Eros of The Impossible - The History of Psychoanalysis in Russia

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Eros of the Impossible
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In 2023 with funding from
Kahle/Austin Foundation
https://archive.org/details/erosofimpossibleO0000etki
Eros of the
Impossible
The History of Psychoanalysis
in Russia
Alexander Etkind
translated by
Noah and Maria Rubins
aes
ieeni
WestviewPress
A Division of HarperCollinsPublishers
All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this publication may be
reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including
photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in
writing from the publisher.
Copyright © 1997 by Westview Press, A Division of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.
First published in Russian as Eros nevozmozhnogo: Istoriia psikhoanaliza v. Rossi in 1993 by

Meduza.
Published in 1997 in the United States of America by Westview Press, 5500 Central Avenue,
Boulder, Colorado 80301-2877, and in the United Kingdom by Westview Press, 12 Hid’s
Copse Road, Cumnor Hill, Oxford OX2 9JJ
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Etkind, Alexander.
[Eros nevozmozhnogo. English]
Eros of the impossible: the history of psychoanalysis in Russia/
Alexander M. Etkind; translated by Noah and Maria Rubins.
De cm:
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8133-2712-1
1. Psychoanalysis—Soviet Union—History. 2. Psychoanalysis—
Russia (Federation)—History. 3. Psychoanalysis and literature.
I. Title.
BEI SES sils) 1997,
150.19°5°0947—dc21 97-12146
CIP
The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard
for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials Z39.48-1984.
iQ i) 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Acknowledgments vu
Introduction
At the Crossroads of Worlds and Centuries:

The Life and Work of Lou Andreas-Salomé
Russian Modernist Culture:

Between Oedipus and Dionysus
A Case of Neurosis in the Revolutionary Generation:

Sergei Pankeev, the Wolf-Man
Psychoanalytic Activity Before World War I
Back to Russia: Sabina Spielrein
Psychoanalysis in the Land of the Bolsheviks
Between Power and Death:

The Psychoanalytic Passions of Trotsky and His Comrades
Pedological Perversions
The Ambassador and Satan:

William Bullitt in Bulgakov’s Moscow
10 The Intelligentsia in Search of Resistance
Conclusion
Notes
About the Book and Author
Index
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Acknowledgments
I sincerely thank everyone who helped me over the course of several years
of work on this book.
If Alan de Mijolla (International Association of the History of Psycho-
analysis, Paris) had not shown an interest in publishing a French edition of
this work, it is quite possible that it never would have been completed.
In various circumstances, at times difficult ones, M. G. Yaroshevsky
(Institute of the History of Natural Science and Technology of the USSR
Academy of Sciences, Moscow), B. M. Firsov (Sociological Institute of the
Russian Academy of Sciences, St. Petersburg), and Clemens Heller (Maison
des Sciences de |’Homme, Paris) all lent me their support.
N. P. Snetkova, M. I. Spielrein, N. N. Traugott, M. J. Davydova, E. A.
Luria, A. I. Lipkina, Ronald Grele, James L. Rice, Boris Kravtsov, Gennady
Obatnin, Leonid Ionin, Paul Roazen, Valery Maksimenko, Yury Vinogra-
doy, Eugenia Fischer, Ferenz Eros, Michael Molnar, Vera Proskurina, and
Yelena Kostiusheva generously shared information that in some cases
proved priceless.
I am especially grateful to the librarians of the Central State Archives of
Russia.
I sincerely thank all who read the original Russian manuscript in its en-
tirety or in part and aided me with their comments and their interest in the
project, particularly Yefim Etkind, Yulia Kagan and Moisei Kagan, Marina
Khmeleva, Igor Kon, Irina Manson, Boris Kolonitsky, Lazar Fleishman,
Andrew Samuels, Natalie Zaltsman, Leonid Gozman, Lilya Mikhailova,
and Yakov Gordin.
A number of clarifications and additions have been introduced in this
English edition in grateful response to reviews and comments on the
Russian edition from Ernest Gellner, D. S. Likhachev, James L. Rice, Irina
Paperno, Eric Naiman, Andreas Trettner, Boris Paramonov, Eliot Bornstein,
Svetlana Boym, Viktor Krivulin, Lesley Chamberlain, and Mariia Amelina.
I wish also to thank Westview’s anonymous reviewer for valuable sugges-
tions and criticisms.
Special thanks to Rebecca Ritke for the patience and enthusiasm with
which she edited the English translation.
Finally, I send gratitude separately to my daughter, Anna Etkind.
Alexander Etkind
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Introduction
This is a book about Russia and written in Russia. It is a sad society whose
truth is told by others, for such a tale tends to be incomplete and one-sided.
History written from within a society is likewise inevitably subjective, par-
ticularly when it is written in the depths of a crisis of historic proportions;
but it is just this subjectivity that is needed in a period of change. The per-
spective of those who have experienced any historical process directly is
distorted, but it is also enriched by the wisdom of those who know where
history has led.
. ° e
Culture in Russia generally has not been so divided and particularized ac-
cording to professional pursuit and academic discipline as it has been in the
West. In Russia, concurrent academic and artistic cultures have always
been infused with the same trends and political ideas. Thus, decadent poets,
moral philosophers, and professional revolutionaries have played as great a
role in the history of psychoanalysis in Russia as have physicians and psy-
chologists.
Russian culture thrived in the decade and a half between the beginning of
this century and World War I, giving rise to a stunning topography of ideas
that was repeated with variations across the humanities, politics, social
thought, the visual arts, and literature (particularly poetry). Russia at this
time was still one of the centers of European high civilization: Although the
prophets of modernist culture included those who predicted an impending
decline into barbarism, Russian cities large and small were witnessing a
- flowering of the modern arts and sciences, as Slavophilic argumentation
gradually gave way before the press of Westernization. However, the be-
lated attempt to modernize the empire would ultimately fail. A series of
military defeats, the czar’s endless blundering, and popular skepticism
about the possibility of real change, combined with a general premonition
of catastrophe, inspired a keen interest in the esoteric and mystical and
compelled people to place their faith in romantic dreams. The “eros of the
impossible” was how Vyacheslav Ivanov, the leading theorist of Russian
symbolism, described the mood of this age.' The roiling life of the intelli-
gentsia was a source of continual surprises, from table-raising seances to
Masonic rites, from the rumors of court orgies to the ever more public and
more extreme political acts of Socialist Revolutionaries.
2 Introduction
Contemporary thought hastened toward the questions of existence that

marked the boundaries of knowledge, skipping across the odds and ends of
life along the way. Love and death became basic, almost exclusive, concepts
of human existence, the primary categories of its analysis, and meided into
a kind of supernatural oneness. The intuitive perception of the unity of love
and death became a constant of the culture, manifested in such disparate
forms as the philosophical writings of Vladimir Solovyoy, the late stories of
Leo Tolstoy, the poetry of Vyacheslav Ivanov, the novels of Dmitry Mer-
ezhkovsky, the plays of Leonid Andreev, and the psychoanalytical works of
Sabina Spielrein.
The writings of Friedrich Nietzsche were likewise immensely popular in
turn-of-the-century Russia.” Nietzsche’s disdain for everyday life and his in-
sistence on reexamining the contemporary system of values exerted a far-
reaching influence on Russian thought that has yet to be fully recognized.
According to an authoritative witness, artist Alexander Benois, “back then,
Nietzsche’s ideas were seen as quite trendy and topical (just as Freud’s ideas
would be later).”? Nietzsche’s impassioned sermons, despite their unsuitabil-
ity for practical application, were interpreted in Russia in such a way as to
provide guidance for daily life. In the words of Apollon Grigoriev, “Russian
romanticism is different from foreign romanticisms in that it takes any idea,
however odd or laughable, to its utmost limit, and puts it into practice, no
less.”* What for Nietzsche and the majority of his European readers was just
a flight of fancy and graceful metaphor was taken in Russia as the basis for
social engineering. There was a prevailing notion that the new man, the
Ubermensch whose existence would crush the outmoded conventions of
common sense, should and would be created in Russia. Russian Orthodox
philosophers from Vladimir Solovyov onward had called for the foundation
of godmanhood on earth through the transformation of man’s bestial side.
This impulse was later drowned in the mystical abstraction of Rudolf
Steiner’s anthroposophy, which promised an easier route to the same end. In
their younger years, future leaders of the Soviet intelligentsia such as Maxim
Gorky, Vladimir Mayakovsky, and Anatoly Lunacharsky were strongly in-
fluenced by Nietzsche, and their late-blooming Bolshevism could well have
owed more to him than to Marx. The political extremism of Russian
Marxists coexisted at that time with the spiritual extremism of Nikolai
Fyodorov, who demanded that all human endeavors be abandoned in favor
of his “common cause,” the resurrection, by means of humanity’s total mas-
tery over nature, of everyone who had ever lived. Now, almost a century
later, it is easy to pass judgment on these philosophical movements, which
seemed so diverse to those living at the time, and conclude that they con-
tained a common utopianism based on total faith in science and a
Nietzschean disdain for the natural or traditional order.
Novyi mir (New World), a book by Alexander Bogdanov, one of the
Bolsheviks’ most serious theoreticians and a psychiatrist by education, be-
Introduction 3
gins with epigraphs from the Bible, Marx, and Nietzsche. “Man is the
bridge to the Ubermensch,” Bogdanov quoted, and continued in his own
words: “Man has not yet arrived, but he is almost here, and his silhouette is
clearly visible on the horizon.” The year was 1904.
Man as he was, was no longer an end and an absolute, but only a means
toward a more advanced, future creature. As Nietzsche taught, man must
be surmounted. Today, given our experiences during the past century, this
idea seems not only dangerous but utterly misanthropic. At the beginning
of our century, however, there were many who took it to heart: Decadent
writers and Russian Orthodox theosophs, high-ranking Masons, and ter-
rorist ideologues disagreed completely about the path that the impending
transformation of man and humanity would take—mystical or scientific,
aesthetic or political; but hardly anyone doubted the goal itself or the ne-
cessity of changing man’s nature.
The Orthodox ideal of conciliarism (sobornost’)—an undemocratic form
of collectivism based on a priori concord and obedience—added another
layer to the Russian conception of this transformation’s means and ends.
The Russian spiritual tradition had developed under the variegated and, it
would seem, incompatible influences of Nietzsche, Orthodoxy, and social
extremism. The victorious Bolsheviks embodied this collectivist ideal in
their program for the mass transformation of man, setting off down a path
that was suicidal for Russian culture but that might well have been the only
one open, given the cultural framework of the time.
e e e
From the 1910s to the 1930s, psychoanalysis was an important component

of Russian intellectual life. In the multicolored mosaic of a rapidly expand-
ing culture, the unusual ideas of Sigmund Freud were assimilated quickly
and without the fierce opposition they encountered in the West. In the years
before World War I, psychoanalysis evoked more interest in Russia than in
France, and, by some accounts, even in Germany. In Russia, Freud wrote in
1912, “there seems to be a local epidemic of psychoanalysis.”®
The eternal Russian “longing for world culture” could be satisfied in
those days, when poets Mandelstam and Pasternak, writers Ivanov and
Bely, philosophers Ilyin and Shestov, and psychoanalysts Andreas-Salomé
and Spielrein were able to live, study, and work abroad for years at a time.
It was only the following generation that would be denied the freedom to
leave their homeland and return at will. Even today it is difficult for
Russians to imagine how closely the intelligentsia of that time was linked to
the intellectual life of Europe, how accessible to them were the best univer-
sities, salons, and clinics in Germany, France, Austria, and Switzerland.
On returning home, the new psychoanalysts found an eager clientele in
Russian society, which was freeing itself from traditional constraints with
unprecedented speed. The first Russian psychoanalysts occupied presti-
4 Introduction
gious positions in the medical world. They were closely involved in literary
and political circles, and had their own journal, university clinic, and sana-
torium. They were on their way to institutionalizing psychoanalysis accord-
ing to the highest European standards. Their patients included eminent fig-
ures of the “Silver Age.” Psychoanalysis, patronized in the 1910s by Emile
Medtner and Ivan Ilyin, became one of the latent causes of the schism in
Russian symbolism that had such a marked effect on the life and work of
the movement’s leaders. Under the influence of numerous translations of
Freud, the word podsoznatel’noe, Russian for “the subconscious” (a noun
specific to psychoanalysis, unlike the older, adjectival form “unconscious,”
or bessoznatel’noe, in Russian), spread like wildfire in the speech and writ-
ing of Russian intellectuals from Vyacheslav Ivanov to Konstantin Stani-
slavsky.
The history of psychoanalysis is surprisingly full of people from Russia,
individuals who became prominent figures in the international psychoana-
lytical movement. Lou Andreas-Salomé, a remarkable, cosmopolitan psy-
choanalyst and a close friend of Freud’s, became one of the brightest stars
of European modernist culture, while still preserving distinct traces of
Russian philosophy in her work. Russian-born Max Eitingon, Freud’s clos-
est pupil, for many years headed the International Psychoanalytic
Association. Sabina Spielrein, the most romantic figure in the history of
psychoanalysis, returned to Russia in 1923 in order to contribute to the
creation of utopia in her homeland—and instead lived the second half of
her life alone, in abject poverty and terror.
These individuals and many others, who maintained close ties with their
native Russia and often returned there, formed a large contingent among
Freud’s earliest students, colleagues, and followers. For years, the analysts
of Vienna, Zurich, and Berlin—many trained by Freud—looked after
wealthy Russian patients. Like other European countries, Russia in the |
1910s and 1920s began to form its own psychoanalytic tradition. Nikolai
Osipov, Moisei Wulff, Tatiana Rosenthal, Mikhail Asatiani, and Leonid
Droznes were all psychoanalysts who had studied or consulted with Freud,
Jung, or Karl Abraham and who returned to Russia before the revolution
to pursue careers as practitioners and popularizers of psychoanalysis.
Beyond that point, their fates diverged: Rosenthal killed herself in 1921.
After founding the Institute of Psychiatry in Tbilisi, which still bears his
name, Asatiani rejected psychoanalysis. Osipov and Wulff emigrated to the
West in the 1920s. Wulff joined Eitingon in Israel to lay the foundations of
psychoanalysis there. Osipov and his student Fyodor Dosuzhkov founded a
local psychoanalytic movement in Prague, and to this day psychoanalysis in
the Czech Republic is led by the scions of a long line of Russian analysts. In
Russia itself, no second generation of psychoanalysts like the one that came
of age in the West during the 1920s managed to develop.
Introduction 5
Freud followed the chain of events in Soviet Russia intently, at first with
hope, then fear, and finally desperation and revulsion. At pains to dispel the
understandable impression that his Future of an Illusion was inspired by
the Soviet experience, Freud wrote in 1927, “I have not the least intention
of making judgments on the great experiment in civilization that is now in
progress in the vast country that stretches between Europe and Asia.” But
just three years later he confessed to Arnold Zweig that the events taking
place in that immense nation presented him with a problem of personal sig-
nificance: “What you say about the Soviet experiment strikes an answering
chord in me. We have been deprived by it of a hope—and an illusion—and
we have received nothing in exchange. We are moving towards dark times.
...1 am sorry for my seven grandchildren.”® Among those with whom
Freud discussed Russian issues over the decades was his patient and coau-
thor William Bullitt, the first U.S. ambassador to the USSR. Bullitt, in turn,
left his unmistakable imprint on Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and
Margarita, as the reader will see in exploring with me the intertwining lives
of Freud, Bullitt, and Bulgakov, in a new interpretation of this novel.
The problems addressed by nascent psychoanalysis were central to the
Russian intelligentsia’s quest for knowledge. One of the most original
Russian thinkers, Vasily Rozanoy, became notorious for his attempts to un-
ravel the riddles of sex. Andrei Bely, the most important writer of the era,
tried to reconstruct early childhood experiences in his novels, and scholars
following in the footsteps of the equally renowned Vladislav Khodasevich
relied heavily on psychoanalysis to understand Bely’s works. Even in the
Soviet period we find the same unexpected overlap: Mikhail Bakhtin,
whose works of literary criticism received worldwide acclaim, carried on a
dialogue with Freud throughout his life. Sergey Eisenstein, the most impor-
tant Russian film director of the time, also sought treatment in psycho-
analysis and used its precepts in his art.
In the early years following the Bolshevik revolution, Muscovite analysts
were supported and employed in the country’s highest political circles, most
intensively by Leon Trotsky, whose interaction with psychoanalysis we will
examine more closely in chapter 7. Psychoanalysis had a remarkable influ-
ence on the ideas that emerged during the political and social debates of the
1920s, and it also made itself felt in the development of Russian psychology
for half a century thereafter. Pedology, the unique Soviet science that of-
fered methods of transforming human nature during childhood, was
founded by people who had gone through relatively serious training in psy-
choanalysis. The most prominent psychologist of the Soviet period,
Alexander Luria, began his long pilgrimage in science as the secretary of the
Russian Psychoanalytic Society. Books by Freud had a tangible impact on
the works of Lev Vygotsky and Pavel Blonsky. Discussions with Spielrein,
who brought the living traditions of the Vienna, Zurich, and Geneva
6 Introduction
schools of psychology to Moscow, seem to have exerted an influence on

Vygotsky, Luria, and others as they formed their psychological views.”
The Russian medical community was less willing to accept psychoanaly-
sis than was the general public. Although Freud’s books were systematically
translated into Russian from 1904 to 1930, they were rarely used in univer-
sity courses on psychiatry. Ivan Pavlov’s physiology and Vladimir
Bekhterev’s psychoneurology, locked in a struggle for supremacy in the field
now known as neuroscience, periodically showed some interest in psycho-
analysis but only from a safe distance. Soviet psychiatry tended toward me-
chanical classification and repressive methods of treatment, contrary to the
principles of psychoanalysis. In Soviet psychotherapy, as befitted the spirit
of the time, hypnosis was the prevailing technique.
After the fall of Trotsky, the Russian psychoanalytic tradition was rudely
interrupted by Stalin’s reign of terror. Some analysts found a temporary
shelter in pedology; but even this escape route was closed off in 1936. Now,
nearing the end of the twentieth century, the question of whether and how
the psychoanalytic tradition might be revived in Russia seems nearly unan-
swerable.
The peculiarities of psychoanalysis lend a certain specificity to the history

of the discipline. The history of psychoanalysis is a distinct sphere of re-
search, with its own authorities, traditions, journals, and international as-
sociation. A Russian reader will easily pick out differences in style and con-
tent between this book and other domestic works on the history of
psychology.'° My approach is also a departure from the view of Russian
and Soviet psychology that currently dominates the works of American his-
torians.!!
The history of psychology and medicine, disciplines closely related to psy-
choanalysis, is directed toward the analysis of scientific ideas, methods, and
categories. Less attention is paid to the people who created and practiced the
science, to their personalities, biographies, and interrelations. In the history
of psychoanalysis, the development of ideas is tightly intertwined with the
lives of the people who created them. Both the ideas and the people were
partially infused with the spirit of their times and partially set in opposition
to the changing influences around them. I find myself most interested by
what one might call the historical and, more broadly, the human context of
psychoanalytic theory and practice. This context illuminates the deep conti-
nuity between the Soviet and prerevolutionary periods of Russia’s intellec-
tual history, which has so often been underestimated for political reasons. I
am fascinated by the influences shared by psychoanalysis and the philoso-
phy, literature, and art of the time; by the relationship between the sub-
stance of psychoanalysis and the lives of those who became involved in it.
Introduction 7.
The lives of analysts and patients are no less interesting (and quite possi-
bly more interesting) than the development of their scientific ideas. The na-
ture of analysis is such that psychoanalytical values, views, goals, means,
and methods could not help but have a telling impact on these people’s bi-
ographies, their words and actions, on the choices they made throughout
their lives, and on their relationships with others. It was through people
that the course of history influenced the essence of analytical conceptions.
The interaction of ideas, people, and epochs is what interests me and moti-
vates this history of psychoanalysis in Russia. Thus, I composed the book
in such a way as to reflect the complex fabric of history: The reader will
find, among chapters focused on the life and work of individuals, more
general explorations of particular eras in the perception, development, and
transformation of psychoanalysis in Russia.!*
This approach will not be congenial to all readers, nor is it the only one
that might have been taken; but it is an approach fully in line with the
views held by many of this book’s protagonists. In 1882, Nietzsche wrote
to Andreas-Salomé: “My dearest Lou, your idea of bringing together philo-
sophical ideas and the lives of their authors [is a good one]. . .. That is just
the way I taught the history of ancient philosophy, and I always told my au-
dience that a system may be discredited and dead, but if the person stand-
ing behind it is not discredited, it is impossible to kill the system.”!%
Arguing with Jung, Freud concluded his history of psychoanalysis with the
declaration, “Men are strong so long as they represent a strong idea; they
become powerless when they oppose it.”!4 For Mikhail Bakhtin, “An idea
is a living event that unfolds in the point of dialogue where two or more
conscious beings meet.”!5 And as Bulgakov’s devil, Woland, playfully put
it, “I am a historian. There will be a most interesting occurrence at the
Patriarchs’ Ponds this evening!”'¢
1
At the Crossroads of
Worlds and Centuries:
The Life and Work of
Lou Andreas-Salomé
In 1861, a girl was born in the General Staff building on Palace Square in
St. Petersburg—a girl destined for fame abroad while remaining virtually
unknown in her home country. Her father, Gustav von Salomé, was a Baltic
German in the service of the Russian army, a Huguenot by confession.
After receiving a military education in Russia, he had quickly risen through
the ranks under Czar Nicholas I. His wife had been born in Russia, the de-
scendant of Danish Germans. The couple gave their newborn daughter a
Russian name—Lyolya.!
Lyolya lived the first twenty years of her life in St. Petersburg. Much
later, speaking of her childhood, she found it difficult to identify her native
tongue. Her parents spoke German, her nanny Russian, and her governess
French; and Lyolya was enrolled in a private English-language school. “We
felt ourselves to be Russian,” Lyolya recalled, at the same time noting that
the family’s household servants were Tatar, Swabian, and Estonian. For her,
St. Petersburg “combined the charm of Paris and Stockholm.” Remem-
bering its majestic beauty, reindeer-drawn sleighs, and ice castles on the
Neva, she described it as a cosmopolitan city despite its idiosyncrasies.*
Lyolya’s father, a general and a privy councillor, had been close to Czar
Nicholas I, and he viewed the reforms of Alexander II with suspicious
reservation. His six children—Lyolya was the youngest, and the only girl—
grew up in an atmosphere of intellectual and political excitement such as
had never before been experienced in Russia. The novels of Tolstoy and
Dostoevsky were written during these decisive decades. It was also at this
time that the first socialist-revolutionary movements were formed, with
women playing a significant role. According to historians’ calculations, 178
8
The Life and Work of Lou Andreas-Salomé 9
women were convicted in the political trials of the 1870s and 1880s. Most
belonged to the “People’s Will” terrorist organization, which succeeded in
assassinating Alexander II on its seventh attempt, the day before he was to
sign the first Russian constitution. One of the women who had played a
key role in the conspiracy against the “Czar-Emancipator” was sentenced
to death.? It is unclear to what extent Lyolya was aware of these events; but
throughout her life she kept a photograph of Vera Zasulich, a revolutionary
who was acquitted by a jury after her attempt to assassinate the mayor of
St. Petersburg that same year. The case became a political cause célébre
throughout Europe, and Zasulich was described by one French journal as
the most popular person on the continent.
Lyolya was very close to her father and brothers. Later she would recall
that she was so accustomed to the company of older men in her childhood
that when she went abroad “the whole world seemed populated by broth-
ers.”* Judging from her memoirs, she was also an independent, introspec-
tive, and dreamy child. She never played with dolls but was constantly in-
venting stories: She spoke with the flowers that grew in the gardens at
Peterhof, where she spent each summer, and she made up stories about peo-
ple she saw in the streets. She remembered that it took her a long while to
believe that mirrors faithfully reproduced her image, as she did not feel sep-
arated from the world around her. The world was probably kind to her. But
her memoirs are also marked by childhood rows with her mother. Her rem-
iniscences include her childhood faith in God and the early loss of that
faith. Lyolya seems not to have felt burdened by protestant rituals and to
have believed in God only to the extent that she found belief necessary. At
some point in her childhood, God disappeared; but there remained a
“darkly awakening sensation, never again ceasing ... of immeasurable
comradeship . . . with everything that exists.”°
First Encounter
This idyllic childhood—if such it was—appears to have ended when Lyolya
was seventeen. She had written to a certain Pastor Gillot, whom she did not
know but whose sermons interested her, introducing herself boldly:
The person writing you, Herr Pastor, is a 17-year-old girl who is lonely in the
midst of her family and surroundings, lonely in the sense that no one shares
her views, let alone shares her longing for fuller knowledge. Perhaps it is my
whole way of thinking that isolates me from most girls of my age and from our
circle—there is scarcely anything worse for a young girl, here, than to differ
from the rule in her likes and dislikes, in her character and her ideas. But it is
so bitter to close everything up in oneself because one would otherwise give of-
fence, bitter to stand so wholly alone because one lacks that easy-going agree-
able manner which wins people’s trust and love.°
10 The Life and Work of Lou Andreas-Salomé
The pastor must have answered politely, as the two subsequently met.
This meeting was the first in a series of encounters that would change
Lyolya’s life. Gillot loaded her down with lessons in philosophy, religious
history, Dutch, and other subjects that he deemed important. The main
protagonists in their discussions were Kant and Spinoza. He also freed her
from the intense dreams she found so onerous, in a way that she would un-
derstand only later—by forcing her to relate them to him in minute detail.
Lyolya concealed her meetings with Gillot from her parents; one can well
imagine how difficult and stormy this as yet unnamed process was for the
introverted, passionate young woman. She later recalled how she saw God
in Gillot and how she bowed down to him as if before God himself. The
two became increasingly intimate, and one day, Lyolya reported, she lost
consciousness as she sat in the pastor’s lap.
In 1879, Lyolya’s father died, and Gillot instructed her to tell her mother
about their lessons. After meeting with her mother, Gillot proposed mar-
riage to Lyolya. The girl was in shock; for her, the experience was like los-
ing God a second time. “With a single blow, what I had worshipped
dropped out of my heart and senses and became alien.”’ For many years af-
terward, sexual intimacy with her would be impossible; Gillot was but the
first in a long line of men who would be enraptured with this girl and
brought to desperation by her stubborn refusal of physical intimacy, linked
as it was with her extraordinary beauty.
The romance with Gillot ended when Lyolya had a row with her mother,
refused confirmation, and developed a pulmonary condition. Travel abroad
was the recommended solution. Gillot helped her obtain a passport, which
was difficult due to her lack of religious affiliation. Her passport was
stamped with her new name: Lou. It was under this name that she would
go down in history.
Something Almost Unwomanly

Lou found herself in Zurich with her mother. For a time, she studied philos-
ophy at the university. The professor who taught the history of religion
there described her as “a fundamentally pure being who had, however, with
exceptional energy concentrated solely on mental development.” He even
saw this as “something almost unwomanly.”*® Another memoirist recalled
her as “a lovable, winning, genuinely feminine being ... who has re-
nounced all the means that women use and has taken up the weapons with
which men conduct the battle of life.”? In photographs that survive from
that time, Fraulein Salomé looks haughty and very pretty: a coal-black
dress, hair pulled straight back, a pale, concentrated face. The girl had just
turned twenty, and she had come to Europe for the first time.
Once again her health gave out, and her mother took her to Italy. In
Rome, Lou met the famous Malwida von Meysenbug, a writer and pas-
sionate advocate of women’s liberation, devoted to the establishment of

new, “honorable” relations between the sexes. Malwida was a close friend
and longtime correspondent of Alexander Herzen’s; she raised his daughter
and had lived for an extended period in his house in London. A quarter-
century before the events at hand, Herzen wrote, “I would like to test
Mademoiselle Meysenbug and take her in. She is unusually intelligent and
very educated .. . fantastically ugly and thirty-seven years old.”!°
In her Memoirs of an Idealist, von Meysenbug recalled her desire to
found an educational union that would lead adults of both sexes toward
the free development of their spirituality, “so that they might then enter the
world as sowers of a new, inspired culture.”!! Within the framework of
Malwida’s project, the familiar forms of the cultural salon were combined
with the recently instigated search for the new man and new relations be-
tween people. It was not a matter of theory; for Malwida, as for some of
her contemporaries and many who were to follow, this idea was thoroughly
practical. It was possible to create a new human being. For this to happen,
all that was needed was ... The completion of this formula was an impor-
tant and perhaps a defining aspect of modernist culture.
A frequent guest in Malwida’s salon was Friedrich Nietzsche. His inter-
locutor, a thirty-two-year-old Jewish philosopher named Paul Rée, was the
author of several books on moral philosophy in which he demonstrated the
applicability of the principles of ethics to practicality, rationality, and
Darwinism. Rée was also a passionate and totally impractical person, hys-
terically ashamed of his Jewish identity, prone to attacks of irrational
melancholy, and unable to rein in his love of roulette.
In Malwida’s words, her project was received with intense enthusiasm by
the two men. Nietzsche and Rée were ready to participate on the spot as
lecturers. Malwida was convinced that this would attract a large number of
young women to whom she could devote particular attention, in order to
make them into noble defenders of female emancipation.'*
Lou, however, did not become a feminist in Italy, just as she had not be-
~ come a revolutionary in Russia. She went her own way, cutting across the
intellectual trends of her time, assimilating something from each, and mov-
ing on in the direction dictated by her subtle intellectual curiosity and
equally refined feminine intuition.
Rée met Lou during a lecture he was giving to a group of educated young
ladies in Malwida’s salon. He fell in love with her right away, and although
he considered it irrational to marry and produce children in such a horrid
world, he hurriedly asked for her hand. Lou rejected him just as firmly as
she had Gillot a short time earlier, but now she felt strong enough to do
more than that. There was no need to run from a man who proved inca-
pable of controlling his emotions; better to conquer those emotions in him,
to force him to crush them just as she had crushed them in herself. As a re-
ward, Rée was allowed to continue seeing Lou and even to live with her.
The girl reasoned that if Rée were to eliminate all possessive feelings to-
ward her, they would be able to live together through their common spiri-
tual interests. Public opinion did not concern her. Rée, once again violating
the principles of his own moral philosophy, agreed. It remained only to
overcome other sources of understandable resistance: Lou’s mother, Pastor
Gillot, and even Malwida von Meysenbug, whose ideas were no longer suf-
ficiently up-to-date. As Lou wrote to Gillot,
Malwida too is opposed to our plan. .. . But it has been clear to me for a long
time now that basically we always have something different in mind, even
where we agree. Her usual way of expressing herselt is: “we” may not do this
or that, or “we” must accomplish this or that—and I’ve no idea who this “we”
actually is—some ideal or philosophical party, probably—but I myself know
only oft
In 1882, the year he met Lou, Nietzsche was on the threshold of yet an-
other in a long series of discoveries; this one would lead to his creative
zenith and then to his final ruin. He had been seriously ill with a malady
that physicians and historians have been unable to diagnose. Some think
Nietzsche suffered from syphilis, while others (such as Odessa physician
I. K. Khmelevsky, who devoted an entire research project to the subject!*)
assert that his degenerative paralysis had a different cause. In any case, by
the time he met Lou, Nietzsche was practically blind and was continually
tormented by headaches, which he soothed with an ever increasing dose of
narcotics and frequent changes of scenery. His illness was cyclical, and dur-
ing the periods of reprieve he wrote ceaselessly and voluminously. He was
lonely despite a close attachment to his sister Elisabeth. Several times he
had asked his friends to find him a wife; with the onset of blindness, he ur-
gently needed at least a secretary. There were rumors that he had never
been with a woman. In sum, he was a man singularly unlike his favorite
hero, the Ubermensch. He was a romantic who lived vicariously through
his diseased but remarkable mind.
That spring, however, Nietzsche was feeling better than ever. When Rée
and then Meysenbug wrote to him about Lou, he read his own subtext in
their words: “Do greet that Russian girl for me, if you see any sense in it: I
have a passion for this kind of soul. . . Considering what I intend to do in
the next years, it’s essential. Marriage is an entirely different story; I could
agree to two years of it at most,”'S he answered Rée lightly, little suspecting
what was to come.
The three of them met in Rome in April 1882. Nietzsche read to Lou and
Rée from his recently completed book, Joyful Wisdom, the most life-affirm-
ing of his works, in which he lauded the strength and magnificence of the
extraordinary man of the future, the Ubermensch. Man as he was, was not
enough for Nietzsche. “It is a different ideal that draws us, a marvelous, se-
13
ductive, and potentially dangerous ideal... , in comparison with which all

the lofty things by which the people justly gauge their values would be no
more than baseness, humiliation, danger, or at the very least a mere means
of self-preservation.” He added with remarkable accuracy that his ideal of-
ten seemed nearly inhuman.!¢ Nietzsche had little time left in which to see
his ideal come to fruition: A tragedy awaited him; but in Rome he experi-
enced only a melodrama—his meeting with Lou.
Together the three traveled through the mountains of northern Italy and
Switzerland and prepared to set up housekeeping together in Paris. They
joined forces to successfully repel an attack by Lou’s mother, who, horrified
by her daughter’s lifestyle, had enlisted Lou’s favorite brother, Yevgeny, in
an attempt to take her back to Russia.
Don’t Forget the Whip!

A remarkable photograph was taken during those days in Lucerne. It
shows Nietzsche and Rée standing harnessed to a cart in which Lou sits,
with a whip in her hand, against the backdrop of the Alps. Rée’s pose is
confident, that of a man who feels utterly at ease. Nietzsche, with his huge
mustache, trains his unseeing eyes on the distant horizon. There is no
mockery in Lou’s face, although it was she who had choreographed this lit-
tle sketch; indeed, this was serious business. It was less than a year later, af-
ter his painful breakup with Lou, that Nietzsche would compose the cele-
brated line, “You go to women? Don’t forget the whip!”
As she brandished her whip, Lou dreamed of building a small intellectual
commune, “as holy as the Trinity,” where men who had relinquished their
claims on her would channel their demands into common spiritual pursuits
that would allow her an equal role. Rée accepted this plan. She called him
“Brother Rée” and praised him for his “unearthly kindness.” For his part,
Rée referred to himself as “your little house”!” in his letters to her. In Lou’s
- new life, Rée truly took the place of her former, brother-filled home. Her
relationship with Nietzsche, however, was entirely different.
In August 1882, Lou wrote to Rée,
Talking with Nietzsche is very exciting, as you know. But there is a special fas-
cination if you encounter like thoughts, like sentiments and ideas—we under-
stand each other perfectly. Once he said to me in amazement: “I think the only
difference between us is that of age. We have lived alike and thought alike.” It
is only because we are so much alike that he reacts so violently to the differ-
ences between us, or what seem to him differences. That is why he is so upset.
If two people are so unalike, as you and I, they are pleased when they discover
points of agreement. But if they are as alike as Nietzsche and I, they suffer
from their differences.'®
For his part, Nietzsche wrote that “it is unlikely that there has ever been
more philosophical openness between anyone” than between Lou and him.
He described her this way to his friend Peter Gast: “She is a Russian gen-
eral’s daughter, twenty years old, keen as an eagle, brave as a lion, and yet a
very girlish child who may well not live long .. . She’s amazingly ripe and
ready for my way of thinking ... Besides, she has an unbelievably firm
character and knows exactly what she wants—without consulting or caring
about the world’s opinion.”!? One can only guess how Zarathustra would
have spoken if Nietzsche’s relationship with Lou had taken another course;
but he seemed then to be standing on the threshold of completely different
discoveries.
It is possible that Nietzsche’s sexual libido was just as repressed as were
Lou’s still unawakened feelings and that for this reason they took such
pleasure in their intimate sharing of the rarefied heights of the spirit. In any
case, experts on this question agree with Nietzsche’s sister, Elisabeth, that
his feelings for Lou were the strongest he had ever experienced toward any
woman. The lovestruck Nietzsche sent a letter of formal proposal to Lou’s
mother in St. Petersburg and for a time, broke off contact with his own
mother and sister, who hated Lou. This rupture with his family was an act
of heroism on Nietzsche’s part, worthy of his philosophy but impossible to
maintain for long. Little more than a year passed before Nietzsche was
cursing Lou, once again influenced by his sister.
If I am leaving you, it is only thanks to your horrible disposition . . . Not only

have you hurt me, you have hurt everyone who loves me ... I did not create
the world, nor did I create Lou. If I had created you, I would have given you
better health and something else which is much more important than health—
maybe a little love for me.?°
Yet, the threats of a decisive breakup at times gave way to second

thoughts:
Dearest Lou and Rée, don’t worry about my flashes of paranoia and injured
pride. Even if I someday take my own life in a fit of melancholy, there should
be no reason for sadness. I want you both to know that I am no more than a
semi-lunatic, tortured by headaches and driven batty by loneliness. I have
achieved this rational understanding of the situation, as I now consider it, after
taking a solid dose of opium, the only thing that saves me from despair.2!
It was, indeed, on the exalted heights of despair that Nietzsche penned

his magnum opus, Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The first part of the work,
from which the following passages are taken, was written in just ten days.
“What is the ape to man? A laughing-stock or else a thing of painful shame.
And just that shall man be to the Superman: a laughing-stock or else a thing
of painful shame.”?? The superman, Nietzsche’s Ubermensch, is the earth’s
meaning and purpose, while man is just a muddy stream. Only an ocean
can take in a muddy stream without becoming impure: “Look, I teach you
the Superman: he is that sea into whose depths your great contempt can de-
scend.”*? People’s contempt for themselves, the author’s contempt for peo-
ple, and the author’s contempt for himself would one day dissolve without
a trace in the glorious new creation.
As his sister, Elisabeth, recalled, “Some cruel fate decided that at just that
time, when my brother’s health had improved somewhat, he had to pass
through harsh personal trials. He experienced deep disappointment in
friendship ... and for the first time he knew loneliness.”24 According to
Elisabeth, the image of Zarathustra was the embodiment of Nietzsche’s
dream of the perfect friend that he had been unable to find during his latter
years; but she wrote this for public consumption. In private correspondence,
written in November of the same year (1882), she expressed herself more di-
rectly: “[Lou] uses Fritz’ maxims so artfully to tie his arms behind his back.
I have to admit, she is truly the incarnation of my brother’s philosophy.”
Peter Gast, a friend of Nietzsche’s and a neutral observer of his romance
with Lou, told a similar story but with greater detachment.
For some time Nietzsche was really enchanted by Lou. He saw in her some-
body quite extraordinary. Lou’s intelligence, as well as her femininity, carried
him to the heights of ecstasy. Out of his illusion about Lou grew his mood for
Zarathustra. The mood is indeed entirely Nietzsche’s own but, nevertheless,
that it was Lou through whom he was propelled into such Himalayan heights
of feeling makes her an object of reverence.”°
Could it be that Nietzsche found his Ubermensch in a twenty-year-old

Russian girl, and Zarathustra, the missing “perfect friend,” was an encoded
version of the beautiful Lou? It is difficult to say just how literally we
should take this interpretation. It seems clear, however, that it was love for
Lou, love unrealized and unspent, that aroused the bonfire of emotion in
Nietzsche that still smolders in the pages of his book. In her monograph on
Nietzsche’s philosophy, Lou herself would tell it this way: “When Nietzsche
no longer forces his spirit, when he freely expresses his emotions, it be-
comes clear what kind of torture surrounded him, one can hear the cry for
self-destruction. ...In total desperation, he seeks within and without the
saving ideal that is diametrically opposed to his internal essence.”*°
While Nietzsche sought his Ubermensch, Elisabeth devoted her life to ap-
propriating first her brother, then his legacy, and in the process lent her
own peculiar interpretation to his work. Her brother fought her attempts at
usurpal, at first; but with the increasing weight of his suffering he became
more and more dependent on her and less able to defend himself and his
work. Elisabeth’s hatred of those who were exceptionally close to Friedrich
seems to have become intertwined with her hatred of Jews: She did all she
could to ruin Rée, apparently because of his Jewishness; and later she as-
serted that Lou, too, was Jewish. In 1885, Elisabeth married Bernhard
Forster, an activist in the German nationalist movement. He was famous
for having collected a quarter of a million signatures on a petition to
Bismarck demanding that he ban the entry of Jews into Germany and fire
them from government service. When he failed in his homeland, Forster
and his wife left for Paraguay to build a new Germany there. His misman-
agement led to a revolt of the settlers, and he shot himself in June 1889.
Elisabeth returned home and occupied herself with her brother’s legacy, as
he had just passed-away in a psychiatric hospital (where he had been
treated by Otto Binswanger, the uncle of Ludwig Binswanger, a close friend
of Freud’s). Thus, it is not surprising that the posthumous collection of
Nietzsche’s unfinished manuscripts entitled Will to Power was later found
by historians to be a hoax, and Elisabeth Forster-Nietzsche identified as the
source of the primitive and racist Ubermensch that would later be accepted
and canonized by the Nazis. It was Elisabeth’s efforts, not Friedrich’s, that
culminated in Adolf Hitler’s 1935 pilgrimage to the Nietzsche archives in
Weimar. Racism was foreign to Nietzsche, and anti-Semitism even more so:
His Ubermensch was purely hypothetical—not so much a myth as the
framework for a myth, a challenge without any prescriptions. As for the
question of race, Nietzsche never considered himself a German, instead as-
sociating his lineage and uncommon last name with the Polish gentry.
In Russia, Nietzsche was viewed as a romantic and a prophet. “It could
be that in Nietzsche we see the romantic desire to accept the whole world”
and to find the “presence of the infinite in the finite,” philologist Victor
Zhirmunsky wrote in 1914. Romantics “bring life and poetry together; the
life of a poet is like verse; life in the era of romanticism is subject to poetic
emotion. ... Experience becomes the subject of poetic expression, and
through this expression the experience takes on form and sense.”
According to Zhirmunsky’s exacting formula, this could have been a kind
of “mass delirium”; “but from a psychological standpoint, in any case,
delirium is a state of consciousness like any other.”?7
In the light of such romanticism, the love between Nietzsche and Salomé
could end only one way. Unfolding as it did amid Alpine peaks and
Mediterranean resorts, the story of the couple’s relationship recalls Russian
romantic literature. Before he met Lou, Nietzsche had read Lermontov and
had written to a friend about the writer’s work, “this totally unfamiliar
country and disappointment in the Western spirit are so marvellously de-
scribed, with Russian naiveté and the wisdom of an adolescent.”28 The ex-
oticism of Russian life was no obstacle to his identifying the same familiar
problems in Lermontov as in Milton or Novalis. In Nietzsche’s letters from
the time of his romance with young Lou, however, there is no mention of
Russian naiveté and immaturity. Lou was well prepared. Nietzsche’s feel-
ings were subject to rules she knew well—the international code of roman-
tic experience, by which happiness is unattainable, love intertwines with
death, and in the end a person is significant only as the shadow of eternity.
It is possible that Nietzsche’s rave review of Lermontov applies to the
Russian author’s most surprising creation, written a half-century before
Zarathustra but strangely reminiscent of the later work. Banned by the
czar’s censors, the epic poem Demon came out in Germany before it was
ever published in Russia, and it was translated into German many times
(first in 1852 by Friedrich von Bodenstedt, who was personally acquainted
with both Lermontov and Nietzsche??). Demon contains the same striking,
nearly absurd romanticism found in Nietzsche’s famous work: a poetics of
loneliness and disdain for everyday life, dreams of resurrection through love,
and a lack of interest in the technical details that would make the dream
come true. Perhaps the author of Zarathustra was amazed to find himself in
the Russian poem’s strange hero, surprised to find his own dreams, worries,
and guilt. The heroes of Lermontov and Nietzsche are dark symbols of the
masculine creative essence invading the settled feminine routine from with-
out, full of premonitions of “new life.” These characters are descendants of
the classic devils of Goethe and Byron and relatives of the new demons of
Russian literature—Dostoevsky’s devils and Bulgakov’s Woland.
One need but open Lermontov’s Demon to discover how love stories be-
gin and end in romantic culture. Lermontov’s hero, a creature of incompre-
hensible nature, was neither god nor man:
the ill he sowed in his existence
brought no delight, His technique scored
... yet evil left him deeply bored.*°
He would have lived on in this fashion, had he not met the mortal woman
who transformed his being:
emotion started on discourses
in language he used to know
Was this a sign of new begetting??'
He tells the beautiful woman of his uncommon ideas and arouses her
thoughts with his “strange and prophetic dream.” Finally, he seduces her
with the transformation that is coming over him:
If you could guess, ifyou could know
how much it costs in tribulation
to expect no praise for evil, no
prize for good deeds.**
But the satisfaction of his demonic passion leads only to the girl’s de-
struction.
Twenty years after Nietzsche and Salomé met, the idea outlined in
Demon (and paralleled in Pushkin’s “Egyptian Nights”), that love and
death are one and the same, would become a dominant theme throughout
“decadent” Russian culture. The idea was deemed to have originated with
Nietzsche, but it slipped smoothly into the Russian context, saturated as it
was with both traditional and newly revived romanticism. I have explored
this development in greater depth in the chapter that follows.
It is interesting that in each story, tragedy came to the hero through an
exotic, foreign woman—an easy focal point for unfulfillable expectations.
For the Demon it was a daughter of the Caucasus and for Nietzsche a
Russian; however, Lou differed from Lermontov’s Tamara, if only in that
her contact with the Demon was not to be the last in her life.
Zarathustra Gets Married

After Lou’s breakup with Nietzsche, she and Rée lived together in Berlin.
Many of the people who passed through their salon were part of the intel-
lectual elite of Europe or were preparing to enter that circle, such as
Hermann Ebbinghaus, one of the founders of experimental psychology, and
Ferdinand Tonnies, the most important German sociologist of the fin-de-
siécle. All attempted to woo Lou, and each was rejected in turn. It was
about this time that an episode took place involving playwright Frank
Wedekind, who was famous for his scandalously erotic plays. When he first
met Lou at a party, she seemed easy prey; but when he took her to his
home, he came face to face with such striking resistance that the next
morning he paid her a visit in a frock coat, bearing flowers. According to
legend, Wedekind got his revenge in the end by making Lou the heroine of
his famous play “Lulu.”
For three years, Salomé and Rée managed to preserve the state of asex-
ual, intellectual partnership that Lou wanted so badly and that it would
seem was acceptable to Rée. When they finally parted ways, Rée was ago-
nized. He abandoned his work in moral philosophy and became a physi-
cian in a small German village. The local inhabitants considered him a
saint: He lived as a hermit and provided free treatment, offering patients
hospitalization at his own expense in Berlin and Breslau and smuggling in
food and wine for them under his clothes. Although his whole life he talked
of suicide, Rée died during a walk in the mountains. This, however, hap-
pened much later, in 1901.
Biographers who have studied everything Lou left behind and fabricated
all sorts of life stories based on this material nonetheless seem unable to ex-
plain why she married Fred Andreas, a forty-year-old expert in Oriental lan-
guages, in June 1886. The marriage was completely unexpected, and as with
every significant act of Lou’s, it had a superhuman aspect—Lou demanded
that the couple’s married life not include sexual intimacy, and this condition
was upheld for several decades. While biographical sources offer descriptions
of Andreas’s frustrated passion and Lou’s fierce resistance, Lou could not ex-
plain her actions, even many years later as she was writing her memoirs.23
Lou’s decision to enter into a platonic marriage with Andreas, however,
was deeply and irrefutably significant. In everything she did, Lou lived out
Nietzsche’s favorite aphorism, “Become what thou art.” Her husband was
incapable of drawing her into the intimacy to which he had full right, be-
cause she did not wish it; she allowed herself to live according to her own
personal interests or fears. When she finally found a desire for intimacy, it
was with other men, and she was not prepared to sacrifice that desire for
her husband’s sake.
It is a dictum of universal logic (otherwise known as common sense) that
each person’s pleasures are paid for by other people. The superman con-
ceived of by Nietzsche scorns common sense as something that must be
mastered; what he gives and takes lies outside the realm of morality, be-
yond good and evil. Nietzsche said nothing concrete about how superpeo-
ple would interact among themselves: Neither he nor his Bolshevik succes-
sors were concerned with obvious, commonsensical questions such as how
and wherewith the superman was to be created, what he should do to avoid
hurting others, and how he was to live and change with the times.
Nietzsche’s Ubermensch exists only in the singular. Zarathustra is not
lonely in the same way as people can be, nor in the same way as Nietzsche.
He is lonely not because he is sick or at loggerheads with someone or be-
cause that’s the way his life turned out. He is lonely on principle, and he
would not want to be any other way.
But Lou lived within the framework of history and changed along with the
people around her. Did she really carry out the Nietzschean myth in practice?
She was becoming herself, and other people either got out of her way or tried
to fall into step. This attempt ended differently for each of them, but for now
we are more concerned with Lou herself. Myths are static, while the world
_ changes. Tomorrow a person will not be the same as he was yesterday; in be-
coming what he is, a person may well find himself different from what he
was. A person’s self-realization thus becomes the story of his life. Become
what thou art, Nietzsche told Lou, employing the words to get what he
wanted from her. With other men did she become what she was—that is,
what she couldn’t be—with Nietzsche? Biography is almost inexplicable, and
a person’s development is equally unpredictable, because everyone realizes
himself in connection with other people, and with each new partner the ego
changes, being practically re-created anew. Thus, in becoming herself under
Nietzsche’s strong influence, Lou became a totally different person.
Historians disagree about the identity of the man who initiated Lou’s
sexual experience. According to the most intriguing variant, her deflowerer
was a prominent member of the German Social Democratic Party and the
founder of the Marxist newspaper Vorwdrts, Georg Ledebour. Ledebour
was for many years a member of the Reichstag. In later decades, his revolu-
tionary activism would bring him into contact with Trotsky in Vienna.
What we do know for certain is that when Lou lost her virginity, she was
past thirty and the event rocked the Andreas family’s life. Fred was ready to
kill himself, and Lou was on the verge of doing the same. In the end, the
crisis was resolved nonviolently, with a settlement that would define their
roles for the rest of their lives: Lou obtained unlimited freedom, while still
living under the same roof with her husband and maintaining a close
friendship with him.
In several of Lou’s publications that were written around this time—
works that made her well known to the intellectual elite—she succeeded in
establishing her independence from Nietzsche’s influence. In one piece, she
presents an interpretation of the Gospel story in which Christ is portrayed
as a lonely, suffering hero. Another book deals with Nietzsche’s philosophy
directly. This treatise enjoyed wide success, and relatively quickly, in 1896,
a Russian translation appeared in the symbolist journal Severnyi vestnik
(Northern Messenger), which was published in St. Petersburg under the ed-
itorship of Lou’s acquaintance Akim Volynsky.
In May 1897, Andreas-Salomé met Rilke, and the two were immediately
attracted to each other. René Maria Rilke was twenty-one, fourteen years
younger than Lou. He had known many women in his life; he would write
them poetry, quickly become entranced by the prospect of happiness, and
lose interest just as quickly. His relationship with Lou stands out sharply
against this background: Although their romantic intimacy lasted only four
years, for the next thirty Lou remained Rilke’s foremost authority and pos-
sibly his closest friend.
Under her influence Rilke even changed his name, transforming the in-
definite, intimate René into the solidly romantic Rainer. (“Your name
willed it so, and you chose the name,” Marina Tsvetaeva wrote Rilke many
years later, infatuated with him from afar.**) Rilke’s creative periods alter-
nated with chronic episodes of ennui, fear, and helplessness. Lou was at
once his lover, his mother, and his therapist: She accepted his emotions even
though they often seemed to her overblown; she valued and stimulated the
channel of expression that was Rilke’s savior—his poetry; and when it be-
came necessary, she could patiently woo him back to reality.
Russia was their common passion. “True Russians are people who say at
dusk what other people reject in daylight,” Rilke wrote to his mother.?5 “In
his poetic imagination, Russia rose up as a nation of prophetic dreams and
patriarchal traditions,” wrote Rilke’s Russian acquaintance, Sophia Shil.3¢
All his life, Rilke tried to find his way into just such a Russia: He studied
the language, wrote poetry about Russian monks and mythic heroes, and
21
corresponded with Russian poets; at one time, he even intended to emigrate

to Russia. During his final days, his Russian secretary never left his side.
Fiction in the Mass of Reality

In 1898, Lou published in the German press an article with the unusual title
“Russian Philosophy and the Semitic Spirit,” in which she presented a
highly original survey of contemporary Russian intellectual life.37 In her ar-
ticle, Lou professed astonishment at the intense battle raging among Russian
intellectuals for the philosophical and spiritual development of their compa-
triots. For the time being, she asserted, these intellectuals would find it diffi-
cult to achieve any philosophical elevation beyond the limits of naive reli-
gious metaphysics. Their attempts to do so were mere imitations of German
philosophy from Schelling’s and Hegel’s day; but abstract German philoso-
phy was ill adapted to take root in the Russian mind. Russia needed a more
systematic philosophical education, in the interest of its cultural develop-
ment. Fortunately, Russia already had a group of people “that has devel-
oped a talent for abstract theology to the point of genius”’—the Jews. Lou
believed that Jews could exert a more productive influence on Russia’s fu-
ture philosophy than on any other area, and she cited her friend Akim
Volynsky, literary critic and publisher, as an example of such influence.
It was difficult to imagine anything more diametrically opposed, Lou
wrote, than the Russian mind with its naive analogies and aesthetic con-
creteness, and the Jewish Talmudic spirit with its tendency toward extreme
abstraction. “The Jewish spirit perceives telescopically what the Russian
mind sees through a microscope.” And yet, she asserted, unlike Germans,
who were at pains to seize any phenomenon in their conceptual “claws,”
Jews saw phenomena through eyes full of love and enthusiasm. This char-
acteristic brought them closer to the youthful culture of the Russians; but
Russian culture was closed to Jews at the time, and for this reason “Jewish
dialectic force has set a subtly aggressive course.” As soon as Russia’s phi-
losophy departments gave Jews the chance to compete freely, Lou pre-
dicted, one would see these two nations learning to understand and interact
with each other, even though they started out from opposite cultural poles.
Nietzsche had written twelve years earlier that “any thinker who has the
future of Europe on his mind will turn to the Jews and the Russians as the
most reliable and probable factors in the great game and struggle of
forces.”28 The century that followed was indeed marked by the tragic brand
of these three ethnic questions—German, Russian, and Jewish. In light of
subsequent events, the perceptiveness and at the same time the limited scope
of Lou’s analysis are striking. She foresaw the great spiritual eruption that
would result as soon as the Russian and the Jewish traditions began to “in-
DA The Life and Work of Lou Andreas-Salomé
tersect”; but she had no inkling of the social orientation that would charac-
terize the new blend of beliefs born of this collision.
In April 1899, Mr. and Mrs. Andreas-Salomé arrived in Russia with
Rilke. Their fairy-tale expectations were confirmed during Easter week in
Moscow, where they met artist Leonid Pasternak (father of Boris), sculptor
Paolo Trubetsky, and Leo Tolstoy. Their Russian interlocutors were hos-
pitable but disagreed with their guests’ perception of Russia, and no partic-
ular warmth arose between them. Rilke would only find spiritual accep-
tance in Russia after the new generation came of age: Boris Pasternak
considered him a great poet; and Marina Tsvetaeva, who had never met
Rilke but had merely seen him in photographs, was head over heels in love
with him. Both Russian poets corresponded with Rilke for many years. The
Russia that Rilke worshiped was an equally attractive fairy tale for
Russians like these, who survived only by a quirk of fate, huddling in com-
munal living quarters or in emigration.
A year later, Lou and Rainer were in Russia again, this time without
Andreas. The impression they left on ten-year-old Boris Pasternak fills the
opening pages of his memoirs, written many years later. The pair made a
striking image:
An express train was leaving Kursk station on a hot summer morning in the
year 1900. Just before the train started someone in a black Tyrolean cape ap-
peared in the window. A tall woman was with him. Probably she would be his
mother or his elder sister. ... There on a platform thronged with people, be-
tween two bells, this stranger struck me as a silhouette in the midst of bodies, a
fiction in the mass of reality.*?
Lou and Rainer were on their way to visit Tolstoy at his home in Yasnaya
Polyana. It could be that septuagenarian Tolstoy also found the pair lacking
in “non-fictitiousness.” In any case, he showed no particular interest in
Rainer’s poetry or Lou’s ideas. These found more resonance at the time
with a little-known peasant poet named Spiridon Drozhzhin.
After a two-month stay in Moscow and St. Petersburg, the travelers re-
turned to Berlin. A short time later, one of Lou’s friends found her and
Rilke so engrossed in the study of Russian language, history, and literature
that when she met them at the dinner table they were too tired to maintain
a conversation.
For Lou the trips to Russia carried a different meaning than they did for
Rilke. For her they were a homecoming—to youth, to her family, to the fa-
miliar places she loved in childhood, to reality. The poetic visions that
bound Rilke so tightly to Russia now appeared to her overdone and even
unhealthy. Love for Russia, which at one time had brought her and Rilke
closer, now forced them apart.
Rilke’s tragic emotion for Lou was encoded in many of his poems. One
of his most famous was first published in The Book of Pilgrimage, after his
breakup with Lou and marriage to Clara Westhof, but was written, accord-
ing to Lou, in 1897:
Extinguish both my eyes: I can descry you;

Slam my ears to: I can attend to you;
without feet I am able to draw nigh you,
without a mouth I still can conjure you.
Break both my arms away, and with my heart,
as with a hand, I'll capture you again;
arrest my heart’s, there'll be my brain’s pulsation;
and if you cast a fire into my brain,
Pll carry you on my blood’s circulation.*°
The correspondence between Rilke and Lou Andreas-Salomé fills a thick

volume. Over the decades that followed the end of their romantic relation-
ship, Rilke wrote to Lou about everything he was afraid to express in his po-
etry. Whenever the anxiety that washed over him seemed too strong, he
would beg for a rendezvous, but nearly always her answer was no. Clearly
intended to hold an unstable partner at a distance, Lou’s letters also fostered
Rilke’s artistic life. She saw his poems as a spontaneous and irreplaceable
form of self-treatment. Later, in 1912, after advising Rilke to begin the
course of psychoanalysis that he was seriously but reluctantly considering,
she began to doubt the wisdom of her advice. The two subsequently agreed
that although psychoanalysis would likely help Rilke rid himself of emo-
tional crises, it probably would also deprive him of the ability to write po-
etry. Just a month after he broke off negotiations with one analyst, Rilke be-
gan composing his Duino Elegies. Thus history has, at the very least, proven
the corollary: Without psychoanalysis, Rilke’s genius remained intact.
Later, one of Lou’s patients in Konigsberg recalled a story she had told
him in the course of his treatment.
Once I was sitting in a train with Rilke and we amused ourselves by playing the
game of free association. You say a word and your partner answers with any
word that comes to his mind. We did this for quite a while. And suddenly I un-
derstood the reasons why Rilke wanted to write his military school novel and I
told him so. I explained to him the nature of the subconscious forces that were
urging him to write because they had been repressed while he was at school. He
laughed at first, then he looked serious and said that now he did not have to
write the novel at all. I had taken it off his soul. This shocked me and I sud-
denly realized the danger of psychoanalysis for the creative artist. To interfere
here means to destroy. That is why I later always advised Rilke against having
himself analyzed. For while a successful analysis might free an artist from ote
devils that beset him, it would also drive away the angels that help him create.*
The Erotic
In 1903, Mr. and Mrs. Andreas moved to Gottingen. The area reminded
Lou of a Volga landscape. She spent only a short time there, however, as
she traveled around Europe with friends, visited her mother each year in
Petersburg (until the latter’s death in 1913), and lived extensively in Berlin.
In 1910, Lou was befriended by Martin Buber, one of the most important
philosophers of the twentieth century. At Buber’s request, Lou wrote a
book entitled The Erotic.*2 The book was successful mostly because of the
unabashed ecstasy it expressed concerning the physical aspects of sexuality;
but rave reviews from an authority like Buber also reflected the work’s high
intellectual level. All living things love each other, Lou wrote, but as one
moves closer to man, and as man develops, love becomes more individual-
istic. The more individual a person, the more demanding and subtle his
choice, and the more quickly saturation and the demand for change will set
in. Love, and more specifically the act of copulation, is experienced differ-
ently by men and women. For a man, Lou wrote, the sex act was a moment
of satisfaction. For a woman, it was a condition—a normal and self-
sufficient phenomenon, the peak of her human essence.
At about the same time, similar ideas were circulating among Russian
philosophers such as Solovyov, Rozanov, and Berdyaev, who equated male
sainthood with asceticism and asexuality, while female sainthood—as Lou
pointed out, referring to the Virgin Mary and to Mary Magdalene—was
the realization of woman’s erotic essence as a mother and lover. In sex, a
woman approached the condition that Lou dubbed “everything.” In her
definition, “everything” was to a woman what the outside world was to a
man. Andreas-Salome’s erotic “everything” is paradoxically reminiscent of
the mystic concept of “all-oneness” in Russian philosophy of that time.
Whatever the name one might assign to this experience, it seems to have
helped Salomé maintain stable relations with her husband. The Erotic,
along with Lou’s other publications, also seems to have won her a degree of
notoriety; her suitors and friends were among Europe’s intellectual elite.
Yet one crucial element was missing from Lou’s intricate internal makeup.
Moses and Magdalene

In September 1911, Lou visited the Psychoanalytic Congress in Weimar,
where she met Freud She had already passed her fiftieth birthday, but this
was yet another new beginning for her. To Lou’s request to attend the fa-
mous “Wednesdays,” Freud responded, “When you come to Vienna, we
shall all do our best to introduce you to what little of psycho-analysis can
be demonstrated and imparted.”*3 Arriving in Vienna after the Congress,
Lou made a most favorable impression on Freud’s close-knit circle of ana-
lysts. Freud himself conducted the weekly meetings, which took place with-
out fail on Wednesday evenings, starting in 1902; the meetings eventually
metamorphosed into sessions of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society.
Lou became involved in the psychoanalytic movement at a key juncture
in its development. Freud had been successful in reworking the theories and
methods of clinical psychoanalysis; at any moment, psychoanalysis would
begin its triumphant march across the world. However, one also can detect
the first signs of the worrisome phenomena, as yet unclear to Freud, that
would soon lead to the dissident activity of Adler and Jung and to a deep
schism in the psychoanalytic movement.
It is surprising that after intimate contact with two monumental roman-
tics, Nietzsche and Rilke, Lou was able to accommodate herself to Freud’s
strict realism; but, as was the case at every significant juncture in her life,
Lou immediately sensed in which direction her vital interests lay, and she
responded without any particular resistance. Later, she singled out two fac-
tors that made her so receptive to Freudian psychology: the fact that she
grew up among Russians, who were particularly open to self-analysis; and
her lengthy interaction with a man of uncommon inner direction—Rilke.*4
Freud was nearing fifty-six. This brilliant man, whom many (in Russia,
almost everyone) would later consider the overthrower of all moral values,
was also a father of six, whose well-ordered life flowed by quietly inside the
walls of his apartment in Vienna. He was always immaculately dressed, his
speech was commendably correct and well enunciated, and his grandiose
manners were something out of the nineteenth century. The intellectual
bravado of his adventures in the realm of the mind was balanced by ab-
solute predictability in his private life: Day after day he rose, worked, and
went to bed according to the same schedule. His office was a few doors
down from his bedroom, so during the short breaks between seeing pa-
tients he could only walk back and forth through the rooms of his apart-
- ment. His patients were well acquainted with his punctuality and knew
how seriously he took their tardiness. His only weaknesses were cigars and
a collection of classical and oriental statuettes that swallowed all his extra
money, particularly toward the end of his life. Freud’s desk was covered
with these statuettes, arranged in exemplary order, leaving a perfectly mea-
sured space for the sheets of paper he used to write his book. Any patient
who showed particular courage in uncovering the depths of his own uncon-
scious was rewarded with a short tour of the collection.
Even knowing so much about human passions, Freud lived a life that was
completely subordinated to intellectual control. The assistance that he of-
fered his patients was justified by his greater mission, and he encouraged
his patients to think of their treatment the same way: as cooperation to-
ward the common cause of learning more about the unconscious. The
struggle with hypocrisy in society, so familiar from his books, was also his
struggle with himself. From a modern point of view, his opinions on sex
seem puritanical. He discovered sexuality in children, but these discoveries
were unpleasant and even repulsive to him. Having laid the foundation for
sexual education, Freud sent his sons to a doctor so they could learn the
necessary facts about sexuality from someone else. One of his daughters-in-
law recalled how he had scolded her, saying that she stroked her infant son
too much, arousing his oedipal fixation. He was only forty-one when he
wrote to one close friend that sexual arousal no longer interested him.**
His natural scientist’s mind saw sexuality as a powerful natural force, but
in showing its power and universality he felt no rapture; he actually felt
rather regretful about it. Above all, Freud never sought to harmonize him-
self with this force in practice based on the new knowledge he had col-
lected. He invariably condemned those of his disciples who violated the
rigid moral code of psychoanalysis and entered into sexual relations with
their patients, regardless of whether they were succumbing to temptation or
experimenting for the advancement of the cause. Freud’s official biographer
reproduced the words he once used: “The great question, to which there is
no response and which I was unable to answer despite my thirty years of re-
search into the female psyche, is the question as to what a woman really
wants.”*° He was impressed by heroic figures such as Moses and Leonardo
da Vinci, who succeeded in liberating themselves from the overwhelming
pressure of their sexuality, thus performing the miracle that was impossible
according to the theory of psychoanalysis.
In this sense, Freud’s study of Leonardo da Vinci is particularly eloquent.
Incidentally, in mentioning da Vinci, Freud was following in the footsteps
of Dmitry Merezhkovsky, whom he considered the only poet who ever
came close to solving the great artist’s riddles. Like Leonardo himself,
Freud lived in an era that “was witness to a struggle between sensuality
without restraint and gloomy asceticism,”*” and he saw his own life infused
with the same lofty and asexual inspiration that he found in da Vinci, who
“converted his passion into a thirst for knowledge.”*® Like Leonardo, he
was a model of “the cool repudiation of sexuality—a thing that would
scarcely be expected of an artist and a portrayer of feminine beauty.”4?
And, like his hero, Freud could hardly have foreseen how grossly misunder-
stood his example would be.
Freud consciously sought to free himself and his doctrine from the temp-
tations of Nietzsche, whom he saw as the most dangerous competitor in the
struggle for intellectual influence. Freud’s disciples—Jung, Otto Rank,
Ernest Jones, Spielrein, Eduard Hitschmann, and others—frequently and
for various reasons demonstrated their dependence on Nietzsche, and this

always provoked Freud’s displeasure. Lou Andreas was still associated with
Nietzsche in her new circle. Jung, for example, saw her appearance at the
Vienna Society as a possibility to expand the intellectual influence of psy-
choanalysis in Germany, “where Frau Lou enjoys a considerable literary
reputation because of her relations with Nietzsche.”5° Freud must have
found in her a new, attractive battlefield for his old rivalry.
We know that in his youth Freud read the early works of Nietzsche and
that he even participated in the German Students’ Club of Vienna, which
combined political radicalism with adoration for Schopenhauer, Nietzsche,
and Wagner. In 1900, Freud wrote Fliess that he was studying Nietzsche’s
books, hoping to “find the words for what remains mute inside me.” One
of the meetings of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society in 1908 was specially
dedicated to the discussion of Nietzsche’s ideas. The speaker, Paul Federn,
said that Nietzsche’s views came so close to those of psychoanalysts that it
remained only to figure out how, if at all, they differed. Freud replied that
Nietzsche had failed to discover displacement mechanisms and infantile fix-
ations. However, Freud then affirmed that the level of introspection at-
tained by Nietzsche was indeed higher than anyone before and probably af-
ter; but he concluded that he could not read Nietzsche’s works, resorting to
a justification that smacked of paradox: Nietzsche’s ideas were too rich.>!
In 1921, Freud was sifting through metaphors that might allow him to
understand the nature of the irrational mobs that had begun to define the
century’s terrifying face and the role played by their leader. Was he a hyp-
notist? The chieftain of some prehistoric horde? In the end, Freud com-
pared the leader of the mass movement he found so heinous to Nietzsche’s
Ubermensch. Later, in 1934, when this theme had acquired unprece-
dented import, Freud tried to talk Arnold Zweig out of writing a book
about Nietzsche, particularly objecting to Zweig’s intention to compare
him with the creator of the superman.
There was no sexual relationship between Andreas-Salomé and Freud,
nor could there have been. But in his own way, in sublimated form, Freud
was enchanted by her and had no trouble expressing his feelings. He sent
her flowers and walked her back to her hotel after lectures. Once, when she
did not come to a Wednesday meeting, he sent her a note, jealously inquir-
ing whether her contact with Adler was the reason for her absence. During
his lectures, Freud had the habit of picking out someone from the audience
whom he would address directly; in his note, Freud confessed that he had
read his last lecture to the empty chair where Lou ordinarily sat.°?
Ernest Jones, commissioned by Freud’s daughter Anna (who, some say,
underwent analysis with Lou) to write the official biography of the founder
of psychoanalysis, noted that Freud was attracted to women “of a more in-
tellectual and perhaps masculine cast. ... Freud had a special admiration
for Lou Andreas-Salomé’s distinguished personality and ethical ideals,
which he felt far transcended his own.”°*
After entering the close circle of Freud’s disciples, Lou immediately be-
friended the one who seemed to her the most capable: Viktor Tausk. The
handsome, blue-eyed physician was much younger than she: He was thirty-
three, while she was fifty-one. Paul Roazen, who wrote a sensational biog-
raphy of Tausk based on interviews he did in the 1960s with seventy people
who knew Freud personally, thought Lou’s charm stemmed mostly from
her reputation as the girlfriend of brilliant people.°* Tausk was vain, and
perhaps it flattered him to find himself in the same company as Nietzsche
and Rilke; but much more important to him was Lou’s relationship with
Freud. Like Adler and Jung, Tausk was attempting to compete with Freud;
but unlike them, he was not strong enough to do it openly and suffer cer-
tain rejection by his former teacher. The history of their relationship is full
of mutual mistrust: Freud suspected Tausk of plagiarism, although he him-
self was at times imprudent in using the ideas and words of his students.
Tausk tried to overcome the distance between them by asking Freud to take
him on as a patient, the only opening that Freud left others as he became
increasingly isolated with the passage of years. For a while, Lou—who had
no difficulty being Freud’s friend and Tausk’s lover at the same time—re-
strained and balanced this precarious situation. Tausk was probably able to
reassure himself with the knowledge that he possessed what Freud could
not, while Freud discussed his rival with Lou for hours on end, thus keep-
ing him under control. However, Lou’s relations with Freud were much
more important to her, and soon Tausk found himself alone, with Lou
denying him intimacy and Freud refusing him treatment. For several years,
Tausk tried unsuccessfully to evoke sympathy from one of the two, and in
1919 his story ended tragically: He took his own life in a meticulously
planned fashion, tying a noose around his neck and then shooting himself
in the head. Freud dedicated a mournful eulogy to him, and at the same
time showed the kind of cruelty of which he was capable, confessing to Lou
in a letter that Tausk’s death was no loss. “I had long taken him to be use-
less, indeed a threat to the future.”*°
The Origin of Optimism

Enthusiasm and optimism are characteristic of Andreas-Salomé’s psychoan-
alytic works, clearly differentiating them from the gloomy stoicism of late
Freud. Her generally joyous worldview even changes her interpretation of
concrete clinical phenomena. For example, narcissism is for her not an in-
fantile condition into which an adult might be drawn by sickness or misfor-
tune, as it is for Freud, but a positive feeling of love for oneself and even an
affective identification with existence, with everything. Narcissus, she

writes, looked at himself not in a mirror made by the hands of men but in a
sylvan spring. Therefore, he saw not the reflection of his own face but his
divine oneness with the infinite world of nature.
The unity of subject and object that encompasses the entire universality
of nature and culture represents for Lou the very essence of love. It is incor-
rect, she writes, to see nature and culture as a set of opposites like light and
darkness. Those who, like Prometheus, create human culture as a second
reality are truly Narcissuses in the extreme. Narcissus loves himself, and
consequently he loves the entire world that is embodied in him. For this
reason, she continues, the adorer is doomed to disappointment; not because
love fades with the passage of time, but because it is beyond the capacity of
individuality to fulfill the expectation of universality that the adorer invests
in the object of his affection.°”
The unique pattern of Lou’s ideas, it seems, was based on Russian
sources with which she was very familiar but which were inaccessible to her
European colleagues. The most influential of these sources was the moral
philosophy of Vladimir Solovyov. The image of all-oneness as the embodi-
ment of the “universal soul” and a spiritual ideal were central to Solovyov’s
thinking, and because of him these were extremely popular ideas in Russia
at the beginning of the century. For Solovyov, as for Andreas-Salomé, all-
oneness has feminine traits; his symbol is Sophia, the mystical image of the
Eternal Feminine and, at the same time, of godmanhood.°® As Russian cul-
ture assimilated Solovyov’s philosophy, Sophia began to take on more and
more sensual characteristics, culminating in Alexander Blok’s “beautiful
stranger, ”°?
The interests of Solovyov and Salomé clearly intersected at least in one
area that was important to them both: the interpretation of Nietzsche in a
Russian context. Solovyov released a series of articles in 1893 entitled “The
Meaning of Love,” which achieved notoriety in Russia. The translation of
Lou’s book on Nietzsche, which became the first systematic analysis of his
_ philosophy in Russian, was published in 1896. Some time later, Solovyov’s
essay “The Idea of the Superman” was issued, in which he starts from the
proposition that “somewhat to his detriment, Nietzsche seems to be be-
coming a trendy writer in Russia” and moves on to his own interpretation
of the superman: Nietzsche is in a way better than Marx and Darwin;
Christ was the real Ubermensch. The most important thing about the su-
perman, said Solovyoy, is his immortality, and the impending solution to
humanity’s problem, the “total and decisive victory over death,” will make
the Ubermensch a reality.®° fe
Solovyov’s shift away from the philosophy of eroticism to the mysticism of
all-oneness and the utopia of godmanhood had a profound impact on the de-
velopment of Russian thought, establishing the limits within which the
search for knowledge would take place for nearly a century. The mystical
worldview of Vladimir Solovyov was as far as can be from Freud’s rational-
ism and individualism. At the same time, aspects of Solovyov’s philosophy of
love brought him surprisingly close to psychoanalysis. “The beginning of
everything good in this world comes out of our dark sphere of unconscious
processes and relations,” he wrote, before Freud’s first book was ever pub-
lished. “This force of physico-spiritual creativity in man is merely the trans-
formation or turning inward of the same creative force that in nature, being
outwardly focused, results in mindless, endless physical reproduction.”®"
In Solovyov’s ideal of all-oneness, the differences between man and
woman, life and death, were overcome. The human being of the future,
who would overcome death and gender, was Solovyov’s dream, and it tied
him inextricably to the generation of Russian intellectuals that would fol-
low. It was Solovyov in Russia who first considered the interconnection be-
tween love and death. This interconnection would be incorporated into
psychoanalysis through the writing of Spielrein and subsequently through
the latter works of Freud. It would also be assimilated into the philosophy
of Berdyaev and other religious thinkers of the Russian diaspora (see chap-
ters 2 and 5). Solovyov cited Heracleitus with deep understanding:
“Dionysus and Hades are one and the same.” Thanks to him, this vague
aphorism was adopted by Russian and European thinkers of the new cen-
tury, and later was transmogrified into Freud’s lesson about Eros and
Thanatos. “As long as Man reproduces like an animal, he will die like an
animal.” The sex act, and even the very division of people into men and
women, is a path leading straight to death. The perversions that psychia-
trists deal with are merely “more barbaric forms of one, all-penetrating
perversion,” that is, sex. “A simplistic attitude towards love ends in that fi-
nal, extreme simplification that we call death.”*®
Solovyov asserted that the only absolute value of human life lies in the
establishment of the unity that has been predicted since Plato, in which all
opposites are melded together. The human of the future is androgynous,
physico-spiritual, and godmanlike; obviously, he/she will have no need of
sex. All this is attainable only in the godman’s mystical formulation of the
future. Ironically, sexual love became Solovyov’s metaphor for this ideal
world, since all-encompassing divinity is achieved by blending the mascu-
line and the feminine, the physical and the spiritual, the singular and the in-
finite. It should be noted that the creator of the philosophy of godmanhood
was seriously convinced that his ideas were more than mere poetry and
could be implemented in actual practice.
Andreas-Salomé most likely viewed Solovyov as an anachronism. She
characterized him as “one of the most typical representatives of Byzantine
Russia.”°? Unlike the Western scholars who made up Salomé’s circle—psy-
choanalysts, sociologists, and psychologists—Russian philosophers were
not concerned with the technical, prescriptive side of their lofty ideas. All
the same, the erotic psychology of Lou Andreas-Salomé, while combining
such diverse intellectual trends as Nietzsche’s romanticism, Solovyov’s
moral philosophy, and Freudian psychoanalysis, remained continuously
linked to the basic current of Russian culture in her day.
Narcissism, Feminism, and Nationalism

Narcissism is not simply admiring oneself in the mirror (a childish theme
that Lou carried with her throughout her life). In Freud’s understanding, it
was also the diversion of the libido from higher goals. Salomé inverted the
Freudian concept of narcissism, which for her was a mature rather than an
initial stage of development. For her, narcissism was not the cause of psy-
chotic stagnation and abnormal development but the source of love, art,
and ethical behavior. As a result, in Lou’s view, the most positive thought
mechanisms of psychic life were embedded in the concept of narcissism.
Narcissism was the most important component in all objective symboliza-
tions of the libido, “the feeling of identification with totality,” and even the
action of “transsubjective force.”** It was narcissism that raised sex to the
level of love and love to the level of friendship, and finally, that trans-
formed all human feelings into the “masterpiece of narcissism” and the
“symbol of symbols of love” —God.® In order to understand the meaning
of narcissism, one must study cases where the libido has not been too
“masculinized” or subjected to the ego’s overeager aggression, when it has
not yet been totally separated from “everything.”°°
Lou reintegrated the Freudian “id” as another closely analogous image.
This concept was originally defined by Freud exclusively in terms that were
logically and normatively negative. Salomé invested the id with concrete
and even optimistic content. Her revision of psychoanalytic theory went be-
yond the bounds of any one concept, touching on the entire range of lower
and pre-rational psychic forces, in essence covering the entire territory that
_ psychoanalysis had discovered and described. Freud found a formidable
new opponent in this landscape, one who could be defeated only with the
help of deep, systematic reconnaissance. Salomé radically shifted the tele-
scope’s focus: She perceived the Freudian unconscious as a reversible state
of personality—a state that was familiar and even pleasant. Her narcissistic
“unification with everything” was in fact the stuff of erotic pleasure and
cultural creativity. Freud’s sublimation of lower forces—their ever incom-
plete and embattled subjugation to the control of higher forces—in Salomé
became a partnership between these opposing forces, a chain of reversible
transactions and alliances. Salomé melded the political and often aggressive
metaphors of Freudian analysis with a completely different set of mystical
and erotic associations.
The national dimension of Salomé’s ideas is significant but underappreci-

ated. Russia occupied just as privileged a position in her geography as did
narcissism in her psychology. The qualities Andreas-Salomé used to define
narcissism in her psychoanalytic articles written in the late 1910s are the
very same qualities that she attributed to Russians in her earlier and later
works: “Childlike directness in interpersonal relations; ...a breadth of
spirit bereft of all routineness; a preference for spending over saving; a lack
of understanding of rules, duty, constancy, legality, and responsibility; insuf-
ficient strength to take action, except in special conditions of ecstasy or fa-
naticism.”°” In her memoirs, these three dimensions—gender-based, na-
tional, and structural—are equally and subtly intermingled with one
another. One chapter, entitled “Russian Experience” (and squeezed in
among such chapters as “Experience of God,” “Love Experience,” and
“Experience of Friendship”), is an astounding attempt to integrate this expe-
rience from the time of her childhood with the thoroughly different concepts
that were layered over it in adult years. She appreciated the complexity of
her ideal, and distinctly contrasted it to the masculine, European, rational
world that she encountered daily in her partners; she more than willingly of-
fered this construction to her readers—and probably her suitors.
In fact, this triple construction—feminine, Russian, and narcissistic—has
little in common with Freudian psychoanalysis and bears a far greater re-
semblance to Russian populism. Salomé absorbed the populist attitudes of
the Russian intelligentsia through her father, an official during the period of
official narodnost’, and from the atmosphere of opposition that reigned
during her youth, an atmosphere she eloquently described in her memoirs:
“I was able to meet people . .. who allowed me to relate to the Russian na-
tion in a new way—namely, politically. For the spirit of revolution which
found its first political program in the Narodniki, the ‘people’s party,’ was
already bubbling and fermenting in the schools. It was hardly possible to be
young and energetic without being affected by it.”
Historians have offered various interpretations of Andreas-Salomé’s at-
tempt to refashion the psychoanalytic tradition by rehabilitating narcissism,
the unconscious, the id, and what she called the “passive instinct.” Angela
Livingstone saw a similarity to Jung’s collective unconscious; Biddy Martin
deemed Salomé’s approach a feminist revision of psychoanalysis.®? According
to Salomé’s own elucidation, she envisioned an analysis that was less individ-
ualistic and rational, less hostile to religious practice, and more sensual and
feminine. What Freud could not accept in Jung, he forgave in the feminine—
and Russian—Salomé. It is understandable that researchers in our day are
more inclined to see Salomé as a pioneer of international feminism than to
ascertain the sources of her inspiration in nationality and other cultural fac-
tors. These factors are quirky, or at least archaic, and perhaps that is why
they have as yet aroused little interest among historians outside Russia.
Nevertheless, in Salomé’s world, values were different. Ideas that today’s his-
torians tend to suppress, Salomé espoused actively and with obvious satisfac-
tion, using them to her apparent advantage as leitmotivs of self-representa-
tion. The game she played with national stereotypes was an important part
of the charm that has made her so irresistible to Western intellectuals.
“The Russian ‘collective’ is marked by attachment to the people, to what
is fundamental, an intimacy of the heart rather than the principle of civi-
lized behavior, or intelligence, or rationality. All ecstasy finds its expression
there, in no way diminished, with an emphasis upon the difference between
the sexes: for passive submission and receptivity mesh with a sharp, active,
revolutionary ... state of spiritual alertness.””° These words of Salomé’s,
penned in 1932 and full of fascination with the Russian obshchina [tradi-
tional village commune], echoed the populist ideas of more than half a cen-
tury before. Salomé shared a romantic populism, acquired at home and in
school, with the Russian revolutionaries she met in Europe. The memoirs
that became the receptacle of these views are naturally peppered with terms
related to her theory of positive narcissism: “In fact, revolutionaries of both
sexes looked to the Russian idea as children look to their parents. .. . The
peasant remained for them the model person. . . . All of the strength of spir-
itual life was concentrated in this primitivism—the childlike state that no
one can fully avoid, even a mature and self-assured adult.””!
In her memoirs, Lou held Pastor Gillot responsible for her “de-
Russification”;’* but the memoirs themselves scream of “re-Russification.”
Nationality here is visibly a psychic process, and a reversible one (Lou per-
formed exactly the same operation with narcissism in other texts). The
reader sees Salomé crossing from Russia into Europe as though undergoing
a metamorphosis, and returning again enriched. In her memoirs Salomé
paraphrased Russian history in similarly dynamic terms: After Russia con-
verted to Christianity, the religion was transformed by a process of
Russification; later, Orthodoxy was de-Russified by Patriarch Nikon; and
the resultant schism was an attempt to Russify Orthodoxy once more.”
Eros was in constant interaction with nationality in Salomé’s life and
texts. The heroine of her novella Fenitschka asserts that she could never
have a non-Russian lover: “Not a Russian? No, I could not imagine that.
My whole life rests on his being a Russian, my compatriot, my brother, a
piece of my own world.”7”4 But Lou herself, as far as we know, never hada
Russian lover. In general, all the men in her life, beginning with Gillot and
ending with Freud, strove to “de-Russify” her; but none was able to do so.
In her memoirs, Lou indicted them all in condemning Gillot, whom she
contrasted with her “Russian,” or more accurately “Russified,” father. In
the complex and often cruel game that Salomé played with Western men—
a game on behalf of another world, at once open and inaccessible—she laid
down both of her trump cards, femininity and Russianness. She forced her
partners, and her readers after them, to uncover two dimensions of her life
at once, two aspects of the “other”: gender and nationality.
Salomé’s heroine, saddled with the demonstrably Russian name
Fenitschka, strolls through St. Petersburg with a random friend (with the
demonstrably German name Max Werner). They spot the popular illustra-
tions to Lermontov’s Demon in a shop window. The pictures show the en-
tire course of history: male seduction, mutual caresses, the death of a
woman. “You can find those pictures here in every house,” Fenitschka says.
Looking at them, Fenitschka translates Demon into German out loud, as
perhaps Salomé did during her strolls with Nietzsche. “Very appropriate
pictures for a young girl,” Werner quips. “Did that not make you imagine
love to be something very demonic? Fight with an angel, hellish delights—
Bengal lights—end of the world.” But Fenitschka protests. Love is some-
thing “totally different.”’’ Not the end of the world, but the opposite state,
like recollections of childhood, narcissistic pleasure, returning home; and if
love ends in death, then it is in the death of the male partner. Salomé chose
her own demons in order to defeat them on the field of battle—in the West,
in rationality, and in sex—escaping from them by retreating into her femi-
ninity and mysticism, and to Russia when the opportunity presented itself.
In analyzing the sources of Rilke’s creative energy, Salomé found a ready
analogy in her own experience of returning to Russia: “I felt a simple joy
., a happy replenishment I had been denied by my early emigration.
...For you the creative breakthrough ... was also a matter of something
your whole being had been profoundly anticipating from the very begin-
ning,” she wrote to Rilke.”° This sort of feeling is unlikely to be founded in
historical reality and thus the subject is prepared to ignore or discount any
change. As Fenitschka said of Russia in 1898: “I have been away for so
long. But now I feel at home again, in all the old and familiar surroundings.
Russia has an enormous advantage in this respect, because you can be quite
sure here that everything is precisely where it was.”’” More interesting yet
is that we find the same idea in Salomé’s memoirs, written in 1932:
“Whenever I returned home»... , reaching the Russian border ... [I felt]
an unforgettable feeling of happiness. . . . Ionly know that it remained sub-
stantially unchanged through the wonderful years in which ... I was so
preoccupied with other matters, so absorbed by quite un-Russian intellec-
tual endeavors.”7* Andreas-Salomé’s worship of the Russian soul and
Russian revolutionaries never ceased; but these “wonderful years” had nev-
ertheless so changed the face of Russia that even she was forced to come to
terms with the most difficult of problems, that of bringing together the
fairy-tale Russian past with the worrisome Russian present.
In Lou’s theory, the highest expression of narcissism was the idea of God,
and the key to the history of narcissistic Russia was the uniqueness of the
nation’s religious life. Bolshevik Russia could only be understood as the re-
sult of this fundamental uniqueness of the Russian soul, closer simultane-

ously to God and the flesh, and “less prone to dualism,” than the soul of
Western man. A Russian must overcome the opposites of daily life in his
bosom; Russian heaven was less abstract than Western heavens, while
Russian earth was less burdened with a feeling of guilt.”? Salomé recalled
the Russian schism and sects, following the 1926 release of a book by
Freud’s Munich publisher, René Fueloep-Miller, The Mind and Face of
Bolshevism.®° The author, who had just visited Soviet Russia, described
what was happening there as the victory of a militaristic, apocalyptic sect,
using this insight as the framework for a full-length book and illustrating it
with a variety of eloquent, semi-factual, semi-fanciful observations.
Salomé, however, altered the author’s assessment significantly in her own
gloss: The victory of the irrational that to Fueloep-Miller and Freud was a
sign of catastrophe seemed to her a rebirth or emancipation, the fulfillment
of a positive, narcissistic regression on a universal scale.
Salomé’s psychoanalytic background is perceptible only in the particular
attention she gave to the politics of sex: “It seems to me that all this influ-
enced sexual love in Russia as well, releasing to a certain extent the ex-
tremes of tension which in Western Europe had developed over almost a
thousand years.”*®! Salomé was referring here to Russian sectarians:
skoptsy, with their “ritual castration,” khlysty with their “sexual myster-
ies,” and Rasputin with his “monstrous peculiarity.”** Although the exis-
tence of these phenomena might be taken to indicate that sexual tension in
Russia had attained a level unheard of in Europe, Andreas-Salomé, driven
by her childhood populism or by the nationalism that served her so well in
her adult years, came to a different conclusion: “[I]n Russian Bolshevism
we see blood and passion flow into the dry, cold theories inherited from the
West, until it... appears ...as the precondition for a new dawn, to which
Russia invites the universe in terms beyond nation and rationality.”®3 Lou
perceived this “new dawn” of civilization, the nightmare of so many brave
men, without fear or condemnation: The predicted end of Europe was not
the end of the world, but a new, fascinating experiment, a source of plea-
sure and art; and she wrote of this in the same triumphant intonation that
she employed in relating the sexual side of love to her timid readers—just
as a therapist might describe orgasm to a patient who fears it.
Gratitude
Lou worked extensively as a psychoanalyst, although she, like many of
Freud’s closest disciples, never underwent analysis herself. We know that
Freud tried to convince her to take on fewer patients, saying that ten to
eleven hours of analysis in a single day was too many. Evidently, she often
fulfilled important requests from Freud, as well. She spent half a year in
Kénigsberg with local psychiatrists and their patients. One of the doctors in
Konigsberg recalled:
I confess that the way Lou analyzed me left a deep impression on me and has
been a great help to me all my life. . .. For the rest, I had the impression that
Lou was more interested in the psychological than in the medical aspects of
psychoanalysis. And after all: every life is a novel. For a writer, such as Lou
was originally, nothing can be more interesting than to descend into the lives
of others. ... I suppose that Lou turned to psychoanalysis because it enabled
her to penetrate into the deepest secrets of life in her fellow men... . She hada
very quiet way of speaking and a great gift of inspiring confidence. I am still a
little surprised today how much I told her then. But I had always the feeling
that she not only understood everything but forgave everything. I have never
again experienced such a feeling of conciliatory kindness, or if you like, com-
passion, as I did with her. We usually sat opposite each other in semi-darkness.
Mostly I talked and Lou listened. She was a great listener. But sometimes she
would tell me stories of her life.**
Lou’s dedication to psychoanalysis did not prevent her late blossoming
in matters of the heart. From 1911 to 1913, besides her romance with
Tausk, she also had a romantic relationship with Swedish psychoanalyst
Paul Bjerre, who introduced her to the psychoanalytic world, and, it
seems, with another of Freud’s young followers, Emil von Gebsattel.
Besides this, she kept up constant correspondence with Rilke and saw him
occasionally. We can hear the recollections of his girlfriend, a young artist
by the name of Loulou Albert-Lazard, who was living with Rilke in
Munich when they were visited by Lou Andreas-Salomé and Baron von
Gebsattel: “From the moment of her arrival our days were filled with her
programmes. In the morning a spiritualist seance, in the afternoon histori-
ans or astronomers. ... Taken separately, each of these gatherings might
have been interesting, but this mad pot-pourri made me dizzy.”*5 Loulou
perceived Lou as a “Russian woman,” noting that “despite a strong sen-
suality, she seemed somewhat too exclusively cerebral.”8° She was sur-
prised that Rilke, who was so different from Lou, could stand her friend-
ship for so long.
Freud’s friendship with Andreas-Salomé lasted twenty-five years. They
left behind over two hundred letters, packed with mutual intellectual inter-
est and solid amity. Mutual admiration and an equal degree of mutual grat-
itude are the most common motifs in their correspondence. The letters are
completely devoid of the passionate and sometimes persnickety egocen-
trism that characterized Freud’s correspondence with his male students. On
the contrary, Freud particularly emphasized and valued Lou’s originality,
which he referred to as her “synthesis,” a word that attained even greater
significance in the context of Freud’s favorite word, “analysis,” its exact
opposite.
The Life and Work of Lou Andreas-Salomé aif
Every time I read your letters of appraisal, |am amazed at your talent to go be-
yond what has been said. Naturally I do not always agree with you. I so rarely
feel the need for synthesis. The unity of this world seems to me so self-evident
as not to need evidence. What interests me is the separation and breaking up
into its component parts of what would otherwise revert to an inchoate
mass... . In short, I am of course an analyst, and believe that synthesis offers
no obstacles once analysis has been achieved.®7
With the passing of years, Freud came to recognize the justification and
mutual necessity of both orientations:
I am delighted to observe that nothing has altered in our respective ways of ap-
proaching a theme, whatever it may be. I strike up a—mostly very simple—
melody; you supply the higher octaves for it; Iseparate the one from the other,
and you blend what has been separated into a higher unity; I silently accept the
limits imposed by our subjectivity, whereas you draw express attention to
them. Generally speaking we have understood each other and are at one in our
opinions. Only, I tend to exclude all opinions except one, whereas you tend to
include all opinions together.**
Strangely enough, Freud’s amicable comparison promised fulfillment of

Lou’s longtime hope for cooperation between the two inherently opposite
types of spirituality, Jewish and Russian.
Exchange of political news was not characteristic of the correspondence
between Andreas-Salomé and Freud, concentrated as it was on psycho-
analysis and psychoanalysts. But in July 1917, Lou wrote to Freud of the
“deep solicitude” she felt on hearing of the events in Russia. She was deeply
mired in these concerns, notwithstanding the “glorious early summer for
which we have waited so long.”®? Contrary to her usual practice, Lou did
not reveal the nature of her worries, but her letter exudes unease. Evidently,
the Russian revolution had deprived her of her fortune, and from the 1920s
on, psychoanalysis and her books were her only source of income. It is well
known that Freud gave her financial assistance several times, something he
- rarely did for his needy disciples.
But despite the approach of old age and the tragic events in her home-
land, Lou was happy. The joy of psychoanalysis was the main theme of her
book Gratitude to Freud.°° No other relationship, she wrote, can come
close in quality to that between analyst and patient; nothing else provides
such deep understanding of humanity and so convincingly asserts the dig-
nity of the individual. Freud appreciated the work, although he was unable
to make Lou change the title to the more impersonal Gratitude to
Psychoanalysis.
Lou spent the last years of her life in solitude. Elisabeth Forster-
Nietzsche, who to the very end never forgot her, set the Nazis on her, accus-
ing her of perverting Nietzsche’s ideas and alleging that she was “a Finnish
Jewess.” In light of the barbaric cult the Nazis had made of Nietzsche and
the hatred they bore toward psychoanalysis, which they called a “Jewish
science,” this presented a real danger to Lou, who nonetheless remained at
home in Gottingen. She tried to ignore the monstrous changes taking place
in Europe before her very eyes. A colleague who visited her on the eve of
her seventieth birthday told of how she “conducted a psychoanalytic prac-
tice very quietly in Gottingen and lived the mysterious life of a Sibyl of our
own intellectual world.”?! To the last hour she was surrounded by friends,
a group that included her patients, students, and suitors.
She died February 5, 1937. Her last words were: “Actually ’ve spent my
whole life working—working hard, and only working. ... What for?”??
2
Russian Modernist Culture:
Between Oedipus and Dionysus
The Science of Daily Existence

