Febris erotica: Love-sickness and the mind-body problem in Russian literature and culture (Alexander Ivanovich Herzen, Ivan Aleksandrovich Goncharov, Leo Tolstoy, Nikolai Gavrilovich Chernyshevsky).

摘要

This thesis examines the transformation of the love-sickness topos in Russian literature in its connection with major philosophical and ethical concerns of Russian culture in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. One of the crucial preoccupations of eighteenth-century Western thought and science that found a particularly lasting resonance in Russian culture concerned the nature of the interaction between body and soul—the heritage of seventeenth-century Cartesian dualism. Love-sickness—a phenomenon that connects an emotion and a physical malady—proved to be an excellent litmus test for each period's solution of the mind-body problem.; This study of love-sickness focuses on two aspects of the problem: the historical development of this topos in Russian literature and culture in the course of two centuries and its theoretical dimension, namely the epistemological, rhetorical, and semiotic potential of love-sickness. The first chapter outlines the high points of the topos' development in ancient and medieval Western traditions, both medical and literary, and discusses its reception in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Russian culture. The second chapter focuses on the period of Sentimentalism in Russian literature and culture and explores, through analysis of medical sources, literary works, and critical and philosophical discourse on sensibility, how the Sentimentalists' concern with the mind-body interaction and the resulting preoccupation with the physiology of emotions, and particularly the nerves, affect their treatment of love-sickness. The second half of the dissertation centers on the epistemological challenges traditionally posed by the diagnostics of love-sickness and examines how Russian writers of the post-Romantic era (Herzen, Goncharov, Tolstoy, and Chernyshevsky) use the love-sickness topos in order to either assert or subvert the positivist and materialist orientation of contemporary science and culture. The polemical potential of the topos is realized most fully in Leo Tolstoy's major novels, where the non-organic character of this illness, inaccessible to doctors, serves as a challenge to positivist epistemology. The rich philosophical potential of the love-sickness cliché accounts for its astonishing longevity in Russian literature, which alters the ancient Western topos to address its own concerns.