Degeneration. Literature and psychiatry in Russian culture of the late XIX century

The book offers a new, unexpected view of the Russian era of Fin de Siecle in the context of its many connections with the pan -European discourse of degeneration. If so far literary scholars have been limited to an indication of parallels between criticism of culture from biomedical positions, on the one hand, and Russian decadent and symbolist literature, on the other, then Nikolosi draws a wide panorama of anti -Modernist discourse about degeneration, which has developed as a result of close interaction of the literature and psychiatry. The book discusses the various transformations of the narrative about a degenerative decline: the poetry of naturalism and forensic psychiatric studies, literature on the life of the criminal world and criminal anthropology, literary Darwinism and Eugenic. At the same time, the conservative psychiatry and literature of late realism and naturalism are assigned equal to important roles in the formation, change and critical verification of various narratives about degeneration. This prospect allows us to identify non-obvious rapprochement in the work of both half-forgotten and firmly included in the literary canon of Russian writers: D. N. Mamina-Sibiryak and F. M. Dostoevsky, P. D. Boborykin and M.E. Saltykov-Shchedrin, in . A. Gilyarovsky and L. N. Tolstoy, A. I. Svirsky and A.P. Chekhov