Daily life had always been problematic for marginal groups; but as the nine-
teenth century gave way to the twentieth, doubts began to move the imagi-
nation of entire societies. The deepest foundations of life began to shift, as it
appeared to many that basic human notions of love and death, reality, and
the spirit could no longer be taken for granted. “There are too many un-
known forces at play within each of us,” Alexander Blok wrote in 1913.
Mankind would get control of these forces someday, but “for now, we live
in the unknown.”! The traditional regulators of daily existence, such as reli-
gion, morality, and law, were no longer capable of performing their previous
functions; the time had come for a practical application of the sciences and
humanities, to replace the norms that had disappeared. Such diverse disci-
plines as political economy, social psychology, psychotherapy, psychoanaly-
sis, education, and eugenics all began to emerge at this time, in competition
with one another for the legitimacy that in nineteenth-century culture had
been the exclusive domain of millennia-old ideas.
During times of such rapid and fundamental social change, natural and
- obvious manifestations of human nature begin to seem of secondary impor-
tance and to conceal a deeper, more significant reality. Hence, the main
goal of scientists, philosophers, and other intellectuals, more urgent than
ever at times like these, is to decipher the reality that lurks behind daily ex-
istence and remains beyond the reach of ordinary man even though his hap-
piness and health depend wholly on his grasp of this inner truth. Different
thinkers had different opinions about the nature of this underlying reality,
about the ways in which it affected daily life, and about how it could be
brought out into the open. However, the idea of a second, hidden reality at
the core of all human affairs was present in every prominent or popular in-
tellectual system at the beginning of this century. Thus, the efforts of such
divergent figures as Freud, Heidegger, Vyacheslav Ivanov, and Rudolf
she
40 Russian Modernist Culture
Steiner were bound together by a common creative impulse—to decipher

the second reality and thus improve daily life—even though they would
have agreed on little else.
This era, now commonly referred to as the age of modernism, began dif-
ferently in different countries and in different arenas of human activity. In
nineteenth-century Russia it was foreshadowed by the popularity of three
European thinkers: Hegel, whose philosophy exerted a decisive influence
on the Russian intelligentsia of the middle of the century; Schopenhauer,
who attracted the sympathies of the two subsequent generations of pop-
ulists; and Marx. At the turn of the twentieth century, yet another German
philosopher became the symbol of the new era. “Nietzsche was virtually a
god for the young people of that decade,” Alexander Benois wrote. “That
winter, everyone was reading Thus Spoke Zarathustra,” Liubov’
Mendeleeva-Blok recalled of 1901.* “Friedrich Nietzsche, the destroyer of
idols, stood at the door of the new century,” wrote another contemporary.
“The recently melancholy Decadents were transformed into admirers of
Nietzsche, anarchists, revolutionaries of the spirit.”> The philosophers and
practitioners of modernism were forced to work in Nietzsche’s shadow,
whether they were aware of it or not; for Nietzsche was the first to articu-
late a new question facing mankind, and the first to suggest an answer:
Man was moved by something unconscious inside him, something bigger
and stronger than he. The individual and collective unconscious would re-
place an outmoded God in the modern world. Only a superman would be
able to control this omnipotent force.
Merely conceptualizing the Ubermensch was not enough; he had to be
produced as well. The new man could be created by altering the nature of
today’s human beings. The philosophy, sociology, and psychology of mod-
ernism therefore became practical disciplines, aspiring to influence human
life in the most direct sense. From this beginning sprang new social theories
that would later inspire not only revolutions but also a new art form—the
art of living. Psychoanalysis likewise grew out of this same general cultural
foundation, while attempting to surpass it.“Psychology is once more the
path to the fundamental problems,” wrote Nietzsche.*
The eminent scions of the Russian literary tradition, so renowned for its
“psychological nature,” had always suspected psychology of harboring just
such an overweening ambition. As Pushkin’s Mephistopheles mockingly de-
claimed, “I am a psychologist. Now there’s a science.” Dostoevsky wrote:
“I am called a psychologist. It is not true, I am merely a realist.”5
Meanwhile, his character Stavrogin (in The Possessed) says pointedly, “I
can’t stand spies and psychologists.” Bakhtin wrote of Dostoevsky that “in
psychology he saw a degrading materialization of the human soul.” Before
relating his heroine’s first menstrual cycle in Liuvers’s Childhood, Boris
Pasternak described psychology as the most ostentatious and entertaining
of human prejudices. Psychology is designed, he wrote, to distract people’s
Russian Modernist Culture
41
tasteless curiosity away from life so that life can unfold as it pleases.
Vyacheslav Ivanov was the first figure in mainstream Russian literature to
employ psychological terminology freely and willingly, and he interpreted
Pushkin’s phrase as indicating his recognition of the uses of psychology, an
“ambiguous and dangerous discipline,” through Mephistopheles, who was
perceptive enough to see its worth.”
According to Vasily Rozanov, however, the quality inherent in Russians
and their culture was not psychology but “psychologicality”—that is, the
natural quality rather than a vague speculation about it. It was a self-
evident, natural phenomenon, requiring no substantiation: “‘Too little sun-
shine’ is all there is to the explanation of Russian history. ‘The nights are so
terribly long’ is the explanation for Russian psychologicality.” Rozanov ital-
icized the word “psychologicality” (psikhologichnost’) and subsequently
provided a definition: “when a thought is hammered deep into the human
soul.” The “psychologicality” of the soul was Rozanov’s primary object: He
had no desire to influence mentality, which did not concern him, or to alter
others’ convictions; for, he confessed, his own had changed more times than
he could count. “My influence would lie in the expansion of the soul .. . So
that the soul might become more tender, so that it might have more ear,
more nostrils.”®
In the dominant discourse of the time, man was portrayed as a malleable
raw material; ne had no inherent properties. He was submerged in culture
and formed under the purposive impact of environment, society, and sci-
ence. As intellectuals’ disappointment mounted concerning the possibility
that life could be improved, they inevitably focused increasing attention on
children. Everything could begin anew through children, who were unen-
cumbered by life’s accretions and responsive to new methods. The “science
of children,” in its philosophical, practical, mythological, and scientific in-
carnations, hovered near the center of Russian society’s aspirations through-
out the modernist period, when “pedagogy” first emerged as an ideology
and a social science. It would reach its apogee much later, in the heightened
‘ transformational enthusiasm of the Soviet period, in the guise of “pedology”
(see chapter 8). The underpinnings of this latter form of intellectual pe-
dophilia, however, were laid long before the Soviet era: “Children—those
absurd, willful creatures, those semi-conscious passivities ... children are
our grotesques, just as they are sketches of our creation. Such is the world in
which our Modernism finds it so pleasant to sing and prattle,” wrote the
renowned poet (and school principal) Innokenty Annensky in 1909.’
Moonlight People
Russian modernist texts abound in direct and indirect quotations from
Nietzsche. At the same time, one could easily search in vain for similar ref-
erences to Freud in the works of such major Russian thinkers of the early
1900s as Vyacheslav Ivanov, Vasily Rozanoy, and Andrei Bely. However,

these and other philosophers and writers of Russia’s Silver Age sought an-
swers to the same questions as Freud; and like Freud, they exposed only
one facet of the universal idea of modernism. The most important issue for
them was to differentiate between the levels of existence—the superficial
and the authentic, the conscious and the unconscious, the trivial and the
profound. The name they gave to their movement, symbolism, reflected the
very essence of this delineation. Symbolism was not a codified artistic
method or philosophical system. Members of the movement liked to say
that it was, rather,a particular way of life. In creating their own myths,
from Vladimir Solovyov’s Sophia to Vyacheslav Ivanov’s Dionysus, from
Blok’s Beautiful Lady to Sologub’s ironic Nedotykomka, the symbolists
hoped to reveal another reality secreted beneath the flotsam of familiar ex-
istence. Such intentions were not all that different from the strategic goals
laid out by Freud and Jung; at the same time, the Russians completely
lacked the constructive drive that prodded European psychoanalysts to
spend ten hours a day analyzing symbols drawn from other people’s con-
sciousnesses.
Symbolists and psychoanalysts likewise shared an avid interest in sexual-
ity. One modern-day researcher of Vyacheslav Ivanov has claimed that
Ivanov sexualized Nietzsche.!° Berdyaev said the same of Merezhkovsky:
“Like many Russians of his time, he linked Nietzschean ideas to orgiastic
sexuality.” Even Pavel Florensky’s theology was essentially erotic, accord-
ing to Berdyaev, who wrote that in Florensky’s work “Platonic ideas ac-
quired a semi-sexual character.” !!
Sex as intellectual subject matter was introduced to the general Russian
public by Vasily Rozanov. Rozanov quoted at length from shocking case
studies that he had found in popular German psychiatric texts on sexual
psychopathology, at the same time deeming it appropriate to expose his
own erotic fantasies, which were more than a little racy, but which, due to
his literary artistry, astonished rather than aroused his readers. In 1916,
Rozanov wrote with pride that the effect of intellectual change during the
previous two or three decades had been essentially positive, since many
people had begun “getting at the root of things.” In Rozanov’s peculiar def-
inition, this meant that “people have acquired an interest in their own gen-
der, in their own personal gender.”
A man of unusual intuition, Rozanov sensed far more than he could ever
know for sure, and his literary talent and easy writing style enabled him to
translate nearly unintelligible revelations into a series of successful books.
“The body, the ordinary human body, is the most irrational thing in the
world,” he wrote in 1899.!3 One of his main themes, paralleling Freud, in-
volved the radical expansion of the concept of “gender” (in Russian, pol—
Rozanov never used the words seks and seksual’nost’) and the reduction of
Russian Modernist Culture 43
numerous other aspects of life to gender in this all-embracing sense. For

Rozanoy, man was “merely a transformation of gender,” a creature “that
passionately breathes gender and only gender: in battle, in the desert, in
self-imposed isolation and asceticism, in trade.”!4 Gender was both flesh
and spirit, a source of both holiness and sin. “The connection between gen-
der and God was greater than the connection between the mind and God,
stronger even than the connection between conscience and God.” Only
gender was essential to human nature: “Even when we do something or
think of something beyond gender, when we have a desire or intend to do
something outside of gender, for spiritual reasons, even when we contem-
plate something anti-gender, it is still gender-related, only wrapped up and
disguised in such a way that it is hard to recognize its face,” Rozanov wrote
in Moonlight People: The Metaphysics of Christianity."
At the same time, the masculine and feminine essences need not be mutu-
ally exclusive; they could coexist in each individual in different proportions.
Rozanov was quick to inform his readers that women found him unappeal-
ing, and that apart from their “mystique,” women generally appealed to
him only “from the shoulders up.”!® Sexuality, for Rozanov, did not lead
people into debauchery, as for Tolstoy; nor into incest, as for Freud; nor did
it lead to the mystical union of everything in existence, as for Solovyov. By
Rozanov’s account, “gender” simply drew people into normal domestic life;
but for Rozanoy, ironically, marital life was a problem. He had married
Dostoevsky’s ex-lover, who made him suffer as least as much as she had
Dostoevsky; but the Orthodox church would not permit Rozanov to divorce
her and remarry. He nonetheless chose to live with another woman, with
whom he passed many happy years in common-law union.
According to Rozanoy, only in marriage did gender attain its normal,
pure, and “most aristocratic” form. People excluded from family life, such
as Russian Orthodox monks and nuns, provoked his suspicion: Was their
“sender” somehow impaired? In his veneration of the family, Rozanov
echoed Orthodox tradition, which unlike Catholicism allows priests to
“marry; for him, traditional Christian asceticism was anathema. He asserted
that Christianity should be reformed in order to embrace all of gender’s
great power as did the ancient religions of Egypt and Israel.
This revelation of gender’s importance to the family might have found its
natural outlet in a handbook on family life; but fortunately, Rozanov chose
a different path. As happened with Freud in a totally different context,
Rozanov felt compelled to explain why his native culture was so hostile to-
ward gender (sexuality), even in marital relations—the better to understand
why it was so resistant to his ideas. In seeking an explanation, Rozanov
made a contribution of considerable significance, throwing open a subject
previously neglected in Russian culture and one that has been problematic
for cultures generally.
Dissatisfied with his predecessors’ treatment of gender in the fields of phi-

losophy (Solovyow’s The Meaning of Love, with its idea of bisexuality, was
unacceptable to Rozanov) and psychology (he used Otto Weininger’s Sex and
Character extensively but considered its author a “sodomite” and opposed
his sudden popularity in Russia), Rozanov launched straight into the most
complex area, perversion. He began with an overview of clinical cases of ho-
mosexuality, then proceeded with an analysis of the “layers of sodomy” in
Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, the Bible, the Talmud, and Russian Orthodoxy.
According to Rozanov, celibacy was unnatural, and those who diverged
from their masculine or feminine predestination, whether monks or hyp-
ocrites, were doing more than suppressing their sexuality; they were acting
on an inborn perversion. That is, the impulse behind the sexual taboo was
sexual perversion, albeit perhaps latent. Thus, Chernyshevsky’s idea of free
marriage as articulated in the novel What Is to Be Done? was “mental ho-
mosexuality” in Rozanov’s view, because it recommended that husbands
resign themselves to their wives’ “friendship.”
Rozanov’s “sodomites,” “moonlight people,” and “effeminates” were all
homosexuals under various labels (the unstable terminology of Rozanov’s
time may partially explain why his ideas about homosexuality have been so
thoroughly neglected). To Rozanov, “sodomites” were a different class of
people: “The sodomite’s eyes are different! The way he shakes hands is differ-
ent! His smile is completely different!” Sodomites, wasting no energy on sex-
ual activity, had created the lion’s share of human culture, Rozanov was cer-
tain. Since sexually normal (“sunlight”) people generally channeled their
strength into family life, the highest of cultural achievements were permeated
by a vein of sodomy—a homosexual, antisexual, antifamily spirit. Rozanov
illustrated this point with a variety of examples: Plato, Raphael, Tolstoy, and
even Christ. Thus, “sodomy gives rise to the idea that copulation is a sin.”
Rozanov considered sodomites conservative and hostile to sexuality: A
sodomite was just as repulsed by normal marriage and childbirth as was a
normal person by homosexual acts. Therefore, Rozanov concluded,
“moonlight” and “sunlight” people could never be reconciled. He had no
doubt that throughout human history countless anti-sexual ideas like ab-
stention, asceticism, and gender equality were all articulated by sodomites.
To today’s reader, some of Rozanov’s speculations might seem perceptive,
others extremely naive (such as, for instance, his recommendation that
newlyweds make love once a week).!”
In Russian literary criticism, Rozanov sometimes has been compared to
Freud. Andrei Sinyavsky, however, contrasted the two.!8 As opposed to
Freud, who was an atheist, Rozanov attributed paramount significance to
sex as a signpost in life, something that might be identified with God; thus,
Rozanov deified sex, whereas Freud sexualized religion. Sinyavsky con-
cluded from this that Rozanov was Freud’s antithesis insofar as his attitudes
toward sex and God were concerned. Although this assertion has some
merit, it oversimplifies the situation; Rozanov’s interpretation of the rela-
tionship between sex and culture was indeed quite close to Freud’s. Both
men believed that sex and culture were inversely correlated and that this re-
lationship was key to human endeavor: The greater a person’s self-realiza-
tion in sex, the less energy he or she would have to pursue other aspirations;
conversely, cultural heroes throughout the ages had had a peculiar, often un-
derdeveloped sexual drive. Freud wrote that Leonardo da Vinci was a man
“whose sexual need and activity were exceptionally reduced, as if a higher
aspiration had raised him above the common animal need of mankind.”!?
Freud considered such people neurotics, while Rozanov called them
sodomites. Freud would not have agreed with Rozanovy that homosexuality
was a basic means of cultural sublimation, although in certain cases, such as
his analyses of Leonardo and Dostoevsky, he attributed great significance to
this factor.?° Rozanov, in turn, was far removed from the sophisticated dy-
namic models that Freud used to describe the human mind and behavior.
The idea that sexual taboos could have positive, culture-forming signifi-
cance, a concept vitally important to the austere and introverted Freud, was
alien to Rozanoy, as is clear from the sensationalist, confessional style of his
writings on the subject, which practically ooze with primordial sexuality.
Despite these and other differences between the ideas of Rozanov and
Freud, their similarity was obvious to those of their contemporaries who
read works by both. Mikhail Gershenzon expressed his gratitude for a copy
of Moonlight People that Rozanov had sent him, writing: “Your intuition
has led you in the same direction that science is headed in right now,
though your vision is far clearer. You must be aware of the theories put
forth by Prof. Freud and his colleagues.”?! Leon Trotsky, who did not hold
Rozanov in terribly high regard, also compared him to Freud; and in the
early 1920s, Roza Averbukh presented her analysis of Rozanov’s work at a
meeting of the Psychoanalytic Society of Kazan University. However, as far
as we know, Rozanov himself was not familiar with Freud’s theories, nor
‘did he ever mention psychoanalysis.
D. H. Lawrence, who recognized Rozanov as his forerunner, offered this
unique interpretation: “Tolstoy would be absolutely amazed if he could
come back and see Russia of to-day. I believe Rozanov would feel no sur-
prise. He knew the inevitability of it.”?* In one of his more far-fetched es-
says, Rozanov had earnestly propounded a system by which sex would be
absolutely mandatory, something he perceived as beneficial and desirable:
A passer-by stops before an attractive woman and tells her, “Hi, I’m with
you.” She stands up and enters her home without looking at him. She becomes
his wife for the evening. Certain days of the week, month, and year are set
aside for this sort of thing. This order should be established for all “free
women (those without husbands, who are not ‘moonlight people’).”?3
This very idea would later become the subject of the anti-utopian night-
mares of Zamyatin, Orwell, and Huxley.
Alchemy of the Soul

Life in the real world, meanwhile, continued in its own equally unique way.
As Vladislav Khodasevich recalled: “We were living in a state of frenetic
tension, aggravation, and fever. In the end, everyone got tangled up in a net
of love and hate, both personal and literary. .. . All you had to do to join
the order (in a way, symbolism was an order) was to burn incessantly. It
didn’t matter what possessed you, as long as it possessed you com-
pletely.”24 The “order” of symbolists, infused as it was with Dionysian suf-
fering and mystical spiritualism—fashionable trends in Europe at the
time—was also reminiscent of the Russian sect of flagellants (kh/ysty), with
their collective eroticism and meditative practice, and their radical dreams
of a “new man” who would inherit the future.
In one of Andrei Bely’s early articles (“On Theurgy”), considered one of
the manifestos of Russian symbolism, Bely proceeded from “divine inspira-
tion” in the vein of Vladimir Solovyov’s moral philosophy to a practical ap-
proach to the problem of the new man: In order to transform the world,
man must be reborn spiritually, psychologically, and physiologically.
Solovyov believed that the world would be transformed only in its final
hours; Bely, like many of his contemporaries, was not content to wait.>
Shortly after his article was published, Bely saw a chance to test his plan
to bring art to life. He tried to save one of the multitude of “young ladies of
modernism—thin, pale, fragile, mysterious, languorous”—who appeared
out of nowhere to fill the auditoriums of the Literary Artistic Circle (the
chairman of which was a psychiatrist) and the symbolists’ salon-
communes. The object of Bely’s “theurgic” aspirations was Nina
Petrovskaya, wife of the editor-in-chief of the Grif publishing house. “She
was completely at loose ends, sickly, tormented by an unhappy life, and
clearly psychopathic. ... [She] would invest herself in the words she heard
around her nearly to the point of madness.”?°
Bely wrote out special instructions for Petrovskaya, entitling them “Stages
of Development in Normal Spiritual Life.” Delighted, she accepted him as
her guru. Her obsessive thoughts of suicide and morphine began steadily to
recede. Suddenly, catastrophe struck—“heavenly love went up in the flames
of earthly love.” Bely was completely unprepared for this development,
which at the time had been noted only in the field of psychoanalysis. He had
imagined himself in the role of Orpheus leading Eurydice out of hell, and
what ensued felt to him like a “fall from grace, a betrayal of my calling.”
Mochulsky wrote that there were passion, repentance, sin, and torture on
both sides. Then another would-be therapist entered the fray: Bely’s friend
and enemy Valery Briusov, who at that time was engaged in occultism and
practicing black magic.”” This ménage a trois continued for about a year. In
spring 1905, Nina attempted to shoot Briusov at a public lecture delivered
by Bely (a similar episode appears in Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago).
Her Browning misfired.?8
In 1911, Petrovskaya left for Italy to seek medical treatment. There she
underwent hypnosis, writing to Briusov that her treatment was “not psy-
chotherapy, but a theurgical act.”2? The goals of “theurgy,” as understood
in their circle, were closely related to the goals of psychotherapy. Freud, evi-
dently, knew of the prevalence of such views in Russia. In 1909, he wrote to
Jung that his Russian colleagues wanted to change the world much more
quickly than was possible using psychoanalysis.?° Twenty years later, an en-
thusiastic Russian reviewer still interpreted Jung as saying that “psychology
is truly an alchemy of the soul which teaches us how to transform base, sub-
conscious affects into precious metals, genuine diamonds of the spirit.”3!
Theurgy was conceived of as a momentary, mystical event that could only
be brought about by the spiritual efforts of rare individuals. Such an act,
however, could irrevocably change human nature. The focus of this dream
was the fundamental transformation of each person and of society as a
whole. The daydreaming symbolists, like their predecessor Nietzsche, did
not give much thought to the mechanisms that would bring about such a
mass transformation of men, nor did they conceive of the consequences; but
they knew they could not do without psychology. Much later the characters
of The Master and Margarita found their way to mystical “transfiguration”
only after a stint in a psychiatric ward. However, Bulgakov’s intent was to
parody rather than propagate these ideas,** so he invested his “theurgy” in a
completely inappropriate host, a typical homo sovieticus. Bulgakov’s novella
A Dog’s Heart likewise takes the motif of transformation to the level of total
absurdity.
In 1928, summarizing the history of symbolism from the dawn of its cre-
ation to cooperation between the movement’s leaders and the Bolshevik
ministry of education (Narkompros), Bely bitterly recalled the “terrifying
profanation of the symbolists’ intimate experience” and the “degradation
of this experience into mysticism and promiscuity, elements introduced by a
decadent and corrupt society into the theme of commonality and mystery.”
Bely lamented that the mystery had been transformed into “an ideological
mystification on a theatrical stage,” and the communal life reduced to the
casual swapping of sexual partners.??
Even in view of their involvement with Narkompros, the symbolists can
hardly be held responsible for the distorted way in which Nietzsche’s dream
of a “new man” metamorphosed into the words and deeds of the Marxist
god-seekers, and later, into the thinking of Bolsheviks such as Lunacharsky,
Bukharin, Yenchman, and others.
The Religion of Dionysus

Russian symbolism was as far as it could be from Freud’s orderly scholarly
community, built according to the art of scientific organization. Vyacheslav
Ivanov, one of the most popular poets and philosophers of the time, made
an attempt to introduce a kind of organization into the symbolist move-
ment after he returned to Russia in 1904 from a term of study in Berlin and
Paris. Andrei Bely trumpeted the entry of “an outstanding ideologue like
Vyacheslav Ivanov” into the world of modernism, pronouncing it a crucial
moment in the history of Russian symbolism. Bely regretted, however, that
Ivanov had offered up for publication in the popular media material far too
elusive and uncontrollable for consumption in such a vulgarized form.
Ivanov had gone so far as to rework Nietzsche in order to reduce his ob-
scure profundities to a generally accessible common denominator. From
this point of view, Ivanov had “polluted the pure air of the symbolic envi-
ronment itself.” Most of all, Bely resented Ivanov’s efforts to consolidate
the divergent currents in modernism. By “welding together decadents, neo-
realists, symbolists, and idealists,” Ivanov had clarified and simplified the
ideology of symbolism to the point where it seemed accessible to all kinds
of “seekers.” In his pursuit of a universal myth, Ivanov had “equated
Christ with Dionysus, St. Mary with any woman giving birth, the virgin
with the maenad, love with eroticism, Plato with Greek love, theurgy with
philology, and Vladimir Solovyov with Rozanov.”**
Ivanov’s contemporaries and successors described his contribution in
mutually contradictory terms: To Bely, it was “immense, in a good and bad
sense”; to Averintsev, “more and more dubious.”*5 Anna Akhmatova, in
turn, called Vyacheslav Ivanov a great mystifier, a new Count Saint-
Germain, and eagerly rehashed stale gossip about him.*°
After 1905, Vyacheslav Ivanov’s apartment in the tower of a building on
Tavricheskaya street in St. Petersburg became the construction site for a
new myth, one well suited to modern circumstances, as they used to say in
those days. An original interpretation of Nietzsche’s philosophy served as
the foundation on which Ivanov built his syncretic symbolism. It was not
the Ubermensch that Ivanov borrowed from Nietzsche, but Dionysus, dy-
ing and resurrected for eternity; the god of wine, the underworld, orgies,
and religious ecstasy.
Ivanov described his ideal as the “eros of the impossible.” A great many
stories have wafted down to us of the erotic experiments sponsored by two
St. Petersburg couples: Ivanov and his wife, poetess Lydia Zinovieva-
Annibal; and by Dmitry Merezhkovsky and his wife, writer Zinaida
Hippius. Many intelligenty of the St. Petersburg elite took part in both
groups. It is hard to say just how far these experiments went.
Homosexuals played a significant role in Ivanov’s salon, among them
Mikhail Kuzmin, who left detailed descriptions of their activities in his di-
aries. Berdyaev, who always spoke highly of Ivanov, claimed that the groups
had engaged in nothing more shocking than circle dances. “Eroticism always
contained a shade of idealism for us,” he wrote, adding that Ivanov’s primary
interest was to win people over, and that in this he excelled. “His penetrating
glance had an irresistible effect on many, especially on women.”37
Although the sexual revolution arrived later in Russia than elsewhere in
Europe, the country had its own revolutionary precursor in the khlysty, a
sect that combined assiduous piety with sexual promiscuity. Interest in the
khlysty was particularly high among Russians at the beginning of the cen-
tury. Journalists and historians later described Rasputin as a khlyst. Andrei
Bely wrote his novel The Silver Dove about a similar sect. Berdyaev fre-
quented pubs in order to converse with sect members. In 1908, Blok and
Remizov attended a khlyst “conference,” after which Blok wrote to his
mother, with some embarrassment: “We went to the sectarians and spent a
few good hours there. It will not be the last time. It is kind of hard to write
about it.”°8 At one point Ivanov himself produced a “sectarian madonna,”
a young and beautiful peasant girl whom he brought to his lectures. When
asked if she could understand the lecture, which contained a good deal of
technical vocabulary, she said: “Course I do! The names and words are dif-
ferent, but the truth is the same.”%?
Ivanov associated the essence of his new religion with the figure of
Dionysus, borrowed from Nietzsche. He liked to repeat that while for Nietz-
sche, Dionysianism was merely an aesthetic phenomenon, he himself saw it
as a religious phenomenon; and he rebuked his predecessor for not believing
in the god he had created. Ivanov was literal and consistent in achieving his
goal as the mouthpiece and propagator of the new religion of Dionysus, the
god who suffers and is reborn. He employed all the means he had at his dis-
posal as the leader of a movement, and as a philosopher and poet. One par-
ticipant in Ivanov’s Wednesday gatherings said: “[He] never provoked quar-
rels or argued vigorously; he always sought ways of bringing different people
and different tendencies together. He had a zeal for articulating new plat-
_forms.”*° All kinds of people met in Ivanov’s tower: poets and revolutionar-
ies, Nietzscheans and Marxists, god-seekers and god-makers. After the
Bolshevik revolution, they all went their separate ways; some became govern-
ment ministers, or “people’s commissars,” like Lunacharsky; others, like
Berdyaev, found fame in emigration; still others, like Khlebnikov and Blok,
died early and did not witness the new Russian reality. But back then, on the
eve of the upheaval of 1905 and immediately after, they sought their future
together. In this search Ivanov aspired to the role of leader and captivator:
I'd pluck one of my love’s bright stars;

in someone’s soul I’d carve a furrow,
and then to plant my starry seed,
in living, virgin soil I’d burrow."
This straightforward, aggressive male sexuality, this urge to achieve as

much power over the soul as could be had over the body, coexists in
Ivanov’s work with sophisticated poetic imagery, revealing Russian mod-
ernism’s quest much more clearly and consistently than many other sym-
bolist works. Ivanov’s “soul-hunting” was extremely successful: “Oh, how
many frigid, empty souls were penetrated by your cold!” a disillusioned
Blok later wrote. According to Nikolai Berdyaev: “A Dionysian wind was
blowing across Russia. .. . Orgiastic eros was in fashion. .. . Eros clearly
had the upper hand over Logos.”
The “religion of the suffering god” combined its own brand of erotica
with a peculiar form of collectivism. “Orgy” and “conciliarism” were the
most commonly used words in the new lexicon. These two unexpectedly re-
lated notions shared one common facet: the mistrust of the ego—or in
other words, the refusal to accept physical and mental limits to the human
self, combined with an obsessive desire to break down such barriers. “The
horrifying descent into chaos summons us with a mighty call, imposing the
most imperative of commands: It calls us to lose ourselves.”** Various
means were proposed to allow people to leave their own egos behind and
enter other selves, to destroy the borders between themselves and to com-
mingle. The means of exiting the self included “pre-Dionysian sexual ec-
stasy,” “divine intoxication and orgiastic oblivion,” the mystical experience
of theosophy, and the Orthodox ideal of conciliarism.
These mystical ideas were more than just a projection of the individual de-
sires of the founders of Dionysianism. Berdyaev, who for three years chaired
the meetings in the tower, found Ivanov’s ideas typical of the Russian intelli-
gentsia, with its “quest for a national, orgiastic, collective and conciliatory
culture.”** This goal, according to Berdyaev, was suicidal for the Russian in-
telligentsia. Some time later, in his article “The Death of Russian Illusions,”
Berdyaev identified the Revolution with “Dionysian orgies out of some dark,
peasant kingdom ... that threaten to push Russia, along with all its values
and wealth, into nothingness.”*° “Dionysus in Russia is a dangerous thing,”
Ivanov wrote in 1909, without further comment.*® “Red Dionysus strolled
through Moscow and sprinkled his ruddy intoxicant over the crowd,” wrote
Sergei Bulgakov, recalling the year 1917.47
Although Ivanov borrowed Dionysus from Nietzsche, he was far more
critical about another famous character—Zarathustra. Nietzsche’s more
radical followers, such as Lunacharsky and Gorky, singled out the idea of
the superman as the essence of Nietzschean philosophy, deriving from it a
license for future amorality and for the total alteration of human nature;
but the liberal Ivanov had no need of such excuses. His popularization of
Nietzsche in Russian ended up inverting Nietzsche’s original intent:
Individualism was no longer viable, Ivanov wrote in 1905. Pushkin, he
stated, was an individualist, but Dostoevsky’s spirit was a spirit of solidar-
ity and conciliarism. In Ivanov’s interpretation, the Ubermensch took on

uncharacteristic features such as conciliarism and primitive religious com-
munality; these qualities, combined with the dream of actually producing a
new man, paved the way for collectivism, with all its beastly consequences.
“No matter what we might experience, we have nothing to say about
ourselves personally,” Ivanov once asserted, without any sign of regret.
Individualism was blindness, according to the leader of the Silver Age, and
enlightenment would lead those it touched to the triumph of conciliarism.
“Let those who will not sing the song of conciliarism leave our circle, hid-
ing their faces. They can die, but they will not be able to live apart.”4°
One of those who would later leave the circle, Osip Mandelstam, singled
out this same “astonishingly penetrating image” for further comment. This
image, Mandelstam wrote, “like the axiom of two parallel geometries,” ra-
diated “two broad vistas on the future.” Even as early as 1909, this poet of
the younger generation knew that he did not agree with the “voices singing
in unison” that his teacher seemed so ready to join with nary a backward
glance. Mandelstam found Ivanov’s book “as charming as Zarathustra,”
and found the fortitude to admit to his teacher that he himself had differ-
ent, “strange taste”: “I love electric lights at night, ... courteous lackeys,
the quiet ascent of the elevator. ...I love bourgeois, European comfort.”
Though it flew in the face of modernism, Mandelstam felt he had a natural
right to his “strange taste,” and he made no attempt to justify it: “I never
ask myself whether it is a good thing.”*?
Did Ivanov ever remember how he had wished death on those who
would not chime in with the chorus, later, when he was working in the min-
istry of education under Lunacharsky and preparing to leave the country?
Boris Zaitsev recalled that period of Ivanov’s life with irony: “It was as if
his dreamy doctrines of ‘conciliarism’ and the end of individualism had be-
gun to come true,... and now he could dream only of escaping from that
very ‘conciliarism.’”°° At any rate, in 1919 Ivanov accepted intellectual re-
sponsibility for what was happening, admitting that it weighed heavily on
his conscience:
Our own, the match that lit this blaze,
As conscience has confirmed,
While prescience, too, proved accurate:
Our heart will be consumed.°'
Even as Ivanov admitted that he had foreseen that he would become the
first victim of the fire “they” had set, he persisted in using the word “we,”
to the point of absurdity: “our heart.” eas
Ivanov’s poetics has been characterized as a “poetics of equation.
According to Sergei Averintsev, Ivanov’s predilection for “equating and
uniting what can be neither equated nor united” led to deception and a du-
bious reputation.°2 In other words, Ivanov’s anti-individualism went hand

in hand with anti-intellectualism. Ivanov wrote: “I am no symbolist if I can-
not use some elusive hint or influence to awaken in the heart of my listener
some inarticulate feelings. These sentiments can be something akin to a pri-
mal reminiscence, sometimes they are like a distant, vague foreboding,
while other times they are like the kind of trembling that comes on when
someone familiar and well-loved draws near.”*? Ivanov also expressed this
idea in verse:
Of borders, years, and “you” and “I”

She is divinely unaware;
She draws unfiltered nectar from the midst of life,
And she remembers not a soul,
In her unity “You” and “I” mean nothing.**
“She” was a nymph, dryad, or maenad. The borders in the conventional

world were erased between “I” and “you,” between personality and uni-
versality, when Apollo was equated with Dionysus, masculine with femi-
nine, and life with death. The masculine, Oedipal essence was doomed:
“The scarce solar force is insufficient in sons, Jocasta’s husbands, and they
die again, blind as Oedipus, that is, lacking the sun.”** Erotic tension in
this world was paradoxically linked to asexuality. Plato’s idea that love
could unite two incomplete parts, masculine and feminine, into a perfect
twofold or asexual whole, was extremely popular in Russian culture, where
it found increasingly literal expression. “In order to preserve his individual-
ity, man restricts his desire to unite with the beyond”; but the most valuable
moments occurred during that “ecstasy of contemplation when there is no
frontier between us and the uncovered abyss. . . . This realm has no borders
or limits. All forms are destroyed, frontiers are leveled, distorted images
disappear; individuality does not exist there. . White foam alone covers
vigorously falling waters. In the midst of this night impregnated with deep
veins of gender there is no distinction of gender. ... The chaotic sphereis
the realm of bisexual, feminine-masculine Dionysus.”** Ivanov compared
the new school of poetry to a somnambulist, and it did indeed contain
much that was drawn from altered states of consciousness, be they nar-
cotic, hypnotic, or meditative.
The religion of the asexual, ever renascent god offered its own peculiar
solutions to the eternal problem of love and death. In Berdyaev’s overview
of Russian philosophy, this theme was central; the three greatest thinkers of
the epoch, Solovyov, Rozanov, and Fyodorovy, likewise focused on the inter-
action of sexual love, the struggle against death, and the idea of rebirth. For
Solovyov, the androgynous integrity of an individual was restored through
love; man ceased to be a fragmented, defective creature and thus had a
chance to overcome death, which was merely a result of the division of gen-
ders. Rozanov viewed childbearing as a means of conquering death, and ar-
gued against the Christian moral tradition that blessed childbearing but
cursed physical love. Fyodorov, in turn, called for a universal struggle
against death and a single act that would resurrect all the deceased, with
the help of a brand-new science that was expected to “transform erotic en-
ergy into the energy of revivification.”
Many decades after Solovyov had founded this tradition, Berdyaev
brought it full circle by repeating much the same thing: “The Greeks already
knew that Hades and Dionysus were one god; they felt the mystical connec-
tion between death and birth.” Berdyaev sensed a “mortal anxiety ... in the
very depths of the sexual act.”°” A similar intuition later led Sabina Spielrein
to her discovery of the attraction to death as the obverse of the two-sided
sexual instinct (see chapter 5). Divining the common nature of love and
death, Spielrein, too, found support for her ideas in cultural mythology.
Even Leo Tolstoy, the lonely opponent of Russian modernism, tackled
this problem in his famous novellas The Kreutzer Sonata and The Devil, in
which love leads to death and is generally indistinguishable from it, and
sexual temptation is thus an attraction to death. It little mattered who the
victims were; the results would be the same. Tolstoy emphasized this point
by providing various endings to the story: In one version of The Devil, the
protagonist kills his lover; in an alternate version published in the same vol-
ume, he kills himself.
A New Savior
The ancient religion of the dying and renascent god was attracting atten-
tion and adherents in a host of European cultures. The famous Scottish
ethnographer James Frazer made an attempt to analyze religion by the
methods of positivist science in which he interpreted all pagan and biblical
narratives as derivatives of one and the same source—the cult of Dionysus.
Nietzsche, too, attributed universal significance to the religion of Dionysus;
and true to the spirit of German romanticism, he managed to purify it of
any trace of nagging reality. He seized on Dionysus and Apollo as universal
symbols of chaos and order, emotion and reason, will and tranquillity.
Although in Nietzsche’s interpretation Dionysus held the upper hand over
Apollo, the latter was seen at least as a potential partner for dialogue.
Ivanov considered the cult of Dionysus a current indigenous to the Slavs.
“The Slavs] were the true followers of Dionysus, which is why their pre-
destined Passions were so much like the Hellenic god’s sacrificial power, as
he gives himself up to be tortured and devoured until the end of time,” he
said ardently, in a public appearance on the eve of the October revolu-
tion.5® The Slavs’ “Germanic and Latin brothers,” meanwhile, were gov-
erned by an Apollonian “concord and order, secured through strict external

and internal self-limitation.”
On his deathbed, Blok smashed a bust of Apollo with an iron poker.
Ivanov practically never mentioned Apollo, but in his writings Dionysus
was transformed into a symbol of infinite depth in which any intellectual,
seeker, or sinner might find what he lacked. Dionysus became monological
and all-explaining, self-begetting, and therefore, a self-sufficient whole.
Dionysus solved all problems and answered all questions through his self-
defining act of death and rebirth, a process that embraced and negated
every concept ever invented by man to understand and explain the world:
birth and death, subject and object, love and hatred.
The influence of Nietzsche’s Dionysian ideas was also enormous among
Austrian intellectuals at the beginning of this century; and just as in Russia,
these ideas were interpreted there in both political and aesthetic terms. The
interaction of the same two principles—Dionysian art and populist poli-
tics—dominated the work of such diverse Austrian modernists as composer
Gustav Mahler, psychiatrist Theodor Meynert, and Social Democratic
Party founder Victor Adler.°? These admirers of Dionysus also were present
in Freud’s closest circle: Meinert was at one point Freud’s friend and em-
ployer, and Mahler was his patient (Freud recalled that no one had ever un-
derstood him better than Mahler); and Freud viewed Victor Adler, his erst-
while friend and rival, with extraordinary respect. In sum, Dionysianism,
the simplest possible vision of the world, was offered up for consumption
by the most outstanding intellectuals of the day. Their contribution was to
shape the near future of Germany and Russia.
The idea of Dionysus found absolutely no sympathy with Freud. Jung,
however, was more responsive. In early 1910, Jung suggested to Freud that
they transform psychoanalysis into a new religion centered around the dy-
ing and renascent god:
Only the wise are ethical from sheer intellectual presumption, the rest of us need
the eternal truth of myth. ... The ethical problem of sexual freedom really is
enormous and worth the sweat of all noble souls. But 2,000 years of Christianity
can only be replaced by something equivalent. An ethical fraternity, with its
mythical Nothing, not infused by any archaic-infantile driving force, is a pure
vacuum and can never evoke in man the slightest trace of that age-old animal
power which drives the migrating birds across the sea and without which no ir-
resistible mass movement can come into being. I imagine a far finer and more
comprehensive task for psychoanalysis. ... I think we must give it time to infil-
trate into people from many centers, to revivify among intellectuals a feeling for
symbol and myth, ever so gently to transform Christ back into the soothsaying
god of the vine, which he was, and in this way absorb those ecstatic instinctual
forces of Christianity for the one purpose of making the cult and the sacred
myth what they once were—a drunken feast of joy where man regained the
ethos and holiness of an animal. ... A genuine and proper ethical development
cannot abandon Christianity but must grow up within it, must bring to fruition
its hymn of love, the agony and ecstasy over the dying and resurgent god, the
mystic power of the vine, the awesome anthropology of the last Supper—only
this ethical development can serve the vital forces of religion.
The content, style, and lexicon of this document, so different from the
usual sober spirit of correspondence between Jung and Freud, are akin to
the ideas and words of Russian symbolists of the time. The issue in this case
is not so much mutual influence as common sources. The most important
of these sources must have been Nietzsche: Nearly every phrase of this let-
ter can be correlated to his ideas. Jung was then embroiled in a crisis
brought on by his relationship with his Russian patient, Sabina Spielrein
(see chapter 5), and he informed Freud that he was “sitting so precariously
between the Dionysian and the Apollonian.”®! The answer that came back
was severe: “Dear friend, yes, in you the tempest rages, it comes to me as
distant thunder.” °*
Jung and his disciples tried many times to combine Nietzschean philoso-
phy, Frazer’s ethnography, and Freudian psychoanalysis. As a matter of fact,
Jung’s Psychology of the Unconscious: A Study of the Transformations and
Symbolisms of the Libido was most of all an attempt to combine Oedipus
and Dionysus. It was this work that led to Freud’s disappointment in Jung as
a theoretician. Freud could accept no synthesis of these two principles, for
he knew it would undermine the very foundations of psychoanalysis. Many
years later, Jung was still framing the most recent historical experience in the
same terms. In 1936, Jung asserted that Nietzsche’s Dionysus was merely
one of many embodiments of the mighty Wotan, the god of storm, magic,
and conquest. Wotan, from his point of view, was the true god of Germany,
a nation of spiritual catastrophes.°?
Dionysus and Oedipus

Dionysus became a key figure in the world of Russian symbolism, just as
Oedipus did in Freudian psychoanalysis. What makes a comparison of the
two more interesting is that structurally, Dionysus (for Vyacheslav Ivanov)
and Oedipus (for Freud) represented the universal images that inhabit the
unconscious depths of human nature. Comprehensible only through inter-
pretation, these icons contained the most important human truths, the uni-
versal script governing human behavior. However, the two images were as
different in essence as they were analogous in function: In his Russian para-
phrase, Dionysus became the polar opposite of Freud’s Oedipus. .
The essence of Oedipus lies in his simultaneous uniqueness and identical-
ness. He is a human being, a man and a son, belonging to a family, a gen-
der, and a generation. His feelings and actions are intensely individual; he
loves only his mother and kills his father. He never confounds his feelings;
love is kept separate from hatred. In Oedipus’s world, love and the death
instinct are just as distant from one another, just as impossible to combine,
as the delineation between mother and father, woman and man. In this
world, opposites exist in their purest forms; they can find no mediator, nor
should they seek one.
In order to apply this conception to female patients—because it was im-
possible to imagine Oedipus as either asexual or bisexual—Freud was com-
pelled to select another myth, that of Electra. Similarly, in order to use
analysis on another generation, on mothers, analysts had to introduce the
Jocasta complex. Oedipus could not accommodate opposite feelings, oppo-
site genders, or opposite generations; the whole point of the tragedy would
be lost if these opposites were “dialectically” joined in his soul.
Dionysus, in contrast, alleviates through synthesis the opposition between
individual and universal, man and woman, parent and child. His essence is
cyclical death and rebirth. Since he revives himself, Dionysus has no need of
parents, children, or a partner of the opposite sex. He is unfamiliar with the
horror that struck Oedipus, Electra, and Jocasta. He is surrounded by poetic
nymph-maenads, but these are of use only to the poets who write about
Dionysus. The god himself would have no idea what to do with them; his
eros is directed toward himself. Yet although Dionysus is Narcissus, he is
also Osiris. Because he loves and hates at the same time, because he is born
and dies through a single act, Dionysus is at the same time Christ and
Zarathustra. Thus were sophisticated philosophical speculations employed
in a way contrary to their original purpose—not to analyze and differentiate
but to blur the lines between different persons and opposite notions.
An article by Odessa psychoanalyst Yakov Kogan, published in 1932 in
the journal of the International Psychoanalytic Association under the title
“One Schizophrenic’s Experience of the End of the World and Fantasies of
Rebirth,” provides an excellent illustration of the Nietzsche-inspired
Russian variant of the Dionysian cult. The article relates the difficult clini-
cal case of a Russian patient in exhaustive detail, with a host of expressive
quotations. The largely uneducated patient had gone to work for a military
library after his return from the front at the end of World War I. There he
read all the latest fashionable literature. In his delirium, the patient saw
himself as an eternally reviving being. The thought that he might have been
born of a woman made him indignant. For him the world had already
come to an end and he—almighty, feverish, lonely, and eternal—spoke of
“ascent” and “descent” in a style eerily reminiscent of certain well-known
texts. Kogan interpreted his patient’s delirium as a radical solution to the
oedipal complex, in which the patient, incapable of accepting or changing
his relations with his parents and the world, denied their existence.64
Symbolists on the Couch

In one of his early works, Return: The Third Symphony, which came out in
1905, Bely described a therapeutic case in terms that eerily foreshadow psy-
choanalysis. Perhaps this is yet another example of Bely’s characteristic pre-
monitions (it is commonly believed that Bely foresaw the atomic bomb and
described its operation in fiction written at the beginning of the 1920s). In
any case, the protagonist of The Symphony comes into dramatic conflict
with his fellow chemists, defending the Nietzschean theory of “eternal re-
turn” while his colleagues stick to “social issues.” These ideological dis-
agreements provoke hallucinations in the protagonist, in the style of a sym-
bolist painting, for which he seeks treatment from Orlov, a wise old
psychiatrist who wields great power within the confines of Orlovka, his
private sanatorium. In the midst of treatment, however, the psychiatrist
takes a trip abroad. “The chuckle of the unsolved and the how! of what has
been irrevocably lost poured together into a single melancholic, plaintive
wail.” Third Symphony is perhaps more a prediction of the need for psy-
choanalysis than a description of psychoanalysis itself; but this work offers
a glimpse of Bely’s anticipation of his tragic break with Emile Medtner, in
which psychiatrists played a telling role.
Blok’s wife (and the object of Bely’s conflicted love), Liubov’
Mendeleeva-Blok, often turned to Freud in her memoirs, which were writ-
ten much later. The relationships she described in these memoirs are more
likely to be encountered in a psychoanalyst’s office than on pages penned
by a poet. The Bloks’ marital life was, to a large degree, a test of Vladimir
Solovyov’s idea of superhuman love drawing attention away from fleshly
love. This experiment yielded depressing results. Based on the philosophical
negation of sexual relations in the name of “white love,” Alexander Blok’s
abstinence from sex in the long run mired his marital life in a series of adul-
teries and produced serious conflict between his mother and his wife. In an
effort to understand what had happened, Liubov’ turned from Solovyov to
Freud (at the beginning of the century, she had been a student of psychol-
ogy). She had styled her memoirs as a chain of free associations designed to
“provide some kind of material, albeit incomplete, for a Freudian analysis
of events.”® She likewise offered up her conflict with her mother-in-law
“to Freud’s disciples.” She wrote that she had come to understand even the
discoveries of her father, an outstanding chemist, as an outlet of “subcon-
scious forces” through a restraining sluice.
“Freud’s science” was not foreign to Blok’s circle, although Blok himself
clearly rejected it. In April 1917, psychoanalyst Yury Kannabikh diagnosed
Blok as neurasthenic and offered him treatment. Less than a month later, in
a letter to his mother, Blok commented on the treatment she was undergo-
ing in Kannabikh’s psychotherapeutic sanatorium in Kryukovo (see chapter
4): “You are counting on some psychological effect; as for me, I don’t be-
lieve in it (and never have). All I see is different combinations of actions
taken by another will from afar.”® Yet in his cycle Retribution, the poet
announces his “neurosis, anxiety, and spleen” as a consequence of his lam-
entable past, the “humanistic fog” that enveloped him in “psychosis in-
stead of feats of valor.”
At the end of 1911, a young man who by heritage and proclivity was at
the center of symbolist culture was admitted to a psychiatric hospital after
two suicide attempts. This was poet Sergei Solovyov (1885-1942),
Vladimir Solovyov’s nephew, Andrei Bely’s closest friend, and best man at
the wedding of Blok and Mendeleeva. Very little is known of Sergei
Solovyov’s problems. Several years prior, he had become involved in the
Blok family drama, instructing them on how to dethrone the “dark element
of astartism” and the “dragon of lasciviousness” (Vladimir Solovyov’s
terms) in order to arrive at genuine, fleshless love, expecting just this sort of
“white love” to arise from the Bloks’ marriage.®” However, Solovyov later
asked Blok to inform his wife that the former’s “love for her would soon
take on sinful overtones.” From time to time, he found himself “still drawn
to the old life, but death peers out from it and life acquires an astartic
form.” He even imagined that there might be a posthumous biography of
him someday, entitled The Fornicator of the Twentieth Century.
This may have been no more than youthful pathos, but then the way in
which culture shaped this youth’s sensibilities becomes all the more inter-
esting. In 1905, Sergei Solovyov wrote to Blok: “You argued with me when
I tried to convince you that Christianity at its very core is beyond gender.
Now I think a final understanding of Christianity is attainable only
through lust. Only for this reason do bunches of grapes shine through in
Christianity—an eternal doctrine, the religion of the future.”®® Sergei
Solovyov’s interpretation of Christianity as a “religion of holy lust”—what
he considered the only correct reading of his uncle’s teachings—is curiously
evocative of Carl Jung’s quest to “turn Christ back into a prophetic god of
wine.”
After a few months in the city clinic, Solovyov was transferred to the
sanatorium at Kryukovo, on the outskirts of Moscow, where most of the
capital’s psychoanalysts were working at the time. His attending physician
was none other than Yury Kannabikh, who by that time had published sev-
eral articles on the psychoanalysis of paranoia; later he would become pres-
ident of the Russian Psychoanalytic Society. Psychoanalysis, routinely com-
bined at Kryukovo with various kinds of physiotherapy, soon proved
helpful to Solovyovy. In 1913, he took a drastically different tack and joined
the Russian Orthodox priesthood; in the 1920s, he converted to
Catholicism and became a priest of “Greco-Russian rites.” In later years,
he was repeatedly in and out of Soviet psychiatric clinics.
59
Another friend of Bely’s, Emile Medtner, had a different medical history,

one that proved even more fertile for Russian psychoanalysis. Medtner was
the brother of a famous composer and the head of the prominent Musaget
publishing house. He was at the epicenter of contemporary literary life.
Musaget issued a large number of books by symbolists during the years of
its operation, among these Bely’s works. Medtner supported Bely until the
latter became involved in anthroposophy, something Medtner tried in vain
to prevent.
According to Fyodor Stepun’s colorful recollections: Medtner would ar-
rive at the Musaget editorial office, and “after quickly dropping his elegant
fur coat with its immense skunk collar and cuffs in the foyer, . . . full of soli-
tary thoughts about Goethe, Wagner, and Nietzsche, he would burst into
his small, olive-painted office and, rubbing his crimson, frostbitten hands,
flop down in his editor’s chair in a very businesslike manner.”°? When Bely
wrote of Medtner, he also alighted on clothing: his wide-brimmed hat,
green-gray coat, and red kid gloves. When they were introduced to each
other, Bely was struck by Medtner’s “tanned, lean face, which radiated ar-
dor and obstinacy.”7°
This persuaded Westernizer, editor, and literary critic, whose contribu-
tion to Russian literature is comparable to Sergey Diaghilev’s to Russian
ballet, was treated by a Moscow psychoanalyst during his time at Musaget.
In the 1970s, Marietta Shaginyan recalled that Medtner had shown
“pseudo-Méniérian symptoms of hysteria” and underwent powerful
seizures of “psychical pain.” According to her, Medtner also participated in
the associative experiments conducted in Moscow by Jung’s recent stu-
dents.’! Further details have been gleaned from the memoirs of Vyacheslav
Ivanov’s daughter, Lydia. One symptom of Medtner’s “psychosomatic ill-
ness” was his aversion to music: “Intolerable noise in his ears and splitting
headaches were the result whenever Medtner heard musical sounds. Prior
to his disease, he lived for music.” Family and friends assumed that his ill-
ness was “psychic in nature,” tied to Emile’s concerns about his brother.
“After a hard-fought but magnanimous struggle,” the love of Emile’s life
had married his brother Nikolai, a popular composer.”
Emile met Vyacheslav and Lydia Ivanov in Davos in the summer of 1929,
and as they sat in a café, music began to play. Medtner’s friends were con-
cerned, as they remembered his problems in Moscow. There was no reac-
tion from Medtner, though: “It’s because of Jung’s treatment,” he ex-
plained. Lydia recalled that Medtner was “aging and completely
exhausted” when he asked Jung to treat him in Zurich. Jung cured him:
“All signs of illness disappeared, he became a normal human being again
and even received Jung’s blessing to treat patients using psychoanalysis.”
After spending the day with him, the Ivanovs learned that Medtner had be-
come “Jung’s close friend and occasional assistant.” All of this increased
Vyacheslav Ivanov’s interest in Jung. According to his daughter, Ivanov fol-

lowed Jung’s publications, and, in fact, Ivanov makes reference in his later
works to Jung, as in his 1934 sketch, “Anima.””? Later (for example, in a
1947 article on Lermon-tov), he not only made use of specifically Jungian
terminology, he also brought to bear a broader framework of psychoana-
lytical understanding. After this meeting with Medtner, Ivanov evidently
found some similarity between the stories he had heard about analytical
psychology and his own mystical insights of long before. He dedicated his
1917 sonnet “The Threshold of Consciousness” to his friend:
Probing mind, a lighthouse shining

Scans out into the desert sea
Of one night soul in harmony,
That sings ofparted, fruitless pining.’*
Lydia Ivanova perceived the result of Emile’s analysis in her own way:
“For me personally, Medtner’s image left a depressing impression: it was as
if he was already partly dead, although he was still walking around and
functioning normally. As a result of the treatment, something was killed
(music?) in his soul. Something meaningful. His soul was no longer full of
life, it was maimed, amputated. Is this what Jung achieved with his psycho-
analysis? But at what price!””°
Such resistance is typical of Russian intellectuals. We should recall that it
was for similar reasons that Lou Andreas-Salomé tried to talk Rilke out of
seeing an analyst. In the Moscow intelligentsia there is a legend that contin-
ues to circulate today (one that might very well be true) that a certain
Moscow psychoanalyst turned Sergey Eisenstein away on the same
grounds, saying that after psychoanalysis the filmmaker would have to
look for an accounting job in the State Planning Committee.”6 Meanwhile,
Anna Akhmatova spoke mockingly of young English intellectuals who
flocked to Freud for treatment of their complexes. “So, does it really help
them?” Akhmatova asked one of her guests from Oxford (who was proba-
bly Isaiah Berlin). “Oh, yes,” he replied. “But when they get back, they’re
so boring you can’t talk with them about anything.”77
Musaget Carries On in Zurich

The outbreak of the war in 1914 found Medtner in Munich, whence he
was quickly expelled to Switzerland. He made Jung’s acquaintance in
Zurich and evidently started taking psychoanalytic treatment from him
right away. Jung’s unpublished letters, currently kept in the Russian na-
tional library’s Moscow archives (seventeen of Jung’s letters to Medtner,
written between 1917 and 1935, arrived in Moscow from Zurich in 1960) 3
61
shed a good deal of light on their relationship.’ In his letters, Jung ad-
dressed Medtner informally, consistently expressing warm feelings for his
correspondent. The letters testify to the fact that theirs was a long and sta-
ble friendship, based on Medtner’s enthusiasm, Jung’s sympathy, and mutu-
ally beneficial collaboration. Their correspondence contains more than just
invitations to dinner; Jung also noted that Medtner’s plans to visit him in
France, where Jung was serving in the military, would have to be cancelled,
as his hospital was to be transferred. On January 19, 1919, Jung wrote:
Dear friend,
Thank you for your New Year’s greetings. The world has yet again turned
upside down. We still have no clear understanding of what is going on.
... You must be in a horrendous position. To know that your colleagues are
stuck in that bedlam ... Surely, the Bolsheviks will be kicked out of the
Entente by spring.
A letter of January 31, 1933 provides insight into other interests the two
men held in common:
Dear Emile,
I’m sorry to hear that you are so sad. I wish I could send you at least tele-
pathic aid. ... 1 spend my time in a terribly old-fashioned way, reading Origen’s
Contra Celsum and tracing the psychological parallels between him and others:
from Plotinus and Proclus via Hegel to—last, but not least—Karl Marx.
The archive also contains several friendly notes to Medtner from Jung’s
wife, Emma. Medtner was also on close terms with Toni Wolf, Jung’s for-
mer patient, who later became his good friend and a psychiatrist. It was
she, evidently, who introduced Medtner to American millionairess and phil-
anthropist Edith Rockefeller McCormick, who was the wife of one of
Jung’s former patients. This wealthy benefactress had offered to finance the
translation and publication of Jung’s works in Russian and French, and
work on this project had begun at the end of 1916. According to Medtner,
Jung’s permission for the Russian translation was contingent on one non-
negotiable condition: that the translation be “as literal as possible, even at
the expense of lightness and, moreover, grace of language.””
It was probably Jung who suggested that Medtner send several translations
to Sabina Spielrein for proofreading. She was dissatisfied with their quality,
however, and in December 1917 wrote to Jung that after numerous attempts to
improve the translations she had sent them back to Medtner. He reproached
her for nitpicking. In the end, Spielrein took part in the publication.*°
According to the original plan, four hefty volumes were to be released si-
multaneously. Medtner accepted Jung’s offer to compose extended forewords
to each volume, not only to give a summary of each book but also to “un-
cover the reasons behind the rift between the Zurich and Vienna schools.”
This shows Jung’s great trust in his new Russian patient and friend.
Later events altered this plan, but amazingly enough the project was ful-
filled almost to the last page. In 1928, work was disrupted by financial crisis.
A year later, the project’s backer, Rockefeller McCormick, died. Medtner
himself lived only long enough to see the first volume, Psychological Types,
in print (it was released in 1929). In all, three volumes of Jung’s Selected
Works in Analytical Psychology were published in Russian translation in
Zurich, authorized by Jung and edited by Emile Medtner. Medtner imprinted
the Musaget logo on the first volume, emphasizing the continuity between
the new publication and the famed publisher of symbolist writers. “It would
be too bad if Musaget never got the chance to touch upon psychoanalytic is-
sues,” Medtner remarked. His foreword was launched with an epigraph se-
lected from Vyacheslav Ivanov. Medtner found various ways to defend the
continuity of the symbolist tradition, which he saw extended in Jung’s writ-
ing. Clearly, Medtner was forced to deepen the contradictions between Jung
and Freud in order to bring Jung closer to the symbolists. Medtner dismissed
Freud’s influence on Jung: Jung “had his own theme, different from that of
Freud.” Overall, Jung was “more than a psychoanalyst” to Medtner.*!
In his foreword, Medtner also offered a compelling discussion of the
polemic in academic journals that surrounded the publication of Jung’s
works, a polemic to which he had contributed. From time to time, however,
he substituted symbolist language for psychoanalytic terminology. “The
symbolic product must perform an act of subconscious liberation,” pro-
claimed Medtner, citing Jung alongside Ivanov, who defined the goal of sym-
bolism in similar terms, as liberation of the soul, and as catharsis. The
Russian edition of Psychological Types was eftusively praised by another au-
thor in Put’, an émigré journal of religious and philosophical orientation.**
The second and third volumes, which contained Psychology of the
Unconscious: A Study of the Transformations and Symbolisms of the
Libido and a series of Jung’s articles on the theory and practice of analytical
psychology, came out only in 1939. By that time, publication was being
handled by the Psychological ‘Club in Zurich; using the late Medtner’s ma-
terials, prominent Russian diaspora philosopher Boris Vysheslavtsev as-
sisted in editing the works. In the articles published as introductions to the
two volumes, Medtner further pursued the kinship between psychoanalysis
and symbolism: Dreams were just as symbolic as artistic images or the
highest expressions of religious wisdom. A symbol resolved the inner con-
tradictions of the psyche and thereby possessed liberating power.
In the last of Jung’s preserved letters to Medtner (of July 31, 1935), he
ardently expressed his gratitude for close partnership and offered support
to his ailing friend. The occasion for the letter was an anniversary collec-
tion that Medtner had compiled for Jung’s sixtieth birthday; but he must
have had other Russian translations in mind when he wrote:
Dear Emile,
I am so grateful to you for your contribution to this edition. I was very

moved by it. I immediately snatched up your article and read it with great in-
terest. You found an original solution to your task. The article demonstrates
that your philosophy matches your temperament and, therefore, you always
evaluate personality in the light of ideas. I was charmed by this; your work is
extraordinarily engaging to read. ... The style is genuinely impressionistic. I
cannot help but tell you how much I appreciate the fact that you took up your
pen on my behalf, let alone all the efforts demanded by the quantity of work
you had to do. Rest assured that your work is as interesting as it will be last-
ing, and it reflects your inner essence.*?
Resisting Evil by Force

Medtner’s friend Ivan Ilyin, a philosopher and junior lecturer at Moscow
University, was treated around 1912 in Vienna by psychoanalyst Eduard
Hitschmann, who was one of the analysts closest to Freud.84 From 1911
on, Hitschmann had served as vice-president of the Vienna Psychoanalytic
Society (Freud was president at the time). A participant in the Russian rev-
olution of 1905 and a member of the Russian Socialist Democratic Workers
Party (RSDWP), Ilyin even attended one of the party’s congresses held in
Helsinki in 1905. Soon, however, he abandoned his revolutionary activism.
Ilyin’s relatives knew of his psychoanalytic treatment, and they had little
confidence in it. According to Yevgeniia Gertsyk:°° “Meeting Freud was
crucial for him. He went to Vienna, underwent a series of discussion treat-
ments, and it seemed for a while that something within him improved and
expanded. But even the Freudian key cannot unlock a safe sealed with
seven locks.”®*© The most unpleasant thing about Ilyin was the way he
“hated, despised, and insulted his ideological adversaries,” among whom
Gertsyk listed Vyacheslav Ivanov, Berdyaev, Voloshin, and Bely: “Ilyin
meticulously picked out all their weaknesses and triumphantly uncovered
‘sexual perversities’ in everyone.”*’ It seems Ilyin particularly disliked
Ivanov. Ivanov’s daughter artfully related one scandalous scene that
erupted between the two men: “Ilyin appeared suddenly from out of
nowhere and began shouting gibberish in Vyacheslav’s general direction.
He was shaking convulsively, and there was foam on his lips.”**
His enemies, however, responded with equal cruelty. Bely, for instance,
described Ilyin as “young, obsessed, pale as a skeleton . . . I believe he had
suffered from mental illness long before there were any obvious symptoms;
... he was a prime candidate for a mental institution.”*’ Even Berdyaev,
who was typically even-tempered, lost his composure when speaking about
him: “I’ve hardly ever read a book as nightmarish and horrid as Ilyin’s.””°
According to Gertsyk, Ilyin’s personality was scarred by “hatred border-
ing on neurosis,” which she felt was due to the fact that since his youth he
had deprived himself of everything, particularly “all manner of lustful-

ness,” for the sake of an abstract idea. Whatever the origin of this hatred,
Ilyin’s contemporaries sensed it even in his philosophical writings. One of
Ilyin’s main ideas was that “resisting evil by force” was justified and neces-
sary, and he dedicated reams of passionately written pages to this concep-
tion. However, the idea provoked an outcry among the intelligentsia of the
day, which had been raised on Tolstoy’s sermonizing. History has shown
that Ilyin had a point, and they should have heard him out.
Lydia Ivanova remarked with surprise that Ilyin had no obvious reason
to hate the symbolists; this observation lends his reasons all the more
weight. Ilyin’s books and lecture transcripts demonstrate that his aggressive
attitude toward Bely’s mysticism and anthroposophy was well thought out
and well documented. The philosopher articulated his criticism in terms
that can be unmistakably identified as psychoanalytic. The anthroposophs,
Ilyin wrote in 1914, “like to cover themselves with the word ‘science,’ but
in reality they preach some sort of pseudo-mystical spiritual practice. In
this dark spiritual practice ... the spirit’s rationality is dissolved in ... the
most physiological aspects ... of the soul. Their ‘science’ is magic, and the
message of their ‘teachings’ is but a vague chimera. The ‘anthroposoph’
tries to magically capture the mystery of his personal unconscious by means
of magic, becoming engaged to this end in direct, living communication,
not with an object but with his own subconscious. Such communication
plunges the center of his personality into the incomprehensible depths of
communal instinct, and this is done not for the sake of knowledge: like any
true magus, the anthroposoph seeks not knowledge, but rather possession
of and power over the rebellious, dissatisfied element of his essence.”?!
Ilyin asserted that what anthroposophs and other mystics referred to as
occult “is nothing other than communal aspects of the unconscious.” He
had psychoanalysis in mind when he wrote that anthroposophs “are un-
aware that scientific experience has penetrated farther and deeper than has
their method into the unconscious and ... that the very ‘mystery’ of their
mysterious practice has already given way to science.”
“Purification of the mind aid soul” required constant internal effort, and
mankind, like individual men, “has been long and painfully seeking the
right way to achieve such purification.” Describing these means, Ilyin com-
piled a long list, starting with the yogi and traversing Pythagoras,
Descartes, and Spinoza to “the cautious and perceptive Sigmund Freud.”
Ilyin characterized psychoanalysis as a “method by which man can not
only heal and purify his unconscious but also bring his spirit to a state of
organic wholeness, sensitivity, and flexibility.” In this psychoanalysis could
assist philosophy, which was threatened by the “pressure of the uncon-
scious realm, in all its subtlety, passion, and elusiveness,” which prevented
the philosopher’s mind from comprehending its subject matter. “All the
spiritual wounds collected since childhood remain untreated throughout

one’s life, often corroding the mind and subjecting it to various psychoses
and neuroses ... that make the mind less suited for objective experience
and research,” Ilyin wrote.
Ilyin, who at that time considered himself a Hegelian, evidently saw psy-
choanalysis as an indispensable instrument for philosophy: “One tool for
philosophical investigation is the living being of the philosopher himself.”
“A philosopher, to a greater extent than any other scholar, should maintain
control over the forces of his unconscious.” A philosopher who had not
passed through a long and excruciating mental purge was at best capable of
only a “more or less successful compromise between requests from his per-
sonal unconscious and from conscious ideology.”??
In 1921, Ilyin was elected chairman of a respectable Moscow
Psychological Society. However, in the fall of 1921, he was expelled from
Russia, along with dozens of Russia’s most prominent philosophers and
writers. As an émigré Ilyin published many books, including the fundamen-
tal Axioms of Religious Experience. In these works, psychoanalysis is ig-
nored, as is neo-Hegelianism. Only once did Ilyin comment disparagingly
about Jung’s idea of the collective unconscious, which, from Ilyin’s point of
view, undermined the sovereignty of the individual.?? Ilyin’s apologetic bi-
ography makes no mention at all of psychoanalysis.?4 The environment
among Russian émigrés did little to encourage psychoanalysis; but in pri-
vate conversations, it seems, Ilyin allowed his unusual interests to come
through. In 1931, Ivan Bunin wrote of Ilyin in his diary that “he has come
to understand even the Russian Revolution according to Freud.””°
Ilyin exerted an unbelievably strong personal influence on Russian com-
munities abroad. After his death in 1954, émigré newspapers extolled him
as the “leading ideologist of the Russian diaspora,” “an adamant and tal-
ented friend of the White cause,” and even as the “spiritual leader of the
White movement.””°
Psychoanalysis Against Anthroposophy

Andrei Bely wrote in his memoirs that Medtner had been his enemy since
1915, and he compared the “ideologies that separated us and disrupted a
wonderful friendship” to coffins.*” Bely’s postwar “ideology” is well known
as anthroposophy, Rudolf Steiner’s innovative doctrine that combined fash-
ionable mysticism with no less fashionable pseudoscience. And in what kind
of ideological “coffin” did Bely feel Medtner had buried himself?
Most likely, he felt it was a psychoanalytic coffin. It is quite probable
that he saw his discord with Medtner and Ilyin, who were undergoing psy-
choanalysis at the time, as a consequence of the negative influence of psy-
choanalysis, evidence of its hostile and alien nature.
In December 1914, Bely wrote in his diary: Medtner “tells me a lot about
his friendship with Ilyin; he seems to be threatening me with Ilyin; all this only
fans my aggressive pathos, urging me to attack ... Medtner.” In the same en-
try, Bely noted that “Medtner has changed a lot, he has aged and soured .. . ;
he has repeatedly proclaimed himself a devoted admirer of Freud and Jung,
and he said that ‘psychoanalysis’ is inscribed in him; this Freudianism in
Medtner repulses me; I perceive Medtner’s interests with hostility.””*
Bely recalled that Medtner’s admiration for Nietzsche (he had worked on
his biography since 1902) did not prevent him from constantly inveighing
against mysticism and the “inevitable transformation of other Romantic
tones into the mystical.” After visiting the leader of anthroposophy, Rudolf
Steiner, in 1909, Medtner passed decisive judgment: “He is some kind of
theosophic pastor, spitting out total banalities,” he wrote to one of Bely’s
friends.?? In 1916, Bely published a book on Steiner and Goethe, directed
against one of Medtner’s recent works. Fyodor Stepun, who knew both ad-
versaries, called it a “nasty blow” that Medtner, for the remainder of his
days, “could not talk about without unbearable agony.” !°° Medtner made
no attempt to respond to Bely’s attack, but Ilyin intervened in his behalf,
writing an open letter that in turn insulted Bely.
Evidently, psychoanalysis was an important, although latent, cause of
schism in the symbolist movement. Under pressure from opposite cultural
influences—rationalistic psychoanalysis on the one hand and mystical an-
throposophy on the other—Russian symbolism split into two mutually hos-
tile currents. Former friends such as Medtner and Bely found themselves at
opposite poles.
Such an understanding of the conflict’s origins is indirectly corroborated
by the uproar that erupted around psychoanalysis inside the An-
throposophic Society. In 1911, a certain Mr. Bolt released a brochure about
Steiner. According to Bely, Bolt “confounded his views with those of Freud
and clung stubbornly to this confusion; one group of members supported
Bolt; different factions within anthroposophy were revealed for the first
time, precisely in connection with Bolt.” Steiner “hotly denounced the
‘Boltist’ tendency, which found shelter under the banner of anthroposo-
phy.” This debate dragged on until the Second Congress of the
Anthroposophic Society in January 1914. Bely participated in the congress,
and it was with great indignance that he observed the schism, the protests,
and the members’ gossiping about their leader, Steiner. And it was all be-
cause of psychoanalysis.!°!
Psychoanalysis and anthroposophy, so far apart in our modern conception,
were perceived then, and even later, as competitors. Valentin Voloshinov (see
chapter 10), for instance, believed that the influence of psychoanalysis in
Europe could be compared only to that of anthroposophy.!© Nikolai Osipov
also published an article devoted to this subject, in which he attempted to
compare and juxtapose psychoanalytic and mystical views of the world.!™

Osipov related that, in 1913, while he and his young wife were traveling by
train, he stepped out of the car at a station for a short walk and was late re-
turning; the train left with his wife onboard. This happened in the very same
city where a woman with whom Osipov would later become involved, after
his divorce, was living. A mystic would explain this occurrence as the result
of unknown influences that directed Osipov’s actions against his will; a psy-
choanalyst would deduce an unconscious protest against his wife. One gets
the feeling, however, that even for Osipov, a professional analyst, it was no
easy matter to choose between these two possibilities.
Bely’s contact with anthroposophy brought him catastrophe in his pri-
vate affairs. His friends in Russia shunned him, and his wife left him in or-
der to be closer to the “Doctor,” as Steiner’s followers called him. The
Doctor himself seems to have seen Bely as just one of his many eccentric ad-
mirers, a position to which Bely could not bear to be relegated.
In his “intimate” notes, intended for publication only after the author’s
death (and published only recently), Bely described the “temptation of St.
Anthony” that he experienced after his wife left him and he had become an
ascetic. Unlike St. Anthony, he had no spiritual weapon he could wield in
the fight against temptation. “A generalized image of woman began to
haunt my imagination. . . . In order to avoid a fall and to overcome sensual-
ity, I had to kill the flesh with rigorous exercise; but this had only the effect
of temporary anaesthesia; I lashed my flesh, it contorted under the whip
but did not submit; I increased the dosage of meditation; I meditated for
hours every day for months on end, and meditation brought me ecstasy and
delight... . But after they subsided, these moments seemed unhealthy to
me, and I felt I was doomed to the same sensuality.”!°* Here one cannot
help recalling Ilyin’s words, that an anthroposoph seeks not knowledge but
power over some rebellious and unhappy element in his being.'°
During a visit to Bely in the anthroposophic community in Dornach,
Medtner told him of his recent experience with psychoanalysis. Bely, who
was going through one of his worst phases, took him for a “spiritual spy.”
His notes abound in all kinds of astral suspicions. Khodasevich, who knew
Bely for many years, described his condition in classic psychoanalytic terms:
This theme, essentially bordering on paranoia, was always one of his favorites.
I deeply believe that it arose in childhood, when he was convinced that some
dark force was out to ruin him, pushing him to commit crimes against his fa-
ther. Bely actually carried the monster . . . within him, but the self-preservation
instinct drove him to search for it in the external world, so he could shift the
blame for his darkest designs, desires and impulses.'°°
Since then, other strange details have come to light from the somber pe-
riod that ensued after Bely’s break with anthroposophy. For example, he
suddenly fell in love with the foxtrot and danced all night long in the
cabarets of Berlin, whirling like a Russian kh/yst—and returned, nonethe-
less, in despair to Russia.
Russian Oedipus, or Kotik the Fatherkiller

“Here is my sincere answer to the questions how I became a symbolist and
when: | never became a symbolist, but I have always been one (before I ever
encountered the words ‘symbol’ and ‘symbolist’).”!°” Bely then proceeds to
one of his childhood memories: “The doctor says I am too excitable and
that my fairy tales should be taken away, and I feel that the saving grace of
this play of images is being taken away from me by external force and that
in their absence I will be thrown into the abyss of gibberish; if adults had
understood my childish fear of losing fairy tales, they would have expressed
it thus: ‘He’s struggling for the integrity of his ego, so as to avoid a nervous
breakdown.’” Bely considered these acts of symbolization his only defense
against an “explosion of inner feelings.” For him, the symbol was a way to
“overcome the early stages of lemur-atlantic chaos and move into some-
thing concrete and logical.” In other words, the symbol was the “third of
two worlds, the intersection of parallel lines, forming a cross, with the in-
ner world at its center.” 108
Bely never tired of repeating this structural principle, which he saw as the
source of the rift between his closest colleagues and friends: “Any symbolist
who repudiates his logical genesis—his experimental gibberish—will degen-
erate into mental illness if he is sincere (like Blok), or he will become a styl-
ist if he is not thoroughly sincere (like Vyacheslav Ivanovy).”
An unbelievably sharp yearning to “wrap words around the very earliest
events in life” produced Kotik Letaev, an unprecedented experiment in ver-
bal reconstruction of preverbal childhood experiences. “The symbol al-
lowed me to emerge from fear,” Bely repeated, time and again; and he con-
tinued to emerge in his novels. In the course of three hundred pages bereft
of plot and characters, Bely describes “how clouds of events puff up at me;
how they run back again” exclusively by means of rhythm, semantics, and
acoustics: “On the brink of my third year I stand before myself; we—con-
verse with each other; we—understand each other.” !°9 In the delirious
labyrinth of awakening consciousness, where the division into “I” and
“not-I” has barely begun and space and time do not yet exist, Bely discerns
periods and characteristics that vaguely resemble the Kantian foundation
common to all Russian symbolists. In this description, we can pick out the
meditative metaphors of anthroposophy that Bely would later adopt: “The
world and thought are just scum on the surface of looming cosmic images.”
Later, Bely even wrote that Kotik Letaev was the result of anthroposophic
training. But Bely’s acquaintance Aaron Steinberg had written with remark-
69
able insight of Kotik that “besides anthroposophy, upon which the whole
work is built ..., there is also what modern psychology and psychoanaly-
sis call infantilism.” !!°
A psychoanalyst, of course, will immediately recognize this infantile
world as his own. Childhood as described by Bely is full of fears, yearnings,
and images that would be used repeatedly by future Russian analysts to il-
lustrate their theories. To.the professional eye, Kotik Letaev remains an ex-
tremely expressive source. But Bely’s discourse itself is devoid of the psy-
choanalytic vision.
The first to reveal the psychoanalytical meaning of Bely’s novels was not
an analyst but one of the most brilliant Russian poets and literary critics of
this century, Bely’s younger contemporary, Vladislav Khodasevich. In two
essays,''! Khodasevich made an attempt, rare in its clarity, to separate out
and describe the content of Bely’s novels Petersburg, Moscow, and Kotik
Letaev, correlating them with events in the writer’s biography.
Khodasevich observed that Bely’s novels were “fragmentary variations
on one plot theme, singular in its deepest essence,” dramas that were
played out in the writer’s family long ago. Little Kotik Letaev, “Moscow ec-
centric” Mitya Korobkin, and the terrorist hero of Petersburg, Nikolai
Ableukhoy, are all reflections of the same person at various stages in life:
Letaev as a child, Korobkin as a high-school student, and Ableukhov as a
university student. Khodasevich demonstrated the similarity in these char-
acters’ outward appearances, their dispositions, and the roles they played in
the novels and in life. “Uncontrollable lust is their constant companion,
and it is the first, main and exclusive motive of their actions. And these ac-
tions are, in fact, crimes.” Bely himself said the same of the protagonist in
his famous Petersburg: “Nikolai Apollonovich became a mix of disgust,
fear and lust.”
“He despised his own flesh and lusted after others’,” Bely wrote in
Petersburg. Ableukhov’s hatred of his own flesh coincided with his hatred
for his father. In Bely’s novel, “Whenever father and son came into contact
with each other, they resembled two ventilators that had been turned on
facing each other; and the result was a most unpleasant draft. Their prox-
imity bore little semblance to love; Nikolai Apollonovich regarded love as a
humiliating physical act.” 1!
In his memoirs, Bely noted that his Oedipal experience of standing before
the Sphinx during his trip to Egypt was an important factor in the writing
of Petersburg. Khodasevich, who knew both Bely and his mother quite
well, once described the author and all of his characters at the same stroke:
“He was afraid of his father and hated him in the strongest way; ... he
pitied his mommy and admired her to the point of sensual delight.” Bely’s
characters are always inflamed by people they loved in their youth, “but
having stoked them, these people push them away at the last minute with
equally passionate contempt.” According to Khodasevich’s scheme, this is

why Bely’s characters commit their crimes; they are always driven by their
suffering sensuality.
Nikolai Ableukhov, the protagonist of Petersburg, takes up company
with a group of revolutionaries and promises them that he will kill his fa-
ther, a prominent senator. They give him a time bomb, which ticks through
the whole narration. “Nikolai Apollonovich takes revenge on his father for
his own impotent desire, for the futile lust which he sees as his inheri-
tance.” With the brutal bluntness of a psychoanalyst, Khodasevich empha-
sizes that this is the only true motivation for Nikolai’s crime.
Mitya Korobkin, the protagonist of Moscow, is the son of a professor
who has invented a substance of enormous destructive power, a fictional
prototype of the atomic bomb. Mitya steals and sells off his father’s books.
He needs the money to seduce the daughter of a German spy, von Mandro,
who is living incestuously with her father. Because of Mitya’s burglary, von
Mandro manages to intercept a sheet covered with enough of the professor’s
formulas to blow up Europe. This is the kind of crime that a touching Kotik
dreams up against his father in particular and his father’s world in general.
Khodasevich’s sketches about Bely were presumably written under the di-
rect influence of Freud’s essay on Dostoevsky. Khodasevich’s conclusion is
clear: “All political, philosophical, and day-to-day goals in Bely’s novels...
are in fact just a pretext to recall and re-assimilate the impressions that
struck him in early childhood.” Bely’s main motif, like that of Dostoevsky
according to Freud, is the drive to commit patricide, guilt over this desire,
and yearning for punishment. Both authors transfer these weighty feelings
onto other people, the state, and the world at large.
However, Khodasevich mentioned neither Freud nor Oedipus in his es-
says, and only once did he refer to Bely’s novels, beginning with Petersburg,
as an “oedipal series.” Regardless of this omission and whatever its cause,
Khodasevich’s essay may certainly be regarded as a classic example of psy-
choanalytic criticism in Russian literature.
Eonvard to Plato
Russian modernist culture created its own theory of sexuality, closely
linked to the ideas of symbolism. This theory arose out of Vladimir
Solovyov’s quest for Sophia, but Nikolai Berdyaev embellished it with more
detail and in 1916, published his thoughts on the matter.'!3 A powerful
sense of the centrality of gender is characteristic of our times: Sex has
emerged from secrecy into the light of day, and sexuality is perceived in
every facet of human life. Gender-specific sexual functions are believed to
be the result of differentiation in some protosexual life, and there is a great
deal of emphasis on these functions.
Wl
According to Berdyaev, however, it would be a mistake to equate

gender
with the sexual act. For although one could achieve control over the sexual
act, gender could never be controlled. Sexual energy could be channeled in
various directions; such energy could be directed into creative activity, for
instance. The division of genders came as a consequence of Adam’s fall:
Adam was androgynous. Only a girl-boy, a unified, bisexual person, could
reflect the image and likeness of God. Christ also was halfway between
man and woman. Human sexuality was nothing more than a painful search
for lost androgyny; but unification through the sexual act was illusory and
entailed retribution, Berdyaev believed. The sexual act was sickly and de-
fective insofar as it was finite and differentiated (whereas it should be eter-
nal and be performed by androgynous beings). Thus, the sexual act was in-
ternally contradictory and opposed to the meaning of the world. The
sexual act was essentially contrasted with genius, and sexuality hindered a
person’s creative forces. There was always mortal anxiety buried at the very
core of the act, for what gave life could also kill.
Surprisingly, we find in Berdyaev yet another aspect of the drive to trans-
form mankind, squaring off in this case against one of the most basic of hu-
man features: masculine and feminine genders. Berdyaev wrote that his
contemporaries were living in a transitional period, that a new natural or-
der was on the rise, in which the birth-giving sexual act would be trans-
formed into a liberated act of creation. In this new era, the previously firm
boundaries between male and female would fade and blur. At this transi-
tional moment, Berdyaev insisted, one might well ask whether the sex act
could be an anomaly.
It should be noted that no matter how we feel about these speculations,
they were not just the result of Berdyaev’s individual improvisation. This
Russian philosopher was expressing the revelations and prejudices, the de-
sires and fears of an entire generation, and perhaps even of the culture as a
whole; hence his popularity then and now in Russia. Berdyaev never
claimed to be original. On the contrary, he was at pains to emphasize the
continuity of his ideas and cited Otto Weininger along with Jakob Bohme,
and Vladimir Solovyov in the same breath as Freud. Most astonishing of all
is the author’s lack of embarrassment in his zeal for androgyny; he made no
attempt to soften this key point for readers. According to Berdyaev, those
he considered his main authorities, from Plato to Solovyoy, shared his belief
that the meaning of love lay in the androgynous. [nae
At the same time, a personal componen t shines through in this philoso-
phy, one that Berdyaev never fully realized. “In unhealthy, tormented half-
sleep, something rose out of the depths of my nature, ... something dis-
gusting and repulsive to the point of terror,” the young philosopher wrote
his future wife from exile in Vologda. “Since early childhood, the question
of the most
of sex has seemed to me at once frightening and important, one
GD Russian Modernist Culture
important in life. This has caused me a lot of emotional anxiety that took
on meaning for my very existence. All my life, I have thought that there is
something mystical about sex, that it has religious significance.” What is
more, he confessed to the woman he loved, a “curse of sexual abnormality
and degeneration” was hanging over him.'!*
It is easier to get a clear idea of what was tormenting this generation
when we take a closer look at this outstanding thinker, whose development
passed from Marxism to existentialism and religious personalism, with his
rare talent for matching words with feelings. Normal sex caused Berdyaev
the same fear and sense of personal guilt as did the calamitous events of his
time. “Everyone is soured nowadays, everyone is joyless and unhappy,
everyone is dismayed in their heart of hearts,” he wrote in November 1917.
“The intelligentsia is being used to espouse the most irresponsible ideas and
utopias, which have never been put to trial through real life experience,” he
added, warning that “severe punishment will follow these ecstatic moments
of strength and glory.”!!°
Boris Zaitsev recalled Berdyaev in 1906 as a “handsome man with dark,
curly hair, sitting in an armchair; he expatiates ardently and at times (ner-
vous tic) opens his mouth wide, sticking out his tongue. ... It’s very un-
usual, I imagine the execution in Dante looked something like that.”!!®
According to Yevgeniia Gertsyk, who was close to Berdyaev in the 1910s,
the philosopher showed clear signs of a “horror of darkness and chaos,” as
if “hovering over an abyss.” The perceptive Gertsyk deduced this from his
tic and the jerky movements he made with his hands. She also reported that
when Berdyaev once spent the night at her house in the Crimea: “Several
times in the course of the night, I heard a terrifying scream coming from the
other end of the house. In the morning, he told me with embarrassment
that in his sleep he had dreamed that something like a tangled blob of ser-
pents or a giant spider was descending on him from above.” Gertsyk re-
marked that Berdyaev’s “many minuscule, insignificant eccentricities”
could be traced to the same source, “his disgust and near phobia toward
everything soft, caressing, and engulfing.”!!7 Against the background of
these observations, which require little commentary, Berdyaev’s claim that
he “never discovered anything in himself approaching the oedipal com-
plex”'!® takes on different overtones.
Berdyaev found Freud’s works interesting. “Freud does not suffer from
the usual psychiatric stagnation; he demonstrates freedom and audacity of
thought.” Berdyaev appreciated the fact that “Freud provides scientific
substantiation of the truth that sexuality suffuses the entire human being
and is even inherent in infants.” Like many others, however, Berdyaev re-
proached Freud for pansexualism. He was especially shocked by Freud’s in-
terpretation of religion. But even his criticism was original: “The tendency
of the Freudian school to explain everything, including religion, as the up-
73
shot of unrealized sexuality takes the form of a maniacal idea,

typical of
psychiatrists. This pansexualism, too, can in fact be explained as
the result
of unrealized sexuality in those who created it.” Later, Berdyaev referred
to
psychoanalysis as the “shamelessness of the modern epoch, but also a ma-
jor enrichment of our knowledge about human beings.” !19
Friendship Was Possible .. .

During the mass exile of 1922 and subsequent voluntary departures, a
number of important Russian philosophers found their way to the West,
where they continued to preserve their rich and particular culture. In the
new surroundings, many encountered psychoanalysis—through their per-
sonal interests or by happenstance—which they tried to reinterpret in their
own fashion.
At the beginning of the 1930s, when the Russian translations of Freud’s
Future of an Illusion and Jung’s Psychology of the Unconscious came out,
psychoanalysis for a time became a favorite theme of Russian moral philos-
ophy. Philosopher Boris Vysheslavtsev, who was close to Berdyaev, devoted
his Ethics of Eros Transformed to a new interpretation of psychoanalysis in
the light of Russian Orthodox philosophy. This new ethical system “com-
bines Christian Platonism with the discoveries of modern psychoanaly-
sis.”!2° The “hearts and wombs” of the Old Testament, the apostle Paul’s
“flesh,” and, certainly, Plato’s Eros, are all presented as foreshadowing
Freud’s unconscious. In this work, the philosopher embraced everything,
undaunted even by sexuality. Vice was derived from the same material as
virtue, Vysheslavtsev insisted, which explained why the soul’s sinful inten-
tions could be sublimated. Sublimation was the main principle of his ethics.
“All of Christian asceticism is one grandiose project of sublimation,” ac-
cording to Vysheslavtsev, who viewed sanctity as the pinnacle of that proj-
ect.!21 Only the images of Christ resurrected and of the City of Kitezh could
“sublimate the chaos of the Russian subconscious,” he wrote, alluding to
particular Russian sects.'2* Psychoanalysis also had an impact on
Vysheslavtsev; but in his improvisations on the theme of religious ethics,
Freudian thought became distorted by a range of completely alien ideas.
Certainly Freud’s view of religion as “one illusion” must have been totally
foreign to Vysheslavtsev. The Russian philosopher rebuked even the mysti-
cally inclined Jung for excessive scientism, despite their reputed personal
acquaintance and professional collaboration.
Another Russian author of the time, Semyon Frank, also reproached psy-
choanalysis for pansexualism, nihilism, and even demonism in a little-
known article, “Psychoanalysis as a Worldview. ”123 “From a philosophical
point of view, psychoanalysis is unable to handle the treasure of profound
thesis
emotional life it has found,” Frank wrote. He rejected the Freudian
that would have garnered even Vysheslavtsev’s support—that the psycho-

analytic libido was the same as Plato’s Eros. Plato saw the erotic essence of
man reflected in his highest achievements, while Freud saw it in his lowest.
Frank likened Freud to Marx, whom he despised, rather than to his beloved
Plato: both Freud and Marx were materialists; the former was a “sexual
materialist,” and the latter an economic materialist. According to Frank,
who viewed sexuality as an even more dubious foundation for humankind
than profit, Freud went even further than Marx down the materialist road
to ruin.
Philosopher Nikolai Lossky was a friend of Russian psychoanalyst
Nikolai Osipov, who had also emigrated to Prague (see chapter 4). Their
relationship was a mix of personal intimacy and surprisingly profound in-
tellectual kinship, as attested by numerous references to Lossky in Osipov’s
later articles (Osipov considered himself a student of Lossky’s even before
they met). The closeness of their friendship is also revealed in the article
that Lossky contributed to the collection dedicated to Osipov’s memory,!**
and in the several pages he dedicated to the analyst in his exhaustive
History of Russian Philosophy.'*> Overall, he saw Osipov’s philosophy as
an attempt to “reexamine Freudian psychological theory in the context of
Lossky’s personalized metaphysics.”!7© On the other hand, he noted
Osipov’s affinity to the classics, primarily to Plato. Lossky cited Osipov ap-
provingly: “The empirical meaning of Freud’s research will not change if
physiological desire is replaced at its center by love in its eidetic sense, as an
absolute value.”!*” He believed that only death had prevented Osipov from
developing his “doctrine of love as the basic factor in the cosmos.” Lossky
referred to Osipov’s article “Revolution and Dreams,” which included
some of the most expressive and analytical ruminations about that era (see
chapter 6), as “rather original in its conception,” but he apparently decided
not to paraphrase it in his History.
Philosopher Lev Shestov was introduced to psychoanalysis by his sister,
Fanya Lovtskaya (1873-1965), who had been studying in Bern since 1898.
After defending her doctoral thesis in philosophy (Bern, 1909), Fanya went
to Geneva to study psychoanalysis. Her analyst there was most likely
Sabina Spielrein. In 1922, Fanya moved to Berlin, where she studied psy-
choanalysis with Max Eitingon. Shestov received this news from his sister
excitedly: “I was terribly glad to get your last letter! Who is this Dr.
Eitingon? I have never heard anything about him! Is he Russian or
German? Judging by the fact that he has read my books, it seems he must
be Russian, but then how was he able to get such a position in Berlin?”
!28
Shestov made friends with Eitingon through his sister and stayed with him
in Berlin on numerous occasions. They corresponded: Shestov wrote in Rus-
sian, Eitingon responded in German. At the beginning of their acquaintance,
in December 1922, Shestov wrote from Paris (he had emigrated in 1920):
75
I see Eitingon often. I’ve met his wife, they are both nice people. He lent me
some articles by Freud—they have a lot of interesting and important material. I
told Eitingon that it’s a pity that Freud became a doctor instead of a philosopher:
if he had not had specific medical tasks, his audacity and skills of observation
might have led him to some interesting discoveries. Eitingon responded that if
Freud had known me, he would have thought it a pity that I am not a doctor.
Shestov wrote with understanding to his sister Fanya, who had informed
him of some difficulties she was having with a patient: “In future, be always
ready for possible friction and approach it with businesslike serenity. You
must by all means develop this serenity within yourself, as you have decided
to do something as practical as treating patients with psychoanalysis.”!29
Lovtskaya had her own understanding of her brother’s works, an inter-
pretation with which he did not agree. “His work on self-improvement
foreshadows psychoanalysis. . . .He can’t seem to understand that
Freudianism will grant him immortality, since he is one of Freud’s most ex-
ceptional predecessors,” she told Aaron Steinberg. Steinberg once pointed
out that such an evaluation of Shestov’s philosophy was quite common: “In
Weimar Germany, there was a group of Russian literary scholars, apart
from Shestov’s sister, who were involved with the psychoanalytic journal
Imago and whose decisive verdict was that Shestov’s mode of thought was
closely related to Freudian doctrine.” !3° (However, this fact did not prevent
others from referring to Shestov as the Russian Nietzsche.)
Eitingon often came to his impractical friend’s aid with advice and
money. Meanwhile, his friendship with Shestov made Eitingon’s house in
Berlin (Steinberg called it a “psychoanalytical salon”) a center of gravity
for the Russian diaspora (see chapter 7). Steinberg, who closely observed
life in this circle, remarked with disapproval that Shestov’s friends in Berlin
were convinced that the philosopher shared their ideas of “moral revolu-
tions?2A
Eitingon never failed to admire Shestov’s books, and he sent one to Freud
in 1928.132 Freud read the book but admitted in his response that he had
been unable to follow the author’s train of thought. “Probably you cannot
imagine how alien all these philosophical convolutions seem to me .
every time there is a psychological or even a psychopathological problem
behind them.”!°?
In this case, Freud hit the nail on the head: Shestov was indeed suffering
from a serious neurosis, which manifested itself in painful neuralgia,
chronic fatigue, and uncanny bursts of creativity. At the age of 19, he had
experienced a “time of profound despair and internal catastrophe” that he
kept secret from everyone.'** Despite his considerable later success and per-
sonal charm, this great Russian philosopher still came across to his audi-
ence as a broken man.
The paths of Freud and Shestov crossed yet one more time: In 1930,
Shestov asked Thomas Mann to nominate Ivan Bunin for the Nobel Prize.
Mann responded to Shestov that, as much as he may have liked to see
Bunin receive the prize, he considered Freud a more worthy candidate:
Freud’s “research made such a deep impact on psychic science and litera-
ture.”!35 Bunin nonetheless was awarded the Nobel Prize a short time later,
in 1933, and Freud never did receive this honor.
Shestov was known and appreciated by Buber, Heidegger, Berdyaev,
Bunin, and Lévy-Bruhl, and he enjoyed a mutual understanding with
Eitingon. This understanding was possible despite profound differences in
professional interests, political views, and lifestyles. Shestov often asked
Eitingon for financial help and, evidently, for medical consultation. Their
friendship lasted fifteen years. After his friend’s death, Eitingon wrote to his
family in Russian: “Few people have had a place in my life as significant as
he. I believed that I understood what he taught us and where he was calling
us to go. I loved him for his limitless kindness and for the quiet beauty of
humanism that he personified.” !%°
But the Place Was Occupied

Let us draw some conclusions, then, about the early history of psycho-
analysis in regard to its Russian manifestations. Psychoanalysis was well
known in Russia in the early twentieth century, and counted among its fol-
lowers influential figures in medicine (see chapter 4) and in the cultural and
artistic community at large. At the same time, the influence of these individ-
uals was quite limited. For instance, there was not a single paper even
vaguely related to psychoanalysis presented at the All-Russia Conference
on Experimental Pedagogy or at the First All-Russia Conference on Popular
Education (although there was a section that combined medicine and edu-
cation), held at the end of 1913 and the beginning of 1914, respectively.
Until Ivan Ilyin was elected its chairman in 1921, the widely respected
Moscow Psychological Society did not accept psychoanalysis either.
One can identify a number of reasons for this situation, but one stands
out far above the others: Russian symbolism was filling the same roles and
performing roughly the same sociocultural and psychological functions that
psychoanalysis had come to fill in German- and in English-speaking coun-
tries around that time. It is another question altogether how well symbol-
ism performed these tasks and how far its influence extended beyond the
world of literature and philosophy.
According to Blok, the only thing that Russian and French symbolism
had in common was their Greek name. Russian symbolism was a move-
ment that transcended literature and was “indissolubly connected with is-
sues of religion, philosophy, and community.”!57During the height of sym-
TE
bolism’s popularity in Russia, a number of intellectual and biographical

threads closely linked it with moral philosophy, the bitter political struggle
of the time, and the practical search for a new style and meaning of life. As
Khodasevich wrote: “Symbolism did not aspire to be merely an artistic
school, a literary trend. All the while it strained to become a life-giving
method, and herein lies its deepest, possibly its unattainable, truth.”!38 In
the opinion of this respectable witness, the symbolists had a more “indivis-
ible connection between life and creative activities than almost anyone, be-
fore or since.” One cannot “disentangle this web until one reads the lives
themselves, in addition to their books.” !3? “The history of the symbolists
became a history of broken lives. ... Part of their creative energy ... was
channeled into writing, but another part did not achieve complete incarna-
tion and flowed out into life, as electricity drains away when insufficiently
'4°
insulated.”
Many of these statements are equally applicable to psychoanalysis.
Neither movement limited itself to the realm of speech; and each created a
different mode of life, an almost inarticulable general atmosphere. What
Khodasevich referred to in symbolism as a “life-giving method” could have
been described by an analyst in talking about his or her goals and milieu,
just as a psychoanalyst might easily have adapted the aphorism that “who-
ever breathes the air of symbolism is forever marked by something.”
The Russian symbolists’ aspirations coincided with psychoanalytic aspi-
rations and methods also in several other ways: Both intellectual move-
ments tried to capture the inexpressible, to become conscious of the uncon-
scious. In both, there is a prevailing intuition that a secondary reality exists
deep inside each human being, radically different from anything known to
reason; advocates of both movements believed that their awareness and de-
scription of this reality would effectively change real life.
As ways of life, both movements contained the means of affecting indi-
vidual human beings. In both cases, these means were concentrated on
emotionally charged interpersonal relations.
As intellectual trends, both movements were essentially semiotic. Both
functioned in the linguistic sphere and both attempted to transcend lan-
guage, moved by the belief that another, nonverbal reality had decisive sig-
nificance in human affairs. Both movements prescribed refined methods of
interpretation, correlations between meanings and signs, emotional experi-
ences and symbols, and dreams and words.
As pictures of the world, both movements attempted to answer the same
set of questions: What is the composition of the “internal man,” whom we
can readily sense but never know, and what does he do? How can we come
to understand this special reality, and how can it be transformed? Which
forms of human existence and culture—dreams, myths, works of art—will
open the way to this reality? What is the meaning of religion for the new
man, who has discovered his individuality? What is the meaning of gender,
why is its significance so consistently underestimated by culture, and how
can human sexuality be integrated into civilization? What is homosexuality,
and is bisexuality a normal, natural human feature?
At the same time, a number of key traits distinguished symbolism from
psychoanalysis: a total absence of the pragmatism, consistency, and disci-
pline so essential to psychoanalysis, without which no real “transformation
of man” is possible; an undifferentiated religiosity that led symbolism into
sectarian rites, dreams of theurgy, godmanhood, and anthroposophy; and
an absence of the passion for scientific analysis that was so characteristic of
Freud and his followers. Symbolism created nothing like the systematic
practice of therapy (“theurgy,” according to a parallel set of terms) that
could be applied to people in need, although the demand for this kind of
help among Russian symbolists was obviously enormous. Finally, at its
deepest roots, Russian symbolism, while tightly bound to parallel trends in
western European culture, was in contrast a de-individualizing and to some
extent anti-intellectual school of thought. In this respect, it was the polar
opposite of psychoanalysis.
The attitude that prevailed among symbolists toward this emerging field
is amply demonstrated by the following advertisement, placed by Lydia
Berdyaeva, the philosopher’s wife, in Boulevards and Crossroads, a satirical
journal that had become popular with the Moscow intelligentsia since the
publication of its first issue in 1915.14!
Physicians and Hospitals

Berdyaev, private practitioner: Mental illness. Diagnosis of crises.
Secularization of illness. X-ray equipment, X-rays.
Ivanov, Vyacheslav, Lecturer: Hypnosis, magnetism. Rhythmic gymnastics.
Steam and ether treatment.
Shestov, dentist. Specialty: root extraction.
Florensky, professor, staff physician. Neuropathologist. Specialty: obsession,
frenzy.
Gershenzon, surgeon. Specialty: psychic surgery, straightening of twisted per-
sonalities.
Bely, psychiatrist. Private hospital for all forms of mental illness. Specialty: vi-
olent insanity.
Steiner, president of the First Aid society. Distance makes no difference.
Patients can be treated by psychic medium.
Another author, Vladimir Ern, placed a more malicious “advertisement” in

the same journal, this time on behalf of Ivan Ilyin.
Authentic quotations from various obscure authors individually crafted ac-

cording to a new and improved German method. A ruble a dozen and up.
Orally, only! Address: The Freud Club, Suite 666, 1 Ilyin Lane, Ostozhenka.
Ask for Ivan Alexandrovich.
Yet despite gibes like these—or according to them—many agents of

Russian modernist culture were connected with psychoanalysis in one way
or another and altered by its influence.
3
A Case of Neurosis in the
Revolutionary Generation:
Sergei Pankeev, the Wolf-Man
According to Freud’s official biographer, Ernest Jones, most of the patients

Freud treated in Vienna came to him from eastern Europe, particularly
from Russia. It is therefore only natural that the most famous of Freud’s
case histories is the story of a Russian. Jones called it “assuredly the best of
the series.”! One contemporary historian has described it as “fascinating
and rich.”? “The most famous case” were the words the patient used in re-
ferring to himself.?
The Best History of Its Kind

