through stages of displacement and
development that render this primal unity apart. The stages center on different orifices of the
body and correspond to a sequence of drive-objects—from the mouth-breast, anus-feces, to the
final, genital phase with its genital objects. The drives, according to Gorskii’s use of Freud, are
conditioned by auto-erotic pleasure, and thus, arise out of a fundamental human trait of
narcissism.
Gorskii writes, quoting Freud at length:
196
Оба термина—“ автоэротизм" и " нарцизм”—были усвоен ы Фрейдом и
исследован ы для его “ теории сексуальности”, построенной на данн ы х
психоанализа.[…] Выразительны утверждени я Фрейда, вставленные им в
последнее издание “ Т е ории полового влечения”: “ Из психоанализа мы, как
через границу, прест у п ить которую нам не дозволено, глядим в водоворот
нарцистического либидо, и оно кажется нам большим резерв у а ром, из
которого высылаются привязанности к объектам и в который они
возвращаются: нарцистическая привязанность и либидо к “ я” кажется нам
осу ществленным в первом детстве, только пр икрытым благодаря поздним
его отросткам, но, в сущности, оставшимся неизменным за их спиной”. То
же в специальной статье о нарцизме: “ Первично либидо концентриру ется на
собственном “ я”, а впо с ледствии часть его переносится на объекты; но по
су ществу этот переход либидо на объекты—не окончательный процесс, и
оно все же продолжает относиться к охваченным им объектам, как тельце
маленького плазматического сущ ества относится к выпу щенным им
псевдоподиям. Мы, естественно, вначале не зам ечали это й доли либидо, т.к.
исходили в нашем исследовании из невротических симптомов” ( где в глаза
бросается именно “ объ е кт либидо”[Gorskii]). (197)
Gorskii is interested in the process of “libidinal cathexes” because of the central role Freud gives
to the imagination, resonating with Kaan’s foundational notion of the perversions as a problem
of the imagination, a “space” in which the drives can be glimpsed, such as in dreams. Gorskii
attempts to connect this primary narcissism to the creation of artistic works, in particular to
works of prose that he very carefully distinguishes from works of the visual imagination, like
197
painting, which can render the pulsation of drives (which, it is assumed, is the ultimate goal of
artistic expressivity) more directly, within a stroke or a gesture. To illustrate how the mark of
“narcissistic libido” is present in imaginary creativity, he references an anecdote from Freud’s
Psychopathology of Everyday Life:
Фрейд где- то рассказал, как одному молодо му человек у для и ллюстрации
техники забывания и обмолв ок было предлож ено назвать, не ду м ая, первое
попавшееся женское имя. Несмот ря на то, что он был в жизни заинтересован
и связан со многими ж е нщинами, он назвал имя, не прин адлежащее ни
одной из них: Альбина. Оказалось, что он был альбиносом—и это имя
должно было означать, что наиболее интересной для него женщиной
является в данн у ю мину ту он сам (ibid.).
As Freud describes, within dreams the drives produce a pressure within the psychical apparatus
spontaneously sending forth a “psychical representative” of somatic agitation through a process
explored by Gorskii in connection to creativity. This process, which Gorskii calls “auto-reflexive
mirroring,” generates distortions in psychical space caused by a primordial narcissistic “flexure”
(izgib), an idea that Gorskii traces to Dostoevsky’s Brat’ia Karamazovy.
Наглядный пример роли нарцистическоr о переноса во всякой сексу альной
вспышке дает страсть Дмитрия Карамазова к Гр у ш еньке. С первоr о взгляда
она не поражает “ но затем грян у л а гроза, ударила чу ма, заразился и заражен
доселе, и зн аю, что уж все кончено.” Что же оказалось ми кробом заразы?
Единственно: ИЗГИБ. “ Я говорю тебе - изгиб. У Гр ушень к и- шельмы есть
один такой изгиб тела, он и на ножке у нее отразился, даж е в пальчике
мизинчика на левой ножке отозвался.” Но откуда у Мити такое напряженное
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внимание именно к этому “ ИЗГИБУ”? Все объясняется: “ нестерпимый
стыд”, охвативший его во время раздевания перед с у дебн ым следствием...
“ стал всех их ниже, теперь они уже имеют полное право его презирать...
точно во сне, я во сне иногда такие позоры над собой видывал”. Самое
главное у д остоверяет автор— “ он сам не любил свои ноги, почему-то всю
жизнь находил больши е пальцы на обеих ногах у родливы ми, особен но
один—гру б ый, плоский, как- то загну в шийся вниз ноготь на правой ноге...”
Уродливость, таким образом, фиксирована на изломе ( плоском изгибе),
искажении все того же искомого ИЗГИБА, питавшего нарцизм ребен ка.
Интересна зеркальная переверн у т ость волны притяжения к Гр у шен ьке:
большой палец правой ноги—мизинец левой ноги. Таковы всегда “ силовые
линии” эротического влечения. (214)
This fascinating description of Dmitri’s sudden, like a bolt of lightning, fondness for Grushen’ka
perfectly captures that little something extra of attraction that appears across Grushenka’s entire
body. The two toes—one big, the other little, one on the left foot, the other on the right—form a
short-circuit, recalling Lacan’s statement of the way the “subject receives his own message in an
inverted form.” The flexure, izgib, is a hypothetical point from which drive and its pulsations
originate, something that gets projected in “narcissistic displacements,” finding resonance with
and reflecting in the other.
Gorskii further speculates on the way dream images produce contact with what he calls
the muse of artistic inspiration and describes the process as the play with a sort of very flat disc-
like mirror that bends, distorts, and refracts images in combinations that add to Freud’s primary
processes of displacement and condensation. Chekhov’s inability to complete the novel was
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barred by a paralyzing fear of death, a firewall erected between life and death itself. According to
Gorskii’s elaboration, proximity to this looming event prevented a generative “play” with
Chekhov’s muse, and the unfinished sketch of the unnamed woman reflected this paralyzing
moment of anxiety.
The izgib is perhaps that which can be glimpsed in an authorial “style”, distributed across
the entirety of an author’s work.
Пользу ясь этой терминологией, мы можем ск азать,что та автоэротическая
направленность, котор а я питает сновидческий процесс, бу ду чи полна отголосками
нарцизма— с одной стороны, оральной и анальной локальности—с др у гой стороны,
главным образом стро ится не на них, а на эротическом влечении, эротическом
восхищении собственным телом в его ЦЕЛОС Т И, причем представителем этой
целости является не столько головное “ Я” ( верхнее лицо) сколько таинственное,
загадочное ОНО ( нижнее лицо) несконцентрированная, непроявленная смутная
масса, МАГНИТНОЕ ОБЛАКО СИЛ, в котором уж е сквозит и у г адывается ОНА
( царь- девиц а, богиня, лучезарная подр у га— МУ ЗА). Создание образов—
воображение, мечта, игра. С кем, однако, здесь человек ИГРАЕТ и что он может
выиграть)? (200)
To the question, what can one “win” in this game with the muse appearing from the
magnetic id-cloud, is the answer of a new human nature, or at least an image, or plan for a
“project for the reconstruction of the organism,” that is “placed before the self,” displaced and
organized into external space through playing out this “eternal game of the gods” with the other
(201). The “ona” and the “ono” implies a Jungian orientation, of the “shadow” and “anima,” with
the goal of the game approximating “individuation,” though Gorskii never cites Jung in this text.
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The Cosmist apotheosis of Gorskii’s theory is the ultimate erasure of the border between interior
and exterior by methods to control and displace the energy of drive from imaginary space
directly into the physical world, with no mediation (Gorskii moves from Freud to other
speculative physiological and perceptual theories). The result is the ultimate erasure of the border
between interior and exterior by methods to control and liberate the energy of drive from the
imaginary and into the physical world. He ends by positing the future appearance of a physically
transparent New Soviet Woman (the end of the text proceeds as an address to a female pupil),
with the power of manipulating objects with her mind and transforming reality into an aesthetic
work of her own artistic vision.
“Vot tak gipofiz! (Kliaksa.)”
So, what is the heart of Bulgakov’s text?—It is the very appearance of a heart in it,
which has gone unmentioned in the critical literature. In the first scene following the successful
operation on Sharik (announced by the ink stain concluding Bormental’’s diary), after
Preobrazhenskii hears Sharikov’s music playing through the wall, another symbol of
expressivity, this heart insists. Recalling Heraclitus’s bow metaphor for life contained within the
word “bios” (meaning both life and bow), Bulgakov shows that something like a heart, or
spirit—an immaterial force—binds the two extreme, physiological poles, moving the entire
system. Despite his extremely penetrating vision, Preobrazhenskii fails to see this heart himself,
because it is something that is beyond vision and representation, yet the new omniscient
narrative point of view of this section allows for its representation.
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There is a formal symmetry between this scene and the one described previously. In one,
Preobrazhenskii strains (and fails) to see inside the gipofiz under full illumination; while in this
scene, within darkness, he “sees too much,” as it were, and rejects the esoteric vision.
Филипп Филиппович сидел у стола в кресле. Между пальцам и левой ру ки
торчал коричневый окурок сигары. У портьеры, прислонившись к
притолоке, стоял, заложив ногу за ногу, человек маленьк ого роста и
несимпатичной нару жности. Волосы у него на голове росли жесткие, как бы
к у стами на выкорчеванном поле, а на лице был небритый пу х. Ло б п оражал
своей мало й вышиной. Почти непосредственно над черн ыми кисточками
раскиданных бровей начиналась г устая головная щетка.
Пиджак, прорванный под левой мышкой, был усеян сол омой, поло сатые
брючки на правой коленке продраны, а на левой выпачк аны лиловой
краской. На шее у человечка был повязан ядовито- небесн ого цвета галстух
с фальшивой рубиновой булавкой. Цвет этого галстуха был настолько
бросок, что время от в ремени, закрывая утомленные глаза, Филипп
Филиппович в полной тьме то на потолке, то на стене видел пылающий
факел с гол у бым венцо м. Открыва я глаза, слеп вновь, так как с полу,
разбрызгивая веера света, швырял ись в глаза лаковые штиблеты с белыми
гетрами. (Bulgakov 167-68)
Sharikov’s physical sketch follows a curious course. His physiology is given with the
obvious “degenerative” details of his appearance (the small “headspace”) but, moving on, it
passes to a description of his unfashionable clothing. From the reader’s point of view, the
physical description traces a kind of cross upon Sharikov’s body, beginning from the top of the
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head (lob), the left side (pidzhak, prorwannyi pod levoi myshkoi), the right (briuchki na pravoi
kolenke prodrany), then back to the left (na levoi vypachkany lilovoi kraskoi). Centered within
the cross is a gaudy, “poisonously sky-colored tie” worn by Sharikov with a false ruby pin at its
center. The tie-and-pin combo literally knots the elements together and burns an afterimage of a
red torch with a blue halo into Preobrazhenskii’s internal vision that, in the dark, becomes
projected onto every surface his gaze rests on. What is the torch but the heart, or the soul, of
Sharikov—a symbol combining the “low” element of revolutionary mass culture with the “high”
one of elite classicism?
Such esoteric knowledge is anathema to Preobrazhenskii’s rationality (the tie is mental
“poison” to the empiricist). At the introduction of the fully manifested chelovechek, the surgeon
cannot help but see a direct image of Sharikov’s “heart”—the cause of the expressivity of the
soul moving the entire monad. It is as if Bulgakov implies the esoteric understanding of truth that
“if you see it, you cannot recognize it; and if you recognize it, you cannot directly see it.”
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Section III (Drives and Aesthetics)
Chapter 5
“В Индию Духа купить билет”: The Creative Drive and Vsevolod Ivanov’s Novel Y
Где я? Так томно и так тревожно
Сердце мое ст у ч ит в ответ:
Видишь во кзал, на котором можн о
В Индию Духа к у пить билет?
—Nikolai Gumilev, “ Заблу д ившийся трамвай”
This chapter will focus on the aesthetic dimension of the early Soviet period in which
psychoanalysis had an influence, and in which the concept of the drives was a central feature.
Most generally speaking, the subject of aesthetics was inextricably bound to the goal of political
ideology at the time, and Marxist criticism would argue that the two are in fact inseparable. This
latter idea differs from that most fruitful combination between art and politics for revolutionary
aims—propaganda—spread by experimental, frequently avant-garde, techniques in every media
of the time, from sign to song. Following the artistic-political agitation of propaganda during
wartime, the period of reconstruction after the revolution emphasized, not the need to gather
force for revolution, but a different wish—the construction, education, and formulation of
collective man. Aesthetic theories of the 1920s contended with the problem of art in this light, as
a question as to its independence from everyday concerns and social life. Thus, psychology and
art became just different ways of understanding how to remake the individual in communism.
Vsevolod Ivanov was a celebrated author of the younger generation of Soviet writers,
who came into artistic maturity in the new order. Alongside many factors shaping his aesthetic
outlook, like close studies of contemporaries like Gorky and Zamiatin, Ivanov was influenced by
psychoanalysis in his early career, what this chapter argues he acquired from his mentorship
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under Evgenii Zamiatin and Aleksandr Voronskii, publisher of the journal Krasnaia Nov’ (and
editor of Ivanov’s popular collection of tales Tainaia tainykh). Psychoanalysis played a role in
several nascent theories of aesthetic creativity that arose in the 1920s. While the origins of the
study of aesthetics extend beyond this study, my concern is to describe the connection between
Soviet aesthetic theories and psychoanalysis.
The chapter posits a drive for creativity, or expressivity, that can be further connected to
Reimarus’s concept of the Kunsttrieb broached in Chapter Three. It has connection to Marx’s
conception of labor power, but is a special kind of productivity which, as has been stated by
“bourgeois” figures like Oscar Wilde, is quite useless. What is the meaning, then, of art, and
what does Marxism have to say about the generation of artistic works aside from the way they
are the expression of a cultural “superstructure.” Is there a way to get beyond the Marxist notion
that art is merely decoration, covering over and obscuring the fundamental mechanisms behind
life? Or, is there something fundamental to creativity which is part and parcel of life? To help
answer this question, one of the authors instructed by Zamiatin in the practice of literature,
Vsevolod Ivanov, will provide the case study, in which the idea of a “creative drive” is
formulated by a character who practices psychoanalysis.
Furthermore, productivity or creativity was seen as the therapeutic approach to healing
human beings, discussed previously. In fact, one could see the negation of psychology and the
turn to pedagogy, or education, as the primary motive of Soviet culture and its approaches to
personal transformation.
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Introduction, the blue light
In “Zakulisy,” one of Evgenii Zamiatin’s essays on creativity in the collection Kak my
pishem (1930), the author mobilizes a provocative extended metaphor to describe his
“psychology of creation” (psikhologiia tvorchsestva):
In every sleeping car compartment there is a little ivory handle: turn it to the right, and
there is full light; to the left, darkness; set it in the middle, and a blue light goes on.
Everything is visible in this light, but it does not interfere with your falling asleep, it does
not keep you awake. When I am asleep and dreaming, the handle of consciousness is
turned left. When I write, it is set in the middle: consciousness burns with a blue light. I
see a dream on paper. My imagination works as it does during sleep, it moves along the
same path of associations. But this dream is cautiously (the blue light) guided by
consciousness. As in a dream, you need but think it is a dream, you need but turn on full
consciousness, and the dream disappears. There is nothing worse than insomnia, when
the switch is broken and, no matter how you set it, you don't succeed in turning off full
consciousness. The white, sober light persistently glares into your eyes. (Zamyatin, A
Soviet Heretic 190)
We can transpose Zamiatin’s idea of creative labor to Lenin’s spontaneity / consciousness
dialectic, which the novel Tsement represents at the level of content. Art distinguished from
craft, which follows a plan, seems to need a measure of unplanned activity, a kind of sustained
attitude of play, a “free-association of ideas.” In another unpublished excerpt, Zamiatin compares
the process of creativity to the illumination of the psyche’s unexamined corners within
psychoanalysis: “Это— нечто вроде фрейдовск ого метода лечения, когда врач заставляет
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пациента исповедоваться, выбрасывать из себя все ‘ задержанные эмоции’” (Etkind Eros
nevozmozhnogo 238).
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As one of Zamiatin’s celebrated pupils and member of the Serapion Brothers, Vsevolod
Ivanov (proclaimed a “Soviet classic” in the 1920s by the critic Aleksandr Voronskii, editor of
the thick journal Krasnaia nov’) may have been familiar with Zamiatin’s description of the blue
light, the moving train, and the strange psychical turns inherent to artistic creation.
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Writing
after his passing, Tamara Ivanova describes how her husband completed Y in 1931 “in one
breath” (na odnom dykhanii) inspired by the dual occasion of the birth of their son and in
response to the destruction of the Church of Christ the Savior (Ivanova 388).
153
Called by its
author a “filosofskii satiricheskii roman,” Ivanov’s novel is an early example of automatic
writing and reads as an extended experiment in form usually attributed to literary post-
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Here is the passage in full: “ Комната, где стоит мой письменный стол, подметается каждый
день, и все- таки, если сдвин у т ь с места книжные полки — в каких- то укромных углах,
наверно, найду т ся пы льные гнезда, серые, лохматые, может быть, даже живые комки,
отту да выскочит и побежит по стене пау к. Такие у к ромн ы е углы есть в ду ше у каждого из
нас. Я ( бессознательно) вытаскиваю отту да едва заметных пау к ов, откармливаю их, и они
постепенно вырастают в моих ...[ героев]. Это — нечто вроде фр ейдо вского метода лечения,
когда врач заставляет пациента исповедоваться, выбрасывать из себя все “ з а держанные
эмоции.” (Etkind, Eros nevozmozhnogo 216) Zamiatin’s reference to the therapeutic process, in
which the therapist, like a priest or hypnotist, “forces the patient to confess” (ispovedovat’), is
another provocative metaphor for the creative process, as we have seen in the previous chapters,
of free association.
152
He may have received his appreciation for psychoanalysis from his teacher as well, though as
we have shown, psychoanalysis played a prominent role in the larger culture of the time.
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The narrator-author mentions the birth (and naming) of his son in light of why he has written
the novel: “ Я его назову Вячеслав ом! В честь моего отца, которого спасали психиатры. Это
было лет двадцать назад. Надеюсь, мой сын будет более удачным психиатром, че м те,
которые спасали его деда. Решено, профессо р. Я его называю Вячеславом.
Большеголовый Вячеслав, у!.. Но пристойно ли к большой голове—Вячеслав? Не
подходят сюда Лу ка, Пров, Сил, Савватий, Зосима, Ермил, Аким? Короче, чтоб сраз у
каждый мог запомнить имя большеголового психиатра. Нет. Зачем перерешат ь? Назовем
его Вячеславом!” (Ivanov, U 15)
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modernism (ibid. 387).
154
It is a text of ornamental prose that overflows with a nearly
overwhelming cascade of self-reflexive and metafictional tricks, such as its repeated references
to psychoanalysis.
155
As this chapter will argue, the text utilized the philosophical debates over
psychology taking place at this time as material to construct a textual counterattack to the
criticisms of the author coming from proletariat writer groups.
156
In 1929, Leopol’d Averbakh
(known as the “elektricheskii chelovek” in allied proletariat literary circles) launched a campaign
attacking Pil’niak, Zamiatin (who was forced to leave the country), and Voronskii.
157
The
154
Patricia Waugh’s Meta or Postmodernist Fiction, considered to be the first extensive study of
the formal devices of postmodernism, rightfully points to the fact that such techniques are hardly
anything new, as they are present at the very origin of the novelistic form itself, in the literary
experimentation of Don Quixote (considered by some to be the first novel), Tristram Shandy, and
other foundational novels. The idea of dissolving postmodernism into the novelistic form is
echoed in After the Future, the quintessential study within the Russian/Soviet context, of the
postmodern novel by Mikhail Epstein. Nevertheless, certain periods have a deeper exploration
and more creative play with the novelistic form than others, with one such period being in the
first decade following the Bolshevik revolution.
155
To take up the first of Ivanov’s “tricks”—the title, Y. Valentina G. Brougher has commented
that the complex overdeterminations of meaning in this single-letter title prevent a smooth
translation into English. “Textual evidence suggests that Y should be read both as the Russian
exclamation “ у” (“u” in transliteration, “oo” in translation) as well as the letter “y” in the Latin
alphabet” (“Myth” 222, f.n. 4). The three epigraphs opening the novel point to three potential
meanings: 1) Lomonosov’s description in his Ritorika of the sound symbolism of У, 2) the final,
mortal cry of Tolstoy’s Ivan Ilyich, “Ia ni khochu-u-u”, 3) and Pavel Florensky’s remark that X
and Y are the “signs of individuality” (znaki individuuma). Additionally, what is immediately
seen to be lost by transliterating Y to U is the “foot” of the letter Y, a necessary piece to the
visual emblematics that symbolically characterize the novel as a whole and echo throughout its
episodes. We will thus retain this visual suggestion and the other descriptors and preserve the
igrek—Y—as the title, a convention suggested first by Brougher: “It is impossible to translate
this title into English without tampering with the mystery and ambiguity that Ivanov intended his
Futurist-minimalist title to convey” (ibid.).
156
For a good example of criticism Levied against Ivanov’s “mysticism” see N. Ognev,
“Otkrytoe pis’mo Vsevolodu Ivanovu,” Literaturnaia gazeta, 30 December 1929 and Brougher’s
article “The Question of Motivation in Vs. Ivanov’s ‘Tainoe tainykh.’”
157
Ivanov had a long trajectory before becoming a published author, fighting in the Civil War
and working in various jobs such as a juggler at a traveling circus. In his autobiographical
writing, he mentions also the youthful desire to become a Buddhist monk. This novel displays
how he also identified in part with the psychoanalyst.
208
accusations had grown to include, alongside generic calls of false political loyalties, the use of
Bergsonian and psychoanalytic ideas, “biological deviations” and “signaling to class
enemies.”
158
Without perhaps ever articulating it explicitly (because of the quality of their intellectual
discourse), the proletarian writers’ “vulgar materialism” seemed to collapse psychic interiority
by rejecting the independent status of psychology and the psychic realm.
159
This is partly to do
with the debates over philosophical materialism taken up in the previous section, though few of
the figures I will look at in this chapter utilized anything specific from these debates, as they
were concerned with the literary field, rather than philosophy strictly speaking. Ivanov is an
exception. This position, of eliminating psychology from the sciences, is parodied in Ivanov’s
text with the repeated image and allegory of “Columbus’s egg,” smashed by Columbus on one
side in a bet to make it stand upright, which means that a simple solution is available to a
difficult problem, one hard to see until someone discovers the obvious way. The anecdote of
Columbus suggests two things in the novel: Ivanov did indeed appreciate psychoanalysis and
saw that its insights revealed previously unknown and surprising phenomena, what in retrospect
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Voronskii frequently praised Vsevolod Ivanov in language that revealed Freudian and
Bergsonian influence, like in the following passages dealing with Ivanov’s early collection of
tales, Tainoe tainykh: “« Тайное тайных» Воронский называет «показательным для всей
литерат у ры „ симптомо м“». […] Тр актовка кни ги во многом дается в ду хе попу лярных
идей 3. Фрейда, др угое дело, что ав тор статьи о «Тайное тайных», вкладывает в свою
оценк у бол е е широкий смысл: «Всеволод Иванов рассказывает о господстве, о
неограниченной власти над челов е ком первоначальной жизненной стихии. Земля, пашня,
хлеб, работ а, инстинкт размножен ия и продолжения рода, женщина, ребенок, тоска по
любимой […] это и есть тайное тайных. Герои писателя действ у ют „ бездумно“,
„ бессознательно“, „ пону ждаются к тому могу чим инстинктом“». (Etkind, “Viacheslav
Ivanov”)
159
At the level of content for what would become codified in Socialist Realism, as in Tsement
(examined in Chapter Three), a characteristic trait of Socialist Realism is a poorly developed
interior world of the individual.
209
seems obvious (i.e., that childhood events follow into adulthood, relations with parental authority
becoming repeated in life, etc.). The second point is that Doctor Andreishin actually despises
Columbus because his anecdote illustrates a short cut to the excessively long process of analysis,
something parodied in the novel. Andreishin desires to keep the mystery of setting the egg
upright intact and thus celebrates the associations of the mind, however impractical they may be.
