“You be Don Quixote but I've had enough.” The absurdity of the “worldly circus” led one Lieutenant Kvitsynskii, in 1852, to write this striking line in his suicide note and precipitate his own death with a pistol. A bemused civil servant in Tsar Nicholas I's security apparatus (the infamous and inquisitive Third Section) dryly recorded the death and quoted this note without comment. Susan Morrissey tells us that the suicide motivated by boredom was a genre cultivated by some Russians who sought neither the heroic final gesture of the revolutionary martyr nor the tragic self-destruction of the deranged. Killing oneself had various meanings in imperial Russia, and those meanings and their arbiters are the subject of this vividly written study.
Examining a prodigiously varied array of sources, Morrissey shows how Russians enacted and interpreted self-killing from the sixteenth century to the eve of Revolution. For early modern Russians, the means of death mattered. Russian Orthodoxy, like western Christianity, regarded the suicide as a rebel against God, and his remains as polluted. Towns had “wretched houses” on their outskirts for suicides, those who died inexplicable deaths, and strangers’ remains. Drinking oneself to death was a dishonourable exit in Russian religious and secular views. Significant shifts in regulation came with the dissenting Orthodox Old Believers’ late-seventeenth-century revolts, in the form of mass immolation. These fiery rejections of authority were the first use in Russia of self-destruction as political protest. Peter the Great responded in part by criminalizing attempted suicide in his westernized military; noteworthy exceptions were made for men suffering from “torment” and “madness”—foreseeing an insanity defence. He also tried to shift the suicide's body from the “wretched house” to the autopsy chamber. Russia's rulers would not complete this shift from sin to crime, and thence to a medicalized, social issue, until the late imperial era. Morrissey argues that Russians followed this general European trajectory but with significant distinctions; she also contends, and diligently demonstrates, how the sacred permeated the secular, how the medical metaphor served political ends. Russians approaching the suicide and his claims did so with “a kind of cultural reflexivity. Often convinced of their own backwardness, Russians constantly looked to Europe in order to interpret past and present experiences and to anticipate future developments” (p. 9).
Romantic sensibility, medical professionalization and the appearance of Russian statisticians in the early nineteenth century all tempered views of suicide, leading to decriminalization in 1845. A new crime, abuse of authority, made serf-owners liable if a serf killed himself, and forensic autopsies provided the evidence. Yet Russia's backwardness meant suicide was less prevalent than in Europe—a Europe Russia understood itself to be joining, albeit at a huge delay. With the Great Reforms of the 1860s (freeing serfs, transforming the courts) doctors seized upon suicide, and the flow of European medical literature on it, to produce constructions of self-killing as the result of “pathologies of the self” (pp. 194–202). Psychiatry's “new toolbox of diagnostic terms” (p. 201) enabled Russia's doctors to prescribe for the body politic. Implicitly and explicitly their prescriptions were a critique of the “kingdom of darkness”—the autocratic patriarchal order that persisted, despite accelerating modernity.
That modernity yielded a political opposition devoted to terrorism; the political suicide now re-entered public life as socialist “martyrs”, and cheated the executioner in Siberian camps and Petersburg fortresses. Psychiatrists and medical experts responded ambivalently to the escalation of violence after 1905's abortive revolution. Some discerned a “revolutionary psychosis” that was purifying and positive, while most began to see terrorists’ suicidal “martyrdom” as “insane and meaningless violence” caused by degeneration (p. 291). Medical experts confronting suicide (as with so many other socio-medical problems in late imperial Russia) see-sawed between an oppositional stance to tsarist patriarchy and a guarded awareness that only by engaging with the state could medical professions exist.
This brief summary of the medical highlights of this lucid and subtly textured book can only hint at the wealth within. In scale and ambition it will remind readers of Laura Engelstein's magisterial The keys to happiness: sex and the search for modernity in fin-de-siècle Russia (Ithaca, 1992). Like that work, Morrissey's book should be read by all historians of modernity—medical, cultural, social and political.