Freud’s Russian patient was to retain his connection to psychoanalysis (or
his dependence upon it) for the duration of his long life. A few other ana-
lysts worked with “Sergei P.” after Freud; as a result, there is probably
more literature about him than about any other patient in the history of
psychoanalysis. Together, these writings provide an interesting body of ma-
terial that can be used to understand how this Russian patient was per-
ceived by his Western analysts. We can draw upon this information to see
how his unusual clinical history may have been linked to the role he played
in Europe as the “other,” as the bearer of a distinct, exotic culture; and per-
haps even to understand why Freud needed a Russian patient, specifically,
in order to write his canonical “case history.”
Preparing the reader for an exploration of Freud’s clinical history of
Sergei P., Jones wrote with passionate conviction: “Freud was then at the
very height of his powers, a confident master of his method, and the tech-
nique he displays in the interpretation and synthesis of the incredibly com-
plex material must win every reader’s admiration.” It is up to the reader to
make his own judgment in this regard. In and of itself, the life of a man
who weathered the century’s worst storms and managed to conserve his hu-
80
Neurosis in the Revolutionary Generation: The Wolf-Man 81
man integrity through it all, thanks to psychoanalysis (and himself), re-

mains interesting not merely as a historical episode. The living material pre-
sented us by analysis is also valuable for anyone who believes in analytical
interpretation, as well as for anyone who is critical of psychoanalysis. The
patient’s life story with its overlay of psychoanalysts’ views and actions in-
spires admiration as a remarkable microcosm of human history.
“Personal peculiarities in the patient and a national character that was
foreign to ours made the task of feeling one’s way into his mind a laborious
one,” said Freud of Pankeev in “From the History of an Infantile
Neurosis,” the primary published record of the case. Freud went on to un-
derline “the contrast between the patient’s agreeable and affable personal-
ity, his acute intelligence, and his nice-mindedness on the one hand and his
completely unbridled, instinctual life on the other... .”5 What was the
source of the striking disjuncture noted by Freud? we might ask ourselves.
Was it the patient’s personality, or his ethnic identity?
Sergei Pankeev (1887-1979) was born on his family’s estate on the
Dnieper and belonged to the same social caste and generation as Nikolai
Berdyaev, Mikhail Bulgakov, and Boris Savinkov, the talented writer and
terrorist; but in many respects his youth reminds us, most of all, of
Alexander Blok’s. Did Blok’s “music” chime within him? We know that
Pankeev was no stranger to art, nor to politics. He painted landscapes, he
was interested in literature, and he left behind memoirs, which he seems to
have written with great ease. In sum, he was a typical Russian intellectual
of the beginning of the century.
Pankeev was a bit younger than the author of Sexual Confession of an
Anonymous Russian, an erotic manuscript written in 1912 in French and
published in English translation by Havelock Ellis in his Psychology of
Sex;® but in many ways, Pankeev and his unknown countryman were simi-
lar. In a short introduction, Ellis described the work’s author as of Russian
background, from a good family, well educated, and gifted, like many of
his countrymen, with an aptitude for psychological analysis. Perhaps Freud
chose Pankeev as the subject of his most important case study precisely be-
cause he was typical of the patients Freud saw during those years.
Pankeev’s life and experience were in no way exceptional for a person of his
generation, a generation that played such a tragic role in Russian history; if
this one case deviated from the standard fate of that generation, it was only
in that Pankeev was lucky enough to live to old age.
Sergei’s father, Konstantin Pankeev, a rich landowner from Kherson, was
an activist in the party of Constitutional Democrats (known by the acronym
“Kadets”), one of the leaders of the group’s influential southern branch, and
the publisher of the liberal newspaper Iuzhnye zapiski (Southern Notes).
During the critical period after the 1905 revolution, the Kadets, a party of
professors and industrialists, became the dominant political force in opposi-
82 Neurosis in the Revolutionary Generation: The Wolf-Man
tion to the czarist regime. The Kadets finally came to power in the revolu-
tion of February 1917, and that year, the younger Pankeev also joined the
party; but he was never much caught up in politics. Only one all-embracing
feeling could breathe life into him and make him act with conviction, and
that was love, the kind of love that leaned toward dependence. Freud would
call this form of neurotic behavior “breakthrough to a woman.” At the
height of his passion, Pankeev sometimes bore a resemblance to Yuri
Zhivago. But more than anything he would remind the Russian reader of
Klim Samgin, the hero of Gorky’s unfinished novel, another “typical exam-
ple” of the contemporary intellectual: honest with everyone else and yet
constantly deceiving himself; using his refined upbringing as a defense
against any collision with real life; and rebelling against all abstract forms of
authority while yearning for personal dependence.’
In a well-known essay on Gorky written forty years after Freud’s first
meeting with Pankeev, Erik Erikson perceived the young writer as more or
less the same sort of immature, dependence-prone intellectual. “Neither
Luther nor Calvin showed him any new spiritual realms; there were no pio-
neers or founding fathers who could discover unknown continents before
him where he could overcome his internal and external slavery.” But from
this exceptional American psychoanalyst’s point of view, the situation was
not hopeless. Erikson found in Gorky’s life “the hub stations in the forma-
tion of a new Russian world view, Russian individualism.” As a whole,
Russian history seemed to him “the delayed establishment of Eastern
Protestantism” in which the universal values of individual responsibility
and initiative would also win out. “We must succeed in convincing the
Alyoshas that—from a very long-range point of view—their protestantism
is ours and ours, theirs.”8
A Descendant of the Brothers Karamazov

There were more than a few instances of depression, suicide, and other up-
per-class forms of mental leave-taking among Sergei Pankeev’s relatives.
For instance, when Uncle Nikolai decided to get married, it turned out that
his father had been no less earnestly courting the same woman. The lady
preferred the younger Pankeey, and Sergei’s grandfather cut off his son’s in-
heritance, deeply offended. Despite this imbroglio, Uncle Nikolai later be-
came a member of the Duma. The story of Uncle Peter, Sergei’s favorite rel-
ative, had a less fortunate ending. Peter, a rich man notorious for his
eccentricity, lived out his last days in the Crimea as a hermit, allowing only
cows, pigs, and other beasts to enter his home. His death was noted in the
newspapers under a sensationalistic headline, something like “Millionaire
Eaten by Rats.” (Blok’s father died under similarly shocking, though some-
what different circumstances.) Sergei’s mother referred to her in-laws as
“the Brothers Karamazov.”
Despite this heritage, Sergei grew up a physically healthy, though some-

what tense, child. At age four, he developed a fear of wolves. Later, he be-
gan to tease the house pets obsessively, sometimes flying into a rage for no
reason. He masturbated in his nanny’s presence and carried on sexual
games with his older sister. Still later, he would frequently flirt with the
servant and peasant girls. He loved to read Lermontov.’ At eighteen or
nineteen, he picked up gonorrhea (Blok also had just such an episode in
his youth). Apart from these details, we know very little about Pankeev’s
childhood and youth, although the work Freud wrote about him is entitled
“From the History of an Infantile Neurosis.” To proceed further, we will
have to reconstruct Freud’s chain of reasoning, since it unfolded within his
own mental framework and had no direct connection to his patient’s biog-
raphy. For the time being, however, let us examine the few additional facts
left at our disposal.
In 1905, Sergei graduated from high school with honors and entered
Odessa University. He took a summer trip across Europe with his mother
and his sister Anna, who was two years his senior. At the time, Odessa was
in an uproar: There were strikes under way that were destined to go down
in history as the first Russian revolution.
When they returned from Europe, Anna left for the Caucasus. Like
everyone in her family, she had a great love for Lermontov. She wrote po-
etry herself, which her father often compared to Lermontov’s verse. After
visiting the spot where the poet had perished, she took poison, and she died
in agony two weeks later.
For Sergei, the period that ensued was what he would describe much
later as a state of “unconscious grief.” When he found out about his sister’s
suicide, he felt no sadness at all; yet, several months later, he went to
Pyatigorsk and soaked Lermontov’s death place with tears. He tried to dis-
tract himself with his university studies, but things went poorly.
Sergei turned to psychiatrist Vladimir Bekhterev on his father’s recom-
mendation and complained to him of “depression.” Bekhterev was at that
very time involved in a search for funds for his future institute. Sergei’s fa-
ther was about to finance the construction of a psychiatric hospital in
Odessa dedicated to his daughter’s memory. Bekhterev’s waiting room was
packed with patients, but he received Sergei immediately. After placing the
student in a hypnotic trance, Bekhterev suggested, “Tomorrow you will
awake hearty and healthy. You will study with enthusiasm and pass your
exam with flying colors. ... Convince your parents to donate funds to
build the Neurological Institute.” After he awoke, Sergei remembered
Bekhterev’s words perfectly, and he was so surprised by the change in sub-
ject that he related everything to his father. He never went back to
Bekhterev.!° His parents sent him instead to the renowned Emil Kraepelin,
whom textbooks still dub “the father of modern psychiatry.” Sergei’s father
also had gone through treatment with Kraepelin in his youth.
Breakthrough to a Woman
After all the records of this case written by Freud, Jones, and other ana-
lysts, we still do not know exactly what was wrong with Sergei Pankeev at
that moment. According to his own recollections, Pankeev felt his life was
hollow, everything that happened to him seemed unreal, and all the people
around him were like wax figures or painted marionettes. Generally, simi-
lar feelings can be found in many texts of the period. Blok, who was a few
years older than Pankeev, wrote to his fiancée in 1903: “Now is the sort of
time when you can sense disquiet everywhere, human relationships are
foundering in frustration and pettiness, notions are multiplying . . . ; for ex-
ample, even marionettes lurching about on strings might come to mind and
give rise to morbid anxieties.”!!
On the other hand, we do know what Pankeev was doing in the Bavarian
sanatorium to which Kraepelin had sent him. At a carnival on the institu-
tion’s grounds, Sergei saw a woman dressed in Turkish garb who turned
out to be a nurse by the name of Therese. Pankeev’s condition changed
drastically for the better, as life now seemed wondrous. “But only on condi-
tion that Therese would be willing to enter into a love affair with me.”!7
For a patient who has just checked into a sanatorium, getting to know a
nurse is not easy. Pankeev found out where Therese lived and burst into her
room to set up a rendezvous with her. She accepted the invitation, though
not right away. Love alternated with quarreling between the rich patient
and his pretty nurse. After each spat, Sergei would try to leave the sanato-
rium. Kraepelin interpreted his condition as the transition between phases
of manic-depressive psychosis and categorically refused to discharge him.
Finally, having undergone four months of treatment at the sanatorium,
Sergei insisted that he be released. After a stay in Paris, where his uncle
took him around to all the night clubs, as he considered this the best way to
avoid unpleasant recollection, he returned to one of his father’s estates near
Odessa. At long last, he felt well.
In the summer of 1908—during the period known in Russian history as
the “years of reaction”—Sergei’s father died suddenly in Moscow.
Konstantin Pankeev was forty-nine years old, perfectly healthy, and, so his
son thought, died of an overdose of veronal, which he took to help him
sleep. In such a situation, any clinician would have suspected suicide; Freud
later concurred with Kraepelin’s diagnosis that Konstantin Pankeev had
been depressive.!3
As after the death of his sister, Sergei was restless rather than distressed.
He took off for Munich to consult with Kraepelin and to visit Therese.
Kraepelin refused outright to continue treating him, confessing (if we are to
take Sergei’s word for it) that his previous diagnosis of manic-depressive
psychosis had been incorrect. While spending the night with Therese, Sergei
Neurosis in the Revolutionary Generation: The Wolf-Man
85
awoke in a state of unbearable anguish. Kraepelin gave in and

sent him
back to the sanatorium in Heidelberg. A peculiarity of this establishment
was that each male patient was assigned a young lady, all of whom, as
Sergei recalled, were from fine families; but the Russian patient had feelings
only for Therese. Each new encounter with his lover ended in a stormy
breakup, but Sergei always returned to her.
Therese Keller was almost ten years older than Sergei, and she had a
daughter. She had a reputation in the sanatorium as a scrupulous nurse; but
the strange Russian man—who, it should be said, was successful with
ladies throughout his life—broke down the barriers she had raised to pro-
tect herself.
For a time, Pankeev returned to Odessa. His mother, concerned about
the mésalliance that was taking shape, did her best to cure him of his at-
tachment to Therese. Among the doctors who came to the estate was physi-
cian Leonid Droznes, of Odessa. Droznes was fascinated by the new direc-
tions in psychiatry that he had plumbed in books by Paul Dubois and
Freud, and he tried to apply these theories to his bright, wealthy, young pa-
tient. For the first time since he started seeing psychiatrists, Sergei began to
take an interest in his own experiences. However, their sessions in Odessa
lasted only a short while, as Droznes became fixated on the idea of bringing
Sergei to see the great figures of European psychoanalysis. Most of Sergei’s
wealth, inherited from his father and uncle, was controlled by his mother,
who had no qualms about spending money on her son’s treatment. So
Pankeev, Droznes, and a student (who was needed as a third partner for
card games) soon left together for Geneva and Dubois, by way of Vienna.
An Hour a Day for Four Years

The impression that Freud made on Sergei Pankeev was strong enough to
remain vivid even some forty years later when he described his first meeting
with the famous psychotherapist. He was struck most of all by the “intelli-
gent, dark eyes, which looked at me penetratingly but without causing me
the slightest feeling of discomfort.” In general, Sergei’s perception of Freud
fits closely with what we know from a plethora of other sources. Pankeev
emphasized Freud’s sensitivity, simple and self-assured manners, conven-
tional attire, and emotional equilibrium. “Freud’s whole attitude, and the
way in which he listened to me, differentiated him strikingly from his fa-
mous colleagues whom I had hitherto known.” age
However, the accuracy of these recollections does not reflect the patient’s
condition at the beginning of his treatment. Freud characterized this state
as unstable and utterly dependent on other people.” Jones, conveying the
opinion that Sergei’s behavior during the first sessions was absolutely unac-
y
ceptable, gives the example of Pankeev’s desire, expressed in shockingl
crude terms, for homosexual relations with Freud.!* At the end of his life,
Pankeev himself denied the veracity of this claim. Generally speaking, it
also does not mesh with Freud’s description of his patient; and it hardly
seems likely that Freud would have suppressed such evidence of the
disturbed condition of his patient’s psyche at the beginning of treatment—
especially when that treatment had ended quite successfully, in his
estimation.
In any case, doctor and patient spent an unbelievable amount of time
with one another. For four years, Freud received Pankeev every day, not
counting Sundays and summer holidays. Freud wrote that under less auspi-
cious circumstances, the course of analysis would most likely have been in-
terrupted much earlier and thus would have been ineffective. Freud insisted
that such cases demanded that the therapist operate “outside of time,” in
much the same way as the unconscious.
The first years of analysis effected almost no change in the patient.
According to Freud, he “listened, understood, and remained unapproach-
able.” His fear of “an independent existence was so great as to outweigh all
the vexations of his illness.”!” Every time the patient made some small
modicum of progress, he would immediately stop trying, in order to avoid
any further changes. In the end, Freud overcame his patient’s resistance by
marking a final date by which the analysis would have to end. It was then,
nearing the close of four years and in anticipation of the ineluctable dead-
line, that “in a disproportionally short time, the analysis produced all the
material necessary to ... remove his symptoms.”!*® Freud thought the re-
sults of analysis extremely satisfactory overall. Many of the details he had
uncovered, however, seemed so incredible that he was unsure whether any-
one else would believe them. In the course of his “History,” Freud would
revisit these doubts three times.
Wolves in a Walnut Tree
At the beginning of his analysis, the patient related a dream he remembered

from childhood. It took years to produce an interpretation. The dream
plays a role of key importance in the entire case history. Freud relied on it
in nearly every judgment he made about the patient, and it is from the
dream that Sergei Pankeev obtained his otherwise undeserved nickname,
which he carried with him into the history of psychoanalysis: the wolf-man.
The dream goes like this:
I dreamt that it was night and that I was lying in my bed. (My bed stood with
its foot towards the window; in front of the window there was a row of old
walnut trees. I know it was winter when I had the dream, and night-time.)
87
Suddenly the window opened of its own accord, and I was terrified
to see that
some white wolves were sitting on the big walnut tree in front of the window.
There were six or seven of them. The wolves were quite white, and looked
more like foxes or sheep-dogs, for they had big tails like foxes and they had
their ears pricked like dogs when they pay attention to something. In great ter-
ror, evidently of being eaten up by the wolves, I screamed and woke up.!?
Sergei associated the dream with the memory that his sister had once
shown him a wolf in a book of fairy tales to frighten him. Probably, he
thought, it was an illustration of the story “Little Red Riding Hood,” taken
from the volume by the brothers Grimm that was so popular in Russia.
However, he agreed with Freud that it could have been an illustration from
another fairy tale—possibly, “The Wolf and the Seven Little Goats.” In that
case it would be understandable why there were seven wolves in the tree.
Freud noted that the two tales had much in common: being eaten by a wolf,
cutting open the stomach, the little girl and goats emerging from the wolf’s
stomach. But the wolves in the tree simply sat there and watched, and it
was precisely this passive behavior that so frightened the patient.
Years of daily meetings passed, and the patient gradually filled in various
other details of his nightmare. At one point he decided that the window
that opened in his dream was his own eyes; Freud submitted that this
would mean that it was not the wolves carefully watching Sergei, but the
boy intently surveying something terrifying.
Through his work with Sergei, Freud formulated the concept of the “pri-
mal scene,” a central theme in psychoanalytic theory, which occurs when a
child views his parents having sex. Such a scene inspires the fear of castration
in the child. In those days, Freud thought that viewing such a primal scene
would necessarily have a specific effect on a neurotic’s further development.
The wolves were white because the sheets on which the boy’s parents lay
as they made love were white. The wolf in the picture from the book of fairy
tales that Sergei’s sister used to frighten him was scary because it stood in the
same position as the boy’s father had when he was caught in the act:
- straightened to full height, with one paw stretched forward. Like a detective,
the analyst deduced from these highly indirect signs not only the origin of
Sergei’s fixation on a certain coital position, but also the time when the pri-
mal scene took place—Sergei was one and a half years old; and the circum-
stances that caused the infant to bear witness to his parents’ sex life. The
conclusion that Freud feared the reader would have a hard time believing
was that the four-year-old’s dream of wolves in the walnut tree was an un-
conscious recollection of the scene of his parents making love, which he had
witnessed at the age of one and a half. This picture would become even more
unbelievable when the reader learned that on that summer night in 1888, the
Pankeevs had had sex in front of their little boy three times in a row.
The strange absence of common sense with which this last detail is as-
serted is a bit disconcerting. The fact that Freud himself believed such a tale
and that later researchers also failed to note its strangeness probably has
something to do with “the Russian stereotype,” a conception held by
Westerners that Russia is an exotic place where even the most incredible ex-
cesses are possible, be they political or sexual.?° Freud wrote that “it is per-
fectly possible” that a small child might witness the sex act of his parents,
and he insisted that such occurrences were not confined to “proletarian
families.”2! It is easy enough to imagine a husband and wife making love,
caught up in the heat of sudden desire, while their one-and-a-half-year-old
child sleeps in their bedroom by chance or because of an illness; it is harder
to believe that they would indulge in a massive, hours-long sexual feast in
the presence of their child, particularly in a huge manor house with all sorts
of nannies and servants on hand.
It might be credible that the images Sergei perceived at age one and a
half, tucked away in his unconscious, could have come out at age four in a
frightening dream and might later have been transformed into the symp-
toms that haunted him for the rest of his life; but it is impossible to believe
that a one-and-a-half-year-old child would have followed the entire endless
sex scene through before finally interrupting it with a scream, and that his
unconscious would have broken it all down into individual acts, counting
all the way to three.
Just in Case
These were not the only noticeable inconsistencies in the story of the wolf-
man’s infantile neurosis, but they did accentuate the artificiality of other el-
ements. Clearly, Freud was troubled by these discrepancies both while writ-
ing “From the History of an Infantile Neurosis” and for a time after its
publication. While working on the case history, Freud was totally con-
vinced that one-and-a-half-year-old Sergei really did witness the primal
scene and then later “remembered” it in distorted and encoded dream
form. But some time afterward, in his equally famous lectures, “An
Introduction to Psychoanalysis,” Freud confessed that such a strong as-
sumption was far from automatic. Childhood recollections like those of a
primal scene “are false most of the time ..., and occasionally are in total
contradiction with the historical truth.”
Freud found this amendment, which had to be introduced into his theory
of psychoanalysis, both striking and embarrassing. Indeed, it radically
twisted a picture that, had it been affirmed in fact, would have seemed as
convincing as a law of physics. In reality, “infantile experiences that are re-
constructed or revived through recollections during analysis may be in one
case unarguably false, in another undoubtedly true, but in most cases they
are a mix of truth and falsehood.” Sometimes, the primal scene was a mem-
89
ory of a true viewing of the parental sex act, while other times
it was the
patient’s fantasy, stored away in the subconscious and recalled as reality
in
the peculiar environment provided by analysis.
After this, Freud was forced to make yet another conclusion, one that led
him quite far from the picture of the world with which he began his re-
search. He found that fantasy also has the quality of psychic reality. “We
are gradually coming to the understanding that in the world of neuroses,
psychic reality is decisive, and therefore fantasy must be attributed impor-
tance equal to that of real events.” Freud’s new position was that events
such as a child’s observation of parental sexual relations, the seduction of a
child by an adult, or the threat of castration either actually happen or “are
composed out of hints, complemented by the imagination.” Regardless of
their source, the result was the same: neurosis. The founder of psycho-
analysis felt that his science had failed to show any difference in the conse-
quences, whether the childhood event was actual or fantasized. People had
an inherent, inborn mechanism for experiencing such events, and if reality
did not provide them, people would get by on fantasy.
Returning again to his “History of an Infantile Neurosis,” Freud was com-
pelled to make certain additions that strongly contradicted his original thesis.
In the new version, he allowed that the image of the sex act between parents
(as before, he had no doubt that the meaning of the wolf dream lay in
parental coitus) could have emerged from Sergei’s witnessing the mating of
sheep in his father’s flock. Perhaps he saw sheepdogs instead of sheep, which
would explain the white wolves. So, as it turned out, Sergei witnessed the
copulation of the sheepdogs three times. All this may inspire respect for the
author’s intellectual fortitude, but it does little to encourage faith in his inter-
pretation. Freud’s interpretation had been irrevocably deprived of the classi-
cal lucidity and purity that Jones had attributed to it.
In addition, the very idea of sheep shows that Freud was in the end unable
to resign himself to the compromise he attempted to make in his “Lectures.”
In fact, if it made no difference whether the patient witnessed the primal
scene in reality or in fantasy, then the whole history of the patient’s per-
sonality, as reconstructed by the psychoanalyst, loses all means of verifica-
tion. It becomes impossible to confirm or reject such stories using the “de-
tective” method so dear to Freud’s heart, whereby the analyst examines
each piece of factual evidence and deduces a consistent whole. It was no
accident that, as Pankeev informs us, Freud loved Arthur Conan Doyle so
much. Freud explained his collection of classical statuettes to Sergei in
much the same way: A psychoanalyst is like an archeologist, restoring
something whole out of a single, minuscule detail. But this detail must be
fact, not fiction. Therein lies the difference between fantasy and reality: It
is impossible to be sure of the former’s authenticity. When Freud spoke of
sheep, he meticulously proved that in those years Sergei did in fact see the
flocks of sheep that belonged to his father; but it is impossible to verify as-
sertions that in his early childhood Sergei simply imagined his parents
making love. There is no one to ask, apart from Sergei himself. There is
nothing with which to corroborate these fantasies and thus there is no way
to determine their veracity, nor at what time or age they appeared.
You’re Gonna Get It!

With his interest in Dostoevsky, Freud may have known of the Russian
writer’s childhood fear of wolves, a phobia that flowed through his pen
into the common domain. In one of his works, the nightmarish vision of a
wolf is chased away when Marei the peasant speaks the words of Christ
and places his finger to a frightened child’s lips.
In a similar vein, Osip Mandelstam wrote in 1908:77
In the wood there are Christmas trees

With golden tinsel blazing
In the thickets toy wolves are gazing
With terrifying eyes.
There is a certain resemblance between these lines and Pankeev’s dream.

In the visions of both Mandelstam and Pankeev, the wolves peer menac-
ingly out of the woods at the child (and do nothing else). Why were wolves
and fir trees so important to the nineteen-year-old poet that he would de-
scribe them in the opening lines of his first book of poetry? As with the
dream, the verse contains no inherent interpretation. “We envision death
coming like the wolf in a fairy tale,” wrote a youthful Mandelstam. But
many years later, he would tell death, “I am no wolf by blood.” Evidently,
the same images may be borne by the rhymed couplets of poets and the free
associations of patients undergoing psychotherapy.
The Christmas tree is an unusual point of intersection between nature
and culture, and its symbolic meaning is understood by any Russian child:
The tree is transported from the woods into the house, it hides gifts, and it
almost ceases to be threatening. The transport of the Christmas tree in-
doors, like Santa Claus, signifies dressing up, the carnival-like atmosphere
of the most important holiday of the year. Disturbed children, who grow up
to be patients and poets, do not accept the metaphor offered by grown-ups,
seizing instead on literal meaning: A forest is still a forest, and wolves in a
fir tree are still scary wolves, even if they are just ornaments. This infantile
refusal to accept the juxtaposition of nature and culture, forest and home is
particularly clear in Mandelstam’s short poem.
But Pankeev did not see his wolves in a fir tree, nor did he see them in
just any tree. He saw them “in a walnut tree.” This seems to be the only de-
tail in the dream that Freud refrained from interpreting, contrary to his
OH
own methodological principle by which the most important elements

in
dream interpretation are those that seem meaningless and unrelated to
the
subject matter and the dreamer’s libidinal experience. The fact that the tree
in Pankeev’s dream was a walnut is just such a detail; but nevertheless,
Freud only mentioned it in passing.
It is difficult to reinterpret a dream that took place a century ago. It is
even more unthinkable to attempt to complement or correct Freud’s analy-
sis, which has significance only as a unified whole. However, one such at-
tempt was made, and it attained a degree of notoriety. In 1926, immedi-
ately after a clash with Freud, Otto Rank offered his own interpretation of
Pankeev’s dream. The wolves in the tree, he said, were a reflection of the
photographs of Freud’s six closest disciples, the members of the so-called
Committee (including Rank himself). The patient had seen them in Freud’s
office, then dreamed about the wolves—a dream in no way drawn from his
childhood. Freud was forced to go back to Pankeev for more confirmation
that his former patient did indeed have the dream as a child.”3
There is still one point that I would like to bring out, particularly since it
may have been inaccessible to Freud, for obvious technical reasons. We
know that Sergei learned German from a certain Herr Riedel, who passed
several successive summers at the Pankeevs’ southern estate. The lessons
ended when the teacher fell in love with Sergei’s sister, who was fifteen or
sixteen years old, and was turned away. This means that Sergei began
studying German when he was ten years old. Even sixty-odd years after he
met Freud, years that he spent almost entirely in Vienna, Pankeev still
spoke German with a slight Russian accent.*4
Opinions vary among psychoanalysts as to whether analysis can be car-
ried out in a language other than the patient’s mother tongue. Theoretically,
the answer should be negative. One might amend Lacan’s famous formula,
which states that the unconscious is structured like a language, and assert
that it is structured like a person’s native language. All of the symbolic ma-
terial related to childhood events is preserved within the protective covering
of the native tongue. Whether these symbols are extracted from memory, as
the psychologist would claim, or from the subconscious, as the psychoana-
lyst would maintain, anyone can see that this difficult process of rediscoy-
ering events from early childhood is made even more difficult when the pa-
tient is forced to translate the material from his “childhood” language into
one of his “adult” ones, a language acquired much later. Each language has
its own rules, idioms, sayings, and phonetic associations that are crucial to
any analysis and yet often simply untranslatable from one language to an-
other. This process is at least as difficult as the translation of poetry, which
is feasible only for professionals—and even then often with great difficulty
and inevitable losses in meaning. It would be strange to expect a patient to
be capable of more.
But psychoanalysis is a practical discipline, and if Freud had really be-

lieved in such a principle, his doctrine never would have gotten beyond the
bounds of the German language. In fact, Freud’s solution to this question
was purely pragmatic: Pankeev was left to cope as best he could with his lin-
guistic difficulties, and Freud was free to interpret his patient’s German as he
saw fit. At the same time, the possibility can never be denied that material
presented by the patient in translation from his native tongue into the ana-
lyst’s language might have been interpreted quite differently in the original.
There is a common Russian idiom, one that any child would know:
“Poluchish’ na orekhi!” This expression—the equivalent of the English
phrase “You’re going to get it!”—might be used by a mother, father, grand-
mother, or nanny if they are angry with a child and want to threaten him or
her with punishment. The origin of this popular expression is unclear; but
the expression is the more peculiar in that it is usually used with very young
children. Its meaning might well be ambiguous to such children and thus all
the more disconcerting: The phrase could be misunderstood as “I'll give
you something to buy nuts with!”; or in a more threatening idiomatic vein,
“[Il give you one on the nuts!” But what nuts? the hearer might well won-
der; for the Russian word “orekhi” does not carry the same figurative
meaning as the modern English slang word. In addition, because “orekhi”
can mean “nut trees” as well as “nuts,” a child might misunderstand this
expression as “You’re gonna get some in the nut trees!” In this connection,
remember that according to Sergei Pankeev’s story, a row of walnut trees
stood just outside his bedroom window.
Freud wrote that it was approximately at the age of two or three years
that Sergei began playing with his penis in front of his nanny, “which, as
with many cases when children do not conceal their masturbation, should
be viewed as an attempt at seduction.” In response, as far as Freud knew,
the nanny declared to the boy that children who did that got a “sore” on
their private parts. However, a somewhat different scene, truer to life,
might have unfolded, a scene in which the nanny, seeing the boy amusing
himself with his sexual organ, threatened to give it to him, as he thought,
“in the nut trees.” In his rising fear and guilt, the boy would have won-
dered what terrible thing went on in the nut trees; and so, a little later, he
had a dream in which he supplied the most comprehensible answer.
Pankeev’s dream becomes understandable in light of this idiom, and it
can be interpreted as the realization of his fear of punishment, extrapolat-
ing simple visual imagery from the usual threat “You’re going to get it!”
Wolves, the most horrible thing he knew both from life and from fairy
tales, were sitting in a nut tree. Considering everything we know from
Freud about Sergei’s childhood, the dream can be understood as a reflection
of the boy’s fear of castration, a terror that came from his nanny—the focal
point of his libido.
93
Childhood with a Nanny

Russian culture has always been full of nannies and grannies, at least since
Pushkin’s famous nanny, Arina Rodionovna. Her absurd image as the great
poet’s true muse, his inspiration and tutor, deeply infiltrated the mass con-
sciousness of generations of Russian and Soviet schoolchildren. The institu-
tion of the nanny is firmly rooted in Russian national tradition, along with
a particular affection for ancestors. The psychological structure that lies be-
hind this tradition is markedly different from the general European mindset
and stands in even sharper contrast to the American psyche.
This phenomenon immediately attracted the attention of psychoanalysts
as soon as they began thinking about Russia. Two classic papers written by
psychoanalysts about Russians—Freud’s monograph on Pankeev and
Erikson’s essay on Gorky—treat this theme as a key point. The protagonists
in Sergei’s early childhood recollections are his Russian nanny and a series
of French and English governesses. To Freud, the nanny was the central ob-
ject of little Sergei’s sexual attraction. The nanny was not only the focal
point of his libido, she also had power over its expression: After she threat-
ened Sergei, he immediately stopped masturbating. This, according to
Freud’s system, knocked him back in development to an earlier, anal-
sadistic phase.
In Erikson’s view, the grandmother was the dominant image in little
Alexei Peshkov’s surroundings.*° Erikson saw her as the image of paradise
lost, of a timeless existence that he considered characteristic of Russians.
The grandmother was the symbol of Russian political apathy, the essence of
Russia’s inertia, and the reason for the Russian people’s childlike gullibil-
ity.2° Perhaps she was the very asset “that makes a people endure and per-
mits it to wait,” as Erikson noted sarcastically in 1950.7” According to him,
agrarian Russia was characterized by diffused motherhood, so children
were protected from “exclusive maternal fixation” and instead received “a
whole repertoire of giving and frustrating maternal images.” This meant
grandmothers, nannies, aunts, neighbor ladies, and so forth. This made the
world “a more reliable home, since mothering was not dependent on one
frail relationship, but was a matter of homogeneous atmosphere.””8
The nanny is a professional in child rearing, something like a prostitute
in the field of sex; she should be skilled, but love is by no means neces-
sary.2? Her monopolistic control is far more effective than the control of the
parents, who are busy with their own affairs and rarely coordinate their ef-
forts in child rearing. Matronly and asexual, she is devoid of both the
mother’s erotic attraction and the father’s libido, which stimulates growth
and challenges the child to compete. The nanny can do only one thing for
the child, but it is something she does faithfully and effectively: She draws
him or her into the value system of traditional peasant culture. This is ex-
actly the nanny’s function—to transmit traditional culture between genera-

tions. Smoothing and muffling intellectual parents’ cultural deviations, the
nanny forces each generation to begin its search anew, from the node of
frozen peasant tradition.
“Tt is not universities that raise the true Russian, but kind, illiterate nan-
nies,” Rozanov concluded approvingly. When a different mood struck the
philosopher, it was to the nannies that he turned for salvation: “Old, sweet
grannies, keep the Russian truth. Keep it safe; there is no one else who
will.”3° It was with horror that Andrei Bely recalled being left for a time
without his nanny at age four: “I was totally defenseless: no nanny, no
bonne; my parents were there, but they were tearing me in two; I over-
flowed with fear and anguish.”?! As one last bit of documentary evidence,
we will refer to Leon Bakst’s portrait of Sergey Diaghilev, a marvelous spec-
imen of his generation.** Surprisingly enough, the famed impresario, cos-
mopolitan and homosexual, is not portrayed against the background of an
applauding concert hall or fluttering ballet dancers; instead, sitting near
him, in the corner, is his wrinkled nanny.
Logically speaking, if motherhood is not individualized, then fatherhood
simply ceases to exist; if motherhood is diffused in the atmosphere, then fa-
therhood is no more than a mere symbol. According to Freud’s description,
Sergei’s libido was transferred from his nanny to his father at a time when
the latter had long since left home.?? Elsewhere, Freud related the story of
Pankeev at age six: He had not seen his father for many months, when his
mother one day promised the children she would take them to the city and
show them something they would like. She took the children to the sanato-
rium, where they saw their father; “he looked ill, and the boy felt very sorry
for him.”*4
Oedipus would hardly have felt at home in such a situation, with the ma-
ternal element distributed among grannies and nannies, while the paternal
element just looks on pitifully from the sidelines. Whom is the little boy to
want, from whom is he to liberate himself, for whom and with whom is he
to fight, when he is confronted only by his nanny’s relentlessly persistent
control and aged flesh? Dionysus would have felt much more comfortable
in Alexei’s or Sergei’s shoes. Strange as it may seem, it was exactly in the
world of Dionysus that the two men lived, a world of grandmotherly fairy
tales about eternal resurrection and sexless love. The multifarious rejec-
tions of maleness in the works of Pankeev’s contemporaries such as Andrei
Bely, Vyacheslav Ivanov, and Nikolai Berdyaev are more easily understood
when viewed as the result of an attraction to paradise lost; not the paradise
of feminine, maternal sexuality, but that of grandmotherly asexuality. Their
childhood stories, embodied and justified through the work of Dionysian
Russian symbolists and the androgyny of Russian neoplatonists, were not
all that different from “From the History of an Infantile Neurosis.”
95
Russia Is a Sphinx!
Freud considered ambivalence his Russian patient’s most identifiable charac-
teristic, and he had no shortage of strong epithets to describe this feature.
Pankeev’s ambivalence seemed to Freud “extraordinarily clear, intense and
protracted” and even “unbelievable.”25 Freud also deemed his Russian col-
league Sabina Spielrein “abnormally ambivalent.”3 There is no doubt that
Freud was in this case influenced by cultural stereotypes. In October of 1920,
Freud confided to Zweig, “Even Russians who are not neurotic are also very
noticeably ambivalent.”%” In the same letter, he wrote that “ambivalence is a
legacy from the psychic life of primitive races; with the Russian people, how-
ever, it is far better preserved and has remained more accessible to conscious-
ness than elsewhere, as I was able to point out only a few years ago in the de-
tailed case history of a typical Russian.”** In his work on Dostoevsky, Freud
repeats more or less the same idea: “A man who alternately sins and then in
his remorse sets high moral standards ... reminds one of the barbarians.
... Ivan the Terrible behaved in exactly this way; indeed, this compromise
with morality is a characteristic Russian trait.”>?
Another of Pankeev’s characteristics was narcissism of a breathtaking in-
tensity. Freud noted yet a third feature common to Pankeev and
Dostoevsky: bisexuality. Freud found in the latter “a clearly expressed bi-
sexual tendency,” while the former’s “homosexual attitude ... persisted in
him as an unconscious force with ... very great tenacity.”*° Moreover,
Freud reminded his reader, from the very start of Pankeev’s analysis “all
work was centered on the effort to open up his unconscious relations to
men.” Sergei’s suppression of his homosexuality explained in part his in-
ability to remain faithful to any woman for long, a tendency that disturbed
him greatly.*!
Freud drew a connection between Pankeev’s latent homosexuality and
his fantasies of rebirth. Around this time, Jung began to speak of rebirth
fantasies as the most basic content of a neurotic’s unconscious life. Freud
used the Pankeev case to take up the theoretical debate, insisting that fan-
tasies of rebirth also derive from the “primal scene.” But anyone obsessed
by such fantasies identifies with the passive actor in the scene rather than
the active one: with the mother, not the father. In much the same way,
Pankeev’s fantasy indicates his desire to step into a woman’s shoes; to re-
place his own mother, make love with his father, and give birth to his child.
“Here, therefore, the phantasy of re-birth was simply a mutilated and cen-
sored version of the homosexual wish-phantasy.”**
Freud dedicated a good deal of space in his case history to four-year-old
Pankeev’s earliest religious impressions. He begins this analysis with the
caveat that he had found it hard to believe at first Sergei’s insistence that
certain conclusions subtle enough to be the product of an adult mind origi-
nated in his early childhood. Nevertheless, Freud takes this placement in

time at face value. When the boy learned about the passion of Christ, he
was indignant at the behavior of God-the-Father. “If he were almighty,” the
boy reasoned, “then it was his fault that men were wicked and tormented
others and were sent to Hell for it. He ought to have made them good; he
was responsible himself for all wickedness and all torments.”** Around the
same time, Sergei’s sadistic streak began to show through in his treatment
of animals. His sadism made him feel like God-the-Father; his masochism
made him feel like Christ himself. He would blaspheme and then make the
sign of the cross to atone for his sin. Whenever he did this, he would
breathe in or out deeply, bringing the Holy Spirit into his game as well.
However, all this ended at the age of ten in a feeling of total indifference to
God, when a young German tutor was invited to take over his daily care
and education. “His piety sank away with his dependence upon his father,
who was replaced by a new and more sociable father.”**
Freud noted that Pankeev’s piety had generally developed under feminine
influences (his mother’s and nanny’s), while the masculine influence would
have facilitated his emancipation from religion.*> He drew the conclusion
that Sergei’s struggle against religion was directly linked to his suppressed
and improperly sublimated homosexuality. The suppression of forceful ho-
mosexual feelings relegated this indispensable part of his spiritual life to a
place too deeply buried in the unconscious. “For this reason, the patient was
without all those social interests which give a content to life,” Freud con-
cludes this section with unexpected pathos. “It was only when, during the
analytic treatment, it became possible to liberate his shackled homosexuality
that .. . each piece of the homosexual libido . . . sought out some application
in life and some attachment to the great common concerns of mankind.”*¢
This text was written as a dry, clinical description. Here and there, how-
ever, it contains some glimpses of emotional timbre. Here we have a case
that Freud chose from among a myriad of similar cases, all of which must
have been interesting and important in some way. Why did the founder of
psychoanalysis choose the case of Sergei P. for his monograph? Was it mere
chance that his favorite patient, like his favorite author, was Russian? It
seems that the mention of “characteristically Russian traits,” scattered
throughout Freud’s texts, bears witness to the fact that, just as Pankeev
“preferred the German element” (and this, according to Freud, “created a
great advantage for transference during treatment”), Freud felt drawn to
the “Russian element” and felt that Russian material would give him a cer-
tain advantage in comprehension and exposition.
In the end, the characteristically Russian traits pointed out here by Freud—
ambivalence, bargaining with the conscience, and bisexuality—are character-
istic of many neurotics. Could it be that Freud was drawn to Pankeev and
Dostoevsky because, due to some Russian peculiarities of which he was
O77
aware, their conscious minds had more direct access to the universal mecha-
nisms of the unconscious? This image of Russians as creatures closely en-
gaged with the subconscious was widespread in both external and internal
perceptions of Russian culture at the time. In 1911, Alexander Blok, whose
poetry dealt with dreams no less often than did Freud’s analysis, wrote to
Andrei Bely, “We are living these deep and disturbing dreams, and we have to
constantly jump up in the middle of the night to chase them away.”47
As Freud began his second analysis of Pankeevy, in 1918, Blok was writing
his poem, “The Scythians,” a work as inspired as it is bizarre. In this famous
poem, Blok compared Russia to a sphinx, while he likened the European
West to Oedipus. Unlike other sphinxes, this particular beast was most terri-
fying in its love. Addressing the West in the guise of Oedipus, Blok wrote:
That Sphinx is Russia, grieving and exulting,

And weeping black and bloody tears enough,
She stares at you, adoring and insulting,
With love that turns to hate, and hate—to love.
Yes, love! For you of Western lands and birth
No longer know the love our blood enjoys.
You have forgotten there’s a love on Earth
That burns like fire and, like all fire, destroys.*8
This metaphor was the inverse of Freud’s, in that Oedipus is active and
ambivalent. In this case, oedipal qualities are attributed to the sphinx. The
image of the sphinx was popular, and Russians tended to identify more
with the sphinx than with Oedipus. Vyacheslav Ivanov wrote of this ten-
dency: “We see ourselves together in the Sphinx.” Blok, however, went
much further.
Blok’s Russia correlated with the West as Freud’s unconscious correlated
with the conscious: It had no sense of time (“For you centuries pass, for us
a single hour”); it had no qualms about contradiction (“grieving and exult-
ing”); it had no measure or boundary (“there are millions of you, but un-
counted hordes of us”); it did not discriminate, forget, or sublimate (“We
love everything. ... We remember everything. ... We love the flesh”); and
it narcissistically blended “I” with “we.” In Blok’s poem, moreover, emo-
tional ambivalence is emphasized several times in a row: Hate and love, re-
joicing and gloom meld into one. This kind of love, long since forgotten in
the West, leads to death:
We love raw flesh, its colour and its stench.

We love to taste it in our hungry maws.
Are we to blame then, if your ribs should crunch,
Fragile between our massive, gentle paws???
And so, the Russian sphinx’s central riddle is the ambivalence of love, in-
nate in the barbarous Scythians but incomprehensible to Western men. As
surprising as it may seem, in essence Blok had in mind here the same idea
that Freud expressed in a letter to Zweig—that emotional ambivalence was
a primitive trait, preserved more in Russians than in other nations.
On the other hand, Freud’s assertion that ambivalence was characteristic
even of Russians who were not neurotic is difficult to prove with this exam-
ple. “The Scythians” was ripening in Blok’s mind just around the time
when Yury Kannabikh diagnosed him as neurasthenic and he began taking
bromine treatment. Fifteen years earlier, during the first rosy days of his re-
lationship with his future wife—a relationship that probably came no more
easily to him than it did to Pankeev—Blok already felt that “when the dual-
ity that lies in every human soul awakes, it shows its sharp and merciless
features—this duality must be defeated.” Here Blok emphasized the word
“every,” implying that this unsettling duality was a universal, not patholog-
ical, trait. But at that time Blok was still far from taking pride in this du-
plicity, in contrast to his attitude during the late revolutionary period. On
the contrary, it was a flaw that “must be defeated,” and “there is no solu-
tion, other than a constant struggle,” for happiness could only be
“achieved consciously, one way or another.”°°
During the same years, actor Mikhail Chekhov was suffering from a seri-
ous nervous disorder. He was treated by psychiatrists, hypnotists, and psy-
choanalysts, but in the end the extraordinary actor was able to cure himself
(see chapter 4). He later described the sensation that he believed had helped
him to weather his crisis: “I perceived good and evil, right and wrong,
beautiful and ugly, strong and weak, healthy and sickly, great and small as
a kind of oneness. ...I did not believe in straightforward, simple psycho-
logical systems. ... They did not take into account that to be human means
to reconcile opposites.”>!
Chekhov believed that he had been taught this truly “Scythian” defini-
tion of man by Russian life itself, with all its contrasts. For example, when
he was a schoolboy, his family had controlled his every move, but his fa-
ther, an alcoholic (who had written books on the harmful effects of drink-
ing), once gave him three rubles to hire a prostitute. Reading Dostoevsky
also served him well in living with the paradoxes of life. In much the same
way, Bely drew his “dialectic” out of a childhood need to bridge the gulf
between himself and his parents, between his father and mother, and be-
tween various authorities.°? Such a “dialectic,” reconciling and intertwin-
ing the opposite forces in life as if contradictions do not exist, is another
way to describe the ambivalence that so surprised Freud in Russians. It
would be only a short time before the “dialectic” became the logical basis
and justification for the intellectual authoritarianism that was to take shape
in the Soviet state.
99
In general, the particular themes that Freud injected into his description
of Pankeev’s case resonate deeply with the basic themes in the “Russian
idea,” themes that ring clear in the novels, poems, and philosophical trea-
tises written by Pankeev’s countrymen throughout the years of his child-
hood and youth (see chapter 2). We see this in a rationalistic critique of re-
ligion coexisting peacefully with a vague sort of mysticism; in an obsession
with death and rebirth; in an unusual focus on issues of homosexuality,
sodomy, and androgyny; and in a strikingly intense inner life combined
with complaints of a lack of real social concern.
We do not know, nor will we ever know, what was really going on in
Pankeev’s mind as described by Freud, or in the Russian soul in general as
described by the philosophers and poets of the Silver Age. All that we have
is portraits and self-portraits; but when a variety of images overlap, we can
begin to guess at the reality underneath. It is difficult to say on which level
these coincidences exist: whether they are the product of stereotyped per-
ception, and in part self-perception by a certain culture; or evidence of a
deep commonality, observed equally on many levels. Could the images of
man proposed by Freud’s psychoanalysis of an infantile neurosis, by
Russian symbolist poetry, and by Russian religious philosophy truly be var-
ious facets of a single, credible syndrome? Were particular features of this
syndrome inherent in people of that time, in a sociological and statistical
sense?
Here the relationship between Sergei Pankeev and Alexander Blok is use-
ful, both in their parallels and differences. Pankeev offers us the image of a
Russian Oedipus, resigned to the position that the Western sphinx has put
him in, and throughout his long life never quite solving the sphinx’s ratio-
nalistic riddle. Blok represents the Russian sphinx, mysterious and two-
faced, shining and absurd, threatening, but more frightening to itself than
to anyone else. Soon after he had issued a call to revolution “with all your
body, with all your heart, with all your consciousness,” after he had written
the gospel of the revolution and accepted a job in the Ministry of
Education, Blok died in a psychotic crisis comparable only to Nietzsche’s
horrid end.
We know from psychoanalysis and from cultural history that there is no
such thing as coincidence. These themes were very familiar and important
to Russian intellectuals of that time, and Freud knew this circle of people: It
was the pool from which he drew his patients, and later, from which he se-
lected a sufficiently representative character for his case history. His judg-
ment was perfect. The analysis of the infantile neurosis revealed the very
same key problems and characteristic features that became clear as the
most developed cultural class reached the apogee of its development. Little
Sergei Pankeev’s subconscious exhibited the same motifs as the highest,
professionally sublimated levels of his native culture.
Russian philosophers never shied away from such correlations, which

might seem to today’s readers a bit too direct. According to Fyodor Stepun,
“our personal feelings unexpectedly brought us to ask the ultimate moral
and even theological questions.”»°* It could be that Freud’s notions about
Russians’ psychological features were no more than illusions of perception
and self-perception, born of historical circumstances and ethnocultural
stereotypes, both of which inevitably influence the thinking of even the
most sophisticated observers. In any case, as far as is known, Freud’s
ideas—whether accurate or not—had no consequences outside the intellec-
tual realm. Meanwhile, Blok’s “Scythians” played a role in the populariza-
tion of Eurasianness, a concept that in the 193(s thrust the Russian dias-
pora into the “massive, gentle paws” of the KGB.
A verse by Tyutchev suggests yet another explanation for the sphinx’s
power. Although Tyutchev’s words were applied to evoke an image of na-
ture, they could equally well be applied to Russia (indeed, they may well
have served as a springboard for Blok’s poem):
Nature is a Sphinx. Her inquisition

Can, thus, more surely break the man she tries;
For fear may put an edge on her perdition,
That in her timeless bulk no riddle lies.**
This verse carries the same Russian ambiguity, dialectic, and ambivalence
as Blok’s “Scythians”; but what ruse or ploy could the Russian sphinx use
to lure and destroy human beings, if it had no riddle to recite? And if it held
no riddle, then what did Freud find so interesting in Russians?
Nevertheless, the end of our century, so different from its beginning, hints
at just such an interpretation of the “Russian idea”: “That in her timeless
bulk no riddle lies.” If we find this convincing, then yet another, more prag-
matic explanation of Freud’s gravitation toward the Russian “element”
suggests itself. Complex and dubious constructions are easier to accept
(even for their author) in an exotic context, even more so in a context that
is buttressed by preexisting stereotypes. Russian material was particularly
valuable to Freud because it provided certain advantages. Pankeev’s story
was written by and large in refutation of the criticism that had been leveled
at the “primal scene” theory by Freud’s disciples as they distanced them-
selves from him. Many a radical intellectual has endowed his story with
some modicum of verisimilitude by setting the scene in an exotic country
about which little is known and therefore in which anything seems possi-
ble. Thus, Russian romantics sent their heroes off to run with the gypsies or
to the Caucasus; Montesquieu portrayed his ideas as they would be imple-
mented in Persia; Nietzsche placed his Ubermensch in more or less the same
area; Bogdanov was forced to launch his social ideal even further afield, on
101
Mars; and Lévi-Strauss discovered his ideas among the savage Indians.
When Charles Fourier, a century before Freud, had need of material for his
ideas about a new world of love where all passions—even the most un-
usual—would find guaranteed satisfaction, his favorite example turned out
to be of Russian descent as well: a certain Muscovite princess Stroganoff so
bothered her serving girl, that by her example Fourier discovered “uncon-
scious lesbian” passion.®> Freud was interested in psychological theories
and the specific human lives that could confirm them, rather than some so-
cial utopia, but the function of exotic material in his work remained the
same. Exoticism became necessary when it seemed that his doctrine might
expand beyond the bounds of credibility.
Recollections of Psychoanalysis
Later, the “wolf-man” became a celebrity. More and more psychoanalysts
of the Old and New Worlds sought to meet with him, as he was one of the
few patients of Freud’s who were accessible to the public. Two parts of
Pankeev’s memoirs, along with essays about him written by his other two
psychoanalysts, were released in the same volume as a republication of
Freud’s “From the History of an Infantile Neurosis.” A Viennese journalist
interviewed Pankeev toward the end of his life, in the middle of the 1970s,
and after his death she put out a book drawing on her conversations with
the “wolf-man.” In the interview, Pankeev spoke of Freud one moment,
and described his latest lover the next. We hear the voice of a man whose
life was strange and broken, but in his cultural milieu this was nothing re-
markable. Having lived the larger part of his life as an émigré, he tells the
young, curious Viennese woman of Kerensky and Lenin, of Pasternak and
Solzhenitsyn. Some of his musings are interesting in their own right: For ex-
ample, he notes the similarity between Tolstoy’s departure from home and
his subsequent death and the circumstances surrounding Verkhovensky’s
flight and death in Dostoevsky’s The Demons. For us, of course, Pankeev’s
most interesting statements relate to how, at the end of his life, he viewed
the influence that psychoanalysis had on him.
Generally speaking, he was skeptical. “What is less good about psycho-
analysis is that one gets used to living according to another person’s guid-
ance. I would say that psychoanalysis weakens the ego. It may perhaps re-
lieve the id somewhat, but the ego suffers because it submits to an
authority.”5¢ Elsewhere he formulated his dissatisfaction in a different way:
Psychoanalysts were “always the same.”
They only go by what Freud discovered. By those principles and symbols, and
they aren’t getting beyond that. I read about Lenin, that his success was due to
“All
the fact that he was always in tune with the times. He said, for example,
power to the Soviets.” Two months later he said, “That’s no longer relevant,
times have changed. We will accomplish nothing if we keep doing the same
thing.” But the psychoanalysts forever do the same thing. They make no
progress. Today, I am more critical of psychoanalysis.°”
This quote might be amusing, were it not coming from a man who had
spent a huge amount of time with Freud himself, from a man to whom
Freud jokingly referred as “a piece of psychoanalysis” and of whose recov-
ery Freud seemed to have no doubt.
Pankeev did identify two elements that he had found useful: Freud’s pos-
itive attitude toward Therese, and the “paternal transference” that immedi-
ately took place, with Freud generating in him feelings that were similar to
those he had toward his father.
We learn from Pankeev’s memoirs that the first question he asked Freud
concerned his relationship with Therese: Should I marry her or not? “Had
Professor Freud, like the other doctors whom I had seen previously, said
‘No,’ I would certainly not have stayed with him.”*® But Freud gave a dif-
ferent answer: Maybe, but let us wait a few months, till the analysis is com-
plete, and then we shall see. The analysis was completed, as we already
know, four years later. All this time, Sergei corresponded with and periodi-
cally visited Therese. “I would have married Therese then and there, had
this not been contrary to the rule Professor Freud had laid down.”»? In the
end, the Professor made an unusual move, and agreed to see Therese. He
liked her very much. A good deal later, in 1970, Pankeev would say that it
was this promised and tensely awaited denouement that served as the pri-
mary catalyst of his cure.
However, Sergei’s father and his relationship with his son were much
more central, to Freud’s way of thinking, than was Therese. In his memoirs,
Pankeev repeated Freud’s words several times, words that are truly difficult
to forget: “You are lucky your father died. Otherwise, you would have had
no chance to get well.”°° Pankeev only superficially understood what Freud
was suggesting. “What he had in mind was that if my father had not died, I
would have been unable to create a transference.” The transference was in-
tense, and the Russian patient was forced to work through the positive and
negative facets of the psychoanalytically induced phenomenon. Until the
end of his days, he felt a deep gratitude to Freud, and at the same time
blamed him for many of his misfortunes.
From Analysis to Analysis

As the deadline that Freud had set for the completion of Pankeev’s analysis
approached, the patient began to produce more recollections of early child-
103
hood trauma. In turn, the analyst became acquainted with his patient’s
lover and gave his blessing to their marriage. The two men were satisfied;
both had what they wanted.
Their last session took place on July 29, 1914. The day before, Crown
Prince Ferdinand of Austria and his wife had been killed in Sarajevo. As he
parted ways with his patient, Freud noted that if Ferdinand had come to
power, Austria would have been drawn into war with Russia.®! As we
know, this event nonetheless did come about, even absent Ferdinand; the
powers of comprehension are limited, even in the most intelligent of men.
In the short epilogue to “From the History of an Infantile Neurosis,”
Freud wrote about the conclusion of Sergei’s analysis: “I parted from him,
regarding him as cured, a few weeks before the unexpected outbreak of the
Great War; and I did not see him again until the shifting chances of war had
given the Central European powers access to South Russia.”
The war began a few hours after Sergei crossed the Russian border.
Therese Keller and her daughter Elsa remained for the time being in
Munich. When Pankeev arrived home, his mother ordered a church service
to celebrate her son’s cure. Their parish priest intoned a prayer in honor of
Sergei and his doctor, “Sigismund.” Sergei felt splendid on his estate near
Odessa, where he succeeded in evading the draft, as he was his mother’s
only son. Despite his mother’s objections, he began preparations to obtain a
Russian visa for Therese, who was now the national of a belligerent state.
Sergei was successful in this as well. Therese left her daughter in Munich
and traversed Romania. They were married. Around the same time, Sergei
passed his exams at the law department of the University of Odessa by cor-
respondence. Everything was going well, apart from the conflicts between
Therese and her new mother-in-law.
In 1918, Austro-German forces entered Odessa and renamed occupied
Ukraine the “Hetman Republic.” Meanwhile, news arrived that Elsa had
contracted tuberculosis, and Therese left as soon as she was able to obtain
a visa, traveling to Munich by way of Kiev. In November, the Central
Powers suffered utter defeat. Odessa was soon occupied by the English,
French, and Poles. The ruble underwent a catastrophic devaluation. The
Odessa branch of the Russian Bank burned to the ground, sending all of
the Pankeevs’ capital up in smoke. What was left was spent on acquiring
visas and emigrating.
On May 29, 1918, Freud wrote to Lou Andreas-Salomé that he had re-
ceived a letter from Odessa. “The young man ... whom after three and a
half years’ treatment I had discharged as cured, as I thought, on as July
1914 ... has become my enemy, who might, for all I know, have fired on
my eldest son.”®? The war was still raging, and this young man, nonethe-
less, was asking for another meeting. Without confiding his motives in Lou,
Freud asked her to come to Vienna, for the sake of “your six big brothers,
who were all so nice to you,” and take up his old patient’s case in his stead.
Lou, however, did not come.
This sort of situation, in which an analyst perceives his patient in the
context of the former’s own intense personal struggle (in this case, also a
situation of political battle) and projects his unfounded fears on that pa-
tient, is a fairly characteristic, though not classic, case of countertransfer-
ence. It must have had a certain therapeutic effect, but Freud never again
mentioned his worries that the Russian he had cured would become fatally
connected with his son while fighting on the Russian front. Then again, he
did pen a metaphorical passage in “From the History of an Infantile
Neurosis,” likening Pankeev’s difficult and plodding treatment to “the situ-
ation ... when ... an enemy army needs weeks and months to make its
way across a stretch of country which in times of peace was traversed by an
express train in a few hours and which only a short time before had been
passed over by the defending army in a few days.”°®* Drawing on what we
know of this case, the only external manifestation of Freud’s own unana-
lyzed emotions appears in his persistent attempts to send his patient to an-
other analyst. In such a context, it is also curious that these appeals were
made to women, that is to people without military responsibilities, and that
these analysts were all “belligerent” nationals—Lou Andreas-Salomé, a
Russian, and Ruth Mack Brunswick, an American.
In April 1919 Pankeev nevertheless made his way to Vienna. Freud pre-
sented him with a copy of “From the History of an Infantile Neurosis”
with a friendly inscription. He noticed that Pankeev evidenced a small re-
mainder of unanalyzed emotion, and took up his treatment again himself.
These sessions lasted from September 1919 until Easter of 1920. Under the
circumstances, Freud felt compelled to give his patient money from time to
time. Sergei then found a job as a humble clerk in an insurance company,
where he would work until his retirement, at the point at which he became
eligible for an Austrian pension.
The impetus for this new round of analysis was a digestive problem.
Sergei explained this problem as the result of an unsuccessful previous
treatment he had received from Doctor Droznes in Odessa, whereby the
physician had prescribed medicines designed for animals. Freud interpreted
these symptoms differently: “He then came to Vienna and reported that im-
mediately after the end of the treatment he had been seized with a longing
to tear himself free from my influence. After a few months’ work a piece of
the transference which had not hitherto been overcome was successfully
dealt with. Since then the patient has felt normal and has behaved unexcep-
tionably, in spite of the war having robbed him of his home, his posses-
sions, and all his family relationships. It may be that his very misery,
by gratifying his sense of guilt, contributed to the consolidation of his
recovery.”®
105
Later, Pankeev concluded that if he had gone home while Odessa was
oc-
cupied by the English, he could have saved the remainder of his fortune;
but Freud would not let him go, explaining his desire to return home as a
form of neurotic resistance. By the time Sergei’s problems with transference
and abnormal peristalsis had been solved to Freud’s satisfaction, the Reds
had arrived in Odessa.
In 1926, a nearly insolvent Pankeev came to Freud for the third time
with hypochondriacal complaints that bordered on paranoid delusions.
After a minor nasal cavity operation, he had begun to fear that his nose was
on the verge of falling apart from scars, cracks, or something of the sort.
Dermatologists had been unable to help him; they had insisted that every-
thing was fine.
This time, Freud ended up sending Pankeev to his colleague Ruth Mack
Brunswick, who was living in Vienna at the time. It is difficult to say what
played a more important role in this decision—countertransference and a
guilt complex linked to the patient, Freud’s disappointment at the failure of
what he thought had been successful therapy, the fact that he was busy with
other patients, or financial difficulties. The septuagenarian professor had
just reduced the number of his patients in 1926 from six to five, at the same
time raising his fee from 20 to 25 U.S. dollars per session. On the other
hand, Pankeev recalled, Freud demanded that his followers receive at least
one patient for free. These are clearly the terms under which Brunswick
took him on. Although he had been severely hurt himself by the inflation of
the Austrian kronen, Freud helped his former patient for many years, slip-
ping him the few dollars or pounds sterling he received from foreign clients.
Pankeev’s sessions with Brunswick lasted five months. She was certain of
the diagnosis: hypochondriacal, paranoid delirium. It should be said that
her clinical report on this case evinces much less respect for the patient than
did Freud’s “From the History of an Infantile Neurosis.” In it, Brunswick
confesses that at first she had trouble believing that the man before her was
the same as the intelligent and honest wolf-man of Freud’s descriptions. She
saw a psychotic whose primary characteristics were hypocrisy, narcissism,
and avarice. Was this a personality change or an illusion induced by coun-
tertransference? Paul Roazen, who closely examined Brunswick’s own clin-
ical history, was inclined to suspect the latter. Brunswick, who had been a
longtime patient of Freud’s, perceived his former favorite as a competitor.°°
Pankeev recalled that he was so indignant at the diagnosis of paranoia, as
well as at the fact that this time he had not been treated by Freud himself,
that he decided to get well as quickly as possible. In 1927, he met Muriel
Gardiner, another psychoanalyst, who would have occasion to see Pankeev
regularly and to assist him over the course of the next few decades. He gave
her Russian lessons. She found him an excellent conversationalist and
wrote that he impressed her as a healthy and perfectly reasonable person.
The Riddle of Therese Keller

Therese had always been proud of her Spanish roots. In the anti-German
atmosphere of Russia in 1914, she had a difficult time, as she knew neither
Russian nor French. Pankeev recalled that she was aided only by the fact
that she looked more like a Spaniard or an Italian than a German. Freud
found her beautiful and described her as a “real Tsarina.”
However, after the death of her daughter, Pankeev said, Therese changed.
She took on eccentricities, becoming stingy and antisocial. Sergei never did
learn how much older she was than he; she had lost her documents before
moving to Russia. She complained of accelerated aging, although she re-
mained attractive to Pankeev. Nevertheless, he was constantly unfaithful to
her.
After the Anschluss in 1938, when the Germans annexed Austria, the
Viennese reacted in various ways. The Jews got the worst of it. As always, a
few managed to emigrate, while an epidemic of suicides swept through the
ranks of those that remained. Pankeev was under suspicion. One day, a
Nazi appeared at his door and began asking questions about his life and his
family. Sergei showed him a photograph of his father. The Nazi said he was
satisfied—Sergei’s father looked like one of the tsars. He confessed that he
had come to find out whether the Russian immigrant was a Jew. Soon after
this incident, Pankeev suggested to his wife that she send to her native
Wurzburg for documents proving her Aryan blood. Therese responded
“with a strange look” that he would remember always.
It was around that time that Therese suggested to Sergei that they com-
mit suicide together. “You’re crazy,” he snapped. “We’re not Jews.” On
March 31, 1938, Sergei Pankeev found his wife dead. She had killed herself
by inhaling gas.
For some reason, neither Pankeev nor the analysts who worked with him
ever expressed an inkling of what seems, in retrospect, self-evident: that
Therese Keller was probably Jewish. She hid this fact her entire life, with
good reason. Perhaps this explains why Sergei’s mother and Kraepelin were
so set against Sergei marrying Therese, considering their union a mésal-
liance. If so, it might also explain the legend of Therese’s Spanish origins
that she fed Sergei, knowing it would appeal to his romantic nature. In his
memoirs, Pankeev described his love for Therese in a chapter entitled
“Spanish Castles.”
A year after Therese’s suicide, Sergei sought out her brother in Munich,
driven by his unrealized grief, as was always the case with him after a loss.
“Your grandmother was Spanish,” he remarked for some reason.
“Spanish? That’s news to me,” the brother responded, and then added,
“but our Grandmother is said to have had an affair with an officer of the
Bavarian nobility.”°”
Psychosis and Reality

After the loss of his wife, Pankeev turned once more to psychoanalysts for
sustenance and survival. He ran straight to Gardiner, who armed him with
a fake passport and sent him out of occupied Vienna to London and Ruth
Brunswick. More hours and months of analysis followed, during which he
asked endlessly, “Why has this happened to me?” Finally, he returned to
Vienna. Until his death in 1979, he led a quiet and apparently healthy life
as a clerk, and then a pensioner, periodically becoming mired in laborious
relationships with women. He also earned some money from his memoirs
and sketches, which he sold through the American Psychoanalytic Society
as Freud’s most famous patient.
His only relapse into supposed “paranoia” occurred in 1951. That sum-
mer, Pankeev wandered into the Soviet-occupied zone of Vienna with his
easel. He was immediately arrested by Soviet soldiers and thrown into a
holding cell. An hours-long interrogation followed, and Sergei was accused
of drawing a military base and of generally being a White émigré and a trai-
tor to the motherland. He tried to justify his emigration by explaining that
his wife was German, but felt the senselessness of any attempt at justifica-
tion. Like millions of his perfectly normal countrymen who have found
themselves in such circumstances, Pankeev struggled in vain against a para-
lyzing sense of guilt and fear. After three days he was released, on the con-
dition that he return in three weeks with all of his drawings. It was then
that he began to experience a psychosis “just like when I was seeing Dr.
Brunswick, only then I felt a physical defect, and in this case the flaw was
moral.”
Understanding that he could never again return home, he presented him-
self at the entrance to the Soviet zone exactly twenty-one days later. The of-
ficer who had interrogated him was no longer on the base, and no one else
had any use for Pankeev.
When he related all this to Gardiner, he concluded with the question, so
characteristic of this case: “What do you think, Frau Doktor? Do you think
it was my mental illness that made me take this incident so seriously?”°8
A
Psychoanalytic Activity
Before World War |
Russian Connections
Freud’s interest in Russia dated from his childhood, and his connections to
Russian culture went back even further. His mother, to whom he was very
close, was born in the little town of Brody, in northeastern Galicia, near the
Russian border. She spent part of her youth in Odessa, where two of her
brothers had settled. In 1883, when Sigmund was twenty-seven, his father
decided to straighten out the family’s ramshackle financial situation by start-
ing a business in Odessa. One biographer characterized septuagenarian Jacob
Freud’s trip to Russia as a “ray of hope” that, nevertheless, ended in failure.’
Freud’s teacher Charcot treated many Russian patients, including mem-
bers of the czar’s family. For a long time, Russians were for Freud a symbol
of wealth and a reliable source of prosperity. In 1898, when Nicholas II is-
sued his Peace Manifesto, Freud announced that he had long suspected that
the czar suffered from an obsessional neurosis, expressed in his characteris-
tic indecisiveness and perfectionism. “We could help each other. I would go
to Russia for a year and would cure his neurosis just to the point of allevi-
ating his suffering but I would leave just enough to prevent him from start-
ing a war. After that we would have congresses three times a year, and ex-
clusively in Italy, and I would treat all my other patients for free.”
Years passed, and Freud became popular—if not with the czar, then at
least with other wealthy Russians who did become his patients. When the
Russian student and son of a millionaire landowner whom we met in the
last chapter introduced his lover to Freud, the latter reacted ebulliently:
“She is a real Tsarina!” There were many others like Pankeev. In his early
years as well as later on, Viennese and Germans in general constituted only
a portion of Freud’s clientele. According to Jones, “most patients came
from Eastern Europe: Russia, Hungary, Poland, Rumania.”?
Even in Paris, Freud managed to find Russian company. During his in-
ternship with Charcot in 1885-1886, he befriended neuropathologist
108
109
Leopold Darshkevich (1858-1925). Together they visited Notre Dame, which

Freud claimed to have loved even more than neuropathology; together they
worshiped Sarah Bernhardt; together they wrote an article on the anatomy
of the aural nerve. Freud once described Darshkevich in a letter to his fi-
ancée: “[he] attracted my attention by his melancholy disposition, typical
of ... Little Russians. . . . 1 discovered in him a quite profound fanatic. He
was averse to all distractions and his soul was absorbed in the motherland,
religion, and brain anatomy. His ambition was to write the first book on
brain anatomy in the Russian language.”* Darshkevich a little later fulfilled
his dream: In 1904 he published the first volume of a textbook on neu-
ropathology in Kazan, which would become a classic and be reprinted
many times throughout the Soviet period.’ In 1889, Darshkevich returned
to Moscow, and five years later he became a professor at Kazan University,
where he organized one clinic for the treatment of mental diseases and an-
other for alcoholics—the first of its kind in Russia. In his Course on Mental
Diseases, he recommended the application of “Freudian psychoanalysis” in
certain cases of hysteria.® Later, however, Darshkevich spoke out vehe-
mently against the Freudian approach to the pathogenesis of neuroses. But
it is hardly accidental that the most powerful center of psychoanalysis in
provincial Russia arose in Kazan. Darshkevich’s other claim to fame is that
he was “one of the first to point out the syphilitic origin of dorsal tabes,” as
the Bol’shaia meditsinskaia entsiklopediia (Great Medical Encyclopedia) in-
forms us. He treated Lenin, and was the founder and first rector of the
Superior Medical School in Moscow, where he inaugurated the department
of psychology.
But for Freud, Dostoevsky was the veritable personification of Russia,
and his contacts with Russians were full of associations with the great
writer. He read Dostoevsky over and over for decades. Pankeev recalled
that one of his analytic sessions with Freud before World War I was de-
voted to interpreting Raskolnikov’s dream. Freud referred to The Brothers
Karamazov as the greatest novel ever written. In 1928, Freud published his
famous sketch “Dostoevsky and Patricide,” which he wrote at Max
Eitingon’s request, as the introduction to the German edition of this novel.
The essay demonstrates that Freud was not only familiar with Dostoevsky’s
novels but also knew the literature about him and a good deal of Russian
history and politics as well.? However, Freud’s attitude toward Dostoevsky
was no less complex than the relations between the writer’s characters—
“ambivalent,” as Freud used to say, or “dialogic,” in Bakhtin’s words. Ina
letter to Theodor Reik, Freud confessed: “In spite of all my admiration of
Dostoevsky, of his intensity and perfection, I do not like him. That is =
cause my tolerance for pathological cases is drained by psychoanalysis.
Besides Dostoevsky, Freud spoke often of Dmitry Merezhkovsky, whom he
considered worthy of praise, and of Leo Tolstoy.
110 Psychoanalytic Activity Before World War I
When Freud discovered the psychic mechanism that selectively prevents

the conscious realization of unacceptable content, he called it censorship. In
an 1897 letter, he explained that he had borrowed the word from Russian
life and that it implied an “imperfect instrument of the czarist regime for
preventing penetration of alien Western influences.””
Freud wrote the major theoretical work of his later period, Beyond the
Pleasure Principle, under a strong and variegated Russian influence. In this
work, he suggested that the death wish be considered a motivating force be-
hind human behavior, just as fundamental as the drives for life, love, and
procreation. The idea of the death wish had been expressed long before the
publication of Freud’s study, by Russian psychoanalyst Sabina Spielrein.
Naturally, it was impossible for Freud to ignore her contribution, but he re-
ferred to it with understandable ambivalence. It is quite possible that he
closely associated this theory with Spielrein’s unusual personage (see
chapter 5), which must have created additional difficulties for him in elabo-
rating the new doctrine. During his work on the text of Beyond the
Pleasure Principle, Freud reread Dostoevsky and wrote a new epilogue to
his “History of an Infantile Neurosis.” Finally, it is significant that the
tragic and inescapable idea of the duality of human attraction is more
closely tied to notions that were dominant in early twentieth-century
Russian culture than to the ideas reigning in the world of early Freud, a
world accessible to therapy and at least potentially rational (in the same
sense that Freud’s beloved detective novels were rational, where the horror
and chaos of life were subordinated to a cold logic that could and must find
a solution).
Freud’s two sons fought on the Russian front, and he worried about
them for years. Many of his students and friends served in the medical
corps of the Austro-Hungarian army. An interpretation of the terrifying
spectacle of Europe straining toward self-destruction required new termi-
nology. It could be that Freud’s idea of the death wish was inspired by his
observations of the Russian revolution and occasional contacts with
Russians in Vienna, refugees and Bolsheviks alike. At any rate, American
historian James Rice is justified in characterizing this idea of the death wish
as Russia’s contribution to psychoanalysis.!° Freud’s interest in Russia had
a variety of roots: biographical, ethnic, historical, economic, and most in-
terestingly, intellectual.
The intellectual affinity that Freud and his circle felt toward Russia
seems only natural in light of biography and history. The military borders
of the two belligerent empires had only recently divided the continent,
which had been a single, organic whole for its Yiddish-speaking inhabi-
tants. Only one generation separated the Jewish intellectuals of the Austro-
Hungarian and Russian empires from their common ancestors, whose cul-
tural territory once covered all of central and eastern Europe. In Freud’s
111
books we run across the same old jokes that are still told in Petersburg,
New York, Jerusalem, and points in between. The fathers of Freud, Kafka,
and Trotsky shared the same cultural frame of reference; and their sons
built new structures on a common foundation.
In a more universal sense, the crux of what Freud wrote about Russia
boils down to a few discernible points. Russians were closer to their uncon-
scious essence than were “Western” people. Therefore, psychoanalysis met
with less resistance among Russians; this is why Russians were such apt pa-
tients and students; therefore, Russians preempted the discovery of some of
the deepest mysteries of the unconscious, above all its attraction to death.
But by the same token, the forces of ego, consciousness, and discipline were
less developed among Russians than among European nations. For this rea-
son, their desires were untamable, in sharp contrast to their noble thought
patterns.
It is not all that surprising that these views of Freud’s, being intuitive
rather than rational in their origin, were close to the stereotypes about
Russians common in the West. Sexual freedom was ascribed to Russians,
along with a mystical sort of concentration; their inherent desire to turn the
world upside down was balanced by an inability to do meticulous work; an
ability to achieve facelessness among the masses was imputed, along with
some innate knowledge of love and death. It would seem that all these con-
tradictory features couldn’t possibly be amalgamated in a single image; it is
this gap between the nation’s various characteristics that lies at the center
of the enigmatic Russian soul. Everything that Freud and the people of his
culture knew of Russians—Lermontov’s poems and Dostoevsky’s novels,
Pankeev’s dreams and Spielrein’s ideas—generally supported such a notion,
but offered no solution.
Russia was perceived as the “other,” and a great deal could be projected
onto its great, unexplored, spiritual space—hopes and dreams, most of all.
For Freud early in his career, intent on uncovering the mysteries of uncon-
scious human existence, these hopes were more than anything an aspiration
to come to know the unconscious. “Russian material” offered certain ad-
vantages in this regard.
If there were ever a nation that lived exclusively through the uncon-
scious, it would undoubtedly have been a great find for any psychoanalyst,
or for any intellectual, for that matter. But if this people were to differ too
much from Europeans, if they were dwarf-sized or had the heads of dogs,
for instance, interest would be merely academic: The unconscious among
such people would be too different to support comparison. Russians, on
the other hand, were in many ways just like Europeans. This was why it
was so interesting to see them as people who, as Rilke said, “say at dusk
what other people reject in daylight,” or, as Freud claimed, who have better
it
preserved the “legacy from the psychic life of primitive races,” making
“more accessible to consciousness than elsewhere.”!! As Europeans, they

probably have a European unconscious, but as Russians they are more
aware of their unconscious. In other words, the transitive, intermediary po-
sition the Russians occupied between Europe and the rest of the world—a
place they so willingly claimed for themselves—became for the psychoana-
lyst a transitive, intermediary position between the conscious mind and the
unconscious. Russians naturally enjoyed a privileged status in Freud’s
world, as they served to lower the most basic barrier to psychoanalysis.
First Contacts
Russian psychiatrist Nikolai Osipov (1877-1934) began his medical educa-
tion at the University of Moscow. After being expelled in 1899 for partici-
pating in a student strike, he began to “wander from one foreign university
to another,” continuing his studies in Freiburg, Zurich, Bonn, and Bern, and
he completed a doctoral thesis on histology in Basel. However, on returning
to Russia in 1904, he lost his fascination with this particular field of special-
ization, which for him had become a symbol of materialism and nihilism. “I
deeply believe it was the unresolved mystery of the soul, and of man in gen-
eral, that drew me to psychiatry. In any case, it was the philosophical, not
the medical side that attracted me.” Osipov worked in Moscow psychiatric
hospitals, and was soon transferred to the clinic at the University of
Moscow, which was under the direction of Vladimir Serbsky. “I was partic-
ularly interested in neurotics, from a psychological point of view. Studying
this particular group of patients, I was confronted with questions of hypno-
sis and suggestion,” Osipov wrote later. There was no shortage of specialists
in the field to teach him in Moscow. For a long time thereafter, Osipov re-
mained a psychiatrist who “had mastered the techniques of psychoanalysis
and the techniques of suggestion in equal measure.”!?
“T first became acquainted with Freud’s works in 1907. Freud was not at
all well known in Russia at that time. . . . Ican safely claim to have been the
first to popularize Freud in Russia,” Osipov remembered. In Moscow, he
published several overview articles on psychoanalysis, and gathered admir-
ers of Freud around him. His colleagues from the Serbsky clinic, Yevgeny
Dovbnya and Mikhail Asatiani, were also interested in psychoanalytic
treatment. Together with Nikolai Vyrubov, in 1910 Osipov founded the
journal Psychotherapy, which offered its readers both Russian and trans-
lated works on psychoanalysis.
On January 2, 1910, Freud wrote to Jung: “Dr. Osipov, assistant at the
psychiatric clinic in Moscow, has written to me; his credentials are two
thick offprints, in one of which the tangle of Cyrillic signs is interrupted
every two lines by the name Freud (also Freudy and Freuda) in European
print, while the other makes the same use of the name Jung. The man has
Psychoanalytic Activity Before World War I 113
two other, original works at the printer’s.” Further, Freud informs Jung of
the address of the Moscow psychiatric clinic in Devich’e Pole, translating
the curious place-name as “Virgin’s Field.”!3 Osipov wrote: “In 1910, I vis-
ited Freud in Vienna, Bleuler and Jung in Zurich, Dubois in Bern.” A copy
of the Russian edition of Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, pub-
lished by the Psychotherapeutic Library and edited by Osipov and Osip
Feltsman in 1911, is still kept in Freud’s house in London. The book was
autographed by Osipov, with the inscription: “To the Brilliant Professor
Mr. Freud.”
Fyodor Stepun once reminisced about the “mystical, erotic, revolution-
ary chord” reverberating in Russia at that time, a chord that only later de-
generated into the awful cacophony of Rasputin’s prerevolutionary era: “In
Moscow of the early twentieth century, among the mercantile patrons of
arts, bombastic barristers, actors spoiled on the adoration of audiences,
connoisseurs of enigmatic feminine souls, and women who dreamed of be-
ing deciphered ... psychology lorded over elemental spontaneity, emo-
tional experience over passion, melancholy over debauchery.”!* Philos-
ophy, psychology, and literature were treated as personal issues, and people
looked for the solution to their own problems in these disciplines.
Seventeen-year-old adolescents sought answers to the questions of flesh and
death that tormented them either in Tolstoy’s The Kreutzer Sonata, or, at
the other extreme, in the works of Nietzsche. In the end, like Stepun, they
would often come to the desperate conclusion that “there’s no choice but to
study, you can’t get through life without philosophy,” and leave for
Heidelberg. The majority sought and found the structure that was missing
in their lives by turning to religious philosophy; but the rising interest in
psychoanalysis, with its direct but difficult practical applications, is quite
understandable in this atmosphere.
The Moscow psychiatrists’ interests were more practical in nature. After
the death of Sergei Korsakov, the founder of Russian psychiatry, a schism
arose in the community, centered around conflicting attitudes toward
Kraepelin’s German school of psychiatry. One group, headed by Pyotr
Gannushkin, followed in Kraepelin’s footsteps to pursue the classification
of mental diseases and personalities susceptible to such ailments. During
the Soviet period, Rosenstein, a key player in these events, wrote that the
other group, “led by Serbsky, became the first to proliferate the ideas of
Freud, Jung, and Bleuler in Russia.”!°
Vladimir Serbsky, who replaced Korsakov as the director of the psychi-
atric clinic at Moscow University, never practiced analysis himself but
urged his students to do so. Young doctors from Moscow usually interned
at the Burghdlzli clinic under the supervision of Eugen Bleuler and Jung.
When they returned, they no longer thought of therapy in terms of bromide
preparations, hypnosis, and dietary restrictions, but as a series of psychoan-
alytic sessions. As for the scientific method, Kraepelin’s intricate classifica-

tions were replaced by dynamic hypotheses, bolstered by Jung’s associative
experiments and references to Freud’s classic cases.
Serbsky was familiar with Freud’s books, and like many psychiatrists of
the time, he believed that psychoanalysis overstated the significance of the
sexual etiology of neuroses. French researcher Jean Marti cited from
Osipov’s unpublished memoirs: “Serbsky, who had a good command of
foreign languages, nevertheless mispronounced Freud’s name, saying ‘Fre-
ud,’ with the accent on the last syllable,” evoking an archaic Russian word
for “sexual organs,” udy. “Then I decided to pronounce Freud’s name like
‘Freund’ (friend),” Osipov continued, “thus expressing my attitude toward
Freud’s theory.”! Meanwhile, Serbsky tolerated and even encouraged
young, enthusiastic, and evidently inexperienced psychoanalysts in his
clinic. “Serbsky has given his blessing to this young clinic where new ideas
in the psychotherapeutic trend will be studied,” wrote Rosenstein.'”
Osipov described Serbsky’s political views as close to the leftist
Constitutional Democrat faction. In Rosenstein’s opinion, Serbsky was “al-
most the only psychiatrist who accepted the revolution as a healthy under-
taking.” In 1911, the government limited university autonomy. Many profes-
sors at Moscow University resigned in protest, including Professor Serbsky
and his assistants. Private practice gave them independence. As Osipov re-
called: “Thanks to private practice, my resignation from the clinic... had no
impact on my financial situation. During my last years at the clinic, as well as
in later years (before the Bolsheviks came to power), my financial situation
was brilliant: I made about 2,000 rubles per month.”!® However, after his
conflict with the administration, Osipov pinned down a position as junior
lecturer at the Moscow Women’s High School (Vysshie Zhenskie Kursy),
with Bazhenov’s patronage. This implied a kind of independence from the
government that was hard to attain during the Soviet period.
Serbsky remained a patron of Moscow analysts until his sudden passing
in 1917. “The death of outstanding Russians is always tragic and absurd:
they die just when they are needed most,” lamented the future leader of
Soviet psychoanalysis, Ivan Yermakovy, in an obituary dedicated to
Serbsky.!? ‘
In 1914, Freud wrote in his On the History of the Psycho-Analytic
Movement: “In Russia, psycho-analysis has become generally known and has
spread widely; almost all my writings, as well as those of other adherents of
analysis, have been translated into Russian. But a really penetrating compre-
hension of analytic theories has not yet been evinced in Russia; so that the
contributions of Russian physicians are at present not very notable.”2°
Taking into account Freud’s usual, skeptically reserved tone, his evalua-
tion of the state of psychoanalysis in Russia does not seem all that low. On
the previous page he noted “the absence of any deep-rooted scientific tradi-
tion in America,” and that France offered less fertile ground for psycho-
analysis than other European countries. Speaking of Russia, Freud pin-
pointed the main problem of budding psychoanalysis there, a problem that
he expected to become more acute in future: the contradiction between the
widespread popularity of psychoanalysis and the lack of productivity and
depth in therapeutic practice.
Freud continued: “The only trained analyst there is M. Wulff who prac-
tices in Odessa.” In 1909, Moisei Wulff (1878-1971), a Russian psychia-
trist, was fired from the Berlin clinic where he worked because he espoused
psychoanalytic views. In August of the same year, Wulff left for Russia,
which, as Jones wrote much later, “was then a freer country than Germany
in such matters.”*! On November 10, 1909, Abraham wrote to Freud: “A
Russian doctor by the name of Wulff, who has been Juliusburger’s assistant
in a private mental hospital for some time, is now going to settle in Odessa.
He is very interested in psycho-analysis and, because of this, lost his last job
in Berlin after only a few weeks. I know him to be a hard-working and reli-
able man who is unfortunately in very difficult financial circumstances.
Perhaps you or one of your colleagues in Vienna might be able to send him
some patients. I expect he will write to you personally as he has asked me
for your address. Juliusburger also tells me that Wulff would like to do
translations into Russian.”?* After his arrival in Odessa, Wulff corre-
sponded with Freud and Ferenczi, published articles in Moscow journals,
and soon put out several excellent translations of Freud.
Some time later, a young man from Odessa, Leonid Droznes, introduced
himself to Freud. He was the author of a radical brochure about “the strug-
gle with modern neuroticism,” in which he wrote, “the prevention of phys-
ical and psychological degeneration of the population depends upon the
fundamental political and economic reform of Russian life.”?? Never-
theless, Droznes did not wait for those fundamental reforms to occur be-
fore sending his rich patient to Freud (see chapter 3).
In 1912, Freud wrote to Jung: “In Russia (Odessa) there seems to be a lo-
cal epidemic of psychoanalysis.”** The fun-loving, cosmopolitan micro-
cosm of Odessa would have a warm place in Russian and later Soviet cul-
ture for generations. Due to its special status as a porto franco, Odessa was
then a flourishing commercial and cultural mediator between Russia and
Europe. Not only was the ruble convertible back then, it was valued as one
of the strongest currencies in the world. A growing sector of Russian and
Jewish merchants from this region in southern Russia, highly receptive to
European innovation, was sending its children to study in Germany and
Switzerland.
Psychiatry in St. Petersburg was at that time developing under the power-
ful and in many ways restrictive influence of Vladimir Bekhterev
(1857-1927). An army general and academician who had made himself in-
dispensable at court while at the same time enjoying a reputation as a lib-

eral, Bekhterev was an outstanding administrator. In psychoneurology (as
he called his science) he had faith only in anatomical and physiological ex-
planations for mental illness. His psychotherapeutic interests were focused
on hypnosis. His propagandistic and organizational talents were fully un-
leashed during the Soviet era, his crowning achievement being the creation
of the Second Petrograd University out of the Psychoneurological Institute
he had earlier founded. Bekhterev proved useful to the new government:
For instance, he wrote an appeal to the nations of the Triple Entente, urg-
ing them to ship provisions to Russia during the famine that the Bolsheviks
had induced after the end of the Civil War. When Bekhterev was invited to
give Stalin a consultation, he dared to diagnose paranoia in the Great
Leader. He lived only one day after this event. Kremlin physicians deter-
mined that the cause of his death was intestinal poisoning from canned
food.*> The year was 1927.7°
Other analysts in St. Petersburg, Petrograd, and Leningrad tended to pale
next to Bekhterev. There was private practice, as everywhere. For some
time Aron Zalkind worked there; Elias Perepel conducted analysis from the
1910s until his emigration at the end of the 1920s; Tatiana Rosenthal suc-
ceeded in adapting psychoanalysis even to the conditions of the Bekhterev
Institute. However, active propaganda and organization in the Muscovite
style was never undertaken in Petersburg.
Not a Society, but a Journal

In the second decade of this century, psychoanalysis stepped out onto the
international stage. The discipline gradually sprouted out of a single man’s
hobby, blossomed into a cluster of apostles, and matured into an ever ex-
panding international movement. Immediately after the Second
International Psychoanalytic Congress in Nuremberg, national psychoana-
lytic societies were founded in Berlin, Vienna, and Zurich. Ferenczi’s at-
tempt at the time to organize a similar society in Budapest ended in failure.
Nor was a psychoanalytic society formed in the United States, although
Freud’s lectures had caused a sensation there; American psychoanalysts
were subsumed under the newly founded American Psychopathological
Association. Psychoanalysis was practically unknown in those days in
France and Italy.
The First Congress of the Russian Union of Neuropathologists and
Psychiatrists was held in Moscow on September 4-11, 1911. Along with
preliminary materials for the meeting, the editorial board of Psychotherapy
published an announcement sent from the Nuremberg Congress on the
foundation of the International Psychoanalytic Association and its regional
affiliates. But the psychoanalysts of Moscow were channeling their organi-
zational skills in a different direction. The institutionalization of psycho-

analysis in Russia would follow its own, original path.
The newly elected governing body of the Russian Union of Neu-
ropathologists and Psychiatrists chose Nikolai Bazhenov (1857-1923) as
its chairman. Bazhenov sympathized with psychoanalysis and psychoana-
lysts, backed Osipov, and, at least in one case in 1909, referred a problem-
atic patient to Freud. Bazhenov was also the chairman of the Moscow
Literary and Artistic Club, an elite group of writers, professors, lawyers,
doctors, and merchant philanthropists. Khodasevich described him in the
following way: “Bazhenov the psychiatrist is obese, bald, rubicund, and
snub-nosed, resembling a teapot with a broken spout. He is a wine connois-
seur, a connoisseur of ladies’ hearts, and the author of a psychiatric portrait
of Baudelaire.”*” In addition, Bazhenov was a prominent Mason. In 1908,
as Master of “Liberation Lodge,” he traveled to Paris, where he obtained
the legalization of the Moscow and St. Petersburg lodges from the French
Masons of the “Great Orient.”7°
Nikolai Vyrubov, a psychiatrist with analytic interests and the editor of
Psychotherapy, was elected secretary of the Russian Union of Neuro-
pathologists and Psychiatrists. Osipov was chosen to serve as one of the sec-
retary’s assistants. Hence, psychoanalysts were well represented, and perhaps
even dominant in the elective body of the union that covered all Russian spe-
cialists in mental illness. Instead of creating an isolated psychoanalytic
“sect,” as happened after the Nuremberg Congress in other European coun-
tries, the Russian analysts preferred to preside over more broadly based med-
ical circles. That they succeeded in doing so proves that psychoanalysis met
with less resistance in prerevolutionary Russia than in the West.
This could be why the Russian Psychoanalytic Society was not formally
established in the 1910s. Evidence to this effect in Western histories of psy-
choanalysis is based on Jones’s words, which were drawn, in turn, from
Freud’s report. On May 2, 1911, wrote Jones, Dr. Droznes called Freud in
Vienna to inform him that, together with Osipov and Vyruboy, he had de-
cided to establish a Russian Psychoanalytic Society.”? Freud, and later
Jones, considered this decision enough to warrant recognition of the
Russian Society. However, I have found no official dispatch on the founda-
tion of such a society in Russia (the journal Psychotherapy, published by
the prospective organizers of the Society, would certainly not have ignored
such an event). Clearly, Osipov and Vyrubov chose to form a coalition with
such sympathetic psychiatrists as Serbsky and Bazhenov and, rather than
creating a separate Psychoanalytic Society, they acted within and on behalf
of the Russian Union of Neuropathologists and Psychiatrists. Translating
this peaceful atmosphere from an organizational level to the level of intel-
lect, Nikolai Osipov asserted in 1911 that there was no contradiction be-
tween psychoanalysis and the academic tradition. Osipov’s article, pub-
lished in the main Russian psychiatric journal, is subtly paradoxical: The

author justifies Freud by referring to Rickert, and he buttresses psycho-
analysis with neo-Kantian theory. Neo-Kantians taught that the world is
endlessly variegated, and that scientific cognition of the world could be
achieved through simplification and “stylizations” of various sorts. Osipov
transferred this speculation to what he called “Freud’s stylization.”
Reduction of “all emotions to a single one, namely sexual, is a legitimate
way to simplify real life,” proclaimed the young doctor, who had also stud-
ied in Freiburg.*°
In 1912, the psychoanalysts organized a seminar called “Lesser Fridays”
(as opposed to the Russian Union’s “Greater Fridays”), chaired by Serbsky.
Osipov “managed” the seminar. The Lesser Fridays were held regularly un-
til the outbreak of the World War I. Their psychoanalytic orientation was
well known and was recognized later even by Soviet officialdom: “Most
speeches were not clinical in nature but sociopsychological, with a strong
Freudian tendency.”?!
Psychotherapy, a journal of psychoanalytic leanings, was established in
Russia around the same time that the Viennese school was setting up its
first journal. Most likely, Psychotherapy was only the second journal in his-
tory dedicated to the psychoanalytic movement. Its analytic tendency be-
came more and more pronounced with each passing year. According to the
estimation of one modern researcher, in 1910, 42 percent of all articles
took a psychoanalytic stance; by 1911 the proportion had climbed to 62
percent; in 1912, to 71 percent, and in 1913, to 87 percent.*?
The general direction of the journal’s work was set by the very first issue.
At that time, psychoanalysis was competing freely and successfully with
other trends in psychotherapy, hypnosis in particular. The journal opened
with Yury Kannabikh’s survey article describing the evolution of nine-
teenth-century psychiatric ideas and the school of hypnotherapy, and point-
ing to psychoanalysis as the cutting edge of science. Osipov contributed an
overview of Freudian analysis, which was continued in subsequent issues
(these were the texts about which Freud wrote to Jung). Vyrubov presented
an article on a “combined hypno-analytic method” to treat neurotic anxi-
ety, which was just one of many attempts made by Russian psychothera-
pists to combine psychoanalysis with hypnosis.*3
Hypnosis and the Will to Power

