Poetry and psychiatry: essays on early twentieth-century Russian Symbolist culture

Abstract

towards cultural history. Her blending of these modes is successful to a large degree. Her literary tools, especially from semiotics, richly inform our understanding of the ways people from diverse social backgrounds self-presented. Her use of close literary analysis for newspaper articles and fashion spreads sets in relief the dizzying network of meanings that shaped social experience of the period. What is more, a historian’s eye for fascinating detail brings the era to life. Take, for instance, her description of a young woman who scandalized Odessa in 1911 with her transgressive outfit, inspiring a newspaper article entitled ‘Disorder Because of Bloomers’ (90–91). At times, however, the historian seems to overtake the literary scholar: a few readings of literary and visual texts seem overdetermined by the larger narrative. Her reading of a striking advertising poster for a 1901 ‘Monster Masquerade’, for instance, highlights the expected positive valences, the emphasis on pleasure and play, while overlooking a visual ambivalence that characterizes the image – a rendering of the central female figure as menacing and monstrous (4–5). Later, she reads a poster for a costume exhibition as visually opposing folk Russia and the West, and yet sets aside the strange visual conjunction of Russian folk costumes with a nude female Greek or Roman bust (71–72). Her richest literary readings address modernist texts. The rather rare less-nuanced moments, however, do not particularly affect the work as a whole, which catches the reader up in a colourful, finely rendered story and affords a captivating new look at modernism in Russia.