Ultimately, Andreishin is presented as a positive character, and his technique defends that “extra
space” inside the egg, that to eliminate the psychical space of emotions, words, symbols, and the
imagination—the stuff of literary activity and its “autogenetic movement”—would be injurious
to the new society. In this way, vulgar materialism gets critiqued in the novel with the image of
Columbus’s egg.
Valentina Brougher has convincingly shown how the rooster named Napoleon is a central
motif of the novel as a symbol of Stalin (the rooster is chased through the streets of Moscow like
the firebird within a dream of the narrator, remaining uncaught and uncatchable by all of its
denizens, “motivating” them to action).
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Furthermore, a reason that Ivanov kept the novel
hidden, aside from its open use of psychoanalysis, was that the proper name of Napoleon had by
that time become affiliated with madness, owing to well-known tales of mentally ill patients
proclaiming they were Napoleon.
161
These were tropes already well-established by Ivanov’s
time. Columbus’s egg, however, is the other side of this image, as a necessary space of the self in
160
Brougher shows that the dream of the rooster in the novel is a veiled allusion to Stalin, the
secretary handpicked by Lenin among other secretaries in the text. The rooster’s pose at the end
of the dream chase evokes the specter of Stalin overtaking and melding with the image of Lenin.
She describes how the 1920-30s press was overrun with mention of Stalin’s 50th birthday, their
focus on the eyes of Stalin connecting to the emphasis of the rooster posing in a suit, as wise, etc.
“The rooster, on the other hand, is continuing to lead [note the present tense of the verb of
motion vesti] the people as it dashes, struts and flies through the capital bursting with activity of
the first five-year plan.” (166)
161
See Jakobson’s article, “Ancient Myth in Merezhkovsky’s Napoleon.”
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which a representation of a wish can appear, an imaginary and signifying space produced from
the movement of drives.
This chapter will describe how the novel highlights the central role of language (and its
instability) in self-creation, personal transformation (like in psychotherapy), and the production
of the artistic text. Figures like Ivanov understood that language is the medium through which
societies and individuals are made and that it is ultimately impossible to restrict its associative
pathways, beginning with the simplest of letters, “ У.” Various associations generated out of this
letter make up the fabric of this text, whose central plot can be summarized by the question,
“who has the gold?” (U kogo zoloto)? I will look at three different theories of creativity
developed at the time, like Voronskii’s aesthetic, Vysheslavtsev’s theological, and Voloshinov’s
materialist varieties, the last of which posits language as the medium through which the
psychological self appears. Psychoanalysis was utilized by each of these Russian philosophical
positions, as well as in Ivanov’s novel. The novel ultimately shows how psychological interiority
became suspect in a socialist society and displays the processes of its negation and continuous
“turning inside out” at the level of form and content, yet Ivanov celebrates and defends its
irreducibility to either society or physiology.
Literary ulcers
When Nietzsche announced that psychology was queen of the sciences, he meant that the
newly-founded discipline of psychology would unite the knowledge attained by disparate
scientific fields into a singular truth of man—an idea carried forward by the materialist monists.
In some sense, Nietzsche was also announcing the exchange of a religious picture of the world
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with a future psychologically-informed Weltanschauung.
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(Not just any psychology, of course,
but one capable of filling out the void left behind by the evacuation of God—the ideal
psychology of the Ubermensch.)
As if taking the Nietzschean aphorism to heart, some writers began directly to refer to
psychological ideas in their work and producing, according to Osip Mandelstam, a “clinical
disaster” within matters of literature. “The ulcer of psychological experimentation has penetrated
into the literary consciousness; the prose writer has become a surgeon, and prose—a clinical
disaster” (Etkind, Eros 181). This may explain why Bulgakov, an author and physician who
would agree with this kind of literary anti-psychologism, kept psychology completely out of
Heart of a Dog, Master and Margarita, and many of his other texts. Mandelstam’s criticism
rightfully points to the risk of literature becoming a color-by-numbers scheme, as if some kind of
psychological guide can help one to write a novel. What is missed in his description, however, is
the potential quality of psychology to shed light on certain truths at the heart of being and to
inspire by way of new knowledge and wonder.
In his “The Psychology of Creative Work” (Psikhologiia tvorchestvo), Zamiatin draws a
distinction between major and minor branches of surgery, the minor being the application of
bandages and lancing of abscesses (his examples); the major, capable of carrying science
forward as such. “The same subdivisions, it seems to me, exist in art,” he writes. “There is major
art and minor art. There is creative work, and there is craft” (Zamyatin, A Soviet Heretic 159).
163
162
For Nietzsche’s influence in the Russian context, see Edith Clowes, The Revolution of Moral
Consciousness, which looks at Russian experiments to fuse Nietzschean thinking with
revolutionary utopianism.
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Ivanov’s literary trajectory after 1927’s publication of Armored Train 14-69 has been
critically appraised as the conclusion to his “authentic” creative period. This is the notion of
Robert Maguire, who writes: “By then [1927], Ivanov’s major work was over. Nothing he did in
the last four decades of his life matched, in quality or in influence, what he had written in those
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In some sense, Mandel’stam was speaking out against simple “craft” and the wholesale
importation of formulaic, external knowledge into literary activity, such as was practiced by the
proletariat writer groups. This type of artistic-creative behavior was, at best, a matter of very
poor taste and, at worst, a threat to “authentic” creative expression. In another sense, Mandelstam
was foretelling more drastic literary strictures to come, many of which were already appearing at
the time of Ivanov’s earlier writing. Ivanov wrote: “[…] после яростной критики цикла
“ Тайного тайных” поголовно все редакторы плотоядно искали в писаниях моих следы
Бергсона и Фрейда и не могли, при внешней приветливо сти, вну т ренне не относиться ко
мне отрицательно….)” (Ivanova 388). Neither confirming nor denying the accusations, we see
here that Freudian ideas played a role in Ivanov’s negative reception by critics. Written on the
occasion of his newly-born son, Viacheslav Vsevolodovich Ivanov, the novel Y may be
considered as a simultaneous piece of literary advice and a response to these hostile criticisms. In
some ways the novel displays the working of a kind of cunning of literary thinking, a literary
trick primed to fool both hostile critics and potential psychoanalysts who lacked the key to
uncover its true meaning. Furthermore, there is good reason to believe Ivanov attempted to push
the form of the novel forward in this highly experimental text, to pass from mere “craft” to
“creative work.”
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six years.” (Red Virgin Soil 146). However, this was written before the official publication and
wide knowledge (beyond samizdat) of the novel in question here. In other words, we are arguing
for the critical value in the creative potential and experimental nature of this novel.
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Y seems to have been composed in order to return the critical volley of those negative
appraisals given to Ivanov’s otherwise publicly successful earlier collection, Tainoe tainykh. The
manuscript of Y remained “in the drawer,” however, until it was published in the 1980s
following the author’s death. For finer details on the publication history of this novel, see
footnote 4 of Valentina Brougher’s “Vsevolod Ivanov’s Satirical Novel Y and the Rooster
Metaphor,” page 160. Brougher’s excellent study focuses on the Bergsonian elements of the
novel; whereas, we are focusing on the Freudian.
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The literary content—gold
The events begin with the historical destruction of Moscow’s Church of Christ the
Savior, directly witnessed by characters (described in a narrative comment of the “front matter”)
in the process of undergoing a collective transformation of identity.
Вы, наверное, помните этот год: ломали храм Христа Сп асителя. Это для
обывателя было, пожалу й, пострашнее, че м октяб рьс кий переворот. […]
Москва внезапно перекрасилась, как умывается человек ради какого- то
иного праздника, вредители каялись и строили у д ивитель ные самолеты,
домны,—и все- таки дл я обывателя было самое у д ивительное—разру шение
храма Христа Спасителя. Эт у громаду! Громада символизировала бога.
Золота на восемьсот тысяч рублей на купол е! Это вещ ь. [my emphasis]
Весь мрамором обложен,—когда вокру г Моск вы нет ничего, кроме
кирпичных заводов. Здесь- то обитал бог, и ег о прогнали, обнесли
сиреневым забором, взорвали. (Ivanov, U 17)
The literary dramatization of how old theology becomes replaced with new ideology is a
violent process that expresses itself at the level of landscape and city, the characters’
psychologies, everyday life (byt), and manifests at the level of language and textual form. In
reaction to the destruction, one of the characters, Savelii L’vovich, a reformed starets of the
church itself, proclaims: “ Наконец- то советская власть победила! В чем ее победа.” The text
literalizes the answer to Savelii’s question of where soviet victory is located: the gold stored in
the cupola of the Church is rumored to have been gathered, transformed into some other object,
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and lost.
165
This could be seen as a parody of the Soviet project of reforming the assumed-to-be
plastic human material. The search for gold thus parallels the metaphysical search for what will
be the psychological or social mechanism to transform ordinary people into New Soviet Men. In
this way, the many characters’ phantasmatic desires are mobilized and their ideological
compasses are tested against the destruction of the old moral code.
The central, embedded narrative is told from the perspective of Egor Egorich, a young
bookkeeper and worker on the grounds of a psychiatric hospital who befriends Doctor Matvei
Ivanovich Andreishin, a psychoanalyst. The latter invites Egor Egorich to be his assistant on a
journey to Berlin in order to present on a psychiatric case to be given against a rival psychiatrist
at an international congress of criminal psychology. The case, however, has yet to be solved, and
Andreishin insists that there is a Freudian explanation to what caused the breakdown and
institutionalization of the Iur’ev brothers, jewelers by trade, who are also suspected of stealing a
crate of gold watches that disappeared from their shop. Being a proper psychoanalyst,
Andreishin dismisses any criminal motivations and potential dissimulations, positing that the
jewelers’ malady—their “fleeing into illness” (begstvo v bolezn’ [30])—was psychogenic and
triggered by some unconscious association that ultimately could be traced to their childhood.
Following the clues, Andreishin deduces that the trigger must have been a woman who visited
them shortly before their collapse. If he could only get a glimpse of her (is she a blonde or a
brunette, significance only Andreishin knows, but that perhaps links to the color of the gold
cupollas, i.e., the jewelers’ illness is triggered by the association), he will have solved both
criminal and psychiatric cases in the span of an hour, still having two hours to spare before the
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There are several gold objects in the text searched out by the characters—a set of gold
watches, a golden crown made for an American emperor, golden buttons on a suit, etc.
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train leaves for Berlin. Attempting to uncover the mystery of the jewelers’ illness, Egor Egorich
embarks on a several-day quest with Andreishin, who is progressively beaten on the head by the
mentally ill occupants of House No. 42 in the Moscow city-region of “pogranichnykh sluchaev
maloi psikhiatrii,” which may be a reference to the Riabushinskii psychoanalytic center in
Moscow.
Egor Egorich and Andreishin become embroiled in another important plot to assist Leon
Ionovich Cherpanov, a high-functioning Party member who suddenly arrives in Moscow from
the Urals to conduct a search for denizens to populate the factory-city Magnitogorsk.
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As
Andreishin becomes increasingly more distracted by the brunette prostitute he has fallen in love
with at the house, Egor Egorich now draws to Cherpanov as his secretary, action taking up the
second half of the narrative. Cherpanov’s dealings are revealed much later to be a cover for his
band of Ural thugs’ (the Lebedevs) true motive—the recovery of a rumored crown made from
the gold of the Christ Church’s deconstructed cupola. Carrying forged orders “from the highest
authorities” under nine wax seals, among endless other documents in the many pockets of his
cyclist’s costume, Cherpanov enlists Egor Egorich’s help for recruitment and encourages the
latter with yet another ruse to locate what Cherpanov truly wants—not the golden crown but an
expensive foreign suit (kostium).
Cherpanov is transformed many times in the narrative and is a kind of psychiatrist in his
own right. He is based in part on Georgii Chelpanov, the founder of the Moscow Institute of
Experimental Psychology fired for his religious and anti-materialist views in 1923. The
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One of the funnier scenes is when Cherpanov interviews a procession of candidates to take to
the Urals, each revealing their psychological contents as gamblers, alcoholics, neurotics, or some
combination thereof, an impure material that Cherpanov is convinced he can transform by his
methods.
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Chelpanov connection is stressed by Andreishin, who may or may not be reading too much into
it, which is his function in the text:
Видали ль вы Черпанова? Отведай те его! Выдающийся homo. Уже
сочетание бу кв в его имени у к азывает на игру каких- то особых
обстоятельств. Сейчас он у п олномоченный по вербовке рабсилы дл я Урала.
А кто он был раньше? Ему двадцать два, но люди с такой ду шой рано
отрываются от сосцов (290).
Cherpanov, the psychiatrist, was in fact quite old when he was fired from his job, so the 22-year
old attribution does not fit. However, seen within the context of the novel’s dilation of time, this
would not be out of place.
Cherpanov / Chelpanov has since been reborn and requalified, admitting at a certain point
that he was found to be insane and cured by psychoanalysis (“ Он посыпал справки. —
Пожалу йста, вот даже по Фрейду и по всему. Все в порядке!” [ibid.]).
At this time, Ivanov was exchanging critical volleys from the members of RAPP, ruthless
in proclaiming the ideological shortcomings and deviations of their literary rivals. Cherpanov’s
stated age of twenty-two may be another guise, as it suggests that he is also based in part on
Leopol’d Averbakh, the young poet and figurehead, along with Yurii Libedinskii, of the October
group of writers, VAPP, RAPP and MAPP, discussed further below.
167
After he shaves his old-
styled moustache (a reference to Nietzsche, according to Etkind), Cherpanov presents himself as
a famous poet while visiting a factory.
168
167
Libedinskii grew up in the Urals, and the Lebedev connection in Y is a hint at these literary
polemics.
168
“ Поэт? Отлично. К нам давно МАПП обещал поэта прислать, да вот, говорят,
обождите до реконстру к ции вашего завода, а то грязь у вас невозможная, а поэзия
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Through most of the narrative, Cherpanov’s purpose is to find and transform the raw
human material into capable workers by way of his own brand of psychological suggestion, one
with a physiological cast. Andreishin and Cherpanov practice, as it were, two completely
opposed techniques of psychotherapy. The psychoanalyst’s intervention is through the word,
while Cherpanov uses the “psychotherapeutic method of the fist” in order to “requalify”
(perekvalifitsirovat’) the working class by pummeling them, including Andreishin, over the head.
Cherpanov’s method is much more expedient.
If Cherpanov represents the new rhetoric of the day, with promises of the instant
(mgnovennoe) transformation of life, Dr. Andreishin’s rhetoric stems from man’s cultural
heritage, from the older tradition of dialogue and discourse associated with Plato and
Aristotle. He discusses the eternal questions of life in the spirit of intellectual inquiry and
delights in clever repartee, showing off his vast learning. But in a kind of reverse
mockery of his intellectual smugness, Dr. Andreishin is shown to be blind in his own
way: he fails to recognize that his actions are subconsciously motivated by the irresistible
attraction that he himself feels for a prostitute. (Brougher, “Vsevolod” 161-62)
Furthermore, it is revealed that Cherpanov’s technique has not been learned from books. The
Lebedevs pass it on after they cure Cherpanov himself of hereditary alcoholism.
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Су дите сами: я пил, и пил зверски, поэтому — я долже н вам открыть — что
низвергну т был в бездну со всех постов, котор ы е до того занимал, и был я
библиотекарем в библ иотеке […] Дело это было тру д ное и без пьянства
наша требует су бъекти вного объективизма в отображении действительности.”
(Ivanov 94)
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Ivanov was known to have suffered from alcoholism, and his father may have been treated for
this in a mental hospital.
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невозможное, потому что совершенно безнадежно, книг было мало, и надо
было их повторять, у н ылые беллетристические измышления, и на таком
тру де многие спивались, и решили назначить ту да грамотных пьяниц, так
как считали, что даже, может быть, подобная работа вызовет известное
отрезвление. И вот пр иехали шесть Лебедев ых, стали думать, кого же
пу ст ить по психической работе, и тогда говорят, мы его вылечим, хотя он
наследственный алкоголик, для нас это даже и легче, мы предпочитаем
наследственные болезни лечить. […] Они приходят и говорят: ты, говорят,
ник у д а, Черпанов, от нас не выскользнешь, наши ку лаки тебя всюду найду т,
хочешь ли излечиться и приняться за психическ у ю обработк у общества?
— Мы, говорят, бу дем создавать рефлекс пьянства. За одн у рюмк у — у дар
ку лаком, но у дар ку лаком своеобразного характера, бу дет бить один из
шести, а есть разные — холодные, горячие, до крови, до икоты, и так как ты
бу дешь ждать и где бы ты ни пил, мы тебя везде достигнем и найдем.
— Излечили?
— В две недели всю наследствен н ость ру кой сняло, но с тела и со смелости
я спал. Дали мне тогда психическ у ю переделк у людей и направили сюда,
так как я пока планов не составил, собирать рабсил у и изучать каждого в
отдельности в его быту и составл ять на каждого психологическ у ю
ведомость. (Ivanov 246-47)
The novel seems to offer a not-so-thinly-veiled criticism of physical interventions into
psychological illness and matters of education. Ivanov seems to imply that the work of the Five
Year Plans, constructing utopia, needs to harness culture for its ends, which would square with
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the larger views of Lunacharskii, Voronskii, and Gorky at the Narkompros. Yet the novel does
not subordinate its views to the dominant ideological rejection of psychoanalysis, gaining
traction at the time. With its many flavors of the fist, the Lebedev’s expedient method works, but
it does so out of fear, intimidation, and physical violence—really, a fascist method. The
representative of the Party in the text, Cherpanov, will apply this method to the working class,
and so seems to be a critique by Ivanov toward certain parties.
However, Ivanov constantly leaves room to dissimulate his authorial intent, in that
Cherpanov turns out to be a Chichikov-like pretender, gathering souls for his own personal
profit, while true power is always obscured, hidden away within darkness. At this time, at about
1931, it simply was not clear what path the Stalinist ideology was carving between the Left and
Right Opposition. The parodic set-up and mockery of Andreishin’s own shortsightedness is
offset perhaps only by his earnestness and ultimate good will. He and Egor Egorich are
characters who do not much care about the valuable gold, and Andreishin’s hunch that the
jewelers are in fact not thieves proves to be correct (they are robbed by the Lebedevs), though
not in the manner he surmised. At the end of the narrative, Andreishin and Egor Egorich are the
only two figures not arrested by Soviet MUR agents, which reveals their overall positive roles.
Literary form overturned
Ivanov ultimately parodies psychoanalysis in the novel by turning it (“psikhoanaliz
psikhoanalizom”) onto its main representative in the text, Andreishin, a foolish trickster figure
blind to the realities going on around him, such as his own erotic attractions to a prostitute,
Susanna. In a telling scene with a phallic cigar, Susanna rebuffs Andreishin’s advances and a
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chamber pot is overturned on his head. Andreishin’s assistant, Egor Egorich (the Panza to
Andreishin’s Don Quixote), asks:
—А помойное ведро, Матвей Ива ныч, если р ассматривать, как символ...
—Вот и уч и профанов!
Доктор захохотал и, схватив тазик с полотенцем, выскочил.
Психоанализ психоанализом, но я испытывал такое состояние, как будто и
меня облили помоями. Нет, многие метафоры ценны именно как метафоры!
(Ivanov 59)
The symbol of a psychoanalyst with a chamber pot on his head is Ivanov clearly parodying the
way Freud’s method digs into the psychical dirt of his patients, that this dirt is always “on the
psychoanalyst’s mind,” becoming literalized in this scene. This is a central theme explored in the
novel, the mysterious process of the material expression of symbolic forms, the
transubstantiation of ideas into material reality, beginning with the de-materialization
(destruction) of the Church of Christ the Savior that bears out the loss of religion’s spiritual
efficacy. The immaterial value of religion is literalized in the gold of the church’s cupollas,
becoming a tangible object of desire for the characters, yet its constant displacement, fluxus and
movement, frustrates every character except Andreishin, who happily goes on with his
interpretations. As such, Ivanov can be seen as a dialectical thinker attempting to think through
the intangibility of ideology in this highly experimental novel. Let us turn to its form.
The novel begins with a dizzying reversal of the traditional novelistic form by flipping it
on its head, as it were, and displaying its critical apparatus (what is usually reserved for the end
of a text) for the reader in the first pages. The narrator (or, as he calls himself, the “compiler”
[sostavitel’]) explains why he has chosen to begin from the wrong end with a series of endnotes
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(kommentarii) and related commentaries (primechanii)—and to which he has appended a
novel.
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Because they are other peoples’ thoughts, so the reasoning goes, they must be good,
another parody by Ivanov of a naïve materialism. In terms of psychology, if mental life is
reducible to social interaction, then one’s own words are simply the words of another, so why not
have a novel comprised of other people’s commentaries of it. In the five pages of notes that
follow, without true correspondence to the text,
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references to novels like Sterne’s Sentimental
Journey appear next to those of history, philosophy, and to many figures that have been
discussed in previous chapters of this dissertation: Freud, Korsakov, Osipov, Pavlov, Bekhterev,
and “1700 other works” of psychiatry and psychology are mentioned in one of the notes (13).
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The notes connect with the peculiar type of psychodynamic therapy practiced by
Andreishin that can be seen as a play on the words razvratit’ (to turn inside out) and razvrat
(perversion). Аs Egor Egorich narrates, the analyst uses what he calls a method of “persuasion”
(pereubezhdenie) and “enlarged psychotherapy” (uvelichennaia psikhoterapiia) as the foray, by
way of speech, into the “subtle penetration into the psyche” (detal’noe uglublenie v psikhiku)—
an essentially parodic description of Dubois’s method of persuasion, psychoanalysis, and other
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“[…] сейчас же, воздвигая комментарии, мы хотим сказать: роман—романом, черт его
знает, удачный ли он, интересный ли, гру стный ли, веселый ли или просто чепуха на
постном ма сле, а комментарии—верное дело: мысли их чу жие, а, значит, и полезные,
можно их без вреда сообщить всем своим знакомым” (Ivanov 10).
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“ И вот, наконец, с гру с тью мы должны сознаться, что дал ьше в предлагаемой к ниге
напрасно люб ите ли то чности поищу т, соответственно пр имечаниям, подходящих
текстовых уст анов ок. Их нет! А если и найдутся похожие места, то они выросли сами
собой, и с тру дом вы вольете в них цитатные дрожжи. (13)
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Here is the note in its entirety: “ К стр. 200- й. — Д- р М. И. Андрейшин у поми нает тру ды:
E. Aster. “Grosse Deuker”; O. Binke. “Psychologiche Vorlesunger” (1919), “Alverdes
Tiersoziologie” (1929); Birn Kann. “Kriminalpsychologie” (1921), а также тру ды Ф рейда,
Кречмара, Ганну шкина П. Б. “ Психиатрия” (1924), Корсакова, Осипова В. П., Павлова И.
П., Бехтерева Б. М., Э. Крепелин, Н. Баженова, В. И. Яко в енко, в об щей сложности 1700
тру д ов.” (13)
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psychodynamic psychotherapies which inflate the psyche with the concept of the unconscious,
conceiving it as bigger or, even, more “exaggerated” (uvelichennyi) than the element of
reason/consciousness (um) alone. For example, Andreishin uses his method to cure Egor Egorich
of smoking:
[ О] н впивался часов на шесть в ваш у субъ ективну ю душевн у ю уст анов к у,
освещал ее с такой бесцеремонностью, что у вас дня два болели зу бы, и под
конец он самым тончайшим образом расчлен ял ваши психофизические
связи и механизмы. Я не поклонник — ни системы психоанализа, ни систем,
противопол ожных ей, я считаю, что, кто умее т лечить, то т пу сть и лечит,
даже смеш ивая в ку чу все системы мира. Поэтому одн а жды мне пришло в
голов у попросить д- ра Андрейшина “ переу б едить” меня ку рить
отвратительный табак. […] Он пр овел со мно й семнадц ать обстояте л ьных
собеседований, не счи т ая сл учайн ы х бесед на теннисе, на к у пании или при
игре в городки. Он натаскал и к себе, и ко мне гигантское количество
литерат у ры, я никак не предполагал, что о табаке могло быть столько на-
писано. Он доказал мн е совершенно непреложно, что табак знали и до
открытия Америки, причем, по дороге, два дня провел сражение с Хр.
Колу мбом, к которому он питал кру пну ю антипатию, считая его
симулянтом, лг уном и человеком самых низких моральн ы х качеств. Он
подошел вначале к табаку биол огически, ука зал на его наглу ю
жизнеспособность, затем направился к нему социально. Что здесь было!