Hypnosis achieved significantly more popularity in Russia and, subse-
quently, in the Soviet Union, than in the West. This rift between Russia and
the West steadily deepened with the passing decades. In the West, Freud’s
criticism of Hyppolite Bernheim (“this was an evident injustice and an act
of violence,” Freud wrote of Bernheim’s “astonishing arts”3+) and Freud’s
own rejection of hypnosis (“the history of psychoanalysis proper begins

with the new technique that dispenses with hypnosis”?5) proved destructive
for hypnosis in the long run. Only in the 1970s was there a kind of revival
of the forgotten art. In the USSR, on the other hand, hypnosis remained the
only legal method of psychotherapy, widely practiced even during the dark-
est years (see chapter 9). This is understandable: Hypnosis is obviously akin
to the psychological mechanisms used to implement totalitarian power. It
was not without reason that Freud compared a leader’s power over the
mob to a hypnotist’s sway over his patient. In the late 1980s, one of the
best Soviet historians, Nathan Eidelman, made an effort to define the
essence of Stalinism as a case of mass hypnosis. Many memoirs of that time
are saturated with hypnotic metaphors, in particular those of Nadezhda
Mandelstam. The focus of psychotherapy on hypnosis was also characteris-
tic of Nazi Germany. Hypnosis again became disturbingly popular in the
USSR at the beginning and middle of the 1980s, an unstable time of apoca-
lyptic expectations. The more paranoiac a society, it seems, the more signif-
icance it attributes to hypnosis.
However, the unusual popularity of hypnosis in Russia had its origin
much earlier, as was the case with many other Soviet traditions. As early as
1910, Muscovite Osip Feltsman, who had just returned from Bernheim and
Dubois, wrote, “At present, we are living through a psychic epidemic, one
of the most dangerous symptoms of which is an overblown attraction to
hypnosis.”7°
We know about the life of early Russian psychiatrist-hypnotists from
Osip Mandelstam’s The Noise of Time,*’ a source that provides a wealth of
interesting details. Around 1905, the poet frequented the house of the “fa-
mous Petersburg doctor who cured by suggestion,” Boris Sinani
(1851-1920), whose son was Mandelstam’s friend. “It was a family of
powerful intellectual character bordering on expressive primitivism,” wrote
Mandelstam. Sinani was Gleb Uspensky’s doctor and Nikolai Mik-
hailovsky’s friend. He was immersed in politics and acted as an “advisor
and confidant to members of the Social Revolutionary party central com-
mittee.” As for medicine, he “had very few patients, and he kept them in-
. timidated, especially the women.”
Mandelstam sensed Sinani’s duality no less perceptively than would an
analyst: “He was a vehement rationalist, and due to this fatal contradiction
he felt the need for an authority figure—he involuntarily worshipped au-
thority, and suffered because of this.” The doctor’s eyes were always glued
to “harmful, worthless books full of mysticism, hysteria, and pathology of
all sorts; he struggled with them, put them aside, but he could not help
coming back to them.” His enemies were the eternal Russian “mysticism,
stupidity, hysteria, and boorishness.” Meanwhile, the “reason was simulta-
neously joy, health, sport, and almost religion.” At the same time, as
Mandelstam would recall much later, in 1925, his “greedy mind was swal-
lowing every possible source of scarce nourishment: the endless debates be-
tween Social Revolutionaries and Social Democrats, the role of personality
in history, the figure of Mikhailovsky, famed for his harmonious nature.
...” This striking portrait embodies much of what was to characterize
Russian psychiatry (especially as practiced in St. Petersburg) during the
decades to come: rationalism in theory, hypnosis in practice, and depen-
dence on the current political authorities.
Russian psychoanalysts tried to oppose this influence. According to
Pevnitsky:38 “We used to treat patients with hypnosis. ... The main pecu-
liarity of this method—and this also applies to treatment through sugges-
tion—is that the doctor does not understand why the patient submits to
him.”3? Pevnitsky was fascinated by Freud, and compared his discoveries in
psychotherapy to Paul Ehrlich’s contribution to pharmacology, salvarsan.
Salvarsan, the first effective medication in treating syphilis, was a new sen-
sation that symbolized the power of knowledge. To Pevnitsky, hypnosis
was for witch doctors, as its primitive curative mechanisms were impene-
trable to science. In the years that followed, Moscow analysts took an even
more critical attitude toward hypnosis. The methods of Bernheim, Charcot,
and Dubois seemed archaic compared to the profound intellectual explo-
ration being pursued by analysts in Zurich and Vienna.
The Moscow psychotherapists moved further and further away from the
primitive solution that hypnosis offered for the problem of power and sub-
mission, turning more and more to Adler, who interpreted the “will to
power” with a psychoanalytic slant. Over the years of its publication,
Psychotherapy exhibited a clear and increasing bias toward Adler, which
first became obvious in 1913. At the very least, two of the journal’s regular
contributors, Bernstein and Zalkind, demonstrated a conscious preference
for “individual-based psychological analysis.” Kannabikh and Vyrubov
also sympathized with Adler, as indicated by their references and terminol-
ogy. Personal relations were probably also involved in this appreciation.
The journal regularly published reports by Adler’s Russian wife, Raisa
Timofeevna, on the proceedings of the “Verein of Free Psychoanalytic
Research,” a group that broke off from the mainstream of Freudian analy-
sis in 1911.
Evidently, Adler’s own “will to power” struck more of a chord with
Russian analysts, connected as they were with political and Masonic cir-
cles, than did Freud’s ideas, which were farther removed from the issues of
the day. Jung’s influence is almost imperceptible, despite his personal con-
nections to a number of the journal’s contributors. The only trace of it is in
Yevgeny Dovbnya’s articles on the associative experiment, but the author
follows a purely scientific path of exploration, eschewing Jung’s mystical
models. One article published in 1913 in Novyi zhurnal dlia vsekh (The
New Journal for Everybody), popular among leftist readers, demonstrates

the dangerously exaggerated expectations that went hand in hand with
early attempts to popularize psychoanalysis in Russia. From the author’s
point of view, psychoanalysis not only solves all the riddles of psychother-
apy, it can be applied to criminal investigation as well. Laying out some of
the results from associative experiments, a certain Vavulin concludes by in-
terjecting his own opinion: “We can only hope that further research in this
field will allow legal practitioners to abandon, with a clean conscience, the
use of material evidence against criminals. If this should happen, the trial
will be reduced to an involuntary confession ..., which would be the in-
evitable result of the perfection of psychoanalytic technique. ... Hence,
that which hypnosis could not achieve will be achieved by the new psycho-
analytic method.”*°
However, the best of the Moscow psychoanalysts’ works were guided by
common sense and clinical experience, influences not confined to any ther-
apeutic school. A. Pevnitsky, for instance, was one of the first therapists to
apply analysis to the treatment of alcoholism. His article on the subject,*!
published in 1912, could be incorporated without amendment into any
Russian psychological journal eighty years later. Moreover, it would inspire
the same reaction as it did all those years ago, the same enthusiasm and the
same objections. Pevnitsky wrote that alcoholics are people of the masses:
That is, psychoanalysis is effective in a number of situations, illustrated by
the author through case histories; but even after treatment, an alcoholic
needs a “society that will take him in hand.” Temperance societies are es-
sential; without them, the patient runs the risk of resuming his drinking
habits. The article, which deserved to be included in anthology after an-
thology, was instead completely forgotten, as was its author.
A Story of Sadism
In Russian practice, psychoanalytic concepts often were applied in a gen-
eral cultural context—art, politics, and so on—before finding their direct
application on the analyst’s couch. For example, in one of his articles pub-
lished in Psychotherapy, Vyrubov attempted to psychoanalyze the speeches
of State Duma deputies, pointing out their characteristic slips of the tongue.
In this way, psychoanalytic paradigms gradually infiltrated the thought
processes of Russian psychiatrists and educated people in general. One
piece of indirect evidence of this process is a case where psychoanalytic
evaluation led to a very serious conclusion, even though no reference was
ever made to Freud—as if the connection was taken for granted. In 1912,
Dr. Nikolai Krainsky published an article entitled “Pedagogical Sadism,”
without any special commentary.” The article related the case history of
K., a 48-year-old school inspector who had earned a reputation as an ex-
traordinarily strict and cruel examiner. Every spring, K. traveled the coun-
tryside, supervising the administration of final examinations. “This agent
soaked his district with blood,” Krainsky wrote, referring to the suicides of
eighteen students, which Krainsky felt had been provoked by K.’s senseless
cruelty. At the same time, K. was so intelligent and extremely polite in his
professional dealings with his peers that even teachers who hated him
found it impossible to oppose him.
Three years before the publication of the article, K. came to Dr. Krainsky
complaining of nervousness, insomnia, attacks of apathy, and ennui. An ex-
amination yielded some intriguing results. Krainsky noted that K. con-
stantly entertained not only thoughts of suicide but also a strong urge to
kill himself. The patient led a reserved married life and had never known
another woman. His erotic fantasies, on the other hand, were rich and cyn-
ical. “K. experienced concupiscence, excitement, and pleasure in mentally
tormenting his students during tests. With time, torturing examinees be-
came an unbridled need. He would experience sexual arousal only when a
student failed his exam. ... During these moments, he would experience
erection and sometimes ejaculation. K. achieved supreme pleasure when
students committed suicide.”*?
Krainsky failed as a doctor. When K. realized that his physician saw
through to the root of his problem, he stopped making appointments.
Krainskv wrote that he couldn’t bring himself to reveal a medical secret in
order to stop K., but his presence on occasion did serve to restrain the
sadistic inspector. Once Krainsky attended an exam along with K., and the
fact of his presence, the doctor maintained, saved two students.
Suddenly, K. came down with sarcoma. When his disease was fairly ad-
vanced, he went to Gomel to give an exam, induced one last student to
commit suicide, and died himself shortly thereafter.
Krainsky waited a year before publishing his report on the case. Whether
purposefully or not, he left a sufficiently clear trail in the text to identify the
murderous examiner: Kosakovsky, the inspector of the Vilnius Educational
District. The article provoked a scandal. The son of the deceased official,
an army second lieutenant, challenged Krainsky to a duel. Krainsky ex-
plained himself on the pages of the Stock Exchange News, expressing his
readiness to “give satisfaction in the traditional manner” if the young
Kosakovsky did not find his explanation convincing. The young man still
insisted on a duel. Negotiations between the men’s seconds yielded contra-
dictory results. After a five-hour session, the officers’ Honor Tribunal “rec-
ognized the challenge as proper according to the dueling code.”
Kosakovsky set January 26, 1913, as the date for the duel. At this point,
the trail of information turns cold.*4 Clearly, Krainsky came through this
trial alive and with his dignity intact, for at the end of the same year he was
appointed to the position of professor extraordinary at the University of
Warsaw.
123
Behind the Backdrop of the Soul

Psychoanalysis found unexpected popularity in the Russian theater, which
was developing rapidly at this time. The outstanding actor Mikhail
Chekhov, a nephew of famous author Anton Chekhov, named Freud as one
of the idols of his youth. In his younger years, Mikhail Chekhov had suf-
fered from a severe mental disorder and, distrusting psychiatrists, treated
himself through acting, reading, alcohol, and anthroposophy. In his own
words, during his most unbearable moments, one of the “three elders”—
Schopenhauer, Darwin, or Freud—would always appear on his desk.
During the brighter intervals, he would read Tolstoy or Solovyov. Chekhov
recalled being tormented by feelings approaching paranoia. He was able to
conceal his emotions in public, but in fact they brought him to the verge of
suicide. One day, for instance, he came to the realization that the “world is
a potential catastrophe that originated in infinity.” However, this realiza-
tion came in 1917, so such thoughts cannot be automatically written off as
pure delirium. “People did not wish to think, and I pitied them; I was indig-
nant and I secretly thought they were crazy.”*°
Chekhov was treated by several hypnotists, and he consulted with well-
known psychologist G. Chelpanov (who advised him to pay more attention
to religion and to abandon philosophy and psychology), but neither effort
proved helpful. Just when his illness was at the most critical stage, his beau-
tiful wife of four years ran off with a visiting hypnotist.
Konstantin Stanislavsky, with whom Chekhov worked onstage, sent him
to a consultative group of famous Moscow psychiatrists for a thorough ex-
amination. As long as the doctors asked routine questions, Chekhov was
eager to answer, and they “established a subtle, delicate relationship.” But
when one of the luminaries, evidently intending to provoke the patient,
asked him to crawl between the back of the sofa and the wall, while an-
other suggested they go out for a walk together, Chekhov was outraged:
“What sort of plot are they hatching?” In the end, he agreed to go for a
stroll with one thin, short doctor; while walking he observed every move
his companion made. The consultation dragged on for a long time. “The
meeting with celebrated scholars (whom I had until then respected) further
contributed to my disillusionment with people,” Chekhov recalled. As the
doctors were leaving, they told Chekhov that they would inform
Stanislavsky of their diagnosis.*°
Stanislavsky had his own method for treating actors. One day, Chekhov
began to stutter, and came to Stanisiavsky to let him know that he would
be unable to work. Stanislavsky announced that Chekhov would stop stut-
tering as soon as he opened the window. This is exactly what happened.
There is a hint of hypnosis in this story; but in the end, Chekhov sought
treatment at the sanatorium in Kryukovo, where psychoanalysts held the
upper hand.
According to Chekhov, he spent hours arguing with Stanislavsky as to

whether an actor should “use or dismiss his personal, incomplete feelings
while working on his role.” Stanislavsky was convinced that “memories
from the actor’s personal, affective life could yield the vivid, creative feel-
ings needed onstage, if the actor would only concentrate on them.”
Chekhov considered this approach counterproductive and believed that the
actor should instead create his image while remaining completely oblivious
to his personal emotions. He argued that the passionate memories in
Stanislavsky’s method often provoked “nervous and even hysterical fits in
actors (primarily actresses).” Chekhov’s stance is psychologically under-
standable: For a psychotic who was intent on controlling his delirium, im-
mersion in his own affective sphere could hardly be helpful.
Stanislavsky saw no particular need to control feelings, whether his own
feelings or his actors’: “Our subconscious is our best friend,” he wrote in
his famous work An Actor Prepares.*’ ‘Subconscious’ was one of his fa-
vorite terms. He used it even in his publications of the 1930s. His method
had as its primary aim to “bring an actor to the point where the subcon-
scious Creative process ignites within him.” “How can one take a conscious
approach to something that is not subject to consciousness, something sub-
conscious?” Stanislavsky’s system included a number of techniques to acti-
vate the subconscious: identification, immersion in personal memories,
physical workouts, and so on. “Fortunately for us, there is no sharp delin-
eation between conscious and subconscious experience.”
Stanislavsky never referred to Freud, although he must have been famil-
iar with his books and seems to have been susceptible to Freud’s influence,
if only indirectly. The conceptual relationship between “Freud’s science,” as
psychoanalysis was then called in Russia, and “The Stanislavsky Method”
deserves someday to be the subject of a more in-depth analysis. For now, I
will simply note that the two shared common features, and that Freud was
popular in Stanislavsky’s circle.
In the 1910s, one of the most outstanding playwrights and theatrical fig-
ures of the era, Nikolai Yevreinov (1879-1953), presented a new philosophi-
cal system: “the theatricalization of life” and “intimization of theater.”
Yevreinov’s theory was based on the expansion of his professional experience
into all spheres of life, on Nietzschean stylistics, and on a strong and relent-
lessly increasing infusion of psychoanalysis. A man of the modernist era, “he
developed pronounced theatrical mannerisms, dressed extravagantly, dis-
played striking wit, and always praised his favorite author, Oscar Wilde.”48
His erotic staging of Salomé was banned by the authorities in 1908; this did
not keep Yevreinov from publishing his bold book, Nudity on Stage. The
body interested him as an image and as the focus of a variety of human inter-
actions. It was during these years before the revolution that Yevreinov wrote
his monumental History of Corporal Punishment in Russia.
125
Raised on Russian symbolism, Yevreinov sought new ways of substanti-

ating and applying the symbolist approach, but in the end he lowered sym-
bolism to the final depths of absurdity. Two books came out of his re-
search: The Origins of Drama: Primitive Tragedy and the Role of the Goat
in Its Origination and Azazel and Dionysus. Both works treat the myth of
the dying and regenerating god that is central to symbolism. Considered in
light of Yevreinov’s “comparative folklore studies,” tragedy appears akin to
phallic fertility cults; the Nietzschean “spirit of music” is derived from “a
tipsy peasant chorus at the festival altar”; and finally, Dionysus is actually a
goat. “The goat is a zoomorphic emblem for Dionysus,” who is also re-
flected in the Semitic god Azazel. In general, all ancient orgiastic cults pre-
scribed the ritual offering of a goat, the most lustful of animals.*? This is
just one step away from Konstantin Vaginov’s Goat Song—the intelli-
gentsia’s bitter farewell to once-dear illusions. However, unlike Vaginov’s
texts, Yevreinov’s are devoid of irony. Could this man of the theater really
have been completely unaware of the denigrating and distorting effect of
his discourse? How right he was when he wrote, in a different work, that
“laughter is the orgasm’s worst enemy.”>*°
The basic idea behind Yevreinov’s creative approach was that “man is a
theatrical beast.” Theatricality was an inherent biological feature of man,
although not only of man (one of his books is entitled Theater Among
Animals). Whatever a man might do in the presence of others, be it court
proceedings, sex, religion, or war, he did it with his audience in mind. What
man did in solitude, most of all in his meditations, was actually Theater for
Oneself (the title of Yevreinov’s primary, three-volume book). An apologia
of theatricality and the attraction of theater, the instinct to transform the
world, and the identification of theatricality with erotica are the main ele-
ments of Yevreinov’s conception.
Some time later, Yevreinov devised the term “theater therapy.” People
heal, he asserted, when their lives are transformed. And what can trans-
form life more deeply than the theater, an art form based entirely on the
“transformational instinct” and on catharsis, known since the days of
Aristotle? As early as 1920 in Petrograd, he “proposed this method of
treatment to the doctors and theatrical figures who control (as strange as it
may sound at first) one of the means by which humanity can be healed, and
a very powerful means at that.”°! Both in articulating and in ardently advo-
cating his conceptions, Yevreinov was far ahead of the main streams in
Western social psychology and psychotherapy, which would eventually also
be based to a great extent on the “theatrical metaphor.” *?
But more than anything, the maestro was interested in Theater as It Is (as
another of his books was entitled). Here, Yevreinov invented his own genre,
“monodrama,” a theatrical analogue to “stream of consciousness,” a “dra-
matic performance with the aim of conveying the character’s state of mind
to the spectator in its most complete form and, therefore, of presenting the
surrounding world on stage as it is perceived by the character.” In 1912,
Yevreinov staged his play Behind the Backdrop of the Soul at the Carnival
Mirror Theater of Parody and Grotesquerie in St. Petersburg. The play pro-
vided a visual image of man reinterpreted anew, in whom tragedy and
irony, mysticism, and analysis are intertwined. In the prologue, a professor
draws graphs on a blackboard, explaining that they represent “strictly sci-
entific work corresponding to the latest psycho-physiological data,” and re-
ferring to Freud, among others. Yury Annenkov’s scenery depicted the
backdrop of the soul: heart, nerves, and lungs. The Soul was played by
three actors: One personified the rational self, the second, the emotional
self, and the third, the subconscious self. The rational self argued comically
with the emotional self about its relationships with the subject’s wife and
mistress, and, pulling on strings representing nerves, both urged their mas-
ter to suicide. The subconscious self slept almost until the final gunshot.°?
Sergey Eisenstein saw the performance and recalled:
The subconscious self is waiting in Yevreinov. It is waiting for the emotional
self to finish pulling at the nerves ... and strangle its rational adversary....A
shot rings out. Strips of scarlet silk, a stage prop symbolizing blood, hang from
the torn-open heart. A trolley conductor in mournful attire approaches the
sleeping subconscious. He holds a lantern in his hands, since it has become
dark on the stage. “Citizen, you have to change trolleys here.”>*
In 1920, Yevreinov revived the performance, changing only the names of

the three “selves.” They became the Accounting Self, the Motivating Self,
and the Slumbering Self.
Yevreinov refers to Freud practically in every theoretical work: “All our
dreams are nothing but theater—we know this for sure from Freud’s mar-
velous work Interpretation of Dreams.”>> His detailed analysis of erotica and
all sorts of perversity as theatrical acting is based primarily on illustrations
from Krafft-Ebing, but clearly points also to his knowledge of analytic litera-
ture. Two interesting works published in the 1920s evidence Yevreinov’s ori-
entation toward psychoanalysis: The Underground of Genius: Sexual
Sources of Dostoevsky’s Oeuvre, by Anna Kashina-Yevreinova (1923), and
The Mystery of Rasputin, by Yevreinov himself (1924).
The book on Dostoevsky was written by the young actress whom
Yevreinov recently had married, and it opens with the dedication “To my
‘old’ husband, from his ‘young’ wife.” It seems likely that the author’s el-
der spouse participated in the project or at least gave it his stamp of ap-
proval. In the book, Freud is praised in superlative tones as “famous for
discoveries” that unraveled the “deepest mysteries of the soul” and “infi-
nite horizons.” He is described as “the greatest genius” and “the most re-
markable man.”** However, the author appears truly to have understood
127
and assimilated only one of Freud’s discoveries—the sexual origin of

neu-
rosis and of the psyche as a whole. Nonetheless, the book does demon-
strate that psychoanalytic interests were in no way considered shameful at
that time.
Yevreinov’s book about Grigory Rasputin was completely different.”
Written clearly and splendidly, full of details that seem scandalous even half
a century later (in 1990, nine publishing houses in Ukraine and Russia were
issuing new editions of the book), this work belongs to the class of sources
that offer history to later generations in ready-made form. According to the
laws of drama, Yevreinov begins with an exposition of Rasputin’s incredi-
ble strength and influence, describing him as a Siberian peasant who be-
came the undeclared monarch of Russia. Therein lies the mystery of
Rasputin. Yevreinov examines possible solutions. The first and the most
obvious for him and his readers is hypnosis. There is documentary evidence
that Rasputin took private lessons in hypnosis from one of the numerous
practitioners in St. Petersburg. Even the czar’s minister of internal affairs,
Khvostoy, referred to Rasputin as “one of the most powerful hypnotists I
have ever met” in his official deposition to the Extraordinary Investigatory
Committee in 1917. Yevreinov introduces his own opinion that Rasputin
was a born actor who turned everything that came his way into a perfor-
mance. In addition, Yevreinov pieces together evidence to prove that
Rasputin was a khlyst.
However, Yevreinov is not entirely satisfied with these explanations.
Referring to manuals on hypnosis, he cites Bekhterev, who proposed in his
musings on Rasputin a focus not only on “ordinary” hypnosis, but also on
“sexual hypnosis.” Sexual hypnosis, according to Bekhterev, accounted for
the special impact Rasputin made on high-society ladies. Seeking a deeper
understanding, Yevreinov looked to the works of Vyacheslav Ivanov,
Nietzsche, and Freud. From the first two thinkers he borrowed the “mask,”
a cover in which each person invests himself, forcing others to believe in the
mask to the same extent that the bearer identifies himself with it. Rasputin,
like the sectarian khlysty, thought of himself as Christ and made others be-
lieve it, as well. At this point the author refers to the “extensive Freudian
literature” and most of all to Totem and Taboo, which had already been re-
leased in Russian translation. Yevreinov comes close to suggesting that
Rasputin’s relationship with “the cantankerous and hysterical Czarina”
and the generally unhappy and sickly royal family was actually transfer-
ence: “One does not have to be a psychologist to understand how easily
and simply a man who instills a thought of his mission of salvation in an-
other person ... with time becomes not only that person’s closest advisor
but also his supreme leader, not only a ‘friend’ but also a “master.
Yevreinov’s final diagnosis was unequivocal: Rasputin was a ‘hysterical
epileptic who suffered from an obviously erotic, religious mania.
In 1920, Yevreinov wrote his famous play The Most Important Thing.°*
The protagonist, Paracletus (which means “advisor, assistant, comforter”—
ironically, these are also names used in the Bible to refer to the Holy Spirit),
introduces himself as an “entrepreneur in the theater called life.” One of
Paracletus’s masks is referred to in the course of the plot as “Dr. Fregoli.”
But, unlike his famous Viennese colleague who bore a similar name, this
doctor tries to use specific, theatrical means to help people in real life: He
hires actors and dictates skits to them in which they play at love with
wretches who take them seriously: a timid young woman, neurotic young
men, and an old spinster. The awful consequences of such uninvited inter-
vention in other people’s lives are not played out and, seemingly, not thor-
oughly thought through. On the other hand, Yevreinov succeeded in estab-
lishing an ideological foundation that—judging by the play’s history and
many other signs (see chapter 7)—was acceptable to the Bolshevik elite and
reflected its own quest. Dr. Fregoli reasons: “Socialism promises a great
deal, starting with a more just distribution of roles. ... But there are mil-
lions of people in the world who cannot enjoy intimacy due to their infir-
mity. Socialist equality will seem a bitter mockery to these millions of peo-
ple. Of course this is not to argue against socialism, but merely to state that
we have more to do.”
Theater therapy in this context is not an outdated form of catharsis, but
an amateur blueprint of totalitarianism and, even more, a technical founda-
tion for possible psychological manipulation. It was devised, however, by a
brilliant intellectual, portrayed with admiration by his acquaintance
Mikhail Bulgakov in his Notes on Cuffs. Moreover, The Master and
Margarita to a large extent continues the ideas laid out in The Most
Important Thing.°? In both cases, outside intervention results in people get-
ting something they could not have achieved on their own; in both cases a
continuous theatrical play unfolds, with the action carefully choreo-
graphed. But the differences are also immense. The author of the play and
his audience, the authors of the revolution, did not identify with the poor,
deceived wretches in the streets but with the wise men who manipulated
them. In Bulgakov everything is reversed: The author and the reader iden-
tify with the Master and Margarita in all their hopes and disasters. In con-
trast, there is not the least hint of magic in Yevreinov. His doctor performs
using exclusively theatrical means: costumes, money, the actors’ play. The
almighty Woland, on the other hand, gives his protégés free choice and
does not know their answer until the choice is actually made. Conversely,
Yevreinov’s earthly doctor makes decisions for living people like a play-
wright making decisions about his characters. Yevreinov appears to have
wanted to prove that it was still technically possible to “do something,”
and he demonstrated how he would do it with his own means, which har-
monized in all respects with the totalitarian idea.
129
The play The Most Important Thing was immediately performed in revo-
lutionary Petersburg, and it enjoyed success even beyond that city: Later, it
would be performed in more than twenty countries around the world. On
November 7, 1920, Yevreinov also staged the monumental show “Assault
on the Winter Palace,” a reenactment of the Bolshevik coup in Palace
Square, involving 7,000 participants. So it is understandable why, when
Yevreinov emigrated in 1925, Dmitry Filosofov made things difficult for
him, accusing him of being a Bolshevik agent. Nevertheless, he would lead
a long and productive life abroad.
Yevreinov’s “theatricalized” idea developed organically throughout the
long years of war and revolution, and it clearly shows the continuity be-
tween the elite intelligentsia’s mission before and after the October coup.
Yevreinov’s sincere solidarity with Trotsky, imbued with hidden meaning, is
expressed in one of the former’s books, written at the same time as The
Most Important Thing: “I am deeply indebted to Leon Trotsky, as are all
who share my views (whether willingly or not) for the invaluable support
for the idea of theatricalization expressed in his recent literary works.”
In Marietta Shaginyan’s novel, One’s Own Fate, written in 1916 (but
published only after the Bolsheviks came to power, in 1923), psychiatric
problems take a leading role.®°! At the time, Shaginyan was close to symbol-
ist circles. The action in the novel unfolds in a sanatorium in the Caucasus,
which may have been inspired by the Kryukovo sanatorium near Moscow.
Psychiatric treatment and the figure of Forster, the head physician, are de-
picted in such an idealistic light that one gets the impression that the author
has just come out of successful treatment. The personnel at the sanatorium
subscribe to the concept of “organic treatment,” a system adversarial to
both psychoanalysis and Yevreinov’s theater therapy. Forster says, for in-
stance: “Shakespeare knew that one has to reject magic in order not to lose
one’s humanity. Everything theatrical is in fact magic. . . . Under no circum-
stances would I allow a mentally ill patient to partake of the pleasures of
theater.” Yevreinov himself cuts a nasty figure in the novel as Yastrebtsov, a
maniacal patient, the source of all evils in the sanatorium. Expounding in
typical symbolist terminology, he “enhances every temptation in each per-
son,” stages a symbolist performance in the sanatorium, called “My
Dream,” drives one patient to suicide, and at the end denounces the re-
markable Forster.
Psychoanalysis is also distorted through caricature. A high-society lady
of “advanced ideas” writes to the sanatorium from the capital: “All this
psychopathology is twaddle, except for psychic analysis. The thing is, you
have to lie down on a couch and associate,... and the doctor has to sit
nearby with a pencil and write everything down. That is all there isto the
treatment. The results have been so impressive that all of medicine is in
who
awe.” One psychiatrist tells the other about a neurasthenic patient
“clung to the couch with all his heart. He kept every little note, and was
sure that he would use them to write another Zarathustra.” The other psy-
chiatrist is even more radically inclined: “Associations made lying down are
moral depravity!” Nevertheless, Forster himself “uses psychoanalysis, but
awfully seldom and with caution.”
Much later, in 1954, while reworking the novel for a new Soviet edition,
Shaginyan took the opportunity to insert a long and rather flat anti-
Freudian passage in Forster’s words.
Before the War

In one of his 1913 articles, Moscow analyst Aron Zalkind (see chapter 8)
wrote of the indignation and contempt that had greeted Freud’s and Adler’s
concepts in the West, adding confidently: “fortunately, the situation in
Russia is incomparably better.”°
Indeed, work was moving along, and the future looked bright. Contacts
between the psychoanalysts of Moscow and Vienna were well in hand, op-
erating efficiently. Detailed summaries of the main publications of the
International Psychoanalytic Association were published in almost every is-
sue of Psychotherapy. Russian translations of these works were released
within a year of their original publication. Translations of Freud’s most re-
cent works were published on a regular basis. For example, his famous arti-
cle “The Question of Lay Psychoanalysis,” published in German in 1910,
appeared in the third issue of Psychotherapy for 1911. Later, in 1919,
Freud admitted to Sabina Spielrein, who wanted to translate his works into
Russian, that there was nothing left to translate, everything had already
been translated, even though he had given formal permission only twice:
for Psychopathology of Daily Life, which was published in 1910 by a cer-
tain Dr. Medem (an unknown pseudonym) and Five Lectures on Psy-
choanalysis, published in 1911 by Osipov.® To the best of our knowledge,
Freud never lodged an official protest against the unauthorized Russian
translations.
At the same time, works by Russian analysts were welcomed in Europe.
In just one 1911 issue of the Vienna analysts’ journal, there were four arti-
cles by Russian authors (one by Tatiana Rosenthal of St. Petersburg, one by
Epstein of Kiev, and two by Odessan Moisei Wulff; and one of these works
included a detailed survey of Russian publications about psychoanalysis).
For the sake of comparison it is interesting to note that psychoanalysis took
root in England only after Jones’s return in 1913, and in France of the
1910s it attracted only ridicule.
At the beginning of the 1910s, the Russian journal Modern Psychiatry
regularly advertised a psychotherapeutic sanatorium run by a certain Mr.
Khrushchev in Kryukovo, in the vicinity of Moscow, which provided pa-
tients with exemplary living conditions. Freud’s psychoanalysis was first

among the methods of psychotherapy practiced there. Yury Kannabikh was
in charge of the sanatorium’s medical affairs, and Aron Zalkind and
Nikolai Vyrubov were among the physicians. The sanatorium charter re-
served preferential treatment for doctors, writers, and relatives of Anton
Chekhov. Obviously, the late Chekhov was somehow involved in founding
the Kryukovo sanatorium.®* The sanatorium operated at least until the
Bolshevik takeover. Sergei Solovyoy, Yevgeny Vakhtangov, Alexander Blok,
and Mikhail Chekhov were among the patients treated there.
In 1914, because of the war, the journal Psychotherapy, which was
printed in the General Staff publishing house, ceased to exist. Psy-
choanalysts, however, continued to publish. In the March 1914 issue of
Modern Psychiatry, for example, a long article by Moisei Wulff appeared.®
It consisted of a meticulous case study about the successful psychoanalytic
treatment of a young man who had been unable to enjoy life and sex.
The war, however, did eventually disrupt the fruitful work of Russian an-
alysts. Many doctors went to the front; patients could no longer pay for
services rendered. The rapid growth of anti-German and anti-Semitic senti-
ment during the war also hindered the development of psychoanalysis. The
next act of the psychoanalytic drama, which was to begin in Russia after
1917, would unfold amidst different scenery, and the actors’ speech would
be different. Nevertheless, the cast would not change all that drastically.
5
Back to Russia:
Sabina Spielrein
More than a century has passed since Sabina Spielrein was born, and a
half-century since she died. Her grandchildren and great-grandchildren, the
descendants of her patients, and her students’ students might have been liv-
ing and working in Russia today; but they are not.
The Soviet regime sought to eliminate her profession. If she continued to
practice under the regime, it was in deep secrecy, and we do not know who
her patients and her students were or whether they are still living.
The Nazi regime strove to annihilate her people. Along with two of her
daughters and a host of other Jews, she was shot to death against the wall
of a Rostov synagogue.
Everything Is Linked
Everything is linked. Yesterday, too, for instance, when the landlady pressed me to
her heart, kissed me, told me she liked me so much, I was such a good person, etc., I
was deeply moved. Do I deserve this? Can anyone really love me this way? It stirred
me deeply that this woman, who has so many worries of her own, can enter into my
feelings, can share my sorrows, without my even mentioning anything to her. I
should have liked to tell her a great, great deal, but I could not bring out a word. I
just hugged her and then commented on the curiously eerie lighting in the hallway. I
was glad to be by myself again; even today I cannot quite face her; I feel somehow
inhibited. I would like to do such nice things for this woman and cannot find a single
kind word! Inwardly so deeply moved—outwardly so dry in manner! I am tired.!
Sabina Spielrein was born in 1885 to the family of a wealthy Jewish mer-
chant in Rostov-on-the-Don. She had three younger brothers: Isaac, Jan,
and Emile. All of the Spielrein children received formidable educations in
Europe and became professors during the Soviet period. Isaac’s life will be
examined in greater detail later in this chapter, as he became the founder
and leader of Soviet industrial psychology.
132
133
Practically nothing is known about Sabina’s youth, which she spent

in
Rostov-on-the-Don. However, Chaim Weizmann, the founder and
first
president of Israel, who was born and raised in the Belorussian town of
Pinsk, studied in Geneva at the same time as Sabina Spielrein, and he left
behind fascinating recollections of her circle:
In Geneva ... in 1900, I met my future wife, who arrived with several other
Jewish girls, schoolmates from her native Rostov-on-the-Don. Like many oth-
ers, she came to Geneva to study medicine because she had no access to educa-
tion in Russia. This group of girls from Rostov ... differed significantly from
ordinary Jewish university girls in Switzerland at that time in their appearance,
manners, and views. They were much more attractive than girls of their age
from the Pale of Settlement; they were less absorbed by Russian revolutionary
ideas. Not that they were indifferent to them, they simply allocated more time
to studies and less to endless meetings and debates. ... Many of the students
were against the Rostov girls but they paid no attention to hostility.”
Weizmann described the small Jewish community in Rostov as relatively

wealthy: His wife’s father, like Sabina’s father, belonged to a merchant guild
and could afford to support and educate his children abroad. This is one
reason why the Rostov girls “were such a contrast to the majority of Jewish
female students in Geneva, who, for the most part, looked nervous, disillu-
sioned, exhausted, and hungry.”*
Spielrein, however, was unwell in Switzerland. It is unclear exactly what her
illness was. Only the dates of her admittance and discharge are documented at
the famous hospital Burgholzli, near Zurich: August 17, 1904, and June 1,
1905.4 The director of the clinic there was Eugen Bleuler, one of the founders
of modern psychiatry; and Sabina’s attending physician was a young intern
named Carl Jung. We know virtually nothing about the circumstances of her
hospitalization, the kind of treatment she received, or for how long she was
treated after her discharge from the hospital. Much later, when Freud was
writing his History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement, he requested informa-
tion from Abraham concerning the beginning of psychoanalytic work at
~ Burghdlzli. Abraham responded that as early as December 1904, Jung had
been analyzing a hysterical female patient there. This could only have been
Sabina. The young woman was Jung’s first psychoanalytic patient.
The letter that Jung sent to Freud later, on October 23, 1906, further illu-
minates Spielrein’s condition.
At the risk of boring you, I must abreact my most recent experience. I am cur-
rently treating an hysteric with your method. Difficult case, a 20-year-old
Russian girl student, ill for 6 years.
First trauma between the 3rd and 4th year. Saw her father spanking her
older brother on the bare bottom. Powerful impression. Couldn’t help think-
ing afterwards that she had defecated on her father’s hand. From the 4th—7th
134 Back to Russia: Sabina Spielrein
year convulsive attempts to defecate on her own feet, in the following manner:
She sat on the floor with one foot beneath her, pressed her heel against her
anus, and tried to defecate and at the same time to prevent defecation. Often
retained the stool for 2 weeks in this way! Has no idea how she hit upon this
peculiar business; says it was completely instinctive, and accompanied by bliss-
fully shuddersome feelings. Later this phenomenon was superseded by vigor-
ous masturbation.
I should be extremely grateful if you would tell me in a few words what you
think of this story.°
The Freud-Jung correspondence had just begun; this was only Jung’s sec-
ond letter to his future teacher. Freud, who was twenty years older than
Jung, was excited to find a professional psychiatrist working in a presti-
gious clinic who was interested in his work. Freud responded to Jung’s first
letter as cordially as possible. While developing the relationship and telling
his elder colleague of Sabina’s case, Jung did his best to make himself out to
be a practicing analyst deserving of professional confidence.
Freud replied in detail, utilizing in his letter all the information available
to him:
I am glad to hear that your Russian girl is a student; uneducated persons are at
present too inaccessible for our purposes. The defecation story is nice and sug-
gests numerous analogies. ... It must be possible, by the symptoms and even
by the character, to recognize anal excitation as a motivation. Such people of-
ten show typical combinations of character traits. They are extremely neat,
stingy, and obstinate, traits which are in a manner of speaking the sublima-
tions of anal erotism. Cases like this based on repressed perversion can be ana-
lyzed very satisfactorily.
You see that you have not bored me in the least. I am delighted with your
letters.°
Freud came up with a saying that later became popular: Life can be un-
derstood only in retrospect, but the trick is that it must be lived forward.
Seven years later, after his final break with Jung, Freud would write to
Sabina Spielrein, “When I had to take sides at the beginning of our corre-
spondence, it looked as if it would work out.””
To Give a Little Bird Its Freedom

I could never stand by the window that way on purpose. The conscious has to be
circumvented in some subtle manner, and then .. . one can indulge oneself a little.
When I was fully dressed, except for my belt, I noticed that a nice young gentle-
man was gazing into my room; I felt myself blushing deeply, and this mild manifes-
tation of the unconscious, which I noted quite objectively, pleased me very much.
For a moment I hesitated. Modesty won out, and I hid behind the curtain. A little
later an older gentleman looked out of the upper building.®
135
Twenty-four-year-old medical student Sabina Spielrein considered

it an-
other indulgence to write down these lines, evidently for her analyst’s bene-
fit. Although he might well have found them trivial, for us they are full of
veiled meaning and anticipation of what lay ahead of her.
It was just as Jung was administering therapy to Spielrein, his first ana-
lytic patient, that Freud informed him of his latest discovery, one that had
yet to be made public. On December 6, 1906, he wrote to Jung that he
would have to keep certain elements of the treatment of neuroses under
wraps for the time being, since “it is not possible to explain anything to a
hostile public.” Perhaps such volatile topics should be cloaked in esoteric
language, intelligible only to the initiated. The most important of these as
yet hidden psychoanalytic discoveries was transference:
You are probably aware that our cures are brought about through the fixation
of the libido prevailing in the unconscious (transference), and that this transfer-
ence is most readily obtained in hysteria. Transference provides the impulse
necessary for understanding and translating the language of the [unconscious];
where it is lacking, the patient does not make an effort or does not listen when
we submit our translation to him. Essentially, one might say, the cure is effected
by love. And actually transference provides the most cogent, indeed, the only
unassailable proof that neuroses are determined by the individual’s love life.?
So it was stated: A cure is achieved through love. Today, this is an obvi-

ous truth to any psychoanalyst, but Freud articulated the essence of trans-
ference a long time ago. According to Freud’s controversial theory, the pa-
tient’s feelings, which until transference remained unconscious and caused
illness, resurfaced and could be experienced anew through love for the doc-
tor. Adult love, into which forgotten but no less heartrending childhood
fears and passions were transferred (and it was through this transfer that
adults became conscious of these old feelings), was the only path that led
one safely through the world. It was a path toward a cure, but not neces-
sarily to happiness, as the satisfaction of desire in this situation would be as
impossible as it had been in childhood. .
During the fourth year of Sabina’s treatment, Jung related the following
story to Freud:
An hysterical patient told me that a verse from a poem by Lermontov was con-
tinually going round in her head. The poem is about a prisoner whose sole
companion is a bird in a cage. The prisoner is animated only by one wish:
sometime in life, as his noblest deed, to give some creature its freedom. He
opens the cage and lets his beloved bird fly out. What is the patient’s greatest
wish? “Once in my life I would like to help someone to perfect freedom
through psychoanalytic treatment.” In her dreams she is condensed with me.
She admits that actually her greatest wish is to have a child by me who would
to let
fulfil all her unfulfillable wishes. For that purpose I would naturally have
“the bird out” first.!°
Vladimir Nabokov commented on this letter in 1974.'' He explained to

his Western readers that the poem in question was written by Pushkin, not
Lermontov, and was entitled “A Little Bird.” Moreover, the poem was “ab-
surdly paraphrased.” Pushkin wrote the poem during his exile in Kishinev.
The protagonist in the poem releases a bird each spring, carrying on his na-
tive custom in a foreign land. This consoles him:
Why should I mutter against God,

When even to one creature
I was able to give freedom!'*
However, there is neither prisoner nor cage in this poem. Both are in-
cluded in Pushkin’s well-known poem “The Captive” (“A captive, alone in
a dungeon I dwell....”).!3 In this poem, however, no one sets the eagle
free, and the sad “comrade” simply dreams of flying away with the captive
and calls to him. In essence, the bird is in a cage with the prisoner in one
poem, and is released in another. Which poem was on the Russian patient’s
mind?
Perhaps the young woman recited and translated so much Russian poetry
to her young doctor that one or the other of them confused the two poems.
Regardless of the origins of this confusion, Jung considered the poems that
were on Sabina’s mind a kind of symptom, and her psychoanalytic treat-
ment would necessarily be based on his interpretation of these symptoms.
The patient offered her own interpretation: She dreamt of becoming a psy-
choanalyst, and therefore recited poems about liberating living things. For
Jung, however, such an interpretation appeared to be just another, more
profound symptom: In her dreams, the patient was confusing herself with
her analyst. In his understanding, the patient saw herself as a prisoner and
dreamt that her doctor, like the eagle out of the poem, would call her
“where turbulent seas rush to merge with sky.”!*Her dream of liberating a
living creature was a reflection of her desire to give birth to his child. This
could happen only if, switching from the lofty genre of romantic Russian
verse to a sleazy Swiss idiom, “he let his bird out.” Thus, Sabina (who is
undoubtedly the person in question) interpreted the poetry as indicative of
her desire to become an analyst, while Jung interpreted it as a hint at her
desire for sexual intimacy with him. Who was right: Spielrein, Jung, both,
or neither? Only the future would tell.
Meanwhile, Jung found himself more and more in Freud’s confidence.
Jung was chosen to represent psychoanalysis at the International Congress
of Psychiatry and Neurology in Amsterdam, which was held in September
1907. This was the first time a psychoanalyst would publicly address an of-
ficial gathering of psychiatrists, and Freud was extremely serious about it.
He wrote to Jung in Amsterdam:
Back to Russia: Sabina Spielrein 137.
Now of all times I wish I were with you, .. . telling you about my long years of
honourable but painful solitude, ... about the serene certainty which finally
took possession of me and bade me wait until a voice from the unknown mul-
titude should answer mine. That voice was yours. ... Thank you for that, and
don’t let anything shake your confidence, you will witness our triumph and
share in it.!5
In his address, Jung spoke of a case that he knew well, that of Sabina
Spielrein, but he was nevertheless doomed to experience the bitterness of
defeat. Both sides were too aggressively set against one another. One of the
experts in attendance declared that Freud’s method could not be taken seri-
ously, since every word was interpreted in sexual terms—which was ex-
tremely harmful for the patient. The speaker himself never allowed his pa-
tients to mention anything related to sex. Meanwhile, Jung’s address went
over the time limit, and he refused to obey the chairman’s request that he
finish up. When he was finally forced to abandon the podium, he stormed
out of the hall in indignation.'®
The Practice That Deters from Theory

Mother says it is impossible for my friend and me to remain friends once we have
given each other our love. A man cannot sustain pure friendship in the long run. If
I am nice to him—he will want love. If Iam always cold—then the [illegible] hurt
his feelings. That depressed me so, so much! Oh dear, what should I hope for? IfI
could move Fate, if I could be sure that a plea spoken before witnesses would be
fulfilled, I would pray here: dear Fate, allow us, my friend and me, to be excep-
tions. Allow us to meet each other always radiant with pleasure, to support each
other in joy and sorrow, to form one soul, even @ distance, to reach out our hands
to each other in the search for the “higher, farther, wider,” or, as my friend says,
“the good and the beautiful,” that we may be a support to many who are weak.'”
Four of Sabina Spielrein’s fellow Russians were also learning psycho-

analysis in Burgholzli at the same time. These were Fanya Shalevskaya, Max
Eitingon, Esther Aptekman, and Tatiana Rosenthal. All were Jewish and
had come from southwestern Russia, and each played a distinctive role in
the history of psychoanalysis. The most significant figure, but also the most
controversial, was Max Yefimovich Eitingon, who became acquainted with
Freud just shortly after Jung. The long walks that Freud and Eitingon took
together through the Vienna streets in early 1907 were later taken by histo-
rians as the first attempt at a training, didactic form of psychoanalysis. In
September of the same year, Freud informed Jung from Rome: “Eitingon,
whom I met in Florence, is now here and will probably visit me soon to
give me detailed impressions of Amsterdam. He seems to have taken up
with some woman again. Such practice is a deterrent from theory. When I
have totally overcome my libido (in the common sense), I shall undertake
to write a ‘Love-life of Mankind.’”'®
Jung was irritated, for reasons that will become clear: “I consider
Eitingon a totally impotent gasbag—scarcely has this uncharitable judg-
ment left my lips than it occurs to me that I envy him his uninhibited abre-
action of the polygamous instinct. I therefore retract ‘impotent’ as too com-
promising. He will certainly never amount to anything; one day he may
become a member of the Duma.”!?
Jung’s attitude toward Eitingon was a mixture of mockery and suspicion,
concealing the envy that lay beneath: Eitingon was rich, whereas Jung con-
fessed to Freud that his solvency was dependent on his wife’s wealth. What
was worse, Jung saw in Eitingon the freedom of polygamy. The son of a
pastor, Jung condemned such behavior in others, but felt an ever increasing
urge to succumb to it himself.
James Rice, an American scholar who analyzed this part of the corre-
spondence between Freud and Jung, discovered in this letter Jung’s
“Russian stereotype,” an intuitive conception of Russians, dominant in
European culture of the early twentieth century and shared by both Freud
and Jung. Rice indicated that a component of this stereotype was sexual
freedom, ascribed to Russians and perceived with a full measure of natural
ambivalence.*° On the other hand, however, it is difficult to overlook the
desire to humiliate a rival in Jung’s association of polygamy and impotence,
as well as in the suggestion that the windbag Eitingon would one day be-
come a member of the politically impotent Russian parliament. Here,
Russian exoticism is merely a convenient form.
There was more at work here than just stereotypes, however. In the same
letter, Jung hopped by free association from Eitingon to Otto Gross, an
early German psychoanalyst and a drug addict: “Dr. Gross tells me that he
puts a quick stop to the transference by turning people into sexual im-
moralists. He says the transference to the analyst and its persistent fixation
are mere monogamy symbols and as such symptomatic of repression. The
truly healthy state for the neurotic is sexual immorality. Hence he associ-
ates you with Nietzsche.”?!
It does not take a psychoanalyst to find something suspicious in Jung’s
repetition of the same motifs when describing two different people. Jung
was interested in individuals who displayed “uninhibited abreaction of
polygamous instincts,” and moreover, those who did so with their patients.
Jung wrote about them as if only to debunk them: He discarded Eitingon
by way of the “Russian stereotype,” which combined sexual freedom with
pompous twaddle. Gross was taken out by way of the Nietzschean stereo-
type, which had no less meaning for Freud, in which amoralism was linked
with the quest for power. However, Jung was not just struggling with his
competitors; even more importantly, he was struggling with himself. His
139
theoretical views were still orthodox at that time, and he employed them
to
convince himself of his own rectitude: “What is civilization but the fruit of
adversity? I feel Gross is going along too far with the vogue for the sexual
short-circuit, which is neither intelligent, nor in good taste, but merely con-
venient, and therefore anything but a civilizing factor.”22
Occasionally, Jung attempted to analyze his own feelings, but he invari-
ably encountered insurmountable obstacles. As he had never undergone psy-
choanalysis—even the primitive form of it that Freud administered to his
early students—for Jung, correspondence with his teacher replaced analysis
and took on all its aspects. Most of all this meant resistance and transfer-
ence. Jung sometimes went weeks without responding to Freud’s letters, and
he often avoided discussing his “intimate affairs.” Freud pointed this out,
mildly at first, and then gradually more insistently. In one of his letters (of
October 28, 1907), Jung explained his delays in correspondence as a patient
might justify tardiness or skipping sessions, or insincerity. The first reason
he offered was his “work load.” The other “is to be found in the realm of af-
fect, in what you have termed my ‘self-preservation complex.’”?3
However, Jung presented a different explanation a few lines later. “So the
self-preservation complex does not come from there; it is rather that my
veneration for you has something of the character of a religious crush.
Though it does not really bother me, I still feel it is disgusting and ridicu-
lous because of its undeniable erotic undertone. ... I therefore fear your
confidence. | also fear the same reaction from you when I speak of my inti-
mateaifairs: 722
This explanation did not change the situation because Jung still had not
even begun to plumb its depths. The pauses in correspondence became longer
and longer. In another attempt to justify himself (in his letter of March 7,
1909), Jung again complained of his busy schedule and of overwork:
The last and worst straw is that a complex is playing Old Harry with me: A
woman patient, whom years ago I pulled out of a very sticky neurosis with un-
stinting effort, has violated my confidence and my friendship in the most mor-
tifying way imaginable. She has kicked up a vile scandal solely because I de-
nied myself the pleasure of giving her a child. I have always acted a gentleman
towards her, but before the bar of my rather sensitive conscience I nevertheless
don’t feel clean, and that is what hurts the most because my intentions were al-
ways honourable. But you know how it is—the devil can use even the best of
things for the fabrication of filth. Meanwhile I have learnt an unspeakable
amount of marital wisdom, for until now I had a totally inadequate idea of my
polygamous components despite all self-analysis. Now I know where and how
the devil can be laid by the heels. These painful yet extremely salutary insights
have churned me up hellishly inside, but for that very reason, I hope, have se-
cured me moral qualities which will be of the greatest advantage to me in later
life. The relationship with my wife has gained enormously in assurance and
depth.25
A Deal with the Devil

And yet I always felt so heavyhearted when I submerged myself in the atmosphere of
the solitary cottage surrounded by that green carpet. I could never surrender com-
pletely to a peaceful life in the bosom of my family. Perfect stillness makes me anx-
ious. I have to have people with passionate strivings around me, I have to experience
the life of many individuals, I must be inspired by mighty and profound feelings, I
must have music. ...In truth, I could never be satisfied. And what about my old
ideal of wandering through the world like the ancient Greek philosophers, sur-
rounded by a crowd of disciples, teaching them outdoors, in harmony with nature?7°
Love between a psychiatrist and his patient is an oft-described phenome-

non. It is frightening to love a person you do not understand. To call such a
person “ill” is to take bearings, to anticipate that the condition is hopeless,
and thereby to relieve one’s own fear. “Schizophrenia” is a word used to de-
fine people whose feelings are incomprehensible; incomprehensible at least
to those who use the word. When an author composes a novel about how a
doctor becomes a drunk or a broken man after falling in love with a schizo-
phrenic patient, he provides his readers with an image of their own fear,
helping them to get well. The entranced reader will know what he has to
fear from the dark recesses of human relations. In many novels on this sub-
ject (from those of F. Scott Fitzgerald to those by Mikhail Chulaki, a
Russian writer of the 1980s), the doctor is drawn by a fateful force that sets
the sick woman apart. Unable to resist his emotions and consequently her
disease, the doctor loses his own mental health, or at least his self-respect.
The psychoanalyst relies on another side of this interaction: Love must
not bring disease to the doctor, it must grant healing to the patient. The
feelings of sick people are at the very least immature, and they can establish
fresh contact with the world of the healthy only through strong emotion.
The psychoanalyst’s duty is to uncover these emotions, to tolerate, analyze,
and discuss them with the patient for years on end. The patient’s passions
are an inevitable and even desirable reality, an indispensable element of the
analyst’s work. However, according to the spirit and letter of the psychoan-
alytic method, a sexual relationship between analyst and patient is imper-
missible. Such affairs are prohibited by professional custom. Psychoanalysis
should not be used in order to satisfy either party sexually. Formulated by
Freud, this rule may have been violated in practice, but it has rarely been
questioned as one of the cornerstone principles of psychoanalysis.
On March 9, 1909, Freud informed Jung that “I too have had news of the
woman patient through whom you became acquainted with the neurotic
gratitude of the spurned.” Arthur Muthmann, a Vienna psychiatrist, had
come to Freud to tell him of a woman who had introduced herself to him as
Jung’s lover. “But we both presumed that the situation was quite different
and that the only possible explanation was a neurosis of his informant.”27
Back to Russia: Sabina Spielrein 141
Freud was expansive in his attempt to console his protégé, who had
found himself in a precarious position, but one not unusual in “our trade.”
“To be slandered and scorched by the love with which we operate—such
are the perils of our trade, which we are certainly not going to abandon on
their account.” Freud quoted from Goethe, referring to the great poet as
Jung’s grandfather:** “In league with the Devil and yet fear fire?” Freud
also soothed his student by inviting his “dear wife” for dinner.
This time, Jung responded promptly: “Dear Professor Freud, I must an-
swer you at once. Your kind words have relieved and comforted me. You
may rest assured, not only now but for the future, that nothing Fliess-like is
going to happen. .. . But I shall not be unfaithful to psychoanalysis on that
account,” he swore, although Freud did not yet suspect anything of the
kind. Jung added, for some reason using his teacher’s imagery, “It’s just that
for the past fortnight the devil has been tormenting me in the shape of neu-
rotic ingratitude.”??
The teacher wrote of the “neurotic gratitude of the spurned,” whereas the
student wrote of the devil’s “neurotic ingratitude.” Jung’s expression is some-
what clumsy: Why should the devil be grateful to Jung, and can the devil be a
neurotic at all? This substitution revealed Jung’s genuine feelings for the
woman whom he came to identify with the devil. However, he insisted there
was no woman at all: “The story hawked round by Muthmann is Chinese to
me. I’ve never really had a mistress and am the most innocent of spouses.
Hence my terrific moral reaction! I simply cannot imagine who it might have
been. I don’t think it is the same lady. Such stories give me horrors.”°°
Something rings false in Jung’s words. He knew that the gossip con-
cerned his relationship with the very same woman about whom he has just
rushed to tell his teacher. It was to his advantage that he managed to tell
him in time: He probably would not have offered the information if he had
not sensed danger. He had reason to be scared, which is why, without any
obvious connection, he brought up Freud’s painful break with Fliess, the
friend of his youth, and naively promised that nothing of the sort would
ever happen to him. Freud could not have ignored the mistakes in style and
emotion made by the heir to his throne.
It had been quite awhile, about two months, since Freud first heard
about Jung’s scandalous affair with his patient, when he received a letter
dated May 30, 1909.
Dear Professor Freud:
I would be most grateful to you if you would grant me a brief audience! It has
to do with something of greatest importance to me which you would probably
be interested to hear about.
nt
If it were possible, I should like to ask that you inform me of a convenie
at the hospital here and there-
time somewhat in advance, since I am an intern
my absence.
fore would have to arrange for someone to substitute for me during
Perhaps you expect me to be a brazen seeker after fame who plans to bring
you some wretched “earth-shaking” scholarly paper or something of the sort.
No, that is not what leads me to you. You, too, have made me feel awk-
ward.
With expressions of my esteem,

Looking forward to your kind reply,
S. Spielrein?!
Spielrein must have come across Russian stereotypes often enough dur-
ing her years abroad—in particular Westerners’ expectation that all
Russians want to change the world—that she found it necessary to let
Freud know from the very start that she had other interests. This, however,
did not help her.
At that very time, a young psychiatrist from Moscow, Mikhail Asatiani,
paid Jung a visit. Asatiani was fascinated by psychoanalysis but complained
that it yielded few therapeutic results. Jung wrote Freud that Asatiani’s lack
of effectiveness was connected with the imperfection of his healing skills
as well as with “the Russian material, where the individual is as ill-
differentiated as a fish in a shoal.” Jung continued, “The problems of the
masses are the first things that need solving there.”>* Since Asatiani did not
know German, the conversation was made possible only with the help of a
translator. This was particularly wearisome for Jung.
Was it Sabina who served as translator? There were other Russians living
in Burgholzli. But Jung’s condition—weariness because of the translation
and irritation with Russians in general—was caused, undoubtedly, by the
situation at hand. It is interesting to note that Jung’s view of Russia corre-
sponded closely with the ideas of those who, like the Bolsheviks, believed
that the most pressing problems in Russia were related to the masses.
At that time, however, Jung and his wife took up residence in a new
house on a quiet Swiss lake, where they would live for the rest of their lives.
Freud’s congratulations probably did little to cheer Jung.
Dear friend,
Hurrah for your new house! I would say it louder and longer if I didn’t know
how you Swiss dislike emotional effusions. ... Of course I understand your si-
lence and even now I would leave you more time if another letter—which I en-
close—had not reached me at the same time as yours. Weird! What is she? A
busybody, a chatterbox, or a paranoiac? If you know anything about the
writer or have some opinion in the matter, would you kindly send me a short
wire, but otherwise you must not go to any trouble. If I don’t hear from you, I
shall assume that you know nothing. ... Your Russian (and I must tell you
again how I admire your patience, or rather your resignation) probably has
some utopian dream of a world-saving therapy and feels that the work isn’t
getting on fast enough. The Russians, I believe, are especially deficient in

the
art of painstaking work. ... With very special regards to you, your wife
and
children in your new house.
Yours,
Freud.°3
There are several interesting aspects to this letter. First, Freud found no al-
lusions to Jung in the letter he had just received from Spielrein, besides its re-
turn address in Zurich. Nevertheless, he forwarded the letter to Jung with
precise comments that leave no doubt as to how much he knew. Second,
Freud switched promptly to the subject of Russians, admiring Jung’s humil-
ity in his contacts with them, and ascribing to the Russian nation certain
utopian ideas and an inability to do painstaking work. At that moment he
was undoubtedly thinking of Spielrein’s letter, wherein she declared that she
did not intend to turn the world upside down, at the same time that she was
interfering with Jung’s work and doing none of her own. At this time, too,
Freud was reorienting his business toward America, so perhaps his deroga-
tory remarks about Russians were a signal of his new financial freedom. In
any case, he sent a curt letter to Fraulein Spielrein in which he refused to re-
ceive her and suggested that she present her request in written form.
The Discovery of Countertransference

Life is so hemmed in by the stupidest formalities, which one must honor, no matter
how petty, if one does not wish to be stamped out. Well, all this is well known.
Enough for today, I think. I could not express the main thing, and that is that my
friend loves me. More about that later.**
On June 4, 1909, Jung sent Freud a cable in response to the latter’s re-
quest and mailed him a long letter. In a desperate attempt to at once safe-
guard Freud’s confidence and prevent Spielrein from spreading the informa-
‘tion any further, he told Freud much, but as will soon become clear, not
everything. In his letter, he accused Spielrein of trying to seduce him, inter-
preted her actions as revenge for his rejection of her usual hysterical de-
mands, and compared her to Gross, whom Freud regarded as a traitor,
Nevertheless, he called Spielrein his “psychoanalytic test case,” and admit-
ted that he maintained friendly relations with her for years, “until I saw
that an unintended wheel had started turning.”*° He wrote that of all his
patients, only Spielrein and Gross enjoyed so much of his friendship and
that they were also the ones who had brought him the most grief,
Freud responded that Jung’s explanations had confirmed his supposi-
tion.
Such experiences, though painful, are necessary and hard to avoid. Without
them we cannot really know life and what we are dealing with. I myself have
never been taken in quite so badly, but I have come very close to it a number of
times and had a narrow escape. | believe that only grim necessities weighing on
my work, and the fact that I was ten years older than yourself when I came to
psychoanalysis, have saved me from similar experiences. But no lasting harm is
done. They help us to develop the thick skin we need to dominate “counter-
transference,” which is after all a permanent problem for us; they teach us to
displace our own affects to best advantage.*°
In this letter, Freud remained what he had always been—a sober, ironic,
and rigid moralist. “The way these women manage to charm us with every
conceivable psychic perfection until they have attained their purpose is one
of nature’s greatest spectacles. Once that has been done or the contrary has
become a certainty, the constellation changes amazingly.”°’ He advised his
student to draw useful lessons from the affair, consoled him, and lent him
the support of a trusting handshake. For Freud, however, whether the se-
ductress had succeeded or failed made all the difference: He had never been
caught “like that.”
A most important point that this letter illustrated was that Freud learned
from the mistakes of others: The letter brings out something new, a concept
still enclosed in quotation marks, the notion of countertransference. This
idea describes the analyst’s feelings for his patient, which naturally reflect
the analyst’s own personal problems. An analyst’s competence and the
course of his analysis depend on the extent to which he is conscious of his
own problems. One can assume (as does the French historian of psycho-
analysis A. de Mijolla*’) that Freud realized the significance of counter-
transference precisely when he was trying to make sense of the difficulties
that Jung encountered as he treated his Russian patient. Freud publicly un-
veiled his theory of countertransference at his earliest opportunity, at the
Nuremberg Congress of April 1910.
Freud sent another letter to Sabina in which, without accusing Jung, he
urged her to “suppress and eradicate” “the feelings that have outlived this
close relationship.”*? He avoided personal involvement and interference,
although the tone of his letter left Sabina some hope that the intrigue might
continue. She was quick to take advantage of this ambiguity.
Jung continued to regret in his “theological” style, as Freud ironically
dubbed it: “[flor actually it is too stupid that I of all people, your ‘son and
heir,’ should squander your heritage so heedlessly.”*° In his response,
Freud begged him not to “go too far in the direction of contrition and re-
action,” and he employed the following metaphor to present the moral of
the story:
Remember Lassalle’s fine sentence about the chemist whose test tube had
cracked: “With a slight frown over the resistance of matter, he gets on with
his work.” In view of the kind of matter we work with, it will never
be possi-
ble to avoid little laboratory explosions. Maybe we didn’t slant the
test tube
enough, or we heated it too quickly. In this way we learn what part
of the
danger lies in the matter and what part in our way of handling it.*
It was during this period that Freud developed his habit of conveying his
regards to Jung’s spouse in all of his letters.
Meanwhile, a messy situation was about to erupt, involving Sabina’s par-
ents, Jung’s wife, and of course Freud himself. Sabina continued to share
new details with Freud, supposedly trying to make him demonstrate to her
that Jung was worthy of love and no villain. She rejected Freud’s advice to
suppress her feelings, not because it was impossible, but because she con-
sidered such a move useless: If she were to eradicate Jung from her heart,
she would never be able to love again; she felt that by leaving the door
open, someone else might someday enter.** Sabina’s mother received an
anonymous letter. Sabina suspected that Jung’s wife, Emma, had written it.
Finally, Jung himself wrote to Sabina’s mother.
In his cold letter, Jung differentiated the roles of doctor and lover in the
following way: The doctor was paid for his work and, therefore, he knew
his limits well. A man and a woman, on the other hand, cannot maintain
purely Platonic relations forever. Therefore, Jung earnestly suggested that
Mrs. Spielrein start paying “suitable recompense,” which would enable him
to confine himself to his role as a doctor. At the end he even named the
price. If he were to remain Sabina’s friend, her mother would have to take
her chances. “For no one can prevent two friends from doing as they wish.”
All this would have been normal if it had occurred at a different stage in
the relationship; but at that moment it was much too late to make such
proposals. Everything had already happened, as Jung was the first to recog-
nize: “I moved from being her doctor to being her friend when I ceased to
push my own feelings into the background. I could drop my role as doctor
the more easily because I did not feel professionally obligated, for I never
charged a fee. This latter clearly establishes the limits imposed upon a doc-
- tor.”43 Under the circumstances, it was impossible for Jung to go back to
his role as a doctor, and his request for fees amounting to ten francs per
hour therefore seems obtuse revenge.
Sabina’s parents were of an exceptionally sober sort. On June 13, 1909,
Sabina wrote to Freud: “I am really lucky that my parents have reacted so
reasonably to these events. I described the manner of our parting to my
mother, and she passed it along to my father, who said only, ‘People have
made a god out of him, and he is nothing but an ordinary human being. I
am so glad she boxed his ears! I would have done it myself. Just let her do
what she thinks necessary: she can take care of herself.’”** Later, Freud
him
would meet Sabina’s father, Naftul Spielrein, and he would remember
with respect many years afterward.
In 1915, Freud wrote in his article “Observations on Transference-Love”

that when the analyst and his female patient fell in love with each other in
the process of analysis, “there is a complete change of scene; it is as though
some piece of make-believe has been stopped by the sudden irruption of re-
ality—as when, for instance, a cry of fire is raised during a theatrical per-
formance.”*5 Successful analysis is impossible without transference, but
love should not be equated with transference; love is only one of its most
intensive and acute forms, facilitating effective treatment, provided the
therapist is skillful enough. Clearly, not all patients and their relatives
would agree. “Any relative who adopts Tolstoy’s attitude to this problem
can remain in undisturbed possession of his wife or daughter; but he will
have to try to put up with the fact that she, for her part, retains her neuro-
sis and the interference with her capacity for love which it involves.”*°
Love brought on by analysis, according to Freud, must never be consum-
mated. “The treatment must be carried out in abstinence,”*’ and this is not
so much an ethical principle as it is a therapeutic necessity: “I shall state it
as a fundamental principle that the patient’s need and longing should be al-
lowed to persist in her, in order that they may serve as forces impelling her
to work and to make changes.”** Suppression of the patient’s craving for
love was no less perilous than its gratification, and therefore the doctor’s
task was to achieve a complex balance between these two simple extremes.
The only possible way to do this, Freud insisted, was to treat the craving
for love as something symbolic, emphasizing the role of resistance in this
love but not questioning its authenticity.
What would happen, Freud asked himself and generations of his follow-
ers, if the doctor satisfied his patient’s desire, liberating his own feelings of
transference? “The patient would achieve her aim, but he would never
achieve his.”*? Freud illustrated this point with an old Jewish joke about the
pastor who came to visit an insurance agent on his deathbed. Their conver-
sation went on for so long that a relative waiting impatiently outside began
to hope that the dying agent would be converted to the true faith before his
passing. At last, the door opened and the pastor came out, fully insured.°°
Perfect Honesty
Yes, those were two bad nights. My love for my friend overwhelmed me with a
mad glow. At some moments I resisted violently, at others I let him kiss every one
of my little fingers and clung to his lips, swooning with love. How foolish to talk
about it! So this is I, usually the soul of pure, clear reason, allowing myself such
fantasies. How am I supposed to withstand this savage force? Here I sit, weary
from all the tempests I have endured, and repeat to myself: not this! Better an ab-
solutely pure friendship, even a distance. That he loves me is certain, but “there is
a but,” as our old natural-history teacher used to say, and that is that .. . my friend
is already married.°!
On June 21, 1909, Jung wrote to Freud,

I have good news to report of my Spielrein affair. I took too black a view
of
things. After breaking with her I was almost certain of her revenge and was
deeply disappointed only by the banality of the form it took. The day before
yesterday she turned up at my house and had a very decent talk with me, dur-
ing which it transpired that the rumour buzzing about me does not emanate
from her at all. My ideas of reference, understandable enough in the circum-
stances, attributed the rumour to her, but I wish to retract this forthwith.°2
It is hard to imagine how difficult it must have been for Jung to write this
letter. He was forced to admit the total falsity of his clinical vision. He even
admitted that Sabina’s sexual contrivances were an illusion: “[I was] imag-
ining that I was talking theoretically, but naturally Eros was lurking in the
background.” Moreover, now he claimed that the patient had freed herself
from transference “in the best and nicest way and has suffered no relapse
(apart from a paroxysm of weeping after the separation).” He no longer ac-
cused her of hysteria and blackmail, totally accepting and repeating her
motives: “Her intention to come to you was not aimed at any intrigue but
only at paving the way for a talk with me.” At this point he confessed, al-
though not quite straight out, that he had committed a sin, and repentance
was evident in everything that followed: “Although not succumbing to
helpless remorse, I nevertheless deplore the sins I have committed, for I am
largely to blame for the high-flying hopes of my former patient.”
However, admitting that his letter to Sabina’s mother had been an at-
tempt at deception, he provided the following explanation, which would
also have appeared patently deceptive not just to Freud, but to any reason-
able adult:
When the situation had become so tense that the continued preservation of the
relationship could be rounded out only by sexual acts, I defended myself in a
manner that cannot be justified morally. ... I wrote to her mother that I was
not the gratifier of her daughter’s sexual desires but merely her doctor, and
that she should free me from her. In view of the fact that the patient had
shortly before been my friend and enjoyed my full confidence, my action was a
piece of knavery which I very reluctantly confess to you as my father.°?
Finally, he asks his teacher, father figure, and most serious competitor for
help, and most likely for collaboration: Freud was to provide Sabina with
documented confirmation of his student’s “perfect honesty,” and by so do-
ing fulfill one of the conditions for capitulation:
I would now like to ask you a great favour: would you please write a note to
Frl. Spielrein, telling her that I have fully informed you of the matter, and espe-
like to
cially of the letter to her parents, which is what I regret most. I would
know of my “perfect
give my patient at least this satisfaction: that you and she
honesty.” I ask your pardon many times, for it was my stupidity that drew you
into this imbroglio.
The long letter ends with an unsuccessful attempt to follow Freud’s ad-
vice and to extract a modicum of benefit from the situation: “But now I am
extremely glad that I was not mistaken, after all, about the character of my
patient, otherwise I should have been left with a gnawing doubt as to the
soundness of my judgment, and this would have been a considerable hin-
drance to me in my work.”**
Jung, a psychiatrist, the author of superb academic works, Freud’s closest
heir and protégé, lost the battle and had to admit his failure in a humiliat-
ing confession. And to whom did he lose? To his former patient, one diag-
nosed by his boss as a schizophrenic. And where did he lose? In his own
professional field, the business of relations, in a reworking of transference,
in coordinating feelings with reality. And what did he lose?
Three days later, fulfilling his student’s almost unmanageable request that
he testify to Jung’s “perfect honesty,” Freud wrote to Sabina Spielrein:
Dear colleague,
I have today learnt something from Dr. Jung himself about the subject of your
proposed visit to me, and now see that I had divined some matters correctly
but that I had construed others wrongly and to your disadvantage. I must ask
your forgiveness on this latter count. However, the fact that I was wrong and
that the lapse has to be blamed on the man and not the woman, as my young
friend himself admits, satisfies my need to hold women in high regard. Please
accept this expression of my entire sympathy for the dignified way in which
you have resolved the conflict. Yours faithfully, Freud.°>
While consoling Jung again later, Freud remarked in passing, “perhaps I

am already too biased in your favour.” His curiosity was piqued; he wanted
to know more about this Fraulein Spielrein. “Amazingly awkward—is she
a foreigner by any chance?”°® he asked Jung. This time Jung took his time
with an answer: “First of all I want to thank you very much for your kind
help in the Spielrein matter, which has now settled itself so satisfactorily.
Once again I took too black a view. Frl. S. is a Russian, hence her awk-
wardness.”>7”
This is how Freud first learned that Spielrein was Russian. Only at this
point could he have understood that the heroine of Jung’s love affair was
the same Russian patient whose “defecation story” Jung had related to him
so long before. Although it would have been difficult, Freud could have
found that early letter in his archives: It was Jung’s second letter and by this
time there were about a hundred. The letter is fascinating when reexamined
in light of these later events: Jung was seeking an opinion about a twenty-
year-old female patient who had been ill for the past six years, yet he wrote
only about her anal games at the age of 3 or 4. Jung requested a consulta-
tion in this difficult case without explaining why it was so difficult. He was
seeking advice, but did not indicate what he was doing or planning to do.
The letter was a symptom in itself: Jung could have used an analysis in the
struggle with his unfamiliar feelings, trying to comprehend his own turbu-
lent unconscious. This is why he appealed to Freud. But, like any other pa-
tient, he was unable to articulate his problem, concealed what was really
worrying him, and presented his letter as an expression of his professional
interest. Freud, nevertheless, took it at face value and began to discuss anal
character. Later, Jung repeatedly asked Freud’s advice regarding the same
young woman, concealing his feelings and withholding even her name.
Sabina’s name was not a matter of chance; Freud taught that there is noth-
ing random in psychoanalysis, and that every detail contains meaning. In
German, Spielrein contains two words, “pure” and “game.”
Later, Jung wrote: “The cause of the pathogenic conflict lies mainly in
the present moment. In constructing a theory which derives the neurosis
from causes in the distant past, we are first and foremost following the ten-
dency of our patients to lure us as far as possible from the critical pres-
ent.”°® This is just what Jung did in his attempt to impart to Freud his
deepest concerns, worries that were unclear even to himself. He did not
provide Freud with any key to understand his real anxieties, and he dis-
tracted attention away from himself in the present by focusing on past
events in the life of his patient. Jung’s behavior in this case corresponded
perfectly to the stereotype of neurotic behavior at the beginning of therapy:
He was ambivalent, sought the psychoanalyst’s help, and desired intimacy
with him, but was at the same time stricken with fear that the analyst might
understand the true character of his problems. He therefore substituted var-
ious lies for his true problems.
Between Jung and Ivanov

He wanted to show me we were complete strangers to each other, and it is humili-
ating if I now go to see him. I decided to go the following Friday, but to act com-
pletely professional. The devil whispered other things to me, but I no longer be-
lieved them. I sat there waiting in deep depression. Now he arrives, beaming with
pleasure, and tells me without strong emotion about Gross, about the great insight
he has just received (i.e., about polygamy); he no longer wants to suppress his feel-
ing for me, he admitted that I was his first, dearest woman friend, etc., etc. (his
wife of course excepted), and that he wanted to tell me everything about himself.
So once more this most curious coincidence that the devil so unexpectedly turned
out to be right. Should one praise him or damn him? This immortal saying: “Part
of power that would/Alone work evil, but engenders good.” This demonic force,
force,
whose very essence is destruction (evil) and at the same time is the creative
is in fact
since out of the destruction (of two individuals) a new one arises. That
the sexual drive, which is by nature a destructive drive, an exterminating drive for
the individual, and for that reason, in my opinion, must overcome such great resis-
tance in everyone; but to prove this here would take too much of your time.
Time for bed!>?
In the process of freeing herself from her feelings for Jung, Spielrein made
the discovery that the sex drive is not the only force at work in mankind, an
idea contrary to Freud’s opinion on the subject. Coexisting with the sex
drive but directly opposite, she found another attraction—to destruction
and the annihilation of life. Freud at first did not accept this idea, which
distorted his theory of libido and required a reevaluation of many postu-
lates inherent in the psychoanalytic method. However, toward the end of
his long life, Freud incorporated this very idea—that Eros and Thanatos are
two equally powerful forces in human nature—into the foundation of the
final edifice of his doctrine. Thirty years later, the quotation from Faust
that had given rise to Sabina’s musings on the subject (as yet, only in her di-
ary) would serve also as a starting point for works by Freud (in the intro-
duction to the psychological biography of President Wilson) and Bulgakov
(in the epigraph to The Master and Margarita [see chapter 9]).
During those intervening years, Sabina Spielrein achieved professional
recognition. Her relations with Jung were obviously fixed at some mutually
acceptable level. She still dreamed of having a child, and she confided in
Freud that she entertained fantasies about her future son, Siegfried, who
would be sired by Jung and who might become the second savior of
mankind, as he would embody the best qualities of the Jewish and Aryan
races. In 1911, Sabina successfully defended her doctoral thesis and set her-
self to writing the article “Destruction as the Reason for Becoming,”®°
which was to become famous. She wrote to Jung about the article:
Dear One,
Receive now the product of our love, the project which is your little son
Siegfried. It caused me tremendous difficulty, but nothing was too hard if it was
done for Siegfried. If you decide to print this, I shall feel I have fulfilled my duty.
toward you. Only then shall I be free. This study means more to me than my life,
and that is why I am so fearful. .. . Siegfried has an enormous creative thrust,
even if he was temporarily consigned to a shadowy existence in the realm of
Proserpina. ...1I do not want to disturb your peace and quiet: on the contrary,
the dissertation is supposed to add as much as possible to your well-being.®!
Spielrein’s work begins with the question of why the mighty sexual in-
stinct gives rise not just to pleasure but also to negative feelings: anxiety,
disgust, and squeamishness. Her voluminous essay alternates between quo-
tations from Jung and a paraphrase of Gogol’s Inspector General, inte-
grates Otto Gross with Oleg the Wise,®? and seats Shakespeare next to
151
Zarathustra. Spielrein also wrote of her patients, but mythology and cul-
tural history provided her with more fertile material. Nietzsche and Freud
dominate in the footnotes. The context reflects the equally powerful influ-
ence of Vladimir Solovyov and Vyacheslav Ivanov.
For something to be constructed, Spielrein argued, what came before has
to be torn down. Therefore, every act of creation implies a process of de-
struction. The instinct of self-reproduction contains two components: the
life instinct and the death instinct. The attraction to death and destruction
is not external to life and art, something that might defile them, or some-
thing that can be purged from them. On the contrary, the attraction to
death is an inseparable element of the attraction to life and life’s continua-
tion in a new human being. After offering a number of biological examples,
Spielrein proceeded with an exploration of the phenomenon in mythologi-
cal and literary sources. She found proof of her theory in many cases where
love was born of hatred, when it arose out of death or engendered death, as
in masochism and sadism. The most obvious illustration was suicidal
lovers, like Romeo and Juliet. Oleg the Wise, in the Russian legend, met his
end in the skull of his favorite horse, which embodied his sexuality and his
death. The flip side of love was the desire to destroy the object of desire;
every birth was a death and every death a birth.
The theoretical conclusion was that “a species’ self-preservation instinct
requires that the past be destroyed to the same extent that something new is
created, and ... is essentially ambivalent.... The instinct of self-
preservation protects Man, while the dualistic instinct of self-reproduction
changes him and resurrects him in a new aspect.”
Spielrein presented this paper at a session of the Vienna Psychoanalytic
Society on November 25, 1911. Eighteen people were present, including
Freud, Federn, Rank, Sacks, Steckel, and Tausk. The talk was followed by a
lively discussion. Tausk criticized Spielrein’s approach as deductive, as op-
posed to the inductive, concrete spirit of psychoanalysis. Several years later,
his horrible death would become an illustration of Sabina’s abstract ideas
(see chapter 1).
Freud expressed a similarly mixed attitude toward Sabina and her paper:
“She is very bright; there is meaning in everything she says; her destructive
drive is not much to my liking, because I believe it is personally condi-
tioned. She seems abnormally ambivalent.”®
Eighteen years later, however, Freud would admit, “I remember my own
defensive attitude when the idea of an instinct of destruction first emerged
in psychoanalytic literature, and how long it took before I became receptive
to it.”© Time had passed, however, and in his famous work, Beyond the
Pleasure Principle, written, it is often assumed, under the influence of the
experience of the war and a succession of personal losses, Freud a
typica
peated Spielrein’s basic conclusions. He paid tribute to her in his
style: “A considerable portion of these speculations have been anticipated

by Sabina Spielrein (1912) in an instructive and interesting paper which,
however, is unfortunately not entirely clear to me.”°° Jung, however, con-
sidered such a reference insufficient: He wrote that the idea of the death
wish was developed by his student and simply taken up by Freud.°”
Freud’s characterization of Spielrein’s work is strangely ambivalent: How
can something that is obscure to one also be “instructive and interesting”?
Perhaps Freud was acknowledging Sabina’s formal precedence, while indi-
cating he did not understand the Russian context that was so meaningful
for her and that to a large extent motivated her work. This might well have
been what made Spielrein’s article “not entirely clear” to him.
The composition and content of Spielrein’s article were reminiscent of
Vladimir Solovyov’s famous essay, “The Meaning of Love.” Solovyov also
began with the means of procreation among insects and fish; he also stated
that the god of life and the god of death were one and the same. At the
same time, he drew completely different conclusions from all of this, under-
lining the need to transform sex and fight against death. Spielrein based her
argument more on the contemporary symbolist tradition, which had been
popular during her youth and was based, in turn, on Nietzschean philoso-
phy (see chapter 2). In her article, Spielrein referred extensively to
Nietzsche’s dreams of eternal resurrection and lent new, psychological
meaning to the superman’s physical resurrection, a teaching that already
had many Russian adepts, from Fyodorov to Merezhkovsky. Spielrein in-
terpreted “eternal resurrection” and the idea of the Ubermensch as the re-
sult of Nietzsche’s identification with his mother: His loving union with his
mother was such that he could only conceive of himself as his mother, and
of his mother as himself. He was pregnant with himself, and so was truly
prepared for constant, eternal rebirth.°* For Nietzsche, he himself, man in
general, and humanity in its entirety were like a mother carrying a won-
drous child in her womb. Man was what would have to be overcome, be-
cause only man could give birth to the superman.
Spielrein offered no biographical evidence to support her conception, in-
stead analyzing Nietzsche as,ready-made mythological material. Spielrein’s
approach probably harmonized well with Jung’s methodology, which was
summarized around that time in Psychology of the Unconscious: A Study
of the Transformations and Symbolisms of the Libido, though it was a
purer form of that methodology. This book, one of Jung’s major works, ap-
peared at almost the same time as Spielrein’s article.’ Later, Jung indicated
that Spielrein’s ideas were linked to one of the chapters in his book, one in
which he discussed the double meaning of maternal symbolism. This is
probably true, but it is more likely that both drew upon Nietzsche as their
primary source; around this time, Nietzschean motifs began to multiply in
Jung’s correspondence. As for Spielrein’s long article, Nietzsche was by far
the most oft-cited author in it, with significantly more references to him
than to Freud or Jung. Spielrein stressed that one of her achievements was a
more profound understanding of Nietzsche. Paul Federn felt more or less
the same way about her work: It was a “contribution to the analysis of the
mystical modality of the mind.””°
In 1909, Vyacheslav Ivanoy, the spiritual father of the Russian cult of
Nietzsche, who centered his quest around the “religion of Dionysus, the
suffering god” (an idea, as we have seen, that was also at one time espoused
by Jung), published his manifesto Following the Stars. In this treatise,
Ivanov wrote of the relationship between Passion and Death, “Eros’ feet
rest on both, out of both arises Love, something at once akin and alien to
both.”’! Ivanov’s sources were the same as Spielrein’s: Nietzsche, world
philosophy, and Russian literature of the nineteenth century. “The fatal
charm of the mystically attractive and horrifying truth that emanates from
Pushkin’s Egyptian Nights lies in the unconscious, primordial memory of
the preordained death of the masculine and of the need to exchange life for
the possession of a woman.”” Just as in Sabina’s article, in Ivanov’s work
lofty mythology intertwines with examples from biological life (in this case,
bees). Ivanov wrote that “the highest truth is reflected in the biological fact
that the male of the species dies after copulation.” The very essence of
Dionysus implies the unification of love and death in the cyclical acts of
birth and death. If Dionysus had any passion, it would undoubtedly be a
double-edged attraction to life and death.
We do not know whether Sabina read Vyacheslav Ivanov or how she felt
about him. We know only that he was read extensively by her whole gener-
ation, from high-school students to the philosophers and poets of the elite.
Later, the philosopher Berdyaev, the painter Bakst, the novelist
Merezhkovsky, and the literary scholar Bakhtin all developed and popular-
ized Ivanov’s ideas in various forms. Ivanov’s obscure symbols became the
common denominators of Russian modernist culture, “driving decadents,
neorealists, Symbolists, and idealists into a single herd.””?
This culture was for the most part alien to Freud. He had crossed paths
with it only through some of his sources, primarily Nietzsche and Wagner,
or through his Russian students and patients. Spielrein, on the other hand,
grew up immersed in it.”4 In a symbolic sense, she made her dream come
true: She gave birth to an article that, like Siegfried, was spawned by two
intellectual traditions, Jewish and Aryan.
Referring to Spielrein, Freud continued his speculations in Beyond the
Pleasure Principle in a very unusual way. Under the sway of a new kind of
logic, he moved slowly, wordily—as he put it, “limping”—from the idea of
the death wish to the directly related idea of gender mix (see chapter 2). As
one might expect, Freud cited Plato’s mythic androgyny, recalling along the
way a similar tale from the Upanishads. It was precisely at this point that
Freud felt himself the closest he had ever come in all of his writings to the
role of devil’s advocate. One sees the striking image of a normally bold and
self-assured thinker coming up against an alien tradition: “But here, I
think, the moment has come for breaking off... . 1 do not know how far I
believe in [my own hypotheses].””°
The idea of attraction to death switches psychoanalytic discourse from
Oedipal logic to a completely different way of thinking, the logic of
Dionysus. Freud’s clear, rational, and heterosexual thoughts were unfolding
before the reader’s eyes with the help of discordant ideas found in Plato,
Nietzsche, and the Russian symbolists—a contradiction that might have ne-
cessitated a fundamental reevaluation of the basic values of psychoanalysis,
had Freud not stopped just in time. He admitted that his difficulties were
moral in nature and that he submitted to self-imposed censorship:
“Unfortunately, however, people are seldom impartial where ultimate
things, the great problems of science and life, are concerned. Each of us is
governed in such cases by deep-rooted internal prejudices, into whose
hands our speculation unwittingly plays.””°
Next to Freud
Sabina Spielrein was admitted to membership in the Vienna Psychoanalytic
Society on December 11, 1911. This happened during the same meeting at
which Freud expelled Adler and five of the latter’s supporters. It was the
start of a period of schisms and exhausting battles within the psychoanalytic
movement. While the “old master,” as Freud called himself, kicked out one
“son” and heir after another, he became more and more dependent on his
adopted daughters. Paul Roazen counted about a dozen such female psycho-
analysts who, each in her turn, took a place next to Freud.’” They included
Eugenie Sokolnicka, who committed suicide in 1934 despite the treatment
rendered her by Freud; Princess Marie Bonaparte; and several of Anna
Freud’s girlfriends. Sabina Spielrein is entitled to top, or near-top billing on
this list. The words that Freud wrote to her on October 27, 1911, relating
the noisy confrontation with Adler and his followers, reveal the significance
this female company had for him at that time, as well as much later:
As a woman you have the prerogative of observing things more accurately and
of assessing emotions more closely than others. It is therefore most pleasant
that you should wish to smooth out wrinkles and folds with a soft hand, as it
were. True, I am often hurt by my inability to raise the level of personal con-
duct and mutual understanding among our members to that which I would
like to foster among psychoanalysts. Our last evening was not exactly a glori-
ous one. But I am not always as humorless as I must have appeared on that
particular occasion. For the rest, I fully approve your attitude and look confi-
dently to the future.”8
He informed Jung of the initiation of Spielrein, “who turned up unex-

pectedly,” and wrote with obvious pride that “she said I didn’t look mali-
cious, as she had imagined I would.””
So far, Freud was still sharing his impressions with Jung. On November
30 he wrote about Spielrein’s article, playing with the pronouns “her” and
“your”:
Fraulein Spielrein read a chapter from her paper yesterday (I almost wrote the
ihrer [her] with a capital “i”), and it was followed by an illuminating discus-
sion. I have hit on a few objections to your [Ihrer ] (this time I mean it) method
of dealing with mythology, and I brought them up in the discussion with the
little girl. I must say she is rather nice and I am beginning to understand.*°
Jung responded with masculine emotion: “I’ll gladly take Spielrein’s new
paper. .. . It demands a great deal of revision, but then the little girl has al-
ways been very demanding with me. However, she’s worth it. 1am glad you
don’t think badly of her.”®! When Jung received the article, however, he
subjected it to devastating criticism, proving that the idea of the death wish
was not their common brainchild, but Spielrein’s alone.®”
It doesn’t take a psychoanalyst to see that such idyllic unity could not last
long. Freud wrote to Jung on March 21, 1912: “Zurich is beginning to
withhold its support at a time when foreign developments are so gratifying.
In Russia (Odessa) there seems to be a local epidemic of psychoanalysis.”*?
Now we are in a position to interpret Freud’s remark: For him, Zurich rep-
resented Jung. Russia at that time was personified for the most part by
Spielrein. Freud was making a choice, but he was still unready to admit it.
Who’s Got the Neurosis?

