Mental Illnesses in Symbolism

Introduction

The collection of essays Mental Illness in Symbolism consists of eight articles, five of them inspired by conference presentations, some given at the Congress of Comparative Literature in Paris in 2013, and others at the Conference of American Association of Comparative Literature in Seattle in 2015. These papers were presented in the frame of the Research Center on Symbolist Movement, Art, Literature and Music in Symbolism and Decadence (ALMSD, http://www.uis.edu/hosted-orgs/ALMSD/index.html), which was responsible for organizing the panels at those conferences. Two essays published in this collection, Nora Buhks’ “Nabokov and Psychiatry: The Case of Luzhin”1 and Olga Skonechnaya’s “Russian Paranoid Discourse,”2 were previously published in Russian, and the third essay, my own, “The Hidden World of the Unconscious: Expressions of Underground Chaos in the Work of Mikhail Vrubel,”3 was originally published in French. In this collection, these three essays appear in my translation and this is the first time that they are available to an English-speaking audience.
All essays in the collection relate to the Symbolist movement, either directly or indirectly, and they all treat theissue of madness in art, literature, and music. The definition of madness that these articles use is quite broad and derives mainly from Michel Foucault’s vision of madness, which he expressed in his book Folie et déraison. Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique (Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason). Jean-Claude Lanne summarized
some of Foucault’s ideas on madness and art in his article “Poésie et folie: le cas du futurisme russe” (Poetry and Madness: The Case of Russian Futurism)4 and this is directly applicable to essays published in Mental Illness in Symbolism. Lanne wrote:

Madness, first of all, is a question of judgment, thus it is a relative concept. One is declared insane when his behavior, sentiment, discourse, and actions betray a difference in relation to the social norm, the system commonly accepted and responsible for the smooth running of the society. When a specialist (a medical doctor) makes a judgment, it implies, for the one who is its object, the treatment, and a return to the “normality,” to the ordinary social life. In the artistic area, one is declared insane not only when his behavior can be distanced from the social norm (there are myriad examples in the history of art: Holderlin, G. de Nerval, Van Gogh, Vrubel, Garshin, etc.), but also, and mainly when the one’s work (verbal and other) is distanced from some criteria commonly accepted which are the basis and definition of the poetical and of the esthetic system of the given time period. First of all, these are the specialists in the area of literature, the critics, who carry that judgment of value about the work, who stigmatize it as delirious, eccentric, absurd, extravagant, in short, “mad.”5

Foucault’s definition is also directly applicable to contemporaries’ perception of the Symbolist movement and its artistic expression in different media (visual arts, literature, and music). For example, and for the reasons that Foucault mentions, when the works of Western European Symbolists, articles about them, and the works of native-born Symbolists began to appear in Russia, many critics called the works of Symbolists insane and labeled those who produced them psychopaths. In one instance, Russian civic critic Boris Glinsky, in his article “Illness or Publicity” (“Bolezn’ ili reklama”) published in The Herald of History in 1896, decried the famous Russian Symbolist journal The Northern Herald (Severny Vestinik) as a psychiatric asylum and all its members as mentally ill, these representing the flower of the first generation of Russian Symbolists and being the founders of the movement. Zinaida Vengerova, a journalist, translator, Russian literary critic and one of the first theoreticians of the Symbolist Movement, laughingly comments on it in a letter to her sister, the pianist Isabelle Vengerova:

By the way, together with the latest issues of The Northern Herald, I will send you the issue of The Herald of History that contains a curious article about The Northern Herald written by B. Glinsky. Glinsky calls Luba [Gurevich, the editor of The Northern Herald] the landlady of the establishment for the mentally ill; all of us are the interns and the most hopeless is Minsky because he proclaims the publication of my book. I can be cured if I let myself be rescued from Minsky’s and Volynsky’s company, if my decadent articles are not published, and I am handed over to my respectable brother, Semen Afanasievich. Isn’t it good? Now we call the publishing house an “establishment,” and each other psychopaths.6