Мне и сейчас страшно вспомнить те мин у ты, которые мне пришлось
пережить под канонадой его диал ектики. Как и е армии искалеченных и
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несчастных катились мимо нас! Какие сплетения недоразумений му чали
людей! Но все это оказалось п у стяками перед тем, что он обнару жил во мне,
особенно с патолого- сексу а льной стороны. Оказалось, чт о не зря я хож у на
рынки, вращаюсь среди отвратите л ьных продавцов и, особенно,
зажмуриваю глаза. Он заставил меня вспомнить, что еще в дв у хлет нем
возрасте я был склонен, если не к убийствам, то к насилию над своей няней,
во всяком сл учае. Моя жизнь представилась мне сплошн ым изу в ерством,
вокру г мен я создалась такая атмосфера, что я дико напу гался и у ме ня вдру г
обнару жились явные признаки отравления. (26)
Much of what has been described in previous chapters is here: the monistic quality of
psychoanalysis to straddle the materialist (biological) and the socio-cultural domains; the
dialectical nature of psychoanalytic interpretation, argued for by the Freudo-Marxists; but also
features that make it extremely suspect, like its orientation to the past, emphasis on sexuality and
violence (the drives) as primary motivational forces, its lengthy process and lack of expediency,
and, finally, the atmosphere of fear (at the self), which leads to the “cure.” The analyst’s hatred
of Columbus is also mentioned here, which has to do with the aforementioned anecdote of
Columbus’s egg, in which a “simple solution is available to a complex problem.” However, more
on that point below.
Andreishin’s quality of expansiveness is the conceptual opposite of reduction in matters
of psychology, and even though it produces (indirectly) a therapeutic effect in Egor Egorich,
Ivanov is parodying its impractical nature for the task of transforming society and, by
implication, these orders themselves. From a materialist perspective, the overemphasis on speech
by psychoanalysis can only produce more speech, when the point is to do. The expansive and
224
bloviating style of Andreishin is a direct contributor to the difficulty of the novel’s form as walls
of text rise before the reader.
This formal difficulty is a feature remarked on by Shklovskii, who wrote:
“ Необыкновенно сложно написанная вещь […] Стиль книги блистателен, но непривычен”
(quoted in Etkind, “Zhit’ u Kremlia” 634). Referencing Auerbach’s distinction between
hypotaxis and parataxis, Maguire has described Ivanov’s general style as “paratactical” in
connection to his other popular works, meaning that his narratives lack a cohesive and organic
sense of development, which is also true of this particular text, in which possible resolutions of
the novel’s many entanglements are constantly deferred, as characters pass through more
narrative bifurcations and digressions, frustrating the reader’s expectations up to the abrupt
ending.
173
Voronskii and creativity
Along with fellow-traveler poets Mikhail Svetlov and Mikhail Golodnyi, the literary
critic Aleksandr Voronskii was a member of the literary group The Crossing (Pereval), which
173
Maguire writes: “Ivanov’s treatment of character reminds us somewhat of early Kievan
literature, where personality attaches not to individuals but to the situations or institutions that
individuals represent—to princedom not to princes; to monkhood, not to monks. Each situation
carries with it a new set of requirements and attributes; and from an accumulation of situations,
the reader may piece together something like a picture of a person. Erich Auerbach has called
this a paratactical technique of characterization. In Ivanov’s work, however, such pictures rarely
take shape, because he uses the paratactical technique not to create personality, but rather to
destroy any possibility of personality. For him, men are hopelessly fragmented creatures, lacking
memory, incapable of learning from experiences, and unable to exercise any control over events;
they therefore act illogically, irrationally, and inconsistently. If sheer accident appears to play a
decisive role in their lives, that is because each new situation presents them with a totally
unexpected set of requirements, to which they must hastily adjust or perish. War makes the point
brutally clear; perhaps that is why it is Ivanov’s most effective setting. Men’s only sense of
reality, even of existence, hangs on their fidelity to circumstances moment by moment.” (R.
Maguire 137-38).
225
became linked to the journals Red Virgin Soil and The New World.
174
His famous phrase that
“Art is the cognition of life” joined aesthetics to personal psychology, and it reflected the view
that ideology was secondary to the artist’s ability to channel the spirit of the times. Voronskii
considered “the artist as an unconscious instrument of historical cognition, and for that reason
paid greater attention to literary style than to content or theme” (Kahn 530).
175
According to Maguire, “It took the discovery of Sigmund Freud to transform this
difference [between feeling and logic] into an articulate conceptual distinction. Among the
contributors to RVS, the first to use him was A. Lezhnev, whose definition of “inspiration,” in an
article of 1924, virtually paraphrased the idea of the dynamic unconscious” (Red 204). Thus, for
Lezhnev and Voronskii, who also referenced the concepts of “dead” and “living water” in a
novel as metaphors for true artistic activity, an appropriate theory of art needed to understand the
processes of intuitive psychosynthesis, rather than analysis.
174
Papkova describes the polemics between Voronskii and the Na Literaturnom Postu group of
proletarian writers (in an article ultimately focusing on Vsevolod Ivanov) in light of Voronskii’s
psychoanalytic interests: Несмотря на у т верждение Воронского, что «фрейдизм, как система
взглядов с марксистск им иск у сст воведением не совмест им», высказанное им в
программн ой статье «Фрейдизм и иск у сство», напостовцы видели в нем чу ть ли не
апологета фрейдизма. Тем более, что в той же статье содержалось и следу ю щее
положение: «… категория „ бессозн ательного“, или у ч ение о „ динами ческом
подсознательном“, не целиком, а частью, принадлежит к плодотворным гипотезам в
области индивиду а льной психологии»[…] Д ругое дело, что Воронский предлагал
смотреть на эти категории гораздо шире, нежели австрийский ученый. На протяжении
1924–1925 гг. возглавляемый Воронским жу рнал «Красная новь» пу блику ет статьи, в
которых у ч ение Фрейда комменти р у е тся до статочно подробно и сопровождается
следующими оценками: « В основе своей, как мы видим, этот вклад ( Фрейда в нау к у.–Е.
П.) глу б око родственен марксизму.” (Papkova 126)
175
In his role as editor of Krasnaia nov’, Voronskii was supported by Lenin and Trotsky (his
“most consistent supporter in the party” [Maguire, Art as the Cognition of Life xiii]), and
Voronskii would join the Left Opposition in support of Trotsky as the twenties ran on, leading to
his removal from publishing and eventually to his political execution a decade later. For more
details on Voronskii’s political activity, see Fitzpatrick, “The Soft Line on Culture and Its
Enemies,” esp. pp. 106-112, in The Cultural Front: Power and Culture in Revolutionary Russia.
Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
226
First of all, art is the cognition of life. Art is not the free play of fantasy, feelings,
and moods: art is not the expression of merely the subjective sensations and
experiences of the poet; art is not assigned the goal of primarily awakening in the
reader “good feelings.” Like science art cognizes life. Both art and science have
the same subject: life, reality. But science analyzes, art synthesizes; science is
abstract, art is concrete; science turns to the mind of man, art to his sensual (i.e.,
sensory) nature. Science cognizes life with the help of concepts, art with the aid of
images in the form of living, sensual contemplation. (Voronskii, Art 98)
Continuing the tradition of the organicist critics of the realist novel of the nineteenth
century, Voronskii’s definition of art echoed Potebnia’s idea that the artistic object produced its
effects with the help of images, or that “art is thinking in images.” Thus, in contrast to the
Russian Formalists (who we will look at more in the following chapter), Voronskii did not take
much note of the Russian “linguistic turn,” adhering instead to an older model of aesthetic
philosophy and classical Marxism that privileged the image for a view of art as a “form of social
consciousness.”
176
In this way, the psychogenic paradigm with its origins in the pathological
contemplation of images, hypnosis, and psychoanalysis, were proximate to Voronskii’s thinking,
as reflected in his interest in the latter.
The “main organ” of the artistic function was intuition, an idea Voronskii premised on
the Marxist idea that social existence determines social consciousness and that art is one of
several forms of social consciousness. “Basically, what Voronsky takes from Belinsky/Hegel,
176
On Alexander von Humboldt and Potebnia’s view of language in the connection to the image,
see Seifrid, 55: “[It] represents the constant creative activity of thought and therefore is the
expression of self-knowledge; speaking consists not just in producing articulate sounds but in
“thinking in words”; the word consists of an outer form and an inner content, the latter
originating in visual or auditory imagery.” (Seifrid 55).
227
Chernyshevskii/Feuerbach, and Plekhanov/Marx is dialectics, materialism, and the materialist
conception of history. This, however, is only a rough three-fourths of the picture. Voronsky does
not say it outright, but he is also a student of Sigmund Freud and an appropriator of
psychoanalysis” (David-West 2-3).
As the editor of the thick journal Krasnaia nov’, Voronskii published some of the first
articles on psychoanalysis after the revolution to a lay public and produced his own article
dealing with psychoanalysis and the creative process, titled “Freidizm i iskusstvo.”
177
While
ultimately negative in his own appraisal, Voronskii became influenced by the trend of
psychoanalysis and the concept of a dynamic unconscious was partly responsible for the
development of Voronskii’s aesthetic theory of artistic creation.
178
Social consciousness was imagistic in essence and Voronskii wrote about the “hidden
unconscious impulses in symbol-images.” “Voronsky turned ever increasingly to the psychology
of the creative process, examining the relationship of the subjective to the objective, and of the
social to the individual. In all these areas, many of Voronsky's ideas remain unfinished—we do
not know where he would have gone if he had not been silenced by Stalinism” (R. Maguire,
177
The full Voronskii citation is: Voronskii, “Freidizm i iskusstvo,” Krasnaia nov’, no. 7 (1925),
241-261. This text was a response to Grigoriev’s article “Psychoanalysis as a Method for
Investigating Imaginative Literature,” Krasnaia nov’. 1925, no. 7, pp. 224-241. There were
earlier articles on psychoanalysis within Voronskii’s journal. The proceedings of the Second
Psychoneurological Congress in Petrograd of 1924 published in Krasnaia Nov’ contained a
speech by Aleksandr Zalkind on the importance of psychoanalysis for Marxist psychology: G.
Daian, “Vtoroi psikhonevrologicheskii s’’ezd,” Krasnaia nov’, 2(19)(March 1924): 155-66, and
3 (20)(April-May 1924): 223-38. Also, see Zalkind’s own text in the same journal: A. B.
Zalkind, “Freidizm i marksizm,” Krasnaia nov’, no. 4, 1924. Zalkind’s article came on the heels
of Chelpanov’s expulsion from the Institute of Experimental Psychology.
178
Martin Miller states this relationship more emphatically. “Throughout the mid-1920s,
Voronskii advocated the usefulness of Freud's work for Soviet literature. As editor of the
influential literary journal Krasnaia nov’, Voronskii was in a unique position to present the
significance of the unconscious to writers and critics.” (Miller, “Freudian Theory” 626)
228
Red). This implies the idea, never articulated by Voronskii, that the unconscious, something
usually conceived as a personal and interior aspect of the psyche, is an external phenomenon.
Artistic truth was social in nature, and thus by the same token so was intuition (and the
unconscious) a form of unacknowledged social thinking—an example of the “turning inside out”
of psychological interiority.
The central division for Voronskii in terms of creativity is that between the Intuitivisty
and the Ratsionalisty that distinguishes between the activity of mere craft versus true artistic
creativity. Voronskii’s close associate, the literary critic Abram Lezhnev (who wrote another
article on Freud in KN), commented on various aspects of this division: “On our banner is the
victory of Mozartism over Salierism, of creativity over handicraft, of art over craftsmanship. In
the best case, Salieri has only dead water. It can force the parts which have been rent asunder by
analysis to come back together. But in order for art to live, to breathe, to move, one needs living
water. And only Mozart has this” (Voronsky xix).
Voronskii saw Ivanov as a central representative of his intuitivistic creative process, over
and above the mediocre, though relevant, work of Gladkov, and many of the rival criticisms
against Voronskii, such as his use of psychoanalytic ideas, also became directed at his main
exemplar, Ivanov. However, Voronskii never got beyond metaphoric explanations for how to
create authentic art. How does one become a Mozart? What is the source of living water and how
does one derive it? These metaphors perhaps can be answered only by more metaphors, as
Zamiatin’s blue light illuminates.
229
A ticket to the India of the soul
It is Heinrich Heine who first mentions the idea of risk in relation to the leap of faith
inherent to any authentic gesture of creativity, supporting any true artistic endeavor: “ Мы
искали физ ическ у ю индию, и нашли Америку. Сейчас мы ищем ду ховну ю индию, и что
же мы найдем?” (Geine 334) What is the “India of the soul,” and what does it mean to buy a
ticket there?
179
In Ivanov’s novel, the figure of Columbus, who missed India and discovered
America, evokes the surprises inherent to true creator endeavors.
180
India was perceived as a
privileged (Orientalized) place of original spiritual knowledge long before Ivanov wrote,
especially for the theosophists and mystics discussed earlier and, it should be said, in problematic
ways for the developing Nazi ideology.
Another possible answer comes up in certain schools of thought over psychoanalytic
technique. Mladen Dolar, one of the three members of the “Slovenian Troika” (with Zizek and
Alenka Zupan či č), describes the position of the analyst in relation to the analysand by way of the
Heinian idea of the “India of the soul.”
According to Freud’s notorious dictum, there are three impossible professions
where one can be certain of an unsatisfactory outcome in advance: government,
education and psychoanalysis. Those professions are impossible because they
179
Psychoanalytic experience provides an answer in the form of the payment given to the analyst
by the patient (to “purchase a ticket to ride”), which is actually inherent to the principles of
Freud’s original technique and may become important to interpreting the transference (issues
around payment frequently become material for analytic interpretation).
180
Also, take the following excerpt: “— Удивительно наблюдать, — начал он [Andeishin], —
когда уже открыт ы все новые земли, человече ство еще бредит Колу мбом. Пу тешествия
вдоль земли кончились, пора вглу бь, и недар ом хитрый Колу мб разбил яйцо. Он боялся,
что его забу ду т. И теперь он постоянно напоминает нам о себе. Мы разбиваем скорлу п у
планеты и скорлу п у наших чу вств. А он, древний, стоит подле нас и хочет нас увлечь
вдоль пространства…” (Ivanov 22)
230
presuppose and imply a relation of transference—they are based on a belief in an
‘illusory’ supposition, an unwarranted assumption, a necessary delusion; and even
though it turns out to be false, it nevertheless produces very palpable effects—just
as Columbus, acting on erroneous assumptions, nevertheless discovered America,
even though he didn’t get to where he wanted to go.[…] the paradox being that
this supposition, this unjustified conjecture, this belief in a presupposed
knowledge, can actually produce knowledge. Yet in order for the subject to
believe in this knowledge there has to be a moment of enjoyment which induces
his or her belief. It is this enjoyment, not knowledge, which is at stake in the
belief, while knowledge can be produced only by a longer, more torturous and
wearisome process opened up by belief. (Dolar xix)
Within the context of increased politicization of literary activities in the Soviet Union, we
can add publishing to Freud’s list of “impossible professions” as an unfortunate subcategory of
government. The “India of the soul” thus seems to be a disjointed space where a degree of
illusion is necessary in order to produce therapeutic activity and movement, or in this case,
creative (which amounts to the same idea) production. Because analysis is a technique of speech
and is in essence a special form of dialogue, the idea of the “ticket” implies that a necessary
asymmetry exists between patient and analyst, as between conductor and passenger, and author
and reader.
As discussed in Chapter Four, psychology itself came under threat within the
philosophical debates of the 1920s between the Mechanists and Deborinites (a debate in which
psychoanalysis was argued about at length), and would in the later 1930s be collapsed entirely
into Pavlovian theory of reflexes. The idea of creativity (tvorchestvo) became a rallying point for
231
different viewpoints that resisted physiological reduction of the psyche, debates that spilled over
into literary activity.
The vulgar materialist position in the Soviet debates over literature, with their attacks on
Formalism, had emphasized content over form, and Averbakh’s attacks on Voronskii and writers
like Ivanov were conflated with the general attack over Formalism.
At the time, however, this subjugation of literature to party ideology was defined
as ‘the primacy of content over form.’ Conservative art forms were promoted:
Proletkult and The Forge poets tried to inject proletarian pathos into the worn-out
poetry of late nineteenth-century populism, and RAPP prose-writers tried to
imitate Lev Tolstoy by replacing psychological complexity with a sense of ‘class
instinct.’” (Kahn 529)
Denunciations reached such a heated pitch that Zamiatin noted that the various literary
circles in Petersburg and Moscow had succumbed to an “epidemic of penitence,” with
submissive gestures to increasing attacks emanating from Averbakh, the On Guardists, and other
proletariat writing societies.
181
Ivanov seems to have doubled down on his artistic approach in
this counterattack of a text, and the novel is thus told in thoroughly Aesopian language, further
adding to its formal difficulty.
182
Vladimir Kaverin concludes his essay on Ivanov’s novel by pausing over the inherent
risk of having written such a strange, experimental work at a dangerous time. Quoting Tynianov,
181
“For a certain time, literary criticism was a virtual monopoly in the hands of the RAPP. A
carefully planned barrage was opened at individual prominent Fellow Travelers [sic] and entire
literary groups. The critical shells were invariably filled with the same standard gas: the charge
of political unreliability. This concept now included “formalist deviations,” “biological
deviations,” “humanism,” “apolitical approach,” and so on.” (Zamyatin 153)
182
On Aesopean language, see: Lev Loseff, On the Beneficence of Censorship: Aesopian
Language in Modern Russian Literature.
232
who had studied Heine extensively, he describes the paradoxical nature of literature to go beyond
its own limitations and conditions: “ Литерат у ра идет многими пу тям и одновременно—и
одновремен но завязыва ет многие узлы. Она—не поезд, который прих одит на станцию
назначения. Много заказов было сделано р у сск ой литераруе. Но заказывать ей бесполезно.
Ей закаж у т Индию, а она откроет Америку” (Kaverin 399). It is a peculiar conclusion to an
essay on a novel that was neither made to order nor published (Ivanov wrote this novel “for the
drawer” a few years before the decree on Socialist Realism would be announced), and which
reflects a compulsion to put words down on paper.
183
It also reflects a polyphonic understanding
and dialogic sense of literature, a vital multiplicity to the meaning of signs that, if Ivanov
understood this, displays resistance by its author to be bound to any decrees on literary
production.
The idea of the ideological sign as multi-voiced was developed by an early member of
Bakhtin’s circle, Valentin Voloshinov, who wrote: “The very same thing that makes the
ideological sign vital and mutable is also, however, that which makes it a refracting and
distorting medium. The ruling class strives to impart a supraclass, eternal character to the
ideological sign, to extinguish or drive inward the struggle between social value judgments
which occurs in it, to make the sign uniaccentual” (23). The following section describes
Voloshinov’s theory of creativity in connection to Ivanov’s idea of language.
183
The only section of Y that was published were a few excerpts titled “Sekretar’ bol’shogo
cheloveka” in Literaturnaia Gazeta, in 1933. Gorky’s secretary, Petr Petrovich Kriuchkov is a
potential reference to Egor Egorich, as noted by critics, who remark that in the manuscript
Ivanov accidentally replaced the initials EE with PP. Gorky is not necessarily the reference to
Cherpanov (the “bol’shoi chelovek”) as we have mentioned, since the text was written several
years earlier; however, it does seem Ivanov capitalized on the event of Gorky’s return to Russia
in 1932 for the publication of the excerpt, as Cherpanov is a character who also returns to
complicate matters in the narrative.
233
Voloshinov’s critique of psychoanalysis
An important development was mounting from another intellectual stream that perhaps
most productively fed into the discourse on psychology and creativity. Discoveries and epistemic
consolidation in linguistics put pressure on nearly every psychological and philosophical model
of subjectivity. The idea of an interior self, as posited by various schools of psychology and
spirituality, was interpreted as an idealistic manifestation, a product of the debates and
conclusions of the Psychologismus Streit that serious Marxist materialist philosophers did not
overlook. This was the positivistic atmosphere that led the Russian Formalists to share with
Marxists the de facto suspicion of all psychologies, due to the way they traced human activity
into some obscure interior source within the individual. Psychology as such was perceived as
holding to immaterial assumptions of some immeasurable and deeply internal, or simultaneously
and equally unacceptable, a transcendental node that was to be the source of subjectivity—in
short, an inaccessible black box that materialists of various stripes criticized as a central quality
of philosophical idealism. In the following passage, from his later work Marksizm i filosofiia
iazyka (1930), Voloshinov critiques two main opponents of his discourse model of
consciousness, the “all or nothing” perspectives:
Ideological creativity [this and following italics mine]—a material and social
fact—is forced into the framework of the individual consciousness. The
individual consciousness, for its part, is deprived of any support in reality. It
becomes either all or nothing. For idealism it has become all: its locus is
somewhere above existence and it determines the latter. In actual fact, however,
this sovereign of the universe is merely the hypostatization in idealism of an
abstract bond among the most general forms and categories of ideological
234
creativity. For psychological positivism, on the contrary, consciousness amounts
to nothing: It is just a conglomeration of fortuitous, psychophysiological reactions
which, by some miracle, results in meaningful and unified ideological creativity.
The objective social regulatedness of ideological creativity, once misconstrued as
a conformity with laws of the individual consciousness, must inevitably forfeit its
real place in existence and depart either up into the superexistential empyrean of
transcendentalism or down into the presocial recesses of the psychophysiological,
biological organism. (Marxism 12)
With Voloshinov’s concepts of the sign and ideological creativity, interiority became, as it were,
once more “turned inside out,” placed into society and social interaction. While Voloshinov
ultimately rejected psychoanalysis, scholars have nevertheless posited a significant influence on
Voloshinov’s system by the psychodynamic school, going so far as to say that Voloshinov’s own
Marxist theory of language was directly prompted by his close working through of
psychoanalytic concepts, which also directly negotiate with language and dialogue. As Titunik
writes:
In his book on psychoanalysis, published in 1928 under the title Freudianism,
Vološinov was even inclined to recognize the therapeutic effects of dialogue in its
role of verbalization of hidden mental complexes. As a matter of fact, Vološinov
felt that Freud’s attention to the role of language in psychoanalysis was a major
asset, while, at the same time, fundamentally disagreeing with the ideological
aspects of Freudianism. (Titunik)
Intellectual colonization by linguistics was a tendency influencing almost every field, except in
the Soviet Union, where Voloshinov and others’ work received much ideological resistance,
235
resulting in Stalin publishing his authoritative book on language. Linguistics impacted
psychoanalysis itself, which would in the 1930s undergo the first signs of its radical
transformation away from the drive model, bifurcating into roughly two branches. The first,
whose tendency was to eliminate the notion of internal drives developed in Britain with the work
of Anna Freud, Melanie Klein, Ronald Fairbairn, Harry Guntrip and others, known as the object-
relations school. The second and equally influential school was based on Lacan’s discourse
model of the psyche, and whose “return to Freud” introduced the developments of linguistics
into psychoanalysis (or, rather, aligned Freudian linguistic intimations and interests in speech
and representation with, chiefly, Jakobsonian linguistics). Lacan explains how linguistics was
always already present in Freud’s thinking, worth quoting in full.
Starting with Freud, the unconscious becomes a chain of signifiers that repeats
and insists somewhere (on another stage or in a different scene, as he wrote),
interfering in the cuts offered it by actual discourse and the cogitation it informs.
In this formulation, which is mine only in the sense that it conforms as closely to
Freud’s texts as to the experience they opened up, the crucial term is the signifier,
revived from ancient rhetoric by modern linguistics, in a doctrine whose various
stages I cannot trace here, but of which the names Ferdinand de Saussure and
Roman Jakobson stand for its dawn and its present-day culmination, not
forgetting that the pilot science of structuralism in the West has its roots in
Russia, where formalism first flourished. Geneva 1910 and Petrograd 1920 suffice
to explain why Freud did not have this particular instrument at his disposal.
(Lacan 676-77)
236
Lacan explains how Freud overlooked developments within linguistics in the formation of
psychoanalysis and gives credit to the Russian context as a crucial stepping stone in examining
the psychical ramification of the discourse model. As this thesis has already displayed, the
Russian context was deeply immersed in psychoanalytic thinking by 1920 and made contact with
early structuralism in Voloshinov’s linguistically-informed critique of psychoanalysis (Freidizm
1927).
