Dr Rebecca Reich has discussed her new book, State of Madness: Psychiatry, Literature, and Dissent After Stalin (Northern Illinois University Press, 2018), with Kimberly St. Julian-Varnon of the New Books in Russian & Eurasian Studies podcast.

Dr Reich is University Lecturer in Russian Literature and Culture at Cambridge, with a primary focus on the twentieth century. Her book State of Madness: Psychiatry, Literature, and Dissent After Stalin examines the politically fraught interaction of psychiatric and literary discourses in the years after Joseph Stalin’s death.

State psychiatrists deployed set narratives of mental illness to pathologize dissenting politics and art in this period of Soviet history. Dissidents such as Aleksandr Vol’pin, Vladimir Bukovskii, and Semen Gluzman responded by highlighting a pernicious overlap between those narratives and their life stories. The state, they suggested in their own psychiatrically themed texts, had crafted an idealized view of reality that itself resembled a pathological work of art. Reich's book explores this encounter between literature and psychiatry through close readings of the unsanctioned poetry and prose of such writers as Joseph Brodsky, Andrei Siniavskii, and Venedikt Erofeev, which engaged with psychiatric discourse to probe where creativity ended and insanity began.

‘Reich demonstrates the truly insidious nature of state-sponsored psychiatric discourse and practice after Stalin,’ notes Angela Brintlinger, Professor of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures at the Ohio State University. ‘Rather than a simple indictment, however, she accesses important primary and secondary sources to explore the complexity of defining ‘madness’ in this conformist society.’

Dr Reich is also the Consultant Editor for Russia and East-Central Europe at the Times Literary Supplement. From 2003 to 2008 she was Arts Editor and Books Editor of The Moscow Times.