The study of the Symbolist movement is sometimes perceived as a study of insanity, partially because it is a movement whose essence derives from the importance of the unconscious, the uncontrollable and irrational part of the human inner world, the world of Dionysus,7 which artists attempt to depict through various artistic forms and media. It is not accidental that in Plato’s Republic the poet is excluded from the ideal city, wherein rationality reigns. Plato describes the poet as a “madman,” full of “divine frenzy,” because he “destroys the reasonable part” of the soul.8
In the second part of the 19th century, the unconscious became a subject of study and of examination by medicine. The French neurologist and professor of anatomical pathology Jean-Martin Charcot, who worked at the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris, searched for ways to access the unconscious in order to cure his patients’ physical pains which he believed resulted from psychological trauma. Sigmund Freud, when he still was a student in Vienna, traveled to Paris to listen to Charcot’s lectures, to meet him, and to see his public presentations of hypnosis applied to “hysterics,” namely Charcot’s patients at Salpêtrière. Charcot’s method consisted of attempting to access the subjects’ unconscious through hypnosis, believing that it was a way to bring out the traumatic experiences and articulate them. According to him, remembering the origins of the pain and talking about them could liberate the patients from ongoing emotional pain and bring them a cure, not only mentally, but also for the physical manifestations of their mental distress. This is the method that Freud later employed in his psychoanalytic talk therapy.
A number of Symbolist artists, among them Odilon Redon, witnessed those presentations, which then had an effect on their artistic imagination, and later, influenced their works. Barbara Larson’s book, The Dark Side of Nature: Science, Society, and the Fantastic in the Work of Odilon Redon (Refiguring Modernism) and some articles such as “L’hystérique, l’artiste et le savant” (The Hysteric, the Artist and the Scholar) by Jacqueline Carroy and “Révolte et folie visionnaire chez Carlos Schwabe: La Vague 1906-1907″ (Revolt and the Visionary Folly in Carlos Schwabe: The Wave 1906-1907)” by Jean-David Lafond-Jumeau in the catalog of the exhibit L’Âme au corps9 certainly explore those issues.
The Symbolist movement searched for ways to express the invisible reality, particularly the reality of the unconscious world; dark, mysterious, and unreliable. It was for this reason that Baudelaire and later Stéphane Mallarmé were so interested in Edgar Allan Poe’s tales that they translated them into French. For this same reason, Redon searched for the “visual language” to describe the indescribable, the life of the unconscious and the chilling feeling that some literary works (including Poe’s) awaken through dealing with these topics.
The first part of this book consists of four articles on art and madness: “Psychiatric Photography, the Expression of Emotions, and Italian Symbolist Art: The Search for Self and Identity Crisis at the Turn of the 20th Century” by Mario Finazzi,“The Hidden World of the Unconscious: Expressions of Underground Chaos in the Work of Mikhail Vrubel” by Rosina Neginsky, “‘Tout n’est que syphilis’: Venereal terror and the representation of women in fin-de-siècle Belgium” by Natalia Angeles Vieyra, and “Verhaeren on Rembrandt’s ‘folie’: ‘S’il n’était un génie, on le prendrait pour un fou’” by Albert Alhadeff. The second part consists of three articles on literature and madness: “Nabokov and Psychiatry: The Case of Luzhin” by Nora Buhks, “Russian Paranoid Discourse” by Olga Skonechnaya, and “Sexual Neurosis or Creative Catalyst? Hysteria and Demonic Possession in Alexei Remizov’s Solomoniia” by Julia Friedman. The third and final part has only one article, “Mental Disorder and Creativity in Composers: The Performer’s Gesture as a Pointer to traces of ‘Madness’” by Jean-Pierre Armengaud, and its topic is music and madness.
Finazzi’s article “Psychiatric Photography, the Expression of Emotions, and Italian Symbolist Art: The Search for Self and Identity Crisis at the Turn of the 20th Century” analyzes the works of three Italian artists: Adolfo Wildt, a sculptor from Milan; Romolo Romani, a painter from Brescia, settled in Milan; and a woman artist, Adriana Bisi Fabbri. Finazzi suggests that they were interested in depicting human emotions of suffering and the tormented inner world of their subjects, partially because they were tormented souls themselves, and because they lived at a time when there was a fascination with the world of the unconscious, especially with its dark side. That fascination was reinforced Darwin’s, Charcot’s, and Richer’s publications, which stressed the importance of studying emotions in order to access and to understand the world of the unconscious. Charcot’s public presentations of hypnosis and the growing fashion in psychiatric hospitals of taking photographs or making paintings of the mentally ill, purportedly for studying their unconscious through their emotions, were also quite popular and known to artists. Finazzi believes that the interest of the mentioned artists in depicting various emotions was partially inspired by the photographs and paintings of the mentally ill and that some of these artists used those works in order to create their own art.