Sabina Spielrein played a vital role in the history of the Jung-Freud relation-
ship. As Jung’s first psychoanalytic patient, she became the focus of her
therapist’s unmediated, unanalyzed attraction; but her “hysterical psy-
chosis” and “anal character” metamorphosed into an incredible receptive-
ness, feminine intuition, and the ability to creatively exploit everything that
Jung gave her during their long relationship. “The neurotic gratitude of the
spurned”*4 had turned into the creative gratitude of a talented colleague
who has made her own way and, regardless of personal differences, contin-
ues to serve the common cause.
The correspondence between Freud and Jung is an astonishingly power-
ful historical and human testament. It is the most dramatic document of
psychoanalytic history and, undoubtedly, one of the outstanding monu-
ments to those bygone days when people actually wrote letters to each
other. This correspondence has various aspects, and it has been and will
continue to be interpreted from various points of view. One of the most im-
portant angles is to examine the letters within the context of Freud’s and
Jung’s relations with Sabina Spielrein.
The correspondence began with the meeting of the two analysts, immedi-
ately followed by Jung’s introduction of his “difficult case,” the Russian
student. The correspondence continued with Jung’s veiled and open abreac-
tions concerning the developing relationship with nis patient, and with
Freud’s attempts to reveal and work through his correspondent’s uncon-
scious feelings. The correspondence reached its culmination after Jung’s im-
mature and ill-prepared breakup with Sabina, to which she responded with
unusual alacrity. In the end, nevertheless, Freud was compelled to recognize
Sabina’s behavior as the most honorable resolution to the situation. The
correspondence ended with the correspondents’ mutual disillusionment
with their competition for a large number of common values, including re-
lations with Sabina.
Freud fully understood and was not inclined to intensify the anxiety and
guilt that Jung experienced as a professional who had failed in his first test
case, flubbed it to the point of scandal. But Freud was probably also
amazed to find that his favorite student was unfamiliar with the simplest,
most basic principles of psychoanalysis. This thirty-four-year-old man, who
thought of himself as a spouse beyond reproach, turned out to be com-
pletely unaware of his own lust. Since he had not undergone analysis, he
was unprepared for the trials of his trade. His first encounter with the
“greatest spectacle of nature,” as Freud referred to the charms of his female
patients, ended in total disaster. Acquaintance with Sabina helped Jung to
discover completely new spaces in his own eros, a realm that he sincerely
believed was confined to his happy marriage. His ethical principles seemed
so contradictory to his inner reality that, at the peak of his crisis, he was
horrified even by a trivial invitation to give a lecture on ethics: “I am so
thoroughly convinced that I would have to read myself the longest ethical
lectures that I cannot muster a grain of courage to promote ethics in public,
let alone from the psychoanalytic standpoint.” At this time he was “sitting
so precariously on the fence between the Dionysian and the Apollonian”
that he began to investigate various spiritual systems, as often happens in
youth. Vacillating between these ideas and trying to apply them to himself,
he strove to bring his internal chaos into some kind of order by using the
formulas of others. At one point he wondered “whether it might not be
worthwhile to reintroduce a few of the older cultural idiocies, such as
monasteries.”** Almost at the same time, he began a lengthy paraphrase of
Nietzsche, devoid of references, which he subsequently mailed to Freud. At
the next moment, he suddenly started prodding his teacher with specula-
tions about the value of homosexual communities.
All sorts of things are cooking in me, mythology in particular, that is to say
mythology should gain by it, for what is cooking is the nuptial complex as is
Back to Russia: Sabina Spielrein 157,
evidently fit and proper at my time of life. My dreams revel in symbols that
speak volumes, for instance my wife had her right arm chopped off.°¢
The crisis in his relationship with Sabina did indeed bring Jung to the in-
sights that he articulated for the first time in his Psychology of the
Unconscious—thoughts that he would rework many times. He was dissat-
isfied with Freudian psychoanalysis, the mode in which his mind had been
operating during the crisis and that, after all, was expressly designed to deal
with such crises.
What I have done and still am doing to promote the spread of psychoanalysis
must surely be of far greater importance to you than my personal awkward-
ness and nastiness. ... Of course I have opinions which are not yours about
the ultimate truths of psychoanalysis. ... Let Zarathustra speak for me: “One
repays a teacher badly if one remains only a pupil.” This is what you have
taught me through psychoanalysis. As one who is truly your follower, I must
be stout-hearted, not least towards you.®”
As had often happened before in the history of psychoanalysis, the student

joined forces with Nietzsche in order to distance himself from Freud.
Freud never did forgive his student for the intellectual quest reflected in
the unexpectedly vigorous inspiration of Jung’s 1909 letters. It was not
Jung’s moral failure or professional mistakes that pushed Freud away from
his former favorite; Jung’s heterodoxy was far more important in this re-
gard. Freud perceived this heterodoxy in familiar terms, as a neurosis.
Rejecting his student as an intellectual partner, he demoted him to the posi-
tion of patient.
You speak of the need for intellectual independence and quote Nietzsche in
support of your view. I am in full agreement. But if a third party were to read
this passage, he would ask me when I had tried to tyrannize you intellectually,
and I should have to say: I don’t know. I don’t believe I ever did. Adler, it is
true, made similar complaints, but I am convinced that his neurosis was speak-
ing for him.*®
Adler had already been dismissed as a neurotic in denial—the worst pos-

sible vice for a psychoanalyst. Jung was still being offered the opportunity
to admit his neurosis: “Still, if you think you want greater freedom from
me, what can I do but give up my feeling of urgency about our relationship,
occupy my unemployed libido elsewhere, and bide my time until you dis-
cover that you can tolerate greater intimacy?”®?
At the height of their row, Jung and Freud once again realized bitterly the
problems that would yet shake the psychoanalytic community many times:
One thing I beg of you: take these statements as an effort to be honest and do
not apply the depreciatory Viennese criterion of egoistic striving for power or
heaven knows what other insinuations from the world of the father complex.
This is just what I have been hearing on all sides these days, with the result
that I am forced to the painful conclusion that the majority of psychoanalysts
misuse psychoanalysis for the purpose of devaluing others and their progress
by insinuations about complexes. ... The pity of it is that psychoanalysts are
just as supinely dependent on psychoanalysis as our opponents are on their be-
lief in authority. Anything that might make them think is written off as a com-
plex. This protective function of psychoanalysis badly needed unmasking.”°
Freud reluctantly agreed: “I too have been disturbed for some time by the
abuse of psychoanalysis to which I refer, that is, in polemics, especially
against new ideas. I do not know if there is any way of preventing this en-
tirely; for the present I can only suggest a household remedy: let us each of
us pay more attention to his own than to his neighbour’s neurosis.””!
Freud must have known that this kind of admonishment would be no
more helpful than advice to a neurotic that he control his emotions:
Dear Professor Freud,
May I say a few words to you in earnest? I admit the ambivalence of my feel-
ings towards you, but am inclined to take an honest and absolutely straightfor-
ward view of the situation. If you doubt my word, so much the worse for you.
I would, however, point out that your technique of treating your pupils like
patients is a blunder. In that way you produce either slavish sons or impudent
puppies (Adler-Stekel and the whole insolent gang now throwing their weight
about in Vienna). ... Meanwhile you remain on top as the father, sitting
pretty. For sheer obsequiousness nobody dares to pluck the prophet by the
beard and inquire for once what you would say to a patient with a tendency to
analyse the analyst instead of himself. You would certainly ask him: “Who’s
got the neurosis?”7?
“Why should I mutter against God, when even to one creature I was able
to give freedom!” Sabina had quoted from Pushkin for Jung’s benefit, in
both Russian and German. But there was indeed something to mutter about:
A person who acquires freedom also liberates himself from his emancipator.
Success in psychoanalysis implies the patient’s ability to finally break ties
with the analyst, ties they have been building together through prolonged,
intensive labor. Tragedy could be lurking just behind this kind of success. Is
it really possible to reconcile freedom and intimate relations, maturity and
dependence, honesty and ambivalence? Although he had insulted his
teacher, Jung still did not consider schism with Freud inevitable, and enter-
tained hopes that their relationship could be transformed:
You see, my dear Professor, so long as you hand out this stuff Idon’t give a damn
for my symptomatic actions; they shrink to nothing in comparison with the for-
midable beam in my brother Freud’s eye. . . Do you love neurotics enough to be
159
always at one with yourself? But perhaps you hate neurotics.... Adler and
Stekel were taken in by your little tricks and reacted with childish insolence. I
shall continue to stand by you publicly while maintaining my own views, but pri-
vately shall start telling you in my letters what I really think of you.”
However, their relationship was drawing to its tragic dénouement. It is

not for us to judge who was right and who wrong: the great teacher who
fell short of perfection only in his fondness for his own greatness, or the
brilliant student who turned out to be too impatient an heir. Perhaps the
fault lay in their method, which allowed both to understand the situation
but did not help them to change it. Could it be that the fateful breakup was
brought about by forces inherent to human nature that are most clearly
demonstrated at the highest echelons of the human spirit? Or is the source
revealed by the old adage—chercher la femme—was it Sabina Spielrein,
who maintained the best possible relations with both of the male characters
in the story?
In January 1913, Freud informed Sabina: “My personal relationship
with your Germanic hero has definitely been shattered. His behavior was
too bad. Since I received that first letter from you, my opinion of him has
greatly altered.”?4 In May, he conveyed nearly the same feelings. “I am
sorry to hear that you are consumed with longing for J., and this at a time
when I am on such bad terms with him. .. . | imagine that you love Dr. J. so
deeply still because you have not brought to light the hatred he merits... . I
am glad that Iam now as little responsible for his personal achievements as
I am for his scientific ones.””°
Freud’s remark is striking. Nine years of correspondence between the
two men—359 letters—testify to a multitude of shared interests, supported
by genuine respect and mutual affection; but clearly, there is a suggestion in
Freud’s letter that their relationship was as much defined by Jung’s behav-
ior toward Sabina (“his personal achievements”) as by his behavior toward
Freud. It is worth comparing this statement of Freud’s with one made by
Jung in a letter to Sabina: “The love of S. for J. made the latter aware of
something he had previously only vaguely suspected, that is, of a power in
the unconscious that shapes one’s destiny, a power which later led him to
things of the greatest importance.”** The two realms of Jung’s “achieve-
ment”—personal and professional—were in this respect closely connected.
There can, of course, be no certain and perfect interpretation of
Spielrein’s role in the history of the extremely complex relationship be-
tween the two men. Their parting of ways was caused by a variety of fac-
tors—intellectual, social, ethnic, and personal. Jung’s mystical interests
were foreign to Freud; and the latter must have been even more repulsed by
the collectivization of the unconscious that Jung would soon embrace, in
welcoming the new concept of the German race. Their conflict can also be
seen as the result of an unwinnable competition between two male egos

that by its nature precluded any truly peaceful resolution. Spielrein’s middle
ground in the clash, first provoking it and later as a mediator, fits well with
such an analysis.
One can also find evidence that their conflict was the result of personal
incompatibility, temporarily smoothed over by mutual professional inter-
ests and by emotions in transference. In one of his first letters to Jung,
Freud pointed out the difference between their characters, describing him-
self as psychasthenic and Jung as hysteric. If this was truly the case, then
Sabina’s role is particularly remarkable, as she managed to maintain friend-
ships with both.
No matter what the interpretations, the fact remains that between 1909
and 1923, Sabina was in constant correspondence with both Freud and
Jung: Twenty of Freud’s and thirty-four of Jung’s letters to her are still ex-
tant. Most of these were written after the two great analysts finally broke
off correspondence with one another in 1913. To some extent, Sabina was
the intermediary who carried on some contact between the two men; she
was also a witness who had seen and who remembered the errors of both, a
judge from whom each demanded confirmation of his own rectitude, and
an attractive woman whose affections were prized by both.
Remnants
Meanwhile, Sabina married a doctor from Rostov, Pavel Scheftel. Freud
learned of their union in 1912 in Karlsbad. He congratulated Sabina and
suggested that her marriage was a sign that she was cured of her neurotic
dependence on Jung, or at least half cured. “The other half still remains;
the question is what is to be done about it.” There had been an agreement
between Freud and Spielrein that she would undergo analysis with him, in
order to “drive out the tyrant,” as he put it. After Sabina’s marriage, Freud
found it necessary to inquire whether she had changed her mind. He recog-
nized that her husband “has rights as well.” “Only what remnant he fails
to clear up belongs properly to psychoanalysis.”?”
Sabina was expecting a child. Once, Freud had interpreted one of her
dreams as indicative of her wish to have Jung’s child, a desire she often
mentioned in her diary. Freud noted, “You could have the child, you know,
if you wanted it, but what a waste of your talents.”°8 It was then that she
realized with surprise to what extent Freud encouraged sublimation in his
patients. Now that she was married, Freud hoped for her “complete cure”
from her old fantasies of giving birth to a new savior in a mixed Aryan-
Semitic union with Jung. Freud added that her fantasy did not appeal to
him at all. “In that other anti-Semitic period, the Lord arranged for him to
be born of the superior Jewish race. But I know these are my prejudices.”
161
In his letters to Spielrein, Freud reiterated this new motif, inspired both by
his disappointment in Jung and by his anticipation of future events:
I can hardly bear to listen when you continue to enthuse about your old love
and past dreams, and count on an ally in the marvelous little stranger. I am, as
you know, cured of the last shred of my predilection for the Aryan cause, and
would like to take it that if the child turns out to be a boy he will develop into
a stalwart Zionist. He or it must be dark in any case, no more towheads. Let
us banish all these will-o’-the-wisps! ... We are and remain Jews. The others
will only exploit us and will never understand or appreciate us.!
Jung was Freud’s only close follower who was not Jewish, and Jung’s in-
terest in “will-o’-the-wisps” and the essence of the race was pulling him to-
ward the Nazi movement. Did Sabina know about this, and did she think
of it as she and a crowd of Rostov Jews were being driven forward by ma-
chine-gun butts?
Apparently, it was at least as hard for Freud to rid himself of his feelings
for his former student and heir as it was for Sabina to get rid of her feelings
for her former therapist and lover. Freud’s persistent reminders to Sabina of
her past and his offers to psychoanalyze her reveal a personal interest:
Freud often used his female disciples for his own abreaction during the
drama that resulted from fallings-out with his male followers. Analysis by
Freud could hardly have proven useful for Spielrein, nor is it clear that she
really needed psychoanalysis at all. At any rate, she did not go to Vienna.
Sabina’s letters to Freud and Jung are distinguished by a subtle under-
standing of the situation and a level of reserve that appear to have been
lacking in her correspondents.
Dear Dr. Jung,
It is very possible that Freud will never understand you when you propose in-
novative theories. In his lifetime Freud has accomplished such extraordinary
things, and he has enough to keep himself occupied for the rest of his days, sim-
ply working out the details of his vast edifice. You, on the other hand, are still
capable of growth. You can understand Freud perfectly well when you wish to,
i.e., if your personal affect does not get in the way. The Freudian theories were,
are, and will remain extraordinarily fruitful. To reproach Freud with one-
sidedness seems very unfair to me, since each of us, and particularly one who
constructs a mighty world-edifice, at first appears a king; then, when people
have had enough and want to free themselves from his sphere of influence, he is
denounced as one-sided and distasteful. You should have the courage to recog-
nize Freud in all his grandeur, even if you do not agree with him on every point,
even if in the process you might have to credit Freud with many of your own
accomplishments. Only then will you be completely free, and only then will you
be the greater one. You will be amazed to see how markedly your eats pesen
ality and your new theory will gain in objectivity through this process.
She wrote to Freud in the same well-defined and appeasing tone: “In
spite of all his wavering, I like J. and would like to lead him back into the
fold. You, Professor Freud, and he have not the faintest idea that you be-
long together far more than anyone might suspect.” Anticipating Freud’s
indignation, she added, “This pious hope is certainly no treachery to our
Society! Everyone knows that I declare myself an adherent to the Freudian
Society, and J. cannot forgive me for this.”!
We know that in 1912 Sabina Spielrein lectured on psychoanalysis in
Russia. Later, she lived in Berlin, where she had problems finding patients
and solicited help from Freud. But Freud had a hard time abandoning his
former perception. He replied in the same vein, interpreting her profes-
sional request within the triangle that still held meaning for him:
Dear Frau Doctor,
Now you are going crazy yourself, and, what is more, with the same symp-
toms as your predecessor! One day I, all unsuspecting, received a letter from
Frau Jung saying that her husband was convinced I had something against
him. That was the beginning; you know the ending.
And your argument that I have not yet sent you any patients? Exactly the
same thing happened with Adler, who pronounced himself persecuted because
I had sent him no patients. Do you not recognize the well-known mechanism
of unduly magnifying a man in order to hold him responsible? ... What in the
world could I possibly have against you after the relationship we have had up
till now? Isn’t it nothing more than your own bad conscience due to your fail-
ure to free yourself from your idol?!
Freud had no patients in Berlin, and he advised Sabina to appeal to

Abraham. Sabina’s wealthy countryman Max Eitingon was also in Berlin,
but they evidently did not get along. Later, the Scheftels moved to
Switzerland, to Lausanne, and then on to Geneva. In Geneva, yet another
extraordinary event took place.
Jean Piaget’s Psychoanalyst

The year 1921 was crucial for twenty-five-year-old Jean Piaget. His cogni-
tive energy, which had until then raced back and forth from the classifica-
tion of mollusks to philosophical epistemology, finally found its focus. It
was in 1921 that Piaget published his first article, devoted to children’s
speech and thought development, and in the same year he discovered ego-
centric speech. Also in 1921, Piaget underwent psychoanalysis with Sabina
Spielrein. The analysis lasted eight months, with sessions held every morn-
ing. The treatment, according to Piaget, was neither therapeutic nor educa-
tional, and was merely a “question of propaganda.” !% Piaget recalled that
Spielrein had been sent to Geneva by the International Psychoanalytic
163
Association. Her goal was the proliferation of psychoanalysis, and he ad-

mitted later in life that he had been happy to “be the guinea pig.” Piaget
was deeply interested but had some reservations about certain theoretical
issues. In the end, it was Spielrein who broke off the analysis because she
was unwilling, as Piaget put it, “to waste an hour a day with a fellow who
refused to swallow the theory.”!5 Besides, he was not planning to become
a psychoanalyst, although he joined Spielrein at the Berlin Congress in
1922. Around the same time, Piaget’s name began to appear in the mem-
bership lists of the Swiss Psychoanalytic Association. In his autobiography,
Piaget does not mention the psychoanalytic treatment he received. But in
his interview with James Rice in 1976, Piaget confirmed once more that
Spielrein had been his analyst, and he described her as a very intelligent
person, full of original ideas.!°° He told Rice that he had tried to contact
her after her return to Russia, but failed.
A year before she met Piaget, in 1920, Sabina Spielrein “of Lausanne”
presented a paper at the Sixth International Psychoanalytic Congress in The
Hague. An abridged version was published in the official journal of the
International Association under the title “On the Origin and Development
of Speech.”!°” Spielrein explained to her colleagues that there were two
types of speech: autistic speech, which was not designed for communica-
tion, and social speech. Autistic speech was primal and served as the basis
of social speech. In a 1923 article entitled “A Few Analogies between
Infantile, Aphasic, and Unconscious Thought,”!°8 Spielrein continued her
argument, setting up the system of analogies (a child’s autistic speech, apha-
sic thought, and the Freudian unconscious) that would play a key role in
psychology during the century to come. Spielrein reinforced her ideas with
observations of and small experiments performed on her elder daughter
Renata. In another presentation, given at the 1922 Berlin Psychoanalytic
Congress and therefore chronologically coincidental with Piaget’s earliest
experiments, Spielrein mused about the genesis of concepts of space, time,
and causation in children’s consciousness.!”
For our purposes, it is important to note that the list of Piaget’s works on
psychology opens with a survey article entitled, “Psychoanalysis and Its
Relations to Child Psychology,” published in Paris in 1920.'!° A year later,
he launched a series of research projects that marked the beginning of a
new era in the study of developmental psychology. In these early works,
Piaget contrasted egocentric speech with socialized speech, which gradually
replaces the earlier form, allowing the child to communicate with its par-
ents and friends. These ideas, articulated by Piaget in a bevy of experimen-
tal works published over the course of more than half a century, gained him
global recognition. . ;
Spielrein traced the first words in social speech, “mama” and papa, to
the sounds made by a suckling infant. The child produced the sound “mo-
mo” when it wanted to eat and suck on its mother’s breast; the sound “po-
po” was produced when the child was sated and playing with the breast.
During the autistic phase, the child received pleasure from smacking its lips,
even when the mother’s breast was nowhere nearby. Then the child linked
these two types of sounds with the parents; this was how the first words in
social speech arose. When a hungry child satisfied itself by slurping “mo-
mo,” its mother appeared; linking its movement with the appearance of
mother’s breast, the child became aware of the magical properties of the
sound it had produced. Later, the “po-po” sound of sated pleasure became
tied to the father. In mastering social speech, a two-year-old child retained
many qualities of autistic thought. For instance, he or she was insensitive to
contradictions, easily switching from one idea to another and just as easily
back again. A child showed many signs of the mental peculiarities that dis-
tinguished those stricken with aphasia. A small child, like someone who was
dreaming, knew only the present. The first phase in the formation of the
concept of time was the idea that something—the mother, for example—
continued to exist, even when she could not be directly observed.
In all of this, Spielrein’s ideas were remarkably close to those of young
Piaget. Positing the very same problems, Spielrein and her Swiss patient be-
gan from a common point but set off in different directions: on the one
hand, the logic of formal thought operations that Piaget was to discover; on
the other, an analysis of the interconnection between speech, mental
processes, and the emotionally charged parent-child relationship. Spielrein’s
approach was psychoanalytic, attributing the greatest importance to the
content of the child’s interaction with its parents; Piaget gradually came to
reject this attitude, forming his own, structural approach. Of course, Piaget
and Spielrein discussed the similarities and differences of their opinions
more than once, as the patient questioned the theoretical basis of analysis
and the therapist presented her counterarguments. The famous Swiss psy-
chologist’s work continued for many decades to be stimulated by an inter-
est in the key issues set before him by Sabina Spielrein in 1921.
In 1923, Spielrein published an experimental work entitled “The Three
Questions.”!'' Students at the Rousseau Institute in Geneva were asked to
think of the three most important questions they could ask God, fate, or
some other higher power. A week later the experiment was repeated, but
this time the students sat with their eyes closed for two minutes before be-
ginning. During the second experiment, the students’ questions were more
concrete and, as Spielrein described them, “egocentric.” Finally, in 1931,
Spielrein used a different experimental procedure in Rostov-on-the-Don to
pursue the same key issue of the relationship between conscious, social,
adaptive thought and unconscious, egocentric, autistic thought.!!2 Several
groups of children and adults were told to draw with their eyes open and
closed. The drawings made with eyes closed were not only technically
165
primitive, they were also more closely tied to kinesthetic experience, more
projective, and in many ways reminiscent of children’s sketches.
Given all this, can it be said that Spielrein’s ideas dominated the thoughts
of young Piaget (as might be said of the aging Freud’s)? Whatever the
power relations between the two, one cannot fail to recognize Spielrein’s
obvious contribution to the trajectory of Piaget’s scholarly development, a
contribution both emotional and intellectual.
The Word “Love” on a Poster

At the beginning of World War I, Pavel Scheftel had left Sabina behind in
Geneva and returned to Russia. He settled in Rostov-on-the-Don, and lived
there in common-law marriage with a Russian woman, a physician, who
bore him a child in 1924. From a letter written by Freud in 1913, we know
that Sabina was still “consumed with longing” for Jung.!!3 This might have
been reason enough for Scheftel to leave. However, Freud might have
slightly exaggerated the problem, so significant was it to him.
In 1917, Emile Metner sent Spielrein several translations of Jung’s works
for proofreading and checking of terminology. After reviewing some pages
and becoming convinced that the translation was poor, she told Jung that
she would not take part in the project; a familiarity with Russian was not
necessarily the same as a familiarity with current Russian psychoanalytic
terminology. Spielrein was particularly concerned that it was impossible to
find previously published Russian translations of Freud in Geneva, or any
texts that could be used to make the technical terms uniform. The problem
was that “neither of us [Spielrein nor Metner] can lay hands on any book
on analysis translated into Russian.” Spielrein advised Jung to withhold
permission for the Russian version, as she felt that inaccurate terminology
would cause additional problems for the Russian reader, especially consid-
ering that “because of political events in Russia the ground is not ready for
scientific matters.” Fortunately, Jung did not follow her advice, and later
Spielrein herself participated in translating Jung’s works into Russian—elic-
iting further jealous remarks from Freud.''*
In 1922, as mentioned earlier, Spielrein attended the International
Psychoanalytic Congress in Berlin. Her presentation there played an impor-
tant role in getting the Congress to recognize the Russian Psychoanalytic
Society, which was no simple matter (see chapter 6). The following year, she
herself returned to Russia to live and work. There are few clues suggesting
why she made this move at the time. However, that same year, a French
journal published two short articles she had written on several clinical
cases—works that, as was almost always the case, reflected her personal in-
terests and concerns.!!5 The first article was entitled “The Automobile as a
Symbol of Masculine Power.” A woman patient had a dream in which she
saw herself riding in an automobile, felt afraid of bumping into a wall, but
always managed to get to where she wanted to be. According to Spielrein’s
interpretation, the wall was an obstacle preventing union with her beloved,
while the automobile symbolized virility, which could overcome that obsta-
cle in the young woman’s perception. The other article also dealt with the
dreams of two young women, one of them sane and the other a schizo-
phrenic. In their dreams, stars fell in a golden rain and the word “love” was
written in gigantic letters on a poster in the sky. Could Sabina’s choice of
subject in these articles have been prompted by latent feelings for Jung or
by a longing to return to her husband? Or did it perhaps spring from a sub-
conscious desire for new love? The available evidence suggests that
Spielrein’s career had stalled. In 1915, Sabina had paid her membership
dues to the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society; in 1919, she was unable to do
so, and Freud persuaded the journal to continue delivering her subscription
on credit. In 1922, she had come into conflict with other psychoanalysts
from Geneva and asked Freud to intervene. Freud was on her side in the
theoretical matters that caused the conflict, but he refused to come in per-
son, ostensibly for fear that he would “produce nothing but national-
patriotic resentment against the old leader who feels entitled to play the
psychoanalytic pope.” !1°
The History of the Question

Sabina Spielrein was an outstanding player in the history of psychoanalysis.
She was a pioneer in many of the discipline’s most important aspects: She
was Jung’s first psychoanalytic patient, and her case was key to the elabora-
tion and confirmation of basic methodological concepts in psychoanalysis,
such as transference and countertransference—especially the latter. Most
importantly, Spielrein herself first articulated the primary discovery of
Freud’s latter years, one that he considered the coup de grace of psychoana-
lytic knowledge: the death wish.
In spite of all this, or rather as a result of it, Spielrein’s life and work were
shrouded in mystery. Psychoanalysts, following in Freud’s footsteps, often
referred to her article on the destructive instinct; Jung did the same; but
nothing further was heard of Spielrein in the West after 1931, when her last
work was published.
Historians of psychoanalysis first turned their attention to Spielrein after
the publication of the Freud-Jung correspondence. The letters were pub-
lished fairly recently, in 1974, as the heirs had long refused to give permis-
sion for publication. Spielrein’s name and work are mentioned in forty of
these letters. Her central role in the relationship between Freud and Jung is
unmistakable.
In 1977, Jungian analyst Aldo Carotenuto was given a voluminous stack
of papers left by Sabina Spielrein in the basement of a building in Geneva
167
where the Institute of Psychology was located. Among the papers were forty-
six of Jung’s letters to Spielrein, twelve from Spielrein to Jung, twelve letters
from Freud to Spielrein, and two from Spielrein to Freud, as well as her diary
covering the years 1909 to 1912. Carotenuto wrote a book based on this
find, which was immediately translated into most of the European languages.
Few paper traces remain of Spielrein’s life in Russia after her return in
1923, although the membership roll of the Russian Psychoanalytic Society,
which was published periodically by the International Association, listed her
as a member until 1934 and recorded her address in Rostov-on-the-Don.
In 1983, Swedish journalist Magnus Ljunggren, who was working at the
time in the USSR (composing a book on Andrei Bely), found Sabina’s niece
in Moscow. Ljunggren promptly published her brief story, and it was incor-
porated into subsequent editions of Carotenuto’s book.
While writing this book, I too was able to meet with M. I. Spielrein and
other relatives of Sabina’s in Moscow. They told me they had not known
her well because she practically never visited Moscow in the 1930s. I also
managed to locate several documents in the State Archives of Russia that
contained bits of information about the work Sabina did in Russia after her
return. Among the documents was her personnel record from the State
Psychoanalytic Institute. It was a great stroke of luck that I also found
Sabina’s stepdaughter, the child of her husband Pavel Scheftel, living in St.
Petersburg. A professional translator working for a publishing company,
Nina Scheftel had always remembered her strange stepmother with respect;
but she was astonished to see books about her in foreign languages. The
family knew that Sabina and her husband had visited Freud, but they knew
nothing of her life in the West. Instead, they talked a great deal about the
Soviet half of Spielrein’s life—a story no less amazing in its own right.
It Was Not to Her Husband That She Returned...

In January 1917, Sabina Spielrein had a dream. The vision and its interpre-
tation, which she conveyed to Jung, give us a sense of her feelings about liv-
ing in Switzerland rather than Russia. In the dream, the wife of famous psy-
chiatrist Vladimir Bekhterev, who lived nearby, was leaving for Russia. Her
little daughter was with her. Spielrein asked Mrs. Bekhterev to carry a card
to her parents. Spielrein interpreted this dream as the embodiment of her
desires: to be an “important figure in psychiatry,” like Bekhterev, and to go
home. “I could be as useful to my ... parents in Switzerland as at home,”
Sabina commented—apparently, help from abroad was vital even before
the revolution. But her parents were not the point. The main question,
“which I often consciously ask myself,” was “Will I be able to establish
contact with my countrymen?”!?”
It took five years for Sabina to make up her mind to return to Russia. We
ed
do not know to what extent personal and family circumstances influenc
her plans; but we do know that she did not immediately rejoin her hus-
band. We also know that Spielrein made her decision during the winter of
1922-1923 and wrote to Freud about it, prompting him to respond in his
letter of February 9, 1923:
Dear Frau Doctor,

lam in receipt of your letter and really believe that you are right. Your plan to
go to Russia seems to me much better than my advice to try out Berlin. In
Moscow you will be able to accomplish important work at the side of Wulff
and Yermakov. Lastly, you will be on home ground. These are difficult times
for us all.
I hope to hear from you soon, but would earnestly request that you write
your address on the inside of your letter, which so few women are wont to do.
Cordially yours,
Freud!!8
It is difficult to interpret the contents of this letter, beyond the fact that
Freud previously had advised her to go to Berlin, where Max Eitingon had
already established his psychoanalytic clinic and was providing employ-
ment for a number of analysts. Fanya Lovtskaya, who was probably
Spielrein’s student (see chapter 2), was one of the many who left Geneva for
Berlin in order to work with Eitingon. For some reason, possibly because of
her attitude toward Eitingon, Spielrein decided to go to Moscow instead.
Freud knew about the situation in Russia: He was in correspondence with
Osipov, who had escaped from the Bolsheviks and had been living in
Prague for some time; the journal of the Psychoanalytic Society had pub-
lished Tatiana Rosenthal’s obituary; and the Bolsheviks had deprived
Andreas-Salomé of her fortune, forcing her to seek charity. Freud likewise
knew of Sabina’s marital tribulations, we can assume, as the usual polite re-
gards to her husband are missing from his letter. While he approved of her
decision to go back to Russia, he supposed she would be going to see her
colleagues, not her husband. He knew all of this, and yet he advised her to
go back. '
Sergei Pankeev once recalled that when he had asked Freud whether he
should remain in Russia if there were a revolution, Freud answered in the
affirmative. When Pankeev told this to one of Freud’s distant relatives who
had studied in Russia, the latter responded, “You know, Freud knows hu-
man intelligence very well, but he doesn’t seem to know the Bolshevist in-
telligence.”!1?
Nor to Her Brother

Isaac Spielrein, recognized as the founder of industrial psychology in the
USSR, was a man of European schooling and unusual productivity. He re-
ceived his training in philosophy from Hermann Cohen in Germany (at

about the Same time, another prominent Soviet psychologist, Sergei
Rubinstein, also was studying with Cohen, as was Boris Pasternak). Isaac
had been in a POW camp during World War I, and he returned to Russia
only after the revolution and by a long route—via Constantinople and
Tbilisi. On his way home, during the summer of 1919, he also had visited
Freud. Isaac worked for a time at the Soviet embassy in what was then in-
dependent Georgia, which was headed by Sergei Kirov. By 1921, two years
before his sister, he had made his way to Moscow. !2°
In Moscow, Isaac worked in the press bureau at the ministry of foreign
affairs, and later at the Central Labor Institute. The director of the Labor
Institute at the time, Alexei Gastev, espoused radical leftist views, a ten-
dency illustrated by the following anecdote: When Isaac Spielrein’s mother
died in 1921 and he approached the director to ask for a short leave to at-
tend her funeral, Gastev refused, saying that funerals were just bourgeois
superstition. “What do you need leave for? She’s dead anyway.” Gastev’s
personal convictions about the “scientific organization of labor” also gov-
erned his institute.
Soon enough, Spielrein and Gastev parted company. In 1923, Isaac
Spielrein became the head of the industrial psychology division of the
Institute of Philosophy, as well as of the Laboratory of Industrial
Psychology under the ministry of labor. At that time, he held numerous
commissions for research projects in applied fields. He conducted profes-
sional evaluations, consulted with enterprises on rescheduling their hours
of operation (in particular, on the changeover to a seven-hour workday),
proposed methods for selecting Red Army personnel, and the like. In the
theoretical realm, Spielrein was a follower of William Stern, and he was not
afraid to speak openly about this connection—even at the Congress on the
Study of Human Behavior, held in 1930.
Spielrein’s interests stretched beyond the limits of even such a seemingly
limitless field as industrial psychology. His book The Language of a Red
Army Soldier was a meticulous sociolinguistic study that probably remains
~ unsurpassed methodologically in the Russian literature even today. It brings
together grammatical analysis and frequency lexicons, painstakingly devel-
oped psychological tests, and a statistical breakdown of linguistic errors,
which together describe the language of the typical Red Army soldier in
1924.12!
Spielrein’s 1929 sociopsychological sketch “On Change in First and Last
Names” leaves the same impression of sensibility and rare precision. In this
study, he analyzed cases of unmotivated change in last names, a frequent
occurrence in a Russia that was losing its identity. According to his calcula-
tions, Russian names were changed to Jewish ones more frequently than
the other way around: A Jewish last name was almost chic in the 1.92 Ogre
Spielrein also wrote a Yiddish textbook.
In 1928, Spielrein became editor in chief of the new journal Industrial

Psychology and the Psychophysiology of Labor and chairman of the All-
Russian Society for Industrial Psychology. In Bulgakov’s Moscow of 1931,
he initiated an international conference on industrial psychology. It was
through this new applied branch of the field that Soviet psychology began
to approach international standards; and Spielrein, along with Stern and
Henri Pieron, was a member of the presidium of the International Society
for Industrial Psychology.
Isaac Spielrein’s daughter recalled that in 1931 Sabina came to Moscow
to attend the international conference. But overall, there is no evidence of
professional collaboration between Sabina and Isaac. There were no joint
publications, nor did Sabina speak at any of the conferences that her
brother organized or publish any articles in Industrial Psychology, the jour-
nal that he edited. Sabina completely lacked the breadth of interests and the
flexibility of people like Luria or Zalkind, qualities that made a relatively
long life in Soviet science possible. Unlike them, she also had obtained
enough experience elsewhere to enable her to make comparisons.
Meanwhile, the ranks of industrial psychologists were expanding expo-
nentially. The ideology of the “new man of the masses,” an idea alien to
Spielrein, began to dominate in this field as well. In 1930, there were five
hundred “organized industrial psychologists” in the USSR. The Congress
proposed a plan to involve three million people in the labor ministry’s pro-
fessional consultation network in 1932. On July 25, 1931, the ministry of
education adopted a resolution based on Isaac Spielrein’s report, calling for
the foundation of a college of industrial psychology.
In October 1934, the entire vast web of industrial psychology establish-
ments was blasted to pieces: By order of the Council of Ministers, twenty-
nine research institutes were shut down and Spielrein’s journal was liqui-
dated. On January 25, 1935, Isaac Spielrein was arrested and charged with
participating in the Trotskyist opposition. His daughter remembered: “On
that day I turned nineteen. ... Only in 1939 was I told that my father had
been sentenced to ten years in prison without the right to correspond.” !23
In actuality, such a sentence meant death by firing squad.
She Returned to Enjoy Her Work

According to an official report of the International Psychoanalytic
Association, Dr. Sabina Spielrein, former member of the Swiss Psycho-
analytic Society, joined the recently organized Russian Society in the fall of
1923.'*4 Alexander Luria and two other Kazan analysts became members
at the same time. Spielrein’s authority and scholarly connections were rec-
ognized from the start. In 1923, she was included in the five-member com-
mittee that was to oversee the State Psychoanalytic Institute and the
Russian Psychoanalytic Society. Judging by a January 1924 document sent

to the Ministry of Education for signature by the director of the State
Psychoanalytic Institute, Ivan Yermakov, Sabina Spielrein also was then a
member of the institute’s staff.!25
At the institute, Spielrein gave a course on the psychology of unconscious
thought and a seminar on child psychoanalysis, and worked in the outpatient
clinic. At a meeting of the Russian Psychoanalytic Society in November
1923, she read a paper entitled “Aphasic and Infantile Thought,” in which
she asserted that the disruption of thought processes in cases of aphasia was
similar to children’s thoughts, and that both of these types of thought shed
light on the processes of speech formation. Spielrein was by that time the au-
thor of thirty published works. In a staff questionnaire, she wrote that she
was planning to complete two new works on symbolic thought and publish
them in Russia (this never happened). In that year, seven of Spielrein’s articles
were released in Western psychoanalytic journals.'° We do not know exactly
when she left for Rostov-on-the-Don, but it was probably at the end of 1924
or 1925. The institute was liquidated in August 1925.12”
According to a ministry of education employee questionnaire, !°
Spielrein was holding down three jobs from September 1923 on: as a re-
searcher at the State Psychoanalytic Institute, as a doctor and pedologist in
a village called Third International, and as chair of the child psychology di-
vision at the First Moscow University. She defined her profession as “psy-
chiatrist and physician-pedologist.” Spielrein filled out her questionnaire
very scrupulously. Similar questionnaires filled out by Yermakov, Luria,
and other employees of the institute are more cursory; many seemingly
pointless bureaucratic questions were deemed undeserving of answers and
left blank. Spielrein answered all of the questions sincerely and with respect
for the procedure, just as anyone who had come to a country to help would
answer questions asked by the government.
Of her qualifications Spielrein wrote, “I began to do independent re-
search very early on, partly on topics which I chose myself, partly on the
topics proposed by Profs. Bleuler and Jung.” Further, beyond the “private
" practice” that Spielrein characterized as her primary source of income be-
fore the revolution, she had worked in “Prof. Bleuler’s psychiatric clinic, at
a psychoneurological clinic with Prof. Bonhoeffer in Berlin, and in psycho-
analysis with Dr. Jung in Zurich and Prof. Freud in Vienna. In Munich, I
worked in the field of mythology and the history of art; I served as a pedol-
ogist at the Rousseau Institute in Geneva, and I practiced psychology in the
laboratory at Prof. Claparéde’s Psychological Institute in Geneva.”
In the block of questions eliciting suggestions to the administration,
Spielrein wrote that she felt it necessary that her workload be lightened,
that she be given more independence and be allowed to have students. In
addition, she was dissatisfied that the State Psychoanalytic Institute was not
providing her the opportunity to observe children in person. This turned

her work with teachers into “purely theoretical speculations” and “pla-
tonic advice in absentia.” To the question “Do you have any scientific or
artistic activities at home?” Spielrein responded that she considered her
work as a doctor both scientific and artistic.
To the question on general job satisfaction, Spielrein responded: “I enjoy
my work and think that I was born for this job, that it is my calling. My life
would have no meaning without it.”
Spielrein’s article “The Problem of the Unconscious in Contemporary
Psychology and Marxism” was listed in Luria’s draft of the table of con-
tents for the second volume of Psychology and Marxism (which was never
released).!2? In his draft, Luria penciled in another possible author, Militza
Nechkina, who later became a member of the Academy of Sciences and an
expert on the history of the Decembrist movement. One can imagine with
what disdain Spielrein, whose social circle had so recently included Freud,
Jung, Claparéde, and Piaget, must have regarded the academic contribu-
tions of her junior colleague, Boris Friedmann, who had filled dozens of
pages in the first volume of Psychology and Marxism with a mishmash of
quotations from Freud, Engels, Plekhanov, and Kautsky.
In the small and extremely active circle of Moscow psychoanalysts of that
time, Spielrein could have become by rights a very powerful figure. On the
one hand, she was more closely connected with the world leaders of psycho-
analysis than were any of her Muscovite colleagues. She knew their latest the-
oretical discussions firsthand, was personally acquainted with every signifi-
cant participant in the European psychoanalytic movement—the presidents
of national societies, the editors of journals, and so on—not to mention her
relations with Freud, which became more and more valuable as time passed.
Given the other connection, to her influential brother, she could have pene-
trated at will to the very epicenter of the most rapidly developing sector of
Soviet psychology. She did not take advantage of either opportunity.
Sabina was lonely in Moscow. The interests of the local analysts, who
could argue about the correlation between “Freudism” and “reflexology”
and “scientific materialism” for years on end, were thoroughly alien to her.
Her connection to Freud was of no use to her there. Spielrein’s withdrawal
from the Moscow Psychoanalytic Society can be interpreted as indirect
proof that as early as the 1920s (during its heyday), the activities and rela-
tionships within the society were far from the atmosphere that reigned in
European centers of psychoanalysis.
The Missing Link

Returning from her extended stay abroad and finding her bearings in
Moscow’s confusing atmosphere, Spielrein emphasized medical and psy-
chological work with children. At the same time or a short time later, Lev
173
Vygotsky did much the same thing, returning from provincial Gomel. In his
career and his theoretical interests, Vygotsky followed in Spielrein’s foot-
steps. The difference was that Spielrein at that time was already a scholar
of worldwide repute, and Vygotsky was a precocious debutant. It could
also be added that Sabina’s brother Isaac Spielrein was and would long re-
main Vygotsky’s dear and respected colleague (for example, in 1933
Vygotsky served as Spielrein’s deputy when the latter was chairman of the
International Society for Industrial Psychology!3°).
Researchers of Vygotsky’s life have noted the peculiarity of his biogra-
phy.'°! He gave his first professional oral presentation in Petrograd at the
beginning of 1924 and entered immediately into the world of Moscow sci-
ence and politics. That same year, six of his works on psychology and ab-
normal development were released. “The Mozart of psychology,” as later
apologists liked to call him, was not all that young—that year, he turned
twenty-eight—and he had not published a single psychological work prior
to 1924.15? This last fact might be explained by the fact that life in revolu-
tionary-era Gomel was not especially conducive to scientific work.
However, in view of Vygotsky’s unusually high level of productivity follow-
ing his presentation in Petersburg, it seems necessary to seek another expla-
nation for his sudden psychological “conversion.”
A parallel to this phenomenon may be found in the psychological “con-
version” of Piaget, which took place two years earlier and in another
world, but, one might suppose, under the influence of the same person.
Spielrein possessed not only exceptional creativity but also a talent for in-
fluencing other people. We know from her relations with Freud that she
was able gradually to overtake even the most powerful of minds. We also
know of her feminine tact and ability to “smooth out our folds and wrin-
kles with a gentle hand,” so important in those stormy years. Her relations
with Jung bespeak her feminine charm, boldness, and ability to extricate
herself from difficult situations. From her relations with Piaget we know of
the role that direct communication with her could play in stimulating intel-
lectual activity and growth.
' Spielrein was working in the State Psychoanalytic Institute at just the
time when Vygotsky was cutting a swath for himself in a field that was new
to him. Young Luria, the secretary of the institute, and young Vygotsky,
who was soon to become a member of the Russian Psychoanalytic Society
(he is listed as a member as of the 1929 roll’), might well have attended
her course, perceiving her lectures as the last word in international science.
They were provincial enthusiasts who believed science would solve their
country’s problems, and Spielrein would have seemed to them the embodi-
ment of advanced European thought: She knew Freud and Jung, Bleuler,
Claparéde, and Piaget; and she didn’t just know them. ve . Bs
The foreword to Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle, written jointly
with Luria, was Vygotsky’s first theoretical publication. Beyond the Pleasure
Principle was the very same Freudian work that Spielrein had so deeply in-
fluenced earlier. In their foreword, Vygotsky and Luria wrote of their
Freudomarxist problems; but in reading the work that followed their ecsta-
tic introduction, they must have noticed that Fread—Freud himself!—re-
ferred to Sabina Spielrein, saying that she had “anticipated . . . a consider-
able portion of these speculations.” !3* Vygotsky and Luria, however, made
no reference to Spielrein. Whatever their reasons for this omission, it seems
clear that Sabina did not create around her person the aura of prestige and
power that normally accompanies successful people. Perhaps she never mas-
tered the philosophical newspeak that was surging around her with stunning
speed, flowing from the pens of psychologists close to her—her brother
Isaac, her assistant Boris Friedmann, and the secretary of her institute,
Alexander Luria—among countless others eager to please the new powers.
The intellectual interests and development of talented people can be set
for a long time to come by impressions gleaned at the very beginnings of
their careers from contact with a bright, famous, productive figure.
Vygotsky’s acquaintance with Spielrein could have played just such a role in
the formation of his psychological interests. It seems likely that Spielrein
served as a mediator between the two schools of world psychology, Jean
Piaget’s genetic psychology and Lev Vygotsky’s cultural-historical psychol-
ogy. Piaget later credited Vygotsky with originating the idea of internal
speech and the hypothesis that it was derived from egocentric speech.!*°
Once again, we sense the presence of Spielrein in Vygotsky’s innovations.
Piaget refrained from commenting on the historical roots of the strange
concurrence between his and Vygotsky’s views and interests, which is even
more surprising considering the two men’s markedly different circum-
stances in Moscow and in Geneva of the 1920s.
For Spielrein, in contrast to Piaget, Vygotsky was a man of the same cul-
ture to which she herself belonged. His intellectual heritage and problems
were well known and easily understandable to Spielrein. In her experiments
with words, with what lies behind words, and with what can be done with-
out them, one senses the same interest, widespread in post-symbolist cul-
ture, that led Vygotsky into psychology, Mandelstam into poetry, and
Shklovsky into literary theory.
This set of problems remains important today. Try to imagine what “the-
oretical differences of opinion” stalled Piaget’s analysis long ago in Geneva,
and how Spielrein might have answered his objections: More than likely,
your internal speech is re-creating Vygotsky’s arguments in Thought and
Speech. Like Spielrein, Vygotsky attributed importance to those emotional
factors in a child’s communication with his parents that Piaget was inclined
to ignore. Vygotsky’s approach, which integrated Piaget’s structural models
with Vygotsky’s own intuition about the role of the “other,” in essence con-
tinued the approach outlined by Spielrein. Vygotsky underlined his own
contribution as “Marxist”; but in the end, his ideas came much closer to
psychoanalysis than to Marxism.'36 Genetically, Vygotskian theory is more
deeply connected to a Freudian understanding of parental roles than to the
infinitely politicized concepts that were referred to as the Marxist study of
environment—in contrast to the theory of Aron Zalkind, who began from
the same psychoanalytic foundation as Vygotsky but evolved in a different
direction. Did Piaget recall his long-ago disputes with Spielrein, as he de-
fended himself against Vygotsky’s critique? In any case, late in his career
Piaget acceded, in the face of rather harsh criticism, to the perceptiveness of
his Russian colleagues. This brought him one step closer to the psychoana-
lytic interests of Spielrein and the early Vygotsky, but of course, not to the
Marxism of the late Vygotsky and Zalkind.
A detailed analysis of the continuity between Spielrein’s works and the
early works of Piaget, Vygotsky, and Luria has yet to be written. For the
time being, we must content ourselves with observing the striking temporal
coincidence in the change of interests in young people so far apart from
each other, in Moscow and Geneva, after meeting this extraordinary
woman. The two, Piaget and Vygotsky, began studying the same issues:
egocentric speech in children, its relationship to social speech and the gene-
sis of internal speech; the attempt to analyze the bonds between infantile
cognitive development and the child’s affective relations with others; the
analogy between aphasia, neurosis, and the Freudian unconscious; and fi-
nally, the search for an experimental approach to nonverbal thought com-
ponents. There is also a striking similarity among the clinical procedures
that Spielrein, Piaget, and Vygotsky used in their work with children, par-
ticularly in their experimental research from 1920 on.
The Last Choice

Each of Spielrein’s steps is a riddle that demands a solution: Why did she
really return to Russia, and why did she not go back to the West in the mid-
1920s, when it was still possible and when some of her closest colleagues
were doing so?
About a year after Sabina’s return to Russia, her private life took another
strange turn: She went back to her husband, moving from Moscow to
Rostov-on-the-Don. In 1926, a second daughter, Eva, was born to Sabina
and Pavel. She was only two years younger than Nina, Pavel Scheftel’s
daughter from his second marriage. Old Naftul Spielrein was also living in
Rostov. Not long before, he had owned income property and a trading
company in the center of town. Even during the years of the New
Economic Policy, he had managed to preserve a part of his earlier fortune;
but then history turned the tables yet again. Thus, in the 1930s, the
Scheftels and their two daughters were living in three rooms allocated to
them in the stables that stood in the yard of an old house in Rostov. In one
room, homemade shelves supported rows of German and French books—
several multivolume series. Nina described them as “something like what is
called ‘scholarly papers.’” It is not difficult to identify them as the pub-
lished studies of the various psychoanalytic societies.
There is, however, at least one curious point in my interview with Nina
Scheftel, Sabina’s stepdaughter.!3” I mentioned that the places where psy-
choanalysts live and work are usually furnished with a couch. “Oh, yes,”
Nina said animatedly. “In that old stable, there was a room that was totally
empty except for a huge, lonely sofa.” Nina was not sure whether Sabina
Spielrein received patients there, but it is more than likely that she did.
Nina did remember that a mysterious aura surrounded Sabina: One day,
she cured a little girl’s headache simply by holding a hand above her head,
without making physical contact. She never talked about her work. Her
niece recalled that Aunt Sabina was in correspondence with a poet or writer
from Leningrad whose nickname was Crocodile. She interpreted his dreams
and gave him advice in her letters.
Western scholars believed that she taught at the University of Rostov,
while others thought she was the force behind the Psychoanalytic
Orphanage there. Neither of these theories can be substantiated. According
to Nina, Sabina worked as a school pedologist, and after the elimination of
pedology in 1936, as a part-time school physician. In 1935, Sabina’s father
and brother were arrested. Her father was subsequently released, after he
had been fleeced of all he owned.
Nina met Sabina in the fall of 1937. As she told me: “She was, in every-
one’s opinion, terribly impractical. She only wore clothes that were given to
her. She looked like a little old woman, although she wasn’t that old. She
was bent, wearing some old, black skirt that reached the ground. She wore
boots with clasps that people now call ‘farewell, youth’ boots. I think she
had brought them from Berlin. That’s how my grandmother used to dress.
It was obvious, she was a broken woman.” But another time, Nina
Pavlovna said that Sabina looked like Lydia Ginzburg, a highly regarded
woman of letters who was hunched and gray, but nonetheless a person of
remarkable clarity and intellectual capacity.
In 1937, Pavel Scheftel died of a heart attack. It seems his family did not
understand him. There are still family legends about his hot temper and ec-
centricity, features that relatives attributed to mental illness. His reunion
with Sabina after ten years of separation was perceived in much the same
way. However, Sabina and her husband were bound by deep and clearly en-
during feelings. One of Nina’s memories from her childhood reflects her
stepmother’s attitude toward her deceased husband. Once, while visiting
Sabina some time after Scheftel’s death, the order-loving Nina decided to
gather up the greeting cards that were strewn over his desk. Sabina got very
upset: Her husband’s papers deliberately had been kept in exactly the same
place where he left them.
Half a year after her husband’s death, Sabina Spielrein performed an act
reminiscent of her youth. She went to Scheftel’s former wife and suggested
that they share responsibility for his little daughters. “If something happens
to you, I'll take care of Nina; if something happens to me, you'll take care
of Eva.” The two women came to an agreement. Preparing for the worst,
they decided to introduce the daughters to each other. Sabina invited Nina
for New Year’s Eve. A Christmas tree stood in the empty room with the
massive couch.'%8 Renata had come back home from Moscow for the New
Year. She was beautiful and looked like an actress in her evening gown.
Then the war broke out. Sabina Spielrein could have been evacuated
from Rostov, but chose not to go. The other wife of her deceased husband,
who was ethnically Russian, managed to leave the city and save her daugh-
ter, Nina. Spielrein made a conscious decision to remain with her daughters
in the occupied city. (Shortly before the city was occupied, Renata had
come to visit again from Moscow.) So there they were, waiting for the
Nazis in Rostov—an old Jewish woman with her two daughters.
Did Sabina recall her own discovery of the unconscious death wish dur-
ing those months between the two holocausts, Communist and Nazi, that
she was fated to experience? Perhaps it was the death wish that guided her
actions back then, although she had been the first to recognize its existence.
We will never know the role that Thanatos played in her mind: Did her
concept of death help her to comprehend the bloody, absurd events that
shook her destitute, lonely life in Rostov? Did it help her to understand the
execution of her brother as a Trotskyist agent, or the concentrated activity
of the people around her who were creating death and death alone, no mat-
ter what it might be called in Soviet terminology?
In any case, the means of understanding life that had guided her through
the fantastically complex fabric of relations with Jung and Freud could no
longer help her. Spielrein, who had so skillfully manipulated her own affec-
tions and given them such an original philosophical interpretation, was
tragically unprepared for her collision with history.
Her stepdaughter, Nina, is probably right in her understanding of
Spielrein’s choice as a reasonable conclusion, drawn from the knowledge she
had accumulated earlier about the world in which she lived. Her view of life
was completely different from that of her husband’s other wife, and from
ours: Having lived among Germans during the best part of her life, she could
not believe they were dangerous. Freud likewise put off his departure to the
last minute, saying that evil could never come out of the nation of Goethe—
and this despite the fact that he lived so close to the center of nascent mad-
ness, had many famous friends who had already escaped, and was coauthor-
ing a book, with the U.S. ambassador to Paris, about an American president.
Spielrein, like those around her, received information about the outside
world exclusively from Soviet newspapers and radio. She knew too well
how distorted the information was—at least, the part she was in a position
to check; she believed nothing that originated with the Soviet government.
Thus, she might well have considered information about the extermination
of Jews by the Nazis just another lie cooked up by Bolshevik propaganda.
And she had already paid dearly for trusting the Bolsheviks. Perhaps she
believed that the German invasion would mean a return to a normal life.
Such is Sabina Spielrein’s life story. It is an uncommon tale, in which
flights of the human spirit are tragically intertwined with mistakes of the all
too human mind.
6
Psychoanalysis in
the Land of the Bolsheviks
Psychoanalysis became truly fashionable in Russia after the revolution of

1917, as many writers of the time have attested. Let us begin, in the spirit
of bygone days, by citing Lenin: “Freud’s theory is a kind of popular fad,
nowadays.”! With a healthy dose of irony, Mikhail Bulgakov’s friend Sergei
Yermolinsky wrote of the Moscow intelligentsia in the 1920s that “Freud
and Spengler have come into fashion.”? According to the reminiscences of
Nadezhda Mandelstam, a neutral observer in this regard, in 1922 Freud
was an interesting novelty in Kharkov. He was “the subject of everyone’s
discussions, but information was just too vague and formless.”
Bolshevik writer Alexei Voronsky deduced the popularity of psycho-
analysis among the newly politicized elite, and participated in organizing a
psychoanalytic society in Moscow. He noted that “Marxist-agitating and
Marxist-leaning segments of the non-Party intelligentsia were particularly
susceptible” to the temptations of Freudian doctrine.* Fyodor Stepun, an
émigré philosopher who held exactly opposite political views, used a sur-
prising phrase to convey his impressions of postrevolutionary Moscow:
“We walked into every office as if it was an institute of psychoanalysis.”°
What he had in mind was more or less banal—how one had to decode hints
and gestures in order to distinguish friend from foe; but at the same time,
~ the very combination of words—institute of psychoanalysis—was so famil-
iar that Stepun could use it metaphorically.
It is as telling to trace the influence of psychoanalysis through those who
showed no outward interest toward the doctrine as through those who pas-
sionately supported it. Not long before he was executed by the Bolsheviks,
poet Nikolai Gumilev wrote a novella entitled Cheerful Brothers. The trav-
eling protagonist, whose baggage consisted of a pack of smokes and a little
volume of Nietzsche, was a student of psychoanalysis. He encountered a
Russian sect that was determined to return the world to its medieval order.
Mystical temptation got the better of the hero, and he set off with the sec-
tarians to find the utopian “city that isn’t on the map but will be more im-
179
180 Psychoanalysis in the Land of the Bolsheviks
portant to the world than Moscow.”® Viktor Shklovsky, the founder of the
formalist school of literary theory, took a more serious approach: “I am no
Socialist, I am a Freudian. ... Russia has invented the Bolsheviks like a
dream, ... the Bolsheviks themselves are not to blame for appearing in the
dream.”” In June 1924, poet and critic Kornei Chukovsky wrote in his di-
ary, “I am reading Fread—without much enjoyment”; but in the same
breath he interpreted his feelings during bouts of insomnia as a “death
wish.”® Poet Mikhail Kuzmin likewise read Freud in 1926, not long before
he wrote his long poem “The Trout Breaks the Ice,” a composition full of
dreams and animated corpses. “I lay down and took up dreams and inter-
pretations by Freud. Of course, he’s a dirty Yid and a speculator, but he
talks about interesting things.”?
This is what enthusiastic Freudians Lev Vygotsky and Alexander Luria
wrote in 1925: “Here in Russia, Freudianism commands exceptional atten-
tion not only in scholarly circles, but among the reading public at large. At
present, nearly all of Freud’s works have been translated into Russian and
published. Before our very eyes a new, original psychoanalytic trend is un-
folding in Russia, in an attempt to achieve a synthesis of Freudianism and
Marxism with the help of conditioned reflex theory.” !°
“We were all under Freud’s influence,” said Natalya Traugott, one of the
most important Soviet physiologists, speaking of her generation. Traugott
recalled the ditty that was circulating among Freud-fixated students during
her studies in the department of pedology at a Leningrad institute in
1926-1927: “Affects suppressed and complexes to spare/Without Freud,
without Freud, you'll get nowhere.”!! Psychoanalysis was not taught sys-
tematically as part of the curriculum, however.
Practicing analyst Sara Naidich, who left Petrograd in 1920 for Berlin,
wrote a reserved, and probably objective comment in the official journal of
the International Psychoanalytic Association: “Representative men of sci-
ence show but little interest for the theory of psycho-analysis and none
whatever for the practice thereof. At their meetings mention is occasionally
made of the Freudian dynamic conception of mental processes. Freud’s sex-
ual theory, a priori, meets with little sympathy. In spite of this aloofness the
position is not unfavourable.”!
Around this time, concepts borrowed from psychoanalysis began appear-
ing in literary discourse. Galina Belaya, a researcher of Pereval,!3 a move-
ment that was influential at the beginning of the 1920s, noted that the
school turned its “constant, unwavering attention on the unconscious.”!4
Belaya insisted that the question of the unconscious “was for 1920s litera-
ture an expression of a general interest in the motive forces of revolution.”
This can hardly be the only explanation. It is no less important to consider
the way in which literary figures viewed and described the people of the
revolution, and this is explained more by intellectual trends and fashions
181
than by historical events as such. Osip Mandelstam noted with surprise the
rejuvenation of interest in psychology and daily life among prose writers.
“The ulcer of psychological experimentation has penetrated into the liter-
ary consciousness; the prose writer has become a surgeon, and prose—a
clinical disaster,”'!> he wrote in 1922.
Indeed, literary figures of the 1920s often reasoned in simplified psycho-
analytic terms. According to Alexei Voronsky, the leader of the Pereval
movement, “The revolution pushed to the fore new heroes with a particu-
lar mindset, with particular conscious and unconscious emotions.”1° He
even found that Babel, Pilnyak, and Pasternak put too much emphasis on
“the unconscious sources in life,” while his primary literary adversaries suf-
fered, in his opinion, from excessive rationality. Dmitry Gorbovy, one of
Voronsky’s close associates, wrote that for these opponents the “world of
subconscious attractions is forcibly torn from the world of conscious con-
victions.” However, Pereval’s opponents from Proletkult!” employed basi-
cally the same language: The journal Na postu (On Guard) formulated the
goal of any writer as the “illumination, the electrification of the huge,
damp cellar of the subconscious.”!* The Concise Literary Encyclopedia in-
forms us that “following in Trotsky’s footsteps, Voronsky reduced the role
of the Weltanschauung in literary works and set up the ‘unconscious’ in op-
position to it. ... This practice was dubbed ‘Voronskyism’ by his contem-
poraries.”!?
Some of the brightest writers of the age were accused of Voronskyism at
the height of the cultural war that ensued. Aptly labeling the first anti-
utopian work of the twentieth century, Yevgeny Zamyatin’s novel We,
“counterrevolutionary,” the new government’s ideologues detected in
Zamyatin, Pilnyak, and Voronsky a proclivity for language in which primi-
tive Freudianism was jumbled together with equally primitive Marxism:
“The essence [of these authors’] statements is clear. Art is a dream, and like
a dream, it is unconscious. ... These essentially bourgeois authors cannot
help but struggle against consciousness and chase it away, because every
single conscious perception of social reality is proof to them of their im-
- pending and inevitable destruction.””°
Meanwhile, Zamyatin wrote clearly and with no trace of fear: “[I]n rail-
way sleeping-cars and in every compartment there is this little handle inlaid
with ivory: If you turn it to the right, the light comes on. If you turn it left,
it’s dark. If you turn it to the middle, a blue lamp comes on, and you can
see everything, but the blue light doesn’t keep you awake, nor does it wake
you up. When I am asleep and dreaming, the handle of consciousness is
switched to the left; when I write, the handle is set in the middle, and my
consciousness shines with a blue light. I dream on paper, my imagination
works as in a dream, moving along the same path of associations, but the
dream is carefully (in a blue light) directed by the consciousness. As in a
dream, one need only think for a moment that it is just a dream, one need
only completely turn on the consciousness, and the dream disappears.”*!
Thus begins Zamyatin’s essay “Backstage,” which was published in 1930
in a collection he initiated himself, entitled How We Write. The collection
was preceded by a questionnaire that Zamyatin had sent to Maxim Gorky,
Andrei Bely, and the other writers he invited to participate in the project.
Among the sixteen questions on various aspects of literary technique were
others of a different nature, such as: “What quantity of drugs do you take
during working hours?” and “Which of the senses most often serve as the
basis for images (visual, auditory, tactile, and so forth)?” But despite his
considerable boldness, Zamyatin could no longer reveal the source of his
approach to the psychology of art, and the textual fragment that did so was
left “backstage,” not included in the final draft:
The room where my desk stands is swept every day, and nevertheless, if you
move the bookshelves to one side, in some nook or cranny you will find a
dusty spot—with grey, shaggy, and perhaps even living clumps, from which a
spider will scurry out and along the wall.
These nooks and crannies can be found in the soul of each of us. I (uncon-
sciously) pull almost unnoticeable spiders out of there and feed them, and they
gradually grow into my [heroes]. This is something like Freud’s method of
treatment, when the doctor makes his patient confess, expelling all his “sup-
pressed emotions. ”?*
Vsevolod Ivanov, one of the Serapion Brothers (see chapter 10),*> wrote:
“Man usually has two lives. He doesn’t like to touch the second, latent life
(nowadays it is called unconscious). And why would he? It is only rarely
that the second life rises to the surface to disrupt the first.”24 The novel U,
written by Ivanov in the middle and late 1920s and published only at the
end of the 1980s, is infused with psychoanalysis—in its terminology, plot,
and meaning. Freud’s doctrine is at times expounded, at times parodied, at
other times simply implicit.
The story is told from the point of view of the accountant at the
“Kraepelin Psychiatric Hospital, located an hour and a half from Mos-
cow.” The situation in the hospital is described knowledgeably: One bloc of
doctors, including the director, promotes the theory of “nosological units,”
or, as Ivanov defined it, “roughly speaking, the possibility that haman men-
tal diseases can be subsumed under concrete and unfailing classifications.”
Other doctors were “fighting for the detailed exploration of the psyche”
and practiced “intensified psychotherapy,” using to this end Adleresque ter-
minology such as “will to power” and “escape into illness.” When the ac-
countant decided to quit smoking, the insane psychoanalyst, Doctor
Andreishin, who had been assigned to the hospital’s “Semi-Calm Patients
Division,” forced him to “recall that when I was two years old I was prone,
183
if not toward murder, at least toward violence against my nanny.” We

might well ask whether Ivanov had read Freud’s “From the History of an
Infantile Neurosis.” Throughout the strange, often absurd plot are inter-
spersed exclamations like “call it psychoanalysis if you will, but I felt as if I
had been doused with slops!”
The protagonists of the novel, in a complex way undergoing the same
metamorphosis as was Soviet psychoanalysis at that time, want to move
from the Moscow psychiatric hospital to a construction facility in the Ural
Mountains, where they will direct the “mental division,” working on the
“mental refabrication of people” according to a four-year plan.25 Only the
narrating accountant guesses that “there is a unique psychological experi-
ment going on here, more real and more tangible than all the efforts of
Doctor Andreishin.”¢
The Horror of the Void

The political elite became more and more acutely aware of a sense of im-
passe, which compelled them to search for new ideas. Of the many prob-
lems with Russian literature in 1923, Yevgeny Zamyatin considered the
most important the absence of a “philosophical synthesis, which is exactly
what is needed most right now; there is a thirst for it, a hunger. Everything
we depended on has been destroyed—along with everything that might
have been.” Switching to Latin, he described the new man’s world as hor-
ror vacui—the horror of the void.””
The entire range of radical leftist prescriptions was well known by then,
and they had been debated many times, even before the revolution. Now
that these proposals had been implemented and had failed, any repetition
could have only ritual significance; but a move to the right, toward eco-
nomic liberalization—which was the direction Lenin headed in, in fits and
starts and without much consistency—would mean losing the power so
treasured by the Bolsheviks. In this situation, the desire to break out of the
accustomed political-economic decisionmaking spectrum (from left to
right, from radical nationalization to emancipation of private initiative)
was only natural, and to many it seemed feasible. The “alteration of man”
appeared to be a new facet of the revolutionary process, implying a deep-
rooted transformation of human nature within the socialist mold. As
Nikolai Yevreinov wrote in 1920, stating the case for his “theater therapy,”
“This is not to argue against socialism, but merely to state that we have
more to do” (see chapter 4).
Later, in the mid-1930s, Andrei Platonov wrote with remarkable expres-
siveness about the same phenomenon in his novel Happy Moscow, then
still in manuscript form.?8 “You get sick of being the same old natural man:
The tedium is impossible to shake.” “Man is still such a jerry-rigged, feebly
constructed creature, no more than a vague embryo, an unrealized blue-

print; there is so much more work to be done to turn this embryo into the
aerial, lofty image that is buried in our dreams.” Such are the feelings ex-
pressed by Platonov’s characters, who most likely never read Nietzsche.
Human sexuality had the hardest going in this new world. “Either social-
ism will penetrate man’s innermost recesses to the very last cache, releasing
all the pus that has accumulated there drop by drop over the centuries, or
nothing new will happen, and every inhabitant will go off to live alone,
jealously hoarding within himself the frightening hiding place of the soul.”
Without referring to Freud, the novel’s protagonist discovers that the
“passion of life” is centered not in the stomach but in another place, one
that is “worse, more hidden and shameful.” It was essential to realize this
right away, since “he had long feared for Communism, that it would be de-
filed by the frenzied shudder rising constantly from the dregs of the human
organism.”
And so, everything that political and economic structural changes had
failed to achieve was sought, contrary to Marxism, with the help of psycho-
logical and educational experimentation. The political leader of this new
trend in Bolshevism was unquestionably Leon Trotsky. Anatoly Luna-
charsky, the minister of education, became the main executor of plans for
the alteration of man. The members of Proletkult were the immoderate
propagators of these ideas. Vacillating and ignoring common sense, many
intellectual Bolsheviks also supported this course, including Nikolai
Bukharin and Nadezhda Krupskaya, who acted as the political supervisor
of the ministry of education at the beginning of the 1920s.
It was neither Marx nor Freud but Nietzsche who laid the philosophical
foundation for the idea that man could be altered. His romantic dream of
the Ubermensch, which logically gave rise to contempt for run-of-the-mill,
philistine, living people; his radical call for the reexamination of all values;
and his neglect of all evidence of reality were actualized by the ministry of
education. Nietzsche’s influence on the Bolshevist consciousness is a fasci-
nating question. Researchers already have demonstrated the adaptation of
Nietzsche’s ideas in works by Bogdanov, Lunacharsky, Gorky, and many
others.*? But there was no way that Nietzsche could become a legitimate
source for the new policy. He had already played on the Russian stage,
when Trotsky and his comrades were still young, and he had been compro-
mised by those earlier discussions. Simply put, he was no longer new. Such
arguments, however, did not prevent the other transformers of human na-
ture, the German Nazis, from adopting Nietzsche as their political oracle.
In contrast to the Nazis, the Bolsheviks found Freud far more attractive.
Science was one of the highest values in their consciousness. Even Stalin
cloaked his insanity in pseudoscience, although in the end he eliminated
anyone who reminded him of the naive aspiration to alter the vicious, cun-
185
ning, and selfish nature of man, which could be disciplined only by force.
Those who inspired the efforts of the ministry of education and Proletkult,
unlike Stalin, were gifted intellectuals. Trotsky was a truly brilliant com-
mentator, Lunacharsky a great rhetorician, Bogdanov excelled in philoso-
phy, and Blonsky in psychology. These people knew the ins and outs of sci-
ence and could precisely evaluate to what extent it was applied. Unlike
their political successors, they reacted unequivocally when faced with intel-
lectual fraud. The Marxist schooling of these intellectuals, complemented
first by their experience of émigré life in Europe and later by their bureau-
cratic administration of huge, chaotic organizations, created a penchant for
analyzing everything that happened in generalized, scientific terms and at-
tributing decisive significance to this understanding. Critical philosophy of
the second half of this century, which has striven to eliminate such extreme
expressions of rationalism, dubs this frame of mind “logocracy”—the be-
lief that knowledge of the truth is enough to change the world. This cult of
consciousness had a strong advocate in Trotsky, who found it acceptable to
promote the idea even in his political oration (see chapter 7).
Nietzsche’s irrational dreams, therefore, made him seem naive and un-
suited to inclusion in the Bolshevist canon. In contrast, the importance that
Freud attributed to the conscious in changing human behavior seemed
more attuned to the new tasks at hand. These elements of Freud’s teaching
indubitably came to dominate the simplified version of it that was pre-
sented in the works of Soviet analysts such as Ivan Yermakov. “Freudism,”
as the Bolsheviks labeled psychoanalytic study, by analogy to the accus-
tomed word “Marxism,” was perceived as a scientifically based promise of
the real, not the hypothetical, alteration of man, achieved through the re-
formation of his consciousness. The scale, of course, would be different,
but Bukharin’s intentions were clear when he mused about the Lilliputians
of bourgeois science and the Gullivers of proletarian science. The
Bolsheviks most likely saw Freud, with his examining couch and individual
patients with whom he would have to work for years, as the forerunner of
psychoanalytic factories of the future—something akin to how Saint-
Simon’s dingy commune gave rise to the Gulliverian constructs of commu-
nism. After a time, former psychoanalyst Aron Zalkind would announce
the resounding success of his pedological experiments in scientifically con-
structing a “new man of the masses.”
Observers of those years note the gradual rehabilitation of private life,
which came as a surprise to many. Men began returning from the front af-
ter a war that had dragged on for almost a decade. City dwellers again took
up their daily routines, which had been disrupted by war communism; bu-
reaucrats, intellectuals, and Nepmen (small entrepreneurs) all abruptly re-
turned to their personal lives. Christian morality had been discredited, but
its communist counterpart was not yet firmly established. Even Lenin-style
Bolsheviks postponed its implementation to the indeterminate future, while

setting an example of completely traditional behavior in their private lives.
The lives of millions of people were to be redesigned from scratch. Young
people, refugees, and newly minted Communist Party cadres experienced a
moral vacuum, an absence of understandable and somehow justified stan-
dards of action in interpersonal relations, family life, and even in the pro-
fessional realm. The modern study of science has correlated the flourishing
of such fields as psychoanalysis, social psychology, and sexology with peri-
ods of social breakdown, when the place once occupied by traditional
norms and behavioral regulators (i.e., religion, law, and tradition) is left va-
cant and science is hastily drafted to fill the vacancy.
Sexuality unexpectedly became a topic for public discussion. Alexandra
Kollontay, the heroine of revolutionary sailors and at that time ambassador
to Sweden, published a letter to proletarian youth in Krasnaia nov’, in
which she affirmed that Party members could love, too, and moreover, had
a right to love. Voronsky felt compelled to publish a reply by one indignant
Bolshevik woman, who compared Kollontay’s opportunistic position to the
“petty bourgeois verse” by Akhmatova.?? Lunacharsky spoke out authori-
tatively at the end of this discussion, attempting to explain that the govern-
ment was in no position to start regulating people’s sexual lives.*!
Such liberal views notwithstanding, a number of pseudoscientific publi-
cations were released in the 1920s containing various recommendations on
limiting sexuality and channeling it toward a “conscious” level. The culmi-
nation of these works was the oft-reprinted “precepts” of Aron Zalkind,
which stated that a class has the right to interfere in the sex life of its mem-
bers for the sake of revolutionary expediency (see chapter 8 for details).
The anticipated results were described by Yevgeny Zamyatin in We and
Andrei Platonov in Antisexus, which remained unpublished in Russia until
the 1980s. Panteleimon Romanov elaborated on the difficulties encoun-
tered by the ordinary “new man” when, for example, he experienced love
for the first time and felt shame at his bourgeois emotion, or experienced
jealousy and therefore felt like a counterrevolutionary. In 1925, Lydia
Ginzburg wrote, “Erotica has become the cornerstone of literature, most of
all as an unfavorable motif.”52 Osip Mandelstam, probably unaware at the
time of the literal meaning of his metaphor, referred in 1922 to contempo-
rary literary figures’ preoccupation with psychology and daily life as akin
to “a convict’s love affair with his cart.”33
The life of that day has come down to us also through the data collected
in several sociological surveys on sexual behavior among young people.>+
All in all, these data bear witness to untraditional and inconsistent sexual
habits among college students at the beginning of the 1920s. A high rate of
early marriage, frequent divorce, and an abortion rate twice as high as the
birth rate were accompanied by unrealistic attitudes, general dissatisfac-
tion, and common complaints of sexual problems. Three-quarters of
187
Odessa’s students in 1927 said they felt a need for a more intensive sex life,
and forty-one percent complained of a lack of sexual stamina. “Classes, in-
tellectual work, and massive waste of intellectual energy, together with an
incorrect diet, seriously aggravate sexual problems,” wrote one contempo-
rary scholar.*> According to data collected by Aron Zalkind, eighty-five
percent suffered from “nervous or bronchial disorders.” The wave of sui-
cides that swept through Russia’s large cities after poet Sergei Yesenin took
his own life in 1925 reflected the extent of disorientation among urban
youth. Answering questions on the topic “The Social Hygiene of Sex,” stu-
dents expressed radical demands, such as state-secured, equal distribution
of women and the opening of free bordellos. At the same time, they nearly
unanimously spoke out against the harm caused by masturbation and the
unacceptability of homosexual tendencies.
The professed goals of this culture were also reflected in an unbelievably
high level of sexual repression uncovered by surveys—if one can believe the
data collected in a series of research projects by the universities of Moscow,
Odessa, and Omsk. More than half of the female students surveyed said
that they had remained virgins until the age of 30, while eighty percent of
male students in Odessa said they had at least once in their lives attempted
to swear off sex forever. Zalkind announced with satisfaction that more
than a third of the Moscow college students in his study were not sexually
active, since “they were channeling their sexual energy into creative social
activity.” Less than half of the Odessan students believed in the existence of
love, although sixty-three percent replied that they had experienced love in
their own lives. Less than half of the female students dreamed of marriage;
on the other hand, only a quarter of the girls were in favor of “free love.”
This total lack of concurrence between actual sexual behavior and per-
ceptions of sex gave rise to a high demand for an intellectual system that
could explain human relations and at the same time would not come into
stark conflict with the Bolshevik ideology that these same young people so
enthusiastically supported. On the other hand, unfulfilled needs can distort
any intellectual system, twisting ideas to suit them.
In this context, it is easy to understand why the two-volume edition of
Freud’s Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, released by the Gosud-
arstvennoe (State) Publishing House in 1922 with a circulation of 2,000
copies (a quantity that Jones considered fantastic enough to write about
thirty years later) was snatched up in a single month.
Turning to Children
These aspects of Russian culture in the 1920s were also closely linked with
a characteristic interest in children. This fixation did not appear suddenly,
but it was perceived as something new, even though it entered the minds of
the most diverse figures simultaneously.
Recalling the 1920s, Lydia Ginzburg had her own take on the literary
process: “We turned to children.” According to her, Kornei Chukovsky “in-
vented children’s literature.” Before 1917, he had been a popular journalist
and literary critic who “was sort of like a newborn himself after the revolu-
tion.” After Bely’s Kotik Letaev was published, Pasternak’s “Liuvers’s
Childhood” and Mandelstam’s autobiographical essays about his own
childhood were released almost simultaneously. In her journal entries from
1925-1926, Ginzburg wrote with irony: “Everyone is terribly excited: ‘Is
Ivan Ivan’ich going on about psychology again?’ I say, let it be Vanechka.”*°
Gorky followed with My Universities, while in painting, Petrov-Vodkin’s
little boys become the symbol of the new era. Nikolai Rybnikov created a
huge collection of journal entries describing child development and tried to
push a large-scale project through the ministry of education to found a bio-
graphical institute that would be charged with maintaining such collec-
tions. One point on the political agenda was the organization of a new,
“Gulliverian” science in the vein of Bukharin, dealing with children and the
transformation of man: pedology.
A plethora of associations and institutes began to spring up with unprece-
dented speed, dealing with a smattering of medicine, psychology, and peda-
gogy, within a more or less psychoanalytic framework. In Moscow, in spring
1918, the Child Institute was founded with two subdivisions, somatic and
psychological, along with a related experimental kindergarten. During the
same year, V. P. Kashchenko’s private sanatorium was transformed into the
Educational Medical Clinic by order of the ministry of education, and on
October 1, 1923, it became a Medical and Educational Research Center with
a widely conceived research mandate. In August 1919, the Clinical
Psychotherapeutic Institute was founded in Petrograd. Our old friend Aron
Zalkind became the director; the small staff of three also included another
psychoanalyst, Ilya Perepel. During the first postrevolutionary years,
Bekhterev’s massive clinical and scholarly organization, the Psychoneuro-
logical Academy, was taking shape in Petrograd, growing out of the Second
Petrograd University. One part of the academy was the Pediatric
Examination Institute, under the direction of A. S. Griboedov, which became
the venue for Tatiana Rosenthal’s 1918 psychoanalytic research on children.
The First Suicide, the First Emigration

Rosenthal was a figure typical of Russia’s psychoanalytic movement. As her
friend Sara Naidich wrote in her obituary, “If psychoanalysis took root in
Petersburg, it was thanks only to the activity of Tatiana Rosenthal.”37 In her
youth, she was an activist in the Social Democratic Party, and she took part
in the revolution of 1905 as a member of a Jewish workers’ movement.
For a time, she was the chairperson of the Moscow Women Students’
189
Association. In 1906, she appeared in Zurich, “tired and upset,” trying to

choose between medicine and law, attempting to ascertain which profession
would be more useful for her activism. It was then that she happened across
a book by Freud. We can still read her subsequent exclamation: “What har-
mony results when one brings together the ideas of Freud and Marx!” After
she received her doctorate in psychiatry (almost at the same time as her col-
league Sabina Spielrein), Rosenthal returned to St. Petersburg and dedicated
all of her energy to the practice and spread of psychoanalysis.
We know little about her career. In 1919, she participated in the research
that was going on in the newly formed Bekhterev Brain Institute, heading
up the Department of Pediatric Neuropathology and Psychopathology.
During the winter of 1919-1920, Rosenthal gave a series of lectures on
psychoanalysis at the institute. At the All-Russian Conference on Caring
for Mentally Handicapped Children, which took place in Moscow in 1920,
Rosenthal forwarded a resolution demanding that anyone involved in chil-
dren’s education be trained in psychoanalysis. For reasons unknown,
Naidich tells us, the resolution was never published.
In 1919, her essay entitled “Dostoevsky’s Suffering and Art” was pub-
lished in a journal edited by Bekhterev.*® Rosenthal called her method
“psychogenetic” and credited Freud with its development, but she objected
to the latter’s psychosexual monism. In her clinical interpretation of
Dostoevsky, Rosenthal was ahead of Freud, who would later repeat a bevy
of her theses in his own writings, without a single footnote. Both Freud and
Rosenthal spoke of Dostoevsky’s ambivalence, of the role played by his
childhood trauma, and of the nature of his epilepsy. The similarity between
their reasoning on the last point is particularly striking. Just as Freud as-
serted later, Rosenthal maintained that Dostoevsky’s epilepsy was not gen-
uine (or, in Freud’s terms, organic), but affected. Her clinical argumentation
and even several of her examples are identical to those employed by Freud:
that attacks were brought on by emotional disturbances; that there was no
weakening of personality; that the great author’s emotional life was unusu-
ally ambivalent; and that his condition improved while he was interned in a
~ labor camp, and the attacks stopped.*? As if illustrating Freud’s idea, she
wrote that “[Dostoevsky’s] attacks were his punishment. He had no more
need of them when he was being punished in another way.” Rosenthal cited
the writer’s own words: “O, it was a great joy to me, Siberia and prison.
Ah, if only you were sent there!”*°
She was not about to wait to experience this joy for herself. In 1921,
Tatiana Rosenthal killed herself.
Dr. Naidich wrote in her obituary,
She was an unusually complex creature: very active, very productive, but filled
with deep internal dissatisfaction. Under her cold exterior, her confident man-
ner, her sharpness of speech and clarity of thought were hidden ceaseless, pro-
found alarm and a gentle, romantic, and mystical soul. Her poetry, published in
1917 in Petrograd, shows this distinctly. She was young (36 years old), gifted,
active in her field. She was the mother of a wonderful child whom she loved
dearly. She greeted her own death as the victim of a fate she chose for herself.*!
Alas, this is all we know. The year that brought the Kronstadt and
Tamboy uprisings, mass famine, and the first signs of the New Economic
Policy provided plenty of reasons for the suicide of a former activist of the
workers’ movement. An analyst’s work, as is clear from the history of psy-
choanalysis, does not protect the practitioner from suicide. Nevertheless, it
seems that we are still guessing at solutions to the riddles of Tatiana
Rosenthal: Who analyzed her in Zurich? What was she doing in Petrograd
from 1911 to 1919? What was the nature of her relationship to Bekhterev?
Did Freud know of her work on Dostoevsky? Why does her poetry not ap-
pear in bibliographies? What happened to her child?
The same year that Tatiana Rosenthal committed suicide, another pio-
neer of Russian psychoanalysis, Nikolai Osipov, emigrated to Prague. Until
his death in 1934, he practiced analysis there and taught at Charles
University. Along with his student Fyodor Dosuzhkov, Osipov became the
founder of Czech psychoanalysis. It is only there that one can still find the
heirs of Russian psychoanalysts.
The sixth congress of the International Psychoanalytic Association, at
The Hague in 1920, was held under direct pressure from the Russians, who
demanded attention and recognition. Their representative at the congress
was Sabina Spielrein, who had arrived from Lausanne. At the first organi-
zational meeting, Spielrein took the floor and suggested that the
International Journal of Psychoanalysis, the German- and English-language
official publication of the international association, systematically publish
articles in Russian, and that summaries of Russian research be published in
the journal’s languages. Theodor Reik objected that it would be too expen-
sive to print articles in Cyrillic. Freud stood up, and recognizing the seri-
ousness of the issue, promised to do something about it in the future.*2
Spielrein’s suggestion was soon carried out, at least in part: Overviews of
Russian work, as well as official reports on the activity of the Russian
Psychoanalytic Society, began to be published regularly.
Letters from Kazan

At the jubilee meeting of the Moscow section of the Soviet Psychological
Society in 1974, famous neuropsychologist Alexander Luria related: “I re-
member the years 1918, 1919, and 1920, when, as a very young man, I be-
gan to work on everything at once. I was interested in social science and I
191
actively investigated issues in the development of social sciences and

utopian socialism.”*? Luria had just matriculated in the department of law
at the University of Kazan when it was renamed the department of social
sciences, with a former professor of ecclesiastical law lecturing on sociol-
ogy. “I was a person of absolutely average capabilities, and like all young
men I came up with a whole run of projects that were practically impossi-
ble, but which served as motivation.”
Luria was a remarkably capable man, and his most important plan of
those days was actually accomplished. The nineteen-year-old student, stuck
in a faraway corner of a huge country turned topsy-turvy by the Bolsheviks,
formed a psychoanalytic group, entered into correspondence with Freud
himself, and managed to get his Kazan group recognized by the
International Psychoanalytic Association.** The members of the group,
which included seven physicians, two teachers, five psychologists, and a
historian (M. V. Nechkina, who later became a member of the Academy of
Sciences), met regularly to discuss translations of Freud and the works of
Dostoevsky and Rozanov. Transcripts and other documents related to the
group were kept in perfect order by Luria, a fact that distinguishes his
group from other psychoanalytic undertakings in Russia.
Kazan, despite its provincial location, was in no way cut off from the
outside world intellectually. The membership of Luria’s group was typified
by Roza Averbukh, a native of Russia who spent the years from 1901 to
1909 as a student at the universities of Bern and Zurich. She returned to
Russia in 1912, participated in the local civil service, and from 1917 on
worked in the hospital at the University of Kazan.*° In 1921, she translated
and published “Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego” in Kazan, a
work considered by local Freudians (for good reason) the most appropriate
to the historical moment.
It is possible that the Kazan group’s remarkable activity and its recogni-
tion by the International Psychoanalytic Association were in some way
aided by the longtime acquaintance between Freud and the founder of the
Kazan School of Neuropathology, L. Darshkevich (see chapter 4). The doc-
tors in Luria’s group were Darshkevich’s students. Although we do not
know for certain that any of the group members actually practiced psycho-
analysis systematically, the very existence of the Kazan group took on im-
portant organizational implications later on.
Psychoanalysis and the Ministry of Education

In May-June 1922, the Russian Psychoanalytic Society (RPSAS) was form-
ing in Moscow. The organization’s charter is still kept in the files of the
Main Scientific Directorate of the ministry of education.*® Psychoanalysis,
according to the charter, “by its nature is one of the methods of teaching
and training man in his social surroundings; it aids in the struggle against
the primitive, antisocial aspirations of an underdeveloped personality and
can be very useful both in the field of pure science and in the applied sci-
ences.” After this follows a long list of “applied fields,” in which psychiatry
is named last. The registration form is signed by fourteen people; among
them are four teachers (all of whom were highly placed in the ministry of
education), four doctors, two professors of art history, two physics profes-
sors, and two authors.*” The signatures at the end of the application were
gathered in September 1922. The first names listed are those of Otto
Schmidt and Ivan Yermakov.
The ministry of education was a highly unusual institution.** The huge
and still growing bureaucratic structure was managed by a motley cast of
characters. Bolshevik commissars who had just returned from the front sat
at the same desks as Bohemian theatrical types accustomed to the adora-
tion of audiences; wizened ministerial officials mixed with radically in-
clined enthusiasts of unheard-of educational techniques; university profes-
sors worked alongside the wives of the new power elite.
“T recall our work at the ministry of education as a joyful oasis, a place
where you get together with your friends, you develop some glowing utopia
on a global scale, and forget for a while about the nightmare that’s all
around you,” wrote the daughter of Vyacheslav Ivanov, who worked in the
School Division from 1918 to 1920 under Nadezhda Briusova, the famous
poet’s sister. Ivanov himself ran one of the sections of the Theater Division.
His boss was Olga Kameneva, Trotsky’s sister and the wife of another
Bolshevik leader, Lev Kamenev. Trotsky’s own wife headed up the Museum
Division, next door.*?
Plans for a glowing utopia—in the most incredible combinations—were
considered and adopted through a highly developed bureaucratic system in-
herited from the Russian empire. For example, on December 24, 1924, the
presidium of the State Academic Council (SAC) of the ministry of education,
chaired by Mikhail Pokrovsky, examined the following issues: approval of a
plan proposed by the scientific-artistic section of the SAC to sponsor a talk
by the famous avant-garde artist David Shterenberg; what to do about “the
Divisions of Popular Education forcing people to purchase books that have
been banned by the SAC from their warehouses”; and an expository note by
Professor Ilya Ivanov, “On the artificial crossbreeding of humans and mon-
keys.” Reporting on this last item was Otto Schmidt, who had also been
charged with organizing a commission to “develop” the proposal.%°
As far as we know, only three of the founding members of the Russian
Psychoanalytic Society actually practiced psychoanalysis: Yermakov,
Kannabikh, and Wulff. Only the latter enjoyed the recognition of his col-
leagues abroad. The membership of Stanislav Shatsky and Pavel Blonsky,
the leading theoreticians of educational reform, as well as that of the direc-
193
tor of the education ministry’s Main Directorate for Social Training, G. P.

Weisberg, guaranteed the psychoanalysts official support. At the same time,
there had to be a price, and it was a price to be paid on a scale and in a
form acceptable to the young government. One professor who became as-
sociated with the group and contributed to its reinforcement, Otto
Schmidt, launched his political career at precisely this time.5!
The Cast and Characters

Schmidt’s strange name and unmistakable appearance were to become fa-
miliar to everyone in the Soviet Union. A famed polar explorer, Otto
Schmidt (1891-1956) had previously headed expeditions aboard the Sedov
and Cheliuskin. He was the chief of the Main Directorate of the Northern
Sea Route (MDNSR), and vice president of the Soviet Academy of Sciences
(1939-1942). He was one of those drafters of Stalin’s five-year plans whose
image inevitably became the stuff of legend. What were the expeditions
for? Who was the MDNSR transporting? No matter who might have asked
such questions, within the country or without, the scholarly authority of
the eccentric mathematician with his huge black beard could arouse no sus-
picions. Before the revolution, he was just a junior lecturer at the University
of Kiev, but during his tenure as a high official of the Soviet regime he elab-
orated a theory worthy of a prestigious appointment—a theory on the for-
mation of the solar system. After joining the Communist Party of
Bolsheviks in 1919, Schmidt immediately began to play a noticeable role in
the young government’s undertakings. In the 1920s, he was simultaneously
or sequentially a member of the collegiums of the ministries of food, educa-
tion, and finance, the State Planning Committee, and the Main Statistical
Directorate. In 1921-1924, Schmidt headed the Gosudarstvennoe (State)
publishing house, and during those years the State Planning Committee re-
leased a series of exceptional books, including most of the “Psychological
and Psychoanalytic Library” series. Then Schmidt switched to a less logi-
_ cal post as the head of the natural science section of the Communist
Academy, where, as the Soviet Encyclopedia informs us, “he allowed a
number of incorrect, nondialectical attitudes to develop.” Clearly, it was
only the speed of his reflexes that saved him from the fate met by many of
his colleagues at the Academy, who were sent nearly as far north in the
1930s as the icebreaker Cheliuskin had been. The heroic polar explorer
and talented scientific organizer was so perfectly fitted for his role that al-
though he found himself always at the heart of the storm, he was able to
weather each wave of repression. The high level of influence and trust
Schmidt enjoyed in scientific and ideological affairs is indicated by the fact
that during the worst decade and a half of Stalin’s rule, between 1924 and
1941, Schmidt was never replaced in his duties as editor in chief of the
Great Soviet Encyclopedia, which gave the official Bolshevik rating to

every phenomenon in the universe, including leaders living and dead.
The first president of the Russian Psychoanalytic Society was Ivan
Dmitrievich Yermakov (1875-1942). A psychiatrist and a former student
of V. P. Serbsky’s, Yermakov dedicated his first scholarly works to the ob-
servation of mental illnesses at the front during the Russo-Japanese war.**
In 1911, Yermakov remained in the psychiatric clinic of Moscow
University after the scandalous departure of Serbsky and Osipovy, who quit
in protest against government decisions that proscribed traditional aca-
demic freedoms. From that time forth, intense enmity reigned between
Yermakov and Osipov. Indeed, their paths would diverge even further later
on—which goes to show the breadth of possibilities for free choice that the
entire Russian intelligentsia still possessed.
Yermakov’s publications began to touch on psychoanalysis in 1913. He
was a prolific writer, and his interest in literature and art, unusual for a
physician, became more pronounced as the years passed. As a result of his
enthusiasm, in 1929 the magazine Under the Banner of Marxism, in uncov-
ering the ideological errors made by the most important Russian philoso-
phers, declaimed, “Everyone knows that if you read Husserl in Russian you
get Shpet, Freud becomes Yermakov, and Bergson sounds like Losev.”>?
On the eve of the revolution, Yermakov published an article entitled “On
Delirium Tremens” in the January 1917 issue of Psychoneurological News.
The first words of the text had the ring of a slogan: “We are living at the
dawn of a new era in the development of our society. We have been called
upon not to turn away from reality, nor to deceive ourselves, but to expand
our perception, to attempt to understand and make sense of our surround-
ings, and to give all our strength for the bright future that (we believe)
awaits our country.”°4
In the years directly following the revolution, Yermakov was a professor
at the State Psychoneurological Institute, where he founded the psychology
department. In 1921, he organized the Psychoanalytic Orphanage-
Laboratory, which was transformed in 1923 into the State Psychoanalytic
Institute, which Yermakov headed until the place was shut down. In 1921
he also formed the Moscow Psychoanalytic Club for the Study of Artistic
Creativity.
Stanislav Teofilovich Shatsky (1878-1934) would play a subtle and unex-
pectedly important role in the history of the Russian Psychoanalytic Society.
Shatsky was a member of the State Academic Council and one of the most
active figures in the ministry of education. He was particularly close to
Lenin’s wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, who had a great deal of influence in hu-
manitarian fields while her husband was alive. Shatsky’s frantic organiza-
tional career began long before the revolution, however.°S In 1906, he orga-
nized a society in Moscow called “Settlement,” a colony for the medical care
Psychoanalysis in the Land of the Bolsheviks 195
and education of children. The organization operated on funds donated by

Moscow businessmen, particularly the famed philanthropist Ivan Sytin.
Settlement was composed of a network of children’s clubs (“English Club,”
“American Club,” “Austrian Club,” and so forth), with fifteen children in
each, operating as compact, self-governing republics, with the children
themselves serving as elected officials. The monarchist newspaper Old
Moscow wrote of Shatsky’s brainchild: “Whose diabolical mind invented
this means of making children into future fanatical revolutionaries, injecting
them from the earliest age with parliamentarian habits?” According to the
audit that led to the closing of Settlement in 1908, the society’s facilities
were “thoroughly comfortable, all the furniture well-made, electrical light-
ing connected everywhere, with marvelous bathrooms.” According to the
government report, however, children were being educated incorrectly: They
addressed their elders informally, they shook hands in greeting, and at the
drop of a hat they would call a meeting, during which they would choose a
chairman and secretary and hold a secret ballot.
In 1919, Shatsky organized the First Experimental Educational Research
Center, also based on self-governance. When Lenin learned of the institu-
tion from Krupskaya, he reacted enthusiastically: “Now that’s some real
work, not empty babble.” In 1928, the clinic was visited by John Dewey,
one of America’s most prominent philosophers. According to his impres-
sions, the Experimental Research Center’s work was unprecedented. He en-
thused that the revolution had assisted contemporary educational reform-
ers, and that reformers in other countries had never been in a better
position.°® The center was located in Maloyaroslavets, in Kaluga province,
which did not keep Shatsky from fulfilling his chairmanship obligations in
Moscow, holding meetings of the educational section of the Russian
Psychoanalytic Society twice a month. Shatsky died quietly in 1934 at his
post as director of the Moscow Conservatory, having been squeezed out of
all his more influential positions due to his unfashionable views. Krupskaya
wrote him a touching eulogy.
The twists and turns in the life of yet another theorist and organizer of
Soviet education, Pavel Petrovich Blonsky (1884-1941), who made a no-
table contribution to the development of psychoanalysis in Russia, provides
more food for thought. As with the other characters in this story, Blonsky’s
professional life took shape before the revolution, and when it came, he
was a mere junior lecturer, a historian of classical philosophy. He had also
been an underground member of the Socialist Revolutionary movement.
The great neoplatonist philosopher Alexei Losev wrote that Blonsky’s work
The Philosophy of Plotinus had, in equal measure with the works of Pavel
Florensky, opened a new era in the understanding of Platonism.°” In his
own autobiography, Blonsky emphasized his indifference to traditional
teaching. As a teenager he loved to mock the absurdity of high school edu-
cation, and later he decided that it was “not funny, it was horrid.” Accord-
ing to him, prerevolutionary pedagogy boiled down to a “very, very well-
developed system to bring up stupid and unscrupulous people.” With revo-
lutionary fervor Blonsky set about “destroying this cursed training.” He
saw trade schools as an important means toward this end. Later he would
confess that he wrote his blueprints for trade schools in 1918 “as if the
classless society were already built.”°*
From 1922 onward, Blonsky worked in the ministry of education. He
participated in the drafting of new curricula, which the ministry would be
at pains to implement over the coming decades. It seems this work was not
to Blonsky’s satisfaction. He turned to pedology as “the vital source,” be-
coming one of the new discipline’s leading theorists. Entering retirement in
1935, Blonsky wrote Outlines of Infantile Sexuality, a curious book con-
structed as a dialogue with psychoanalysis.°?
A less remarkable figure among the founding members of the Russian
Psychoanalytic Society was V. I. Nevsky (1876-1937). After the revolution,
Nevsky became rector of the Sverdlov Party University, head of the Party
commission for auditing the ministry of education, director of the Lenin
Library, and the man in charge of the Central House of Enlightenment
(Tsentral’nyi dom prosveshcheniia). In the words of one modern historian
who made a special study of Nevsky’s work, “the posts he held were so di-
verse that it is hard to pinpoint where he was based in formal terms. ... It
is more important to realize that Nevsky was part of a tiny group of trusted
party leaders who supervised activities in many areas.”°°
One founding member whom we have already met is Alexei Voronsky
(1884-1943), who belonged to an even narrower circle of first-generation
Bolsheviks of the former underground. At the time the Psychoanalytic
Society was being chartered, he was the head of the Main Directorate for
Political Education in the ministry of education and was editor in chief of
the political literary journal Krasnaia nov’. He “was truly in the victors’
camp,” as Nadezhda Mandelstam recalled. “The irony is that everyone met
the same fate.”°! , .
In addition to these individuals, a number of other names in the member-
ship roster also enjoyed the respect of the intelligentsia. These people were
tastefully chosen to symbolize the connection that the Russian
Psychoanalytic Society would have with the intellectual elite at large.
Among them was art critic Alexander Gabrichevsky, one of the best Soviet
cultural historians. His wife, Natalya Severtsova, the daughter of a famous
Russian zoologist, spoke of their circle of friends, which included Gustav
Shpet, Mikhail Bulgakov, Vasily Kandinsky, and Robert Falk:
New people were joining us all the time, people who fed on each other’s
minds, although they were often total and irreconcilable opposites. . . .
Evenings we would go to visit people, drink vodka, stop into basement cafés
on Arbat street to sip beer. We ate little, had a lot of fun, and nobody ever
grumbled about the way things were. We did our jobs, got paid next to noth-
ing, and two weeks later we were sitting there without a penny to our names,
waiting for the next paycheck.®?
The Gabrichevskys’ apartment, which was one of the centers of this

lifestyle, was on Nikitskaya street, right near the building that housed the
State Psychoanalytic Institute.
A short time after the society was founded, it was joined by Aron
Zalkind, a neuropathologist and the future leader of the pedological move-
ment (see chapters 4 and 8). Then came Mikhail Reisner (1869-1929), a
professor of law and one of the authors of the first Soviet constitution (as
the father of Larissa Reisner, the romantic heroine of the Russian revolu-
tion, he was the father-in-law first of Fyodor Raskolnikov and then of Karl
Radek). Hungarian immigrant and communist N. Vargyas followed soon
after, at that time a philosopher at the Institute of Red Professorship spe-
cializing in Freudomarxism. Also joining the group was Bolshevik diplomat
Viktor Kopp, who would soon be sent off to Tokyo as ambassador. By
1923, the thirty members of the Russian Society composed a full eighth of
the total membership of the International Psychoanalytic Association.
As we have seen, doctors played a relatively inconspicuous role in the
group, to say nothing of practicing analysts. At the same time, many of the
members were prominent Bolsheviks, extremely close to the highest eche-
lons of power in the country. Far-reaching political intent seems to have
been at least as important in the organization of the Russian Psychoanalytic
Society as was the natural desire of people like Yermakov, Wulff, and
Gabrichevsky to gather others of like mind around them. Who, then, was
their protector on high?
Jean Marti, an expert in the field, thought the Schmidts were relatives of
the old Bolshevik and labor minister V. V. Schmidt, who could have assisted
them actively as part of his policy supporting specialists whose honest labor
might be useful to the new government.® Luria himself recalled that the
Russian Psychoanalytic Society’s organizers were supported by “Karl
Radek and a slew of others.” He made this statement at the beginning of
the 1970s, however, when it was still impossible to mention the names of
those “others.”®+ It seems to me that the most serious figure behind the
scenes was probably Leon Trotsky, who had his own reasons for support-
ing psychoanalysis (see chapter 7).
Thanks to benefactors in high places, the Psychoanalytic Institute was al-
located a beautiful building—the Ryabushinsky house on Malaya
Nikitskaya street. Twenty-one-year-old Alexander Luria, the institute’s sec-
retary, was given, in his own words, “a marvelous office with silk wallpa-
per, where once every two weeks the meetings of the Psychoanalytic Society
were held in a frightfully solemn atmosphere.”® Later, the house was given
over to Maxim Gorky; today it houses a museum in his honor.
The Kazan Incident

In 1923, the International Journal of Psychoanalysis, under the editorship
of Ernest Jones, published information on the work of the Kazan
Psychoanalytic Society. The text was given equal space with news on the
activity of the Vienna, British, Berlin, and other well-known societies. The
information from Kazan included a list of the fourteen members of the
Society (corresponding roughly with an earlier list found in Luria’s
archives), an additional list of seven honorary members (all of them physi-
cians in Kazan), and the minutes of the organization’s 1922-1923 meet-
ings. In the same issue, under the rubric “The Psychoanalytic Movement,”
which generally provided information about events in countries where psy-
choanalytic societies had yet to be officially organized, such as France,
Switzerland, and so forth, Jones included a report on Russia. In fact, this
article concerned only Moscow.°°
The application of the Russian Psychoanalytic Society for admittance to
the international association, submitted at the seventh congress of the asso-
ciation, in Berlin (September 24-27, 1922), was very controversial.®” Ernest
Jones, the president of the association and organizer of the congress, pro-
posed that consideration of the Russian society’s application be post-
poned—immediately after he had admitted the newly formed Indian
Psychoanalytic Society to the international association. Freud himself inter-
vened (this was the last congress he would attend). Insisting that he was
abreast of the situation, he suggested that the Russian society be admitted.
Next to take the floor, however, was Jones’s onetime deputy president in
the British society, Douglas Bryan. He declared that it was impossible to
admit the Russian society, for exclusively technical reasons (the Russian so-
ciety had failed to submit its charter to the Central Executive before the
deadline). Freud was forced to agree, but he announced that he “proposed
that the Central Executive be empowered to admit the Moscow Society as
soon as the formal conditions of admission should be satisfied.”°8 This sug-
gestion was followed.
Subsequently, Jones raised a different issue: He suggested an amendment
to the charter of the International Psychoanalytic Association, giving the
organization the right to directly unite local groups operating in member-
states. Freud moved that this procedure be applied only to small local
groups, on which motion the amendment was passed unanimously. Vienna
and Swiss society member Sabina Spielrein spoke during the discussion, ex-
pressing her thoughts on the application of this amendment to groups in
Psychoanalysis in the Land of the Bolsheviks oP
Russia. The exact words of her statement, unfortunately, have been lost.
She could only have been speaking of the competition between the group of
Muscovite psychoanalysts supported by Freud and the Kazan group, which
was assisted by Jones. A compromise, from the point of view of the highest
echelons of leadership, was to be reached by offering Kazan a kind of sov-
ereignty.
This situation also was one of the main problems that drew Otto and
Vera Schmidt to visit Freud and Abraham in the autumn of 1923.°
Abraham was then the secretary of the international association, and sup-
port from him and Freud could have countervailed against the opposition
of the president, Jones. Indeed, after their discussion, the journal of the in-
ternational association informed the public of Jones’s decision to temporar-
ily admit the “Moscow Society,” pending confirmation at the following
congress. (The Salzburg congress in April 1924 later affirmed the decision.)
Before the Schmidts departed, negotiations were held between the leaders
of the Moscow and Kazan groups. As a result, the following resolution was
adopted in Kazan on September 4: “In order to concentrate the psychoana-
lytic movement in Russia, it seems desirable that the members of the Kazan
Psychoanalytic Society join the All-Russian Psychoanalytic Union, based in
Moscow. At present, it has been agreed upon that A. R. Luria, Dr. B. D.
Friedmann, and R. A. Averbukh should move to Moscow.””° Luria was im-
mediately elected secretary of the Russian society.
It should be noted that even in 1957, as he compiled the index to his
three-volume biography of Freud, Jones continued to view the Kazan soci-
ety as an independent subdivision of the international association. It seems
that Jones’s actions, aimed at postponing the admission of the Russian soci-
ety, and his veiled disagreements with Freud in this regard, can be ex-
plained by his deep bias in favor of the Kazan society. Understanding that it
would eventually become necessary to give in to Russia’s demands, Jones
invented the right of “local groups” to be admitted as well, putting the
Kazan group on equal footing with the all-Russian society. Although the
political game that Jones was playing seems strange in retrospect, he re-
ceived Freud’s consent for this solution.
The beleaguered Muscovite initiators, who nevertheless wielded immense
capabilities within their country, decided it was preferable to solve the in-
ternational situation by simply transferring Luria and his people to
Moscow. The problem ceased to exist, along with the Kazan group itself.
One might even suspect that twenty-year-old Luria was pushing for just
such a result. It is curious to note that in his subsequent official reports as
secretary of the Russian Psychoanalytic Society, Luria seemed reluctant to
reveal the details of the affair and asserted that the all-Russian society had
been immediately recognized by the international psychoanalytic move-
ment.
Three Organizations of Soviet Analysts

One of the psychoneurologists of the Bekhterev school who was an uncom-
promising opponent of psychoanalysis, M. I. Astvatsaturov, wrote in 1924
that “the followers of Freudian doctrine form a particular caste, with their
own journals and conferences.””! This may well have been the case in
Russia, as it was just about everywhere else.
Member lists of the Russian Psychoanalytic Society were published sev-
eral times in the journal of the international association. The list that was
published in 1924 included the founding members, with whom we are al-
ready familiar, with the addition in autumn 1923 of Sabina Spielrein and
three Kazan psychoanalysts, led by Alexander Luria.’* Most of the previ-
ous art historians and writers were missing from the list that was released
to the international association six years later, but there were new names
that would later play a prominent role in Soviet science: Lev Vygotsky, who
gained world recognition through his works on the theory of thought; and
Nikolai Bernstein, the future author of The Physiology of Activity.”
The work of the Russian Psychoanalytic Society overlapped significantly
with that of two other organizations of analysts, the State Psychoanalytic
Institute and the Orphanage-Laboratory. It is clear that all three organiza-
tions existed thanks to the intense activity of a single set of people. The di-
rector of the institute and president of the society in 1924 was Ivan
Yermakov. Moisei Wulff also played a major role in both, as head of the so-
ciety’s medical section (and later as Yermakov’s replacement at the post of
president) and director of clinical admissions at the institute. Alexander
Luria was at once secretary of the society and secretary of the institute.
Yermakov was also in charge of the Orphanage-Laboratory, but in fact
Vera Schmidt was responsible for its scholarly and practical work. Her hus-
band published a multivolume series, the “Psychological and Psycho-
analytic Library,” out of the State Publishing House, which he controlled,
and the compilation and editing of the series was Ivan Yermakov’s dearest
project. ,
This group formed rather early on—at the latest, in 1921—and held to-
gether in its compact form for about five or six years. The elite circle had a
wide network of intellectual and political contacts, but no new members
_were ever initiated into its ranks. An astonishing example of the exclusivity
of the clique was the entry into the group and sudden disappearance of
Sabina Spielrein. After returning to Moscow in 1923 with Freud’s blessing,
Sabina set about enthusiastically to find a project in which she could partic-
ipate. The institute’s course catalog”* lists her lectures and seminars on
child psychoanalysis, a practicum with elementary pupils (that is, student
practice in psychoanalyzing schoolchildren), and a walk-in clinic conducted
by Spielrein in tandem with her new assistant, Dr. Friedmann. If any of this
actually came to fruition, it didn’t last long. Spielrein soon left Moscow for
Rostov-on-the-Don, where a sad fate awaited her (see chapter 5). All three
psychoanalytic organizations proved unable to hold this person, whose
qualifications were unequaled in all of Russia.
In 1923, according to the International Journal of Psychoanalysis,’5 a
committee was formed in Russia that was to coordinate the activities of the
institute and the society. Ivan Yermakov became president of the commit-
tee, Otto Schmidt vice president, and Luria secretary. Among the committee
members were Spielrein and Wulff. This body was comprised of truly able
analysts (with the exception of Schmidt), but unfortunately it was never
again mentioned in official documents.
There are two versions of the 1923 course catalog of the State
Psychoanalytic Institute in the Ivan Yermakov archives. These two different
study plans provide answers to a range of puzzling questions. The
Psychoanalytic Institute is described as the residence of the Psychoanalytic
Society, the location for its “organizational and informational” meetings.
“The Society retains its right to manage itself ideologically.” There were to
be five subsections within the institute: the Orphanage-Laboratory, an out-
patient department, a clinic, psychological laboratory, and a library.
Yermakoyv and Wulff were prepared to give a course together on general
principles of psychoanalysis; Yermakov planned an additional special class
on the application of psychoanalysis in education.
Of the eleven seminars included in the institute’s course offerings, ten
were to be in the arts and education. Several of the same figures were called
upon to take charge of many of these classes, but there were new faces as
well. Nadezhda Briusova was to give a course on “Music and Children.”
The head of the Main Directorate for Social Training, G. Weisberg, taught
a seminar on “Organizing a Children’s Collective.” The only exception in
terms of subject matter, listed first in the course catalog, was Wulff’s semi-
nar on the therapeutic applications of psychoanalysis. Apart from these
seminars, the pedagogical section of the society held its meetings in the in-
“stitute, jointly with the Shatsky Experimental Pediatric Clinic and
Voronsky’s literary section of the society.
In the truncated version of the course catalog we find a somewhat differ-
ent assortment of figures. Topping the list was Sabina Spielrein: Her duties
were to include consultations, child psychoanalysis, outpatient consulta-
tion, and a lecture series. Next came Wulff, Yermakov, and Alexander
Luria, who seems to have been assigned courses in both literature and sci-
ence (“The Psychological System of Psychoanalysis: Literary Overview”
and “Psychological Laboratory”). They were followed by two lesser-known
scholars from Kazan, Boris Friedmann and Roza Averbukh. A totally unfa-
miliar name closes out the list, A. Belousov, next to which was the modest
designation “Medical Psychoanalysis.”
Between Leon Trotsky and Vasily Stalin