Positing “ideological creativity” as the dynamic process between personal interiority and
extra-personal exteriority, Voloshinov affirms his methodological adherence to “materialistic
monism.”
184
Within the ideological horizon, he termed his model a “Socio-psycho-physiological
complex” (Voloshinov 47). Ivanov’s sophisticated literary style as reflected in the novel takes
qualities from Voloshinov’s concept of the ideological sign, which conserves the psychological
realm by emphasizing the role of language as the mediator between society, the body, and the
psychic self. For Voloshinov, variability is also inherent to the sign and subjectivity. The sign
has the ability to transform into many different meanings and may recover old significations
when the social context calls for it. The instability of Y’s form echoes the variability of the
characters, refracted in the variability of the letter “Y”.
A central symbol for subjective transformation that repeats throughout the text comes
from the famous story of “Columbus’s egg.” The story plays an important thematic role in the
text and does not represents the discovery of America as an already conventional metaphor for
the journey of self-discovery, but rather, crucially, a rejection of the idea of finality. Andreishin
184
Recall that Chapter Four took up how the discourse of psychoanalysis was thought to be a
missing link for a monistic conception of the psyche for Marxists like Luria, Vygotskii, Malis,
and others—figures critiqued by Voloshinov in the last chapter of Freidizm, published a year
before his Marxism and the Philosophy of Language.
237
has a very negative opinion of Columbus (“ Доктор, высказав несколько резкостей в сторону
Хр. Колу мба, катая по троту а ру яй цо”), and divides Columbus into two images, of the
explorer and the one of the anecdote of the egg. The egg is a symbol of the power of the word, as
it keeps everyone guessing the trick of how to make it stand up right, keeps the audience
engaged. For Andreishin, as for Ivanov, it is to get the egg to stand without recourse to
collapsing one of its sides. The narrator, who the reader is supposed to understand is an older
version of Egor Egorych, in fact admits that the style of the novel and his own method of
reasoning is influenced by Andreishin’s peculiar psychoanalytic Weltanschaaung—a flair for
making the experience of reading strange by his bloviating style: “Но что поделаешь, если
ясность и правда мышления, воспринятые несомненно мною от доктора, не позволяют
мне вычеркивать события, как бы архидетективно они ни зв у ч али и как бы они ни мотали
меня то ту да, то сюда, а читателя пу тали.” (Ivanov 95) Ivanov was a sympathetic reader of
psychoanalysis and understood its potentials for creative expression. The turning inside out of
the form of the novel, the critical apparatus opening the text that is mirrored in the episode where
Susanna puts a chamber pot on top of the psychoanalyst’s head, implies that criticism is the
detritus of true literary activity, of creativity. The formal mess of the novel nevertheless contains
a core content and message. In the last pages of the novel, Andreishin turns to Egor Egorich and
says, “ Мы, врачи, част о п у таем законы врачебной психологии с законами иск усства. С
точки зрения иск у сства герои достоевского все здоровы, он воздейству ет психологически,
а с точки зрения врачебной—больны, что доказывалось много раз. Точно так же и о
Шекспире. (Ibid. 262)” These final words of Andreishin pit the figure of the psychologist
against the author-artist, or better yet, draw a line of demarcation between two closely-related,
but separate disciplines, implying that literature and psychotherapy arise out of the same general
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trunk and, as it were, diverge as to the aims of their practices—the healing of souls and the
creation of art, practices that seek to enact transformation through language.
The novel implies that subjective movement, from the interiority of the writer, and not an
endless string of exterior critical references, is the true engine of composition. Experience that is
external to the author becomes interiorized, becomes the material from which the composition is
made, yet the text can never be a simple reflection of exteriority, as a realist mirror. In the words
of Voloshinov, the external material becomes accented as it is processed by the subjectivity of
the author; it is inflected by the drives of the author and takes on secondary aesthetic values that
elevate the text above both political and individual concerns, and into the haloed realm of art.
The Party’s attempts to control literature meant to control the very lever of the direction of
accent.
Vysheslavtsev and creativity
The religious philosopher Boris Vysheslavstev (1877-1954) was beyond reproach for the
Marxist debate over ideological materialism and creativity, as he was one of the intellectuals
expelled on Lenin’s philosopher ships. He is an important figure to consider in connection with
the psychoanalytic concept of drives and their relationship to “the ticket” of creativity, which
was central to his philosophical attacks against the materialists from abroad. Vysheslavtsev
developed his theory by linking human creativity (what he posited as the divine feature of man’s
freedom) to the body (plot’) by way of the Freudian conception of the drives (in Vysheslavtsev’s
terminology, erotiko-tendiruiushchie vlechenie/stremlenie). Thus, Voloshinov, Voronskii, and
Vysheslavtsev shared in a mutual interest in psychoanalytic ideas (precisely on the concept of
drives) despite the great distance between their ideological convictions. Vysheslavstsev’s
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thought contains a component of materialism, as he attempted to reconcile biology and scientific
knowledge in his spiritual and thoroughly Hegelian conception of the absolute. A key to his
philosophy was the questioning and reformulation of the psychoanalytic concept of sublimation,
which lay at the source of his ethical philosophy and conception of the process of
individuation.
185
Vysheslavtsev was the editor and preparer of the second, third, and fourth volumes of the
Russian translations of Carl Jung’s selected works, published abroad in Zurich from 1929-1939,
a task taken up and continued by him after the death of the poet Emilii Metner (Antonov f.n.
58).
186
In Eros and Creativity: The Philosophers and Freudians, Anna Lisa Crone has described
how Vysheslavtsev “made the ‘Christianization of Freud’ virtually his life’s project” by recasting
the psychoanalytic idea of sublimation in a spiritual light (2). He would do this two years before
Otto Rank developed a conceptual bridge between the drives and the art-work through
sublimation.
Vysheslavtsev is the author of the most psychoanalytical Christian theory of
creativity and therefore the pivotal figure in the fate of Freudian sublimation in
Russian religious thought […], whose contribution crowns and completes the
tradition that we have set out here. Vysheslavtsev is pivotal firstly because he
knew Freud, Jung, Adler, Rank, Baudouin and Coue better than almost all other
Russians of a religious persuasion, saw the genius of their work and admired
them. In his dialectic intellectual approach, he used traditional Orthodox
185
Vysheslavtsev wrote: “[P]recisely the fact that man includes within his make-up all the lowest
stages of being (chemical, sexual, etc.) makes his freedom creative freedom” (Crone 191).
186
In this way, it is inaccurate to label Vysheslavtsev as a Freudian; rather, he should be seen as
a follower of the mystical strand of Jungian “analytic psychology,” which he adapted to his
Orthodox spiritualism.
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Christianity with its defective theory of man as his thesis, the Freudian
unconscious and Freudian sublimation as their antithesis, and then used the
Jungian collective unconscious and Jung’s views of the creative and religious
man—to provide a new Christian synthesis at a deeper level. (Crone 189-190)
Vysheslavtsev’s The Ethics of Eros Transformed (Etika transformirennogo erosa, 1931),
published in Paris the same year Ivanov completed his novel, explicitly drew from
psychoanalysis and depth psychology to develop a spiritual theory of creativity.
187
Like
Voronskii, Vysheslavtsev utilizes the Dead Water and Living Water distinction, however, it is
done against the background of a critique of Marxist materialism as in his later, more targeted
attack in The Philosophical Poverty of Marxism.
If we consider the aspect of drive developed in the previous pages, the metaphor or image
we walk away with is something that is in constant fluxus, a dialectical conception, that is akin to
the Marxist (Deborinite) Voronskii. He conceives this element as flowing vitally like water,
however, with one of its aspects being “dead,” or impotent, and the other as “living,” bringing
something additional to the mix, a certain indefinable feature.
Greatly influenced by Jung’s concept of the collective unconscious, Vysheslavtsev
emphasized subjective interiority as also a process “turned inside out” by highlighting its
187
As Crone describes in her monograph: “Nevertheless, there were four major Christian
religious thinkers in Russia who considered all forms of higher human creativity to be a
sublimation of transmutation of the sexual instinct or drive. These were Vladimir Sergeevich
Solovyov (1853–1900), Vasily Vasil’evich Rozanov (1856–1919), Nikolai Aleksandrovich
Berdyaev (1874–1948) and Boris Pavlovich Vysheslavtsev (1876–1954). The first two advanced
a theory of sublimation similar to Freud’s before Freud first articulated his view in 1896, and did
so with no knowledge of Freudian psychoanalysis. The latter two thinkers knew Freud’s works
before they left Russia permanently in 1922, and they came to know psychoanalysis even better
while in Paris as they were there at the height of the impact of Freudian thought in the Western
world (1).”
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grounding in social exteriority and linking it to a transhistorical and universal moral principle. In
his seven-stage “hierarchy of the self,” he describes a multi-dimensional basis of the subject,
beginning as physical and chemical energy, and providing a link with matter that complexifies
along the higher steps. There is an interesting and relevant gap between steps 2 and 3: the living
energy of the biological body and the activity of cells (2) is followed by the collective
unconscious (3), which becomes the “soil” of levels 4, 5, and 6—the three stages of personal
consciousness. The collective unconscious is the foundation and matrix upon which personal
differentiation and development occur and is where the ideal of Christ lies for Vysheslavtsev.
The final step in this hierarchy (7) is the irrational superconsciousness of the “image of God
within the self” in which the spirit-matter opposition is overcome and the unity of the whole is
achieved.
When for Freud love for the Absolute (religion) and individualized love are
termed an illusion (a superstructure on a sexual base), when the only thing that is
not an illusion is ‘the sexual drive and its normal functioning,’ where do these
‘moral ideas’ (in Freud) come from which [Freud says] attempt to control and
direct the sexual drive and which carry out repression (Verdrangung), and those
which carry out sublimation? In Freud’s system those forces do not exist. Thus we
have, as Max Scheler indicated, a vicious circle: all higher moral feelings are
reduced to sublimated sexuality and, on the other hand, the sublimation of
sexuality is explained by a ‘morality’ which by its prohibitions represses the
sexual drive and directs it to moral tasks. But what moral tasks are these? Where
is up and where is down? This naturalism can never answer. (Crone 209-210)
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Crone alights on Vysheslavtsev’s criticism of Freud as a biological reductionist and emphasizes
the Jungian components of Vysheslavtsev’s psychodynamic spiritualism. Here, an opposite
tendency can be noted, as well as a limit, to Freud’s blurring of Hume’s fact-value distinction, as
mentioned in the introduction. Recall Paul Ricoeur designation of the Freudian concept of drives
as one that crosses between domains of separate discourse. However, we have been arguing that
Freud went beyond the merely physiological by his continued focus on linguistic phenomena.
Reading Vysheslavtsev against Voloshinov, it seems that the former posits a particular
moral code into the superstructure (a step always resisted by Freud), a moral code that is
universal and timeless, unable (or unwilling) to ultimately take account of its social
determination.
Conclusion
In a novel that certainly puts the “mental” in ornamental prose, the collapsed space of
Columbus’s egg is a symbol of narrative closure. It is death itself, final stability, and the closing
off of narrative possibility—the reason why the expansive and life-loving Andreishin loathes
Columbus. Ivanov’s novel argues for preserving this mental space as an ethical position, a stance
also taken by the narrator toward his son, the one with ample head room, the “ большеголовый
Вячеслав, у!” Literature is the practice of expanding this interior space and the reader is
encouraged to keep it open if we are to continue to dream of a better society.
On April 23, 1932, the formation of the Union of Soviet Writers by resolution of the
Central Committee decreed all independent literary groups closed (surprisingly, also including
those like RAPP), casting artistic literature as a de jure extension of the voice of the party
(Dobrenko 146). With about 50 other soviet writers gathered at the home of Gorky on October
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26, 1932, Stalin infamously pronounced that writers were the “engineers of human souls”
( инжинеры человече ских ду ш). Ivanov was in attendance at this house, as was Averbakh, and
Ivanov may have appreciated the historical background of Gorky’s new lodgings, the
Riabushinskii osobniak, more than his literary rival. The Schechtel-designed house on Malaia
Nikitskaia was an Art Nouveau architectural site appropriated by the state and which went
through several different institutional transformations. Its original inhabitants, the
Ryabushinksiis, were a famous family of textile manufacturers, who funded the artistic group
Zolotoe Runo and were well-known for their vast collection of Old Believer icons. A section of
the house was designed to store their precious collection and there was also a chapel in which
some of the rarest religious artifacts were displayed. Following the October Revolution, the
house went through a series of transformations. For the first half of the 1920s, it was the site of
Moscow’s psychoanalytic institute, a state-sponsored psychoanalytic laboratory, and an
experimental children’s home. The nature of this site can be seen as a kind of architectural
palimpsest on which the major historical strokes of the turbulent period were written and
rewritten. When Gorky returned to Soviet Russia in 1932, his house became the major gathering
place for authors and politicians, being the place where the 1934 decree on Socialist Realism was
finalized and announced at the Congress of Soviet Writers, officially crushing the dynamic and
vital activity of many creative artists, like Ivanov.
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Section III (Drives and Aesthetics)
Chapter 6
“The Fairer the Paper the Fouler the Blot”: Tynianov’s Podporuchik Kizhe as a Literary
Link between Russian Formalism and Psychoanalysis
[Names] signify nothing but the Ideas, that are in the Mind of the Speaker […]
—Locke
Имя твое — птица в ру ке,
Имя твое — льдинка на языке.
Одно- единственное движенье гу б.
Имя твое — пять бу кв.
—Tsvetaeva
As described in the previous chapters, the influence of psychoanalysis on Russian and
Soviet intellectual life has been well documented and can be roughly divided into two decades
preceding and following 1917, each characterized by a centralized institution and publishing
arm. What has received less attention is the fertile contact Freudian thought made there with
Russian Formalism. As Galin Tihanov writes in a recent study that situates Formalism within
intellectual history: “To locate Russian Formalism properly, we also need to look at its close
typological proximity to contemporary intellectual developments that occupied the stage in the
years around World War I. A very important relation to classical psychoanalysis emerges here”
(31). This chapter will further sketch this regime of relevance (which, however, Tihanov does
not pursue at length: “a point on which I do not dwell” [1]) by examining passages of Shklovskii,
Jakobson, and Tynianov, with a particular literary focus on the latter’s text Podporuchik Kizhe
(1928), which will serve as the literary case study. This parodic historical novella (povest’) is full
of allusions to psychoanalysis, may in fact be read as a kind of analysis of Emperor Paul I,
though this is of course never directly stated. To give the main examples, PK begins with a
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disturbing dream of the mentally ill Emperor Paul I, describes several decisive “slips of the pen,”
contains the strong thematic presence of symbolic Eros (Amur, in the text), reverses Oedipal
tensions between son and mother (Paul’s hatred of his mother, Catherine II), and is also an
exemplary case of what we will describing in this chapter as a speculative “onomastic drive.”
Perhaps offering a too-easy reading in psychoanalytic terms, PK must be seen as a work of
parody, expressing much of Tynianov’s own theoretical work on the genre of parody within the
practice of literary production. I will argue this text was likely informed by (though went
beyond) what were already by that time psychoanalytic clichés, exemplifying direct Formalist
engagement with psychoanalysis. Thus, this chapter will describe several important links
between Russian Formalism and classical psychoanalysis before moving on to a reading of PK.
The link between Formalism and psychoanalysis appears at first in their surprising
disconnection, as Formalism eschews any reference to psychology (or the interior world or
motivations of the author) in favor of a close study of devices, meaning-generating structural
differences between words, or figures of speech, making up the curved surface of literary form.
We will navigate these (dis)connections by way of three interpretive interventions related to the
concept of drives: certain passages of Viktor Shklovskii, Roman Jakobson, Tynianov, and others.
Tynianov’s text can be read as a pure example of a textual onomastic drive—a name that “acts”
without a person, rendering the bracketing of psychology by Formalist methodology as such and
rendering it into literary content. In this sense, Tynianov can be said to have crafted a tale that
allegorized the Formalist approach to literature. Kizhe is a paradoxical subject endowed with
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personhood but who lacks a person, a kind of Gogolian “dead soul” who is less than dead, but
who, despite a lack of material form, has palpable material effects.
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Formalism between the psychological and social
The relationship between Formalism and psychology is summarized succinctly by Boris
Eikhenbaum, who wrote that “contemporary poetics is characterized by a desire to use the
methods of linguistics in order to get rid of subjective-psychological interpretation [my
emphasis] and make the analysis of poetic texts objective, morphology-based” (Eikhenbaum 13).
At the conclusion of the Psychologismus-Streit, a series of debates that gave birth to logical
positivism in philosophy, Formalism is usually described as decisively falling to the side against
psychologism, as it tried to ally itself to the methodological procedures of the natural sciences,
logic, and mathematics, meaning that it had to evacuate the psychological subject from its field
of study, the literary text. In her highly informative monograph Psychomotor Aesthetics, Ana
Hedberg Olenina, however, has convincingly pushed against this idea, arguing how this was not
necessarily so clear-cut, as the subjective dimension persistently snuck its way back into
Formalist thinking.
Olenina highlights this discrepancy in light of the phonemic nexus at the place between
the physical and mental—the “psychomotor”—as something that seems to reach beyond the
surface play of formal difference:
Most readers today may find it surprising that Shklovskii and other Russian
Formalists would consider the choice of phonemes in a poetic text as motivated
188
Tynianov was conducting a deep study of Gogol at the time of conceiving PK, examined
below.
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by the workings of the poet’s psychology. This idea seems to suspend the axiom
that language and literary style are purely a matter of convention. The latter tenet
is typically perceived as fundamental for the Formalists’ exploration of the
intrinsic laws of literary evolution. Yet we may recall that Shklovskii’s colleague
Roman Jakobson, toward the end of his career, would ponder over the issue that
‘there is a latent tendency for the sounds to be congruent with their meanings’ and
claim that ‘such correspondences are very often built on the phenomenal
interconnection between different senses— on synesthesia.’ Likewise, the linguist
Lev Iakubinskii, whose essay “On the Sounds of the Poetic Language” (1919)
Shklovskii published in one of the first Formalists’ collections, went to great
pains to explain that the arbitrariness of the sign is true of the everyday,
“practical” language of communication, but it may not apply for the poetic
language. (Olenina 13-14)
189
A constructive approach to grasp this problem further (which will become increasingly relevant
for reading Kizhe) would be to consider it from the viewpoint of the complex status that the
proper name has held in the history of philosophy and linguistics, its particular salience for the
Russian Modernist intellectual context, and direct relevance to literary studies.
189
As we mentioned in Chapter One, in her wide-reaching study, Olenina does not dwell on
psychoanalysis, though offers many brief asides on psychoanalysis in her introductory chapter:
[T]he scientific trends highlighted in these chapters are non-Freudian. My exclusion of
psychoanalysis is not intended to dismiss or mis-characterize its tremendous influence on
Modernist culture or, indeed, to disregard overlaps between Freudian approaches to bodily
movement and certain experimental practices I have described in Psychomotor Aesthetics. In
shifting attention away from psychoanalysis in this book, my goal is to spotlight lesser known
discourses, which existed alongside Freudianism and frequently—but not always—presented
themselves in opposition to it. (Olenina xxx)
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The onomastic device
In the history of ideas, perhaps the first extended discussion on names comes from
Plato’s dialogue Cratylus, which stages a debate between Cratylus and Hermogenes on the truth
or “correctness” of names. The point of contention between Cratylus and Hermogenes is the
division between natural and conventional names. For Cratylus, names are “appropriate to their
objects insofar as they describe them,” whereas for Hermogenes, names are arbitrary, as nothing
more than labels established by social convention.
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The famous rediscovery of the Cratylus
during the Enlightenment by John Locke is characterized by Michael Ragussis as occurring
simultaneously with the emergence of the genre of the novel (4-5). Generally speaking, the
novel, with its deep focus on representing individual, psychological experience within the world,
appears at the same time as the advent of scientific discourse that searches for the general names
for things (i.e., categories). Locke attempts to resolve the debate of the Cratylus of whether
names are natural or conventional by denying that words transmit the reality of things, displacing
meaning from the object or individual to the mind. Locke pronounces the famous dictum that
names “signify nothing but the Ideas, that are in the Mind of the Speaker.” As Michael Ragussis
writes, “[Locke] argues for the conventional nature of names by explaining the way in which we
come to have general terms when all things are particular: communication would simply be
impossible if everything had its own name.” (Ragussis 4)
From the point of view of novelistic discourse, the mistake in the Cratylus (according to
Ragussis) is that it draws no essential distinction between the names of things and the names of
persons; when Socrates, in the first part of his argument, defends the natural meaning of names,
190
For a further discussion of Plato’s Cratylus, see Jonathan Culler’s introductory chapter to On
Puns.
249
he employs a method of etymological analysis that renders all names the same, so that, for
example, “air” is etymologically deciphered as “the element which raises things from the earth,”
while in a similar vein “Agamemnon” is deciphered as “admirable for remaining”—a useful
description, but one that remains at the level of description. This mistake inhered in Locke’s
Essay (and the philosophic tradition that derived from it), in that it neglected the essential quality
of proper names—their sonic distinctiveness. In other words, philosophy seeks general names for
things and ideas, while fiction seeks proper names, for individual persons. (5)
191
To put this issue in the terms used by the Formalists and Olenina, the proper name
contains a kind of internal limit, in which we can sometimes glimpse a phonemic nexus between
“word and nerve” that has characterized much of the scholarly divisions on this topic. In their
fascinating essay, “Myth, Name, Culture,” Lotman and Uspenskii designate this limit by positing
the difference between what they call mythological and nonmythological (descriptive) thinking.
They make a striking claim: modern languages appear to display vestiges of an entirely different
linguistic system (and mode of thinking) buried beneath it like an ancient ruin.
The world is matter. The world is a horse. One of these statements belongs to a
definitely mythological text (The Upanishads), whereas the other can serve as an
example of a text of the opposite type. In spite of the outward formal similarity of
the given constructions, a fundamental difference exists between them. (211)
191
The Polish author Bruno Schultz intuited this phenomenon when he wrote in “The
Mythologization of Reality”: “The unnamed does not exist for us. To name something means to
include it in some universal meaning. The isolated, mosaic-type word is a later product, is the
result of technique. The original word was an hallucination circling the light of meaning, was the
great universal totality. The word in its colloquial, present-day meaning is now only a fragment,
a rudiment of some former, all-encompassing, integral mythology. For that reason, it retains
within it a tendency to grow again, to regenerate, to become complete in its full meaning”
(Schultz).
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The statement “The world is a horse” functions as a mythological description of a world lacking the
concept of logical categories—a qualitatively different idea of the significance of proper names than
either that of Cratylus (descriptive) or Hermogenes (conventional). The objects of this world are
(1) of the same rank (without hierarchy),
(2) regarded as integral wholes,
(3) and occur only once (212-13).
As a consequence, they write, the idea of metaphor is unavailable to mythological thinking, its
distinguishing feature, the world being not metaphorically like a horse, but isomorphically the
horse—The Great Horse. They consider mythological-type thinking as inherent to the origin of
culture itself, vestiges of which are retained in the habits of thinking of children and operating to
an extent in archaic forms of literature like folklore and parody where usage of the redende
namen appears most widespread.
192
They write, “the sign in mythological consciousness is analogous to the proper name”
and “mythological space is filled with proper names” (213; 216). In mythological consciousness,
the word is equal to the thing itself; thus, if a thing is not named, it does not exist, and if two
objects are named with the same word, they must be the same object.
If for the nonmythological consciousness some objects can be classified as
belonging to one class, for the mythological consciousness these objects will be
considered one and the same object. The mythological consciousness does not
allow for any logical hierarchy of objects, it perceives any object as unique.
192
In Totem and Taboo (1919), Freud makes a similar point in the final chapter, “The Return of
Totemism in Childhood.”
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Therefore, for this type of consciousness, the sign is equivalent to a proper name.
(Semenenko 42)
In mythological thinking, all signifiers act as proper names, having a direct connection to their
objects, being their referents. Such was the common understanding in ancient warfare, offered as
one example in this essay, of not only murdering the king of the enemy, but proceeding to
eliminate the entire clan, which shared in the proper name. The individuals of the clan were not
perceived by mythological thinking as members of a species, elements within a set, but as a
singular entity. Lotman and Uspenskii hypothesize that modern languages retain a layer of such
thinking, sensed in some usages of proper names.