Neginsky’s article “The Hidden World of the Unconscious: Expressions of Underground Chaos in the Work of Mikhail Vrubel” examines various representations of the image of the Demon by Russian Symbolist artist Mikhail Vrubel. His demon was originally inspired by Michail Lermontov’s long poem The Demon, but eventually moved into its own original direction. The article specifically studies how Vrubel’s hallucinations affected his choice of colors, shapes, and ornamentation in some of his representations of the Demon and led to the creation of a new Demon, different from the one that appears in Lermontov’s poem.
Vieyra’s article “Tout n’est que syphilis: Venereal Terror and the Representation of Women in Fin-de-Siècle Belgium” explores the idea of madness in relation to the role of women who were perceived as carriers of venereal diseases responsible for madness. Vieyra examines visual works such as those of Belgian artists Fernand Khnopff and Felicien Rops, and especially Khnopff’s front-piece illustration for Pelladan’s novel Istar and Rops’s engravings Human Parody and Mors Syphilitic, which exemplify the responsibility put on women for being carriers of venereal diseases. She stresses how social and medical ignorance, labeling women as the only responsible parties for venereal diseases, contributed to the creation of an image of a femme fatale: a beautiful and seductive destroyer of men.
In his article “Verhaeren on Rembrandt’s ‘folie’: ‘S’il n’était un génie, on le prendrait pour un fou,’” Albert Alhadeff explores the Belgian culture at the turn of the century by analyzing the writings of Symbolist Belgian poet Emile Verhaeren, whose poetry was dedicated to the 17th century Dutch artist Rembrandt. Alhadeff demonstrates that these writings are particularly interesting because they express Verhaeren’s world-perception which allows him to see Rembrandt’s works from a Symbolist point of view and explains the reasons why his contemporaries, as well as later art critics, perceived Rembrandt as a madman. Adhadeff specifically uses the example of Rembrandt’s painting Night Watch to demonstrate that Verhaeren sees this work as a precursor of Symbolism, since he believes that it depicts the unconscious asex pressed through a dream. Adhadeff believes that “Verhaeren qualifies Rembrandt as [a] madman, because of his unconventionality, his ability to dismiss the social conventions and expectations, and the ability to live entirely in his own inner world, the world of an inner dream,” and that is what makes his works diverge from normality” and makes Rembrandt a precursor of Symbolism.
Nabokov’s novel The Luzhin Defense is the topic of Nora Buhks’ article “Nabokov and Psychiatry: The Case of Luzhin.” Her article is a study of the novel’s main character, the chess player Luzhin, whom Nabokov creates using the model of autism, the mental condition that psychiatrist Bleuler describes as “the escape from reality with, at the same time, the relative or absolute predominance of the inner life.” Bukhs notes that “Luzhin’s fear in front of the real world contributes to the development and growth of his imaginary world, which seems to him “understandable, harmonious, and subjugated to his will.” The article addresses a mental condition taken to the extreme as a reflection on the Symbolist movement, whose prerogative was based on the philosophy of withdrawal from physical reality and immersion within the inner world as the foundation for creativity and building a better world. The autistic Luzhin could be perceived as an example of danger with such an attitude and a satire on Symbolism.
Olga Skonechnaya’s article “Russian Paranoid Discourse” is a study of how Russian Symbolist novels, such as those by Andrey Bely and Fedor Sologub, treat paranoia. Skonechnaya explains the particularity of madness in the Symbolist novel and stresses that “Symbolism distinguishes between two types of folly: the elevated prophetic folly whose role is to unveil the mysteries of existence; and the low folly which represents the supreme level of stupidity/silliness or the confinement to that absurd world.” Through an analysis of Russian Symbolist novels, she demonstrates how “the clinical folly can appear as a degeneration of the elevated folly into illness … or as the opposite, a sort of hypertrophy of earthly thought, a hypertrophy of a limited intelligence, which in its importancy destroys its own limits (such is ‘Peredonov’s mania’).”
Julia Freedman’s article “Sexual Neurosis or Creative Catalyst? Hysteria and Demonic Possession in Alexei Remizov’s Solomoniia” examines Remizov’s text “Solomoniia,” is a study of the main character Solomoniia’s demoniac possession. Freedman explains that this text is a result of Remizov’s interest in and knowledge of Jean-Martin Charcot’s studies of “hysterics.” One of Freedman’s questions is about the relationship between creativity and madness. By citing Remizov’s attestation that he connects his pain with his writing, Freedman implies that mental illness is often prompted by outside conditions and leads to uncovering the world of the unconscious, which Symbolists (and, following them, Surrealists) believed to be a foundation for the creative process.
The last article in the collection is “Mental Disorder and Creativity in Composers: The Performer’s Gesture as a Pointer to traces of ‘Madness’” by Jean-Pierre Armengaud. Armengaud analyzes mental imbalance in composers such as Robert Schumann, Eric Satie, Alexander Scriabin, Serge Rachmaninov, Anton Brückner, and Gustav Mahler who lived and created in the late 19th century and the early 20th. He studies the insanity of these artists from the point of view of a performer of their works. He explains that:

