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Frederick H. White, Degeneration, decadence, and disease in the Russian fin de siècle: neurasthenia in the life and work of Leonid Andreev

Degeneration, decadence, and disease in the Russian fin de siecle: neurasthenia in the life and work of Leonid Andreev, by Frederick H. White, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2014, xii + 290 pp., £75.00 (hbk), ISBN 978-0-719-09164-3The composite title of Frederick White's book - Degeneration, Decadence, and Disease in the Russian Fin de Siecle: Neurasthenia in the Life and Work of Leonid Andreev - aptly summarizes the dual nature of its content. The study entails two intertwined projects. The first one concentrates on Leonid Andreev (1871-1919), whose work epitomizes an uneasy relationship between modernism and the Russian literary market circa 1900. Andreev was one of the literary comets of fin de siecle Russia. His sudden rise to fame in the late 1890s was matched only by Maksim Gor'kii's. In the following decade he quickly became one of the most popular, widely discussed, and well-paid Russian authors. However, his celebrity all but evaporated in the 1910s, leaving him with the reputation of a writer of cliched psychological thrillers capitalizing on the era's obsessions with criminality and mental health. Building on his previous work on the subject (Memoirs and Madness, 2006), White problematizes this image and calls into question many received notions about Andreev, particularly the "sanitized" Soviet versions of the author's biography. White presents a lifelong struggle with depression and anxiety - diagnosed at the time as "neurasthenia" - as fundamental to an understanding of Andreev's oeuvre and as the primary reason for his immense, although short-lived popularity. In doing so, White also examines the influence of degeneration theory on scientific, social, and cultural constructions of mental illness in Russia, all of which had a considerable impact on the public reception of Andreev's work. Although not without its problems, White's book constitutes a remarkable effort to put the author of "The Abyss" back on the map of Russian modernist studies.In the first part of the study, White traces the connections between degeneration theory, the development of Russian psychiatry, and social attitudes to psychopathology in late imperial Russia. Central to his thesis is the concept of illness narrative, defined as a narrative articulation of one's illness experience - of how it feels to be sick - under the influence of social and cultural constructions of illness. White's discussion aims to recreate the "external" factors shaping Andreev's illness narrative, leaving "internal" ones for part two. Readers will find here a good overview of the above-listed topics along with a useful bibliography. What harms this section is that it often reads like a set of interconnected encyclopedic entries rather than a coherent argument. Russia's attempts at containing degeneration and its "symptoms" make for a fascinating read, but both chapters comprising White's historical and theoretical introduction could have been streamlined, given that much of the information contained in them can be found elsewhere (for example, in studies by Daniel Beer and Olga Matich, both of whom White references). …