193
It should be clear that the idea of the totemic
word being equivalent to the thing it named is a complete departure from the Saussurean concept
of the “arbitrariness” and “differential” nature of the signifier.
194
193
This relates to a crucial question for translation: how to carry across a proper name from the
source to the target language and simultaneously retain the identity of the character? If we
subscribe to mythological-type thinking, the identity of the individual is in the distinctive sound
of the name, this is why Lotman and Uspensky argue that proper names are not translatable
(219), an idea echoed in the work of Sir Alan Henderson Gardiner, an Oxford philologist and
Egyptologist. For Gardiner, a proper name is always distinguished by what he termed “sonic
distinctiveness,” the unique sounds, and not potential “meanings,” comprising the proper name.
This distinctiveness makes the proper name immune to literal translation. “This notion goes
along with the considerable shock and dismay that one feels when trying to translate the proper
name of a character from one language to another by a literal translation of meaning: e.g., Louis
Brasfort for Louis Armstrong; Oliver Pierre for Oliver Stone; or Sigmund Joy or Sigmund
Pleasure for Sigmund Freud(e)” (Himes, Power 199).
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As the psychoanalyst Mavis Himes explains in The Weight of the Proper Name, Freud
described many similar vicissitudes of this special linguistic element: “In psychoanalytic terms,
the proper name has both theoretical and clinical implications. According to Freud (1913), names
may take on particular significance in the unconscious of certain individuals. In Totem and
Taboo, he discusses some of the anthropological studies linking nomenclature and totemism. For
example, quoting Max-Muller, he writes, ‘A totem is a clan mark, then a clan name, then the
name of the ancestor of a clan, and lastly, the name of something worshipped by a clan’ (p.110);
or quoting Pikler, he writes, ‘Mankind required both for communities and for individuals a
permanent name which could be fixed in writing…The core of totemism, nomenclature, is a
result of the primitive technique of writing’. The relationships between name and totem thus
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In Tynianov’s Podporuchik Kizhe, a narrative is constructed out of the philosophically-
complex notion of the proper name, which was an element in modernism that many artists
utilized for artistic effect. This in part can be seen in the modernist experiment of Ivanov’s У,
which literalizes metaphorical speech as part of the state-building project under Stalinism,
though the focus of this text was on a singular letter.
Karaul!
In PK, the titular “character” appears slowly, as if out of the abyss in the imagination of
the conspiratorial Adjutant, when he first conceives that the royal crime of yelling “Karaul!”
should fall squarely on Kizhe’s shoulders. Tynianov subtly describes this process of association.
Так началась жизнь подпору ч ика Киже. Когда писарь переписывал приказ,
подпору ч ик Киже был ошибкой, опиской, не более. Ее могли не заметить, и
она потону ла бы в море бу м аг, а так как приказ был ничем не любоп ы тен, то
вряд ли позднейшие историки даже стали бы ее воспроизводить.
Придирчивый глаз Павла Петровича ее извлек и твердым знаком дал ей
сомнительную жизнь—описка стал а подпору ч иком без ли ца, но с фа милией.
Потом в пр ерывистых мыслях адъ ютанта у него наметилось лицо, правда—
едва брезж у щее, как во сне. Это он крикну л “ карау л” под дворцовым окном.
Теперь это лицо отвердело и вытя ну лось: подпору ч ик Киже оказался
злоу мышленником, который был осу ж ден на дыбу или, в лу ч шем сл учае,
кобылу—и Сибирь. Это была действительность.
establishes a kinship tie that links the individual to the clan, and in this way, to ancestral
lineage.”
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In flashes of insight while pondering the scribe’s mistake, the sound-quality of the “ki” and
“zhe” generates a face in the Adjutant’s mind’s eye. Then, one after another follow the details—
Kizhe’s persona, crime, and punishment.
This passage bears many of the traces of Tynianov’s 1921 study on Gogol and
Dostoevsky, in which the process of imaginative association deriving from a name recalls
Tynianov’s term for Gogol’s method of artistic composition, by generating and negotiating with
what he terms slovesnye maski, which Tynianov posits as Gogol’s overarching device.
“ Основной прием Гого ля в живописании людей—прием маски. […] Маской мо жет
сл у ж ить пр ежде всего, одежда, костюм ( важное значение у одеж ды у Гоголя при описании
нару жност и), маской может сл у ж ить и подчеркн у т ая нару жность (11). Gogol’s characters
become frozen grimaces formed by the magnification of some part of the whole that begins to
move through and generate the plot of the story. What is more, in his creative evolution, Gogol
slides further from unfolding associations out of elements of description to that of pure sonic
distinctiveness. “« Акакий Акакиеви ч», где слов есная ма ска потеряла уже связь с
семантикой, закрепилась на зв у к е, стала зв у к овой, фонетической (12).
Tynianov relates an anecdote by Count Obolenskii of Gogol’s uncanny ability to generate
a living description of a person from the sonic distinctiveness of a name:
Гоголю достаточно знать словесн ую маск у, чтобы тотчас же определ ить ее
движения. Кн. Д. А. Оболенский разсказывает, как Гоголь создал маск у и
движения на словесно м у зн ак у: “ На станции я нашел штрафн у ю книгу и
прочел в ней довольно смешн у ю жалобу какого- то господина. Высл ушав ее,
Гоголь спр осил меня—А как вы думаете, кто этот господин? Каких свойств
и характера человек? — Право не знаю,—отвечал я.—А вот я вам
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разскаж у.— И ту т же начал сам ы м смешным и оригинальным образом
описывать мне сперва наружность этого господина, потом рассказал мне
всю его служебную карьеру представляя даже в лицах некоторые эпизоды
его жизни. Помню, что я хохотал, как сумасш едший, а он все это выделывал
совершенно серьезно.” […] фамилию, как словесн у ю ма ск у, Гого ль
преобразил сначал а в маск у вещн ую ( нару жность), а затем последов а тельно
создал ея движения (“ выделывая”) и сюжетную схему (“ сл у ж ебн у ю
карьеру” и “ эпизоды”). Таким образом, и жесты и сюжет предопределяются
самими мас ками. (Tynianov, Dostoevskii, 13-14)
Shklovskii also homes in on such peculiarities of the proper name. The sonic distinctiveness of
the proper name can be connected to the proto-linguistic flux that the Zaum poets attempted to convey in
their writings, and what the Symbolist and Formalist thinkers attributed as stemming from the “elements
of emotion,” inspired by what Potebnia called the “inner form of the word” (vnutrenniaia forma slova),
or the sound-image (zvukovoi obraz), insisting in the initial phase of the creative process of composition.
Shklovskii’s reference to the proper name in the following passage quoted by Olenina will become
increasingly more significant later on this chapter:
One of the examples that Shklovskii gives to illustrate “the gestation of a sound
image” out of emotion is a passage from Knut Hamsun’s novel Hunger (1890): “I
stopped and stared at her face to face, and on the spot a name came to me I’d
never heard before, a name with a smooth nervous sound: Ilayali.” What seems to
interest Shklovskii here is the way in which the intensity of the encounter and the
impression that the speaker receives from watching the woman’s face get
converted by his consciousness into sound. A new word is born, and its
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significance is closely linked to the speaker’s subjective experience of the
situation. Shklovskii emphasizes that “Ilayali” does not have a definable meaning;
it encompasses the whole complexity of psychic responses that the speaker is
living through and thus is not reducible to any clear-cut image. “Ilayali” is pure
innervation translated to mental sound. (Olenina 24)
Some psychoanalytic connections with Formalism
Commentators on Russian Formalism have too quickly deduced Shklovskii’s rejection of
psychoanalysis based on a few passages, such as the following passage within his essay on Belyi
in O teorii prozy.
195
Не ну жно увлекаться биографией ху дожника, он пишет, а потом, ищет
мотивировок. Меньше всего ну жно увлекаться психо- анализом. Психо-
анализ анал изир у е т душевные тра в мы одного человека, а один человек не
пишет,—пишет время, пишет школа- коллект ив. (211)
The Formalists, by attempting to create an objective science of literary analysis, rightfully
viewed the psychological dimension of the author with suspicion, which it is true Shklovskii may
have perceived as being represented by the psychoanalytic school of literary criticism, most
likely practiced by Ermakov, Osipov, appearing in various texts of Freud (such as his
psychobioraphical readings of Dostoevsky, Jansen, etc.), and other members of his circle.
196
195
Bely famously loathed psychoanalysis, which was a direct competitor to Rudolph Steiner’s
Anthroposophy. A scandal relating this link is described in a chapter of Poetry and Psychiatry:
Essays on Early Twentieth-Century Russian Symbolist Poetry by Magnus Ljungrenn.
196
The most famous example of the psychoanalytic approach to literature in Russia at the time
was I. D. Ermakov’s studies of Pushkin and Gogol, especially his reading of Gogol’s “Nos” and
“Shinel’”. See Donald Young, “Ermakov and Psychoanalytic Criticism in Russia.”
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Shklovskii, however, was a complex and contradictory thinker. This passage, frequently used as
evidence of Shklovskii’s position against psychoanalysis,
197
on a second approach reveals that
Shklovskii does not deny the effectivity of clinical psychoanalysis in treating one person, does
not reject psychoanalysis as such, but rather in a proto-Barthean way sees an author’s literary
activity as channeling something beyond the limits of personal biography, something essential
from her linguistic inheritance and community. This also implies the introduction of a social
element, curiously that which Formalism, attempting to delineate its territory, also is commonly
seen to reject on the basis of methodology, and for which the Soviet critics would persistently
hound it. As will be demonstrated below, psychoanalysis itself contains a prominent tendency of
giving close attention to form, a method of close reading derived from specific techniques used
to analyze the words and expressions of the patient in, for example, recounting the experience of
a dream, always however with the objective of moving beyond form. This means that it too can
be conceived apart from the psychobiographical approach and the speculative statements on the
true motivations of an author.
Furthermore, the passage above should be aligned with another comment: “I am no
socialist, I am a Freudian,” Shklovskii wrote, “…Russia has invented the Bolsheviks like a
dream,…the Bolsheviks themselves are not to blame for appearing in the dream.” (Shklovsky,
Sentimental’noe 76). This statement was perhaps meant as more of a provocation than a
pronouncement of loyalty by an experimental thinker who at this time was composing a highly
original and non-linear blend of fiction and memoir. Shklovskii’s stated interest was owed more
likely to the theory’s timely radicality. In a few short but turbulent years, he would publish
197
See, for example, Jessica Merrill, The Role of Folklore Study in the Rise of Russian Formalist
and Czech Structuralist Literary Theory.
257
“Isskustvo kak priem”, and later O teorii prozy (1929; “Isskustvo, kak priem” appeared in 1917,
1919, 1925), which was an attempt to develop a scientific approach to literary study premised on
three main principles: to evacuate the psychological dimension (of the author) from
considerations of textual meaning, to undermine Potebnia’s priority of the image as the primary
component of literary effects, and to reframe literary aesthetics in terms of the relationship
between his concept of automatization by way of estrangement (ostranenie).
As Gerald L. Bruns writes in his introduction to Shklovskii’s Theory of Prose (the
English title to a translation of Isskustvo kak priem),
Russian Formalism is not Structuralism. Its method is historical research rather
than the analytical construction of models. Structuralism raises itself on an
opposition between system and history, structure and event; Russian Formalism
defines itself not against history but against psychology [ital. mine]. The
difference between Formalism and Structuralism lies in the way the singular is
preserved in the one but erased by the other.” (xi)
According to Bruns, Formalism appears against the background of the rejection of
psychology, and yet in Sentimental Journey its foremost practitioner claims that he is a
psychoanalyst. How to square the two? The only correct answer to be offered is that
psychoanalysis is not psychology, or is of another nature psychological. Psychoanalysis is not
psychology because it derives its data from the dual nature of the clinical situation, its
hermeneutic principles arising from the dynamic interaction of analysand and analyst, akin to the
relationship between reader and text, as something dynamically produced to be interpreted.
While being skeptical of the direct application of psychoanalysis onto literary terrain,
Shklovskii does not reject it outright as a practice on its own terms, possibly with some salient
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devices he could poach. The various turns of thought described in Freud’s texts such as Jokes
and their Relationship to the Unconscious and The Psychopathology of Everyday Life can be
sensed in Shklovskii’s study, which we can tease out by focusing on those places where the
psychological component reappears.
For example, Shklovskii’s presentation of automatism is developed against the
background of unconscious motivation and has much affinity with the Freudian pleasure
principle, the idea that internal tensions result in psychic discharge following the path of least
resistance.
If we examine the general laws of perception, we see that as it becomes habitual,
it also becomes automatic. So eventually all of our skills and experiences function
unconsciously—automatically. […] It is this process of automatization that
explains the laws of our prose speech with its fragmentary phrases and half-
articulated words. The ideal expression of this process may be said to take place
in algebra, where objects are replaced by symbols. In the rapid-fire flow of
conversational speech, words are not fully articulated. The first sounds of names
hardly enter out consciousness. In Language as Art, Pogodin tells of a boy who
represented the sentence “Les montagnes de la Suisse sont belles” in the
following sequence of initial letters: L, m, d, l, S, s, b. […] This fact also accounts
for much discord in mankind (and for all manner of slips of the tongue). In the
process of algebrizing, of automatizing the object, the greatest economy of
perceptual effort takes place. (Shklovsky 5)
In an uncanny way, these passages from “Art as Device” sound like Freud’s pronouncements on
the psychic apparatus’s main tendency of maximizing pleasure and avoiding pain in the
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satisfaction of unconscious drives. (It could be that Shklovskii’s “economy of perceptual effort”
is akin to Freud’s hypothesis of the “economy of psychic effort” because they arise from a
common source, in the work of Fechner, Mach, and other mechanical energetics models.
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)
In what way is the notion of automatization not psychological, however, if we consider
that Shklovskii uses psychological scenarios that recall hypnotic states or trances for explanatory
purposes? In other words, actions that are unconscious, a term with a long history far predating
Freud who nevertheless did the most to popularize it. Shklovskii’s famous example illustrating
automatization comes from a personal anecdote told by Tolstoy wherein the author forgets
whether he has swept or not (coupled with a discussion of a literary text, “Kholstomer”), which
distributes automatization between the literary and psychological/personal. Olenina notes the
same discrepancy that was also noticed by Vygotskii:
One thing is certain: as Shklovskii’s contemporary, the psychologist Lev
Vygotskii remarked, had the Formalists completely eschewed the role of
psychology for aesthetics, they would have run into a dead end trying to explain
how estrangement—a striking new sense of the object’s palpability—occurs in the
artist’s or his addressee’s perception […] Vygotskii points out that in explaining
the function of art, the Formalists rely on psychological theories— for instance,
Shklovskii’s idea of estrangement, or deautomatization of perception, at its core
relies on particular theories in psychology of perception. (16 and f.n. 44)
Shkovskii breaks the principle of psychological motivation in a passage discussing
creativity in chapter 2: “[A] work of art also contains an element of creativity, a force of will
driving an artist to create his artifact piece by piece as an integral whole. The laws underlying
198
See Birken, “Freud’s Economic Hypothesis.”
260
this creative will must be brought to light.”
199
Once again, Shklovskii resorts to Tolstoy, who
elaborates on the origins of the character Andrei Bolkonskii by denying any personal,
psychological motivation: “Andrei Bolkonsky is no more than a character created by a novelist.
He does not represent the writer’s personality or his memoirs. I would have been ashamed to be
published if all of my work consisted of nothing more than copying a portrait from life, or
discovering and remembering details about people. I shall endeavor to say who my Andrei is
[…]” (41). Tolstoy’s remarks illustrate that his compositional choices and concerns are aesthetic,
rather than psychological or referential to life, and yet something unsatisfactory remains. It is as
if in creating his characters Tolstoy is pulling from a box of ready-made concepts, knowing
exactly what the final product of the narrative is to be, following a kind of schematic. Any reader
of Tolstoy, or any other great piece of literature, can sense the organic unity of the work that
arises from a palpably dynamic quality of discovery as the characters and events reveal
themselves, which works because it necessarily parallels and emerges from the process of
discovery the author herself makes during composition. To be generous to Shklovskii’s position,
it would seem he begins from the literary and, despite himself, expands out to the psychological,
rather than making a move (barred on principle) from the psychological to the literary. In the
process, he preserves the autonomy of literary activity, paid for by the price of not being able to
explain how a text is spontaneously generated.
There are several more relevant examples that can be mentioned in connection to
psychoanalysis, apart from the ubiquitous presence of a split psyche undergirding automatization
and defamiliarization. Shklovskii’s discussion of erotic tales and riddles (which operate by
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We have examined some of the aspects of creativity (a “creative drive”) in the previous
chapter, with Voronskii concluding that psychoanalysis served an informative role in a
theoretical conception of this tendency.
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“repressing” the signifiers for genitalia in exchange for those of prosaic objects for effects of
“erotic estrangement”; 18-19, 69, 143), discussion of the myth of Oedipus (52, 58-59), the use of
dreams (175), a reading of Rozanov’s slips of the pen (examined further below), the onomastic
device, and others. Consider the following passage on the vicissitudes of literary evolution
(Tynianov’s term that can be readily applied here), repressing narrative clichés into the
background only to be resuscitated by later authors: “[The] outlawed themes continue to exist
outside the literary canon in the same way that the erotic anecdote exists to this very day or in the
way that repressed desires exist in the psyche, revealing themselves unexpectedly in dreams”
(191). These and various other excerpts resonate with well-worn psychoanalytic terminology.
Thus, Shklovskii’s is not a space sterilized of the psychological or psychoanalytical. “A
literary work is pure form,” Shklovskii writes. “It is neither thing nor material, but a relationship
of materials. And, like every relationship, this one too has little to do with length or width or any
other dimension. It’s the arithmetic significance of its numerator and denominator (i.e., their
relationship) that is important” (189). This highly original formulation housed in the device, or
figurative language, is the Formalist move par excellence. It is a restating of “difference”
decades ahead of its time, and deserves all due credit. Without a psychological component to
animate the text, which keeps encroaching upon Shklovskii’s discourse, whether in its creation
or reception, the picture one leaves with is a dead text that asks to be filled in, an object for
analysis struck lifeless on the table of literary criticism (such is some of the criticism levelled at
Vladimir Propp’s algebraizing functions, which removes all specific content [like names] in the
analysis, evacuating the specificity of deeply socially- and culturally-embedded phenomena like
folk tales). This foregrounds the major conceptual distinction of psychoanalytic approaches from
Formalism and structuralism, or to go even further, from deconstruction. While admitting the
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“play of difference” between signifiers or figures of speech in generating the form of a text,
discourse, or cultural phenomenon, psychoanalysis posits the real presence of an irreducible and
traumatic kernel as the cause of these phenomena, which is also named the drives.
As stated in the introduction, the attention Shklovskii paid to this school of thought came
from the fact that psychoanalysis was closely allied with Shklovskii’s central concern—the
description and study of literary “devices,” mechanisms, or functions.
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On the one hand,
Shklovskii’s approach can be compared to the development of the behaviorist school of
psychology taking place at this time, which denied the psychodynamic model, and strove to hone
in on the directly perceivable elements, the observable behaviors of the subject. And yet, as
discussed in Chapter Two, behaviors frequently lie. The outward signs of behavior conceal that
which the psychodynamic model, which also must rely on observable phenomena but in a
qualitatively different mode, attempts to reach beyond. Shklovskii seemed to understand this idea
beyond an intuitive level.
His method of close reading inevitably caused controversy with the Soviet authorities
who accused Formalism of the opposite tendency—stripping the work from its historical context
and embeddedness in social relationships, the hallmarks of a Marxist and socio-historical
philosophical view (examined in Chapter Four). Formalism evacuated any psychological
principle from its conception of the literary text and separated the text from any interaction it had
with the public, the primary concern of the social critics of previous generations who, like
Belinskii’s famous “organicist” criticism (aimed at Nekrasov), placed the worth of art and
200
This grounding of psychoanalysis was also precisely what drew G. Stanley Hall, the founder
of American psychology (he opened the first experimental psychological lab in the United
States), to psychoanalysis, leading Hall originally to invite Freud and Jung to Clark University in
1909.
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literature in its capacity to aid social and political emancipation. Put another way, for Formalism,
the arguments behind the Psychologismus Streit resulted in an important conceptual contribution
for literary criticism, the ability to elevate literary activity to a scientific status at the price of
disassociating it from the motivations of the author (psychology) and society (politics). “It is
from this that comes the inoffensive character of art, its sense of being shut up within itself, its
freedom from external coercion” (189). And yet the text has to be coerced from inside the author
to exist.
Rozanov and Freud
Shklovskii’s concern with Rozanov in the essays collected in O teorii prozy is especially
illuminating for his interest in psychoanalysis. Shklovskii fully quotes an endnote from
Opavshye list’ia that illustrates the psychic division that announces itself with slips of the pen.
Curiously, this passage contains a typographical error that may be intentional on Shklovskii’s
part, reproduced in most versions of this text. Rozanov’s words:
“ Несовпадение вну т ренней п [sic] внешней жизни, кончено, знает каждый в
себе, но в конце концов с самых ранних лет (13-ти—14- ти) у меня эт о
несовпаден ие было до того разительно ( и тягостно часто «сл у ж ебно» и
«работно»—глу б око вредно и разру шительн о), что я бывал в посто янном
у д ивлении этому явлению […]” (238).
The sense of the “misalignment of internal and external life,” deeply felt by Rozanov as a child,
is the condition of his motivation to note meticulously the time and place of his contradictory
observations and free associations (время и обст ановка записей), in order to catch the precise
reason for the constitutional misalignment. Why, in other words, an unconscious? Shklovskii,
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quoting this passage, adds the observation: “ Все это примечание помещено в «Опав. лист.» на
стр. 525 после списка о печаток; здесь мы видим обычный прием Розанова: помещение
материала на необычн ое место.” (238) In no uncertain terms is Shklovskii gesturing to
psychoanalysis here, foregrounding Rozanov’s incredible intuition of its basic principles.
As Etkind writes:
Человек необыкновенной инт у иции, Розанов чу вствовал гораздо бо льше,
чем он мог знать, а литерат у рный дар и легко с ть письма позволяли ему
переносить тру д нопост ижимые озарения в пользу ющиеся успехом книги.
„ Тело, обыкновенное человече ское тело, есть самая иррациональная вещь на
свете", — писал он в 1899 году. Одна из основных его идей, параллельная
мысли Фрейда, состоя ла в радикальном расширении понятия „ пол" ( Розанов
не у потреблял слова „ секс") и сведении мног их остальных областей жизни к
„полу" в этом его всео хватывающем значении. Человек для Розанова „ весь
есть только трансформация пола", су щество „ страстно дышащее полом и
только им, в битвах, в пу ст ыне, в отшельничестве и аскетизме, торговле...”.
Пол телесен и ду ховен, он источник и святос ти, и греха. „ Связь пол а с
Богом — большая, че м связь ума с Богом, даже чем связь совести с Богом".
Вне полового в человеке нет ничего су щественного. „ И даже когда мы что-
нибу д ь дел аем или думаем, хоти м или намерены якобы вне пола, „ ду ховно",
даже если что- нибу д ь замышляем противопол овое — это есть половое- же,
но только так зак у танн ое и преобр аженное, что не узнаешь лица его", —
писал Розанов в книге со странным названием „ Люди лунного света.
Метафизика христианства". (Etkind)
265
Rozanov’s near-obsession with the “sexual question” is what drew many to call him the “Russian
Freud” (and the “Russian Nietzsche). In 1916, Vyacheslav Polonskii, known later as editor of
Novyi Mir, described his appreciation for Rozanov’s writings by their attention to the overlooked
elements of everyday life, of byt—his writings a “hymn to byt” and his ideology a “fetishizm
melochei,” many passages of which resonate with Freud’s The Psychopathology of Everyday
Life. Of great significance for Rozanov was also the myth of Oedipus, mentioned by
Shklovskii.