In general, the aspect of madness shows itself to the fingers of the pianist as an impossibility, a step beyond the musical project, the crossing of a red line, or even aggression. . . . The pre-symbolism in Schumann . . . gives the music the power to access a meta-rational order, where the hands of the pianist are arbiters between the comprehensible and the incomprehensible, like symbolist painting would be between the visible and the invisible. . . .

The collection of essays Mental Illness in Symbolism makes explicit the link between the Symbolist movement’s artistic expression and madness. It complements the earlier studies of madness in the arts and especially in art, literature, and music that are part of the Symbolist movement or derive from its precepts.



1 Nora Buhks, “Nabokov i psychiatriia. Sluchai Luzhina” (“Nabokov and Psychiatry: The Case of Luzhin”), in Semiotika bezumiia, ed. Nora Buhks, Sorbonne, Paris-Moscow: Russian Institute, 2005,172-193.

2 Olga Iu. Skonechnaya, “Paranoidal’ny roman russkogo simvolizma: Fedor Sologub, Andrei Bely, Universalii russkoj literatury, v. 5, in Collection of Essays, ed. Faustov A.A., The State University of Voronezh, Voronezh: “Nauchnaya kniga,” 2013, 63-77.

3 See Rosina Neginsky, “Inconscient et Clandestinité: l’expresion du chaos souterrain dans la peinture de Vrouble,” in http://irphil.univlyon3.fr/accueil-philosophie/philosophie/recherche/publications/la-clandestinite-etudes-sur-la-pensee-russe582181.kjsp?RH=1326705502535, ed. Françoise Lesourd, 2011, 236-245.

4 Jean-Claude Lanne, “Poésie et folie: le cas du futurisme russe” (Poetry and Madness: The Case of Russian Futurism) in Semiotika bezumiia, ed. Nora Buhks, Sorbonne, Paris-Moscow: Russian Institute, 2005, 128-142.

5 Ibid, 130. See also Michel Foucault, Folie et déraison. Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique (Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason), Paris: Plon, 1961.

6 See Rosina Neginsky, Zinaida Vengerova: In Search of Beauty. A Literary Ambassador between East and West, Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2004, 70. For the Russian version see, Rosina Neginsky. Pis’ma Z.S. Vengerovoi k S.G. Balakhovskoi-Petit, Revue des Etudes Slaves, Paris, LXVII/2-3, 1995, letter N 33, 499.

7 See Friedrich W. Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music, London: Penguin, 1993. See also Thomas Mann, Death in Venice and Other Stories, New York: Signet Classics, 2006, and Madness and Creativity in Literature and Culture, eds. Corinne Saunders and Jane Macnaughton, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005, Dionysus in Literature, ed. Branimir M. Rieger, Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1994.

8 See Corinne Saunders, “’The Thoughtful Maladie’: Madness and Vision in Medieval Writings,” in Madness and Creativity in Literature and Culture, eds. Corinne Saunders and Jane Macnaughton, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005, 68.

9 L’Âme au corps, the catalog of exposition, Paris, National Galeries of Grand Palais (october 1993-janvier 1994).

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