About the “medical” text of Russian literature of the 19–21th centuries

Abstract

The article describes the prospects of the study of the “medical text” of Russian literature of the 19–21th centuries — not in its usual cultural and anthropological version, but from the respective of individual, biographically motivated connections of many Russian writers with medicine, their personal “poetics of medicine”. The diversity of intertextual connections in the deployment of the “medical text” over the decades, its new emphases brought by the reality of the 2020s, and its deep connection with the intellectual discourse of different eras: theories of positivism, cosmology, psychoanalysis, etc., are emphasized. “Medical text” includes a rich typology of doctors and patients in writers-doctors, but is not limited to it: the focus of the researchers also includes images of doctors and patients created by writers who were not doctors, artistic embodiment of epidemics, psychopathological aspect and psychoanalytic approaches to the problem, “pharmacy” topos, medical prescription as microtext of the artwork. In the development of the “medical text” is marked by a certain continuity and consistency, which so far has not been the subject of special consideration. A logical continuation of the “medical text” becomes the “covid text” of contemporary Russian literature to the extent that the COVID itself becomes a literary symptom. All this opens up space for new investigations and interpretations.