201
In Rozanov’s article on Dostoevsky (whose wife, Polina Suslova, he married after
Dostoevsky’s death), he quotes the author and comes close to describing the drives:
“ Счастье дл я каждого—исполнить свое хотенье; не разумное, не благородное, не
полезное для него по высчитыванью чу жих соседей, всемирных филантропов или
всемирных у м ников, а вот именно только свое и именно хотенье, да еще,—шеп ч ет
он,—с разными почесываньями...’ И совсем на ухо вн ушает: ‘ В почесываньях’— то
все и дело. Каждому хоч е тс я по- своем у почесаться, и иногда так, что вслу х он ни за
что не скажет...” (Rozanov “Oslabnuvshii fetish”)
Finally, Shklovskii’s many references to the proper name is what this chapter will focus on.
Jakobson and the aphasias
Roman Jakobson’s essay “Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic
Disorders” describes the damage caused by the aphasias (forms of brain damage that affect
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“In Russian literary criticism, Rozanov sometimes has been compared with Freud. Andrei
Sinyavski ,however, contrasted the two. As opposed to Freud, who was an atheist, Rozanov
attributed paramount significance to sex as a signpost in life, something that might be identified
with God; thus, Rozanov deified sex, whereas Freud sexualized religion.” (Etkind, Eros 44)
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language operations like speaking, writing, and reading) as distortions of the subject’s abilities to
construct metaphors and metonymies.
The Russian novelist Gleb Ivanovi č Uspenskij (184-0-1902) in the last years of
his life suffered from a mental illness involving a speech disorder. His first name
and patronymic, Gleb Ivanovic traditionally combined in polite intercourse, for
him split into two distinct names designating two separate beings: Gleb was
endowed with all his virtues, while Ivanovic, the name relating a son to his father,
became the incarnation of all Uspenskij's vices. The linguistic aspect of this split
personality is the patient's inability to use two symbols for the same thing, and it
is thus a similarity disorder. Since the similarity disorder is bound up with the
metonymical bent, an examination of the literary manner Uspenskij had employed
as a young writer takes on particular interest. (112-113)
The mechanisms that Freud describes making up the dreamwork from the day’s residues are the
processes of “condensation” and “displacement,” sketched in a famous passage of the
Interpretation of Dreams. In his essay on the aphasias, Jakobson equates Freudian condensation
and displacement with the fundamental poles making up the poetic function and, moreover,
every activity of linguistic communication and processing—the axis of selection and the axis of
combination.
A competition between both devices, metonymic and metaphoric, is manifest in
any symbolic process, be it intrapersonal or social. Thus in an inquiry into the
structure of dreams, the decisive question is whether the symbols and the
temporal sequences used are based on contiguity (Freud’s metonymic
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“displacement” and synecdochic “condensation”) or on similarity (Freud's
“identification and symbolism”). (113)
One of the key examples of Jakobson’s discussion of aphasias centers on Gleb
Uspenskii’s problematic disposition to language (leading to his rapid decline and eventual
psychotic break), reflected in the features of his literary production. Jakobson states this was a
largely unconscious process that operated primarily in a metonymical mode due to some
apparent damage to the substitutive, metaphorical pole of language (112-113). Jakobson posits
Uspenskii’s progressive disintegration of personality to the hypothetical existence of a
physiological lesion that would correspond to the decline of his ability to make metaphors—a
potentially localizable place in the brain ruling the function of the paradigmatic / selective /
metaphoric pole, and thus to the processes of Freudian condensation and displacement.
A detour on the drives
The elements of a dream may be a good illustration of mythological thinking and its lack
of the concept of metaphor, resembling what Freud termed the primary process, the drives, and
as described aptly by the philosopher Paul Ricoeur:
At a certain point the question of force and the question of meaning coincide; that
point is where instincts [drives] are indicated, are made manifest, are given in a
psychical representative, that is, in something psychical that “stands for” them; all
the derivatives in consciousness are merely transformations of this psychical
representative, of this primal “standing for.” To designate this point, Freud coined
the excellent expression Reprasentanz. Instincts, which are energy, are
“represented” by something psychical. But we must not speak of representation in
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the sense of Vorstellung, i.e., an “idea” of something, for an idea is itself a derived
form of this “representative” which, before representing things—the world, one’s
own body, the unreal—stands for instincts as such, presents them purely and
simply. (134-135)
The random occurrences of sensory experience throughout waking life (that have imprinted in
what Freud calls “residues”) form the content of the dream into a composite and “meaningful”
image, or sequence. However, the drive is not stricto sensu meaningful at this point. It is a
persistent pulsion, and random, though perhaps because of this it is adaptive and potentially
meaningful. For Freud, the primary process only takes on meaning when its experience in the
subject is rendered into a secondary, linguistic signification, as in analysis, when a dream is
(re)counted and organized according to the linear, because uttered in time, chain of speech—the
“secondary process.”
In the section “Marx, Freud: the Analysis of Form” in The Sublime Object of Ideology,
Žižek describes the usual misrepresentation of Freud’s theory of the dream, the process of
translation from the “latent” to the “manifest content,” which can be used to constructively read
the dream that opens Podporuchik Kizhe.
In both cases [Marx’s commodity form and Freud’s dream work] the point is to
avoid the properly fetishistic fascination of the ‘content’ supposedly hidden
behind the form: the ‘secret’ to be unveiled through analysis is not the content
hidden by the form (the form of commodities, the form of dreams) but, on the
contrary, the ‘secret’ of this form itself. The theoretical intelligence of the form of
dreams does not consist in penetrating from the manifest content to its ‘hidden
kernel’, to the latent dream-thoughts; it consists in the answer to the question:
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why have the latent dream-thoughts assumed such a form, why were they
transposed into the form of a dream? (3)
The crucial difference that the argument rests on is triple: it is precisely how the “unconscious
desire at work in the dream” reveals itself in the relationship between manifest content (the text)
and the latent thought, which is “an entirely ‘normal’ thought which can be articulated in the
syntax of everyday, common language […] the subject is usually aware of it, even excessively
so; it harasses him all the time…” (4) This is a feature of Paul’s dream in Tynianov’s fictional
text.
The story begins with a persecutory dream where Paul trembles at the arrival of a soldier
he fears is coming to finally assassinate him, from whom he hides under a table and utters,
“Nous sommes perdus...[Мы погибли ( фр.)]—закрич ал он хрипло жене из- под ст ола, чтобы
она тоже спряталась. (1)” The scenario illustrates the simple appearance of the latent thought
within the manifest content, the text of the dream rendered into speech or writing. Paul is
perfectly aware of the fact that he is paranoid, that he has been sequestering himself in more rigid
means of defense against real (and imagined) foes. This is no secret. From the time of his
childhood, he has known that he has enemies who want to kill him, like his mother, and that he
should be on guard. He is conscious of this, and the text clearly reflects this knowledge when the
dream provides his wish-fulfilment: the assassin is a friend who announces the death of his
mother.
Herein, then, lies the basic misunderstanding: if we seek the ‘secret of the dream’
in the latent content hidden by the manifest text, we are doomed to
disappointment: all we find is some entirely ‘normal’—albeit usually
unpleasant—thought, the nature of which is mostly non-sexual and definitely not
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‘unconscious’. This ‘normal’, conscious / preconscious thought is not drawn
towards the unconscious, repressed simply because of its ‘disagreeable’ character
for the conscious, but because it achieves a kind of ‘short circuit’ between it and
another desire which is already repressed, located in the unconscious, a desire
which has nothing whatsoever to do with the ‘latent dream-thought’. (5)
In this light, the phrase Paul utters deserves a second look, in that the French “Nous sommes
perdus” is intentionally distorted by Tynianov—a work of the devices of condensation and
displacement.
202
The definition of Perdu: 1) out of sight; in hiding; concealed, as in military
ambush, is also 2) a soldier on a very dangerous assignment. It also maintains in “pain perdu,”
or French toast, literally “lost bread,” or the stale bread that would have been tossed away but
has been repurposed to make a sweet and aromatic dish, widely consumed at the time.
The central issue of Podporuchik Kizhe is not that a fake person appears on the stage, but
that Emperor Paul’s real personal problem has become the problem of everyone else, a weight
that has grown unbearable by the time of the action of the story. Kizhe can be seen as merely the
outward symptom of this larger complex. More accurately, Kizhe is one side of the complex,
sharing this privileged status with Podporuchik Siniukhaev, deleted from symbolic reality by a
slip of the scribe’s pen and finding himself in the impossible position of being dead—the mirror
image of the “birth” of Kizhe and its other, hidden side.
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“The relationship between the ‘latent thought’ and what is called the ‘manifest content’ of a
dream—the text of the dream, the dream in its literal phenomenality—is therefore that between
some entirely ‘normal’, (pre)conscious thought and its translation into the ‘rebus’ of the dream.
The essential constitution of dream is thus not its ‘latent thought’ but this work (the mechanism
of displacement and condensation, the figuration of the contents of words and syllables) which
confers on it the form of a dream.” (Zizek 4-5)
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Paul’s adherence to Prussian military discipline at all levels of society makes him into a
representative of formal structure itself. The empire is described as a machine unfolding from the
center of power, symbolized by a clock gifted to the emperor by, significantly, Marie Antoinette.
Также часы, подарок Марии- Анту анетты, стояли на яшмовом столе. Часовая
стрелка была золотым. Сату рном с длинною косой, а м ину тная—амуром со
стрелою. Когда часы били полден ь и полночь, Сату рн заслонял косой стрел у
амура. Это значило, чт о время побеждает любовь. Как бы то ни было, часы
не заводились.” (6)
The center is characterized by extreme sexual intensity, of simultaneous pleasure and violence,
split between the symbolic rose and cream-colored wallpaper and by the potential of violent
outburst glimpsed in the animal maws and claws of the statuary, one of which, a lion, the
emperor resembles.
As one throws away bread (Pain perdu), Paul will do the same to Kizhe, the
phantasmatic soldier of “French” extraction.
203
Kizhe is prepared in the parodic manner of
novelistic clichés of the hero: stripped of his rank, ordered flogged, marched to Siberia, but then
on second thought as the stale bread is recycled into French toast, is pardoned, promoted,
decorated, gifted a lavish estate, and married off in a truly sublime ceremony upon a lover who
jilted Paul. Paul’s unconscious in the dream, if one can say, has sent him a message from the
future, in order to watch out for something. Like the front-facing side of a flat disc, Kizhe,
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“Он не родственник Олс у фьев у, граф. Полковник Киже из Франции. Его отец был
обезглавлен чернью в Ту лоне.” (20)
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propped up by the amorous attention Paul gifts him, hides the figure who should have occupied
his trusted place, the glib Siniukhaev, for whom symbolic orders are real physical facts.
204
Thus, the dream prophetically “stages” the entire narrative in another place, outside the
bounds of its symbolic reality. Kizhe is pure plasticity. He is wind. He is dust. He is a punished
nobody stripped of his title and he is a nobleman occupying a luxurious estate. As such, he
becomes the perfect vessel of pleasure to occupy Paul’s changing moods and represents the pure
play of formal difference, allowing the conspiracy to manifest right under the emperor’s nose.
Kizhe is counterbalanced by Siniukhaev, the truly innocent victim of the emperor’s
repressions, and who will return when “the clock strikes midnight” (what has been repressed in
the symbolic returns in the real).
205
His aimless wandering (brodiachnichestvo) traces the
circular motion of a clock’s hand in ever-narrowing circles to the center of power.
Он не разбирался в направлениях. Но эти направления можно было
определить. Уклоняясь, делая зигзаги, подобные молниям на картинах,
изображающих всемирный потоп, он давал кру г и, и кру г и эти медленно
су жались. Так прошел год, пока кру г со мкн у лся точкой, и он всту пил в С.-
204
“Он привык внимать словам приказов как особым словам, не похожим на
человече скую речь. Они имели не смысл, не значение, а собственн ую жизнь и власть.
Дело было не в том, исполнен приказ или не исполнен. Приказ как- то изменял полки,
у л ицы и лю дей, если даже его и не исполняли.” (5)
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The object of Paul’s repression is his mother, all traces of whom he has attempted to erase,
yet whose scent lingers: “ Похитител ь ница престола, его мат ь, была мер т ва. Потемкинский
ду х он вышиб, как некогда Иван Четвертый вышиб боярский. Он разметал пот е мкинские
кости и сровнял его могилу. Он ун ичтожил самый вку с матери. Вку с похитительницы!
Золото, комнаты, выло женные индийским шелком, комнаты, выло женные китайской
посу дой, с голландски м и печами, и комната из синего стекла - табакерка. Балаган.
Римские и греческие медали, которыми она хвасталась! Он велел употребить их на
позолот у св оего замка. И все же ду х остался, привку с остался. Им пахло кру гом, и
поэтому, может быть, Павел Петр ович имел привычку принюхиваться к собеседникам.”
(6)
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Петербу рг. Всту пя, он обошел его кру гом из к онца в конец. Потом он начал
кру жить по городу, и ему сл учало с ь неделями делать один и тот же кру г.
Шел он быстро, все то ю же своей военной, развинченной походкой, при
которой но ги и ру ки казались нарочно подвешенными. (18)
The implication is that Siniukhaev will play the role (at least in spirit) of one of twelve assassins
(a significant number) who will have murdered Paul I at Saint Michael’s Castle, a historical
fact.
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The brilliance of Tynianov is to include a character who becomes deprived of his
symbolic identity (his mind/head) and yet who’s bodily activity nevertheless persists being
driven onward. Siniukhaev is the representative of the underside of the onomastic drive, as
Ricoeur described that place where “force and the question of meaning coincide.”
Conclusion
The discussion on the relationship between psychoanalysis and Formalism concluded by
alighting on the phenomenon of the proper name as a device that reaches beyond the structuralist
approach. There are several elements in Tynianov’s text that suggest a parodic play on basic
psychoanalytic concepts, such as the creation of Kizhe from a mistaken slip of the pen, the
appearance of Eros, or Amur, as an important thematic through line, descriptions of Paul’s
motivations and paranoia in light of his Oedipal relationship to his mother, a looming “return of
the repressed,” and of course the drive of the proper name. The Shklovskian concept of
automatization is taken to its extreme within the context of an empire that is meticulously
organized from the center of power, giving impetus to the presence of the Bergsonian concept of
206
This is quite an interesting detail. All but one of the twelve identities of the assassins are
known to historians.
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humor as a function of men acting like machines. In the full length monograph on proper names
in psychoanalysis, Mavis Himes concludes with a gesture toward the irreducible sonority of the
proper name, connecting nerve to word, and that can be compared with a provocative statement
of Shklovskii on art. “Art is not a march set to music, but rather a walking dance to be
experienced or, more accurately, a movement of the body, whose very essence it is to be
experienced through the senses.” (22)
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Conclusion
The Anatomy of Drives has focused on a three-decade history of classical psychoanalysis
in Russia (from about 1905 to 1935), the proximity and affinity of psychoanalysis with
intellectual concerns at this time and place, and those influences flowing from Russian culture
into psychoanalysis itself. I have touched on various topics in the history and philosophy of
science, Marxist history of ideas, and developments within the literary and cultural spheres. This
conclusion will reiterate the main points covered in the previous six chapters, briefly sketch the
historical trajectory of psychoanalysis in Russia beyond the scope of the dissertation, and,
finally, tie the threads of our conceptual examination of the notion of the drives with a comment
on the central role of literature in this study.
In the Russian, words such as (u)stremlenie, dvizhenie, and (u)vlechenie convey the idea
of a subject moving toward an object or goal of some sort, a process that may become disturbed
or impeded by external obstacles. Though far from the only discourse to do so, psychoanalysis
and its theory of the drives posits that the obstacles can also be internal, or psychical, in nature,
captured by the last of the three terms above, which is the word used to translate the German
term Triebe used by Freud.
The first part of this dissertation described how at the turn of the century the scientific
study of the mind was divided into a myriad of irreconcilable and competing positions that
reflected a “crisis of psychology,” debates over its philosophical and methodological
foundations, the degree to which the mental sphere was reducible to physiology, and, relatedly,
methods of intervening into mental illness. We looked also at the origins of the psychiatric
paradigm in the work of Heinrich Kaan, who, coincidentally, served for a time as the personal
physician to the Russian Tsar Nicholas I. Kaan was the first western figure to link mental illness
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to a disturbance between the forces of a sexual instinct (what he termed a nisus) and the
imagination. Foucault described how Kaan drew a foundational demarcating line for the history
of madness in his Psychopathia Sexualis (to be distinguished from Kfrafft-Ebbing’s important
work of the same title, under whose shadow Kaan’s precedent-setting study disappeared)
between scriptural categories of sin and those “disorders of the imagination” that led to the first
psychiatric nosology. These were categories of mental illness based on the link between the
imagination and the sexual instincts, composed of exactly six types: masturbation, pederasty,
bestiality, lesbian love, necrophilia, and the violation of statues. In a Freudian reading, we
posited that Kaan corroborated the later psychoanalytic idea that the workings of the
imagination—the “movement of the soul,” or the activity of Psyche—is always closely
accompanied by Eros, or the libido and its drives. In the cultural domain of the pre-revolutionary
moment, ideas like impulses, instincts, compulsions, and other notions describing the movement
of an internal, psychological force that could become “disorganized” were rendered in the
Russian cultural context by way of metaphors of the abyss and fate, images that foregrounded an
opaque nucleus at the heart of subjectivity and spiritual, or psychical, life.
The first chapter considered the drives in connection to the metaphor of the “abyss”
(bezdna), a widespread image derived from Schelling’s philosophical thought, which gained a
new appeal to Symbolist authors and the Bogoiskateli and Imiaslavtsy philosophers of the
“Russian religious Renaissance.” Generally speaking, these were followers of the Neo-Platonic
philosophy of Vladimir Solov’ev, a figure whose thought was grounded in German Romantic
philosophy, but who soundly rejected the “coldness of thought” of Western reason, a pattern of
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thinking that was applicable to much of the intelligentsia.
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As a symbol for the unknown X in
the external, as well as, and especially, the internal world of the soul, the abyss was a point of
hidden intensity capable of drawing subjects to act against their conscious will. Furthermore, as
the discourse over sexuality became a popular topoi, linked to degeneration theory and the
scandals over the translation of Weininger’s Sex and Character and Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia
Sexualis, the publication of literary texts like Tolstoy’s Kreutzer Sonata, Artsybashev’s Sanin,
and Andreev’s “The Abyss,” the metaphor of the abyss took on exceedingly erotic qualities,
beyond those of temptation and preoccupation with scriptural sin and morality. The abyss as an
image for the infinite depths of the sea hiding a primordial Leviathan, or the bottomless pit of
hell in which the devil named Apollyon resided,
208
became displaced as an eroticized gap within
subjectivity itself, following Heinrich Kaan’s earlier move in many ways, though in the opposite,
positive direction. Sexuality became something not to be shunned, but imaginatively explored
and expanded as the very conduit through which to reach spiritual perfection. In this intellectual
cauldron, Freudian ideas found a natural place.
Freud’s “revolution in thought,” however, was ultimately incompatible with
temperaments that actively courted madness and frenzy as a way to unleash the creative forces of
the artist, for the simple reason that such temperaments rarely sought therapeutic help. In some
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Alexander Kozhevnikov (Kojeve), a Russian philosopher who led a series of famous seminars
on Hegel in Paris in the 1930s (attended by Bataille, Derrida, Lacan, and other French
intellectuals), believed that Schelling lay at the basis of all of Solov’ev’s metaphysics, whose
idea of Divine Sophia had a profound effect on Russian decadent culture. The Romantic writings
of Schelling, his coinage of the “unconscious” (Unbewusst) was an important inspiration both to
Soloviev’s concept of Sophia, or the Divine Feminine, and to Freud’s unconscious (See Fenichel,
Schelling, Freud, and the Philosophical Foundations of Psychoanalysis). Schelling also
conceptually described the beginning of the world as an abyss, using the German word Ungrund
208
The latter is a widely-used reference to Revelation 9:11. “They had as king over them the
angel of the Abyss, whose name in Hebrew is Abaddon, and in Greek, Apollyon.”
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ways, it became fashionable to be sick, the sine qua non of the cult to artistic genius. Evelyn
Bristoll described the decadent hero of this time as “a reversal of expected values regarding
morality and health. In his religion he was a Satanist and blasphemer. He preferred his
melancholia to happiness and could not rise above ennui to vigor. He was drawn to death rather
than to life, and he cherished his insanity. He sought sensual refinement rather than spiritual
elevation. And he disdained the mob” (270). Freud’s idiosyncratic inclination toward these ideas
found particular resonance in Russia because a rise in extreme social behaviors in the Russian
Empire, such as suicide, the “epidemic of madness,” like so-called “revolutionary psychosis,”
etc., had led many to perceive Russian society as morally bankrupt.
As psychoanalytic concepts made their way into the popular imagination outside Vienna,
the founder of psychoanalysis was fashioned (in some ways, self-fashioned) as a fearless thinker
who dared approach the edge of the abyss, yet who maintained a firm hold on material reality,
dispelling imaginative constructions with the conceptual tools of this new science of the mind.
This characterization is somewhat appropriate because, as the technique of classical
psychoanalysis had it, the analyst at all times had to keep a “cool head” when confronted with
the abyssal dimension of human desire, bearing the traumas of the patient’s experiences, staying
with the contradictions of dreams and recurring fantasies, like violence directed against the self
or even loved ones. The analyst, who “listened with the third ear” to a kind of “poetry of the
unconscious,” became a witness to the most private phenomena, tucked away from the public
and, this was the revelation, from one’s own consciousness, encrypted, rebus-like, in dreams to
be deciphered, revealing itself in the cracks of language, slips of the tongue, and so on. This kind
of highly suggestive description of psychoanalysis was extremely infectious, radioactive even. In
close proximity to this heroic image of the analyst was, of course, the charlatan and swindler,
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what several of our literary case studies reflect, an idea that Bakhtin expressed in the suspicion
that every psychologist was a spy. Thus, many were suspicious of the promises of
psychoanalysis, and rightfully so.
In Vienna, during a meeting of Freud’s inner circle in 1912, Sabina Spielrein, a Russian
psychoanalyst and a former patient of Jung, presented a paper called “Destruction as the Cause
of Becoming,” which described a hypothetical “compulsion towards death,” distinguishing it
from Freud’s self-preservation and sexual drives. Undoubtedly influenced by cultural factors
back in Russia, Spielrein characterized this compulsion as a tendency to dissolve and negate the
self, turning “I” into a “We,” a kind of “ego death” and precondition to the arrival of novel forms
of subjectivity (Being). At the time, Freud rejected Spielrein’s idea, but would return to it in the
1920s and his “second topology” in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, but this early influence
describes a central contribution of Russian culture to psychoanalysis. Finally, Chapter One
described perhaps the first instance of the appearance of a psychoanalyst in Russian literature. As
an extrapolation of his central lyrical theme of the spiritual that confronts the poet in the abyss of
exotic and unknown lands, Nikolai Gumilev’s late and incomplete prose-work Veselye brat’ia
displaced the generative abyss to the heart of Russian peasantry itself. The novel’s protagonist, a
psychoanalyst, conveyed Gumilev’s break with Symbolism and its more radical, mystical ideas,
especially in relation to creativity, yet the character’s Western scientific credentials are depicted
as powerless against the Eastern mystery of the Russian peasant.
Chapter Two continued to develop the notion of extra-conscious forces preceding the
October Revolution in connection to psychoanalysis, utilizing the widespread metaphor of
“fate.” Marietta Shaginian’s novel Svoia sud’ba, written in 1916 against the background of
Shaginian’s withdrawal from Symbolism, presented the connection between mystical thinking
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and its relation to mental illness, as well as its psychiatric cure. The chapter described how
Shaginian’s close relationship with Emilii Metner, Ivan Il’in, and Andrei Belyi put her in contact
with the growing trend of psychoanalysis, which was one of the factors underlying the breakup
of Symbolism. This was due in part to Metner’s early contact with psychoanalysis and
subsequent frustrations with Belyi, who was at the time becoming increasingly infatuated with
the anthroposophy of Rudolph Steiner. Metner underwent a personal treatment with Freud (as
did Il’in) for his “pseudo-Meniere’s disease” but, following Freud’s split with Jung in 1914,
precisely over the role of mysticism in psychoanalytic practice, Metner sided with the latter,
striking up a two-decade working relationship with Jung in Switzerland. According to
Ljungrenn, “It is obvious that Medtner [sic], by virtue of his affinity with Jung and his unique
experience in the Russian Symbolism movement, confirmed and corroborated vital aspects of his
analyst’s new theory. Medtner recognized Belyi’s brand of Symbolism in Jung’s psychology,
which he perceived to be a further development of the Russian movement” (Poetry 7). Aside
from Belyi’s hatred of psychoanalysis, the nature of his argument with Metner revolved around
the figure of Goethe and the idea of the Bildungstrieb, a life force that compelled the organism to
unfold in a predetermined fashion and to a predetermined end. We described the structural
feature of this “fate-drive,” as necessitating a direct relation to some ideal image (the Bild, in
German, having as its other senses “image,” “idea,” and “form,” as in the Platonic sense of
Form, or Eidos), a pre-determined plan that the organism follows as it passes through various
stages of transformation to its final form. In Svoia sud’ba, Shaginian weaves these concepts and
her experiences with Metner and Jung into a plot taking place at a sanatorium in the mountains
of the Caucasus, in which psychoanalysis and theosophical ideas are pitted against each other, as
well as against a Goethian-inspired psychiatric method—a unique system developed by
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Shaginian (who now distanced herself from both Metner and Belyi) to address the epidemic of
mental illness in the empire. When the novel was published in full in 1923, Shaginian had
undergone a radical transformation herself, withdrawing even further from these polemics into
the new role of a materialist and fiercely-dedicated Bolshevik.