One unique aspect of the situation in Russia was the unusual closeness of
Soviet psychoanalysts to the highest echelons of power. This intimacy is ev-
ident in the broad overlap between the composition of the Russian
Psychoanalytic Society and upper government bodies and in the harmony
between the scholars’ most characteristic statements and the dominant ide-
ological line. This kind of proximity to power can be found nowhere else
and at no other time, and may well be the most distinguishing feature of
Russian psychoanalysis in the 1920s. This closeness became obvious even
in the Psychoanalytic Orphanage-Laboratory, which was for all intents and
purposes run by Vera Schmidt, and which was perhaps the furthest of all
the Moscow analysts’ undertakings from the gravitational pull of politics.
A teacher by profession, Schmidt never had any professional analytical
education. Nevertheless, her publications in international psychoanalytic
journals received high praise from her foreign colleagues. Her works were
dedicated to the methodology and the experimental work of the
Orphanage-Laboratory, plus a monograph describing the development of
the Schmidts’ son, Alik. It is said that Anna Freud and Marie Bonaparte
were fascinated by these works. Wilhelm Reich, incidentally, has noted that
the International Psychoanalytic Association took a half skeptical, half hos-
tile attitude toward Vera Schmidt’s experiments.”°
Besides Vera Schmidt’s book and Alexander Luria’s regular reports pub-
lished by the International Psychoanalytic Association, we have a stream of
archival documents at our disposal that shed light on the work of the State
Psychoanalytic Orphanage. There is a handwritten rough draft of Yer-
makov’s detailed report, capped by the title “The International Solidarity
Psychoanalytic Institute and Laboratory.” It covers the history of its found-
ing, sources of financing, details of its pedagogical approach, and plans for
further scholarly work. The text is undated, but it can be tentatively identi-
fied as having been written in 1923.’” We also have the institute’s founding
documents, employee records, reports of the commission of the ministry of
education that was investigating the orphanage’s activity, orders from the
ministry’s scientific-educational section and state academic council con-
cerning these audits, and the ensuing correspondence.’® Additional details
are contained in the unpublished memoirs of Alexander Luria and in an ar-
ticle by Jean Marti, who most likely received his information from Moisei
Wulff.
The orphanage-laboratory opened in August 1921 in the mansion on
Malaya Nikitskaya street, on the second floor of the same building that
housed the State Psychoanalytic Institute. The orphanage’s place in the tan-
gled organizational structure of the ministry of education posed a problem
from the very beginning. According to Yermakov’s report, it was originally
opened under the auspices of the Academic Center, which shared control of
scientific institutes with the Main Scientific Directorate. The orphanage
was then given over to the main directorate for social training, which over-
saw all other orphanages. “Finally, at a special meeting, the minister of ed-
ucation ordered that the institute be left under the auspices of the Academic
Center, where it remains today.” Thus, the orphanage was seen in point of
fact as a scientific research institute. Formally speaking, and most likely in
practice as well, the institute and orphanage were one and the same organi-
zation. Yermakov occasionally referred to it as the “Psychoanalytic
Institute-Laboratory.”
However, the institute did not receive funding from the Academic Center.
It was financed, according to Yermakov’s report, “partially” by three differ-
ent sponsoring organizations: the directorate for social training, the ministry
of food production, and the Gosudarstvennoe [State] publishing house. The
publishing house, in fact, allocated a certain percentage of the profits from
the sale of books in its Psychological and Psychoanalytic Library series.
However, the institute was constantly mired in financial and food supply
difficulties. In March 1922, the institute was visited by Comrade Witt, a
representative of the Union Coalition of German Manual and Intellectual
Laborers. According to Yermakov’s report, Witt was “intrigued ideologi-
cally by the work of the institute,” and after negotiating with the Comin-
tern, the academic council of the ministry of education, and the Russian
miners’ union, he agreed to sponsor the orphanage. It was then that the psy-
choanalytic institution was assigned the name International Solidarity.”
The institute’s personnel consisted of a director, eight officers with peda-
gogical experience, and “various workers who could not be included in the
regular staff, as a result of cutbacks.” This last classification included
Moisei Wulff.
In a more philosophical section of his report, Yermakov accentuated the
“success of the new trend in psychology, which has broken all connection
with previous, idealistic currents.” He defined its primary scientific objective
- as “methodical observation in a special institution for children” the likes of
which had never been conducted “anywhere, neither in the West, nor here in
Russia.” The practical intent of this scientific activity was to develop pro-
phylactic methods of fighting certain abnormal phenomena in mental devel-
opment. Psychoanalysis was touted as “a powerful means of liberating a de-
ficient person from social constraints.” Yermakov established as his goal
“educating the socially useful individual within the collective.” .
In describing his charges, Yermakov made a remark that sheds new light
on the nature of the institution he directed. “The children: most of them are
the children of Party officials who spend most of their time doing impor-
tant Party work, and are therefore unable to raise children.”*° Luria under-
lined the same idea; according to his recollections, the “psychoanalytic
kindergarten” took care of the children of the politically powerful, includ-

ing the Schmidts’ son (the very Alik whom his mother described so volumi-
nously) and Stalin’s son. Luria was probably referring to Vasily Stalin, who
was born in 1921.*!
Apparently, the experimental psychoanalytic orphanage was quite an
elitist institution, where Party functionaries “unable” or unwilling to raise
their own children could hand them over for safekeeping. Of course, these
important people provided the institution with everything it needed, what-
ever the circumstances. Psychoanalysis, scientific observation, management
by the Academic Center, and other such subtleties were in part a good
cover for privilege, in part fashionable practice that for the time being
elicited no objections.
Nevertheless, the educational principles presented by Yermakov sound
convincing. At least in theory, he truly laid out a plan for psychoanalytic re-
search. He wrote that the period before age four was the most important
for later development and also the least explored. Erogenous zones and in-
stinctive attractions were given enormous significance in Yermakov’s plans.
“What adults consider negative and improper is not seen the same way by
children. Each aspect of the child is valuable, since it allows us to acquaint
ourselves more deeply with his internal world. But in order that the child
might reveal himself fully, we must create an atmosphere of total trust and
respect on the part of the adult toward the child, as well as vice versa.”
There is one last principle here, which corresponds with the main pathos of
Yermakov’s own theoretical works: “A child grows up by limiting the
importance of the ‘pleasure principle’ over the ‘reality principle.’ However,
this limitation must be carried out by the child himself and must lead him
not to a feeling of weakness but to a sense of control, of conscious achieve-
ment.”
Personnel at the institute-laboratory were required to observe certain rules:
It is possible to study the child only by establishing contact and rapport with
him.
Contact can be made only if employees work on the unknown processes
that are buried in the unconscious and prevent us from seeing, understanding,
and maintaining contact with children, as these processes cause a reaction in
children in the form of incomprehensible caprices or similar behavior.
Through contact (transference) with his teacher, the child finds it possible to
make a connection with reality and reject corporal pleasures (e.g. anal) that
stunt his development and make him antisocial.
To this end, the child must not only trust the teacher in terms of everyday
relations but also in those areas that are usually considered improper to adults
but not to children. Much of what serves to cure a patient’s neurosis becomes
humanly possible only from the moment when he finds the courage within him
to open up to himself and to someone else.®2
There was also a research plan that called for studying the children,
keeping daily journal entries and individual dossiers, exploring the different
types of erogenous zones, and analyzing the children’s games, fears,
dreams, and art projects—their drawings and other constructions.
At the same time, there was no reference in Yermakov’s papers to the
principle that from the start was considered key to the success of the entire
operation: All of the employees and teachers of the psychoanalytic pediatric
facility were themselves to undergo analysis. As the journal of the
International Psychoanalytic Association described the Moscow orphan-
age’s intentions, “All those persons who look after the children will be
analysed, in order to nullify the injurious effects of their own complexes on
the work.”®? Given the conditions of the time, this idea was probably so
unrealistic that Yermakov never even promised to do anything about it. He
would pay for his neglect, in the end.
Inspections and a Dissenting Opinion

Inspection documents found in the archives of the ministry of education al-
low us to get a sense of the atmosphere that surrounded the Moscow ana-
lysts as they worked (Jean Marti also mentions five inspections).**
In April 1923, the psychoanalytic orphanage on Malaya Nikitskaya
street was visited by an inspection team composed of State Academic
Council member I. L. Tsvetkov and two education ministry inspectors,
R. V. Larikova and P. V. Karpov. The detailed report of this audit®* was
proffered to the next organization up the chain of command from the or-
phanage-laboratory, the Academic Center. According to the report, the or-
phanage had been opened in August 1921. The staff included fifty-one peo-
ple when work began, but by the time the inspection was carried out, only
eighteen were left after a series of layoffs. The inspection team recognized
Yermakov as the orphanage director. When the institution opened in 1921,
there were twenty-four children in his charge, and at the time of the inspec-
tion only twelve remained. Of these, five were four-year-olds, four were
three-year-olds, and three were two-year-olds. The children were tidy and
communicative. The kitchen, according to the inspectors, was good. The
business office, on the other hand, was chaotic at best. “The so-called
archives are in total disorder.” Finances were drawn from three sources.
During the first three months of 1923, the orphanage-laboratory had re-
ceived 30,000 rubles from the Moscow Finance Division, 3,600 from the
State Publishing House, and 1,545 from the children’s parents. In addition,
the first delivery of food had arrived from the German trade union in June
1922: 320 kilograms of flour, 200 cans of condensed milk, and much more.
Food deliveries from Germany continued to arrive later on. The inspection
commission found stores of unused food in the larder.
Little was written about the scientific part of the work at the orphanage.
The children were observed with the assistance of teachers, who kept jour-
nals, maintained personal dossiers and schedules, and so on. Children were
offered drawing, paper collage cutting, and various games. All the results
were meticulously noted, and a great deal of unique data had been col-
lected. All of the data were being studied under the watchful eye of
Professor Yermakov, and the work was mainly of a descriptive nature.
There was no laboratory on the premises—not even an ordinary scale on
which the children could have been weighed—nor were the children sub-
jected to regular medical examinations.
The commission’s conclusion included the following:
Externally, the orphanage is well kept, and the same can be said of the children
living there. But a pleasant exterior should not be a value and a goal that justi-
fies such an expensive orphanage; and as for its scientific work, ... the re-
search plan and methods are slapdash and amateurish, since it is concerned
mainly with mere description; there is no laboratory work at all, and those
here who are interested in an accurate approach to the scientific study of chil-
dren know little about it themselves, to say the least.
Appearance and observation, of course, are easily achieved, which is why
this first stage of work has been completed. Not only has serious laboratory
work not yet begun, there has not been the slightest effort in this direction, al-
though the orphanage has pretensions to the title of laboratory and institute.
In view of the fact that its scientific work is wanting, the commission is op-
posed to considering this orphanage a scientific institution.
On April 26, 1923, the case was reviewed by the presidium of the scien-
tific-educational section of the State Academic Council. Chairing the ses-
sion was Mikhail Pokrovsky. Among those present were some figures we
already know: Tsvetkov, Blonsky, and Shatsky, along with three other pre-
sidium members. Yermakov was also invited to attend. The minutes of the
meeting speak not of an orphanage-laboratory but of the International
Solidarity Psychoanalytic Institute and Laboratory. After hearing presenta-
tions by the inspectors and Yermakoy, the presidium resolved
a) that the research performed in the orphanage in its present form expends
a disproportionately large quantity of government funds, when compared with
the results produced;
b) that there is no basis to assume that the activity of the International
Solidarity Psychoanalytic Laboratory can be utilized for the immediate tasks
set before the State Academic Council.8¢
Shatsky, however, registered a dissenting opinion that deserves some at-
tention.®”
Assuming that the presidium’s decision raises the immediate question of
whether to close the orphanage, Ifind it impossible to agree with its reasoning.
The issues explored by the institution in question are so important that any
attempt in this direction must be supported. In the case at hand, it has been es-
tablished incontrovertibly that educational affairs are well conducted; the chil-
dren are treated with attention, care, and fondness. The teachers are working
hard to improve observation methods and notation of pedagogical phenom-
ena. The data collected are extremely interesting. From a scientific point of
view, it would be desirable to invest a great deal of energy, but this is obviously
not so straightforward, and the institution in question can hardly be blamed in
this regard. As a result, measures can be taken only to improve, and perhaps to
reorganize (administratively) certain aspects of the institution’s work. There
should be more economy, some anatomical and physiological observation
should be done, but work should not be halted entirely. A great deal of scien-
tific energy all over the world is being expended to explore problems of psy-
choanalysis in education. We have at our disposal a whole series of fascinating
foreign publications (Psychoanalysis in the Primary School, for example), and
there is only one place in Russia where such issues can be applied. This is the
Psychoanalytic Society and its base: the institution in question.
S. Shatsky.
Two days later, the case was presented to the next highest instance, the
presidium of the State Academic Council. The council refrained from mak-
ing its own comments about such a complex situation, and ordered the ma-
terials to be handed up even higher, to the collegium of the ministry of edu-
cation. Perhaps the council presidium had been seeking informed advice on
the orphanage when it had invited Lenin’s wife Nadezhda Krupskaya to its
meeting, ostensibly to “discuss questions involving the scientific-
educational section.” Shatsky’s close relations with her were well known.
Two Meetings in a Single Day

On May 16, the presidium of the ministry of education, chaired by Mikhail
Pokrovsky (described colorfully by one historian as “the third whale of the
ministry,” after Lunacharsky and Krupskaya**) accepted Schmidt’s proposal
to keep the International Solidarity Institute-Laboratory open “for a proba-
tion period of one year” and to create yet another commission, in the inter-
est of improving the institution’s operations.® This time, the commission
was composed not of semi-literate inspectors but of the best specialists who
had a connection to psychoanalysis or showed a clear affinity for the disci-
pline. O. L. Bem, an influential bureaucrat from the ministry of education,
was appointed chairman of the commission, while its members were
Schmidt, Blonsky, Kornilov, and Glivenko. Thus, of a five-man commission,
three were founding members of the Russian Psychoanalytic Society; two—
Blonsky and Kornilov—were prominent and well-qualified psychologists.
As the commission worked, bureaucratic clouds continued to thicken
around the Psychoanalytic Institute and Orphanage-Laboratory. On July 9,
the Council of Ministers itself demanded an investigation of International

Solidarity.2° The archives have preserved the long correspondence between
the ministry of education and the Council of Ministers, in which the supe-
rior body demanded a report on the results of the inspection, while the sub-
ordinate body answered evasively. Judging by the fact that the institution in
question was referred to in the correspondence as the “International
Solidarity Orphanage-Laboratory,” it seems it was the work of the orphan-
age that alarmed authorities, not the activity of the Psychoanalytic Institute.
One can still read the minutes of those commission meetings, and they
provide a general impression of the style in which they were conducted.”!
The commission met for the first time on September 17, 1923; in atten-
dance were Bem, Schmidt, Kornilov, and a secretary. The matter at hand
was treated with all due seriousness, judging by the minutes. A report was
made on the composition of the commission, and then it was resolved to
bring in the missing Blonsky and to invite Spielrein and Luria in as consul-
tants. It was also decided to begin with an inspection of the premises, with
departure for the institute and laboratory set for September 20.
This creative plan of attack, however, was not to be fulfilled. On the
same day, September 17, the commission met again, this time in the pres-
ence of the head of the Main Scientific Directorate, N. F. Petrov. Without
any further inspection, expert testimony, or postponement, five resolutions
were immediately passed. One was an affirmation of the “great pedagogi-
cal value of this institution, unique not only in Russia but in Europe as
well, which is truly capable of studying phenomena in the mental activity of
children under conditions that guarantee objectivity.” According to the
commission, the institution sought “methods of forming a personality that
is socially valuable within the collective, based upon the data of psycho-
analysis.” To this end, it was necessary to expand the orphanage’s mandate
to include “the study of social principles governing child development.”
The commission recommended that the orphanage be subordinated to the
leadership of the Psychoanalytic Institute “on the condition that Marxists
have a guiding influence in its work.” As for the children, it was advised
that the orphanage strengthen the “proletarian contingent” and increase
their number beyond the present twelve, thus reducing the maintenance
cost for each child. The commission expressed the highest possible regard
for both the scientific and educational work performed at the orphanage.
Who wrote these resolutions? Clearly not the experts, Spielrein and
Luria, who were never hired. Nor could it have been Schmidt or Korniloy,
who apparently later found themselves facing similar faits accomplis.
Neither could it have been Petrov, who had no connection whatsoever to
psychoanalysis.
These minutes were appended in full to the resolution of the committee
that was subsequently submitted to the ministry of education. Only one
209
point from the original text disappeared from the resolution. The missing
lines are telling, even striking: “c) To have the Main Scientific Directorate
include in its agenda the creation of a psychoanalytic institute and define its
relationship to the orphanage.”
The individual who dictated these ideas to the commission seems to have
forgotten that the Psychoanalytic Institute already existed within the Science
Directorate’s system. He was a man who clearly had his own political invest-
ment in Russian psychoanalysis. He was clearly literate in the discourse of
both psychoanalysis and ideology. He was more powerful than both
Schmidt and Shatsky, so when he told Petrov what to do in his own office,
his orders were carried out the very same day. Finally, he was a man who,
even knowing whose children were being cared for at the orphanage, not
only was not afraid to point it out, but even proposed diluting them with
children from the working class. This man could only have been Trotsky.
It was around this time, just ten days after the events at hand, that
Trotsky sent a letter to Ivan Pavlov, telling him of his acquaintance with
Freudianism, asserting the doctrine’s relative value, and, getting to the heart
of the matter, offering his sponsorship for a project that would synthesize
Pavlov’s theory of conditioned reflex with Freudian psychoanalysis. This
could not have been a mere coincidence of dates. Trotsky attributed great
importance to the letter, a fact borne out by its inclusion in his Collected
Works, one of his last publications in the USSR, released in 1927 (the letter
is cited and discussed in more detail in chapter 7). Be that as it may, a formi-
dable intervention decided the future of this one small institution within the
system of the Main Scientific Directorate, and it was immediately recognized
as “the only one of its kind, not only in Russia, but in Europe as well.”
In October, the collegium of the ministry of education, under Anatoly
Lunacharsky’s chairmanship, approved the commission’s report, extolling
its conclusions as “absolutely right.”?? In a decree passed by the ministry of
education, the first point dictated that “it is essential to preserve the or-
phanage, as it is carrying on extremely valuable work, observing and study-
ing children in general and child sexuality in particular.” The commission’s
conclusions were then duplicated to serve as guiding directives. Of particu-
lar interest here is the mention of child sexuality, which had never before
attracted the attention of the ministry of education leadership. The decree
was sent upward, and “considered” at a meeting of the Lesser Council of
Ministers on January 25, 1924. It was finally approved on behalf of the
Greater Council of Ministers by Alexei Rykov on February 6.”
Transference Within the Collective

Immediately after receiving support from on high, the Schmidts set out for
Vienna, where they were to report to Freud himself on their achievements.
In the archives of the ministry of education there is a record of the “busi-

ness trip abroad taken by Psychoanalytic Institute employee V. F. Schmidt
and Institute Curator O. Y. Schmidt in September 1923 in order to inform
the International Psychoanalytic Association of the progress made in
Moscow.””4
On October 18, 1923, Otto and Vera Schmidt reported to the Moscow
Psychoanalytic Society on their trip to Berlin and Vienna, “intended to
form direct contacts between psychoanalytic groups.” According to the re-
port, published by Jean Marti:
Particular interest had been expressed in the Moscow Orphanage and State
Psychoanalytic Institute. Professor Freud, Dr. Otto Rank, and Dr. Karl Abraham
made a series of interesting comments concerning the Orphanage’s work. One is-
sue that was discussed was the relationship between collective training and psy-
choanalysis (and what happens to the oedipal complex within the collective).”°
This discussion, during which the Muscovite organizers of psychoanaly-

sis conversed on an equal footing with the movement’s world leaders, was
probably the apogee of the development of the Russian psychoanalytic
movement. As history would have it, the Schmidts gained backing simulta-
neously from Freud and Trotsky, from the leadership of the International
Psychoanalytic Association and the presidium of the ministry of education.
Right after their visit, the international association admitted the Russian
Psychoanalytic Society as a full-fledged member. But the triumph, if it was
one, did not last long. A new court intrigue immediately began around the
Moscow psychoanalytic movement.
In July 1924, seven teachers from the orphanage-laboratory wrote a vo-
luminous appeal to the curator of the Psychoanalytic Institute.”° After three
years of experience, this group of educators had come to the conclusion
that it was impossible to continue working under current conditions. In
other countries, wrote the teachers, the most important prerequisite for the
practice of psychoanalysis was extensive training in the field. Such training
protected teachers—those who worked with children, educated them, and,
in particular, taught sex education—from “internal conflicts that slow
things down terribly and have an effect on the nervous system.” The au-
thors of the letter emphasized that they had received no such training. As a
result, a strange situation had arisen in the orphanage-laboratory. “The un-
believably difficult atmosphere is based on the so-called ‘transference ef-
fect,’ which Freud describes in depth in his works. A certain portion of the
child’s feelings for his father or mother are transferred onto another person.
... This results in an immense degree of dependence on this person.”
Further on, this theoretical introduction was decoded into clearer terms.
The heart of the matter was actually a conflict between the teachers and
Ivan Yermakov, the director of the Psychoanalytic Institute. The teachers
211
continued: “The moment of transference is a powerful means of training

people, but with conditions as they are in our orphanage, with so little re-
spect for the personality of teachers on the part of the director, it...
changes into negative transference. . . . Due to the fact that the institution is
run by a single person, he has become the only object of transference for
the whole collective. The resulting sense of massive dependence was impos-
sible to overcome, since we had never undergone analysis.” However, the
educators were more than favorably disposed toward the results of their
work, and had no desire to close up shop. “The orphanage-laboratory is
truly important, as the only institution in the world where the basic suppo-
sitions of psychoanalysis are applied to pedagogy.” The orphanage, they in-
sisted, had collected “material that is one-of-a-kind, with data on the un-
controlled sexual development of children.” This material, however,
remained unutilized, due to many shortcomings in research management.
There was no plan or method, hypotheses were chosen as if at random,
there was a total lack of initiative. “The upshot is a high level of dissatisfac-
tion in our work and a total inability to rectify it by ourselves.” Moreover,
the data collected remained inaccessible; even employees of the psychoana-
lytic institute and members of the Psychoanalytic Society could not get ac-
cess to the orphanage’s studies, and “there is a thoroughly abnormal situa-
tion unfolding, in that this huge store of material has been collected and is
still being collected for use by a single person.” (As the reader may recall,
Sabina Spielrein was also displeased that she could not observe the children
personally, nor put the teachers through analysis, which is why her work
with them was “purely theoretical speculation” and “platonic advice.”)
Again, the teachers’ “massive dissatisfaction” was accompanied by the
“extraordinary social importance of the institution.” Total disorganization,
a total lack of continuity in long-term research, and the turnover of fifty
teachers during the previous three years had induced the desperate teaching
staff, who still believed their mission could be accomplished, to write this
exposé.
The teachers’ suggested solutions were as diverse and well thought out as
was their exposition of the problems. The orphanage should be run by
“someone with more social and educational experience.” “Several mem-
bers of the Russian Psychoanalytic Society” should be brought in as consul-
tants. There should also be continuing education courses arranged at the
Psychoanalytic Institute to retrain the orphanage staff, courses which
should last from one to two years. Temporary employees should be hired
for the duration of retraining to fill in for permanent personnel, since it
would be impossible to combine work with psychoanalytical study.
This unique document allows for several different interpretations. On the
one hand, it might be viewed as a “ladies’ revolt,” which in the Soviet sys-
tem was a common outgrowth of a female staff working under the direc-
tion of a man. On the other hand, the obvious root of the dispute was a cer-
tain divergence of interests between the Schmidts (one of whom was the ad-
dressee, and the other undoubtedly one of the authors of the appeal) and
Yermakov. Taking into account the fact that the Schmidts had just returned
from Vienna and Berlin, it is likely that the object of debate was influence
or representation in the International Psychoanalytic Association. Perhaps
Otto Schmidt saw himself as the new head of Russian psychoanalysis. It is
impossible, of course, to deny the validity of the teachers’ remarks, as they
really did lack the qualifications to work as psychoanalysts; there is also no
reason to doubt their evaluation of Yermakov’s managerial abilities.
Finally, it could be that the beginnings of change in the political situation
were reflected in this private conflict. To appreciate the subtle game of his-
torical realities that was being played out in the text, it is essential to reread
the key complaint in this document, written just after Lenin’s death and
during Stalin’s rise to power: One person was the single object of transfer-
ence for the entire collective. The resultant sense of dependence was impos-
sible to overcome, since they had never undergone psychoanalysis.
The letter from the teaching staff addressed to the curator is kept in the
archives of the ministry of education. Whatever Schmidt’s motives, he was
the person designated in the official roll as curator of the Psychoanalytic
Institute, and he passed the letter on. The Main Scientific Directorate, natu-
rally, set up a new commission. On July 3, the Psychoanalytic Society held a
hearing on the matter. In the resulting resolution, the society recognized
that “the orphanage-laboratory can work in full harmony with the de-
mands of psychoanalysis only if it has at its disposal teachers who are well
acquainted with the theory and practice of psychoanalysis and have under-
gone analysis themselves.” It was recommended that the Psychoanalytic
Institute immediately set out to train such a staff, and until this task was ac-
complished “the institute may not take responsibility for the orphanage’s
educational work.” For the time being, it was considered expedient to com-
pletely separate the administration of the two institutions. However, they
would both remain in the same building on Malaya Nikitskaya street, “to
allow the psychoanalytic institute to make observations and set up experi-
ments in the orphanage.” The orphanage was to independently choose its
own administrators, “but only from among those people who accept the
basic values of psychoanalysis.”°”
The Curator Washes His Hands

“In the 1920s, not only was it not dangerous to practice psychoanalysis, it
was prestigious,” recalls Natalya Traugott.?* But ever so slowly, the storm
clouds were gathering. On April 24, 1924, the head of the Science Division
of the Main Scientific Directorate, A. P. Pinkevich, demanded that there be
213
“fundamental reorganization designed to widen the scope of the institute’s

mandate in the field of educational research.” Yet again, the powers that be
were trying to meld psychoanalysis with the new science of the transforma-
tion of mankind. The latest commission resolved that although Pinkevich’s
suggestion was desirable, it was unattainable.
At the end of 1924, the Psychoanalytic Institute and the International
Solidarity Orphanage-Laboratory were administratively separated after the
institute’s budget was split in half. In addition, all of the teachers working
there were fired, and four new educators were hired in their place. Was this
the implementation of Vera Schmidt’s idea to hire a temporary staff during
the main teaching corps’ year or two of psychoanalytic training? Unfor-
tunately, this was something else altogether.
In November 1924, Otto Schmidt sent a letter to the deputy minister of
education, V. N. Yakovlev, and the head of the Main Scientific Directorate,
N. F. Petrov.
Respected Comrades:
Three years ago, the orphanage-laboratory was founded under the aegis of the
Psychoanalytic Institute with my assistance. Since I am quite familiar with psy-
choanalysis, am a member of the presidium of the Russian Psychoanalytic
Society, and because I have more than once defended the orphanage in the face
of attempts to close it, an attitude has formed that I carry some responsibility
before the ministry of education and the Party for the orphanage-laboratory’s
work.
The work has been fascinating, and the results of research have been pub-
lished abroad and inspired the intensive attention of Freud and his followers,
as well as of international medical and educational circles.
As the children grew older, however, the lack of teachers with psychoana-
lytic training began to have a more marked effect. Not wishing to use insuffi-
cient means to carry on experiments that attract the scrutiny of psychoanalysts
the world over, we decided to leave the orphanage administration until such
time as the cadre of pedagogues is fully trained.
The Main Scientific Directorate, as you know, has concurred with this deci-
sion and has moved to utilize the well-situated Orphanage as a laboratory not
only for psychoanalytic experiments but for all kinds of scientific and educa-
tional institutions.
Psychoanalysts have practically no influence left in the orphanage.
I wish the Main Scientific Directorate the best of luck in its multifaceted uti-
lization of our inheritance, but Ifeel it is my duty to inform my dear comrades
to whom this letter is addressed that in future I will have nothing to do with
this orphanage and I will take no responsibility, direct, indirect, or even moral,
for its work.!
Two instructions are inscribed on this letter of November 20, 1924. The-
HAS Cian seed
first is “to be forwarded to the Scientific Division, 11/28, attention Petrov,
and the second “to be filed, 06/24/25.” Schmidt’s letter was later used as evi-
dence in behalf of the closure of the Psychoanalytic Institute; but the letter
contained no criticism directed at the institute or its leadership and not the
slightest hint that Schmidt condemned psychoanalysis—only a tinge of pique,
masked by sarcasm, at the “dear comrades” to which it was addressed.
Jean Marti mentioned several bits of gossip that were circulating about
the orphanage—for instance, that the children there were subjected to ex-
periments in order to stimulate premature sexuality.!°' Yermakov’s daugh-
ter also spoke of rumors about sex experiments; according to her, the ru-
mors caused her father a great deal of trouble.!°? Vera Schmidt also
mentioned them. It seems probable that this sort of gossip, although it was
likely groundless, provided the impetus for the endless commissions con-
vened to decide the institute’s future. The latest of these commissions,
which gathered on January 2, 1925 (consisting of Petrov, Pinkevich, the
new director of the orphanage, Zhukova, and parent representatives), had
practically confirmed the rumors. The minutes reported that “sexual phe-
nomena such as masturbation have been observed in most of the children
living at the orphanage, while masturbation has not been observed in chil-
dren just entering the orphanage from families.” !°>
This was bound to lead to scandal, particularly keeping in mind who the
parents were. On February 24, Pinkevich piled on yet another resolution:
The orphanage was to be cut off from the Psychoanalytic Institute once and
for all. The institute itself could remain in Moscow “only if it joins up with
someone (with the Psychological Institute, for instance).” Then someone
came up with the idea of moving the Institute to Leningrad. Since Pavlov
lived in Leningrad, this may well have been another expression of the idea
“of creating a synthesis of Freudianism and Marxism through the study of
conditioned reflexes.” Yermakov countered that the Psychoanalytic Institute
bore a resemblance to the Psychological Institute only in name; that the
Psychoanalytic Institute was the only place of its kind not only in the USSR,
but in Europe, and for this reason it had to be left in the capital; and that all
of the institute’s employees lived in Moscow, a fact that would equate its
move to Leningrad with closure.!°4 But now all of these protests were in vain.
In January 1925, the presidium of the ministry of education, chaired by
Lunacharsky, adopted a curious resolution: “Concerning the relocation of
the Institute for the Study of Arid and Desert Areas to Leningrad and the
Psychoanalytic Institute to someplace outside Moscow—No objections.” A
separate decision recommended that “Comrade Schmidt be used full time
in the ministry of education.”!%
On August 14, 1925, the Greater Council of Ministers, chaired by
Minister of Health Nikolai Semashko, adopted the following resolution
based on Pinkevich’s report: “The Psychoanalytic Institute and Inter-
national Solidarity Laboratory are to be liquidated.”1%
o15
The End
We still have the institute’s “work plan” for its last season of operation,
from September 1924 to July 1925.1°7 Lectures were given each day in the
institute. The Russian Psychoanalytic Society met there twice a month, and
in addition, the society’s pedagogical section held its own meetings there
twice a month. Yermakov combined his clinical work with lectures on the
psychoanalysis of literary works and also with research on hypnosis, in
which he had become deeply involved by this time. In addition, together
with Vera Schmidt he planned to speak about the research done by the al-
ready closed orphanage. Roza Averbukh was to continue the work she be-
gan in Kazan on the psychoanalysis of Vasily Rozanov’s writings. Boris
Friedmann was preparing a paper on the psychoanalysis of idealism (using
Turgenev’s character Rudin as the prime example). The only new face was a
political immigrant from Germany named Wilhelm Rohr, who was to give
lectures in German on “The Psychoanalysis of Collective Thinking.”
In November 1924, elections were held in the Psychoanalytic Society.
Moisei Wulff was elected president, as he was truly the most prominent au-
thority among the candidates, as well as a close acquaintance of Freud and
a great benefactor of Russian psychoanalysis. Yermakov and diplomat
Viktor Kopp became vice presidents. Kopp (more about him in chapter 7)
was now a member of the Trotskyist opposition. Luria was elected secre-
tary, and Kannabikh became a member of the bureau.!°°
At the tenth congress of the International Psychoanalytic Association in
Innsbruck, in 1927, President Max Eitingon said in his opening speech that
“in Russia, one of the older countries to interest itself in analysis, the circle
which has really gone further in the subject has grown. We shall all under-
stand that our colleagues there are working under very difficult conditions,
and I should like in the name of us all to express our deep sympathy with
them.”1!°? Annual dues (two dollars per person), Eitingon added, had been
collected in Russia, but had not yet been received due to technical difficul-
ties. Freud, however, who either had a better grasp of the situation or, un-
_like Eitingon, had no reason to be hypocritical (see chapter 7), wrote to
longtime émigré Osipov on February 27, 1927: “The [psycho-] analysts in
Soviet Russia are, by the way, having a bad time. From somewhere the
Bolsheviks have caught the opinion that psychoanalysis is hostile to their
system. You know the truth that our science is not able to be put into the
service of any party, but that it needs a certain liberal-mindedness in turn
for its own development.!!° ”
The work of Soviet psychoanalysts continued lethargically but uninter-
ruptedly until the beginning of the 1930s. The center of activity was
Moscow, although some work also was taking place in Leningrad, Odessa,
Kharkov, and Rostov. Around 1930, an Odessa psychiatrist who had
served as Freud’s interpreter, Yakov Kogan, acquired a double-sided por-

trait for his office; on the front was Pavloy, on the back Freud.'!’ During
the day, Dr. Kogan saw patients and conversed with his superiors under the
portrait of Pavlov; then he would flip the painting over and consult with his
secret analytical patients all evening under Freud’s likeness. Leningrad doc-
tor Ilya Perepel put out a few psychoanalytic books using his own money;
the last of these works, released in 1928, contains a preface written by
Alexei Ukhtomsky, an outstanding physiologist, which is full of kind words
for both the author and his method.!!*
Psychoanalysts were truly trying to make themselves useful. Wulff, for
example, did some fascinating applied research, although the results came
out only after he had emigrated.'!? Based on a massive study of Moscow
bus drivers and trolley conductors, data were collected on the extent of sex-
ual disorders prevalent in that particular profession, most of all impotence.
Deeper analysis revealed that while they were on the job, many drivers ex-
perienced sexual arousal. During coitus, on the other hand, they tended to
recall their place behind the wheel. Wulff suggested a psychodynamic ex-
planation for this strange case—an explanation that, in keeping with
Freud’s observation, could hardly have served the interests of the prole-
tariat. Boris Pilnyak knew about similar studies done in the printing indus-
try, mentioning in his novel Ripening Fruit “the psychic alteration brought
about by lead, a theory promoted by several Moscow psychoanalysts.”!!4
The Russian Psychoanalytic Society continued to operate, and held fif-
teen to twenty meetings a year between 1925 and 1927, judging by its re-
ports to the international association. In 1926 the society spent some time
conducting hearings on pedology, the novel science that was then taking
shape in the womb of the movement. In April 1927, Luria left his post as
secretary of the society. A great future in science awaited him, and in the
1960s he would become one of the most important neuropsychologists in
the world.'!’ Meanwhile, at the end of the 1920s, judging from his unpub-
lished memoirs, he was already seeking his fortune in applied fields. He had
constructed a primitive lie detector that he had used in an associative exper-
iment, with pneumatic gauges that measured finger tremors (the connection
is obvious between the idea behind his detector and the associative experi-
ments conducted by a youthful Jung). Vera Schmidt filled in for him at the
society, and it was she who traveled to Innsbruck in 1927 to speak before
the annual congress of psychoanalysts.
On November 3, 1927, Wulff left for Berlin on a business trip, leaving
Kannabikh to perform his duties for him. He never returned. In his presi-
dential speech at the eleventh congress of psychoanalysts, in Oxford in
1928, Eitingon would make oblique mention of this desertion:
Owing to the circumstances in which the Russian Society carries on its work, it
has, of course, been impossible to effect a change in the situation there, espe-
2A,
cially since their valued leader, who for many years had directed the society,
has gone to live elsewhere. Our colleagues in the Moscow Society, together
with individual members in Kiev and Odessa, continue, with a courage which
must excite our admiration, the struggle to preserve and consolidate what they
already possess.!!6
Until 1933, Wulff worked in Germany, publishing extensively in the

journals of the International Psychoanalytic Association. After the Nazis
came to power, he emigrated once again, this time to Palestine, where to-
gether with Eitingon he helped to organize the local Psychoanalytic Society.
After Eitingon’s death, Wulff became the president of the Palestinian
Psychoanalytic Society, and he remained in that post for ten years. In many
ways repeating in his new homeland what he had already done in Russia,
he organized a series of Hebrew translations of Freud. Wulff lived a long
life, and died in 1971.
The Russian Society was flickering out. Still, as late as 1930 it held a few
meetings, one of which was dedicated to “planning work for 1931.” Later,
another émigré, Leningrad native Ilya (Elias) Perepel, wrote in an American
journal that “the psychoanalytic movement slowed down, and about the year
1930 came to a standstill. From this date it officially ceased to exist.” !!7
In 1936, a Dr. Lerman of New York met with Vera Schmidt, who told
him that the psychoanalysts’ meetings continued and that there were fifteen
people participating.'!® Two years later, Perepel wrote an article about the
“death sentence” that had supposedly been meted out to psychoanalysis by
the regime, and called on his colleagues in the West to intervene.!!? On the
whole, these and several other similar accounts are more than likely just
legends. Psychoanalytic medical practice continued underground, and
probably unpaid, carried on by a few remaining loners. One example of
this might be the examination of Mikhail Zoshchenko that was performed
in 1937 by the Leningrad physician I. Margolis (see chapter 10). The horri-
ble fate of Sabina Spielrein, unhappy and unemployed in provincial Rostoy,
is the best illustration of how the psychoanalytic profession was perceived
- in the inhuman conditions of the 1930s. Any systematic activity, particu-
larly out in the open, such as the gathering of a psychoanalytic club, was
dangerous for all involved.
In 1948, professor of psychiatry A. S$. Chistovich was fired from the
Military Medical Academy in Leningrad because he used “the building
blocks of psychoanalysis” in his lectures on dreams and did not deny it
when he was called to task at a Party meeting.!2° Aron Belkin, however, has
related how in 1952 he underwent psychoanalysis in Siberia; the analyst
was Professor I. S. Sumbayev.!2! Soviet political prisoners turned to various
systems for spiritual comfort—some to Marxism, others to Orthodoxy, still
others to Buddhism. Yevgeny Gnedin, for example (the son of Leonid
recalled
Parvus, who allegedly financed Lenin’s efforts in Russia in 1917),
how after monstrous torture he adopted a new faith while sitting in the iso-
lation chamber, a belief reminiscent of Buddhism and practical yoga.’
The Yermakov Library

One practical accomplishment of the Moscow psychoanalysts that cannot
be overlooked is the publication of the “Psychological and Psychoanalytic
Library” series. Over a very short period of time, from 1922 to 1928, a
colossal amount of translation and editing was poured into these books.
Among the works translated were Introductory Lectures in Psychoanalysis
and Psychoanalysis of Infantile Neuroses. The Outline of the Psychology of
Sexuality was reissued, and wonderfully chosen collections of essays by
Freud (Basic Psychological Theories in Psychoanalysis and Methods and
Techniques of Psychoanalysis) and his followers (Childhood Psychoanalysis
and Psychoanalysis and the Doctrine of Character) were translated, as was
Jung’s Psychological Types and books by Klein and Jones.!*°
Russian translations of the basic theoretical canon—Introduction to
Psychoanalysis, Totem and Taboo, and others—were done by Moisei
Wulff. He is also credited, along with Nikolai Osipov, with the develop-
ment of Russian psychoanalytic terminology. But on the whole this project
was a large-scale success due to the efforts of Ivan Yermakov.
Thirty-two books were slated for publication in the series, including new
editions of older translations of works such as Interpretation of Dreams, a
few collections of new translations, the psychological works of Bleuler and
the American psychologist William McDougall, Foundations of Psychiatry
by William Alanson White, and, finally, a collection of essays from the
International Solidarity Orphanage. It is surprising only that Yermakov
was able to carry out such a large portion of this plan.
The reissue of Freud created a sensation in the Soviet Union in the 1980s,
but few people know that almost all of those editions were reprints of old
books from the 1920s, mostly edited by Yermakov (the translators’ names
are often not even indicated in the new editions, as if Freud wrote in
Russian!). There has been much criticism of these translations, but so far
no one has done any better.
Many of the books published in the Library were prefaced by Yermakov.
Reading these introductions, it becomes clear that most of all their author
appreciated the ethical aspects of psychoanalysis and its educational pur-
pose: He repeatedly emphasized the “bright” mechanisms of the conscious
in their hard-fought struggle with the recalcitrant unconscious. Yermakov
devoted much less space to Freud’s other ideas, such as transference, infan-
tile sexuality, bisexuality, and the death wish. It is difficult to say whether
his understanding of psychoanalysis was really so simplified, or if this was
just the result of many years spent adapting his analysis to the limited capa-
bilities of his audience.
219
Yermakov’s personal archives hold the transcript of an interesting meet-

ing of the psychoanalytic club, held when he was acting as chairman.!?4
There were seven people present, all of them, it seems, amateur psychoana-
lysts. Yermakov conducted the meeting as a group session, discussing clas-
sic themes such as the relationship between the unconscious and intuition.
One of the female participants quipped that she had often observed pa-
tients who had been treated with psychoanalysis, but that she herself had a
definite dislike for it. In response, Yermakov laid out his credo: “Healthy
people restrain themselves, while psychoneurotics are unable to do so.
... Any adult’s goal is to take account of his surroundings. A psychopath
considers only himself. We lead the patient back to reality by having him
learn about himself and his own unconscious. There you have a diagram of
what’s going on.”
Within the same series, Yermakov released two of his own books on the
psychoanalysis of Russian literature: one on Gogol, the other on Push-
kin.'*° These works have practically disappeared from scholarly circula-
tion, and it is unlikely that they will return (the book on Pushkin, however,
has been reissued by an émigré publishing company). In reading these un-
structured, wordy “Outlines” and “Sketches,” the reader senses the au-
thor’s personality. Yermakov noted that Gogol, “with his suppressed ag-
gression,” had a tendency to use other people’s themes in his work in a way
that was “contrived and forced.” “I have followed this kind of phenome-
non, characteristic of neurotics, in a very large number of cases subjected to
psychoanalysis,” he wrote.!*° As we know, a psychoanalyst’s pet discovery
is often a feature of his own character.
“All our expectations and excitement, important events in life and every-
day experience, all lead to something that is somehow hopeless and vain,”
Yermakov began his analysis of Gogol’s stories. Yermakov’s texts often
transmit his own fear to the reader, his internal inhibition and self-censure.
The author seems afraid to relate the entire idea he wants to describe, and
he ceases to see it in its entirety. Sometimes this self-limitation comes out in
the text. For example, in the middle of his musings about Gogol’s character
Chichikov, Yermakov suddenly interrupts himself: “Perhaps there is quite a
bit of symbolism in all this which I am unfortunately unable to uncover.”
Pointing to the incestuous motif in the story “A Terrible Vengeance” (a mo-
tif that is totally obvious, as Gogol openly describes the magician’s lust for
his daughter), Yermakov suddenly writes, “even if everything I say here is
dubious, I still consider it necessary at least to mention itech There are a slew
of medical legends tied to Gogol—that he was stricken with syphilis or
schizophrenia, that he died of excessive masturbation. In Yermakov’s texts
we find plenty of hints, but few clearly formulated and well-documented
hypotheses. Rozanov, who knew nothing of psychoanalysis and wrote
twenty years earlier, had no qualms about saying that Gogol’s sexual secret
as
was necrophilia. Berdyaev, who wrote about Gogol at the same time
Yermakov, also posited “some kind of unguessed-at secret.” He interpreted

this secret, however, in a different context. Yermakov could not have
helped but see this context, but nowhere did he let on that he noticed:
“There is something Gogolian in all this revolutionary tastelessness.
... Perhaps the gloomiest and most hopeless thing about the Russian revo-
lution is its Gogolian aspect.” !77
In his analysis of Pushkin’s Little Tragedies, an important and endlessly
layered work, Yermakov’s perception was distorted by his own feelings to
the extent that he could see only one thing: “In these four tragedies, fear is
the unifying emotion.” The stingy knight is afraid of losing his wealth; even
Mozart is afraid because he failed to hand over his requiem. Don Juan is a
criminal who has shoved his guilt back into his subconscious, which is why
he is forced to repeat his crime. According to Yermakoy, fear is his basic
emotion, as it is for all the rest of Pushkin’s dramatic protagonists. In the fi-
nal scene with the Stone Guest, he attributes absent-mindedness, helpless-
ness, and meekness to Don Juan (as opposed to Akhmatova, who saw Don
Juan as “a mix of cold cruelty and childlike carelessness ” The statue’s
!**).
visit is merely a hypnosis-induced hallucination. “The outward strength of
Juan’s passion hides his internal inferiority.” These statements contain far
more moralizing than they do real analysis. Yermakov manages to reach a
new vision of the text when he reads “The Little House in Kolomna,”
which he unexpectedly interprets as an ironic inversion of Pushkin’s own
“Prophet.” Thus Pushkin, Russia’s revered genius, is turned into a poet of
fear, while his most romantic hero is obsessed with fear and meek servility.
“Fear brings out the vilest facets of the human soul.”
The same was said even more strongly in Yermakov’s book on Gogol,
which came out a year later. “Dead men look on, they look on and wait for
the end, they wait—and the weak and pitiful get scared.” Yermakov wrote
these words about Gogol’s “Viy,” but they described real life as well:
Although the Civil War was past, ahead stretched the Great Terror. At the
time these lines were written, the omnipotent power that decided the fate of
so many people was busy deciding the fate of the State Psychoanalytic
Institute and its director.
Ilya Ehrenburg recalled how he visited the Kremlin with his make-believe
superman Julio Jurenito, and he conveyed his impression of Lenin, Trotsky,
and their ilk:
Not that I believed all the charming legends that portrayed the Bolshevik bosses
as something halfway between Jack-the-Giantkiller and an apocalyptic locust
swarm. No, I was just afraid of these people who could not only do something
to me, but to other people as well. I have always felt this fear of power, even as
a boy. ... In recent years, seeing my acquaintances, drinking buddies and class-
mates become ministers, commissars, and other “high and mighty” types, I
have realized that my fear is churned up by the Cap of Monomakh, by a brief-
221
case, by a teeny little warrant. God knows what they’ll want next, but
in any
case (and this is for sure), whatever they want, they can get.!??
Everything had changed, and now for a Russian intellectual like Ehrenburg
the Ubermensch was simply anyone unafraid of having a word with the au-
thorities.
Yermakov was deprived of his positions relatively swiftly: After the State
Psychoanalytic Institute was closed in 1924, he ceased to be its director,
and in 1925, Wulff replaced him as president of the Russian Psychoanalytic
Society. In 1928, the State Publishing House shut down Yermakov’s
Library, although a great deal of energy and money had already been spent
on the series. Yermakov did not publish after this (however, he did manage
to print Freud’s History of an Illusion as late as 1930), but he continued to
write. His archives include a hefty tome on Dostoevsky, executed in the
same style, as well as a variety of essays and articles on literary criticism.
His passion was collecting ornamental Tatar embroidery, and he wrote ex-
tensively about this art also. It seems he wrote nothing on the practice or
theory of psychoanalysis in the 1930s. His compositions gradually lost
their analytical flavor as the years passed.
In 1940, Ivan Yermakov was arrested on a typical charge, and he died
two years later in a labor camp.
Revolution and Dreams

Nikolai Osipov was the same age as Yermakov and knew him from their
Lesser Friday Society meetings. He later became a Russian refugee and lec-
turer at Charles University in Prague, living and working far away from the
storm of the century.!3° In his memoirs, written just before his death, he re-
peated often that he “never got involved in politics.” But as Bismarck said,
if you don’t get involved with politics, politics gets involved with you.
Political problems followed Osipov around throughout his life. In 1899, he
was expelled from Moscow University in his second year for organizing the
first general student strike. “I was far removed from politics of any ilk... . I
danced a lot and worked little. Somehow, I’ve no idea how, I was elected by
my classmates to the executive committee. . . . Before I even learned that I’d
been elected, I was arrested.” !3! He was an assistant professor in 1911,
when he and Serbsky once again abandoned Moscow University, this time
in protest over the policies of the erstwhile minister of popular education
(Yermakov was brought in to replace them). In 1921, Osipov fled the new
government. “The pre-Bolshevik period of the revolution made me feel to-
tally repulsed by any socialist movement. For me, the Bolsheviks were ab-
solutely unacceptable.” !*?
pp hs Psychoanalysis in the Land of the Bolsheviks
Osipov worked extensively as a psychotherapist (he collected data from

1,030 cases for his planned book Psychology of Neurotics, which he never
had time to write), he corresponded with Freud, and in Prague he wrote
some important theoretical works. The histological leanings of his youth
were left far behind, and he remained unmoved by the “materialist” ideas
about the link between psychodynamic processes and brain substrata that
so excited his Soviet colleagues—ideas that had their roots in the early
works of Freud and culminated in Luria’s works. As a curiosity, Osipov col-
lected quotations from the works of Russian psychiatrists that began with
the claim that no organic changes had been found in patients with a given
psychological disorder but ended with the dogmatic assertion that the dis-
ease in question was based on physiological, anatomical changes.'*?
Osipov, like Jung, likened those who studied psychic life by analyzing the
brain to a person who wants to understand what a house is and thus goes
about analyzing the chemical makeup of bricks.!** But unlike Jung and
many of his Russian contemporaries, Osipov also put no stock in the flac-
cid mysticism of the Dionysians. His political and psychoanalytic experi-
ence both contributed in equal measure to his clarity of thought, which dif-
ferentiated what he knew from what he hoped to learn, as well as from
what he had no hope of ever understanding.
The irrational exists. Most of all, it exists in ourselves. A brave adult does
not feel fear in the face of irrationality, according to Osipov’s definition, as
he might at the prospect of some real danger. He feels mystical horror, as
does a person who perceives something uncanny, fantastic, and irreal.
Mystical horror and evil spirits are just temporary pseudo-irrationality, in-
comprehensible only as long as they remain outside the realm of comprehen-
sion. Rationalism saves us from fear, but not from mystical horror; horror
has to be experienced, interpreted, and evaluated.
To a certain degree, Osipov’s interests developed in parallel to Yerma-
kov’s. Osipov also became involved in the analytical interpretation of
Russian classics. Moreover, he was fascinated by the same aspect of these
works as was Yermakoy: “The Frightful in Gogol and Dostoevsky” was the
title of one of his most important articles. The tone, however, is completely
different: While Yermakov stubbornly insisted that Gogol, Pushkin, and
Dostoevsky, along with their characters, were all in constant fear of some-
thing, Osipov was more concerned with the ways in which they overcame
their fear. “How to make a fool of the devil” was the phrase that struck
Osipov as Gogol’s main idea.
Osipov analyzed the erotic nightmares of “Viy,” the incestuous plot in “A
Frightful Vengeance,” and the gory episodes from “Taras Bulba” as resur-
rected childhood fears, “the inheritance of our own childhood or the child-
hood of humanity.”1%° Infantile fears in adult life, Osipov insisted, were the
primary symptom of neurosis. “The fear of a father figure is the resurrection
of our childhood fear,” he wrote, referring to Gogol’s protagonists, to his

Czech patients, and most likely, to the countrymen he left behind.
The mass of horrid occurrences in Gogol, and in life in general, were all
interwoven around sex; but sex was not the only source of fear. The inter-
section of love and death was the primary target of analysis. “The mistake
made by many Freudians, including Yermakoy, is that they falsely attribute
pansexualism to Freud, and, lovingly engrossing themselves in sexual issues,
distort his entire doctrine. Freud asserts, along with basic sexual attraction,
still another basic attraction, the obsession with death.”!36 The Freudian
death wish, which is normally perceived as something tragic, presents the
possibility of bravery for Osipov. If attraction to death is just as natural and
fundamental as attraction to life, then fear of death is just as much a symp-
tom as fear of sex. “Fear of death is a neurotic symptom,” Osipov wrote not
long before the end of his life.!57 “Gogol and Dostoevsky, although they
themselves suffered from infantile, archaic fears, can teach us to overcome
these fears, to overcome timidity (the word ‘timidity’ [robost’] comes from
the word ‘child’ [rebenok]), and to be brave.”!38
In 1931, Osipov published his article “Revolution and Dreams.”!*? (It is
clear from one of his letters that Osipov planned to send the text to Freud
in translation.'*°) His idea was simple and paradoxical: The equilibrium of
a healthy person is disrupted in his sleep so that it can be rejuvenated dur-
ing his waking hours. Perhaps, Osipov suggested, we observe the same
thing in society as a whole during revolution.
Osipov tried systematically to compare these two phenomena in his arti-
cle, both of which he knew well. A dream, according to Freud, was the ful-
fillment of suppressed desires, the revolt of certain “sub-egos” against oth-
ers that usually have a firm grip on power. Revolution was the realization
of the suppressed, subjugated desires of one social class. The ambivalence,
instability, narcissism, and archaic symbolism that were characteristic of
dreams could also be found in revolution: “Soldiers who once would have
given their lives for their officers were ready to flay the skin off their backs.
At the same time, these soldiers were transformed into the unwavering
slaves of their new bosses.”
Osipov also suggested that the “class-based, narcissistic self-affirmation”
of revolutionary masses led to the same profound disruption of the princi-
ple of reality as did a dreamer’s quirky visions. The author took this argu-
ment to great lengths:
Revolution and dreams have the same content: the revelation of infantile, ar-
chaic “desires,” primarily narcissistic, sublimated and unsublimated. The form
of these revelations is also the same. ... This form is downright incomprehensi-
ble, confusing, senseless, like a word puzzle. Both revolution and dreams re-
quire interpretation. Interpretation shows that the slogans of the revolution are
actually lightly covered, false weld, just like the disguised symbols in dreams.
Thus, one could “compare a nation in conditions of law and order with
an individual in a state of alert wakefulness, or a nation in conditions of
revolution with an individual in the process of dreaming.” Osipov sensed
the intellectual precariousness of such an analogy, but remained firm:
“Revolution and dreams are one and the same phenomenon; they are both
the expression of narcissism, just on different levels of daily life.” !*1
All of this was written clearly, analytically, and with no sign of fear.
Indeed, “neurotics and psychotics experience fear when a healthy person
feels mystical horror at most.”!*4
After Osipov’s death of heart disease in 1934, his friends—literary
scholar A. Bem, psychoanalyst Fyodor Dosuzhkov, and philosopher
Nikolai Lossky—published two volumes dedicated to his memory, entitled
Life and Death. Two hundred copies of the first volume were released on
the first anniversary of Osipov’s death, and two hundred copies of the sec-
ond volume were printed exactly one year later.!*4
On the cross over his grave in Prague, there is an inscription: “Doctor of
Medicine N. E. Osipov, Docent at Moscow University.”
iL.
Between Power and Death:
The Psychoanalytic Passions
of Trotsky and His Comrades
Western literature on the history of Soviet psychoanalysis tends to attribute

disproportionate significance to the ideological debates that took place at
the end of 1920s.’ In an oblique way, Western scholars are in agreement
with the Soviet debaters they study, many of whom really believed that the
force and ideological purity of their arguments could shape something tan-
gible in the future. The future, however, was decided in the end by people
who had trouble understanding not only Freud but even Marx; thus, the
course of debate was in many ways predetermined. The lives of the people
involved, in contrast, are much more telling.
Fire and Water

Some time after the end of World War I, Freud told Jones that a Bolshevik
had paid him a visit and had half converted him to communism. Jones was
amazed. Freud explained: The Bolsheviks believed that their victory would
be followed by several years of suffering and chaos, which eventually
would be replaced by general prosperity. Freud quipped that he believed the
first half of this prognosis.27 As Hanns Sachs recalled: “After the
Revolution, when Freud’s works had begun to be published by the Russian
government (the State Publishing House), I spoke optimistically about the
influence that psychoanalysis could have in creating a new Russia. Freud,
retaining his skepticism toward the Russian soul, retorted: “These Russians
are like water; they fill any container, but do not retain the form of any.’”
The ambivalent interest in Russia that was characteristic of Freud’s circle
was and remains extremely common among left-leaning Western intellectu-
als. This same attitude was evidenced by Marx, who through most of his
life viewed Russia as a terrifying threat to civilization and hoped the cre-
ation of the First International would serve to block Russian influence in
225)
226 Between Power and Death
Europe. At the end of his life, Marx suddenly came to believe that socialism
was possible in Russia. He was thrilled by the Russian translation of Das
Kapital, he began studying Russian himself, and after his death two cubic
meters of papers on Russia were found in his office.’
According to James Rice, who interviewed Freud’s niece, the founder of
psychoanalysis had dozens of relatives in the Russian empire.* They often
sent patients to young Dr. Freud from Zhitomir, a center of Jewish habita-
tion in the Ukraine that suffered horribly from pogroms. Freud also had
personal contact with revolutionary struggle, as his uncle Joseph Freud,
who became the hero of one memorable episode in Interpretation of
Dreams, spent the 1860s in an Austrian prison. Not long ago, this case
turned up in the Austrian police archives. As it turned out, Uncle Joseph
was holding a huge sum of counterfeit rubles printed by Jews in London to
support the uprising in Lithuania.°
Freud’s own political views were not radical. Many times he expressed his
distrust of utopian ideas about rebuilding society, and his skepticism grew
with the years. In February 1918, Freud wrote to Lou Andreas-Salome:
I am sorry to hear of the state of your fatherland and that its radical policies
have been so discredited. Revolutions, I believe, are acceptable only when they
are over; and therefore they ought to be over very quickly. What the human
beast needs above all is restraint. In short, one grows reactionary, just as inci-
dentally did the rebel Schiller in the face of the French Revolution.®
Despite his sober evaluation of events, Freud continued to entertain hope

for quite a while, and he spoke of this hope many years later. In November
1930, Zweig sent him a sort of manifesto that he or his friends had written
in support of Soviet Russia, hoping for Freud’s signature. Freud refused,
confessing both his former leftist sympathies and his present disillusion-
ment with socialism: “Any hope that I may have cherished has disappeared
in this decade of Soviet rule. I remain a liberal of the old school. In my last
book, I criticized uncompromisingly this mixture of despotism and commu-
nism.”’ Freud wrote in that book that the communist economic program
had gone beyond the government’s capacity, and that Soviet ideological
postulates were no more than unfounded illusions. In June 1933, Freud
wrote to Marie Bonaparte that the world was turning into one big prison,
and he predicted an “amazing paradox”: Nazi Germany “started out by
declaring that Bolshevism was its worst enemy; it will end up totally indis-
tinguishable from it.” All the same, if he had to choose between these two
hopeless alternatives, Freud preferred the Russians: “Bolshevism, any way
you look at it, has borrowed revolutionary ideas, while Hitlerism is totally
medieval and reactionary.”
Some of Freud’s close disciples were active Social Democrats.’ Even Jung,
who was further to the right on the political spectrum than most of his col-
Between Power and Death
MONG
leagues, characterized the Bolshevik revolution in Russia as an “expansion

of consciousness.” At a seminar on March 13, 1929, Jung said: “Fire puts
an end to everything, even an end to the world. Fire that is the sap of cul-
ture can burst forth and destroy everything. This happens from time to
time, as for instance in the Bolshevist revolution, when the cultural form
could not hold the tension of energy any more, and the fire broke forth and
destroyed the Russian civilization.”? It is curious to note how Freud and
Jung, each searching for his own metaphor to encapsulate the mysterious
Russian soul, came up with totally opposite images: Freud compared it to
water, while Jung likened it to fire.
Psychoanalysis of the Proletariat

The intersection of psychoanalysis and socialism has often been cited as a
phenomenon of intellectual history that gave rise to such exceptional
thinkers as Herbert Marcuse and Erich Fromm. These same common ideas
brought many of their followers to the barricades during the “student revo-
lutions” in Europe and the United States. Disillusionment with Stalin’s ver-
sion of socialism in the USSR and shock at the victory of national socialism
in Germany were two equally important factors that pushed a great many
liberal intellectuals into psychoanalysis. If socialism was so hard to achieve,
if the masses were ready to support the most inhuman political regimes,
then politics could not be the only factor involved; there had to be some-
thing built into the nature of man that also required attention. At the same
time, professional analysts both before and after the war were clearly
drawn to radical ideas.!° Jacques Lacan, for instance, once declared that his
teaching was to Freud’s doctrine what Lenin’s ideas were to Marx. As re-
cently as the 1990s, French leftist psychoanalysts held a conference on this
very topic, and a prestigious publishing house released the papers read
there, subsumed under the title Marx and Lenin, Freud and Lacan.'!
The discussion of the relationship between Freud and Marx began at a
meeting of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society in 1909. The keynote speech
was given by Alfred Adler and entitled “The Psychology of Marxism.” For
Adler, this was no theory. He was married to a Russian socialist, he knew
Trotsky well, and the Russian Adolf Ioffe was one of his patients. Lou
Andreas-Salomé, who had many dealings with Adler, referred to him as an
heir to Marx and noted in 1912: “For the proletariat, social utopia is based
on the motives of envy and hate, and Adler sees in children a similar ideal
that forms a personal utopia based on social comparison.” 2
Ferens Eros, who delved into the materials left behind by the Vienna
Society, found that the discussion of Adler’s speech brought out three
points of view.!3 According to Adler and his supporter Paul Federn, the
same aggressive instincts that were suppressed in neurotics were trans-
formed in the proletariat into the class consciousness addressed by Marx.

The opposite opinion held that socialism was nothing but a substitute for
religion, and perhaps was even a particular type of neurosis. Freud tried to
find a liberal compromise, as he always did in matters of politics.
Ten years later, after revolutions had shaken eastern and central Europe,
Federn argued a different point of view in his book On the Psychology of
Revolution, based on new information. He asserted that Bolshevism was
nothing other than the replacement of patriarchal power, the power of the
father, with matriarchal principles of brotherhood. The Soviets, he claimed,
signaled a return to prepatriarchal forms of fraternal cooperation, but there
persisted a constant danger of “psychological Tkermidor,” the restoration
of the patriarchal principle. Federn warned that brothers who are deprived
of their father will always seek a replacement, and in this same way the dic-
tatorship of the proletariat could be transformed into tyranny.'*
Early revolutionary regimes, nonetheless, were well disposed toward psy-
choanalysis—and not only in Russia. During a short period of success after
the Hungarian revolution of 1919, one of Freud’s closest colleagues,
Sandor Ferenczi, was appointed director of the Psychoanalytic Institute at
the University of Budapest. Even Ernesto “Che” Guevara considered him-
self a connoisseur and lover of psychoanalysis. Then, too, the German so-
cial democrats, like Karl Kautsky, liked to refer to Freud and Adler in their
musings on mass psychology. Of course, psychoanalysis to them seemed
closer to reformist socialism than to Bolshevik-style communism. Their
Russian counterparts, led by Trotsky, felt otherwise.
Freudomarxism in Russia
In Russia, the problem was first articulated by the Kazan club. The minutes
of one 1922 meeting state that there was a similarity between the methods
of Marx and Freud: “1) both are analytical through and through; 2) both
are concerned with the human unconscious; 3) the object of both methods
is the personality in its social and historical context; 4) both study dynam-
ics.”!5 At the meeting, Luria, Averbukh, Friedmann, and Nechkina were as-
signed the task of preparing a special discussion of this topic. The first three
later shifted the discussion onto the pages of the Party press after their
move to Moscow.
From 1923 onward, the topic was continually on the agenda at meetings
of the Moscow analysts and in the journals they published. They had ac-
cepted a commission from the government, which allowed them to live in
relatively tolerable and even privileged conditions: to seek a new ideologi-
cal face for Bolshevism. At the same time, the analysts had to respond to
crude attacks from their numerous opponents, who posited the incompati-
bility of psychoanalysis with Soviet Marxism, attempting to dislodge
229
Freudianism from the politically advantageous position it occupied. Many

theories were vying for the title of “the only materialist conception of
man”: Bekhterev’s reflexology, Pavlov’s physiology of conditioned reflexes,
and the set of ideas that were developing within the framework of pedol-
ogy, which would later come to dominate the Soviet scene under the cum-
bersome rubric, “The Cultural and Historical Theory of Activity of L. S.
Vygotksy, A. N. Leontiev, and A. R. Luria.”
In this struggle, which was more political than scientific, Soviet psychoana-
lysts had two strategies from which to choose. One tactic, which we will call
the “idea of particularity,” sought to prove that psychoanalysis was a partic-
ular case within one of the other “materialist conceptions of man.” Since it
was a particular case, psychoanalysis did not contradict Marxism, and it
could even strengthen Soviet science with its empirical observations. This
particular case idea was first expressed by a philosopher who later achieved
notoriety, Bernard Bykhovsky. Quoting Freud extensively in the journal
Under the Banner of Marxism, Bykhovsky attempted to demonstrate that
psychoanalytic theory was monistic, materialist, and dialectical. Bykhovsky’s
model was the reflexology of Bekhterev, under which he felt psychoanalysis
was subsumed.'® Later, Aron Zalkind followed in his footsteps for a time.!”
The pursuit of this strategy, of course, brought up certain unsolvable logical
problems. Even setting aside these inconsistencies, psychoanalysis would still
end up subordinate to other conceptions. This position might have pleased
many, but it certainly was not to the psychoanalysts’ liking.
The other, more profound approach would today be dubbed the “idea of
complementarity.” Psychoanalysis and the conception chosen by materialist
science complement each other, so goes the argument, since they are differ-
ent points of view on the very same phenomena. If this was so, then psy-
choanalysis and reflexology or Pavlovian physiology were equal spheres
that, in essence, need not logically be linked by any interrelations. Clearly
this idea of complementarity allowed psychoanalysis far more freedom
than the idea of particularity. The complementarity strategy was articulated
first by Leon Trotsky; in his oft-repeated metaphor, he likened Freud to a
man who looked down a well and saw the bottom only murkily but in its
entirety, while Pavlov was like a diver who painstakingly examined every
grain of silt from below.'®
Mikhail Reisner, who had close connections to the authorities, continued
this motif in his essays of 1923 and 1924.'? He particularly appreciated the
psychoanalytic concept of sublimation, anticipating later Western attempts
at Freudomarxist synthesis, such as those associated with Reich and
Marcuse. Then again, the pathos of sexual revolution typical of Western
Freudomarxists was completely absent from Reisner’s articles. .
Psychoanalytic (or more accurately, Freudoma rxist) ideas dominat ed
other approaches in Psychology and Marxism, 2° a collectio n released in
1925 and edited by the new director of the Institute of Psychology, K.

Kornilov. In their contributions to this volume, Alexander Luria interpreted
psychoanalysis as a “system of monistic psychology,” Reisner explored the
relationship between Freudian social psychology and Marxism, and Boris
Friedmann wrote on “Freud’s Basic Psychological Views and Historical
Materialism.” In these early attempts to coordinate two attractive world-
views, there is no sense of the fear that would become clear in texts pub-
lished only a few years later. These works remain fully in line with the aca-
demic tradition of the time, which might in part explain why they seem so
hopelessly out of date today. For serious psychoanalysts, however, this kind
of approach likely would have seemed unacceptable even back then.
The most famous Soviet psychologist, Ley Vygotsky, made his own con-
tribution to the Marxist critique of psychoanalysis. This contribution re-
mained unappreciated for many decades. Vygotsky was a skilled methodol-
ogist, and his attention was drawn to the immense breach between Freud’s
ideas and the way they were elaborated by Soviet supporters as they
adapted them to the present moment. “Not a single psychoanalytic journal,
of course, would ever publish articles by Luria and Friedmann,” he pointed
out reasonably in an essay composed in 1927 but published only half a cen-
tury later.7! The genuine ideas of psychoanalysis, Vygotsky wrote, were
profoundly different from the way Soviet theoreticians made them out to
be, and these scholars were misleading their readers when they declared
that Freudianism and Marxism were close. “A strange situation results:
Freud and his school never call themselves monists, nor materialists, nor di-
alecticians, nor supporters of historical materialism. But they are told: ‘You
are all of them, and you don’t know yourselves who you are.’” Vygotsky
was absolutely correct, but if this text had been published at the end of the
1920s it would have had the effect of a political denunciation. Vygotsky,
who had once been (according to the 1929 roll) a member of the Russian
Psychoanalytic Society and had friends and coauthors from among the
group’s ranks, refrained from publicizing his position.
Adolf Ioffe, Patient

Although Soviet Freudomarxism of the 1920s was a bizarre, unforeseen
phenomenon that seemed to have neither roots nor consequences, it did
have a sort of history.
Adolf Abramovich Ioffe (1883-1927) was one of the central figures of
the Russian revolution. He was a professional guerrilla and the organizer of
the October uprising, and he later became an important diplomat. After
joining the Central Committee in July 1917, he became the chairman of the
Military-Revolutionary Committee in October. He was also the chairman
of the Russian delegation to the Brest peace conference, participated in the
231
Genoa negotiations, and served as ambassador to Germany, China, Japan,

and Austria. Ioffe was one of the leaders of the Trotskyist opposition, and
after the group’s purge he committed suicide.
Such was lofte’s life. His autobiography yields more detailed informa-
tion.** In 1908, when he met Trotsky in Vienna, where they were founding
the newspaper Pravda together, Ioffe was a fugitive from justice for the fifth
time. He had done much in his twenty-five years: He had spread propa-
ganda in many Russian cities, masterminded an unbelievable jailbreak out
of the Sevastopol military prison, delivered illegal literature to Baku, and
been expelled from Germany by special order of the imperial chancellor. He
had also been a university student in two different fields: medicine (in
Berlin) and law (in Zurich).
Leaving loffe’s autobiography behind and lending an ear to Trotsky’s
memoirs, we learn something quite astonishing. The younger man’s revolu-
tionary feats of valor seemed to Trotsky a “meager political past.” In
Vienna, Ioffe lived the life of a student of medicine and a patient. To quote:
“Despite his extremely impressive appearance, too impressive for his young
age, the remarkably calm tone of his voice, his patient gentility in conversa-
tion and exceptional politesse and other signs of internal stability, Ioffe had
been a neurotic since his early childhood.” Trotsky’s clinical observations
were derived from “his eyes, as if distracted and at the same time deeply
concentrated. One could read in them the tense and agitated work going on
inside.” More surprising still, but nonetheless true, was that “even the ne-
cessity of explaining himself to certain people, even to converse over the
telephone, made him nervous, frightened, and exhausted.”73
Vienna at that time was the world capital of psychoanalysis, and the
matching of neurotics with their analysts must have been decided in the
heavens: Alfred Adler became Ioffe’s analyst.** Adler was Freud’s closest stu-
dent, and it was just at the time in question that he was putting forward his
own version of psychoanalysis, which rested on the primary importance of
one particular motive. This motive, the will to power, was as fundamental to
Adler as eros was to Freud. It stands to reason that Adler’s interaction with
young Russian Marxists would have aided him in formulating his ideas.
Freud did not accept Adler’s innovation, and the latter was soon forced
to leave the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society along with his followers.
Trotsky was aware of Adler’s problems but understood them in his own
way: loffe “was treated by Alfred Adler, who later became famous as an
‘individualist psychologist.’ Adler emerged from Sigmund Freud’s school,
but by that time had broken with his teacher and formed his own faction.”
This event took place at the end of 1911. Trotsky met “from time to time”
with Adler later on as well, and in 1923 he described these meetings in this
way: “Over the course of the several years I spent in Vienna, I came into
relatively close contact with Freudians; I read their works and even went to
their meetings.”25 Trotsky also wrote of Adler in his memoirs:
My first introduction, and a very summary one at that, to the secrets of psy-
choanalysis was given me by the heretic who became the founding teacher of a
new sect. But my true guide through this new and largely unknown field of
heresy was Ioffe. As a young doctor, he was a follower of the psychoanalytic
school, but as a patient he invariably put up resistance, and therefore a slight
note of skepticism could be detected in his psychoanalytic propaganda.*°
Trotsky himself harbored ambivalent feelings for the Freudian move-

ment: “I have always been struck by their approach, combining physiologi-
cal realism with an almost belletristic analysis of mental phenomena.”?7
It is clear that Trotsky spoke with some knowledge of psychoanalysis,
knowledge he owed not only to Ioffe. Isaac Deutscher, the author of a
three-volume biography of Trotsky, asserted that he “studied psychoana-
lytic issues deeply and systematically, and therefore knew the method’s
shortcomings.”2° But back then in Vienna, Trotsky naturally was not about
to be left in debt to the younger Ioffe: “In exchange for lessons in psycho-
analysis, I preached to Ioffe the theory of permanent revolution and the ne-
cessity of breaking with the Mensheviks.”??
loffe’s own psychoanalytic treatment was intensive: During those years
he visited his analyst five or six times a week. It was expensive, too. The
Party coffers most likely did not cover Adler’s fees. Ioffe would have had to
get by on his personal funds; luckily, his father was a wealthy Crimean mer-
chant. We do not know how long the treatment lasted. In any case, in 1912
Ioffe was arrested again, and he was interned in a Siberian prison until the
February revolution. There he performed amateur psychoanalysis on the
other inmates, and he published the results from prison in the journal
Psychotherapy.° This was a downright weak piece of work, more likely
than not published by the journal as a political prank. It described the case
of an exiled medic whom Ioffe had attempted to cure. After a number of
false alarms, the medic committed suicide as his wife and friends looked on;
it seems a few sessions with loffe did little to help him. The article con-
cluded with an eery epilogue, given how loffe’s own life would end: “Such
was the tragic end of one of the many ‘healthy’ people of our time. Life is
such a riddle! But if there is some key to solving this mystery, it can lie only
in making the secret clear, in becoming conscious of the ‘unconscious.’
Someday this problem will be totally solved, and many, many people will
be saved from the same tragic fate.”
loffe, however, was not saved.
The Revolution Dealt with It Better

After a seven-year hiatus, Ioffe met Trotsky again. Trotsky related the cir-
cumstances:
233
loffe had been elected to the St. Petersburg City Duma, and he became the
head of the Bolshevik faction there. This came as a surprise to me, but in the
chaos of the era I had no time to enjoy the progress made by my old friend and
student from Vienna. After I had become chairman of the Petrograd soviet,
loffe appeared one day at Smolny to report on behalf of the Bolshevik faction
in the Duma. I must confess, I was concerned about him, as I remembered him
from before. But he began his speech in such a calm and assured tone that all
my reservations vanished immediately. The large audience in the White Hall at
Smolny beheld an impressive figure at the podium, brunette, with a wide, thick
beard streaked with grey; this figure must have seemed the very embodiment
of positive attitude and self-confidence.3!
Ioffe had a deep, velvety voice, spoke in well-structured sentences and

with measured gestures, and was surrounded by an aura of calmness. He
had the ability to rise from colloquial tone to the level of true pathos.
Trotsky was a good judge of charisma, and he gave the thirty-four-year-old
Ioffe high marks for potential. “In the glamorous attire of a diplomat, with
a soft smile on his peaceful face, .. . Ioffe watched with curiosity as shells
exploded nearby, without speeding or slowing his step.”
Recalling all this from far-off Mexico, Trotsky cherished the memory of
his friend, and at the same time never missed a chance to underline the
striking metamorphosis that he felt had come over the man. “It came as a
pleasant surprise to me: The Revolution had dealt with his nerves far better
than psychoanalysis. ... The Revolution lifted him, straightened him out,
concentrated the stronger sides of his intellect and character. Only occa-
sionally in the depths of his pupils did I encounter an excessive, almost
frightening concentration.”*?
For a clearer understanding of Joffe’s neurosis and personality, it is illu-
minating to turn to part of his correspondence with Lenin. In a letter to
Ioffe composed March 17, 1921, Lenin wrote:
It was with great sadness that I read your deeply disturbed letter of March 15.
I see that you have the most understandable reasons to be displeased and even
indignant, but I assure you that you are mistaken in seeking such a reason.
In the first place, you are mistaken in repeating (more than once) that I am
the Tseka. This could be written only in a state of great nervous irritation and
overexhaustion. Why get so upset as to write a completely impossible, a com-
pletely impossible phrase, like “the Tseka—that’s you.” It must be overexhaus-
tion.
In the second place, I am not in the least displeased with you, nor do I dis-
trust you.°**
The specific source of the spat is not particularly interesting: loffe, of-
fended that Lenin and the Central Committee had ignored his opinion, was
reprimanding Lenin for, shall we say, undemocratic tendencies. Of course,
loffe had to be absolutely confident of his own position as a public figure,
and a very brave person in general, to declare to Lenin, “the Tseka is you.”
In his response, Lenin was highly agitated, twice repeating the same words
and underscoring them with a thick line. More than that, he brought up
Stalin as an example to convince Ioffe: “How can this whole affair be ex-
plained? Fate has dealt you a poor hand. I have seen it in many officials.
Stalin, for instance. Of course, he would stand up for himself.” Counseling
loffe to take a vacation, “maybe it would be best to go abroad, to a health
resort,” Lenin ended his letter with a stream of compliments in his typical
style: “You have been and remain one of the most prominent and best of
our diplomats and politicians. ...”
In November 1924, loffe was appointed ambassador to Vienna, and
Austrian diplomats guessed at possible underlying reasons for the appoint-
ment—either Ioffe’s illness and need for treatment by the best Vienna doc-
tors, or the decline of his influence in Moscow. In November of the follow-
ing year, loffe arrived in Vienna for treatment once again, this time outside
of his official capacity.*> He was accompanied by his family and his per-
sonal physician, Yury Kannabikh—psychotherapist and the last president
of the Russian Psychoanalytic Society.
In 1925-1927, loffe served as deputy chairman of the Main Committee
on Concessions of the USSR, under Trotsky. He was treated in Russia by
Kannabikh and Sergei Davidenkov, physicians who were at least sympa-
thetic to psychoanalysis and who probably practiced it as well.
Not One Day Without Meaning

What happened next we know from the letter that Ioffe sent to Trotsky just
before his death, on November 16, 1927. The letter was meant to be distrib-
uted among their comrades, and so three hundred copies had been made.*°
Ioffe pinpointed the primary means used to destroy the Trotskyist oppo-
sition intellectually and organizationally as “the Party policy denying work
to opposition members.” After Ioffe was removed from all Party and Soviet
posts by decree of the Politburo, his health went quickly downhill. Kremlin
doctors diagnosed tuberculosis, myocarditis, colitis with appendicitis, and a
gall bladder infection. Most of all, loffe was tormented by polyneuritis,
which confined him to bed or a stretcher. “Prof. Davidenkov supposes that
the reason for the relapse of my serious case of polyneuritis is that I have
been so worried lately.”>” Ioffe’s doctors informed him that he must not
work, that Russian health spas would do him no good, and that he had to
go abroad for treatment, for at least half a year. As we know, this was com-
mon practice at one time. But at this time, the Central Committee repeat-
edly delayed deciding on the question. Meanwhile, the Kremlin pharmacy
stopped giving Ioffe his medicine. It was then that Ioffe recalled that he had
“given several thousand rubles to our Party, in any case more than I was
235
worth, since the Revolution deprived me of my fortune.”28 He realized that

he was no longer able to pay for his own treatment.
He wrote in a letter to Trotsky that more than thirty years earlier he had
“adopted the philosophy that human life is meaningful only to the extent
and as long as it serves the eternity that we call humanity; after all, since
everything else is finite, work in the service of anything else is without
meaning.” Adolf Ioffe had been only ten years old “thirty years before.” “It
seems to me,” he wrote, “I have the right to say that my entire conscious
life I have been faithful to my philosophy. ... It seems I have the right to
say that there was not a single day of my life, in this sense, that I lived with-
out meaning.”>?
It is difficult to judge to what extent this philosophy was related to
Adler’s. loffe’s psychoanalyst probably had tried to reveal all the most vital
implications of this philosophy of the infinite, then striven to introduce his
patient to the transitory and finite nature of human reality. If Adler inter-
preted loffe’s philosophy as a symptom of his neurosis, he more than likely
concluded that the illness was incurable.
In any case, Ioffe had come to the conclusion that “death now can be of
more use than continuation of life.” Along with Trotsky’s recent expulsion
from the Party, Ioffe hoped that his suicide would become “just the push
needed to rouse the Party.” Near the end, he decided to tell Trotsky what he
had never said before. “You lack Lenin’s inflexibility, his unwillingness to
give in. ... You were always right politically, but you often denied your own
rectitude. .. . Now you are more right than ever . . . so do not fear, now.”*°
In His Own Hands

There is a particular motif in Trotsky’s words, as they stray far from the fa-
miliar intonations of Lenin and Stalin. It is probably due to this motif that
he has retained his attraction for his followers at opposite ends of the planet.
Man at last will begin to harmonize himself in earnest. He will make it his busi-
ness to achieve beauty by giving the movement of his own limbs the utmost pre-
cision, purposefulness, and economy, in his work, his walk, and his play. He
will try to master first the semiconscious and then the subconscious processes in
his own organism, such as breathing, the circulation of the blood, digestion, re-
production, and, within necessary limits, he will try to subordinate them to the
control of reason and will. Even purely physiologic life will become subject to
collective experiments. The human species, the coagulated homo sapiens, will
once more enter into a state of radical transformation, and, in his own hands,
will become an object of the most complicated methods of artificial selection
and psycho-physical training. This is entirely in accord with evolution.*!
This dreamer, a minister of defense and of the navy, was prepared to go
further than his colleagues: He aimed to seize upon and consciously regu-
late not only what went on in the factory, the marketplace, and the family,
but also what went on in the conjugal bed and even within the human
body. Exactitude and expediency, Trotsky’s highest values, were attainable
only one way: through awareness. For him, beauty was equated with con-
sciousness. The opposite held true as well; everything unconscious, ran-
dom, and spontaneous was ugly and repulsive. Nothing should happen by
itself, he felt, as it had in the accursed past. Only what was thought
through, conscious, and systematic deserved to exist.
“As he rises, Man purges from the top down: first he rids himself of God,
then the foundation of government starting with the Czar, then he purges
his economy of chaos and competition, then he moves on to his internal
world, driving out the dark and the unconscious.”*” Trotsky’s pen slips ever
so smoothly, almost unnoticeably, from atheism and socialism into psycho-
analysis, from Bolshevik banality to ideas that are completely extraordi-
nary, ideas more utopian than the communist utopia itself! All this fits to-
gether into a cogent and familiar pattern: a purge from the top down.
Throughout this passage, layers of youthful romanticism and revolution-
ary pragmatism alternate: The old life is hateful, but the new one must be
kept under control. “Communist life will not be formed blindly, like coral
islands, but will be built consciously, will be tested by thought, will be di-
rected and corrected. Life will cease to be elemental, and for this reason
stagnant.”*
What’s wrong with coral islands, one might ask? For Trotsky, there was
no such thing as a nature where beautiful things came into being of their
own accord. Man could and should alter nature. He was already altering it.
When he had remade the nature of things, was it not inevitable that he
would set about changing his own nature? “We may be able to drive a rail-
way across the whole Sahara, build the Eiffel Tower, and talk with New
York by radio, but can we really not improve man? Yes; we will be able to!
To issue a new ‘improved edition’ of man—that is the further task of com-
munism.”*4
All this was well and good, but Marxism never went quite that far. Marx
had provided instructions on how to transform the relations of production,
but he seemed to think man would change automatically. This never came
to be, however, and moreover nothing should happen “automatically” for a
revolutionary. Therefore, many people at that time were casting about in all
directions, seeking a superstructure that would adequately update and
equip Marxism for new tasks. Later, throughout the 1930s, many leftist in-
tellectuals, including such serious thinkers as Karl Mannheim, wrote of the
possibility of “transforming mankind” with the help of psychoanalysis.45
Against this background, Trotsky’s approach doesn’t look all that out of
place. Within the bounds of his logic, Freudianism emerged as the direct
continuation and even the perfection of Marxism, just as Marxism was the
23y),
continuation and perfection of science in general. If Marxism drove the

natural element out of the base, Freudianism would eliminate it from the
superstructure.
This is entirely in accord with evolution. Man first drove the dark element out
of industry and ideology, by displacing barbaric routine by scientific technique
and religion by science. Afterwards he drove the unconscious out of politics,
by overthrowing monarchy and class with democracy and rationalist parlia-
mentarianism, and then with the clear and open Soviet dictatorship. The blind
elements have settled most heavily in economic relations, but man is driving
them out from there also, by means of the Socialist organization of economic
life. This makes it possible to reconstruct fundamentally the traditional family
life. Finally, the nature of man himself is hidden in the deepest and darkest cor-
ner of the unconscious, of the elemental, of the sub-soil. Is it not self-evident
that the greatest efforts of investigative thought and of creative initiative will
be in that direction?*¢
It is indeed clear that they were already headed in that direction; and
only the crass and uncouth could have had any second thoughts in this re-
gard. According to Trotsky, the old Nietzschean task of reconstructing man
presented no particular difficulties. He found only two problems: First,
there had to be boldness and concentration on this important goal. This
task was perfectly clear to the man who had been chairman of the
Revolutionary Military Council. It had to be emphasized again and again,
sparing no eloquence, with total confidence: “Man will look for the first
time at himself as if at raw material, or at best, as at a half-finished prod-
uct, and say, ‘I’ve finally got you, my dear homo sapiens; now I can get to
work on you, friend!’”4” Secondly, science was of the utmost importance.
Trotsky understood this and formulated the problem in a politically cor-
rect, materialistic way: “We must first know Man from every angle, we
must know his anatomy, his physiology and the part of his physiology that
is called psychology.”
Much later, in 1932, as an unwanted emigrant but still a powerful orator,
Trotsky would repeat in Copenhagen:
Anthropology, biology, physiology, and psychology have accumulated moun-

tains of material to raise up before mankind in their full scope the tasks of per-
fecting and developing the body and spirit. Psychoanalysis, with the inspired
hand of Sigmund Freud, has lifted the cover of the well which is poetically
called the “soul.” And what has been revealed? Our conscious thought is only
a small part of the work of the dark, psychic forces. .. . Human thought, de-
scending to the bottom of its own psychic sources, must shed light on the most
mysterious driving forces of the soul and subject them to reason and to will.
Once he has done with the anarchic forces of his own society, man will set
to work on himself, in the pestle and the retort of the chemist. For the first
time mankind will see itself as raw material, or at best as a physical and psy-
chic semi-finished product... . [T]he man of today, with all his contradictions
and lack of harmony, will open the road for a new and happier race.*8
The Well Metaphor

Ivan Pavlov was an awkward man for the authorities, as he did many
things for which no one else would have been forgiven. In 1920, he applied
for emigration. The question was mulled over at the highest levels of gov-
ernment by Lenin, Gorky, Lunacharsky, and others. The great scientist was
persuaded to stay after he was promised firewood and meat for his labora-
tory, after certain confiscated property was returned, and probably after
some threats.
At about the same time, a large-scale expulsion of scholars was in the
works, a campaign that affected many of the famous people who disagreed
with the new government: Berdyaey, Ilyin, and many others. Pavlov was
treated differently. It could be that his specialty was seen by the Bolsheviks
as strategically important, directly related to their plans to remake and re-
forge mankind. We might recall that it was about this time that Otto
Schmidt—a Bolshevik, astronomer, and the “curator” of Soviet psycho-
analysis—gave a speech before the ministry of education supporting the
plan to crossbreed man and monkey.
After negotiations between Lenin and the Cheka,*? Pavlov was allowed
to tour the West on a lecture circuit. He returned from his trip even more
independently inclined. The lecture he gave on September 25, 1923, is par-
ticularly well known for its sharp criticism of the Bolsheviks.°° There were
immediate and totally opposite reactions from two key players in Russian
history of that time: Trotsky and Bukharin. The latter rebuked Pavlov in a
series of long, crude, and perfectly typical articles (see chapter 8): “As for
our governing circles, we venture to assure Professor Pavlov that they un-
derstand a good deal more of biology and physiology than Prof. Pavlov
does in the social sciences.”*! Meanwhile, just after Pavlov’s lecture,
Trotsky sent him a personal letter.5* Although it was quite personal, the let-
ter was published in Trotsky’s collection of works, prepared by him just be-
fore his expulsion, one of the only epistles that was included. It is clear,
therefore, that the letter’s theme and addressee were of importance to him.
The subject of Trotsky’s communication is surprising. The letter proposes
that Pavlov’s physiology of conditioned reflexes be united with Freudian
psychoanalysis. Trotsky wrote respectfully, admitting that he was but a
dilettante in these issues, but he did not neglect to mention his personal ac-
quaintance with the Freudians of Vienna, a connection he hoped would jus-
tify his initiative. Trotsky wrote, “Your doctrine of conditioned reflexes, it
seems to me, embraces Freud’s theory as an individual case.” If Pavlov had
agreed with this, psychoanalysis in Russia would have had the support of
239
his authority. Arguing for the compatibility and complementary nature of

the two greatest scientific schools of the century, Trotsky found a powerful
image: “Both Pavlov and Freud assert that the ‘bottom’ of the soul is its
physiology. But Pavlov, like a diver, plunges to the bottom and painstak-
ingly examines the well from the bottom up. Meanwhile, Freud stands
above the well and tries to see or divine the outlines of the bottom, staring
penetratingly through the depths of the ever rippling, murky water.” The
same logic was also applied to the connection between Marxism and
Freudianism. “The attempt to declare psychoanalysis ‘incompatible’ with
Marxism and turn our backs on Freudianism is simpleminded, or at least a
bit simplistic. But we are in no way obliged to adopt Freudianism.”
In 1923, Trotsky was the second in command of the Bolshevik govern-
ment. Pavlov, a Nobel laureate and quite nearly the Bolsheviks’ most trea-
sured intellectual asset, was also an influential figure. In addition, the letter
was published not by archivists but by Trotsky himself, while he was still in
the USSR. Trotsky felt no need to hide this strategic idea, even after he had
suffered defeat.
Since then, Pavlov and Freud have been compared and contrasted any
number of times, and decades of dogmatic discourse have wiped out any in-
terest in Russia in the question that Trotsky raised. At the same time,
Pavlov and Freud each recognized each other’s scientific accomplishments.
An American mathematician who visited Moscow in the 1930s met with
Pavlov, who told him that the idea of inhibition came to him as he was
reading a book by Freud and Breuer on hysteria. Passing through Vienna
on his way back, the American related this to Freud, who commented dole-
fully that if Pavlov had said something about it earlier, this affinity might
have been of use.°? Other early psychoanalysts also looked favorably on
Pavlov’s experiments and even on his theories. Jones, for example, in the
1920s published a positive review of the English translation of Pavlov’s
book on higher nervous system activity.
Even during the darkest years, there were intelligent, thinking people
working within the framework of the Pavlovian school, people who re-
~ spected the ideas of psychoanalysis. In 1947, Sergei Davidenkov’s book was
released in Leningrad, in which he attempted a theoretical synthesis be-
tween Pavlovian physiology and evolutionary genetics and the ethnography
of Sir J. G. Frazer and L. Sternberg. In his book, Davidenkov displayed un-
expected erudition and intellectual daring. He named Freud, whom he re-
ferred to as a “subtle observer” and “a talented clinician,” the direct fore-
runner of his ideas.**
Davidenkov was an eminent neuropathologist who had worked with
Vyacheslav Ivanov as the rector of the University of Baku at the beginning
of the 1920s. He had served as a physician in the Kremlin for a time and
later headed the Leningrad Neurosis Clinic, where Pavlov held his
Wednesday meetings. According to Natalya Traugott, who attended these

sessions at the beginning of the 1930s, clinical talks on psychoanalytic
treatment were quite common. At these seminars, which were conducted as
a form of clinical investigation, Pavlov often digressed into theoretical tan-
gents. He showed no irritation when speaking of Freud, and said that
“Freud digs from above, while we dig from below.” This formula, in fact a
paraphrase of Trotsky’s well metaphor, carries on the same idea: that psy-
choanalysis and “materialist physiology” are compatible.
But as far as is known, seventy-four-year-old Pavlov never responded to
Trotsky’s call to action. Bukharin, however, did manage to gain the scien-
tist’s confidence. Pavlov once gave his opinion of him: “Nikolai Ivanovich
is a man with a fine mind, a real intellectual. But how can he be a revolu-
tionary at the same time? After all, he’s a true Russian intellectual
sniveler!”°°
A Chance for Power

Is a Chance for Psychoanalysis
“What is one to say about the psycho-analytic theory of Freud? Can it be
reconciled with materialism, as, for instance, Karl Radek thinks (and I also)
..?2”°° Such were Trotsky’s words, inscribed in the platform of the
Trotskyist movement, the book Literature and Revolution. Trotsky was
then the mighty leader of a totalitarian state, and the texts he published, the
letters he sent, even mere rumors about their contents, were taken as guide-
lines for action—although not by everyone, naturally. Around this time,
several articles were released in central Bolshevik magazines sharply attack-
ing Freudianism and, in the same stroke, indirectly deriding the movement’s
instigator in Russia. Nonetheless, the thinking of Moscow’s Freudo-
marxists such as Alexander Luria and Boris Friedmann was very close to
Trotsky’s position in both theoretical and political terms.
Georgii Malis, the author of a book called Psychoanalysis of Com-
munism, published in Kharkov in 1924, cited Trotsky liberally, enthusiasti-
cally putting forward ideas and completing thoughts that the great leader ei-
ther never intended to express or that simply had never occurred to him.
The book begins with an assertion in boldface that is indeed very important:
“It is not by chance that psychoanalysis has been given such an opportunity
to develop in our country.” Psychoanalysis, according to Malis, was a fun-
damental tool in the great reexamination of values, in conjunction with
Marxism. This reevaluation would soon transform the whole of human in-
tellectual life. The current scale was not large enough to satisfy the author:
“Human thought has to bring about the same revolution in ideology as has
already begun in economics.” As culture became more complex, Malis ar-
241
gued, man was forced to sublimate his desires more and more, which was
why the number of mentally ill was on the rise. In the harmonious society of
tomorrow, as was the case in prehistoric societal groupings, there would be
nothing to sublimate, nor any reason to do so. “We have the good fortune to
bear witness to the painful birth of a new society, one that will reveal to each
human being all forms of gratification.” Malis insisted that “in communist
society there will be no neuroses, no religion, no philosophy, no art.” What
would there be, then? The response sounds a bit abstract: “Social structure
will be the social implementation of the human unconscious.” The year was
1924, a communist government was in power, and it needed more concrete
prescriptions. Here, Malis naturally hung all his hopes on the children and
their education in a new spirit: “Children must be united into monolithic so-
cial groups with elected leaders”; these “communist battalions” would be
able to “swallow the child whole.” The primary enemies of this golden age,
unexpectedly, would be the teachers; Malis’s childish hatred toward them is
perhaps the most surprising feature of his essay. “Because soon in the diver-
sity of communist society each unit will be able to find a true place for itself,
there will be no ‘teachers,’ people unable to find that place now.” School re-
formers, whom Malis acridly called “instant pedologists,” would not be up
to the task. Teachers were the “most broken-down element of society.”
Psychoanalysis, however, was presented as a communist alternative to all
teaching methods, a path even more radical than the policy adopted by the
ministry of education.>*”
The political link between Trotsky and Russian psychoanalysts has been
underestimated in Western literature on the history of psychoanalysis.
Trotsky’s own public statements, as well as references to him made by com-
munist supporters of psychoanalysis, are not the only evidence in support
of the hypothesis that the early Soviet psychoanalytic movement was highly
dependent on him. The movement’s historical window of opportunity un-
mistakably shadowed the zigzag of Trotsky’s political career. The apogee of
the movement’s strength in the beginning of the 1920s was the time when
Trotsky was exerting maximal influence; 1927—the year of his downfall—
_ was the year when Moisei Wulff defected and the Russian Psychoanalytic
Society fell into stagnation. By the beginning of the 1930s, a time of vio-
lence against everything that bore any resemblance to Trotsky, all memory
of the recently frantic activity of Russian psychoanalysts had vanished. In
the ideological polemics of the end of the 1920s, psychoanalysts (and later
pedologists as well) were often accused of Trotskyism. And indeed, some of
the members of the Russian Psychoanalytic Society, like writer Alexei
Voronsky and diplomat and society vice president Viktor Kopp, were con-
spicuous figures in the Trotskyist opposition.
The Moscow-based analysts participated willingly and actively in the con-
struction of communism. These people were enchanted by the perspectives
thrown open for the scientific transformation of life; they were equally en-
chanted by their newfound intimacy with the government and fascinated by
political intrigue. They sincerely believed that their psychoanalytic knowl-
edge would make a great, even a decisive contribution to the victory of the
new ideas of which their knowledge was a part. Meanwhile, the unparal-
leled privileges that psychoanalysts enjoyed at the beginning of the 1920s,
such as the supply of foodstuffs from German labor unions, could probably
not have been arranged without the direct support of the highest authorities.
In the Soviet system, assistance from political elites was given anonymously,
and as a result, without responsibility. We have noted certain signs that the
activity of the Moscow Psychoanalytic Society and its orphanage was sup-
ported by a variety of people—Krupskaya, Radek, and even Stalin. But this
indirect evidence cannot compare with Trotsky’s direct speech.
In popularizing and defending Freud’s ideas in the Marxist press, the group
of Moscow analysts and the philosophers who shared an affinity with them
were at the same time developing and defending Trotsky’s theses, which were
well known to their readers. On the one hand, they were standing up for
their right to do what they loved to do, something they were sure was useful
to society; on the other hand, they were participating in a dangerous political
game, the outcome and stakes of which remained a mystery to all.
This political aspect of the Russian society’s activity is extremely impor-
tant. It would be inaccurate to imagine the organization’s leaders as dissi-
dents bravely opposing the system, or as autistic intellectuals who paid the
political process no heed and occupied themselves exclusively with their pa-
tients and books. Both images merely confound these people of the 1920s
with those who gained their political and clinical experience in Russia half
a century later. Nor was the situation reminiscent of the moment when psy-
choanalysis was quashed in Nazi Germany, which Jones characterized as
“one of Hitler’s few successful achievements.”>* The situation was certainly
nothing like the peaceful but alienated coexistence of analysts and the state
so familiar in the West.
The people who created the revolution were then facing one vital, all-
encompassing problem: The new society had been formed, but there was
no way people could live in it; they didn’t know how, and more impor-
tantly, they didn’t want to. This has been proven, and it was common
knowledge. Let us, then, examine the choices faced by those who came to
grips with this dilemma for the first time, and the paths they might have
taken to overcome this situation.
One possibility was retreat. Let people live the way they want, the way
they know, and as they are able—or at least something approximating that.
This choice was generally associated with Lenin and his New Economic
Policy. There was another possibility: to use artificial selection to pick out
those prepared to live in the new society, and get rid of everyone else. This
path is also familiar, and it is associated with Stalin and the gulag. It seems
243
that Trotsky, whom political opponents endlessly criticized for haughtiness,

was looking for a third possibility, the most ambitious and romantic of all,
and the most unrealistic. If people were incapable of living in the new soci-
ety, then people had to be remade. To transform human nature! But how?
Marxism couldn’t help there, as Marx hadn’t foreseen the situation at
hand. Risky incursions into unfamiliar territory had to be made.
Reading Trotsky’s works from the 1920s, it begins to seem as if the
Kremlin dreamer sincerely believed that at any moment he would find the
Philosopher’s Stone among the latest scientific advances, some device that
would make people happy in the society that he and his comrades had cre-
ated. He seems to have been confident that once he found it, he would be
able to justify everything. This is probably why he appeared to be so pas-
sive during the years that proved so decisive for him and for history—there
was more at stake for him than just power. To bring together Pavlov and
Freud; to conclude a union with them on behalf of the victorious Party, and
to put old homo sapiens to practical work at long last—with goals like
these, who wouldn’t have their minds on higher matters!
Reich in the Communist Academy

