State of Madness

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What madness meant was a fiercely contested question in Soviet society. This examination focuses on the politically fraught collision between psychiatric and literary discourses following Joseph Stalin's death. State psychiatrists used set narratives of mental illness to pathologize dissenting politics and art. Dissidents like Aleksandr Vol'pin, Vladimir Bukovskii, and Semen Gluzman highlighted the troubling overlap between these narratives and their own experiences. They argued that the state had crafted an idealized view of reality resembling a pathological work of art. Writers such as Joseph Brodsky, Andrei Siniavskii, and Venedikt Erofeev engaged with psychiatric discourse to explore the boundaries between creativity and insanity. Together, these dissenters positioned themselves as psychiatrists to a sick society, challenging psychiatry's authority to label them or their work as insane. They exposed the state's claims to rationality and modernity as self-serving fictions in the post-Stalin era. Like the child in Hans Christian Andersen's "The Emperor's New Clothes," they revealed the truth, with the truth-teller being pathologized in a society that insists on collective delusion. This interdisciplinary study situates literature's encounter with psychiatry within a broader struggle for authority and power, appealing to literary specialists, historians of culture, science, and medicine, and scholars of the Soviet Union and i