After 1917, those Marxist thinkers partial to Freud sensed that there was a materialist
component to his “hydraulic model of the psyche” and reformulation of the widespread
philosophical notion of the drives that could provide a crucial missing element in an all-
encompassing materialist theory of reality. Very similarly to the Symbolist “God-seekers” who
sought an all-encompassing system, the Marxist materialist “God-builders” (bogostroiteli) also
searched for the proper combination of conceptual elements that would reveal a monistic system
to explain every phenomenon of reality—a new (Soviet) monism. Post-1917 Freudian thought in
Russia inevitably fell under the influence of the new Soviet monism. Chapter Three looked
closer at these developments, in which the Soviet Marxists, their language and behavior
conditioned by the political victory of October and the maximalism of War Communism, aimed
their intellectual weapons at those concepts within “the last hide out in the citadel of idealism”—
psychology. This nascent field, still mired within its methodological “crisis,” was described as
the most ideologically compromised scientific practice whose various views of the mind, spirit,
and metaphysical spaces of interiority reflected “bourgeois idealism” at each turn. It was to be
expediently debunked by materialist philosophy on the path to their monistic system, which was
of course rife with its own idealistic assumptions, since materialism was not a stable doctrine at
the time, a detail exacerbated by the fact that few of these philosophical theorists were practicing
scientists themselves. Psychoanalysis, however, passed the initial review and was officially, for
the first time in history, accepted by the new state as one of three competing theories of
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materialist psychology, receiving state funding for developing centers of training and clinical
application. What intrigued the Marxists in psychoanalysis revolved specifically around Freud’s
secular articulation of the concept of the drives, as it implied a potentially measurable energetic
force within the “economic model of the psyche,” called by the defenders of Freud a
“materialist” and “dialectical” concept. Furthermore, it was figures such as Trotsky who came to
its defense and secured its political support.
Chapter Three took up the paradigmatic distinction that constitutes the Marxist theory of
subjectivity, that of “Spontaneity and Consciousness,” which fed into the development of the
Socialist Realist doctrine in literature of the 1930s. This formulation of the later Marx was
revealed to have an interesting legacy in connection to the “drives” explored in this chapter. As
some scholars have noted, Karl Marx was engaged with the concept of the passions in the early
period of his thinking and may have encrypted notions of compulsions and drives into his
concept of so-called “productive forces,” as well as the theory of labor that would come to
characterize his later thought. The work of the German natural philosopher Hermann Samuel
Reimarus on the animal instincts (in his Drives of Animals of 1760) was of particular interest for
the young Marx as he was writing his dissertation, “The Difference Between the Democritean
and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature.” Reimarus was in fact first to posit the concept Trieb, or
drive, applied to the animal world: “In what was gradually to emerge as the basic explanatory
category in psychology, Reimarus argued that there were innate drives in animals (including
human beings) that interacted with sensations” (Bellamy). He developed ten classes and fifty-
seven subclasses of drives, the highest of these being the Kunsttrieb, the drive of creativity or
“skillful drive,” which manifested in the work of bees, spiders, and other animals by way of an
innate compulsion to spontaneously generate material forms. Reimarus saw the Kunsttrieb as the
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most developed variety of instinct because it exhibited a feature of selection on the part of animal
behavior, “incorporating an element of choice,” something that heavily influenced the thinking
of Marx’s early intellectual activity.
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The point is that the primacy of drives were crucial for
Marx as he developed his idea of labor, having roots in Marx’s early productive period of 1841-
1846, one that, coincidentally, was only beginning to be explored in the 1920s, important in light
of Soviet attempts to develop a thorough materialist philosophy (Van Ree, 276). Within the
history of Marxist studies, the publication of works like The German Ideology, The Economic
and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, and other early writings of Marx, never before seen by
the public and influencing many of the theorists of Marxism in the 1920s (like Bukharin), was a
project undertaken at the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow by its founder, David Riazanov. This
was precisely during the time when psychoanalysis was influential in the Soviet Union, between
the years 1921 and 1931, displaying a marked interest in theorized compulsive forces.
210
I described a coincidental link with the endeavor to bring Marx’s early works together
with psychoanalysis, by the work of Riazanov who purchased a socialist library from the brother
of Freud’s first patient. Gladkov’s novel Tsement, edited by the psychoanalytically-informed
critic Voronskii, was the case study to flesh out these issues. Gleb’s return from the
209
For an overview of interpretations taking subjective, emotional factors as important elements
underpinning Marx’s notion of “productive forces”, see E. Van Ree “Productive Forces, the
Passions and Natural Philosophy”, who writes that “There is a powerful intuition in the literature
that something is inherently problematic about the idea of the primacy of the productive forces
and that Marx must have realized that” (275); this and the following page contain a scholarly
review of the how the notion has been understood.
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Riazanov was chiefly responsible for collecting the entire works of Marx, editing, and
publishing many installments of the first volumes in the Soviet Union (today, called the first
Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe, an effort restarted in the past several years in Germany). Earlier in
his career, Riazanov had introduced the concept of “permanent revolution,” so central to
Trotsky’s conception of political organization, and spent time at the Frankfurt School in the early
1920s.
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revolutionary war finds him amidst the ruins of a cement factory and under the influence of a
spontaneous compulsion for labor, reflecting the materially-productive force of Reimarus’s
Kunsttrieb. Returning to Kaan, I described how Gleb’s fantasy of a fully functional (cement)
factory, lacking state funds to be rehabilitated after the war, was a thoroughly eroticized and,
thus, motivating image.
Chapter Five looked at the “ubiquitous discourse of the reflex” as it came in contact with
psychoanalysis in the 1920s within the discourse of materialist monism. The figures who
attempted to reconcile psychoanalysis with Marxism pointed to the work of Bekhterev and
Pavlov as developing physiologically-based schemas of behavior that were “coterminous” with
the psychoanalytic concept of drives. To enact a synthesis of the two would be a major step in
the development of a materialist psychology, and these thinkers, such as Trotsky, Luria,
Vygotsky, Bykhovsky, Malis, Reisner, and others, though incapable of articulating what that
fusion was in detail, confidently gestured to the future in which the link would be forged. It was
arguably the work of Aleksandr Gorskii, a Cosmist philosopher with links to Bogdanov’s ideas
of “Empiriomonism,” who took the speculative next step. Utilizing psychoanalysis and quoting
Freud at length, Gorskii attempted to cross the gap between the mind and body in an entirely
unique system. Through his notion of a psycho-physical entity he termed the “izgib” and its role
in the process of “auto-reflexive mirroring” (avto-refleksivnoe zerkal’nost’), Gorskii elaborated a
speculative system by which the physiological workings of the human organism and its
“spontaneous pulsations” linked up to the psychical production of fantastic images, perceiving
psychoanalysis as the science of the “laws of movement of the flow of images.” As figures like
Deborin and a group of influential Neo-Kantian philosophers looked at the claims of the Marxist
Freudians from the standpoint of a rigorous Kantian critique (the last “idealist” philosopher to be
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taken seriously by materialists, logical positivists, and even linguists), the concept of the drives
became bound up with the so-called “mechanist controversy,” during which the attacks on
psychoanalysis increased. Gorskii’s outlandish theory, however, slipped past their critique, and
stands as a unique contribution of a psycho-physio-social fusion of Marx, Freud, and Pavlov.
Within the context of discussions over monistic systems of thought, Bulgakov’s novella Heart of
a Dog provided a poignant metaphor for the link between the body and mind in the image of the
heart (of a dog). Developing a theme in his earlier Rokovye iaitsa to its apotheosis, the heart of a
dog is the dancing of a fire in the tension of a string strung between somatic and psychical nocks,
the “hot” bodily nether regions bound to the “cold” and heady conceptual realms of reason.
Where philosophy and empirical science failed, in a parodic mode that only literature can
approach, this imaginative predication represents the closure of “Leibniz’s gap,” producing a
monistic and “eroticized” image of a New Soviet Man, the Frankenstein product of science that
fuses man and dog, endowing the creature with the name Sharikov.
Chapter Five took up the widespread cultural discourse in the interwar period over the
issue of artistic creativity, which had close ties to the arguments unfolding in psychology,
materialist philosophy, and literary debates. I looked at Vsevolod Ivanov’s unpublished novel У,
written on the occasion of his son’s birth and Stalin’s attack on religion of the early 30s, in which
a psychoanalyst attempts to solve the mystery of a missing treasure-trove of gold, collected from
the cupolas of the destructed Cathedral of Christ the Savior. Rumor spreads that the gold had
been transformed into various objects, a shifting sequence of desire-inducing images: a set of
gold watches, a crown for an “American king,” an expensive foreign suit, etc. The chapter
connected this novel to Freudian themes in the thinking of the religious ex-pat philosopher Boris
Vysheslavtsev and the Soviet critic and editor of Krasnaia Nov’, Aleksandr Voronskii, both of
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whom described the creative process of the artist with the aid of psychoanalytic concepts. In a
gesture back to the second chapter, we described how Vysheslavtsev took up the editorial duties
began by Emilii Metner in Switzerland to edit the second, third, and fourth volumes of the
Russian translations of Carl Jung’s selected works. Utilizing Jungian concepts, Vysheslavtsev
“made the ‘Christianization of Freud’ virtually his life’s project” (Crone 2), which is born out in
his unique sequence of seven stages of personal transformation (individuation), concluded at the
final stage by the advent of an “irrational superconsciousness.” In his writings on the creative
process, he posited an “erotic drive” (erotiko-tendiruiushchie vlechenie) behind artistic
creativity, marking the proximity of the erotic to the work of the artistic imagination, which aids
in the processes of lifting repressions and sublimating base matter into high art. The process of
life parallels the creative struggles of the artist, both of which (in a returning gesture to Bild,
form, image) are aided by a paradoxically eroticized image of God, an “image of God within the
self.” While operating from a materialist atheist position, the thinking on creativity by Voronskii
(who edited Ivanov’s work and was closely associated with his circle), posited the claim that “art
cognizes life,” a claim premised on a sensual (perhaps, even erotic) component to cognition.
“[…] science turns to the mind of man, art to his sensual (i.e., sensory) nature. Science cognizes
life with the help of concepts, art with the aid of images in the form of living, sensual
contemplation.” The chapter navigated what seems to be a common thread to these thinkers’
understanding of creativity—as the product of a cognizing play with an erotic/sensual image.
Chapter Six examined the contact of psychoanalysis with linguistically-informed critics
of the 1920s, such as the Bakhtin circle (Voloshinov) and the Russian Formalists. We looked at
the link between Shklovskii’s notions of motivirovka and priem in light of Formalist claims to
have evacuated psychology from their critical system, as well as Jakobson’s later alignment of
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Freud’s condensation and displacement with the syntagmatic and paradigmatic axes in his paper
on the aphasias. We read Tynianov’s Podporuchik Kizhe as a Formalist parody of psychoanalysis
and examined Voloshinov’s dialectical materialist reading of “Freidizm” as perhaps the most
sophisticated critique of psychoanalysis, surpassing those of the Neo-Kantian philosophers
highlighted in the previous chapters. Voloshinov provided a sustained examination of the idea of
an interior domain set apart from consciousness and operating independently of it. It was
exposed as a psychoanalytic “myth,” one that specifically revolved around the erroneous internal
drives, having no real substantiality to be subject to measurement. Voloshinov instead gives a
fascinating elaboration, which some have seen as preceding the “post-structuralist” linguistic
update to psychoanalysis by some decades—mainly, the idea that the source of psychology is
exclusively in external social relationships, more specifically the extra-individual system of
language that is absorbed into subjectivity, the “official” and “unofficial” voices of internal
“dialectical consciousness.” This dynamic internal process, seen as an interiorized social legacy
of the exterior social sphere, was the true picture of the psyche obscured by the erroneous notion
of the unconscious and its hidden drives. Voloshinov saw psychoanalysis as split between a
philosophical Schopenhauerian idealism and a biological aspect (derived from Weissman's idea
of the generational transfer of the immortal germ plasm), critiquing in the tenth chapter those
Freudo-Marxists like Bykhovskii and Luria, who attempted to “find the red thread” in
psychoanalysis in what they saw as the material nature of the drives. For Voloshinov, the drives
are dressed in the garb of objective psychology but are ultimately disconnected from any actual,
measurable bodily energy, effectively rendering psychoanalysis as another version of subjective
psychology, self-relating and description of internal states in the terms of “feelings,” “will,” and
“perceptions.” Thus, Voloshinov critiqued psychoanalysis as incompatible with historical
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materialism. His argument, however, proceeding from an explicit critique of the idea of the
drives, nevertheless utilized the generative theory of drives to develop his own theory of interior
dialogue. By negating what he saw as the most sophisticated theory of psychological interiority
at the time in the Freudian paradigm, he moved beyond it to develop a Marxist theory of
language.
When Wilhelm Reich visited the Soviet Union in the late 1920s, his presentations on the
link between the reflexological concept of perekliuchenie with Freudian “sublimation” fell on
deaf ears. The political atmosphere had become toxic, infiltrating into every domain of public
discussion. The debates over psychology, the mechanist controversy, etc., was ultimately decided
by Stalin and his attack on any thinking perceived to have links with Trotsky and the “left
deviation” tainted psychoanalytic activity by association. After Stalin published Dialectical and
Historical Materialism in 1938, the rejection of the psychodynamic paradigm in psychology
became absolute and, with it, any mention of an unconscious, drives, sexuality, desires, etc.,
became prohibited. The personal and subjective space of the self was, as we described, “turned
inside out,” and a new emphasis on the will (volia) emerged as the active principle of a
consciousness that became fully transparent to itself. Stalinist materialism’s emphasis on the will
and consciousness, old categories of thought as well, was where the path of the mechanist debate
would terminate. Such a view spread through the 1930s as Pavlovian physiology canalized the
psychological sciences and Stalinist “historical materialism,” with its own theory of language,
decided the various debates in metaphysics.
211
211
The history of psychoanalysis in the West resonates in some ways with the Soviet history of
psychoanalysis. When Karen Horney began to critique Freudian biological reductionism in the
1920s, she elevated the cultural component over the biological in her dissatisfaction with the
masculinism of psychoanalysis, which claimed that “anatomy is destiny.” In this branch of
development of psychoanalytic thought, the biologism of Freud was rejected, similarly to
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Po tu storonu
And so, in 1932 during the All-Union Psychiatric Conference, Luria disowned any
former links with psychoanalysis, as would the founder of Pedology and former analyst, Aron
Zalkind, with “Freidizm.” For those years, from the early 1930s, through the Second World War,
the late 1940s, and the death of Stalin in 1953, the unconscious became a neglected category. A
reductive Pavlovian behaviorist physiology was declared the victor in the battle for the citadel of
idealism, occupying the place of psychology. The monist dream of the 1920s materialists was, at
least in psychological meta-theory, realized by S. L. Rubenstein, to whose work we briefly turn.
Throughout the 1930s, a new Soviet psychology following the principles of Marxism-
Leninism and Pavlovian behaviorist tenets was developed by Rubenstein. His system would be
officially accepted in the 1940s and represents the conceptual product to the collapse of
subjective interiority in the psychological sciences. Known as “activity theory,” Rubenstein’s
system was articulated on the wholesale rejection of the unconscious and the elevation of the
concept of activity as a “dialectical synthesis” that operated on the principle of “the unity of
consciousness and behavior.” In this system, human behavior became transparent, as it were,
visible actions representing a simple and direct connection to internal motivation. In other words,
for the New Soviet Man, no gap separated observable external acts from interior mental states.
What did it mean that the idea of the unconscious was “repressed” for so long? What did it mean
for Soviet metaphysics that the social environment and its history fully determined human
consciousness, as the Marxists claimed? This meant the decay of individual interiority and
personhood, a continuous process, to return to Spielrein, of “destruction as the cause of
Voloshinov’s rejection of the biologism of Freud, ushering the “objects-relations” paradigm in
psychoanalysis in which the psychical space became thoroughly socialized.
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Becoming,” of the dissolution of the “I” into the “We.” This ontological attitude can be seen in a
concrete historical detail, the total disappearance of the widely-popular genre of the personal
diary. “[The] diary as a genre of intimate writing disappears. Neither the revolution nor the terror
is favorable to it… The new man has no more interiority. A private diary? He does not even
know what that means.” (Nivat, “Le journal intimate en Russie” [Helbeck, 366]). Once the
strictures of Stalinism eased, it still took several decades to publish the famous diaries of
Nadezhda Mandel’stam, for example.
During the high point of Stalinist repressions, psychoanalysis disappeared from public
discussions almost entirely, suppressed in the press and attacked as a “bourgeois reactionary
theory.” However, even in this period, Freud’s books were never burned in the streets as they
were under the fascist regimes in Nazi Germany and Austria, forcing Freud to emigrate from
Vienna to London with the help of his friends and family, his daughter Anna Freud and the arch-
duchess Marie Bonaparte, on the eve of World War II in 1938. With psychodynamic conceptual
tools off the table, however, psychology was powerless to approach the question of behavior that
is duplicitous and deceptive, what is perhaps the ultimate description of the psychological subject
of this period of high paranoia, sabotage, and intrigue, for how can behavior and consciousness
always coincide, as Rubenstein conceived it?
212
Following World War II, a prominent psychiatric conference taking place in 1948 took
up many of the themes discussed in the 1932 All-Union Psychiatric Conference. In the same
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Such conceptual premises naturally led to the development of dubious psychiatric schemas
like the “sluggish schizophrenia” diagnosis in the late Soviet period, which is an egregious case
of the political abuse of psychiatry, pathologizing political dissidents who consciously rebelled
against the state. One who did not want to work, to contribute to the collective and the state, such
as Brodsky and the historian Bukovsky, both of whom underwent the experience of Soviet
political hospitals, had to have been mad. If the infallible Party always represented the Truth,
who but either an enemy of the state, or a madman could resist it?
291
politicized manner, its participants still dismissed any “Menshevizing idealism” within
psychiatry, meaning psychoanalysis and psychodynamic psychiatry more generally. However, a
shift occurred between this 1948 conference and the following major conference taking place in
1956 (with, significantly, Stalin’s death occurring in between). As an outside observer wrote,
There is a marked shift of emphasis in research since the preceding conference of
the same kind, held in 1948. I. P. Pavlov’s influence remains, true enough, as
strong as ever. But increasing attention is being paid now to the use of suggestion,
hypnosis, and speech therapy in general; in fact, almost all papers contained in the
book have something to say concerning these methods of treatment. (Winn ix)
Psychoanalysis itself was never mentioned, yet its presence must have been felt by many who
now negotiated with concepts that it had developed. What could be behind such a shift?
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As the contemporary analyst Mikhail Reshetnikov described it, there were three
tendencies that were repressed in the Soviet sciences: genetics, cybernetics, and psychoanalysis,
only the first two being rehabilitated in the 1960s. Psychoanalysis was explicitly represented in
1979 at the Second International Symposium held in Tbilisi, Georgia, overseen by Dimitri
Uznazde’s Georgian school of psychology—an independent Soviet school of psychology that
can be said to have preserved psychoanalytic, drive-inflected theories. The famous Uznazde
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The Stalinist strictures over psychodynamic concepts loosened following his death during the
Great Thaw, no doubt. It is, perhaps, also that the International Psychoanalytic Association
conducted their first meeting in ten years in 1949 (a decade following Freud’s death in 1939),
that could have been perceived in the Soviet Union. It is ironic that during this conference, the
IPA’s president, Ernest Jones, made specific political appeals. Jones made a plea to the
psychoanalytic community to steer clear of political concerns and “the influence of sociological
factors” upon the clinic, urging analysts to focus only on the “primitive forces of the mind”
(Herzog 2-3). This eschewing of political and social factors would meet some resistance,
examined in detail by Herzog in his study Cold War Freud, though tellingly it ushered in two
decades known as the first American “golden age” in psychoanalysis, marked by intellectual
reaction toward deviance, homosexuality, feminism, etc.
292
organized a conference specifically on questions of the unconscious, the effects it produced, its
status as a material entity, a conceptual heuristic device, or something else, marking the official
“return of the repressed” to the Soviet Union.
Professor Reshetnikov explains how important this conference was to the generation that
rehabilitated psychoanalysis in the 1980s, going so far as to politically agitate for the institutional
recognition of this forgotten specialization. Psychoanalysis would be officially reinstated after
the collapse of the Soviet Union when Boris Yeltsin signed a decree (ukaz) in 1996 in support of
psychoanalysis and, remarkably, calling for setting aside state funds to support the development
of psychoanalysis in post-Soviet Russia, just as it happened in the 1920s.
293
Figure 2: Presidential Decree signed by Boris Yeltsin on 19 July 1996, allocating
state funds for the development of psychoanalysis in Russia.
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The concept of drives, finalized?
The concept of the drives can be best understood as a “device,” linking it to the
mechanistic and positivist context that predominated in these years, a conceptual device that is
perhaps ultimately unstable and inconsistent, but that nevertheless came in dialogue with
discourses in psychology, secular thought, Marxism, religious philosophy, and other intellectual
movements, such as Russian Formalism. The drives may be thought of as a kind of Foucauldian
dispositif, or apparatus, and this study, too, has described its working as a montage, or rather a
“demontage,” as it is described by Maire Jaanus:
Drive seems peculiarly unqualified and undetermined. It is as radical an alteration
of instinct as a montage is of the pieces of reality of which it is composed. Within
the drive, the component elements of the instinct no longer make immediate
sense. The reconstruction is discontinuous and disjointed (163), inmixing the
natural with the unnatural, the mechanical with the sexual, and illogic with mere
intimations of intention. (122)
As Freud defined it himself, drive is the term for the way the instincts come to be translated
within human psychology, and in that sense, they must be understood as categorically falling on
the side of psychology, rather than physiology, appearing in their essence as a disjointed and
fragmented montage of disparate elements. Were we to “organize” these fragments, the product
would never encompass a whole. Rather, the constitutive crack running through this hypothetical
construct would become wall-papered over with a mere image of fullness and plenitude, one that
would, on closer inspection, be anything but. And is not such an image of plenitude and
fullness—the “sublime object of ideology”—readily supplied by the historical anomaly that was
the Soviet Union, which posited a future subjectivity that would overcome the deadlocks of
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history itself, one that would emerge as a utopian New Soviet Man (lacking an internal split
characterizing the unconscious) and whose motivations, thus, would be entirely self-transparent?
We have tried to articulate what that “device” may be, finding a pertinent example in the
way psychoanalysis has always centered on the linguistic medium through which a patient
expresses his thoughts, dreams, and desires. If there is anything to redeem psychoanalysis from
its idealist heritage, it is this feature, underscored by later analysts and theorists, that, from a
certain place of alignment, the material stuff of language, of words and signifiers, contains, as it
were, a “little piece of flesh,” binding the signifier to the instinctual body through repetition (a
significatory stimulus that could perhaps be seen as the coterminous quality between the drives
and Pavlovian reflex, for what was the bell for the dog but the “name” of food?), a locus of
alignment in which word and nerve coincide.