In 1929, Wilhelm Reich, a psychoanalyst and communist who tried his
whole life to achieve a Freudomarxist synthesis, made a two-month pil-
grimage to Moscow. In Reich’s opinion, “sexuality became aware of itself
in the person of Sigmund Freud, just as economy began to be aware of itself
in the person of Karl Marx.”>?
His special interest was the sexual revolution, and at the beginning of the
1930s he applied unbelievable energy trying to involve the German
Communist Party and the Fourth (Trotskyist) International in his “sexpoli-
tik.” In 1931, Reich organized the German Association for the Sexual
Politics of the Proletariat, known by the acronym Sexpol. He wrote to
Trotsky in October 1933, generalizing his impressions of Russia: The onset
of reaction there, he concluded, was due to the fact that the sexual revolu-
tion had been halted in 1923. As their correspondence bears witness,
Trotsky politely declined Reich’s invitation to participate in the global sex-
ual revolution. A year later, Reich tried to get Sergey Eisenstein on his
side, but failed on that count as well.*!
While plugging his ideas in Moscow in 1929, Reich gave several lectures
at the Communist Academy and published an article in the journal Under
the Banner of Marxism. His visit had no further effect, as he was unable to
convince the Academy of the need for sexual revolution. Later he would ac-
cuse “those scoundrels” in Moscow of organizing a campaign against him
in the German Communist Party.*?
When he returned to Vienna, Reich published a report on his travels in a
psychoanalytic journal.®? According to him, the Russians did not decry psy-
choanalysis as an empirical method, they were only against “Freudism,”

which they saw as a false social doctrine. Young people, he said, were very
interested in psychoanalysis; but the ruling party was condemning it be-
cause debates on psychoanalysis were distracting them from political work.
Aron Zalkind, he held, was his most aggressive critic in Moscow: Zalkind
had scolded him for being diplomatic and accused him of trying to hide the
real substance of Freudianism from the Communist Academy. In Berlin, the
recently emigrated Moisei Wulff wrote a rebuttal to Reich’s article for the
same journal, saying that Reich was “trying to prove that psychoanalysis
can be acceptable to Marxists,” but that this would not happen to psycho-
analysis, “because what would be left if it should happen would hardly de-
serve the name of psychoanalysis.” According to Wulff, “in a country
where Party censorship rules, where there is no freedom of speech nor free-
dom of thought,” psychoanalysis was doomed. Wulff concluded, however,
that there was “a strong interest in psychoanalysis outside the Communist
Party—among scholars, teachers, lawyers, and even doctors.”°*
In his book Mass Psychology and Fascism, first published several months
after the Nazis came to power, Reich asserted that fascism enjoyed the mass
support of the working class. He explained that this phenomenon, never
recognized by orthodox Marxism, was the realization of the authoritarian
character structures that form in sexually repressed people within patriar-
chal systems.®°
Reich’s views passed through a curious evolution with time, one reminis-
cent of the Soviet Freudomarxists’, who gradually retrained themselves as
pedologists (see chapter 8). Beginning with traditional psychoanalytic
work, he eventually came to a conclusion incredible for an analyst: that
therapy was pointless. “There is no use in individual therapy! Of course,
you can make money and help here and there. But from the point of view
of social problems, problems of mental hygiene, there is no use.” Like his
Soviet opponent Aron Zalkind, Reich switched over to working with chil-
dren. It seemed to him then that only this kind of work would provide the
means to transform human nature in the desired direction. “There is no use
in anything except working with children. You should go back to the un-
spoiled protoplasm.”°°
In 1934, Reich was expelled from the International Psychoanalytic
Association. According to Jones, “Freud had thought highly of him in his
early days, but Reich’s political fanaticism had led to both personal and sci-
entific estrangement.”°” Almost simultaneously, but probably for other rea-
sons, Reich was kicked out of the German Communist Party as well.
A Man of High Integrity

The life and career of Max Eitingon (1881-1943), one of the leaders of the
early psychoanalytic movement, is also strangely intertwined with Soviet
Between Power and Death 245
Russian history, the applied policy of the Bolsheviks, and Trotsky’s fate.
Born in Mogilev, Eitingon lived in Germany from early childhood, studied
at one of the centers of Russian student life in the West—the department of
philosophy at Marburg—and then took up medicine. As an assistant at the
Burgholzli clinic with Jung, Eitingon was the first foreigner to visit Freud
and express admiration for his works, and also the first to consult with him
on a difficult case. In 1909 (at the same time as Tatiana Rosenthal and a bit
earlier than Sabina Spielrein), he defended his doctoral dissertation at the
University of Zurich. His topic was the associative experiment under condi-
tions of epilepsy.°°
Jung, who was Eitingon’s doctoral advisor in Zurich, treated him with a
measure of irony. We have already read Jung’s words to Freud about how
Eitingon would someday become a deputy to the Duma.®? Jones had a hard
time believing that Freud could take Eitingon’s intellectual capacity seri-
ously. On the other hand, Eitingon remained ever faithful to Freud, whose
“lightest wish or opinion was decisive for him.” For the rest, Jones added,
Eitingon was very susceptible to influence, “one could not always be sure
of what his own opinion was.”7°
Sandor Rado, who worked closely with Eitingon, told much about the
man in his memoirs. “He was philosophically excellently trained, cultured,
enormously inhibited, but extremely good as a man who could build an or-
ganization; and he idolized Freud. ... He never in his life wrote a clinical
article or ever delivered anything but a general speech. He was an orga-
nizer, which meant that his name was put on paper while other people did
the work. But do not get me wrong. He was a man of high integrity.””! A
certain duality, or perhaps incompleteness, marks almost all recollections of
Eitingon. Analysts like Ferenczi and Binswanger thought very highly of
him, however. Lev Shestov, an important Russian émigré philosopher and a
man of immaculate scruples, also harbored deep respect for Eitingon (see
chapter 2).
Freud trusted Eitingon immeasurably, and this trust only grew with the
years. In 1920, Eitingon became a member of the committee, the secret group
made up of Freud’s six closest students, a panel that exerted decisive influ-
ence on the policy of the International Psychoanalytic Association. Eitingon
was one of Freud’s closest protégés; he was given the authority to speak for
the teacher, and he headed a variety of psychoanalytic enterprises. He is cred-
ited with the opening of the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute and Clinic in
1920, which saw the first systematic examination of patients and elaboration
of procedures for psychoanalytic training. The Berlin Institute was doubtless
the model for the State Psychoanalytic Institute in Moscow. In 1926,
Eitingon was elected president of the International Psychoanalytic Associa-
tion, and he fulfilled his responsibilities in that capacity for many years.
Eitingon practically never missed Freud’s birthday, and Freud’s door was
always open to Eitingon, although for others he became more and more in-
accessible. For example, in 1929 only Lou Andreas-Salomé and Eitingon

attended the ailing Freud’s birthday.”* Unlike those in his professional cir-
cle, however, he was an unproductive scientist and author.
Eitingon was rich, and this rare quality was unfailingly mentioned by all
who wrote of him. Jones, for example, referred to him as the only psycho-
analyst in the world at that time who owned private capital.” It is well
known that he used his own funds to finance the opening of a psychoana-
lytic publishing house in Vienna that put out Freud’s works, journals of the
Association, and so forth; the founding of the Berlin Institute, of which he
was the director; the famous sculpted portrait of Freud; and many other ef-
forts. Eitingon was also responsible for the modest sums of cash that were
given periodically on Freud’s behalf to Lou Andreas-Salomé, who had lost
her money to the Bolsheviks but still managed to help her relatives, who re-
mained in Russia until the 1930s. Finally, Eitingon often lent money to
Freud himself during the lean, postwar years, a practice that met with dis-
pleasure in Freud’s family.
Freud himself deeply appreciated this assistance. An impression of their
relations can be gleaned from a letter addressed to Eitingon in honor of the
fifteenth anniversary of their meeting (in 1922):
For many years I was aware of your efforts to come closer to me, and I kept
you at bay. Only after you had expressed in such affectionate terms the desire
to belong to my family—in the closest sense—did I surrender to the easy trust-
ing ways of my earlier years, accepted you and ever since have allowed you to
render me every kind of service, imposed on you every kind of task. ... So I
suggest that we continue our relationship which has developed from friendship
to sonship until the end of my days.”4
Ten years later, Freud wished Eitingon a happy fiftieth birthday, writing:
“T rarely said this to you, but I never forget what you have done for us over
the years.” Official congratulations from the International Psychoanalytic
Association to its “Dear President” were composed by Ferenczi. The note
stressed Eitingon’s “high merits,” his “boundless and productive activity,”
and “unfailing manners and readiness to help.””>
When historians note Eitingon’s exceptional contribution to the develop-
ment of the international psychoanalytic movement, they usually speak of
his great entrepreneurial spirit and energy as an organizer and his ability to
extract some benefit for his cause from any circumstances.”® Elisabeth
Roudinesco, whose study came out before any compromising material on
Eitingon was uncovered, held him up as a hero of the diaspora, a wanderer
in eternal search of a homeland and an identity. “In Zurich he was from
Vienna, in Vienna he was a Berliner, and in Berlin he dreamed of Jerusalem.
Everywhere he was Russian, ... and most of all he was a Jew.”77
It was thought that Eitingon had inherited his fortune. On the other
hand, Jones said the family business that yielded Eitingon’s income was
Between Power and Death 247
based in America. The crisis of 1929 put Eitingon in a difficult position, ac-
cording to Jones, and he was forced to take up a collection among his col-
leagues for the maintenance of the Berlin Institute, and a year later for the
psychoanalytic publishing house.78
Immediately following Hitler’s rise to power, Eitingon traveled to Vienna
to discuss the situation with Freud. The Nazis were demanding that Jews be
fired from administrative positions in scientific institutes and societies.
Freud called on Eitingon to stand firm: “Just like you I shall leave my place
only at the very last moment and probably not even then.”7? Nevertheless,
both were lucky enough to escape, each in his own way. Freud left five
years after Eitingon (see chapter 9), who resigned from his posts in Berlin
as early as August 1933.
The new chairman of the German Society of Psychotherapy, M. H.
Goring (Hermann Goring’s cousin), purged the ranks of psychoanalysis on
ethnic grounds. Jung cooperated with Goring, in the interest of construct-
ing a new, Aryan psychology. True, Jung was far away in Switzerland, and
his contribution was mainly theoretical. But he remained active in his posi-
tion as editor of the Nazi psychotherapeutic journal as late as 1940, when
he finally resigned.
Eitingon left for Jerusalem, where he organized a local section of the
International Psychoanalytic Association (recognized by the parent group
as early as 1934) and the Psychoanalytic Institute.*°°
Soviet Furs for International Psychoanalysis

Max Eitingon (Soviet and Israeli sources call him Mark) was the co-owner
of an enterprise that traded furs from the Soviet Union. This was the source
of his fortune, as well as the primary source of financing for the undertak-
ings of the Berlin psychoanalysts. From the memoirs of Sandor Rado we
learn:
His personal income did not come from his medical practice, which he did not
have; but it flowed from a fur enterprise his family ran in five countries. The
Eitingons were one of the biggest fur traders. They had an establishment in
Russia, one in Poland, one in England, two in Germany, and one here [in the
United States]. The old man had died, and Max Eitingon’s brother-in-law ran
the whole enterprise, and then came the years of the depression, during which
all this began to collapse. For a while, even under the communist regime, they
had the biggest contract with the Russians for furs.*?
The monopoly on foreign trade was one of Lenin’s main ideas, and more
importantly, one of his government’s few attainable goals. The Eitingons
large-scale export of Russian pelts to the West could have been conducted
only with approval from the highest echelon, as hard-currency earnings did
not come in through the usual state export-import channels. Ironically,
whatever else the money earned by the Eitingon brothers’ fur imports was
spent on, we know for certain that some of it was used to finance the psy-
choanalytic movement.
He Never Became a Duma Deputy,

but Was He an NKVD Agent?
Max’s relative Naum Eitingon (or Ettingon; there are different records of
his first name, as well: Western sources refer to him as Leonid**) was one of
the most powerful commanders of Stalin’s NKVD,*° an organizer and par-
ticipant in many of its secret operations. In the words of Russian historians
of the era, “In the 1930s Naum Eitingon stood behind the scenes of many
(and perhaps all) of the NKVD’s sabotage operations abroad.”** General
Eitingon orchestrated the most famous of these adventures personally, in-
cluding the murder of a Soviet defector and former NKVD agent named
Ignaz Reiss in Switzerland in 1937, the abduction of General Yevgeny
Miller in Paris the same year, the assassination of Trotsky’s son, Lev Sedov,
in a Paris hospital in 1938, and finally the liquidation of Trotsky himself in
Mexico in 1940. Naum Eitingon was Caridad Mercader’s lover, and it was
he who hired and paid her son Ramon to break into Trotsky’s home and
plant an icepick in his brain.
After Naum Eitingon returned from Mexico, he was received by a grate-
ful Stalin, who awarded him the Order of Lenin, embraced him, and swore
that as long as he, Stalin, was alive, not a hair would be touched on
Eitingon’s head. As the deputy head of the GRU,** Naum Eitingon directed
Soviet espionage in the West until 1952. Only a short time before Stalin’s
death was he removed from that post, which he had occupied longer than
any of his colleagues. At the end of 1953, after Stalin’s death, Eitingon was
sentenced to twelve years in prison for supporting Beria. Nevertheless, the
master’s promise was kept even after his death. After waiting out his sen-
tence, Eitingon returned to Moscow and lived out his days peacefully and
inconspicuously, working as an editor at the Mezhdunarodnaia Kniga pub-
lishing house.
Psychoanalyst Max Eitingon was implicated in at least one of General
Naum Eitingon’s illegal schemes, the scandalous kidnapping of General
Miller, by subsequent testimony in criminal court proceedings. At the time of
his murder, Yevgeny Miller headed the Russian Inter-Army Union (ROVS),
an émigré organization of the White (anti-Bolshevik) movement. Soviet pro-
paganda, beginning in about 1925, accused the ROVS and Trotskyists of
joining forces to carry out sabotage within the Soviet Union.®* Soviet intelli-
gence agents gradually infiltrated the organization’s leadership until it was
peppered with them. Emigré politicians Boris Savinkov and Vasily Shulgin
249
were forcibly returned to the USSR, and Generals Alexander Kutepov and
Yevgeny Miller disappeared. Miller’s abduction was part of a larger and
more ominous conspiracy. The plan was carried out by Naum Eitingon,
along with a White general named Nikolai Skoblin—a double agent for the
Soviet NKVD and its Nazi German counterpart, the SD—who became the
next head of the ROVS. Fake documents prepared under Skoblin’s direc-
tion, alleging that Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky harbored pro-German
sentiments, were handed over to Stalin through the president of
Czechoslovakia. We know that Hitler was aware of the operation and ap-
proved of it. It is unclear whether Stalin knew that the documents he re-
ceived were forgeries. In any case, the result was the annihilation of the en-
tire Soviet military command on the eve of the German invasion.
When Naum Eitingon kidnapped General Miller in September 1937, the
way was opened for Skoblin to take over the White émigré movement. By
other accounts, Miller was taken out because he knew too much about
Skoblin’s interests. The case was taken up, however, by the French police,
which usually did its best to turn a blind eye to such happenings in the émi-
gré community. Skoblin disappeared forever, and the trial focused on his
wife, popular émigré singer Nadezhda Plevitskaya.
Czar Nicholas II once told Plevitskaya during an encounter at Livadia,
his summer palace in the Crimea: “I once thought it would be impossible to
be more Russian than me. Your singing has proven otherwise.”®” During
her wild youth, the singer toured Russia with Nikolai Kliuyev, a poet and
self-proclaimed khlyst. In Berlin, one of Plevitskaya’s admirers was Max
Eitingon (we recall the words Freud wrote long ago of young Eitingon’s ro-
mantic fancies, that “such practice is a deterrent from theory”*%). Later,
Plevitskaya spilled the beans in court, admitting that Max “dressed her
from head to toe” and financed the publication of her two-volume
memoirs. In the records of the police investigation, which have not yet been
fully declassified by the French, Max Eitingon’s name is mentioned several
times, according to historian J. Dziak. Dziak followed the trail of this case
at the request of U.S. military intelligence, and he went so far as to presume
that Max Eitingon recruited both Plevitskaya and Skoblin.®’ Plevitskaya
testified that Max saw her off at the train station two days after Miller’s
kidnapping, where she got on a train for Florence with the intention of flee-
ing from there to Palestine. Dziak’s hypothesis was corroborated by the
singer’s prison diary, which recently turned up in the archives of Columbia
University.°° The journal included allusions to the fact that Skoblin met
“with the Bolsheviks” in the 1920s in Max Eitingon’s Berlin home. The lat-
ter subsequently sent them a Bible from Jerusalem that contained cipher
codes. The book was seized during a search and became one of the key
pieces of evidence against Plevitskaya. The singer and her friends knew
about the “Eitingons’ dealings with the Bolsheviks, how they buy up furs in
Siberia and send them off to London.” In addition, it was established dur-
ing the trial that Plevitskaya and Skoblin spent ten times more than they
earned.
The singer was convicted by a French court for her part in Miller’s ab-
duction. Nina Berberova was at the trial and included the story in her
memoirs, relating how Plevitskaya denied everything.”! Later, however, she
confessed to her lawyer that the accusations against her were correct. She
died in a French prison in 1940.
Plevitskaya’s testimony and Rado’s recollections indicate that Max
Eitingon could well have been an accomplice in a subtle political game that
was being played on a pan-European scale, in which the leader of interna-
tional psychoanalysis carried out the commands of Stalin’s secret service.
However, most of the evidence to that effect is circumstantial. A definitive
judgment will have to wait until the opening of the Soviet and French
archives. Nonetheless, Rado’s claims about Eitingon’s financial affairs and
about the Soviet sources of his capital seem extremely important. It would
appear that today there are sufficient data to link Max Eitingon in one de-
gree or another with his brother-in-law’s schemes. In any case, we can con-
clude from what Sandor Rado revealed that at the beginning and even the
middle of the 1920s, during the reign of Trotsky and the height of Soviet
psychoanalysis, the international psychoanalytic movement was financed
indirectly by Soviet money.
In this light, the psychoanalytic interests of another political figure,
Viktor Kopp, begin to make more sense. This diplomat of the Bolshevik
school, the first official Soviet representative in Berlin (1919-1921),
showed up at the Russian Psychoanalytic Society soon after a series of
speeches by Trotsky in which the latter attempted to enlist psychoanalysis
in the service of communism, declaring himself a defender of the discipline.
Kopp, who was three years older than Ioffe, was also in Vienna in 1909
and worked alongside Ioffe under Trotsky’s direction at Pravda. Later, in
1918, it was loffe who laid the groundwork for Kopp’s diplomatic career.*”
Of course, he also became involved with the psychoanalytic interests and
acquaintances that his Pravda colleagues maintained in the Vienna émigré
community. Beyond these specifics, we know nothing about the psychoana-
lytic career of the man who became vice president of the Russian society.
We do know that Kopp later became the Soviet ambassador to Japan and
Sweden; and in 1927 he joined the Trotskyist opposition.
During his term as vice president of the Russian Psychoanalytic Society,
Kopp also occupied a post as the representative of the foreign ministry to
the Council of Ministers, and he was a member of the collegium of the for-
eign ministry. This probably meant that he was responsible for coordinat-
ing the Bolshevik government’s foreign economic, diplomatic, and hard-
currency operations.
251
One might suppose from these facts that Viktor Kopp’s participation in
the management of the Psychoanalytic Society was not so much scientific
or organizational as it was operational. This supposition is indirectly sup-
ported by the unusual ties between psychoanalytic Moscow and psychoan-
alytic Berlin in 1923-1924. The State Psychoanalytic Institute in Moscow
was financed by a German trade union, Otto and Vera Schmidt traveled to
Berlin, and Kopp was elected vice president of the society shortly after he
arrived from Berlin. One might suppose that Kopp was linked to the
Eitingons’ fur business. As vice president of the Russian Psychoanalytic
Society, Kopp became Max Eitingon’s official partner, creating a channel of
communication that was legal from a Western point of view and could
serve as a cover for joint activity of a totally different sort.
The Suicide of the Intelligentsia

If Max Eitingon took part in the crimes committed abroad by the Stalin
regime, he was certainly not the only intellectual to have done so; even more
famous people participated in these events, including some who had ab-
solutely no connection to Russia. Under Naum Eitingon’s direction, the
armed attack on Trotsky was carried out by Mexican artist David Siquieros,
while Chilean poet Pablo Neruda was fired from the diplomatic corps for is-
suing Siquieros the visa that allowed him to escape from the Mexican author-
ities after the assassination. Lev Sedov and Ignaz Reiss were killed through
the direct collaboration of Mark Zborovsky, an anthropologist who worked
with Margaret Mead and later leaked to the Americans the whereabouts of a
network of KGB agents—information that bought him a pardon.”
Sergei Efron, author and husband of Marina Tsvetaeva, a Eurasianist by
conviction, also took part in the plots cooked up by Naum Eitingon’s
group. Reiss’s murder was on his conscience, and he participated in the
Miller affair. Efron managed to escape back to the USSR, something he had
dreamt of for decades in emigration. In his homeland he was arrested a
short time later and executed. Tsvetaeva, who probably learned of her hus-
band’s involvement only after his departure, found herself ostracized by
émigré circles in Paris. Nobody wanted to talk to the wife of a Bolshevik
agent. Only Eitingon’s cousin, who was living in Paris at the time, came to
her aid.4 In the end Tsvetaeva herself, though a brilliant poet and a woman
of unimpeachable respectability, returned voluntarily to the USSR, to her
murderous husband and the control of murderers.
Tsvetaeva’s fate, giving up her freedom and returning to inevitable sui-
cide, was symbolic of that entire generation of Russian intellectuals. Pavlov
once wrote: “It can be said without exaggeration that the former intelli-
gentsia is now partly destroying itself and partly decaying.””° But the
Russian intelligentsia sealed its own fate; and it was responsible for its own
252, Between Power and Death
destruction, not some outside force. This fact was affirmed by people
whose political reputation remained impeccable. Berdyaev called the
Russian revolution the suicide of the Russian intelligentsia.”° Nina
Berberova wrote with her characteristic precision: “Now ... I see that an-
nihilation came not by the direct route, but subtly, through a kind of blos-
soming; it was not so simple to make it through this ‘heyday,’ some people
did indeed thrive, and some perished, and some destroyed other people
without even knowing it.” In presenting several examples of this,
Berberova chose three of our story’s characters from among hundreds of
possible names: Trotsky, Voronsky, and Pilnyak.”’
We do not know how Eitingon felt about Soviet Russia (although by one
account he tried to convince Freud to reject a text that he considered anti-
Soviet?’). Aaron Steinberg recalled that ideas of “spiritual revolution” were
popular in Eitingon’s “psychoanalytic salon” in Berlin; Eurasianists were
common guests there, including the movement’s ideologue, P. P. Suv-
chinsky.?? In contrast, Jones informs us that in the mid-1920s Eitingon was
a true Germanophile. Thus, he would have had all the more reason to hate
Nazi Germany, which had forced him to emigrate to Israel.
Was Max Eitingon motivated by a desire to wreak vengeance on
Germany, the country he had once loved but that had so viciously and
senselessly ruined him and his career? He might well have collaborated
with his brother-in-law Naum out of the conviction that espionage was
necessary in order for the new, progressive Russia to oppose the new, re-
gressive Germany. There were, to be sure, other possible motives for such a
collaboration. At the beginning of the 1920s, Max Eitingon received money
through Naum Eitingon and Viktor Kopp. This was either Bolshevik “as-
sistance” offered to progressive fields of Western science or payment for
representation and business services—perhaps even for keeping tabs on
émigré circles. Trotsky’s fall from grace and the regime’s about-face must
have liquidated these sources of income for Eitingon, forcing him to close
not only his fur business but the Berlin psychoanalytic clinic as well. The
Great Depression in the United States would have provided Eitingon a con-
venient explanation for his new financial troubles. But history pressed for-
ward: Hitler seized power, presenting a direct threat to Max Eitingon, to
psychoanalysis, and to all German Jews. It is believable that at this point
Eitingon might have begun to pull old strings. In hopes of counteracting
fascism, perhaps he joined a risky game where the means and ends were out
of his control. Or perhaps he was confronted by demands to return the
money that had already been spent, in part on the earlier undertakings of
analysts in Vienna and Berlin, and more recently in Palestine. Naum
Eitingon, the head of Soviet counterintelligence, certainly had at his dis-
posal the means to force his relative, the head of international psychoanaly-
sis, to cooperate in covert operations.!
253
A Scene from Real Life

As we know, at the end of the 1920s and the beginning of the 1930s Lev
Shestov, a Russian philosopher and then political refugee in Paris, often vis-
ited his friend, psychoanalyst Max Eitingon, at his villa in the stylish Berlin
district of Tiergarten. One day he encountered there his old acquaintance
Aaron Steinberg, another Russian Jewish philosopher who once organized
the Free Philosophical Association in postrevolutionary Petrograd. Stein-
berg would soon become a prominent figure in the World Jewish
Congress. !°!
A practicing Jew, Steinberg viewed what was going on in Eitingon’s “psy-
choanalytic salon” with irony and instinctual alarm. “Shestov’s trips to
Berlin gave Dr. Eitingon the desired excuse to invite people over. ... Along
with people of his own school, he invited émigré intellectuals from various
countries,” Steinberg wrote in his memoirs. Corroboration of this report
can be found in another source. In June 1924, Vyacheslav Ivanov was sent
on an open-ended “business trip” by the ministry of education. One of
Shestov’s friends, in telling him about this, asked him to “force” Ivanov to
read his poetry “at Dr. Eitingon’s, like Remizov read his Petka last year.” !°2
It seems that many of the heroes of our story found their way to the villa
at Tiergarten. Vyacheslav Ivanov might well have conversed there with Lou
Andreas-Salomé; Moisei Wulff might have sat with colleagues fondly re-
membering Sabina Spielrein; and of course, Otto and Vera Schmidt could
not have passed by Eitingon’s salon during their trips to Berlin. ... Freud
had occasion to visit, as well. Naum Eitingon also might have dropped in,
under one of his professional aliases. It is highly likely that Viktor Kopp
was a frequent guest. Might Trotsky also have visited? Ioffe? Metner?
Yermakov? Bullitt? Bely? Zalkind? Pankeev? Eisenstein? Nabokov?
We leave these suppositions behind for the moment. During the evening
that Steinberg recalled, the usual visitors were gathered at the villa: Shestov,
who came to stay with Eitingon and see his sister the psychoanalyst; “a va-
riety of Russian émigré literary scholars connected with the journal
Imago”; “other guests, specialists in psychoanalysis and believers in all
sorts of syntheses”; and, finally, “one totally unexpected guest”—the famed
Russian singer Nadezhda Vasilievna Plevitskaya, accompanied by General
Skoblin and the rest of her entourage. |
Steinberg’s memoirs have preserved snippets of the conversation. “Both
of them, Freud and Shestov, have yanked the same mask from the face of
our civilization, the mask of lies and hypocrisy,” one of the young partygo-
ers parroted. The salon’s hostess, Nadezhda Eitingon, was trying to per-
suade Shestov to read “something of his own.” Meanwhile Suvchinsky,
who was one of the singer’s biggest fans, exclaimed: “Just think! Shestov
and Plevitskaya—it’s got to go down in history!”
“We'll get ourselves into history yet,” Steinberg punned angrily, clearly
smelling a rat. As per the custom of southern Russia, Plevitskaya sang
“Honor and Glory” to Shestov, but mispronounced his Jewish name and
patronymic. Steinberg saw it all as “intolerable mockery,” clowning “to
pander to God knows how low-caliber an audience.” With uncanny per-
ceptiveness, he inquired of Suvchinsky: “Say, who is the director of this
tacky scene? Could it be Plevitskaya?” But in the end, Shestov was per-
suaded to read from his philosophical writings at the dinner table.
Shestov read a fable entitled “The Philosopher of Miletus and the
Phrygian Shepherdess.” !°3 Thales of Miletus was so engrossed in his lofty
thoughts one day that he didn’t notice a cistern of water that lay in his
path. He stumbled and fell in with a splash. The quiet evening was sud-
denly shattered by resounding laughter. It was a young Phrygian shep-
herdess, who was driving her goats from the pasture to the city. The ques-
tion arises, who was right? Philosophy teaches that the wise man was right
in not watching where his feet landed, if in doing so he uncovered the pri-
mal essence of things. But it is more than possible, Shestov concluded his
tale, that the giggly shepherdess was wiser than the wise man.
“Oh, how marvelous! That’s just gr-r-eat!” Plevitskaya drawled in a
singsong voice, clapping her hands ecstatically and bowing to Shestov.!
All-Powerful, Because It Was True

The Enlightenment began with the breakdown of the old, once meaningful
picture of the world—a world that had been built on a higher reason,
which was nevertheless analogous to human reason and therefore theoreti-
cally accessible to human understanding. The Newtonian-Darwinian world
offered reason an entirely new place. Man could understand how the plan-
ets moved and how monkeys developed; but the meaning of it all remained
a mystery. Nor could man understand the meaning behind Braun’s move-
ment of people, goods, and ideas in the new society. Human beings had
their place in society, life taught them to value this place and fight for it; but
the spiritual system that defined views, opinions, and tastes did not define
man’s role or purpose. Man’s place in life was no longer a logical extrapo-
lation of the meaning of life. Meaning disappeared, and all that remained
was space and man, lost in that space.
Marxism fundamentally changed all this. Unlike Darwinian evolution,
Marxist history had coherent meaning. More than that, on the basis of this
new understanding, man could change the world! Changing the world was
the primary task set before science, the most prestigious institution in the
new society. Along with the new system of meanings, a new system of
places was built.
255
Man regained his faith in the supremacy of reason, in the ultimate ratio-
nality of existence. Natural or traditional life was seen as intolerably
squalid and sluggish, with no more reason than a can of worms. Life, there-
fore, could and should be rebuilt on a new and conscious foundation.
Reason would no longer be set in motion by a God separated from
mankind, nor by some abstract and isolated absolute; reason would be im-
plemented directly by the hands of man and his comrades. For Trotsky and
his comrades, this was key: “Socialist construction is in essence a con-
sciously planned construction,... striving to rationalize human
relations, . . . to subordinate them to reason, armed with science.” The con-
ditions for this process were ripe all over the world: “The forces of produc-
tion have long been ready for Socialism. ... There is only one last subjec-
tive factor missing: consciousness is missing from life.” 15
The belated Russian Enlightenment found its best expression and highest
fulfillment in Trotsky’s words and deeds. Trotsky’s favorite tactic, the
“purge from the top down”—of God and czar, of chaos and competition,
of unconsciousness and darkness—was the last word of the Enlightenment.
No longer dramatic, this word today sounds both tragic and ludicrous.
Violence was inevitable along this path; violence invariably accompanied
the Enlightenment, and not only in Russia. The defeat of Trotsky put an
end to an entire period of history, perhaps the best period for intellectuals.
Stalin’s political victory meant the victory of dark force for its own sake
over bright, abstract dreams, the victory of will over reason, earth over cul-
ture, charisma over utopia, Nietzsche over Hegel. It meant the defeat of the
Enlightenment, empirical proof that the epoch’s great project was unviable,
or at least insufficient.
Lenin’s words were taken up and repeated many times by Stalin: “Marx’s
doctrine is all-powerful because it is true.” Usually this phrase is perceived
as empty tautology; but it is in fact a profound, truly philosophical for-
mula. All one had to do in order to change the world was to find the truth.
Things would then be transformed magically, in a revolutionary way, in the
twinkling of an eye. Revolution was conceived in just this way: as a one-
time act of universal understanding and illumination. There is a similar
concept in psychoanalysis: insight, the instantaneous act of understanding
and restructuring accumulated memory.
However, not even the most dedicated psychoanalyst can set his sights on
a conscious understanding of the processes that occur in every cell of the hu-
man body. The true art of psychoanalysis is the search for a delicate balance
between what needs to be brought out into the conscious for arbitrary regu-
lation and what can and should remain in the unconscious. A great multi-
tude of processes take place in human beings that we cannot realize and that
cannot therefore be regulated consciously. There are other processes that are
accessible to the conscious, but that work much better without its interfer-
ence. Any actor or rhetorician, anyone who can dance, knows that all it
takes is one little thought about what you’re doing, and you’re sure to screw
up. Consciousness is engaged during certain stages and disengages itself dur-
ing others, when emotional or intuitive factors are more important—curios-
ity, arousal, inspiration, or fear. These other factors go beyond the limits of
consciousness, and there is no way to replace them by conscious thought.
The amazing idiosyncrasy of communist theoreticians was the persistence
with which they rejected the significance of such unconscious factors in
every realm: in economics, in the organization of labor, in education, in
philosophical ponderings about thought processes, and in psychotherapy.
“They wanted to organize everything, so the sun would come up according
to schedule and the weather would be determined in an administrative of-
fice. They could not understand the anarchy of life, its unconsciousness, the
fact that a tree knows best how it should grow.” Viktor Shklovsky was right
on the mark when he wrote these words in 1923.1°
Psychoanalysis combined the elaboration of practical ways to translate
the unconscious to the conscious with an extremely detailed study of the un-
conscious itself. An instantaneous act of realization could follow extended,
years-long analysis of the subconscious. Bolshevism began from the other
end. The elemental unconscious was completely devalued. Only what was
self-conscious, according to the only true scientific theory, deserved to exist.
These conclusions seem consistent with the primary idea of Bolshevism:
the statization of property. In point of fact, private property could be con-
trolled “unconsciously” as well as consciously—based on traditions, practi-
cal experience, or intuition. Collective property, like stocks, could be con-
trolled based on democracy; but state property could be controlled based
on science alone, or at least in its name.
In this worldview, ideas were more real than reality itself. Bolshevik sci-
ence in every way resembled the real thing, but in fact it was the exact in-
verse, the mirror image: In place of facts there were plans, in place of hy-
potheses—reality. If reality did not correspond to the plan’s ideal, then it
had to be remade or eliminated, just as a scientist might amend or reject an
unconvincing hypothesis. Then again, scientists could create without com-
punction whatever they pleased within the ethereal world of ideas: Rejected
hypotheses won’t rot with dystrophy and scurvy, they don’t fill mass graves
to overflowing, and their bones won’t protrude from foundation ditches on
construction sites half a century later.
So-called war communism, introduced under Trotsky’s direction during
the years after the revolution, meant total control by the state not only of
material and intellectual production but also of distribution and consump-
tion. From then on, the reins of this massive control network were to be put
in the hands of reason, not subjected to pitiful, individualistic demands. To
each person his ration; less would be illogical, more would also be illogical.
ASI
Of course, it is easier to weigh a ration of bread—provided there is bread—

than to determine a reasonable measure in culture or sexuality.
This was the purpose of the various fields of Soviet science. From the be-
ginning of the 1920s, there were heroic attempts to create scientific norms
in the organization of labor, daily life, recreation, nutrition, education, and
everything else that accompanied human life. The dramatic part was that
scientifically these attempts were not at all without merit; on the contrary,
they gave rise to the greatest accomplishments of Soviet science, recognized
the world over. For example, work aimed at culling scientifically tested in-
structions for performing maximally efficient basic actions (how to hold a
hammer, how to walk, and so forth) was the starting point of Nikolai
Bernstein’s concept, which later became famous around the world in the
field of physiology. Research on labor organization was run by Alexei
Gastev, a poet of the radical avant-garde; but even there, serious work was
done in industrial psychology, in many ways ahead of its time. The work of
pedologists, dedicated to introducing scientific principles into the education
of the new generation, was carried out on a grand scale.
There were some truly important scholars scattered among the semi-
educated masses that took part in the activity of the steadily expanding
planning bodies. One was theologian and mathematician, Father Pavel Flo-
rensky; God knows if he was any good at his new job. Even the Main
Political Directorate and the Procuracy had their share of serious re-
searchers: Andrey Vyshinsky, for instance, included the associative experi-
ment in interrogation and investigation. Here, however, as in other areas of
government, methods of physical persuasion were deemed far more practi-
cal.
To Recast Dreams as Reality

It is interesting to compare the ideas of Trotsky and the Moscow analysts of
the 1920s with the vision that has formed today on the basis of this century’s
difficult experience. We cite the English poet W. H. Auden, whose pithy for-
mulation is an excellent substitute for a more long-winded discussion:
Both Marx and Freud start from the failures of civilization, one from the poor,
one from the ill. Both see human behavior determined, not consciously, but by
instinctive needs, hunger and love. Both desire a world where rational choice
and self-determination are possible. The difference between them is the in-
evitable difference between the man who studies crowds in the street, and the
man who sees the patient, or at most the family, in the consulting room.
_.. The socialist accuses the psychologist of caving in to the status quo, trying
to adapt the neurotic to the system, thus depriving him of a potential revolu-
tionary: the psychologist retorts that the socialist is trying to lift himself by his
own boot tags ... so that after he has won his power by revolution he will
recreate the same conditions. Both are right. As long as civilization remains as
it is, the number of patients the psychologist can cure are very few, and as soon
as socialism attains power, it must learn to direct its own interior energy and
will need the psychologist.!°”
Freud, too, voiced his judgments on this question. In 1913, he told the
son of Theodor Herzl, the socialist founder of Zionism: “Your father is one
of those people who have turned dreams into reality. This is a very rare and
dangerous breed. ...I would simply call them the sharpest opponents of
my scientific work. It is my modest profession to simplify dreams, to make
them clear and ordinary. They, on the contrary, confuse the issue, turn it
upside down, command the world. . . . Ideal in psychoanalysis, they deal in
psychosynthesis.” !°%
And Freud admonished young Hans: “Stay away from them, young
man, ... stay away, even though one of them was your father; . . . perhaps
because of that..."
8
Dneprostroi and the Science of Man

Relating the successes of the pedological movement during the 1920s, Aron
Zalkind was hard pressed to favorably compare the level achieved under
the Soviet regime with progress made before the revolution, since pedology
had been practically nonexistent before the revolution.! Zalkind was an ex-
tremely active participant in almost all of the important events in the his-
tory of Soviet pedology, and as such he was doubtless a biased observer.
The founder of the interdisciplinary science of the child and the man who
coined the very word “pedology” was G. Stanley Hall, one of the giants of
American psychology. He also became part of the history of psychoanaly-
sis, for it was he who arranged Freud’s famous trip to America in 1909.
Later, in 1911, Stanley Hall became one of the founding members of the
American Psychoanalytic Society. That same year, the First Pedological
Congress was held in Brussels.
Pedology and psychoanalysis crossed paths frequently both in Russia and
in the West. This was only natural: Both disciplines shared an interest in
childhood and a practical orientation. In western Europe and America,
however, psychoanalysis continued its triumphant expansion into the hu-
manities, social service, and daily life, while pedology quickly lost in impor-
tance. Twenty years later, Vygotsky informed readers of the newly founded
Soviet journal Pedology that in the West, as opposed to the Soviet Union,
this progressive science had long since died out or at least had become a
walking corpse.”
In the Soviet Union, the picture looked completely different. By the end of
the 1920s, psychoanalysis had been all but stamped out, while pedology was
undergoing an unprecedented boom. Nevertheless, several of the leading fig-
ures in pedology, the foremost of whom was Aron Zalkind, had received
psychoanalytic training. The best conceptual achievements made in pedol-
ogy, generally associated with the late works of Vygotsky and Blonsky, bear
the incontrovertible mark of a dialogue with psychoanalysis. In 1923,
Polina Efrussi, who was not at all sympathetic to psychoanalysis, noted that
259
260 Pedological Perversions
“Freud’s method has managed to penetrate over the last few years from psy-
chiatry and psychopathology into Russian pedology as well.”°
Besides psychoanalysis, Vladimir Bekhterev’s school of psychoneurology
served as an important source for the post-revolutionary pedological move-
ment. The first pedological institution in Russia was founded quite early
on—in 1909 in St. Petersburg—as part of the Psychoneurological Academy,
funded with money donated by businessman and philanthropist V. T.
Zimin.* The small building that housed the pedological facility still stands
today next to the fence surrounding the Psychoneurological Institute.
Today it is occupied by government offices.
Several typically bureaucratic attempts were made to implement
Bekhterev’s research program, which called for an all-encompassing study of
mankind. A few years after Bekhterev’s demise and the collapse of the
Psychoneurological Academy, which he had founded, “at a meeting chaired
by Comrades Stalin, Molotov, and Voroshilov and attended by Maxim
Gorky, .. . the decision was made to reorganize the Institute of Experimental
Medicine in Leningrad into the All-Union Scientific Research Institute for the
Comprehensive Study of Mankind.” This decision, according to one eyewit-
ness, “was met with general approval, ... and due to the exceptional impor-
tance and grand scale of the Institute’s proposed goals, it was nicknamed the
‘Dneprostroi’ of Natural and Medical Science.”> The idea of undertaking a
comprehensive study of man through an interdisciplinary synthesis, first pro-
posed by Bekhterev on the eve of the first Russian revolution, turned out to
be remarkably popular in a totalitarian atmosphere and outlived more than
one generation of scholars and administrators.
In the first decade after the Bolshevik revolution, pedology ripened and
consolidated its strength in the shelter of Bekhterev’s looming authority.
His tragic death, the story of which is today common knowledge (see chap-
ter 4), is also symbolic, in that it occurred after the close of the First
Conference of Neurologists and Psychiatrists and on the eve of the opening
of the First Pedological Conference. Bekhterev was supposed to chair both
conferences. The Pedological Conference began with a memorial service at
which Vyshinsky and Kalinin paid their respects. The death of the great
leader of psychoneurology was followed by a series of conflicts between his
closest disciples. In the end, pedology emerged as the leader of the new sci-
ences that had reached maturity within the confines of psychoneurology.
The role of ideologue and leader would pass to Aron Zalkind, a pedologist
and former psychoanalyst.
Border Conflicts
Pedology was a scientific discipline characteristic of the beginning of the
twentieth century. The new concepts that were competing for status as
Pedological Perversions 261
fields of knowledge or even as sciences at that time emerged not as a result

of the continuous, gradually accumulating labor of generations of scientists
but through the revolutionary work of brilliant individuals who were estab-
lishing new ways of looking at phenomena. Such was the genesis of psycho-
analysis. The result of this process generally was a school that might be
more or less productive but that would always remain only one of many
subfields within a given science. In the atmosphere of intolerance that ac-
companied the struggle for survival and power under Bolshevik rule, any
new school tended to squeeze out its competitors, pushing for a monopoly
of understanding in its field. Each school declared its point of view the only
true approach, while other points of view were dismissed as unscientific.
This situation, as a rule, was recognized not as a dispute within the science
itself, but as a “border conflict” between distinct disciplines with claims on
a single subject matter—for example, between biology and sociology, psy-
chology and physiology, pedology and industrial psychology, and pedology
and education. Endless discussions about “lines of demarcation” to divide
the sciences and prescribe the permissible field of endeavor for each disci-
pline were typical of scientific development in the totalitarian society—in
part, perhaps, because the level of abstraction that characterized these dis-
putes made them understandable to political leaders. Interdisciplinary dis-
cussions differed from other scientific disputes in that they allowed for sim-
ple, administrative solutions: The losing side of the debate could simply be
closed down, as was done later with pedology, while the winning side—ed-
ucation, for instance—was declared the only revealer of truth. Another way
such disputes were solved was by interdisciplinary synthesis, which in-
volved the creation of new organizational structures: After the synthesis of
structures had been accomplished, the representatives of distinct sciences
were obliged to communicate with one another, which was supposed to in-
duce intellectual cross-fertilization. Pedology was constructed precisely in
this latter way, as a comprehensive science of the child rather than a range
of “partial” sciences that studied various aspects of infantile life—psychol-
ogy, sociology, anatomy, physiology, and so forth—in isolation from one
~ another. However, the integration of information gathered by different sci-
entific disciplines remains to this day extremely problematic because of the
divergence of methods used in the various disciplines.
The leaders of pedology wrote voluminously about their new field, insist-
ing that it was not just a casserole thrown together from the leftovers of
other disciplines. Pavel Blonsky was stricter than most in defining pedol-
ogy’s field of study: “Pedology is the study of the entire set of symptoms of
the various eras, phases, and stages of childhood, their temporary conse-
quences, and their dependence on a range of conditions.” It was not simply
the “study of children,” it was the “study of childhood.”® Blonsky con-
ceived of pedology as a scientific, theoretical basis for applied education. In
the effort to get his point across, he expressed this thought with a metaphor
that might shock readers today: “As an animal breeder relies on zoology in
his work, so must a teacher rely on pedology.” However, the course on
pedology that Blonsky wrote was roughly equivalent in its scope to today’s
courses in developmental psychology, with descriptions given consistently
by age groups. Psychological data were correlated with the results of physi-
ological, anatomical, and genetic research.
Vygotsky, who made a special attempt to clarify the relationship between
pedology and industrial psychology, went through quite a bit of paper try-
ing to reinforce the special status of both sciences. At the same time, he
noted that differences between two disciplines do not necessarily prevent
them from intersecting in a certain object—in this case, the child. Each sci-
ence, he said, could continue on its merry way, minding its own affairs.’
Isaac Spielrein made the same claim from a position in industrial psychol-
ogy, insisting that there had to be “a decline in artificial delineations, that
is, those not inherent in the objects under study, delineations of the sort
that exist between such related sciences as pedology, psychology, experi-
mental education, and industrial psychology.”® On the other hand,
Vygotsky saw that “we fear intermingling like the plague,” since it “would
seem to mean the end of existence for separate sciences.”
The political leaders of the scientific community worried more than any-
one about the demarcation and subordination of various disciplines, since
for them the importance and universality of the discipline they headed were
always direct indicators of their personal political weight. Bukharin hinted
at this when he described the situation of pedologists: “The relationship be-
tween pedology and education ... is such that from a certain point of view
pedology is the servant of education. But ... the position of servant here is
[different], in that the servant is giving the orders.” Zalkind, who was a
contender for leadership in the field of psychoneurological science, tended
to exaggerate the importance of pedology to the point where it became a
universal science of human development. In much the same way, Vygotsky
occasionally likened his quest ,for interdisciplinary synthesis to pedology,
asserting that a pedology of adults was possible and necessary.
The theoretical views of pedologists were expressed in the form of “prin-
ciples.” The principle of unity and the principle of development seem to
have been shared by all pedological theoreticians. To these Zalkind added
the principle of activity: “Personality is studied as an active, rather than a
contemplative, phenomenon.” Apart from these concepts, pedologists also
emphasized the concept of plasticity, in other words the principle that envi-
ronment exerts a formative influence on children’s development.
Environment itself, Zalkind insisted, must be studied not “like an inven-
tory, but within its active, dynamic purpose.” These principles, codified by
pedological publications of the late 1920s, would later be incorporated in-
delibly and without significant alteration into the methodological canon of

Soviet psychology.!°
But the most profound pedological principle may have been formulated
by Nikolai Rybnikov. In his book The Language of the Child ™ (which is
still unique, along with its appendix The Russian Child’s Dictionary),
Rybnikov wrote: “Pedology tends to see childhood not only as the prepara-
tory stage leading to adulthood, but considers the childhood period to have
significance in and of itself.” The language of the child, for instance, is not
simply a primitive form of adult speech; it has its own rules, its own lexicon,
its own logic. Today, even in Russia, the “discovery of childhood” in science
is attributed to American ethnography of the 1920s and 1930s, and particu-
larly to the works of Margaret Mead.'? The work of Nikolai Rybnikov, who
led the first large-scale study of the language, ideals, and political concep-
tions of the Russian child, was forgotten in Russia and remained unknown
in the West, despite its originality and potential usefulness.
The Organized Simplification of Culture

It would be impossible to comprehend the metamorphosis that transformed
Russian psychoanalysis into pedology without at least partially understand-
ing the political atmosphere during the early years of the Bolshevik regime,
an atmosphere that suffused the life and work of the movement’s leaders
and many of its practitioners. While society’s mood swings have little to do
with science, they can determine the direction, values, and global method-
ology that scientists adopt. This influence becomes particularly marked
when the dominant mood in society acquires the unusually extremist char-
acter that it did in Russia during the 1920s.
“Listen to the Revolution” was Alexander Blok’s 1918 call to the intelli-
gentsia. The cause and duty of the intelligentsia, he wrote, was “to see what
has been thought up. .. . What has been thought up? To remake everything.
To make everything anew; to make our false, tedious, horrid life into one
that is just, pure, happy, and beautiful.”!° This jubilant embrace of the new
government was typical in the social groups that formed the cadre base for
pedology. Bekhterev, who did much to cause this turnaround in the mood
of the intelligentsia, announced at the end of 1923 at the All-Union
Conference of Scientific Workers: “Back in 1920, after my public speeches
in favor of Soviet rule, my colleagues wouldn’t leave me alone; they called
me a turncoat and a traitor. Now in scientific circles it would be considered
strange not to recognize the huge advances and historic wisdom of the
October revolution.”!*
Ivan Pavlov at that time took a different attitude toward events. In 1923,
Pavlov wrote that it was impossible to understand from any angle how the
Bolsheviks could be so certain that global revolution would win a speedy
victory. “A lot of money is being spent on things, like on Japan, with an eye
to the global revolution, while our academic laboratory gets only three
rubles in gold per month.” He added, “Certain people have imagined that
they can entirely remake today’s educational system, despite their own ad-
mission of ignorance.” The great scientist had a hard time understanding
how the Bolsheviks’ lofty goals could be attained by workers whose igno-
rance was obvious even to the Bolsheviks themselves. Much later, on
October 19, 1928, Pavlov wrote to the government:
Educated people have been transformed into mute observers and executors.
They see how mercilessly and for the most part unsuccessfully everything in
life is being changed to the foundations, how mistakes are being piled one atop
the other.. .. You have simplified man too much in your work, in hopes of
making him truly common property, for instance by locking him up in all sorts
of endless meetings to hear the same doctrine repeated over and over.'*
Bukharin replied hotly, coming right to the point: “And we will change
it, just as we need it to be, there is no doubt we will change it! We will
change it just as we have changed ourselves, as we changed the govern-
ment, as we changed the army, as we are changing the economy, as we
changed [the peasants of Russia] into an active, strong-willed, quickly
growing, popular mass that is greedy for life.” Everything can be changed,
and what’s more changed in just the way we would like. Bukharin’s conde-
scending attitude (shared by Pavlov as well) toward the ignorant masses in
no way dampened his faith in the feasibility of change (it did Pavlov’s), and,
on the contrary, only fanned his enthusiasm. “A common mistake among
important people (and particularly among scientists) of the ‘old world’ is
that when they evaluate the catastrophe of the entire old regime they vainly
console themselves by applying the standard measures [to which they are
accustomed] of peaceful, ‘normal’ capitalist life. This is like Gulliver trying
to put on a baby Lilliputian’s pants.”
There was a dichotomy between the new science of Gullivers and
Pavlov’s Lilliputian science.'® The new science of man was the science of his
transformation. The question, “What is it?” from then on would be re-
placed by the question “How can it be transformed?” Everything intrinsic,
stable, and inaccessible to external influence was declared insignificant or
outdated, unimportant, and Lilliputian. The process of development under
the influence of outside forces was declared the only important factor. In
his speech to the First Pedological Conference, Bukharin said: “The ques-
tion of social environment and its influence must be solved, in the sense
that the influence of social environment is greater than usually supposed.
Changes can take place much more quickly, and the profound reorganiza-
tion that we call the cultural revolution has a sociobiological equivalent
that reaches down to the very physiological nature of the [human] organ-
ism.”'? There is nothing specific here concerning methodology, and

Bukharin’s announcement is simply an adaptation of the general principle
that “there is no fortress that Bolsheviks cannot take.” In nature and soci-
ety, in the child and his development, there was nothing that could not be
influenced; everything could be changed, including the physiological nature
of the human being.
There was consensus regarding this point of principle: Minister of Health
Nikolai Semashko parroted the Party leader at the same pedological confer-
ence: “The development of pedological science, which includes medicine, is
distinguished today by the attention paid to the influence of envi-
ronment.”!® Nadezhda Krupskaya, who was slipping from her position,
still managed a relatively aggressive statement to this regard: “Some see un-
derestimating the influence of environment as an antidote against the
Marxist elements that are penetrating the school ever more deeply.”!”
When the spread of Marxism depends upon a recognition of the influence
of environment, to underestimate the influence of environment is to speak
out against Marxism. In these statements we find the origins of the barrier
that Lysenko later raised in genetics, economics, and the whole of Soviet
science. Scholars found themselves faced with a choice: to be swept under
the carpet, or to promise to storm any fortress and change any principle.
But the minister of education, Anatoly Lunacharsky, was most expressive
of all, declaring that “when pedology has learned the nature of the child and
the laws by which children develop, . . . it will have illuminated the most im-
portant question: ... How to produce a new man that will parallel the pro-
duction of new equipment in the economic sphere.”*° Not only is it striking
that a cultured, intelligent person could say such a thing; it is also shocking
that in this new world such statements had become so commonplace.
A few years earlier, Blonsky, who had been a junior lecturer and neopla-
tonist but at that time was serving in the ministry of education, had writ-
ten: “Along with botany and animal husbandry, there should be another,
analogous science: human husbandry, and education ... should take its
place along with veterinary medicine and phytoculture, borrowing methods
and principles from them as from more developed, related disciplines.”*!
This passage, written in all earnestness, formed the core of a run-of-the-mill
textbook on education, a book on which more than one generation of
teachers probably cut their teeth. Bukharin was expressing the same idea
more directly when he wrote: “We need to direct our strength not into ab-
stract chatter, but into an effort to produce a certain number of living
workers in the shortest possible time frame; qualified, specially schooled
machines that we can start up right away and set into motion.”**
Old-school psychoanalysts clearly perceived a threat to their position. In
1926, Moisei Wulff wrote: “The ideal teaching method should be ab-
solutely free of any ulterior motives, of all principles and interests outside
of the child... . Ican repeat this triumphant truth because lately under the
influence of a misinterpreted doctrine of reflexes, there has arisen a re-
newed form of the old, naive conception of the child as a tabula rasa on
which anything can be written. There have been some assertions put for-
ward that with the help of the appropriate catalysts, the teacher can de-
velop whatever ‘conditioned reflexes’ in the child that he wishes and thus
mold the ‘right kind’ of person.”7?
Freud himself responded respectfully but skeptically to the idea of a new
reconstruction of human relations in his work The Future of an IIlusion,
which was originally published in the 1920s and republished in Russian
translation by Ivan Yermakov in the 1930s.** “That would be a golden
age,” he wrote. “The grand nature of the plan and its importance for the
future of human civilization cannot be disputed.” At the same time, he ex-
pressed doubts that the idea was attainable: “It may be alarming to think of
the enormous amount of coercion that will inevitably be required before
these intentions can be carried out,” he wrote, with amazing foresight.”°
Old revolutionaries found their own ways of processing and expressing
the spiritual and political dead end in which they found themselves. In
1923, Krupskaya published a sympathetic description of Taylor’s system
(the division of labor into its simplest elements and the institution of an ex-
act definition of each worker’s function), proposing it as a means to fight
against the rampant bureaucratism of Soviet institutions.** Emmanuel
Yenchman, who had served as a military commander during the civil war
that followed the Bolshevik revolution, declared in his Theory of the New
Biology that any discussion of knowledge, reason, or worldviews was just
an exploitative ruse. He asserted that after the overthrow of the exploiters,
everyone would let down their guard, after which all the “reactions of
knowledge” would be annihilated, giving rise to a “single system of orga-
nized movements.”*” Yenchman explained that by “producing an organic
cataclysm” within himself, he had “gained a few years head start on the re-
volting mass of laborers.” For this reason, he seriously put forward his own
candidacy for the position of head of the “Revolutionary Scientific Council
of the Republic” or even of a “world commune with corresponding subor-
dinate bodies all over the republic or even the globe” (incidentally, the bril-
liant poet Velimir Khlebnikov also had designs on that position).
Despite the absurdity of these ideas, they bear the imprint of a Russian
culture that not long before had entertained seemingly well-founded claims
to greatness. As Moisei Altman, a student of Vyacheslav Ivanov’s and later
a prominent scholar of literature in his own right, wrote:
Perhaps besides all these eugenics,

I, though a bookworm Pharisee,
Am more of a decadent and neurasthenic.
267
“All these eugenics” was Altman’s poetic way of denoting the various sci-
ences that were in fashion at the time, disciplines that stylish people were
involved in, either simultaneously or in series. Altman recalled how he
wrote his “terribly long and terribly revolutionary” articles using a new or-
thography, while he wrote his diary using the old. Ivanov sensed this dual-
ism in him, a feature characteristic of the entire generation, but chose to ig-
nore it. “I heard two songs, but chose to listen only to one.”28
Meanwhile, Bukharin devoted dozens of pages of newsprint to denounc-
ing Yenchman’s delirium.*? He and other opponents agreed that they would
never have reacted to Yenchman’s far-fetched writings if the “theory of new
biology” had not found support among young Communists. All of this,
however, was merely a discussion among soft-spoken, cultured people. In
contrast, the tone of Mikhail Levidov’s manifesto, published in 1923 by the
journal Krasnaia nov’, was probably much more understandable and grati-
fying to Party members who had just finished fighting a war: “The repug-
nant word ‘intellectual’ has already disappeared from circulation among
the younger generation; that spineless, flabby, morose, damp-chicken word,
the likes of which you’ll not find in any human tongue. ...In twenty or
thirty years, the tribe of intellectuals will disappear from Russian lands.”
The only honorable thing for an intellectual to do, Levidov wrote bluntly,
was to kill himself; or if he wanted to dishonor himself, an intellectual
could emigrate; but the most despicable intellectual for Levidov was the
one who remained alive in Soviet Russia.°°
Levidov’s poetic sentiments were fully compatible with the tone of his
day, dominated as it was by the ill educated and the illiterate. In 1923, eight
to ten times less was spent on each college student’s education than had
been spent in 1914. The average salary for rural teachers was only seven-
teen percent of what they had earned in 1914. Overall, spending on educa-
tion per capita was four times lower. “But the pre-war situation is really
not our educational ideal,” wrote the ministry of education bureaucrat who
presented these figures, and there was a touch of melancholy in his
words.3! Fifty-two percent of school-age children were not in school in
1923, which meant that about four million children were receiving no edu-
cation at all. Only thirty-two percent of the population could read. The
ministry of education was saddled with the colossal task of universal edu-
cation and literacy.
A series of decrees from the ministry of education had radically changed
teaching in the Soviet Union. Grades and exams were abolished, and home-
work was eliminated. The State Academic Council, under the leadership of
Krupskaya, Blonsky, and Shatsky, introduced new school curricula.
Gargantuan efforts were undertaken in order to set in motion a system of
vocational training. Teachers opposed these measures, as they were unpre-
pared to implement them and felt that they were losing control over the
children. “The teachers didn’t exactly sabotage the process, they were sim-
ply ... incapable of accepting and assimilating a mass of new ideas.” The
ministry of education logically concluded that this was “not the teacher’s
fault, it is his problem and his misfortune.”*?
But Lunacharsky and his colleagues were unable to slow down the pace
of the cultural revolution. Bukharin’s “reconstruction of man as he should
be” and Levidov’s “organized simplification of culture” had to proceed as
planned by the Marxist intellectuals in the ministry of education. New
times were at hand, and they promised changes that even Levidov had
never imagined in his wildest dreams.
The Infrastructure of Utopia

At the First All-Russian Conference of Psychoneurology, which took place
in Moscow in January 1923, Polina Efrussi professed astonishment at the
volume and popularity of the work done by practicing psychologists. In par-
ticular, she singled out pedologists and industrial psychologists. “Before our
very eyes, there has been an incredibly swift reevaluation of psychology’s im-
portance in daily life.”°? This amazing productivity is no less puzzling today:
Where did the money come from to support such frenetic intellectual activ-
ity in poverty-stricken, postrevolutionary Russia, which could barely find
the funds with which to provide its citizens even a rudimentary education?
It is difficult for us now to understand the hopes that the new govern-
ment had invested in pedology. The science was generally viewed as a pow-
erful, magical force that would swiftly solve any problem. Lunacharsky,
whose ministry for decades to come would struggle to accomplish even a
small portion of the tasks it had been assigned, announced at the First
Pedological Conference: “Our school network can approach the standards
of a truly normal school network ... only when it is penetrated clean
through by a network of pedologists with sufficient scientific training.
... Also, there must be a strong little pedologist living in the brain of each
teacher.”°* It wasn’t firewood, or school buildings, or teachers that
Lunacharsky needed more than anything to build a new educational net-
work—he needed pedologists.
In order to construct a kingdom of reason in a country where seventy
percent of the population could neither read nor understand the words pro-
nounced from the podium, naturally a new intellectual elite had to be cre-
ated. At the very least, nothing was to be done that might interfere with the
thousands of young people who were gripped by abstract ideas and wanted
to make their own immediate contribution to the construction of utopia.
The number of teacher training colleges in the country increased by fifty
percent over the course of the 1919-1920 school year, but the colleges were
still overflowing with teachers in training: In 1921, there were six times as
many students enrolled as there had been in 1914.35
Lydia Ginzburg recalled with a touch of irony the frantic activity of
young intellectuals: “During the war communism years, when once presti-
gious, inherited professions were extremely insecure and often inapplicable,
the youth of the intelligentsia flocked in droves to become musicians, ac-
tors, writers, and journalists, turning their household talents and hobbies
into professions.” It is simple enough to add educational reformer, pedolo-
gist, and industrial psychologist to this list of new professions. “There was
a kind of ease and momentary applicability, something akin to the pressure
and transitory nature of the time, something that suited the vision of an old
world forever in ruins. Everyone had to put bread on the table, besides, and
nobody imagined then how difficult it could be to get bread.”3°
In 1922, several new institutions of higher learning opened their doors in
Moscow: the Superior Courses in Pedology, Psychological Research
Courses, Superior Courses in Scientific Education, the Central Institute for
Organizers of Popular Education, the Academy of Social Training, and the
Teachers’ Institute for the Study of Defects in Children. Educators were
also being trained in four other teachers’ colleges and nine vocational
schools. There was also a wide range of scientific research centers operating
in the field: the Psychological Institute of the First Moscow State University
(directed by G. I. Chelpanov), the Central Pedological Institute (whose ad-
ministrator was N. A. Rybnikov), the Moscow State Psychoneurological
Institute (A. P. Nechaev), the State Medical Pedological Institute of the
Ministry of Health (M. O. Gurevich), the Laboratory for Experimental
Psychology and Pediatric Psychoneurology under the auspices of the
Neurological Institute at the First Moscow State University (G. I.
Rossolimo), the Medical-Pedagogical Clinic (V. P. Kashchenko), the Central
Psychological Laboratory of Auxiliary Schools (P. P. Sokolov), the
Experimental Psychological Laboratory of the General Staff Academy
(T. E. Segalov), the Soviet Labor Unions’ Central Labor Institute (A. P.
Gastev), the Ministry of Labor’s Laboratory of Industrial Psychology (I. N.
Spielrein), the Central Educational Institute for the Humanities (V. N.
Shulgin), the Museum of Preschool Education (E. A. Arkin), and even the
Institute of Social Psychology (R. Y. Wipper).°” At first, only the ministries
of education and health were involved in pedology. Soon, the ministry of
transportation opened its own pedological office, followed by the industrial
ministries. The labor union and the ministry of labor were actively engaged
in applied, industrial psychology.
Natalya Traugott, who in 1927 was studying at the department of pedol-
ogy at the Leningrad Teachers’ Institute, recalled the “exceptional” educa-
tion she received there. Lectures were given by Bekhterev, celebrated pedol-
ogist M. Y. Basov, prominent animal psychologist V. A. Wagner, and by

Vygotsky and Blonsky, who came up from Moscow regularly.
Pedological work went on in the provinces as well as in Moscow and
Petrograd. In 1923, the first issue of the Pedological Journal was published
in the town of Orel, edited by Basov; Bekhterev became coeditor after the
first issue. This mouthpiece of the Orel Pedological Society did not last
long—just long enough to acquaint its readership with a passable explana-
tion of the Rohrschach ink-blot test, an overview of Anglo-American IQ
tests, a few articles by Riga’s psychoanalysts, and finally a marvelous bit of
empirical research on the children of Orel, done in 1918 (see below).
A community of professionals was gradually taking shape. By the mid-
1920s, a number of collective actors—scientific societies and associations—
had evolved: In 1923 in Moscow, there were a Psychological Society
(chaired by Ivan Ilyin), a Psychoanalytic Society (headed by Yermakovy),
and a Society of Experimental Psychology (chaired by A. P. Nechaev). May
1927 saw the founding of the Moscow Association for Psychological
Testing, under Blonsky’s chairmanship. In November of the same year, the
All-Russian Society of Industrial Psychology was registered (with I.
Spielrein as chairman). By the end of 1927, the Pedological Society was
ready to hold its first conference.
The pedological movement was developing to a large degree from the
bottom up, rather than from the top down. In preparation for the confer-
ence, the director of the Central Pedological Institute, Nikolai Rybnikov,
attempted to survey sister institutions across the country. He was taken
aback by the scale of the pedological movement, and most of all by the fact
that it was mainly the result of grass-roots activity. “The network of pedo-
logical institutions has proven incredibly expansive—significantly larger
than we thought when we began our research.” The network of “grass-
roots cells” was particularly huge. Rybnikov mentioned specialized pedo-
logical institutions in Ryazan, Tashkent, Orel, and the town of Sarapul in
the Ural region. The laboratory at the Uglich Teachers’ Vocational School,
for example, was working on typical pedological problems: the concepts
held by local schoolchildren, their interests and ideals; knowledge tests; an-
thropometry; the study of environment. Unfortunately, however, Rybnikov
found that these pedological institutions were linked together in a haphaz-
ard manner.*®
It was only in 1931, after a change in management (Alexei Bubnov re-
placed Lunacharsky), that the ministry of education brought a measure of
order to the work of the nation’s practicing pedologists. Directives were is-
sued concerning “regional pedological laboratories” and “local pedological
offices.” The roll of personnel in each regional pedological laboratory was
to include a minimum of thirteen employees—pedologists, psychologists,
industrial psychologists, physicians, and technicians:
gf |
Laboratory Director 1
Research Fellows (one of whom is
the director of the psychometric lab, and the other,
a specialist in industrial psychology) 5)
Researcher in Pedology and Abnormal Development
(also director of the “difficult childhood” section)
Pedologist-educators
Physician-pedologists
Physician-neuropathologists
Technicians rR
Ane
AR
There is nothing to indicate how many such laboratories and offices were
set up across the country. In Moscow, however, according to a report given
by R. G. Vilenkina at a conference of Muscovite pedologists in 1931, there
was not a single district in town where pedological research was not
under way (there were eighteen pedologists in the Lenin district, nineteen in
Krasnopresnensky district, and so on). In addition, there were pedological
offices in a great many schools. Nevertheless, to Vilenkina’s mind there
were still too few pedologists; in some districts there were 1,500 children to
a single specialist. Vilenkina characterized this situation as deplorable.
Funds had been allocated, but there were too few professional pedologists.
Vilenkina’s analysis indicated several practical functions currently being
performed by pedologists in schools and clinics: composing pupil groups
according to individualized testing methods; selecting students for admis-
sion to remedial educational facilities; studying deviants; evaluating student
performance (however, Vilenkina added, pedologists should not replace
teachers in this task); working with parents; and analyzing the environ-
ment. There was also a certain amount of experimentation taking place
with pedological consultation in the workplace and with pedological clubs
for teachers.”
Anna Lipkina, who worked as a pedologist in a Moscow school, recalled
- that pedologists for the most part were engaged in IQ measurement. The
slower children were examined first of all. If children fell behind in class
and gave low indicators on standardized tests, they were to be transferred
into remedial schools. There primary education lasted seven years, and the
teachers were experts in abnormal psychology. On average, five pupils were
singled out for transfer from each class of thirty-five.
Students managing at least a C were not transferred to remedial schools.
Pedologists sat in on lessons, systematically observing the children. If tests
showed that a child had a low IQ, he was to be observed in class in order to
evaluate the extent of his involvement and memory. There was work to be
done with parents, as well, gathering information about family life and ex-
amining the environment at home. Besides mentally handicapped children,
Pig) Pedological Perversions
there were others who were difficult to educate, and these were often
passed over by the system. This category was not transferred to remedial
schools but was provided with special teachers in a normal school setting.
If there was drinking or physical abuse in a child’s family, the pedologist
was obliged to work with the parents. The pedologist was not required,
however, to educate or train children—this was left to the teacher.*°
Gradually, individualized work with children and their families came to re-
place the psychological testing that had been so fashionable in the begin-
ning. (As S$. S$. Molozhavy had written in 1927: “Standardized testing is
threatening to become a daily phenomenon of our school life. Some schools
order tests by the bundle from Moscow, and then with striking single-
mindedness use them to test their children. Other schools take it upon
themselves to develop their own ‘local’ tests.”*")
Pedologists were held in high regard in their schools, and administrators
were reluctant to part with them. In 1932 in Leningrad, the government
came up with the idea to ship pedologists off to collective farms; at that time
100 pedologists were working in Leningrad’s school system, one in each
school. Not one school in the city was willing to give up its pedologist.*”
The Zalkind Trajectory

Sabina Spielrein’s life and work naturally paralleled the trajectory of Soviet
psychoanalysis, and according to her adopted daughter, she worked as a
pedologist in a school in Rostov-on-the-Don from the end of the 1920s
through the early 1930s. Other former analysts complemented the person-
nel of quite a few pedological offices and laboratories. The work offered
them a useful niche that they could fill and enabled them to survive in what
might otherwise have been intolerable conditions.
But Aron Zalkind (1888-1936) was a totally different sort of figure, one
thoroughly typical of his time. The trajectory of his life, from psychoana-
lytic practice to his role as organizer of “the new science of childhood” and
the builder of a “new man of the masses,” is at once unbelievable and pos-
sessed of an unmistakable logic.
During the 1910s, the young doctor—like most of the other psychoana-
lysts working in Moscow—attended the Little Friday seminars run by
Vladimir Serbsky (see chapter 4). Zalkind’s breed of analysis leaned toward
Adler, and he was interested in issues unfamiliar to many psychoanalysts,
such as somnambulism. Even before World War I his work had already been
published in the primary journal of Russian psychoanalysis, Psychotherapy,
where his articles were assigned a place of honor, conveying their author’s
reputation as an engaged and highly successful psychotherapist.*3
The definition Zalkind gave of creativity sheds some light on his views
and, most likely, his intentions at that time: “Whatever field it might in-
273
volve, creativity is the process of maximally efficient utilization of spiritual

force in order to achieve the highest possible goals within the limits of a
given situation.”** It is doubtful that the author foresaw the direction his
life would take, or what kind of creativity would be demanded of him in
order to achieve the highest imaginable goals given the limits under which
he was to work. Rarely does history provide examples of such exact imple-
mentation of theoretical mistakes.
Zalkind embraced the revolution ecstatically. Having offered his services
to Party members (the 1925 Directory of Medical Physicians described his
specialty as “psychopathology”*5), he soon became convinced that the ana-
lytical approach was ineffective in treating members of this group. He
quickly worked out a new, absurdly ideologized view of mental health is-
sues: “The great French Revolution, as a massive therapeutic measure, was
healthier for humanity than a million hot baths, running water, or a thou-
sand new medicines.”*¢
However, in his book Outlines of the Culture of Revolutionary Times
and other articles published in the middle of the 1920s, Zalkind described a
fascinating situation that he alone seems to have noticed. The core of Party
activists, which was carrying the heaviest burden in the construction of rev-
olution, was burning out fast, he insisted. Thirty-year-olds were presenting
symptoms of diseases normally experienced at age 45; forty-year-olds were
practically old men. Zalkind pinpointed the cause as constant nervous ex-
citement and overload, neglect of normal hygiene, cultural backwardness,
and even a lack of appropriate qualifications among certain workers. Up to
ninety percent of Zalkind’s Bolshevik patients suffered from neurological
disorders, while nearly all had high blood pressure and poor metabolism.
Zalkind even went so far as to assign a specific name to this set of symp-
toms: “the Party triad.” In his essay “On Ulcers in the Russian Communist
Party,”*” he complemented this clinical portrait with skillful sociopolitical
analysis, demonstrating his understanding of the situation within the Party.
Zalkind had uncovered a high incidence of neuroses in members of the op-
_ position. Opposition leaders were stricken with excessive emotionality,
which was the essence of neurosis, as Zalkind asserted back in his Adlerian
period. For all such cases, he recommended one treatment: “redoubling the
Party’s reeducation efforts.”
Among the Communist student body (which, it should be noted, for the
most part supported the Trotskyist opposition), the incidence of nervous
disorders as Zalkind understood them was between forty and fifty percent;
there was also no shortage of clinical illness, averaging out at ten to fifteen
percent. Several of the cases Zalkind examined are interesting in their own
right. One twenty-two-year-old college student who had been a unit com-
mander during the civil war was suffering from depression—life during the
NEP was “nasty.” Another Red commander experienced hysterical som-
nambulism, his sleep haunted by visions of “cheering Nepmen, fat and

well-dressed.” Zalkind interpreted this hallucination as a “switch into an
alternate world, where his desires come true, where he finds himself in bat-
tle again, a commander serving the revolution in his own way.” One female
commissar who had been raped by czarist forces suffered from neuralgia;
Zalkind observed ten such cases, but said that usually “these comrades
dealt with it like revolutionaries,” and did not experience any “ideological
crisis” after being raped.
Whether because of his psychoanalytic past or his experience working
specifically with Party members, Zalkind put particular emphasis on sexu-
ality in discussing the proper hygiene of Party activity. Modern men suf-
fered from sexual fetishism, he claimed, and it was the task of science to
put sex in its proper place. “It is essential that the collective have a stronger
pull than the sex partner.” To this end, Zalkind developed a detailed sys-
tem: the twelve commandments of sexuality.** The general idea was that
the energy of the proletariat should not be distracted by sexual ties that
serve no purpose in its historic mission.
“Sex should be subordinated to class,” he declared, “in no way interfer-
ing with class interests, and serving them in any way possible.” Therefore
abstinence should be practiced before marriage, until 20 or 25 years of age;
the sex act should not be repeated too often; there should be less sexual ex-
perimentation; sexual selection should be arranged according to class inter-
ests and revolutionary, proletarian expediency; there should be no jealousy.
The last and most important of the twelve commandments held that a class
had the right to interfere in the sex lives of its members in the interest of
revolutionary expediency.
At the Second Psychoneurological Conference that took place in
Leningrad at the beginning of 1924, Zalkind’s talks attracted everyone’s at-
tention. Only 429 of the 906 delegates to the conference were physicians;
many of the participants considered themselves Marxist educators. One ob-
server concluded that among teachers, the “move toward revolutionary
ideology is taking place much more quickly than among other sectors of the
intelligentsia, where people are shut up in a narrow circle of isolated prac-
tice.”*? Zalkind addressed this audience, which would soon form the nu-
cleus of pedology, presenting a remarkably eclectic program. The reception
he received was highly animated. The magazine Krasnaia nov’ summarized
Zalkind’s speech as “sociogenetic biology combined with the doctrine of re-
flexes, with a cautious use of a variety of very useful Freudian concepts and
his own separate experimental methods.” The journal concluded that this
mix would “surely enrich Marxist theory and practice.” Zalkind’s speech
was lauded by a special resolution of the conference as “a consistent socio-
logical analysis of a variety of neurological, psychopathological, and pedo-
logical problems in the light of revolutionary public-spiritedness.”
275
The First Pedological Conference was held at the end of 1927. In his ad-
dress, Zalkind proposed a platform that could unite all 2,500 conference-
goers, who represented several different scientific fields and countless
theoretical orientations. Among the throng there were certainly some psycho-
analysts who, given the unprecedented tightening of social control and the
elimination of anything resembling private practice, had found employment
with the government in schools and other ministry of education structures.
In April 1928, the Planning Commission for Pedological Research in
Russia began work under the auspices of the Main Science Directorate of
the ministry of education; Zalkind was appointed chairman. That same
year, the journal Pedology began publication under his editorship. In 1930,
Zalkind held a Conference on the Study of Human Behavior, as his aspira-
tion to lead expanded to embrace the entire science of man. His address at
that conference, entitled “The Psychoneurological Sciences and the
Building of Socialism,” deserves particular attention; this speech signaled a
great turning point in pedology.°°
Over the course of twelve years of Soviet rule, Zalkind concluded, the
nation had seen the birth of a new man of the masses. It saw him in the
economy, where he showed indefatigable creative initiative. He could be
found in the military, in child care, in art, and even in science. It was with
great difficulty that this new man pushed his way through the educational
establishment, because he had been set to work without a scientific system.
The revolutionary era threw him together in slapdash form, but he was
winning battles left and right nevertheless. It was a shame, however, that
the psychoneurological sciences had offered no assistance to the new
masses. A rift had formed between the cultural revolution and psychoneu-
rology. Psychoneurological literature had to be written for the masses,
widespread consultation should be given, as well as mass instruction in the
discipline. There was none of this, and there were ominous augurs running
through psychoneurology; this science was not yet prepared for work with
the masses. The governing bodies of the Party had their work cut out for
them with cadres and education, and science had nothing constructive to
~ say on these matters. On the contrary, one even heard negative exhorta-
tions, threats directed at the new man of the masses. It was more than obvi-
ous, Zalkind concluded, that most of psychoneurology was not doing what
it should for the revolution.
It is difficult to judge today to what extent Zalkind’s campaign was
forced on him by circumstances. An ideological war had been declared, but
it was still far from its climax, and the politically aggressive tone of
Zalkind’s speech seems remarkable for that time. Whatever the case, at the
end of 1930, the Psychological Institute in Moscow was reformed into the
Institute of Psychology, Pedology, and Industrial Psychology. Zalkind re-
placed M. K. Kornilov as director of the institute.°!
A Pine Stake Through

the Heart of Soviet Freudianism
Unlike the “new man of the masses,” Zalkind had a past, and now he had a
chance to get rid of it. People of his status were never allowed to forget
their biographies, nor to force others to forget. The stature of those in rela-
tively high places allowed them only to reinterpret their past mistakes in a
new light; they could never be free from fear of others who had the power
to apply their own view of the past.
The most damaging stain on the pages of Zalkind’s life story was his
Freudianism. His own take on this shameful episode is unusual and psycho-
logically curious. Zalkind admitted: “[I] objectively aided the popularization
of Freud in the USSR between 1923 and 1925, but later did so only by iner-
tia. In any case, I contributed my own particular understanding to ‘Freudism,’
which in fact was a total perversion of Freud’s doctrine. However, I continued
to call my views Freudian, and this drew in the ‘little people.’”*?
Zalkind recalled that he had always tried to reinforce “an extreme socio-
genic conditionality, the plasticity of man and human behavior.” He claimed
that he had constantly defended the conception of personality as an “active,
aggressive, creative essence.” But Zalkind did not find this in old, reactionary
psychoneurology and psychology. “I encountered Freud in 1910-1911, and
it seemed to me I had finally struck gold. In fact, personality in Freud burns
and struggles; it is dynamic and takes from others, adopts a stubborn strat-
egy, changes the direction of its aspirations, its energy reserves, and so forth.
In short, it seemed to me then that Freud had finally tossed the empty, slug-
gish ego of old psychoneurology out of science once and for all.” Clearly, on
this particular point Zalkind can be taken at his word: This is just how Freud
was perceived by romantically inclined young people during the years of his
greatest popularity in Russia, and even twenty years later, such feelings
would not have been foreign to Zalkind. “I took the new, fresh, active part of
personality from Freud, and made it the leading part.”
Of course, Zalkind was even then far from Freudianism, and he moved
even farther away later in his career. One need only recall lig twelve com-
mandments of sexuality to be convinced that he was subjectively honest in
this regard as well. But the further development of their predecessors’ ideas
along the lines of their own personal interests—a normal phenomenon
among scientists—was inadmissible for Zalkind and his cohorts. Thus,
Zalkind’s “self-criticism” bears little resemblance to the typical recollec-
tions of scientists about how they used to think and to whom they owed the
evolution of their views; But neither is it a mere show of repentance. The
sincerity of Zalkind’s tone is a hint at his attitude toward the words as an
action of all-consuming importance for himself: His future depended on
whether others believed his story.
277
I drew in the little people, Zalkind confessed: “This is the worst damage
done by my ‘connection’ with Freudianism, and I bear some of the blame
for Freud’s persisting popularity here. ... The reinforcement of the dicta-
torship of the proletariat hammers—once and for all—a pine stake through
the heart of Soviet Freudianism.”
People of the old school did not agree with this vampiric metaphor and
in general did not understand the magical meaning of Zalkind’s actions.
Krupskaya, for instance, rushed to Freud’s defense: There’s no sense in
overcompensating, she said, the unconscious has some role to play in life.53
But the damage had been done, and Zalkind had pretty much said it all.
His new methodology declared: “We have been transformed from the
slaves of scientific methods into their masters. ... The vast majority (if not
all) of scientific research today should be short-term, giving quick, definite
conclusions applicable to the near term.” This, he exulted, “sounds like a
coup d’état in the so-called ethics of science.”*4
It was all for naught. In 1932, Zalkind was removed from his posts as di-
rector of the Institute of Psychology, Pedology, and Industrial Psychology
(after less than a year in office, he was replaced by V. N. Kolbanovsky) and
as editor in chief of the journal Pedology. The journal itself had only one
more year to live.
In 1936, Zalkind died of a heart attack after reading the Central
Committee decree “On Pedological Perversions. . . .”°°
The Children Revisited

“Meanwhile, these children have no idea what’s written on their faces, and
only their blue, astonished, inquisitive eyes shine from their very depths
with unknown secrets, calmly and sadly fixed on the scroll of life.” These
were the words that Andrei Bely used in reference to the generation born in
the 1910s.56 Hardly anyone during Bely’s time would have supposed that
surveys taken of schoolchildren in Orel, Odessa, and Samara would retain
~ more value for future generations than public ideological debates held by
the leaders of pedology; however, this was exactly how things turned out. If
not for the research of a humble group of provincial pedologist practition-
ers, we would have known practically nothing about the children of the
revolutionary era, apart from occasional belletristic impressions. .
The Russian tradition of empirical research on children was established
long before the revolution, but was most actively pursued in the Soviet pe-
riod by the Central Pedological Institute under the leadership of Nikolai
Rybnikoy. In 1916, Rybnikov compiled a collection of research on the
“ideals of children in the countryside,” containing a statistical analysis of
replies to the classic question “Who do you want to be when you grow up?
Also gathered were children’s conceptions about morals, religion, and more.
The first survey-based research on children after the revolution was pub-
lished in the journal of the Orel Pedological Society. D. Azbukin had per-
formed a study of schoolchildren in Orel in 1918.°” The historic tremors
that shook the city of Orel, in Azbukin’s poetic words, did not prevent him
from collecting 1,000 questionnaires, filled out by children between the
ages of ten and eighteen. The forms contained twenty-three questions each,
and the children wrote in their answers themselves.
Eighty percent of those surveyed wrote that they had been to the theater
at least once in their lives; somewhat fewer had been to the cinema. The
most preferred art form was music, favorite writers were Pushkin and
Gogol (although children also revered Dumas, Shakespeare, and Thomas
Mayne Reid). Most children wanted to be like their parents when they
grew up, and then, in descending order, Lenin, Trotsky, Lunacharsky, and
Kerensky. A few responded that they would like to be like animals:
Animals, they explained, were usually well fed. Most children wanted to be
government officials, teachers, doctors, or actors.
Many of the children preferred school to home. Forty-eight percent liked
to do physical labor at home, and thirty-eight percent preferred mentally
demanding work. Homework had already been abolished, but half of the
children surveyed continued to study lessons on their own time, by habit.
The least favorite subject, as among children of other times, was mathemat-
ics. Most of the children—sixty percent—felt that they were behind in their
studies. However, the new school system had gained the children’s favor,
since the teachers were closer to their students, breakfasts were free, pupils
were more independent, and grades had been eliminated. Four percent of
the children had already “gone to work,” but Azbukin commented that
“they had not yet become primary breadwinners, as would be the case with
almost all of them later on.”
According to data collected in Moscow in 1925-1926 by L. S. Geshe-
lina,°* only three percent of children in working-class families and twenty-
eight percent of officials’ children received “good nutrition at home” before
they entered kindergarten. Half of working-class children slept in a com-
mon bedroom. Psychoanalyst Ilya Perepel wrote around this time that
“{jJust introducing the idea that common bedrooms are colossally harmful
could give the population a thousand times more benefit than a thousand
educational treatises.”»>?
According to the research of Y. I. Kazhdanskaya,® in 1924 only nine
percent of the schoolchildren in Odessa between the ages of seven and
twelve knew who Lenin was. A scattered few could explain who the com-
munists were and what they stood for. On average, the children surveyed
were able satisfactorily to answer only eight percent of the survey questions
on sociopolitical subjects. After two and a half years of study under a new
curriculum, fifty-two percent of answers were characterized as “vague,”
279
“absurd,” or just wrong, complemented by thirty-four percent that were

“hackneyed”—answers that were outwardly correct, but only memorized
and formulaic, with no meaning for the child. Two hundred compositions
on the revolution were collected for examination. The essays were a “casse-
role ..., in which the events of both revolutions were mixed together with
the ‘ninth of January,” a date that for some reason stood out most clearly
in the children’s minds.®!
“The children are tragically illiterate,” Kazhdanskaya concluded. “There
is a limit beyond which the popularization of complex concepts leads only
to distortion bordering on profanation.” On the other hand, the Odessan
teacher and pedologist wrote suspiciously in 1928 that “the abundance of
bloody episodes in courses on politics over the first two years of education
... is dangerous, in that it might dull children’s sensitivity.” The editor of
the journal Pedology discounted this conclusion in a note as “too categori-
cal and pessimistic.”
However, these conclusions echoed the findings of other researchers.
Rybnikov,°* who had by then gathered 120,000 questionnaires from
provincial Russian schoolchildren, asserted that only a negligible propor-
tion knew the meaning and history of the most recent revolution. However,
all the children, according to Rybnikov’s figures, were sure that the Soviet
government was better than any other. Meanwhile, the scientist noted an
interesting phenomenon where children “underestimated the economic ad-
vances made by their own class and overestimated the achievements of
other classes.” Working-class children pointed to the land that they felt the
revolution had given to the peasants; at the same time, peasant children
pointed to the eight-hour workday and to the belief that factories had been
handed over to the workers.
Half of the peasant children surveyed in the Samara region at the end of
the 1930s preferred mental work to manual labor. Only eleven percent pre-
ferred various sorts of peasant labor (children in Orel had given totally dif-
ferent responses only ten years earlier). One-third of peasant boys ex-
pressed a clear dislike for agricultural labor, and eighty-five percent said
that they did not like to do chores around the home: Anti-peasant policies
had done their work.*°?
The pedologists’ surveys give perhaps the only source of reliable statisti-
cal information about children’s feelings during that transitional time when
collectivization was just beginning, opposition in the party was being
crushed, and the country was sliding into mass terror. The press had al-
ready been cowed into uniformity and hatred of independent thought.
What were people thinking back then? |
In 1928, R. G. Vilenkina conducted a survey of working teens by collect-
ing anonymous statements that they wrote on cards and dropped into a
box. She repeated the vital and extremely diverse words of a generation
that would soon be dragged through repression and war: “Why is it that in
the eleventh year after the revolution, there’s no bread, no butter, no flour,
and no sugar? How long is this going to continue?” “Why are peasants
who have only two cows denounced as kulaks?” “The land should be taken
away from the peasants, so they become rural workers, so they live off a
salary like workers.” “Why is everyone leaving the countryside for the city?
Things must be really bad there.” “Why didn’t they take Trotsky out and
shoot him?” “Opposition leaders should have been converted, not exiled.”
“What kind of freedom is it, if you can’t organize your own party?” And fi-
nally, a characteristic judgment that reflected a mood that may have pre-
saged the fate of the entire country: “Young people will eventually abandon
revolutionary work, because it’s boring. I hope there’s a war soon.”°*
A series of pedological expeditions at the end of the 1920s pushed deep
into the most remote areas of the countryside. A new field of research was
created—the pedology of ethnic minorities, the exact equivalent of today’s
ethnic child psychology. Research was conducted on the children and ado-
lescents of Buryatia, Altai, and Uzbekistan, and on Tatar schoolchildren in
Moscow. This was important work, but to this day its merits remain unrec-
ognized.
The history of science is most of all the history of its internal composi-
tion and the people that created it, the history of categories and methods,
of leaders and institutions. But there is yet another layer in the history of
social science, which has much to do with changing reality: the unique pic-
ture captured by science at a certain historical moment. This layer can turn
out to be the most important for posterity.
Trouble at the Top

Pedology came under fire immediately after the so-called ideological war
on two fronts (both left and right) was declared. At the very start of 1931,
a resolution was adopted at a meeting of the presidium of the Communist
Academy, which underlined a great turning point in science. The resolution
was drafted in response to a report by Otto Schmidt (the very same Otto
Schmidt who had recently served as the “curator” of Soviet psychoanaly-
sis). It stated that “it is of momentous import that we unmask all breeds of
pseudo-Marxism,” and went on to list a number of such deviations from
the Party line, among them pedology. On January 25, 1931, the Central
Committee of the Communist Party passed an order removing the editor of
the journal Under the Banner of Marxism. Toward the end of the year, the
journal crystallized the political climate: “Within the psychoneurological
sciences, there has not been enough open criticism of the mechanical and
idealist theories of Kornilov in psychology, Gannushkin in psychiatry and
neuropathology, and Blonsky in pedology ... nor of Comrade Spielrein’s
281
system of idealist errors, Comrade Zalkind’s Menshevik, idealist eclecti-

cism, and so forth.”®
Zalkind’s journal Pedology also leaped into this campaign of mutual self-
destruction. Zalkind called on his colleagues to unmask themselves volun-
tarily before events caught up with them. “If these dispassionate pedolo-
gists (who have managed to totally avoid publication in our journal—could
this be a symptom?) would think a bit harder about the ideological debates
on pedology and psychology, they would understand that their isolation
from today’s practice is organically linked to their Marxist virginity.” Such
was the tone of editorials in Pedology at the beginning of 1931.% It is un-
likely that Blonsky, Basov, Vygotsky, and Luria were dispassionate during
this alarming period, and there is no way any of them could be accused of
virginity of any sort. However, they declined Zalkind’s offer to help them
criticize themselves. What followed immediately thereafter proved this a
wise choice.
The journal’s pages became crammed with ideological tirades. One ex-
ample was P. Leventuyev’s article entitled “Political Perversions in
Pedology.” Pedology was digging its own grave, even through its terminol-
ogy. It spared neither Zalkind nor his journal. On the contrary, Zalkind
was removed from his post as editor as early as the end of 1931, and a year
later the journal was shut down. Isaac Spielrein, who had remained unin-
volved in the debate for the most part and who was very reserved in his re-
sponse to criticism, continued as editor of Industrial Psychology and
Psychophysiology of Labor for three more years. He continued to work un-
til the day of his arrest, which coincided almost exactly with the closing of
the journal.
Nevertheless, apart from these few cases of leadership turnover, there
was no warning of the blow that would finish off pedology suddenly in
1936. Textbooks on pedology were reprinted as before, people continued
to be trained, more and more pedologists were working in schools.
Moreover, their competence had increased: A ministry of education decree
of January 15, 1935, entrusted to pedologists the selection of children for
admission to school, in addition to their previous responsibilities. However,
the Deputy Minister of Education, M. S. Epstein, who had supervised
pedology, was soon removed from his office. B. M. Volin was then ap-
pointed first deputy to Minister Bubnoy. Both Volin and Epstein, as well as
Bubnoy, were later arrested, during the terror.
On July 4, 1936, the Central Committee of the Communist Party passed
a resolution entitled “On the Pedological Perversions of the Ministry of
Education System.”®” The pedological movement was reviled in terms that
would have signaled disaster to any Soviet citizen involved: The movement
had allegedly created dangerous organizations in the schools, with its own
regulatory centers. The Central Committee saw the damage wrought by
pedologists in their pseudoscientific experiments, countless examinations,

and their senseless and harmful questionnaires and tests. All of these ef-
forts, the Central Committee asserted, were designed to find as much nega-
tive or pathologically perverse information as possible to describe the
Soviet schoolchild, his parents, his family, and his social environment.
Explorations into mental development and talent in children, the
Committee declared, were merely formalized mockery of the pupils.
Particular attention was paid in the resolution to specialized and remedial
schools. The document’s anonymous author asserted that the majority of
students in such places were perfectly normal. More than that, there were
even gifted children stuck in remedial institutions; they all should be sent
back to ordinary schools. The Central Committee also held that as a result
of the activity of pedologists, the rights of regular schoolteachers had been
abridged. Also included was a philosophical analysis of pedological doc-
trine. The view that child development was fatalistically conditioned by bi-
ological and social factors was declared “the primary directive of pedol-
ogy.” This “deeply reactionary idea” was denounced, it being in flagrant
opposition to the extensively successful Marxist practice of reeducation in
the drive to build socialism.
Exactly why pedology was eliminated remained a mystery to contempo-
rary observers, who sought the reason in secret, random events. A legend
formed that pedologists had been studying the son of a certain very power-
ful government official (as rumor had it, A. A. Zhdanov). The son had al-
legedly been given an unfavorable diagnosis, which brought the official’s
wrath down on pedology.
Reading the text of the resolution, one does indeed sense the presence of
greater knowledge and personal interest, albeit one-sided, than was usual in
such matters. The tone of the document does not wholly correspond with
the accepted ideological style of that time, which would have been full of
vague delineations and abstract labels that only in the secret world behind
closed doors would take on the power of a denunciation. This decree,
moreover, touches on common motifs that characterized professional de-
bate in the field.
No other pseudoscience in Soviet history ever rated a special Central
Committee decree. The uncommonly high level at which pedology’s record
was reviewed demands an explanation. Did it really involve a personal
grudge on the part of one of the nation’s political leaders? Or was the reso-
lution an interim result of some unknown game within the nomenklatura,
part of some unfinished political scheme in preparation for a larger, later-
aborted process?
The decree contains an astonishing array of peculiarities that do not fit
well together. There were of course plenty of shortcomings in the quickly
expanding activity of pedologists and their new network of special schools.
But the total liquidation of the pedological service, including the closing of
special schools, appears to have been unjustified by real circumstances; fa-
talism, the “primary directive,” and other anti-Marxist perversions unjustly
attributed to pedology had nothing to do with the problems of specialized
schooling.®® But most surprising of all was that although the resolution
contained very strong accusations, including the charge that pedology cre-
ated an anti-Marxist organization that performed mass experiments on
children, it had relatively meager consequences. In the context of 1936,
these kinds of accusations, particularly when they were handed down by
the highest governmental bodies, were more than enough to warrant execu-
tion. No executions followed, however. The word “sabotage,” which
would probably have been deadly, was absent from the resolution.
Pedology was eliminated as a science; but its leaders were not repressed, as
were the leaders of industrial psychology, for example. Only later, in
1937-1938, were the employees of the Russian ministry of education and
parallel ministries in other republics subjected to near-total purges, and
even then it was on different grounds. Nor did the decree on pedology lead
to any widespread ideological campaign such as followed on the heels of
the Central Committee’s interference in philosophy in 1931.
Perhaps the action was intended to discredit the popular Bukharin once
and for all (children were at stake!), as he had publicly supported pedology
for many years; but Bukharin had already bared his Achilles’ heel, and he
was taken out of the picture by much simpler means. This time, the heavi-
est guns in the imposing ideological arsenal were filled with blanks, result-
ing in no evident sacrifice of human lives.
However, the Central Committee resolution did have decisive importance
for Soviet pedology and education. The series of decrees that flowed out of
the ministry of education liquidated all pedological institutions and offices,
snatched books and textbooks out of libraries, created unified departments
of pedagogy in all teachers’ colleges, opened courses for retraining pedolo-
gists, and restructured specialized schools of all kinds. Only children with
the most serious mental illnesses remained in the ministry of education’s
) restyled sanatoriums; even oligophrenics did not qualify. A separate article
required that all pedological observations be removed from pupils’ files.
Another special resolution forbade surveys based on questionnaires.°?
A few months later, Volin issued a decree “On the Verification of
Execution of the Resolution of the Central Committee of the Communist
Party.””° The orders to eliminate pedology, as it turned out, were being ex-
ecuted poorly. There were still forty specialized schools in Moscow, teach-
ing seven thousand children. There were still schools for “mentally handi-
capped” and “hard-to-educate” children. The large-scale transfer of
children had naturally caused huge problems. The system was disorga-
nized, teachers were at a loss, pupils were out of control. The ministry of
education decree included the story of how one schoolgirl by the name of
Stepanikova stopped going to class after being transferred out of remedial
school, complaining that her studies were too difficult. After skipping
school for a while, she appealed personally to the ministry of education,
asking to be returned to a remedial school.
Bubnov held a series of meetings, trying to explain the motivation behind
the Central Committee resolution and to avoid personal responsibility for
the organization of pedological science. In his speeches to educators, rather
than emphasizing the remedial schools (the transfer of sick and difficult
children into regular schools was probably not terribly popular among edu-
cation professionals), he stressed the lack of control over pedologists, their
independence from school administrators, and the subordinate position of
teachers. Bubnov concentrated his attack on the recently deceased Zalkind,
whom he characterized as the single leader of pedology whose views were
“a Menshevik apologia on spontaneity, objectivism, and the Socialist
Revolutionary doctrine of interacting factors, combined most of all with
Freudianism.” Bubnov criticized Vygotsky, also deceased, as another “pillar
of today’s pedology.” He spoke more softly about Blonsky, who was pres-
ent in the room, chastising him for immediately resigning rather than en-
gaging in self-criticism (Blonsky later came forward with a repentant con-
fession).’! To all appearances, this was but another attempt to cushion the
fist that was poised above all those present, including Bubnov himself.
Based on what we know today of this particular case, we can aspire to
explain only the most general mechanisms operating in the functioning,
adaptation, and destruction of knowledge in a totalitarian atmosphere.” In
its struggle to survive, pedology succumbed to the same fate as other, re-
lated fields—the hypertrophic development of applied areas without suffi-
cient underlying support in scientific knowledge. In the place of science, de-
signed to describe and understand reality, there appeared a doctrine, a
phenomenon specific to Soviet intellectual life, in which remnants of true
science were intermingled with irrelevant promises to reconstruct an un-
yielding reality. This metamorphosis was marked by the appearance on the
scene of charismatic scientific leaders, who ran their sciences in the same
way as other leaders ran the Party or the railway transport system. In the
science of man, this led inevitably to the depersonalization of scholarship,
erasing all distinctions between schools, authors, and movements, and also
to the de-individualization of its content, which was more and more ori-
ented toward the “new man of the masses.”
Soviet pedology, psychoanalysis, industrial psychology, and pedagogy all
shared this common fate. A few of the best scholars attempted to resist, al-
lowing the marvelous political centrifuge occasionally to squeeze out extra-
ordinary products of intellect along with the usual streams of worthless
tripe. Despite ideological pressure and direct threats of violence that would
soon be carried out, the human sciences of the 1920s and 1930s left behind
a unique and invaluable record of the people of that time. Pedology can
only be properly understood as a historical reality that suffered from the
horrendous mistakes of its era, paid a price for those mistakes, and in its
occasional valid contributions to science, rose above the limits of that era,
preserving it forever.
2
The Ambassador and Satan:
William Bullitt in
Bulgakov’s Moscow
William C. Bullitt, the U.S. ambassador to Soviet Russia in 1933-1936 and

later to France (1936-1941), was also one of Freud’s patients. It was Bullitt
who arranged Freud’s escape from occupied Vienna. Psychoanalysts per-
haps know Bullitt best for his success in convincing Freud to coauthor with
him a biography of President Woodrow Wilson, most of which Bullitt
wrote himself.! Diplomats know him as a key player in American foreign
policy before World War II. Finally, to Slavicists he is remembered for his
friendship with renowned writer Mikhail Bulgakov.
Quite a bit is known about Bullitt; but more can still be deduced from
the evidence available.
From Wilson and Lenin to Roosevelt and Freud

Bill Bullitt was born to an aristocratic Philadelphia family. His paternal an-
cestors were French Huguenots and his maternal forebears Polish Jews;
both branches of the family were among the first immigrants to America.
Bullitt studied at Yale and Harvard, then became a war correspondent and
traveled throughout Europe, and in 1917, during Wilson’s presidency, he
began working for the U.S. State Department.’ Bullitt’s unique life story
took its first odd turn in Russia. In April 1919 Bullitt, who had been a par-
ticipant at the Versailles peace talks that defined Europe’s sad state between
the two world wars, was sent by Wilson to Russia at the head of a semi-
official mission. The situation Bullitt found in the Kremlin seemed to him
no less important than events at Versailles.
Lenin had made an offer to the American delegation, which consisted of
one diplomat with only two years of experience, one journalist, and one
military intelligence officer. Soviet Russia was ready to relinquish control
over sixteen territories that formerly belonged to the czarist empire. These
286
The Ambassador and Satan
287
lands included Poland, Rumania, Finland, and the three Baltic republics,
half of Ukraine and western Belorussia, the entire Caucasus and the
Crimea, and all of the Urals and Siberia, with Murmansk to boot. “Lenin
had offered to confine communist rule to Moscow and a small adjacent
area, plus the city now known as Leningrad.”3 It is not quite clear what
Lenin asked for in exchange. He probably asked that his country be in-
cluded in the Versailles negotiations and that the Bolshevik state be recog-
nized by the former allies of the Russian empire. Bullitt was thrilled with
Lenin: “Think, if I only had a father like that.”* He would find his surro-
gate father only later; but Lenin did reciprocate the American’s warm feel-
ings, even calling him a friend.
The personalities and intentions of the Russian communist leaders so
struck Bullitt that upon his return to Paris he did everything he could to at-
tract Wilson’s attention to Russia. But the president, notorious for his one-
track mind, was much more concerned at the time with demands for repa-
rations issuing from England and France, and he never even considered the
Russian offer.
Any signs of interest in the Russian experiment exhibited by Americans
irritated the strongly anticommunist president. The first and most telling
sign of this interest was John Reed’s book, Ten Days That Shook the
World. Reed died of typhus in a Moscow hospital shortly after the revolu-
tion that he described so glowingly in his book. He died in the arms of his
companion, Louisa Bryant, who a few years later would become William
Bullitt’s wife.
Bullitt resigned in protest over the U.S. president’s failure to take note of
the important diplomatic information he had delivered, and he sent a se-
vere letter to Wilson. The long list of accusations addressed to the president
opened with the following statement: “Russia, ‘the acid test of good will,’
for me as for you, has not even been understood.”* According to the view
that Bullitt elaborated in this letter, America’s neglect of Russia and overly
intimate relations with France would render the conditions of the Versailles
peace agreement unjust. Germany would be subjected to unnecessary hu-
miliation and the League of Nations would be incapacitated in its attempts
to prevent war in the future.
After his resignation, Bullitt worked as a film editor for Paramount. For
a while he lived in Europe, which at the time was a fashionable mecca for
many Americans who were fleeing Prohibition and boredom. Bullitt made
friends with FE. Scott Fitzgerald and also met Hemingway in Paris. Together
with his compatriots, he fell straight into The Moveable Feast, leading a
carefree, merry life in inexpensive postwar Europe. When the epoch sub-
sided, it left in its wake not only a handful of famous American novels but
also a number of more ordinary stories—such as the medical case history of
alcoholic Louisa Bryant.
288 The Ambassador and Satan
In 1926, Bullitt’s novel It’s Not Done was released.®° The setting was his
home city of Philadelphia. The protagonist struggles with the conservatism
of his environment, marries the woman he loves in the face of resistance,
and in the end must rescue his son from accusations of involvement with
communists. The novel seems to have met with little success. But shortly af-
ter its publication, Bullitt’s life took another turn—one that inspired him to
write a second book, which would preserve his name for posterity.
Beginning in 1925, Bullitt underwent analysis with Sigmund Freud.
Nothing is known about the motives that drove this successful man of
American high society to Vienna. His wife’s alcoholism might have been
part of the problem. He told a friend that after slipping from his saddle
while horseback riding he had become aware of an unconscious desire to
commit suicide.” Unfortunately, very little is known about what went on
during the analysis. Gradually, as sometimes happened, Freud’s patient be-
came his student and friend.
Over the course of ten years, Bullitt visited Vienna regularly to discuss
various personal and political problems with Freud. Freud was ill at the end
of 1930 when he wrote, in response to Zweig’s suggestion that he write a
book on Nietzsche and the will to power: “I cannot write the yellow book
you wish me to. I know too little about the human drive for power, for I
have lived my life as a theorist. ... Indeed I would like to write nothing
more, and yet I am once again writing an Introduction for something some-
one else is doing. I must not say what it is. . . You will never guess what.”®
It was an introduction to the book Thomas Woodrow Wilson, which Bullitt
finally published under two names, Freud’s and his own. Freud, of course,
received top billing. Freud rarely collaborated, and almost never in his lat-
ter years; this work was most likely Freud’s only study dedicated to a polit-
ical figure. Historians and psychoanalysts still argue about the quality of
the book and the extent of Freud’s contribution.
According to Bullitt, the collaboration was born when he visited Freud in
1930 in Berlin. Freud was sick and gloomy; he said he wasn’t long for this
world, and that nobody would care when he died, anyway, since he had al-
ready written everything he ever wanted to and his brain was empty. Bullitt
told Freud about his idea for a book that would include his psychological
sketches of Clemenceau, Orlando, Lloyd George, Lenin, and Wilson. Freud
shocked Bullitt by proposing that they write the book together. “He had
been interested in Wilson ever since he had discovered that they were both
born in 1856.” A chapter grew into a book. The first draft was completed
in 1932, and later was revised several times. The final version was ap-
proved and signed (each chapter by both authors) in 1938, but it could not
be published as long as Wilson’s widow was alive.!°
It is clear from the book and the history of its writing that Bullitt, al-
though not a professional psychoanalyst, shared Freud’s analytical views
289
and understood his philosophical beliefs well enough to be capable of car-

rying on a dialogue with the doctor. “He was a Jew who had become an ag-
nostic. I have always been a believing Christian. We often disagreed but we
never quarreled,”!! Bullitt wrote in his introduction to the book.
Meanwhile, their political allegiances were almost identical in the interwar
period. Freud and Bullitt wrote, in particular, that “Wilson’s refusal to bur-
den his ‘one track mind’ with Russia may well, in the end, turn out to be
the most important single decision that he made in Paris.”!2Bullitt was for
many years one of Freud’s most important and reliable sources of informa-
tion on Russia.
In 1933, after the election of a new president, Bullitt began working for
Roosevelt’s administration, accepting an appointment as U.S. ambassador
to the USSR. George F. Kennan, his subordinate at the time and destined
later to become one of the best known of American diplomats, described
him in the following way:
We took pride in him and never had occasion to be ashamed of him.