The classical psychoanalytic theory of the drives, therefore, is ultimately ambiguous,
being rooted in the same Romantic philosophy of the nineteenth-century that inspired the
Symbolists, while having a foot in positivistic, rational and scientific discourse. Embedded in the
cultural legacy of western Judeo-Christianity, psychoanalysis reformulated the dynamic of
conflicting elementary forces into the scientific terminology of the day, and put reason above
extra-conscious forces, but in a particular and wholly unique way. Freud’s 1895 “Project for a
Scientific Psychology” was unsustainable from the point of view of rigorous science, but it was
nevertheless deeply suggestive and evocative, pointing precisely to those areas within
psychology that eluded positivistic and mechanical approaches fundamental to other fields of
research. As such, the drives are clearly an inconsistent concept, which appears to oscillate
between abstract notions of force and concretized mechanistic schemas; on the one hand,
appearing to conform to the scientific standards of empiricism and operationalism (rules of
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science articulated, coincidentally, only in the 1920s), and on the other, flouting them with
metaphysical speculation. Our central (historical) argument posited that the scientific
terminology of psychoanalysis is precisely what allowed the theory and practice to pass the
definitive, ideological break of revolution, which applied an ideological filter on Romanticism
and its field of ideas.
214
Aside from the historical component detailing the entrance and exit of psychoanalysis
into Russian culture and intellectual life, the study has also given critical readings of several
novels and long-form literary works of prose. Our critical approach has been informed by the
concepts of psychoanalysis, though it remains open-ended and somewhat eclectic, about which a
few words should be said in conclusion. Psychoanalytic literary criticism certainly has been
guilty of applying a conceptual straight jacket upon texts, something the Russian Formalists
understood when they attempted to determine what made a text literary as such (its
“literariness”) and what tools, derived from the literary field (i.e., devices of literature and never
extra-literary concepts from psychology or sociology), to approach textual meaning and
structure.
Independently of the Formalists, the New Critics in the West also attempted much of the
same. In the “polemical introduction” of The Anatomy of Criticism, Northrop Frye gives a
definition of what a literary critic does when performing a reading by describing, with a clear
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There was something ironic to this transfer of ideas, however. We stated that, at the precise
moment when psychoanalysis appealed to Marxist materialism, Freud abandoned the ambition to
pursue “scientific psychology” by, among other things, introducing the concept of the “death
drive,” a concept directly inspired by Sabina Spielrein’s speculative thinking on a compulsion
toward death, as a precondition for self-renewal (becoming). Freud’s writing toward the end of
his life reaffirmed the foundational pessimism of psychoanalysis, displaying his affinity with
Romantic thought and the ideas held by the Symbolists, that reason is ultimately helpless before
the “rising tide” of instinctual forces immanent to all human activity.
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word of warning, what the critic should not do; namely, succumb to what he calls the
“determinism fallacy”—filtering the text through a system of thought outside the literary field.
[A] scholar with a special interest in geography or economics expresses that
interest by the rhetorical device of putting his favorite study into a causal
relationship with whatever interests him less. Such a method gives one the
illusion of explaining one’s subject while studying it, thus wasting no time. It
would be easy to compile a long list of such determinisms in criticism, all of
them, whether Marxist, Thomist, liberal-humanist, neo-Classical Freudian,
Jungian, or existentialist, substituting a critical attitude for criticism, all
proposing, not to find a conceptual framework for criticism within literature, but
to attach criticism to one of a miscellany of frameworks outside it. (6)
In other words, the tools for the study of literature should come from within literature itself, and
to subordinate literary meaning to a “coherent philosophy of life with its center of gravity in
something else” would be to commit the determinist fallacy (7).
215
This is why in selecting the
literary texts crowning each chapter, we have chosen those works of fiction that deal explicitly
with psychoanalysis, representing characters who are psychoanalysts themselves, texts depicting
psychoanalytic concepts within the fictional space, and having authors who expressed interest in
psychoanalysis. One could say that these novels encroach onto the field of psychoanalysis as it
developed and was being established in the Russian context, and not the other way around,
cracking the door open for a psychoanalytically-inspired criticism to enter.
215
One wants to ask whether Frye’s extensive use of Aristotle’s Poetics should be seen as
drawing on a literary work, a work of philosophy, or something else.
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What is also quite striking is that directly following this warning and admonition, Frye
provides an example, one that is “curious, brilliant, scatter-brained,” of what a critical evaluation
derived from within the field of literature looks like. He gives a quotation of John Ruskin’s (a
Romantic thinker) observation on Shakespeare.
Of Shakespeare’s names I will afterwards speak at more length; they are
curiously—often barbarously—mixed out of various traditions and languages.
Three of the clearest in meaning have been noticed. Desdemona— δυσδαίμωνα,
miserable fortune—is also plain enough. Othello is, I believe, “the careful”; all
the calamity of the tragedy arising from the single flaw and error in his
magnificently collected strength. Ophelia, “serviceableness,” the true, lost wife of
Hamlet, is marked as having a Greek name by that of her brother Laertes; and its
signification is once exquisitely alluded to in that brother’s last word of her,
where her gentle preciousness is opposed to the uselessness of the churlish
clergy— “ministering angel shall my sister be, when though liest howling.”
(Ruskin, quoted in Frye, 9)
What is this reference to the proper name as a conduit to a possible, authentic literary
criticism, free of the conceptual limits of other disciplines?
216
In the previous chapters, we tried
to articulate how literary texts foreground the motivational qualities surrounding the proper name
of characters, which become sites of inscription resonating with the unfolding of the plot,
encrypting the character’s “fate” in associative pathways that can help uncover potential
meanings of a literary text, perhaps the most central ones. This is a legacy, no doubt, of literature
216
It should also be mentioned that Frye’s critical system, like “archetypal analysis,” which he
insists is not definitive or finalized, but is to be taken as suggestive and principled rather than
rules-based, relies on psychoanalytically derived concepts.
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that has transferred to psychoanalysis in its development, glimpsed in concepts like the Jungian
“nominative determinism,” or Lacan’s “name of the father” (nom du père).
The final word on psychoanalysis has to rest on this “drive device” and its connection to
the “weighted signifier” of phenomena such as the proper name, as that linguistic and,
simultaneously, social element that renders the space of drive in terms of a psychological field,
one that can be “tickled” by certain tricks of the signifier, which seems to “hook onto” the
physiological body at certain spots. Like Ruskin, psychoanalysis itself is a practice that is
“curious, brilliant, scatter-brained,” but one that has the potential to perceive the arrival of future
forms of the self. Nietzsche’s famous aphorism that “man is the abyss stretched between ape and
Ubermensch” describes the arrival of a future form of subjectivity, whose name is forever
associated with the dark legacy of fascism, which it prophesied in many ways. Nietzsche,
however, can and should be disentangled from this association. In the Anatomy of Criticism, Frye
describes how the satirical mode of narrative, its ironic distance to represented events of life, and
genre conventions of parody, tends to coincide with moments of civilizational decline. Like the
changing seasons, the history of literary genres also shows what follows this mode, how a need
for a new “mythopoetic” literature necessarily (for Frye) proceeds an exhaustion produced by the
satirical mode. At the end of his life, and before he succumbed to mental illness, perhaps
Nietzsche sensed and articulated the name for a figure to an epic mode that was on the rise.
There is a great risk in identifying our lives with fictional processes, as Nietzsche and many of
his followers did in Russia, and yet something still drives us to do so, an image perhaps of a
future form toward which the self yearns.
Psychoanalysis, as a therapeutic intervention, as well as a critical school, frequently
negotiates with the element of the proper name, in a sense, utilizing it as a “device” to aid in self-
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narrativizing the patient’s own history, helping to gain a distance from traumatic events by
placing the letter, one that has always-already been there, so to speak, between event and subject.
On the other hand, and depending on the clinical structure, the reverse is also true, in that
psychoanalysis can dispel pathological identifications with the name by showing how it is a
wholly arbitrary signifier and that its coincidental effects contain no meaning whatsoever. That
our lives contain moments of beauty that approach the greatest pieces of literature is as true as
the non-relation our lives have with “literariness,” a border between art and life that the Russian
Symbolists attempted to erase, frequently at their own peril. In Kotik Letaev, a novel of the
1920s, Belyi gives a description of the creation of the (new) world that is equated to the creative
process of the artist and the mystical transformation of subjectivity, a suggestive extended
metaphor with which we will conclude: how out of the chaotic abyss, a single sound emerges (an
“ У,” as promoted by Ivanov, perhaps), drawing our attention to a singular point in the chaos,
which quickly doubles into two points, a pair of eyes, gazing out to reveal the contours of a face
(obraz) of a coming-subject-to-be, a fate announced with the articulation of an as-yet-unknown
New Name.
301
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Appendix A:
Timeline of Psychoanalysis in Pre- and Post-Revolutionary Russia:
Major Events, Publications, Case Histories
Figure 3: The Riabushinskii Mansion (osobniak) is a Fyodor Schechtel-designed, Art Nouveau
mansion on Malaia Nikitskaia Street in Moscow. After Soviet appropriation, it held a
psychoanalytic kindergarten, outpatient clinic, and psychoanalytic training center in the 1920s,
becoming later the home (and now house-museum) of Maxim Gorky. (Photo credit: unknown)
1899, Freud publishes Die Traumdeutung.
1904, First psychoanalytic text translated to Russian, Freud’s Über den Traum (O
snovideniiakh).
Pavlov wins Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine for work on conditioned reflexes.
314
1905, Bloody Sunday; Russian Revolution of 1905; Russo-Japanese War concludes.
The National Conference of Psychiatrists (Natsional'naia konferentsiia psikhiatrov) in
Kyiv supports governmental reform.
1906, First Imperial Duma convenes; Stolypin reforms begin.
1907, V. I. Iakovenko and V. F. Chizh debate role of politics in psychiatric medicine.
1908, N. E. Osipov, publishes two essays on Freud and Jung in Zhurnal nevropatologii i
psikhiatrii imeni Korsakova.
1909, N. A. Vyrubov opens Kriukovo sanatorium outside Moscow, where psychoanalysis is
practiced.
1910, Russian aristocrat, S. K. Pankeev (The Wolf Man), enters psychoanalytic treatment with
Freud.
Osipov visits Freud in Vienna, receiving official approval to translate Worcester, Mass.
Lectures (O psikhoanalize...).
Famous Bundist, V. Dav. Medem, translates Freud’s Zur Psychopathologie des
Alltagslebens (Psikhopatologiia obydennoi zhyzni).
Vyrubov, Osipov, Iu. V. Kannabikh, A. N. Bernshtein, and O. B. Fel’tsman publish
Psikhoterapiia, a journal focused on original psychoanalytic case studies and translations.
Close to 30 of Freud’s essays translated and published.
1911, Delo Kasso shakes higher education.
V. P. Serbskii debates P. B. Gannushkin over diagnostics in psychiatry.
Serbskii resigns as director of Moscow Psychiatric Clinic; Serbskii, Osipov, and N. N.
Bazhenov form weekly psychoanalytic circle outside hospital system (Malye piatnitsy).
Tatiana Rozental’ publishes case of a young woman’s fear of abandonment, as a response
to larger cultural and social factors (first of its kind).
Osipov writes about suicidal tendencies in Anna Karenina and describes the case of a
patient’s compulsive smile.
Osipov and Fel’tsman establish Psikhoterapevticheskaia Biblioteka book series (11
volumes total); three of Freud’s monographs published (O psikhoanalize; Tri stat’i o
teorii polovogo vlecheniia; Psikhoanaliz detskogo strakha).
315
1912, Ultra-nationalist philosopher, I. A. Il’in, undergoes analysis with Freud in Vienna.
S. N. Spielrein delivers a paper on a compulsion toward death to Viennese Psychoanalytic
Society, Die Destruktion als Ursache des Werdens (Destruction as Cause of Becoming).
Jansen’s Gradiva published in Russian translation in Odessa with forward by Freud.
Osipov writes about a suicidal patient in Psikhoterapiia, connecting mental health to social
worth.
Radical (Bolshevik) psychiatrist, P. P. Tutyshkin, publishes article on psychoanalysis.
Freud’s study of Leonardo da Vinci translated.
1913, Russian translation of Interpretation of Dreams (Tolkovanie snovidenii) published.
S. S. Goloushev publishes the case of Gospodin Iks in Psikhoterapiia, a man suffering
from impotence.
1914, Russian Empire enters the Great War.
Psikhoterapiia journal folds.
Polish philologist, F. F. Zelinskii publishes Russian translation of Sophocles’ Oedipus
Rex (Tsar’ Edip).
Il’in encourages Symbolist, E. K. Metner, to take up analysis with Freud in Vienna.
G. I. Chelpanov’s Institute of Experimental Psychology opens, modeled on Wundt’s lab
in Leipzig, Shtumpf’s Berlin lab, and 9 U.S. psych institutions.
1916, Influenced by her relationship to Il’in and Metner, Mar. S. Shaginian composes novel
Svoia sud’ba, first Russian literary text exploring psychoanalysis.
Metner moves to Switzerland to work with Jung.
1917, February Revolution; Kerensky’s Provisional Government; October Revolution.
Russo-American psychoanalyst, G. Moi. Zil’boorg, studies under Bekhterev and serves
as secretary to Kerenskii’s Minister of Labor.
Kannabikh diagnoses Blok with neurasthenia and treats his mother at Kriukovo
sanatorium.
Streshnevo, a private psychoneurological sanatorium, opens.
316
1918, Period of War Communism.
Bolsheviks appropriate Kriukovo as orphanage for derelict children.
Kannabikh works at Streshnevo.
Osipov leaves the country, settling in Prague.
N. S. Gumilev composes Veselye brat’ia, about a psychoanalyst travelling to Russian
countryside.
Bekhterev publishes article on sexual drives, “Razvittie polovogo vlecheniie s tochki
zreniia refleksologii,”
1919, Soviet-Polish War begins.
T. Rozental’ develops psychoanalysis at Bekhterev’s Neurological Institute in Petrograd.
1920, Freud credits Spielrein for inspiring the Todestrieb (death drive) in Jenseits des
Lustprinzips (Beyond the Pleasure Principle).
1921, New Economic Politics (NEP) period begins; Povolzh’e famine breaks out.
Vera Schmidt, I. D Ermakov, and Moisei Vul’f oversee three state-funded institutions:
The Moscow Psychoanalytic Society, The State Psychoanalytic Institute, and Detskii
Dom-Laboratoriia in Moscow.
Rozental’ ends her life.
1922, Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (SSSR) officially established.
Fridtjof Nansen receives Nobel Peace Prize for hunger relief efforts in the Soviet Union.
7 million displaced orphans (besprizornye deti) live in the new Soviet state.
A. R. Luria forms Kazan’ Psychoanalytic Society with B. D. Fridman and R. A.
Averbukh.
Vorlesungen zur Einführung in die Psychoanalyse translated into Russian.
1923, Chelpanov removed from head of Institute of Experimental Psychology, replaced by his
student, K. N. Kornilov.
Academic philosopher, B. Em. Bykhovskii, publishes article arguing for compatibility
between Freudian concepts and central tenets of historical materialism.
317
Averbukh translates Freud’s Massenpsychologie und Ich-Analyse.
Pravda publishes Trotskii’s letter to Pavlov, urging for collaboration with Freud.
Ermakov begins publication series Psikhologicheskaia i Psikhoanaliticheskaia Biblioteka
and publishes monograph on Nikolai Gogol, Ocherki po psikhologii gogolevskogo
tvorchestva.
Pavlov publishes work summarizing twenty years of research.
1924, Lenin dies in January; Trotsky’s Left, Stalin’s Center, and Bukharin’s Right Oppositions
clash at the Thirteenth Party Congress; First Soviet Constitution ratified.
Second Psychoneurological Congress in Petrograd meets to accept Kornilov’s
reaktologiia, Pav. P. Blonskii’s dialekticheskaia psikhologiia, and A. B. Zalkind’s
refleksologirovannyi freidizm into Soviet psychology.
Constitutional lawyer, M. A. Reisner (author of First Soviet Constitution), publishes
article giving psychoanalytic critique of religion, “Freid i ego shkola o religii.”
Zalkind publishes essay “Freidizm i marksizm” and gives psychoanalytic diagnosis of
high-ranking party members in volume Ocherki kul’tury revoliutsionnogo vremeni.
Medical student, G. Malis, gives psychoanalytic reading of communism and the coming
society, Psikhoanaliz kommunizma.
Cosmist philosopher, A. K. Gorskii, writes about psychoanalysis of the new soviet man,
Ogromnyi ocherk.
Young L. S. Vygotskii gives talk on applying psychoanalysis to literature at State Psychoanalytic
Institute in Moscow.
Theater director, I. M. Evreinov, publishes psychoanalysis of Rasputin; Anna Kashina-Evreinova
(his wife) publishes psychoanalytic reading of Dostoevsky.
Dialectician philosopher, V. Iurinets, negatively critiques psychoanalysis in article
“Freidizm i marksizm.”
1925, Krupskaia relates Lenin’s negative view on psychoanalysis, calling it a “fad” (svoego
roda modnaia prichuda).
Vul’f translates Freud’s case history of the Wolf Man, Iz istorii odnogo detskogo
nervosa.
Luria and Vygotskii write lengthy introduction to Vul’f’s translation of Freud’s Jenseits
des Lustprinzips.
318
Kornilov’s edited collection of Soviet articles on psychology published, Psikhologiia i
marksizm, where Luria and Fridman write about monistic, dialectical, and materialist
features of psychoanalysis and its compatibility with Marxism.
Leader of Dialectician philosophers, Ab. Moi. Deborin, writes critique of psychoanalysis
in “Freidizm i sotsiologiia.”
Iurinets publishes another, three-part critical article on Freud’s relation to social
psychology, “Freid i psikhologiia.”
Detskii Dom Laboratoriia closes.
Literary critic, V. M. Friche, reports on debates in Communist Academy of Science over
psychoanalytic sexual theory in relation to art, “Freidizm i isskustvo.”
Literary critic, I. Grigor’ev, writes positive article on the link between aesthetics and
psychoanalytic theory for Soviet culture, “Psikhoanaliz kak metod issledovaniia
khudozhestvennoi literatury.”
Cultural enlightenment figure and editor of Krasnaia nov’, A. K.Voronskii, advocates for
usefulness of Freudian thought for Soviet literature, writing about unconscious forces of
creativity.
Franz Wittel’s first biography of Freud translated to Russian.
1926, Trotskii, Zinoviev, and members of the United Opposition denounce Stalin.
Dialectician philosopher, I. D. Sapir, publishes systematic critique of Freudian theory, its
lack of concern for social factors, and the nonexistence of the unconscious from Marxist
perspective, “Freidizm i Marksizm.”
Zalkind publishes volume, Polovoi vopros v usloviiakh sovetskoi obshchestvennosti.
1927, The Fifteenth Party Congress under Stalin’s control expels the United Opposition from
the Communist Party.
Voronskii is fired from Krasnaia nov’.
Luria steps down as Secretary of the Russian Psychoanalytic Society; Vygotskii lectures
negatively on psychoanalysis.
Marxist philosopher of language, V. N. Voloshinov, critiques psychoanalysis, Freidizm:
kriticheskii ocherk.
1928, Shakhty (show) Trials begin.
319
American psychologist and educator, John Dewey, visits Soviet Russia.
Tynianov writes Podporuchik Kizhe, parodying psychoanalytic conventions in literature.
1929, Trotskii exiled from the Soviet Union; Stalin announces the Great Break, First Five-Year
Plan (backdated to 1928); Collectivization begins.
Dialecticians defeat Mechanists in philosophical debates; Second All-Union Congress of
Marxist-Leninist Scientific Institutions enforces dialectics in the natural sciences.
Wilhelm Reich visits Moscow for two months, publicly defending psychoanalysis against
critiques of Sapir and Dialecticians, “Dialekticheskii materialism i psikhoanaliz” and
“Psychoanaliz kak estestvenauchnaia psikhologiia.”
Sapir replies to Reich, “Freidizm, sotsiologiia, psikhologiia.”
1930, Psychological discussions begin: First All-Union Congress on Human Behavior in
Moscow meets; each psychological school critiqued by Dialecticians; psychoanalysis
officially denounced.
Final report about activities of Russian Psychoanalytic Society sent to the International
Journal of Psychoanalysis.
Freud publishes Das Unbehagen in der Kultur, arguing that a non-repressive society is
impossible.
1931, Central Committee passes resolution to eliminate Dialecticians and followers of Deborin.
Osipov critiques Bolshevism from Prague, “Revoliutsiia i son.”
Western Freudo-Marxist, Erich Fromm, publishes “The Method and Function of an
Analytic Social Psychology” in which he argues that libido is primarily modified by
economic conditions. Frankfurt School (Fromm and Herbert Marcuse) continue adapting
Freudian ideas to Marx.
Exiled Russian religious philosopher, B. P. Vysheslavtsev, writes positively on
psychoanalysis in pamphlet, Etika preobrazhennogo Erosa.
1932, All-Union Psychiatric Conference: new socialist psychology based on Marxist social
relations is proposed by A. Talankin, “Protiv men’shevistsvuiushchego idealizma v
psikhologii.”
Luria officially recants Freud in article, “Krizis burzhuaznoi psikhologii,” yet publishes
famous text Nature of Human Conflicts based on experiments conducted between 1923
and 1930.
320
1934, Death of Vygotskii.
1935, Luria composes entry “Freidizm” for Great Soviet Encyclopedia, denouncing its links to
Marxism as a bourgeois phenomenon.
1936, New Soviet Constitution instated; Show Trials begin.
Death of Pavlov.
Zalkind commits suicide after Central Committee decrees ban on Pedology.
Voronskii, Deborin, are executed.
1940, Trotsky executed.
1948 First post-war psychiatric conference meets strictly in Pavlovian mode.
1955, Herbert Marcuse publishes most popular synthesis of Freud and Marx (challenges
Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents with concept “repressive desublimation”) in Eros
and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud.
1956, Pavlov Conference meets, with renewed interest in psychodynamic phenomena; the
psychoneuroses, unconscious drives, and depth-psychological categories of hysteria and
obsessive neuroses return to discussion.
1957, Reich is arrested in the United States by the FBI; a trove of his works is incinerated.
1960s, Snezhnevskii school of political psychiatry grows; use of Sulfazin, physical restraints,
and diagnosis of vialotekushchaia shizofreniia applied to political dissidents.
1967, Standard Soviet Marxist critique of Freud given by historian of science, A. V. Petrovskii,
Istoriia sovetskoi psikhologii.
1971, Dissident, V. K. Bukovskii, smuggles documentation of political abuse of psychiatry,
causing a global scandal in the political and scientific communities; expelled 1976.
1979, Psychoanalysis openly explored at Second International Symposium in Tbilisi, Georgia,
organized by D. Uznadze.
1980, New generation of intellectuals rediscover the history of psychoanalysis in Russia.
1990, Fall of Berlin Wall.
1991, Collapse of Soviet Union.
Eastern European Institute of Psychoanalysis (VEIP) established in Saint Petersburg.
321
1996, Boris Yeltsin signs Decree of the President of Russian Federation to provide state support
for the development of psychoanalysis.
1997, Moscow Institute of Psychoanalysis established.
2016, Federal Service for Supervision in Education and Science (Rosobnadzor) revokes
governmental accreditation for VEIP.
Figure 4: The Riabushinskii Mansion pictured in Moscow today. (Photo credit: Daria Donchenko,
2023)
Abstract (if available)
Abstract
The dissertation examines the arrival of classical psychoanalysis in the Russian / Soviet context, prior to the period of Stalinism. It argues that what allowed psychoanalysis to pass the break of the October Revolution and flourish in the 1920s was the notion of the “drives” (Triebe). This concept helps explain how Freudian thought became distributed between incompatible schools in the works of Soviet materialist thinkers, expatriate religious philosophers, and the remarkable work of several modernist artists of the period. It synthesizes several historical studies on philosophy, psychology, and psychoanalysis in connection to the concept of the drives. Furthermore, since literature has frequently played the role of psychological education in Russia, the thesis develops this history alongside discussion of under-examined literary case studies. These texts explicitly feature psychoanalysts as characters and psychodynamic concepts as central, thematic motifs—what I name “Russian psychoanalytic novels.” While publicly critical of the rapid spread of psychoanalysis in the popular imagination, these authors were nevertheless inspired by psychodynamic lines of thought, in which case studies read like literary texts themselves. With the arrival of Stalinism, psychoanalysis became a prohibited practice, as it was further associated with the “Left Opposition” group allying itself with Trotsky, a vocal supporter of the Freudian movement within the state apparatus
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