... Bullitt, as we knew him at that time in Moscow, was charming, brilliant,
well-educated, imaginative, a man of the world capable of holding his own in-
tellectually with anyone. ...He resolutely refused to permit the life around
him to degenerate into dullness and dreariness. All of us who lived in his en-
tourage were the beneficiaries of this blitheness of spirit, this insistence that life
be at all times animated and interesting and moving ahead.!°
At the same time, Kennan characterized the embassy as a “lonely and ex-
posed bastion of American governmental life, surrounded by a veritable
ocean of official Soviet ill will.”
Henry Wallace, future vice president of the United States, was on close
terms with Bullitt and described him as a very attractive personality.
According to Wallace’s unpublished memoirs, which reside in the Office of
Oral History at Columbia University, Bullitt was a world traveler, a con-
noisseur of sophisticated entertainment and witty conversation, and at the
same time a man distinguished by his deep convictions and rare sincerity.
He had at his disposal a wide array of anecdotes about his prominent con-
tacts abroad.'°
In 1933, American financier J. P. Warburg joined Bullitt in organizing a
conference on economic issues in Europe. Warburg left behind the follow-
ing impressions: “He’s a naughty boy; he loves to create a scene and he can
put on an act of indignation such as I’ve rarely seen and come out roaring
with laughter over it. He had little concern over the success of the confer-
ence; he had no concern about anything economic. He’s one of these curi-
ous people to whom the drama was more exciting than the results.”1° At
the same time, Warburg supported Bullitt, because he was “the only person
on the horizon a) who knows Europe thoroughly, and b) who has real tal-
ent as a negotiator.”!7 Warburg also called Bullitt a maverick in all senses

of the word. A Soviet historian evaluated Bullitt as an “unusual figure
among diplomats, .. . a man of extremes who easily changed his mind, am-
bitious and suspicious.”!8 A recent American biography of Bullitt describes
him as “a man of mystery and paradox.”!”
Satan’s Ball at Spaso House: Three Literary Variations

On April 23, 1935, a reception was held at Spaso House, the gorgeous
mansion on Arbat street which to this day serves as the U.S. ambassador’s
private residence. Five hundred people were invited to the reception—
everyone who was anyone in Moscow, apart from Stalin.*° The Americans
were ready to have some honest fun, and they wanted very much to enter-
tain their guests. For them it would be harder to relax. The fall of the intel-
lectual Bolsheviks (Bukharin, Bubnov, and Radek were among the guests)
was only a few months away, and the highest-ranking military commanders
(Tukhachevsky, Yegorov, and Budenny) had already become mere pawns in
a two-faced game between Soviet and German intelligence. The theatrical
elite (Meyerhold, Tairov, Nemirovich-Danchenko, and Bulgakov) expected
groundless reprisal at any moment; the wait would be short for some and
painfully long for others.
The guests arrived at midnight. They danced in the hall of columns.
Multicolored spotlights shone down on them from the balconies. Live birds
fluttered behind a net. Baby goats, sheep, and bears roamed in pens in the
corners of the dining room. Roosters in cages hung on the walls. The roost-
ers all began to crow at three in the morning. “Russian style,” Mikhail
Bulgakov’s wife ironically concluded the description of the ball in her di-
ary.*! It was the costumes that attracted her attention most of all. Everyone,
except the military officers, wore tailcoats. Bulgakov did not own a tail-
coat, so he came in a black suit; his wife was in a black ball gown with pale
pink flowers. The Bolsheviks’ apparel stuck out like a sore thumb:
Bukharin was dressed in an old-fashioned frock coat, Radek wore a hiking
outfit, and Bubnov was in a khaki suit. One stoolie notorious in Moscow
diplomatic circles attended thé ball as well, a certain Baron Steiger, whom
Bubnov’s wife referred to as “our resident secret policeman.” He was
dressed, of course, in a tailcoat. The conductor’s tailcoat was especially
long, reaching all the way to his heels.
Judging by her remarks, the scene was amusing but not particularly re-
markable. However, there was a touch of mystery in Elena Bulgakova’s per-
ception of the reception: With impressions of the party still fresh in his
mind, her husband supposedly wrote a new version of chapter 23 of his
new novel, entitled “Satan’s Ball.” It was this version that was incorporated
into The Master and Margarita, the most widely read Russian novel of the
twentieth century.
291
The writer’s wife claimed that this final draft of the ball scene was writ-
ten much later, during Bulgakov’s final illness, and that it “reflected the re-
ception held by Bullitt, American ambassador to the USSR.”22 She con-
fessed that she was “terribly fond” of the other, former version (where
what she referred to as a “small ball” was held in Woland’s bedroom, or in
other words, in Stepa Likhodeev’s room). Elena was so aggressive in her in-
sistence that the “small ball” was better than the “big ball” that the ailing
Bulgakov destroyed the old version while his wife was away in order to
“avoid mistakes,” as Elena Bulgakova later recalled.23
This embassy party, called the Spring Festival, was a celebrated event.
Ambassador Bullitt wrote to President Roosevelt on May 1, 1935: “It was
an astonishingly successful party, thoroughly dignified yet gay. ...It was
the best party in Moscow since the revolution. We got a thousand tulips
from Helsingfors and forced a lot of birch trees into premature leafage and
arranged one end of the dining room as a collective farm with peasant ac-
cordion players, dancers, and all sorts of baby things, such as birds, goats,
and a couple of infant bears.”?4
Serious preparations went into building a collective farm in the dining
room. The ambassador was fond of extravagant entertainment, and the
embassy was known in the Moscow diplomatic corps as “Bill Bullitt’s cir-
cus.” When Bullitt arrived in Moscow, he found nothing livelier than a
tenor in the repertoire of local diplomatic entertainment. According to in-
structions given by the ambassador, the ball was to outdo anything
Moscow had ever seen, before or after the revolution. “The sky’s the limit,”
he told his employees as he was leaving to spend the winter of 1934-1935
in Washington.*> Preparations for the ball, which was to coincide with his
return, were entrusted to Charles Thayer, a secretary at the embassy, and
Irena Wiley, an advisor’s wife. The ambassador covered all of the expenses
personally.
Thayer had already had painful experience organizing American parties
in Moscow: The previous reception had featured an animal trainer named
Durov, whose seals juggled obediently until Durov got drunk, when the
seals went for a dip in the salad bowl. The animals for this ball were bor-
rowed from the Moscow zoo. Thayer had become more cautious and re-
fused to trust Soviet trainers. He found out for himself that goats and sheep
could not be put in the dining room: No matter how well washed, they still
stink. As it turned out, mountain goats were the least aromatic breed, so
they were selected for the ball. Tulips also posed a problem. After a fruitless
search all over the Soviet Union, the flowers were ordered from Finland. A
Czech jazz band that was performing in Moscow at the time was hired,
along with a troupe of gypsy musicians and dancers. When the guests ar-
rived, the light in the hall went out, and the moon and stars were projected
on the high ceiling. The director of the Kamernyi theater (possibly Tairov)
was in charge of the projector. Twelve roosters sat in covered cages. On
Thayer’s command, the cages were uncovered, but only one rooster began
to crow, albeit loudly. Another rooster escaped and landed on the dish of
duck-liver paté that had been delivered from Strasbourg.*®
When Bullitt was staffing the embassy in Moscow, he had hired only sin-
gle men in order to avoid the extreme openness that diplomats’ wives might
engender. However, “the romantic attachments and resulting complications
of the bachelors soon outmatched any indiscretions wives might have com-
mitted and today the recruiting policy for the Moscow Embassy is quite the
reverse—preferably no bachelors.”?” At the time of the ball, those
Americans in attendance were for the most part single men.
The ball ended at 9 a.m. with a lezginka performed by Tukhachevsky
and Lelya Lepeshinskaya, a famous dancer from the Bolshoi, who was
Bullitt’s frequent guest. The ambassador at the time was accompanied by
his daughter Anna; Louisa Bryant had stayed at home in the United States.
Bullitt had a long affair with Roosevelt’s personal secretary, who once ar-
rived at the embassy in Moscow to find Bullitt in the company of Lelya
Lepeshinskaya. No one at the embassy had any doubt that the ballet
dancer, who had the closest connections among the political elite, routinely
collaborated with the NKVD.
Despite the romantic atmosphere that was typical of these American
bachelors’ gatherings in Moscow, the party guests were most impressed by
the Russian bears. Thayer’s memoirs show just how impressed they were:
The book is entitled Bears in the Caviar. Russian bears and Soviet people
staged a poetic mise-en-scéne without the assistance of any animal trainer.
The symbolism of the act went unappreciated, even by an American con-
noisseur of Russian realities. Karl Radek, who was known for his sharp
wit, found a bear cub lying on its back with a bottle of milk in its paws,
and switched the bear’s nipple to a champagne bottle. The cub took several
swallows of Cordon Rouge before he noticed he’d been fooled. Meanwhile,
the malicious Radek had disappeared, and Marshal Yegorov, who hap-
pened to be standing nearby, had to console the crying bear in his arms. As
the general rocked the bear, it vomited on his medal-encrusted uniform.
Thayer soon appeared at the scene of the crime. Half a dozen waiters were
fussing with Yegorov, doing their best to clean his suit, as he bellowed:
“Tell your ambassador that Soviet generals are not accustomed to being
treated like clowns!”?8
Elena Bulgakova’s description of the embassy ball pales against the back-
ground of these marvelous details, which could have been the work of a satir-
ist or a historiographer. Satan’s ball in The Master and Margarita, meanwhile,
does not seem to have any connection to the American “Spring Festival,”
conceived more in the style of FE. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.
For Muscovites, however, the opulent ball took on other nuances in ret-
rospect—it had been a place where victims enjoyed themselves alongside
293
their executioners, as nearly all the guests were to perish over the next few
months, to the astonishment of their hosts. At the time that Bulgakov de-
scribed the scene, he was probably one of the few people still alive who had
been at the ball that the Americans honestly considered “the best party in
Moscow since the revolution.”?? Nevertheless, it was not the frightening
Abadonna but naked, gorgeous Margarita who became the main figure of
Bulgakov’s ball.
It is enough to reread this chapter from the novel to become convinced of
a fact that will sound surprising to modern readers: It was not political in-
trigues, grief over the dead, or desire for revenge that reigned at Satan’s
ball. Of all the “kings, dukes, knights, suicides, poisoners, gallows birds,
procuresses, jailers, card sharpers, hangmen, informers, traitors, madmen,
detectives, and seducers,”*° the author shows only one category—sex-
related criminals.*! Monsieur Jacques, who poisoned his king’s mistress
and the “reverse case” —the queen’s lover, who poisoned his wife; a Russian
noblewoman who liked to burn her maid’s face with a curling iron; a
Neapolitan lady who helped five hundred of her female compatriots get rid
of their tiresome husbands; Frieda, who was raped by her employer and
later suffocated her child; the owner of some peculiar brothel in
Strasbourg; a Moscow dressmaker who had made two peepholes in her fit-
ting room, a fact of which every last one of her female clients was fully
aware; and a young man who had sold his beloved to a whorehouse. This
stream of stories ended, understandably, with Messalina; after that,
Margarita could no longer tell one face or sin from another.
It is impossible to ignore the erotic tension in the slowly moving proces-
sion, where beautiful, naked sinners appear at the ball with their seducers
and rapists. Practically the whole scene was cut out by Soviet censors when
the novel was first published in the 1960s. Of course, Margarita was not
the first nue in Russian literature, but she was appearing naked in an unbe-
lievably public place and, what was even more shocking, she was not the
least bit ashamed. Moreover, she was not alone. “The naked women
mounting the staircase between the tail-coated and white-tied men floated
up in a spectrum of colored bodies that ranged from white through olive,
copper, and coffee to quite black. . . Diamond-studded orders glittered on
the jackets and shirt fronts of the men.”*? Sex was not individualized here.
As opposed to Nabokov, Bulgakov was not interested in how his character
fell into sin. “Satan’s Ball” was not twentieth-century psychological erotica
but rather an erotic epic, a static picture of the monotonous and insur-
mountable might of sex: The force of lust knew no boundaries in time or
space; it ruled all nations and all epochs.
But it seemed there were exceptions. One such exception was the country
and time Woland visited. Although there were only a few political criminals
at Satan’s ball this time, they all walked straight in off the streets of Moscow.
The “newcomers,” as Satan’s assistant Koroviev designated them, were

all political criminals. Koroviev introduces the last two arrivals nebulously
and without much emotion—these two poisoners are the only visitors from
the outside world whose sin was not the fruit of love. The last guest, Baron
Maigel, whose spilled blood closes out the ball scene, has a clearly political
vice, however—he is an “eavesdropper and spy.” His prototype was Boris
Steiger, who according to Russian scholar Leonid Parshin was the represen-
tative of the Collegium for External Relations of the ministry of education
who invariably accompanied foreign ambassadors, including Bullitt, on
outings to the Moscow Art Theater.*?
The “newcomers’” sins were not related to sex, and yet the great sinners
of the past went to hell exclusively for their sexual adventures. Did this
mean that for past generations morals lay largely in the sexual realm, while
modern sinners would be judged for their political misdeeds?
As far as we know, this idea has no roots in the works of Mikhail Bul-
gakov. It could, however, have sprung from the mind of William C. Bullitt.
What Margarita Didn’t Know

Very little in the accounts of Elena Bulgakova and Charles Thayer is remi-
niscent of the famous chapter in The Master and Margarita. Only a few cu-
rious details coincide. Several times during the evening, Margarita is dis-
turbed by the sound of flapping wings. Thayer’s memoirs include a colorful
explanation: A flock of birds was borrowed from the Moscow zoo for deco-
ration. Over the course of the ball, the birds slipped out of their cages and
flitted all over the building. The next morning, the entire embassy staff was
engaged to catch them, with the ambassador at the head of the operation.
Another addition to the fund of common details was the expedition under-
taken by the Soviet pilot who was dispatched by the Americans to find flow-
ers: He flew first to the Crimea, then the Caucasus, and finally, to Helsinki.
This trajectory resembles Likhodeev’s fantastic voyage. Finally, there was
the conductor’s tailcoat, which, according to Elena Bulgakova, “mesmerized
[Bulgakov] more than anything else.” This tailcoat can be correlated to the
“unusually long tailcoat of an'unbelievable cut/style” worn by Woland (at a
different occasion, however—at the show in the Variety Theater).3+
There is some incongruity in the story of the tailcoat, however:
Bulgakova did not mention it in the journal entry written directly after the
event. She wrote about it only as she was editing her diary at the beginning
of the 1960s. Bulgakov scholars provide their own perspective: “When
[Elena] entered her story about the ball at the American embassy, she had
no idea that Bulgakov would make use of his impressions in The Master
and Margarita. But when she was editing the second draft, she was fully
aware of it and, naturally, drew out of her memory some half-forgotten im-
295
ages that had never attracted her attention before.”25 It seems that the edi-
tion of Elena Bulgakova’s diaries that is available to the public is not so
much an eyewitness account as it is the recollections of a memoirist in
which facts are mixed in with half-forgotten images. Rather than recording
events as they were, the diarist tried to explain in retrospect a fact that she
knew from her husband’s book but never understood, a fact which there-
fore stuck in her memory when she was reworking her journal. This fact,
clearly expressed by Bulgakov (and probably reiterated during his debates
with his wife over which version of chapter 23 to keep), was the association
between Satan’s ball and the real party at the embassy. What Elena
Bulgakova did not understand was the basis for the association. Why
couldn’t she understand, even though she was present at the ambassador’s
reception, had served as a prototype for the character of Margarita, and
edited her husband’s novel? The writer’s widow never answered this ques-
tion, and instead returned decades later to the same theme, introducing
new, minute details into her diary that still fail to solve the problem.
We can deduce from all this that there was some connection or similarity
between the receptions held by Bullitt and Woland, a commonality of which
Bulgakov’s wife was aware. But as to exactly what sort of connection it was,
Elena was most likely left guessing. At any rate, the link was not based in all
the details of Russian-style exoticism, in all the roosters, bears, birch trees,
and informers that she saw at Spaso House. The similarity must have been
something else, something more important, that even she didn’t know about.
He Bedeviled the Russians

Kalinin accepted the Americans’ credentials on December 19, 1933. The
long-awaited diplomatic recognition of the Soviet Union by the United
States was considered a great achievement. The first U.S. ambassador, who
was Lenin’s friend besides, was welcomed with “effusive Slavic emotion,” as
American newspapers described the event. Bullitt was quite animated him-
self. At a Kremlin banquet, he successfully withstood his first test of en-
durance: an endless stream of toasts during which to eat or sit would have
been a breach of decorum. Bullitt even received a personal offer of assistance
from Stalin, in the form of land on which to build the new embassy com-
pound in the Lenin Hills. Reporting this encounter in a letter to Roosevelt,
the ambassador referred to his own tactics in words reminiscent of Woland’s
notorious advice: “Never ask for anything! Never, especially of those who
are stronger than you. They will offer everything themselves, and they will
give everything themselves.”3° His subtle experience in psychobiography
was not enough to allow him to see past Stalin’s image as a “wiry Gypsy
with roots and emotions beyond my experience.”*” Voroshilov struck him
as “one of the most charming persons that I have ever met.”°*
According to Wallace, Bullitt was very enthusiastic about the Bolsheviks

during his first years as ambassador. He even tried to convince Wallace,
then secretary of agriculture, to pay closer attention to the Russians’
achievements in this field, for some reason particularly emphasizing the
progress they had made in artificial insemination. Stalin received Bullitt
regularly; once they talked one-on-one all night. Bullitt recognized the
Soviet leader as an exceptional personage, but could not mask his disgust
when recalling how Stalin had kissed him with an open mouth. Nor did he
enjoy the copious drinking bouts and feasting rituals so common behind
the Kremlin walls. Wallace saw Bullitt as a liberal man of unconfined spirit
who was used to going wherever he pleased and could not tolerate being re-
stricted or spied on. As a result, Wallace explained, Bullitt’s attitude toward
Soviet Russia changed drastically over the course of his tenure in Moscow.
In 1946, Bullitt compared the Soviet Communist Party to the Spanish in-
quisition. At the same time, he professed a deep love of Russians and main-
tained admiration for the women of Moscow—they were more involved
than men in the construction of the subway system. In the end Wallace,
who after the war became a moderate supporter of rapprochement with the
Soviets, began to criticize Bullitt for his instability and extreme anti-Soviet
views. People like him brought on the Cold War, he wrote. Wallace added
that Bullitt was a wonderful man, but given to sudden mood swings.°?
Meanwhile, Stalin was in no hurry to keep his promises; the construction
of Moscow University had begun in the Lenin Hills, and the people whom
Bullitt had won over to his side and whom he loved were disappearing one
after another before his very eyes. On May 1, 1935, immediately after the
Spring Festival, Bullitt wrote to Roosevelt: “I can, of course, do nothing to
save anyone.” After the arrest of Georgy Andreichin, former ministry of
foreign affairs liaison to the U.S. embassy, Bullitt received a note from
prison, written on toilet paper (!), in which Andreichin begged him “for
God’s sake to do nothing to try to save him, ... [as] he would certainly be
shot.”4° Whether or not Bullitt believed in the authenticity of such mes-
sages (and he most likely did, otherwise he would never have conveyed
them to Roosevelt), he was virtually powerless. Boris Steiger replaced
Andreichin as official liaison but he was soon arrested as well. The ambas-
sador also reported this event to the president.
Later, Bullitt would describe his actions toward the end of his tour in
terms fairly unusual for a diplomat: “I bedeviled the Russians. I did all I
could to make things unpleasant.”*!
Supernatural Intervention
Bulgakov was living then under the relentless strain of a horrible threat, a
danger beyond human capacity to counter. “So, are you really that sick of
The Ambassador and Satan 297
us?” Stalin asked him during their telephone conversation.*2 Bulgakov

wrote later to a friend: “Trust my taste: His manner during the conversation
was strong, clear, stately, and elegant.” The writer confided in Stalin that
since the end of 1930, he had “suffered from a severe form of neurasthenia
accompanied by attacks of fear and anxiety”* and insisted that only a trip
abroad in the company of his wife would help him. After his request was de-
nied, Bulgakov received treatment by hypnosis from Doctor Sergei Berg.
The treatment helped him from the very first session. According to
Bulgakova’s diary, her husband began seeing Berg on November 21,
1934.4 The doctor left his patient with the suggestion that the next day he
would be able to go out to a party alone. The writer did indeed set out
alone the following evening, something he had not done for six months.
Two months later, a fascinated Bulgakov began using hypnosis on others.
His patient was an artist, Dmitriev, who suffered from “gloomy thoughts.”
After the first session, Dmitriev called Bulgakov in “ecstatic delight,” ask-
ing for another session: “He says his gloomy thoughts are gone and that he
doesn’t even recognize himself.”*>
In February 1935, Berg administered three more sessions to Bulgakov.
One round of treatment, in the patient’s words as recorded by Elena
Bulgakova, was “just marvelous.” After another session, the Bergs, the
Bulgakovs, and other guests dined together. “As he was leaving, Berg said
that he was happy that he had managed to cure Mikhail.”
Then Berg fell ill himself. Apologizing that he would be unable to hold
the next session, he wrote: “I am truly glad to know that you are in good
health. It could not have been otherwise, you know: you have the perfect
reserves, the perfect background for absolute and lasting health!” He re-
turned the payment he had received from his patient: “There’s no way I can
accept money for visiting close acquaintances.”*°
In an odd way, Bulgakov employed a hypnotic tone in his response to the
sick hypnotist. It is';worth reproducing the unpublished letter from March
3091935 iv foll:
Dear Sergei Mironovich,
I was chagrined to hear that those pains are still dragging on. I hope, believe,
and wish that this nasty ailment will unhand you as soon as possible. And so it
will be. You will rise again with the springtime sun. I think of you, and don’t
feel like writing my [illegible fragment].
In short, I feel very well. You have made it so that damned fear no longer
torments me. It’s far off and muted. I will visit you. I often recall our friendly
conversations. It goes without saying that Elena Sergeevna sends her best re-
gards. Best wishes to Sofia Borisovna from both of us.
Yours,
M. Bulgakov.”
In Bulgakov’s work, the childlike state of a hypnotized patient, depen-

dent on the will of another and thus capable of expecting magical assis-
tance from outside without a second thought, took the form of a sparkling,
ironic fantasy where every dream comes true. Let the philistines and agents
of the secret police take the fantasy as sleight of hand or hypnosis. As in the
epilogue of The Master and Margarita, “educated people took the view-
point of the police: a gang of brilliantly skillful hypnotists and ventrilo-
quists had been at work.”48 Naturally, the reader does not trust this conclu-
sion. The reader trusts the author and his tragic credo: Supernatural
intervention is not only possible, it is the only way out of the absurdity of
Soviet life.
Bulgakov’s novel and plays of the 1930s carry the image of an omnipo-
tent helper with absolute secular power and limitless magical might, willing
to step in and use them to help a sick and destitute artist. At the beginning
of the decade, Bulgakov had expected much the same from Stalin.
Apparently, by the mid-1930s his hopes had been reoriented, coming to rest
on the U.S. ambassador to Moscow.
For some reason, in December 1933 Elena Bulgakova copied down in
her journal the official announcement about the arrival of the “new
American ambassador” in Moscow.*? Something, we are not sure exactly
what, attracted the Bulgakovs’ attention. Elena was slightly off the mark in
her appreciation of the event: Bullitt was the first ambassador, but he was
in no way “new.” However, the author of the diary was drawn by some-
thing other than the event’s political implications. The easiest assumption
to make is that the couple was concerned about the American copyright for
The Days of the Turbins, on which negotiations had intermittently taken
place. Indeed, Bullitt went straight out to see a performance of The Turbins
and afterward requested a manuscript of the play through Intourist®°—he
kept the text on his desk. In March 1934, The Days of the Turbins was
staged at Yale, Bullitt’s alma mater.°! Charles Thayer recalled in his mem-
oirs*? that his first meeting with the ambassador after his arrival was also
connected to The Days of the Turbins. Thayer, who had recently taken up
Russian lessons, was looking for a job at the new American embassy in
Moscow. Bullitt was then housed in the Metropol hotel, and it was only
with great difficulty that Thayer managed to push his way past the severe
Muscovite doormen to introduce himself to the ambassador. Bullitt asked
him to read a page from the manuscript on his desk. It was The Days of the
Turbins. Thayer could not yet read Russian, but he knew the play and be-
gan paraphrasing the plot. His cheating did not escape the perceptive am-
bassador, but Bullitt appreciated the skills of the young man who was even-
tually to become his interpreter and a career diplomat.
Bullitt and Bulgakov first met on September 6, 1934, at a regular perfor-
mance of The Days of the Turbins at the Moscow Art Theater. Bullitt ap-
299
proached the playwright and told him that he “had already seen the play
four times, and he went out of his way to praise it,” according to
Bulgakova’s diary. “He followed along with an English translation of the
script. He said the first few times he had to glance down at the text fairly
often, but now he rarely had to.”53
According to Elena Bulgakova, she and her husband often attended offi-
cial and informal receptions at the embassy. At first, this relationship
seemed sensational to the Bulgakovs’ friends: “The curiosity was killing
them—friendship with Americans!” Later on, Elena Bulgakova’s entries
about these contacts become more reserved, even monotonous. On
February 16, 1936, she penned: “Bullitt was very courteous as usual”; on
February 18, “the Americans are very nice,” and on March 28, “At 4:30
we were at the Bullitts’. All the Americans, including him, were even
sweeter than usual.” Two weeks later she wrote: “As usual, the Americans
are extremely nice to us. Bullitt begged us to stay longer.”54 The ambas-
sador was showing off his friendship with the Russian writer, introducing
Bulgakov to European ambassadors and lauding his plays.
The relationship between the Bulgakovs and Bullitt and his entourage
was like that of close friends: At times they saw each other very often, al-
most every day, while at other times they did not get together for long peri-
ods of time, particularly when Bullitt left for Washington. On April 11,
1935, the Bulgakovs received the Americans in their own home. “Caviar,
salmon, homemade paté, radishes, fresh cucumbers, fried mushrooms,
vodka, and white wine.” On April 19, they had lunch at the home of em-
bassy secretary Charles Bohlen. On April 23, the Spring Festival was held
at the embassy. On April 29, the Bulgakovs once again hosted Bohlen,
Thayer, Irena Wiley, and several other Americans. “Ms. Wiley invited us to
go to Turkey with her.” The next day, the Bulgakovs were at the embassy
again. “Bullitt brought many people over to meet us, including the French
ambassador and his wife and the Turkish ambassador, a very fat and jolly
fellow.”55 The next evening, the third in a row, the Bulgakovs spent again
with the U.S. diplomats.
It was around that time that Bullitt wrote to Roosevelt: “I can, of course,
do nothing to save anyone.”°°
But help was needed desperately. All this time, the Bulgakovs were trying
to obtain exit visas. On April 11, 1935, the Bulgakovs received Bohlen and
Thayer, “M[ikhail] A[fanasievich] mentioned that he had requested pass-
ports for foreign travel... . The Americans thought this was good, and that
it was about time we left,” Elena Bulgakova wrote.*” Their documents were
accepted by the appropriate office in June 1935. In August, the Bulgakovs
received yet another refusal. On October 16, Bulgakov visited Thayer at his
summer cottage. On October 18, the Bulgakovs went to dine at the ambas-
sador’s residence: “Bullitt came up to us and talked for a long time, first
about The Days of the Turbins, which he adored, and then he inquired as
to when Moliére would be staged.”°* The Life of Monsieur de Moliére was
performed for the first time in February 1936. Thayer and his colleagues at-
tended the dress rehearsal: “The Americans were delighted and thanked
us.” On February 21, Bullitt came to see Moliére: “During the tea
break, ... Bullitt spoke unusually highly of the play and of Mikhail in gen-
eral, referring to him as a master”®? (clearly, this word was of great signifi-
cance for Bulgakov). On February 19, 1936, Bullitt showed his guests a
film. The Bulgakovs were among the guests, and the movie was selected
with clear intent—it was about “an English servant who remained in
America, fascinated with its people and their way of life.” Meanwhile,
Moliére was banned from the stage. On March 14, the ambassador once
again invited the Bulgakovs for dinner. “We decided not to go, as we didn’t
want to hear all his questions and expressions of sympathy.”°° Two weeks
later, however, they did go back to Bullitt’s house. “The Americans, includ-
ing him, were even nicer than ever.”°! As far as we know from Elena
Bulgakova’s diary, Bulgakov paid two more visits to the embassy in
November.
What did he talk about there? Some of these discussions Elena
Bulgakova did not hear, and some she heard but preferred not to record. At
any rate, plans for the Bulgakovs’ departure must have been discussed with
the employees of the American embassy, who in turn supported these inten-
tions through word and film. It is hard to imagine that Bulgakov would not
have vested his dearest hopes in them, and particularly in the ambassador
himself.
After Bullitt left Moscow, Bulgakov never again visited the embassy. In
April 1937, he was again invited to a costume ball, this time organized by
the new ambassador’s daughter. He did not attend, excusing himself for
lack of a costume.
The Order Has Come to Take You Away

William Bullitt was Freud’s patient, coauthor, and savior; diplomatic inter-
locutor of Lenin and Stalin; Roosevelt’s colleague; and Bulgakov’s patron.
He would make a fine fictional hero. But perhaps his novel, a great novel,
has already been penned.
Let us go over the sequence of events once more: The Bulgakovs’ emigra-
tion papers were filed with the appropriate official bureau. In June 1934,
Bulgakov’s request to leave the country was refused yet again. He appealed
this decision in another letter to Stalin, but received no reply. All summer
long, “Mikhail has felt horrid”; “can’t do anything right, because of all the
uncertainty”; “his condition is very bad—again this fear of death, loneli-
ness, and space.”** On September 6, Bulgakov met Bullitt at the perfor-
mance of his play at the Moscow Art Theater. On September 21, Bulgakov
resumed work on The Master and Margarita. On October 13, his wife
wrote in her diary: “His nerves are in bad shape. Fear of space and loneli-
ness. He is thinking about turning to hypnosis.”°? In October 1934,
Bulgakov wrote a rough draft of the last chapter of the novel: Woland is
chatting with the Master: “I have received an order about you. A very fa-
vorable one. In general, I should congratulate you. You were a big success.
So anyway, I received an order,” Woland says. “Someone can give you or-
ders?” the Master replies in astonishment. “Oh, yes. The order has come to
take you away.”
Neither Woland nor the Master appeared in early drafts of the novel,
written before Bullitt’s arrival in Moscow. The devil figured in the plot
from the very start, but he was at first only an abstract, magical force.®
With each reworking of the novel, the Devil became more and more earthly
and concrete, acquiring more and more human features, albeit unusual
ones. With this image, it was only natural that he be a foreigner, even be-
fore Bulgakov met Bullitt. Among possible titles were “Consultant with a
Hoof” and “The Foreigner’s Horseshoe.”
Although Bulgakov scholars have found hundreds of allusions to other
texts in The Master and Margarita, from the encyclopedia and Faust to an-
cient tomes on demonology and freemasonry, there is general agreement
that Woland, despite the fact that he is referred to many times as Satan,
cannot be considered wholly diabolical. “Bulgakov’s Woland has a long
pedigree as a literary character,” Yanovskaya writes, “but in fact he bears
little resemblance to any of his predecessors.”°® Kreps goes even further in
summarizing the reader’s usual perception: “Bulgakov’s Woland is not just
an unusual devil, he is many ways the Satan’s antithesis. .. . Woland’s role
in the novel is not to sow evil but rather to unmask it.”°”
Bullitt’s tenure in Moscow coincided very closely with Bulgakov’s work
on the third draft of his novel.®® It was in this version that the formerly op-
eratic Devil acquired particular human qualities that can be traced, in my
opinion, to the person of the American ambassador. In Bulgakov’s eyes,
Bullitt personified might and mischief, humor and taste, love of opulence
and circus tricks, solitude and stage presence, a derisive but affectionate atti-
tude toward his retinue (it is, indeed, tempting to seek prototypes of the
Devil’s groupies in the guise of embassy employees). Woland and Bullitt had
similar physical traits: Bullitt was bald, his photographs convey a magnetic
gaze, and he also suffered from a streptococcal infection that made his joints
hurt. It is also known that Bullitt loved Schubert, whose music reminded
him of happy days spent with his first wife. And of course Bullitt had a
globe at the embassy, a device that allowed him to visualize geopolitical
ideas so vividly that to him the seas seemed filled with blood. In any case,
one of Bullitt’s postwar works is entitled The Great Globe Itself.
Wallace made brief mention of the smashing parties Bullitt threw in Paris
in the 1920s, at which a butler served guests in the nude.*? Bullitt probably
repeated this trick later as well, or at least talked about it. His sensitive
Russian interlocutor was much more interested than Wallace in such tales,
thirsting for impressions and details about an inconceivable life abroad.
“He would listen eagerly to those who had been abroad, his jaw hanging
wide open,” Bulgakov’s first wife remembered him.”°
Bullitt’s stories and actions would have seemed even more incredible in
the Moscow of the 1930s than they had in the Paris of the 1920s. In the
real lives of people who were deathly afraid of one another, in the lives of
the unreal witnesses and defendants at the Moscow trials, in the lives of
Mandelstam, Zoshchenko, Bukharin, and Beria, things like the love affair
between the Master and Margarita, or group bathing in cognac, could re-
ally happen. But the erotic opulence of Satan’s ball is more reminiscent of
the literary reality of Bullitt’s friend F Scott Fitzgerald, his novels about
millionaires who drank themselves silly out of boredom and threw grand
balls every spring. Thence, too, perhaps, the image of the naked maid,
Gella, the mere sight of whom drove Muscovites crazy, as well as naked
ladies of all kinds walking arm in arm with their partners in tailcoats, and
group dives into a swimming pool full of champagne.
Sociopsychological Experiments at the Variety Theater

Bullitt and Bulgakov were both born in 1891, just as Freud and Wilson
were born in the same year. Despite all the differences between their lives
and positions, in their personalities and interests they had much in com-
mon. Bullitt, a patient of Freud’s. who had a tendency to interpret every-
thing, including names, and Bulgakov, who dreamed up a great number of
curious names, must have surely noticed and discussed the similarity be-
tween their last names (one of Bulgakov’s pen names was M. Bull).
What stories did Bullitt tell Bulgakov? Did he speak of Parisian beauties
and Hollywood receptions in swimming pools? Or did he explain Freud’s
theory that everything in man, good and bad, can be explained as a mani-
festation of his sexuality? But the political atmosphere of the day would
have been difficult to explain away with sex alone—take Steiger, for exam-
ple, spying to his own detriment. Perhaps Bullitt told his friend how naive
he had been himself in thinking that the Great Experiment had wrought in-
ternal change in the populace of Moscow, when in fact an outing to the
Variety Theater would be enough to show that the people hadn’t changed
at all.
Or did Bullitt insist that Goethe had been right, predicting that after
passing through Satan’s trials the world would change for the better?
Mephistopheles’ lines “That power I serve/Which wills forever evil/Yet does
303
forever good” serve as the epigraph to The Master and Margarita, and are
also mentioned in the foreword to the book on Wilson (although the mean-
ing was subverted in the latter case: Wilson eternally willed good but with-
out fail worked evil). Even if the appearance of this quotation from Faust in
both books was sheer coincidence, it still testifies to an unexpected connec-
tion between the two works.
The ambassador’s friend was a man who lived his life under conditions
that went beyond the bounds of comprehension, like the person of Stalin
himself. Bulgakov was a former physician, and had treated many syphilitic
patients and performed a few dozen abortions. He enjoyed politics and
filled entire pages in his diary with malicious jokes about Bolshevik leaders
and detailed reports of the Soviet government’s international negotia-
tions.’' In his country, he was a popular writer who had invented a whole
cast of eccentric characters who seemed nevertheless completely natural to
millions of his readers. Bullitt must have been curious to know what his
Russian companion would agree with and what he would dispute. But the
ambassador could have never imagined the power and grace of the associa-
tions that would come to the mind of this handsome man who tried never
to ask for anything. Bullitt could not have imagined how Bulgakov would
improvise on the theme of his slightest gestures and most careless words,
his extraordinary personality and the observations he made in Moscow.
Bullitt did not know how integral a part of history he would become, with
Bulgakov’s help.
The hero of Bulgakov’s novel, a “consultant” from abroad, has returned
to Moscow in the 1930s after a long absence, and has set himself a very pre-
cise goal. His intention is to observe “Muscovites en masse” and “evaluate
the psychological changes” in the populace of Moscow. The means he uses
appear diabolical to unaccustomed Muscovites, but the associations that his
goals evoke are in no way mythological. Although he is endowed with mag-
ical abilities to carry out his experiment, Woland uses perfectly ordinary ex-
perimental logic. “The Muscovites have changed considerably—outwardly,
I mean—as has the city itself... . But naturally 1am... interested . . . in the
much more important question: have the Muscovites changed inwardly?””*
Woland asks a professional question of himself, his companions, and his au-
dience. Incidentally, Freud posed the same question many times, notably in
his Dissatisfaction with Culture. “A vital question, indeed, sir,”’? Woland’s
retinue agreed. In fact, this is the issue of the transformation of man which
was so central to Russian culture from the symbolists of the Silver Age to the
time of the pedologists, Woland’s contemporaries. Modern amateurs and
professionals alike are still fascinated by this problem, which is nowadays
framed in terms of homo sovieticus. Naturally, almost all of the scene at the
Variety Theater, as well as the chapter on Satan’s ball, was cut from the
1960s edition of the The Master and Margarita.
The Devil does not simply torment and torture, he tempts men and puts
them to the test. One of Bulgakov’s contemporaries, Vyacheslav Ivanov,
elaborated on this question at length. According to Ivanov, Goethe’s
Mephistopheles tempts Faust in the same way that Satan tempts Job in the
Old Testament, and, as in the older text, the Devil finds only one weak
point: “the sphere of desires.” Naturally, Faust’s first excursion with his
new, omnipotent guide led straight into the witches’ kitchen.”* As opposed
to Goethe, Freud, and Ivanov, Bulgakov did not consider desire the most
frightful and mysterious aspect of mankind. Margarita and the Master,
people of a new age, boldly surrender themselves to their love, making it
superfluous for Woland to tempt them or interfere in the erotic side of their
life in any way. Woland and Bulgakov see the mystery of mankind in some-
thing else altogether: in cruelty and mercy, in dependence and the ability to
resist, power over the mob and the ability to fuse with it.
“I’m not really an actor at all,” Woland insists after the experiment, try-
ing to explain his epistemological goals and methods. “I simply wanted to
see some Muscovites en masse and the easiest way to do so was in a the-
ater.”’> Indeed, he conducts a series of logical, superbly arranged tests at
the Moscow Variety Theater. The reaction of the audience to uncertainty
and silence is tension and anxiety. They react to the rain of banknotes with
general happiness, amazement, and excitement. The reaction to death, to
the severed head, is mass hysteria, with a female voice pleading for mercy.
All these reactions are quite satisfactory, one might even say universal.
Woland muses: “They are people like any others. ... They’re fond of
money, but then they always were. ... They are thoughtless ... but they
sometimes feel compassion too.”’° Woland was in fact putting to the test
the Nietzschean-Bolshevik hypothesis that man can be transformed. It was
only a mental exercise for Bulgakov and Bullitt, but Woland brought it into
the realm of action. The same experiment would be concluded in real life
only half a century later. As a result, Woland diagnoses the Soviet people,
and his diagnosis has proven correct until this very day: “They’re ordinary
people—in fact, they remind me of their predecessors, except that the hous-
ing shortage has soured them.”77
The idea that man can be transformed concerned Bulgakov as the quin-
tessential problem of his time. He presented one aspect of the issue in The
Heart of a Dog, and another in The Master and Margarita. van Bezdomny
undergoes a complete cycle of transformation after his meeting with
Woland. An encounter with the Devil, severe delirium, and the psychiatric
treatment that followed transform the proletarian lush of a poet into a re-
spectable Soviet professor. This typical homo sovieticus, whose last name is
yet another reminder of his nation’s “housing shortage,”78 perceives all that
befalls him without much astonishment.
305
Mikhail Zoshchenko’s characters (see chapter 10) speak of their incredi-

ble daily adventures in a similar way, with an even more astonishingly
jaded tone. The Soviet man is totally immersed in Soviet routine, he ceases
to think about his actions, and is delivered of his doubts, surprise, and wor-
ries. It takes a foreigner to defamiliarize Soviet life for those who live it. In
1922, Osip Mandelstam wrote: “Everyday routine is foreignness, it is full
of false exoticism; it is invisible to the homebound, native eye. ... A foreign
tourist (a fiction writer) is a different story altogether: he stares at every-
thing and his comments are always inopportune.””? Ilya Ehrenburg’s Julio
Jurenito came out the same year. The plot is structured around the contrast
between two visions of Soviet life, seen through the eyes of a foreign Uber-
mensch and a local simpleton. A decade and a half later, Woland, the
Master, and Bezdomny would demonstrate how exponentially that bifur-
cated approach had branched out in complexity.
Bulgakov went to a professional psychiatrist to see what he would say
about Ivan Bezdomny’s “case.” The psychiatrist did not think Ivan should
be indifferent to his own fate, particularly when he seemed to be stricken
with chronic paranoiac aggressivity: “In accordance with the rules of psy-
chopathology, Ivan Nikolaevich [Bezdomny] should be experiencing anx-
ious fear. A man who sees such deviltry cannot help but feel uncomfortable.
You have brought this fact out very skillfully in the character of the de-
ceased Berlioz. As for Ivan Nikolaevich, he seems to channel his energy into
persecuting his enemies and undermining their designs, but he does not in
the least react to things that happen right in front of him or to him.”8°
But only for Woland, Bullitt, and, to some extent, the psychiatrist and
the author was Bezdomny’s life unbelievable. Ivan saw his own life as com-
pletely normal, and Soviet writers can understand this better than any psy-
chiatrist. Stories of “psychic transformation” related by Vsevolod Ivanov in
U (see chapter 6) also might strike the reader as incredible, while the char-
acters themselves aren’t shocked in the least. Generally speaking, Soviet life
was stunning only to the external observer.
The Master and Dependence

Thus, we have the foreign ambassador, as much a theater lover as Woland,
meeting the Master, Bulgakov, who has fallen into a trap from which he
cannot extricate himself without help. However, not even Bullitt’s assis-
tance could improve his situation. The Master’s omnipotent helper left
Moscow and regretfully abandoned the writer and his wife, who would
now have to find their way into eternity by themselves. Since all his unlim-
ited abilities had failed to help the Master in his earthly existence, the “for-
eign consultant” must have thought he had simply distracted the Master
for a moment and shared his dream of the peace and quiet no one would let
him have. He had no idea the Master would remember him as he traversed
the last leg of his earthly journey.
Dependence motivated Bulgakov throughout the last part of his life, sup-
plying him with material for constant creative reworking. But this depen-
dence did not entirely define the content of his writing. Significant aspects
of Bulgakov’s novel, such as the Gospel theme, had nothing to do with
Bullitt. Similarly, the image of Woland integrated a variety of traits that the
author commandeered from other sources.
Bulgakov’s dependence on Bullitt and the Master’s dependence on
Woland are similar in some respects to the author’s dependence on hypno-
tist Sergei Berg, although the doctor-patient reiationship is different in
other ways. Berg was an important figure for Bulgakov at that time. He vis-
ited the writer frequently at home, and over the course of several sessions
cured him of a serious neurotic reaction. Bulgakov was fascinated by hyp-
nosis and began to work miracles himself: It took him only one session to
relieve a friend of the kind of “gloomy thoughts” that were running ram-
pant in 1935.°! It has long been recognized that Woland and the Master
can be superimposed to produce an astonishing effect: The two characters,
so outwardly divergent, convey a single history in the novel, each building
on the words of the other. One of the psychological mechanisms of depen-
dence is identification with the object cf dependence. In much the same
way, amidst all his suffering, Bulgakov began practicing hypnosis on his
friend, and as a result managed to identify with his own hypnotist. Later he
would employ suggestive language in the aforementioned letter to Berg.
Effective hypnosis is a marvelous apotheosis of one man’s dependence on
another. Not everyone can be a hypnotist, just as not everyone can be hyp-
notized. But Bulgakov had the ability, and the theme of hypnosis is one of
the few that runs through the entire novel: Stravinsky uses hypnosis in
treatment, Yeshua treats Pilate in the same fashion, and the “educated and
cultured people” of Moscow interpret the tricks performed by Woland and
Company as hypnosis (as do a few contemporary literary historians). In
April 1938, S. L. Tseitlin, who had advised Bulgakov on the “psychiatric”
side of his novel, sent him a “classic book on hypnosis.” Rationally inex-
plicable, miraculous in the literal sense of the word, the art of hypnosis pre-
supposes absolute passivity in one person and absolute power in another. It
requires that the subject accept this control willingly and gratefully. This
whole setup was well suited to the spirit of the Soviet era, particularly its
Stalinist period. Hypnosis died out in the West in the face of Freud’s vehe-
ment opposition, but it was in fact the only psychotherapeutic method that
survived and even flourished under communist rule. The survival of hypno-
sis in Russia encouraged many popular practitioners, from Wolf Messing in
the 1930s to Anatoly Kashpirovsky in the 1980s.
307
It is highly unlikely that Bulgakov, the patient of a hypnotist, and Bullitt,

the patient of a psychoanalyst, discussed their clinical experience.
Something else is more important, however: Only a miracle could save a
person from the horrible, inexplicable, unpredictable world of Stalin’s
Moscow. When all that is left is the hope of a miracle, even miracles seem
possible and attainable. Stalin was perfectly capable of working miracles.
The ambassador of a remote and powerful country could work miracles; a
hypnotist could, too; even the patient of a hypnotist could do it. The only
condition was that the victim believe in miracles at the moment when he
was most frightened and confused.
On October 30, 1935, Akhmatova came to see the Bulgakovs: “She
looks dreadful. Her husband and son were both arrested on the same night.
She came to submit an appeal to Stalin. She is clearly very upset. Muttering
something to herself.”** Bulgakov helped Akhmatova write the letter of ap-
peal. Then he suggested that she handwrite the typewritten text; it would
be more convincing, he contended. The letter was delivered to Stalin. Four
days later, Akhmatova received a cable from her husband and son: They
had been freed. It was truly a miracle. The events dearest to the human
heart depended on the performance of certain mystical rites. Bulgakov’s let-
ters to Stalin were precisely such magical acts, and the absence of the de-
sired result would have meant that they had been performed improperly.
Thus Zamyatin explained why he had received permission to emigrate and
Bulgakov had not: Zamyatin’s letter was written “distinctly and clearly,”
whereas Bulgakov’s letter was written “incorrectly.” *?
Dependence, like love, comes in all colors. Bulgakov’s dependence on
Stalin—one-sided, absolute, totally pure, and deeper even than Moliére’s
dependence on the Sun King—was different from his relations with Bullitt.
Regardless of all the contrast in their respective social positions and future
plans, theirs was an authentic, amicable, and evidently mutually gratifying
affinity. As a result, Woland looks much more like Bullitt physically, emo-
tionally, and personally, than the Louis from Moliére resembles the real-life
Stalin.
This is not to say that Bullitt’s personality had a major impact on the
artistic side of The Master and Margarita. The ambassador was an unusu-
ally bright man, but an unexceptional writer. There is none of Bulgakov’s
magic in his only novel, It’s Not Done.** And yet it is the voice of Bullitt, an
admirer of women, Schubert, Goethe, and opulence, that resounds in
Woland’s admonition: “What good is your little basement now? Oh, thrice
romantic master, wouldn’t you like to stroll under the cherry blossom with
your love in the daytime and listen to Schubert in the evening?” ®° As a sign
of their ironic interest in breeding a new species of man, the Devil adds:
“Don’t you want, like Faust, to sit over a retort in the hope of fashioning a
new homunculus?”®¢ Bullitt said much the same thing to another thrice ro-
mantic master, Freud, who referred to himself as an “old master,” hesitant

to leave the slaughterhouse his homeland had become.
The difference was that Bullitt could not do for Bulgakov what he did for
Freud in a similar situation—help him escape.
The Saga of Foreign Aid

The plot of Bulgakov’s novel develops simultaneously in several directions,
as do all the main characters.” Margarita, for instance, is the Master’s af-
fectionate companion, a witch, and a lightly disguised portrait of the au-
thor’s wife. Her witch persona fulfills the wishes of her wife-companion
self, who is incapable of achieving them by earthly means. Woland is at
once the Devil and Bullitt. The mythological Woland does well against the
backdrop of historical Moscow, a place more terrifying than the Devil him-
self. He takes the Master and Margarita out of a Soviet life they can no
longer bear. Woland’s historical prototype was unable to do the same for
the author, despite his tremendous influence; but in Bulgakov’s novel, what
the author’s powerful friend could not do for him, the Devil the author cre-
ated did for the Master.
One can only speculate about the otherworldly “peace” Woland offers to
the Master and Margarita, but its earthly analogue is clear: emigration and
life abroad. One need only reread the farewell scene to find confirmation of
this connection: a “tremor of sadness,” “delicious excitement, the gypsy’s
thrill of the open road,” a “profound and grievous sense of hurt,” “proud
indifference,” and a “presentiment of eternal peace.”’® These words could
only be the poignant expression of a man forced to quit the city and culture
he loves, abandoning them for life as an immigrant, where he will have
peace but no light. Light can shine on him only at home.®?
This is the price the Master has to pay. After this experience, he can look
Woland boldly in the eye. “Forever ... I must think what that means.””°
Bulgakov must have whispered these words to himself as he submitted his
papers for an exit visa. Or perhaps he had in mind the last, hurried words
and gestures of Yevgeny Zamyatin, one of the luckier Masters who man-
aged to escape. Later, Zamyatin would correspond with Bulgakov, who had
never been abroad. Not all his letters found their way to their addressee. In
any case, Zamyatin’s decision to leave was perceived by both as an infernal
act: In a letter Zamyatin sent on the eve of his departure, he referred to
himself as Ahasuerus, and this was the name by which Bulgakov would
later allude to him.”!
It is senseless to argue about how the novel really ends, whether the
Master and Margarita die or emigrate. It is just as pointless to argue about
Woland’s true identity. But the reader should certainly mystify the novel no
309
more than the author did himself. Likewise, we cannot ignore the fact that
the book’s mythological framework circumscribes a real-life drama, and
that the Master’s farewell is a difficult decision that nonetheless many were
prepared to make, including Bulgakov himself.
As we know, the real Bullitt was far from omnipotent. Nevertheless, it is
possible that the ambassador’s demonstrative attention helped the writer.
International acclaim was taken into account even in those days, at least by
those who issued the paychecks. At a performance of one overly aggressive
play, Stanislavsky exclaimed: “What will America think?” with the same
intonation he sometimes used when concerned about Stalin’s opinion.
During rehearsals for Moliére, he frightened Bulgakov: “What if the French
ambassador walks out after the second act?”
Bulgakov found little peace even during Bullitt’s stay in Moscow, but af-
ter his departure at the end of 1936 the writer’s life took a sharp turn for
the worse. In an attempt to save himself and to justify his dependence at the
same time, Bulgakov wrote a play about Stalin, Batum, and it was expected
that the protagonist himself would read it. A psychoanalyst would charac-
terize this process of switching from one powerful figure to another
(Stalin-hypnotist—Bullitt-Stalin) as an obsessive search for an object of
transference. A neurotic transfers his expectations of supernatural help to a
suitable figure, and all his mental energies are concentrated on this object.
When a writer is a neurotic who finds himself in a dangerous, humiliating,
and nearly untenable situation, his text becomes a message to the object of
his transference, conveying love, dependence, and fear. This text resembles
the associations directed at the analyst during a psychoanalytic session. In
the beginning, while Bulgakov was still strong, while he sustained hope and
had a choice of different objects for transference (Stalin and Bullitt), his cre-
ative work expressed dependence only in shrouded form, and it did not
overlap with his mystically flavored letters to the Great Leader. But the
writer’s strength ran out, and he was left with only one powerful figure to
whom he could appeal. It was then that these two divergent genres were
fused in a single text. This text conveys love for the patron, cowering fear
before his power, a desire to share unclear feelings, instinctive magic, self-
conscious flattery, beseeching, hope, and prematurely expressed gratitude.
Such a text becomes the focus of all of life’s aspirations. Its acceptance by
the patron can save the author and lift him to dizzying heights, whereas de-
nial can lead only to suicide. Bulgakov fell mortally ill on learning that his
play about Stalin had been rejected by its subject. It was then that he re-
turned to his novel about Woland, the Master, and Margarita.
If Bulgakov had consciously encoded Bullitt in the image of Woland, it
was a carefully guarded secret.*? He told one of his friends: “Woland has
no prototype, please keep this in mind.”’* He invented quizzes for his
house guests: “Who is Woland, in your opinion?” “Satan,” the guests
would respond, much to the host’s satisfaction.”> Bulgakov plainly had said
as much in his text, so the purpose of this question was unclear.
However, we would offer a different answer: Woland is Bullitt, the
Master’s insane dream is emigration, and the whole novel is a desperate cry
for help. It is irrelevant whether the help was expected to be supernatural
or foreign, hypnotic, magical, or real. The Master and Margarita was
Bulgakov’s “prayer over the cup,” in mingled pride and dependency: “You
should never ask anyone for anything. Never—and especially from those
who are more powerful than yourself. They will make the offer and they
will give of their own accord.””°
Shuffling the Deck

“The result can be amazing when you shuffle the pack!” Woland exclaimed
when he realized that a Moscow girl who had been brought to his ball was
also the great-great-great-granddaughter of a sinful French queen. “There
are some matters in which even class barriers and frontiers are powerless.”?”
In June 1935, several months after Margarita listened to Woland while
preparing for Satan’s ball, Bullitt made a speech in Virginia: “The noblest
words that can issue from the mouth of man have been prostituted, and the
noblest sentiments in the heart of man have been played upon by propa-
ganda to conceal a simple truth: that those dictatorships are tyrannies im-
posing their dogmas on the enslaved people.”’® In November, Bullitt met
with his colleague, the U.S. ambassador to Nazi Germany in Berlin. The am-
bassador to Germany later wrote: “His remarks about Russia were directly
contrary to the attitude he held when he passed this way last year.”?? It was
around that time that Bullitt asked Roosevelt to transfer him to Paris.
Bullitt’s role in France was of tremendous importance.!°° During the two
years directly preceding the war, Bullitt coordinated all U.S. policy in
Europe. After life in Moscow, his anti-Soviet sentiments welled up to equal
his anti-German fervor. As a close friend of Blum’s and Daladier’s, he in-
sisted on the rapid arming of France and played an important role in the
preparation of the Munich Accords. For some time before the German inva-
sion, Bullitt acted as a surrogate mayor of Paris. After the French capitu-
lated, Bullitt, contrary to Roosevelt’s order, refused to evacuate the embassy,
an act that would have meant recognizing France’s defeat. Bullitt wrote to
the U.S. state department after he had been caught in an air raid: “I have for
years had the feeling that I have had so much more in life than any human
being has a right to have, that the idea of death does not excite me.” !0!
Bullitt’s career as a diplomat ended dramatically.!°* He had discovered
that one of Roosevelt’s advisors was a homosexual, and informed the presi-
dent of this. Roosevelt felt that this tale-telling was more immoral than the
sin itself. It might well have been due to this mistake that Bullitt was forced
to resign for the second time in his career. He then enlisted as an infantry-
man in de Gaulle’s army. In August 1944, Roosevelt mentioned him in con-
nection with Russia, asserting that Bullitt had acted horribly and that he
would burn in hell for his intrigues; and furthermore, he, Roosevelt, had no
idea what Bullitt was doing at the moment, whether he had been killed at
the front or had survived to become a future French prime minister.!°
William Bullitt died in his sleep in Paris, twenty-seven years after the
death of Mikhail Bulgakov. That same year, two books were published si-
multaneously in different corners of the globe: the psychoanalytic study of
U.S. President Woodrow Wilson and the novel about Woland, The Master
and Margarita.
10
The Intelligentsia
in Search of Resistance
Heirs to the Silver Age

The Russian intelligentsia, which always laid claim to a particular destiny,
suffered unimaginably from what happened to the country during the hard
decades of Soviet rule; but intellectuals themselves bore a considerable
share of responsibility for these events. Anton Chekhov wrote in 1899, a
time when such strong words could only have been aroused by remarkable
perspicacity: “I do not believe in our intelligentsia—hypocritical, false, hys-
terical, ill-mannered, and lazy. I do not even believe them when they suffer
and complain, since their persecutors emerge from their own ranks.” Ten
years later his words would be quoted by the authors of the famous essay
collection Landmarks, in order to reinforce their own equally damning ac-
cusations against the intelligentsia that had carried out the first Russian
revolution.! After the third revolution, in his book The Apocalypse of Our
Time, Vasily Rozanov chose even harsher words: “Actually, there is no
doubt that Russia was killed by literature.”* Another twenty years further
down the road, the bitter truth about the intelligentsia’s helplessness and re-
sponsibility would emerge clearly even in far-off Kolyma,* where prisoner
Varlam Shalamov wrote: “The experiment of humanistic Russian literature
led to the bloody violence of the twentieth century I see before me.
... There is no rational basis to life—that is what our time has proven.”
Soviet cultural figures were not simply innocent victims of the regime.
Many Party leaders, including those who were directly culpable for the de-
struction of culture and the persecution of the intelligentsia, were undoubt-
edly the latter’s children and grandchildren. More importantly, the most
renowned writers, musicians, and scholars collaborated closely with the au-
thorities from the late 1920s on, and with few exceptions maintained these
contacts until their arrest or death. This was true not only of talentless pre-
tenders like Trofim Lysenko but also of such masters of their trades as
312
The Intelligentsia in Search of Resistance 313
Stanislavsky and Meyerhold, Maxim Gorky and Alexei Tolstoy, and

Vladimir Bekhterev and Pyotr Kapitsa.
The 1930s brought much that the world had never before seen, among
which was the development of Soviet high society—a monstrous mélange
of personal talent, corruption, and unheard-of cruelty. Salons where gener-
als and Politburo members were constant guests were hosted by beautiful
actresses like Zinaida Reich, Yesenin’s widow and Meyerhold’s wife, who
was brutally murdered in her own apartment after Meyerhold’s arrest, and
Natalya Satz, who was close to both Lunacharsky and Tukhachevsky.
Famous writers and poets of the 1930s—Babel, Pilnyak, Ehrenburg,
Pasternak, and even a loner like Mandelstam—each had his own patron on
high. Conversing over tea or vodka, poets like Mayakovsky and
Chukovsky (judging by the latter’s memoirs) would often discuss the rich
and powerful, knowing whereof they spoke. Trotsky, Stalin, Kamenev,
Yenukidze, and even Voroshilov held receptions where poetry was read and
opera singers would perform. The children of Party officials most often
took up intellectual professions when they grew up: In the 1930s, the intel-
ligentsia was becoming a privileged sector of society, and it enjoyed benefits
that approached those of the bureaucratic and military upper crust.
Fear was not the only common motivating factor in the intelligentsia’s
collaboration with the new leadership. A fuller explanation can be found in
the history of ideas, in the events and the beliefs that cast many Western in-
tellectuals into the same sort of political embrace. Westerners felt no threat;
nevertheless, many different individuals (including a number with the most
impeccable reputations) at various times leaned toward collaboration with
the Bolsheviks, from André Gide to Jean-Paul Sartre, from Leon
Feuchtwanger to Bertolt Brecht, from Pablo Neruda to Pablo Picasso. Some
made an honest mistake, while others were choosing the lesser of two evils;
still others were misguided by their belief in utopia, the eternal lure for in-
tellectuals. If one respects these people’s conscious and, as a rule, guileless
choice, then one must also understand their Soviet counterparts, whose
moral convictions were formed under much less sanguine conditions and
whose decisions were made under the duress of vitally important threats
and rewards. In these circumstances, even unspoken resistance to the
regime brought not only conflict with a seemingly almighty power, it also
brought rejection from the majority of one’s peers.
Two Meanings of Resistance

“Until the waves of this Dionysian tide wash away the last edges of individ-
uality, with the mysteries of death submerging it in the limitless ocean of
the universal whole...” This challenge to the elements was issued by the
leader of Russian symbolism, Vyacheslav Ivanov.’ Washing away the last
edges of individuality would lead to the mysteries of death, just as would

historical materialism. We already know of one madman who returned
from war to preach the superman in its most absurdly literal form (see
chapter 2). Lunacharsky, future head of the ministry of education, also
wrote “Dithyrambs to Dionysus.” And Ivanov himself later spent some
time serving in the ministry of education.
Resistance to the regime became not only deadly, it became intellectually
difficult. In that culture, undermined as it was by the efforts of several gen-
erations, there was no tradition, philosophy, or language of opposition. It
was not by chance that of all the concepts of psychoanalysis, resistance at-
tracted the least attention among professional Russian analysts; for resis-
tance was most pronounced in the attitude of Soviet intellectuals toward
psychoanalysis.
The resistance of Freud’s Soviet readers was far more political than the
resistance that Freud had detected and interpreted in his Viennese patients.
For some Soviets, psychoanalysis was associated with the regime’s most
ambitious claims; for others, it seemed an encroachment on what little was
left them that was still uncontrolled and uncensored—their dreams, emo-
tions, and aspirations. Others found comfort and hope in psychoanalysis
precisely because of its dissimilarity to the all-penetrating Soviet ideology.
Thus, Russians held many different views of psychoanalysis; but the
Russians who were familiar with it by more than just hearsay were few and
steadily dwindling. By the 1930s, an interest in psychoanalysis was almost
invariably accompanied by resistance in both senses of the word, political
and psychoanalytic; and in the Soviet context, these two meanings were
much closer than the canon would place them.
In contrast to Freudian constructs, for the Soviet intelligentsia of the
1920s and 1930s, the issue of sex was incomparably less troublesome than
was the issue of power. The aspects of psychoanalysis that were linked with
issues of power and subordination—for example, the asymmetrical rela-
tionship between analyst and patient—were subjected to systematic criti-
cism. Having had such a traumatic recent experience with power, Soviet in-
tellectuals suspected that the application of psychoanalysis under prevailing
conditions could only lead to a new form of totalitarianism. In light of
what we now know about those times, one must admit that those individu-
als who had heard Trotsky’s speeches and read Zalkind had good reason to
be suspicious. Even Vladimir Nabokov, who being an émigré was distanced
from events, saw in psychoanalysis “the threat of a totalitarian state based
on the gender myth.”®
Psychoanalysis had begun to conflict with the spirit of the times.
Outward life was now far too terrifying to attribute any importance to in-
ternal fears. Osip Mandelstam’s wife once related the nightmares she had
during the couple’s exile to Voronezh, not long before her husband’s second
The Intelligentsia in Search of Resistance
315
arrest and agonizing death. She exclaimed, “No Freud would dare explain
away these dreams with sublimated complexes, suppressed sexual feelings,
oedipal nonsense, and other such well-meaning atrocities!”” (It should be
pointed out, however, that Freud interrupted his work during the occupa-
tion of Vienna, explaining that when the conscious was shaken, it was im-
possible to be interested in the unconscious.) “The conscious is much more
terrifying than any unconscious complexes,” wrote Mikhail Bakhtin,
whose experiences of that time were similar.®
The intelligentsia’s attraction to psychoanalysis, which had flared so
brightly in the early 1920s, quickly dwindled and died in the period of
Stalin’s rule. History has recorded no firsthand accounts of interest in psy-
choanalysis among the next wave of philosophers and writers, such as
Andrei Platonov and Boris Pasternak. Anna Akhmatova, who knew “in
what kind of garbage poems can grow shamelessly,” nevertheless told her
close friends that she hated Freud. Of the great Russian writers of this cen-
tury, Nabokov seems to have written the most about psychoanalysis. He
called Freud a “Viennese charlatan,” and devoted long feuilletons to him.
However, a psychoanalytic approach was still adopted from time to time
in the Soviet humanities, even in some of the most ideologically charged
fields. One example of this was the research of renowned philologist V.
Adrianova-Perets into Russian folklore, the results of which were published
in 1935 by the prestigious Academy of Sciences press.” Psychoanalysis also
continued to play a vital role in the lives and work of several other first-rate
creative minds—as we will see, for different reasons and with diverse con-
sequences in each case.
Sergey Eisenstein in the Goosefoot Jungles

For much of his productive life, Sergey Mikhaylovich Eisenstein
(1898-1948), the great film director and creator of Potemkin and many
other films, was an observer and critic of the developing field of psycho-
analysis. The theoretical writings he left behind have been partially pub-
lished by V. V. Ivanoy.!°
Eisenstein’s intellectual engagement with psychoanalysis periodically
waxed and waned according to his level of interest and the intensity of his
resistance; but he continued to be involved with it throughout his life.
Pavlov, Freud, and Meyerhold are the first three individuals mentioned in
his huge autobiography; through the works of these writers, he undertook
his youthful “joust with the windmills of mysticism.” Eisenstein first read
Freud in spring 1918, while serving as a volunteer in the newly created Red
Army. With cinematographic accuracy he recalled, “In the frenzied crush of
people I was so engrossed in Freud’s little book that I didn’t notice that I
had long since squashed my pint of milk.”'! FR M. Ermler, a young actor
who was close to Eisenstein in the 1920s and who would later become a fa-
mous director, remembered that Eisenstein knew Freud “with the usual sys-
tematic thoroughness that characterized his intellect”; according to him,
scenes from the film New and Old leave no doubt that Eisenstein used psy-
choanalysis in his work. Ermler himself was also interested in psychoanaly-
sis, but one day Eisenstein declared to him: “If you don’t stop messing
around with Freud, our friendship will be over. You’re a jerk. Read Pavlov,
and you'll see that Freud’s not the only thing in the world.”!* This charm-
ing brutality was a substantive feature of Eisenstein’s style at that time.
Another friend related that he had called Eisenstein the “Devil’s agent,”
and the nickname had been to the filmmaker’s liking.
Eisenstein was friends with Stefan Zweig, who was in Russia not long be-
fore he wrote the book Healing and the Psyche, which contains a long,
adoring anecdote about Freud. Zweig described Freud to the director as the
“reat Viennese,” the “patriarch of the new Athenian school.” Eisenstein
wryly recalled how these stories “melded Plato and Aristotle into the over-
whelming personality of the man with the Wagnerian first name.” Zweig
could not resist introducing Eisenstein to Freud, and in 1929 the latter
agreed to a meeting in Vienna. The meeting never took place. Later, in
1946, Eisenstein described his analytic experience as “my raids into the
fantastic jungles of psychoanalysis, jungles penetrated by the powerful
breath of the lebeda.”!> Lebeda, Russian for goosefoot, was Eisenstein’s
pun on Freud’s concept of the libido.
In his unfinished memoirs, Eisenstein related how Freud had helped him
understand his relations with his own teacher, Vsevolod Meyerhoid. “It
was an oedipal complex like the play of passions within Freud’s own
school. The ‘sons’ were attacking their father more in response to his
‘regime of tyranny.’ And the father in this case was more like Saturn, who
devoured his own children, than like Oedipus’s harmless father. .. . Isn’t
this the source of the image of the horde that eats the eldest of its kind?”!4
Why do I get so excited when I talk about psychoanalysis, Eisenstein asked
himself. There was a ready answer: The whole situation within the
Freudian school unfolded in a way similar to the relations between
Meyerhold and his students.’“The same sort of grand old man, infinitely
charming as a master and foully malicious as a person; the same discord, a
rupture in initial harmony; ... the same energetic growth of individualities
around him. The same intolerance for any sign of independence.”
Eisenstein went even further in his introspection. Just as Freud represented
Meyerhold, so Meyerhold symbolized Eisenstein’s own father. Little
Sergey’s father never told him where children came from, and his later men-
tor was even more evasive in questions of art. “God willed that in questions
of ‘secrecy,’ my spiritual papa should be just like my biological one.”!5
“How can I tell that to the child?” appears four times in his memoirs, in
German, and moreover, these words were tentatively chosen as the title.
317
We can easily extrapolate Eisenstein’s further thoughts from these gen-

eral statements: While his father never gave him an answer about Sex,
Meyerhold demurred when asked to explain professional issues, and like-
wise Freud’s answers failed to satisfy his search for the final truths of the
psyche. He saw in both Freud and Meyerhold (and of course, in his father)
“the union of creative genius and personal vileness,” and suspected Freud
of knowing something he wasn’t telling.
Otto Rank’s famous book The Trauma ofBirth had an important impact
on Eisenstein. A passionate admirer of Nietzsche and at the same time one
of Freud’s favorite students, Rank sought a psychologically sound compro-
mise between Oedipus and Dionysus. In his book, he introduced the new
concepts of embryonic and birth experiences in an analytical context, con-
tending that such early experiences would prove useful in psychotherapy.
Bakhtin, who knew the book, perceived it as psychoanalysis taken to ab-
surd extremes. Eisenstein was enthralled by the idea that people were con-
stantly trying to get back into their mothers’ wombs, an idea that gave an
extremely concrete outline to the myth of rebirth. According to Ivanov,
who had conducted research in the Eisenstein archives, the filmmaker tried
to use Rank’s theory to explain a variety of cultural manifestations, includ-
ing mystery novels. Like the Minotaur myth or the biblical story of Jonah,
mystery novels were focused on the primal quest to find the supreme truth
within some secret and inaccessible space, the archetype of which was the
maternal womb.'®
A true Renaissance man, Eisenstein identified with Leonardo da Vinci.
His friends in America called him Leonardo, and comparisons between
Eisenstein and the Renaissance artist were popular in Western surveys of
the director’s life. What is known of his personal life does suggest at least
one parallel with Leonardo, as Freud described him: Rozanov would have
been pleased to include Eisenstein in his list of “Moonlight People.”
Eisenstein himself, however, told his biographer Mary Seton: “A lot of peo-
ple say I’m a homosexual. I never have been, and Id tell you if it were
true, ... though I think I must in some way have a bisexual tendency.”'”
Along with Solovyov, Ivanov, Berdyaev, Bakhtin, and other utterers of
the “Russian idea,” Eisenstein seriously espoused the Platonist idea of an-
drogyny as the ideal of the whole person. Eisenstein felt that the superman
was “originally an androgynous being, only later divided into two distinct
cores—male and female—that in matrimonial integration celebrate a new
restoration of that initial primary, unitary, bisexual essence.” “Everywhere
and always the achievement of these features of primal divinity has been
linked to the power to attain a superhuman condition. ... In Nietzsche,
this element exists in the image of Zarathustra as well as in those moments
_.. when the creator becomes one with the image of superhumanity he has
created. ... [Here] we take a great stride toward the ideal of an original,
- primal, prehuman state.” In another place, however, Eisenstein asserted
that he became interested in the problem of androgyny not after reading

Nietzsche’s Zarathustra but rather Freud’s “Leonardo.”!® But in all of his
statements, Eisenstein clearly made a connection “between the conception
of superhumanity and the androgynous complex.”!”
Eisenstein struggled mightily with his own perception, due to deeply in-
grained Russian tradition, of Freud as a pansexualist (a feeling possibly un-
derpinned by irritation with Freud’s individualism). Eisenstein recalled in
his memoirs that as the years passed, he came to understand that the “pool
of primal impulses is more than just narrowly sexual, as Freud sees it.” The
unconscious was the reflection of the earliest levels of undifferentiated so-
cial existence. In Eisenstein’s view, the unconscious included sex but was
not dominated by it. Sex was merely the “biological adventure of human
individuals.” The author was “drawn to cosmic forms of total union inac-
cessible to the limited individual.” Ethnographic prehistory, which was so
fashionable during that decade, when Frazer began jumbling Freud and
Marx in the brains of intellectuals, was most interesting to Eisenstein as a
clue in the search for syncretic unity. “I would say of myself: this author
seems stuck on one idea once and for all, one idea, one topic: .. . the ulti-
mate idea of achieving unity.”7°
The reader should have no trouble recognizing this new incarnation of
the familiar ideas of Nietzsche and Vyacheslav Ivanov. And indeed, Ivanov
held that “the personification of my ‘principles’ ...is of course Dionysus
and Apollo.” For both Ivanov and Rilke, the synthesis of the two gods
could be found in Orpheus. Art, like alcohol, returned man to a former
state, to the underworld of the pre-logical, to Dionysus. But there was a dif-
ference between their perspectives and Eisenstein’s. Unlike Ivanov,
Eisenstein had experienced firsthand the magnetic pull of the masses, and
for him the return to a former state was not merely a topic for cocktail-
party conversation, but a real possibility in life: All one had to do was step
out into the street, into the heart of a seething crowd.
Or make a film about it.
Orpheus and the Mob

“Intermediary conditions are the most interesting: not sleep, not wakeful-
ness.”*! For Eisenstein the “royal road” to the unconscious lay not in
dreams but in altered states of consciousness. The alterations in conscious-
ness that he had in mind were at once elementary and ideal, both superhu-
man and subhuman, and governed by their own rules. Eisenstein investi-
gated the options with the practicality of a producer preparing to use the
information gleaned in his work: He researched “rhythmic drumming” as a
means to “temporarily turn off the upper layers of the conscious mind and
become totally engulfed in sensuous thought.” Comparing Asian shamans
319
with Russian khlysty, he pondered the mechanisms of cultic ecstasy based

on “psychic drumming,” “when a single image is made to ceaselessly repeat
in the conscious, veiled in various forms.” He also researched similar oc-
currences elsewhere in the world—teligious ecstasy, in old Jesuit books,
and narcotic ecstasy, in the mescaline-induced intoxication of Mexican
Indian tribes.
In the final analysis, Soviet life proved an even richer source of such phe-
nomena. Eisenstein’s observations of these events emerged from his mind in
a series of free associations, and they never appeared in his writing, subject
as it was to government- and self-imposed censorship. A much more impor-
tant and at the same time less controlled medium for Eisenstein was film:
Strike, October, and Potemkin are full of scenes of mass panic and violence,
scenes that could have been used as illustrations in Freud’s “Group
Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego” (with which Eisenstein must have
been familiar), if not for the opposite emotional timbre in which they were
shot. Unlike Freud, Eisenstein felt no aversion to mass hypnosis; on the
contrary, he felt drawn to melt into the crowd, and he invited his mass au-
dience to join him.
And the audience went along; it is no coincidence that scenes such as that
on the massive concrete staircase in Potemkin became the most celebrated
of all. These scenes and the true heroes of Eisenstein’s films, his unbeliev-
ably expressive masses, attracted hundreds of thousands of revolution-
minded viewers all over the world to see Potemkin. After Goebbels saw the
film, he ordered his cinematographers to make a Nazi version. These peo-
ple felt the erotic attraction of the mob’s unitary, undiscriminating, sexless,
and constantly regenerating body, wherein each individual could experi-
ence again the soothing security of his mother’s womb. The eroticism of the
crowd, that final stage of development for Plato’s divine Eros, brought to
life all of Nietzsche’s and Ivanov’s imprecise dreams. The “Age of the Mob”
found in Eisenstein its most exceptional artist.
When Eisenstein moves on to portray the individual person, his hero be-
comes the Great Leader—the crowd’s omnipotent, cruel, and inscrutable
hero. “In my films, crowds of people are mowed down, hooves trample the
skulls of farm laborers buried up to their necks, . . . children are crushed on
an Odessa staircase, thrown from rooftops, and left to die by their own
parents.” The list of horrors takes up half a page and closes with a logical
segue: “It seems not at all coincidental that for a number of years the ruler
of my thoughts and my favorite hero was Ivan the Terrible.”
In Ivan the Terrible, filmed by Stalin’s direct order, Eisenstein found a
distanced, beautiful way to paint the monstrous cruelty of Russia’s first dic-
tator. He once explained that his fondness for showing violent scenes
emerged out of childhood experience, and that he was under the impression
that Ivan’s cruelty derived from a similar origin. But the czar’s cruelty also
seemed to Eisenstein fitting for the demands of the time: An iron fist al-
lowed Ivan to promulgate “progressive government initiatives.” The direc-
tor clearly associated himself with his hero (who represented Stalin), as he
explained that childhood trauma was the secret of their (all three) historic
successes: “When a series of childhood traumas coincides in emotional tim-
bre with the tasks that stand before an adult—it’s a fine thing.” Adult af-
fairs demanded brutality, and anyone who had been prepared by childhood
trauma had a head start. This was psychoanalysis turned on its head. “This
was the case with Ivan,” but it was also the case with Eisenstein himself: “I
think that in this sense I was lucky with my biography. I turned out to be
useful to my time, and on my own turf I ended up exactly the way my indi-
viduality dictated.”*?
In his latter years, Eisenstein was dissatisfied with Freudian analysis,
which lacked the concrete somatic and motivic models that would have
brought it closer to his own syncretistic gift: “The curse of a cognition that
is incapable of mastering action hangs over all of psychoanalysis,” he wrote
in 1946.*4 Eisenstein found his gold mine of metaphors in the more activist
Marxism. He often likened ecstatic, undifferentiated states of consciousness
(the “proto-psyche”) to the classless society. For him, the proto-psyche of-
fered a psychological ideal, much as Engels saw his social ideal in the class-
less, promiscuous social grouping. In such primitivistic ideas, the past and
the future, progress and regress are confounded, just as male and female,
subject and object, individual and mass are commingled. Nonetheless, a
perfect commingling proved unattainable.
For Eisenstein this impossibility of a total union of all opposites was “as
painful as Golgotha.” A refined intellectual, Eisenstein recognized his own
deviation from universality, and it tore him apart. Even the opposition of
sensual and symbolic thought was for him a “central trauma.” Orpheus re-
mained elusive, and in his place was merely a new incarnation of Dionysus,
who had come out onto the square to perish in the ecstatic masses so as to
come to life again in their irrational Leader.
It is known that Eisenstein more than once turned to psychoanalysts in
Moscow concerning his persqnal problems; but as far as we know, he pur-
sued no sustained course of analysis. During his short-lived stint in
Hollywood in the mid-1930s, he did again seek the aid of an analyst, a Dr.
Reynolds whom he had met through Charlie Chaplin, in an effort to sur-
mount difficulties that had arisen during the filming of The Glass House.
His producer, Ivor Montegu, was disturbed when Eisenstein “began to
spend hours—and cash—sitting with Dr. Reynolds on our balcony being
analyzed to find out the obstruction that prevented him . . . from thinking
of a ‘Glass House’ story.”?° Fortunately, added Montegu, nothing came of
these sessions. Incidentally, Montegu considered Eisenstein’s production of
The Glass House an idée fixe, even a kind of addiction.
321
However, the idea behind the movie is extremely interesting, and the in-
ternal quandaries that induced the director to turn to a psychoanalyst are
just as revealing. Having declined the screenplay offered him by the distrib-
utor, Eisenstein intended to create a Hollywood version of Zamyatin’s
novel We, a great satire of the socialist paradise, which depicted a man’s vo-
ciferous resistance to the mass society that had deprived him of his individ-
uality and of love. The creator of October and Potemkin clearly wanted to
take advantage of his stay abroad to express a new, more highly nuanced
attitude toward the regime in his homeland. The ambivalence that arose
was so intense that it brought on artistic deadlock. “Life abroad is the final
test for an artist, the test of whether he is capable of creating outside the
revolution.”*° But Eisenstein’s choice of Zamyatin’s We indicated that the
acid test lay not so much in combating homesickness as in embracing a
hard-won, fresh understanding of himself and his society.
Montegu knew that Zamyatin’s novel served as a prototype for The
Glass House,”’ but he was most likely unaware of what was going on in the
utopia from which his boss had so recently extricated himself. We, in con-
trast, can easily imagine the daunting mixture of creative energy, fear of the
regime, garbled ideas, and devotion to ideals that confronted Dr. Reynolds
on that balcony in California.
The First Russian Postmodernist

Mikhail Bakhtin’s interest in psychoanalysis appears to have been purely
theoretical. He was not involved in the practice of psychoanalysis either as
patient or analyst. His fundamental field of interest was literature and man,
or otherwise stated, how man was revealed through literature. His heroes,
naturally, were Dostoevsky and Rabelais. His book on Dostoevsky (the
first edition was released in 1929, the second in 1963) became very popular
and may well be the most cited Soviet-era work in the humanities.
Bakhtin was a younger contemporary of the majority of the characters in
this book. He was born in Orel in 1895. We can imagine the atmosphere in
- which he grew up and studied, judging by the sociological research carried
out in Orel in 1918 by D. Azbukin (see chapter 8). Eighty percent of ado-
lescents had been to the theater at least once. Most of the children of Orel
wanted to be officials, teachers, doctors, or actors. Many felt that school
was better than home. (Published in 1923, these research findings sounded
then—and still sound today—like a history of paradise lost. The provincial
centers of the Russian empire gave Bakhtin the impressive education in the
humanities that would enable him to astonish Soviet readers in the 1970s.)
When Mikhail was nine years old, his family moved to Vilnius, and from
there to Odessa. In 1914, Bakhtin moved from Odessa to Petrograd to at-
tend the university there.
The most unique aspect of Bakhtin’s biography is his connection to his

elder brother Nikolai. Born the same year, the two brothers were unusually
close to one another in their studies and, evidently, somewhat divergent in
character and habits. Both possessed a keen interest in the humanities; both
chose to study in the classics department of St. Petersburg University, under
the same professor, a follower of Nietzsche by the name of Faddei Zelinsky.
For Bakhtin, interaction with his brother probably took on the same ques-
tioning, provocative, and protesting tone that would later become his ideal
definition of true dialogue.
By definition, a dialogue is never ending. But the brothers were separated
by history: Nikolai joined the anti-Bolshevik White Guard, and after their
defeat, he sailed the Mediterranean as a deck hand and served a few years
in the Foreign Legion in Africa. After he was wounded, he continued his
philological investigations at the Sorbonne, and finally, in 1932, he began a
quiet teaching career at one of the colleges in Cambridge.** Despite his ex-
otic experiences and marvelous working conditions, Nikolai went down in
history only as the “other” Bakhtin. Mikhail, on the other hand, remained
in Russia and worked his way through Soviet hell—whether by force of
habit, conviction, or infirmity (he had suffered from osteomyelitis since his
youth and had lost a leg to it)—succeeding, despite totally adverse circum-
stances, in proving true what he and his brother had intuited as young men.
The problem with which Bakhtin grappled throughout his creative life-
time was the relationship between the self and the other. For Russian and
European thought, this problem was nothing new. Martin Buber and
Alexei Ukhtomsky, for example, had suggested their own Judaic and
Orthodox solutions. The issue would become vital to Western humanists of
the last third of the century; it would be one of the basic themes of the
school of thought now known as postmodernism. Bakhtin grasped these
themes early on, and developed them with considerable nuance in his work.
The key concept in Bakhtin’s texts is dialogue. Bakhtin attributed special
status to dialogue and dialogism as cross-disciplinary, humanistic ideas that
simultaneously describe human reality and prescribe a particular approach
to that reality. His discourse was developed in direct counterpoint to the
monologism of traditional science.
“Acting upon a dead thing, on voiceless material that can be sculpted
and formed as one pleases is one thing; it is something else altogether to act
on an outside, equally viable and vital consciousness.” “Not analysis of
consciousness in the form of a uniform and solitary ego, but analysis of the
interaction between many consciousnesses—not of many people in the light
of a single consciousness, but many equal and fully functional conscious-
nesses.” “Not what happens inside, but what happens on the border of
one’s own consciousness and on the threshold of another’s.” “Not another
person, who remains the object of my consciousness, but another, equal
323
consciousness that stands next to mine, without relation to which my own

consciousness cannot exist.”2?
Bakhtin’s concept of dialogism meant that any statement about a person
made by someone else was bound to be insufficient and defective. Any
analysis, interpretation, or evaluation was merely an “externalizing, uncon-
nected definition.” The free act of self-realization expressed in words
seemed to Bakhtin the most reliable, and probably even the only permissi-
ble, form of statement. “The truth about a person heard from someone
else’s lips . . . becomes for him only denigrating and deadening lies.”
It is likely that Bakhtin was the first to formulate this position with such
persistence. His stance is exactly the opposite of the analytic position, more
widespread in our age and so clearly expressed by Freud: that the truth
about a person is inaccessible to him, because he is unable to control his
own desire to become the victim of self-deception. Only someone else can
learn this truth, the analyst insists, and only if he observes a variety of strict
conditions.
As viewed by psychoanalysis, the truth about a person is an objective
description of his unconscious that defrocks the illusion of self-
understanding. The unconscious cannot be translated into the conscious
within the individual; to accomplish this, another person must be included
in the equation. This second, external person can also push the conscious
and the unconscious further apart, as bad parents do. In the history of psy-
choanalysis there is a long tradition of evidence indicating that self-analysis
is impossible. When Freud analyzed his own dreams, the only justification
for his doing so was the absence of colleagues with whom he could have
consulted. For his followers, Freud was the “other” who noted the errors in
their self-awareness and had every right to correct them.
For Bakhtin, on the contrary, the internal point of view had significant ad-
vantages over the external: “There is always something in any person that
only he can uncover through the free act of self-awareness and the word.” A
man and his self-awareness were never alone: “Looking inside himself, he
looks another in the eyes or looks with the eyes of another.” In Bakhtin’s
world, a person could only be a subject; he would actively and firmly reject
any attempt to consider him an object. “The genuine life of the personality
can be penetrated only dialogically, and then only when it mutually and vol-
untarily opens itself.”3° In such a dialogue, “Man is never coincident with
himself, The equation of identity A = A is inapplicable to him.”°" ,
Many years ago, Vyacheslav Ivanov wrote much the same thing: “I am
not a symbolist, if my words are equal to themselves.”°? Taken further, this
position rejects the utility, reliability, and ethical permissibility of any con-
structions designed to explain humans from the outside, as well as any logic
by which A must equal A. If the only valid data are those perceived through
self-awareness, then what is to be done with the unconscious, which by
definition does not yield to self-awareness? Many, beginning with Freud,

inferred that Bakhtin’s favorite author, Dostoevsky, was particularly inter-
ested in the unconscious. Bakhtin, on the contrary, was not inclined to at-
tribute any importance at all to the unconscious. For him, any description
of the unconscious was a monologic “foreign word,” while each person
would “always strive to smash the completing or deadening framework of
other people’s words about him.”
Here the idea of resistance will come naturally to the psychoanalyst’s
mind. It might even seem that Bakhtin’s entire construction is, so to speak,
a poetics of resistance, a system set up to justify and ennoble resistance.
Authorship and Dialogue

After the October revolution, Mikhail Bakhtin left Petrograd for a part of
the hinterland he knew well: Nevel, then Vitebsk. His scholarly reputation
and personal magnetism were such that in every city where he lived, a “cir-
cle” would gather about him, composed of a few intellectually kindred spir-
its. Bakhtin’s circles had no structure and left behind no charters or minutes.
The final results of all the hours of discussion over tea were only ideas with-
out a single master, and in this they fully accorded with the spirit of
Bakhtin’s theories. “No verbal statement can ever be attributed only to the
person who spoke it: The statement is a product of interaction among
speakers.”?3 Ideas, as Bakhtin understood them, were born of dialogue and
perished in dialogue. Books, of course, had some significance—otherwise,
why would he have written so many? But in general, books were something
like notes to jog the memory, strewn along the path of dialogue, either
purely at random or to point out particularly sharp turns in the road. Such
indifference to authorship is an unusual trait for a scholar; many, and this
applies to some of the most talented, have been eager to sacrifice their rela-
tions with others in order to enjoy undisputed mastery over their (but often
not entirely their own) intellectual products. Freud might again be taken
here as an example diametrically opposed to Bakhtin. Unhappily, as it
turned out, Bakhtin’s partners’in these conversational circles were so inferior
to him in authority and talent that no dialogue ever came out of their inter-
actions with the great scholar. Today, historians are inclined to attribute
nearly everything that relates to those circles, personally to Bakhtin.34
The only one of his published works to treat a contemporary author was
his lecture on Vyacheslav Ivanov. The lecture began with the words:
“Speaking of Vyacheslav Ivanov as a poet, it must be first of all concluded
that he is lonely.”35 The same, strangely enough, could be said about
Bakhtin (although both men had typically close circles). Further, Bakhtin
compared Ivanov with other contemporary poets: “He is less modernized,
there are fewer echoes of the present in him, and that is why he is so little
The Intelligentsia in Search ofResistance
325
known and so poorly understood.” This is likely just how Bakhtin was per-
ceived in Vitebsk in 1920, where he must have encountered Chagall and
Malevich—or for that matter in Petrograd/Leningrad, where his potential
partners in dialogue might have included Bely and Blok, Florensky and
Berdyaev, Merezhkovsky and Zamyatin. But Bakhtin wrote nothing about
them or in coauthorship with them. It seems that his life long, he was carry-
ing On a conversation with absent friends: Dostoevsky, Rabelais, and... . In
third place on this list—and if we put the names in chronological order, in
first place—the name of Freud would appear.
Valentin Voloshinov’s book Freudianism: A Marxist Critique appeared in
the “Psychological and Psychoanalytic Library,” printed at the State
Publishing House by Ivan Yermakov (the book includes an advertisement
for the series). The book, which came out in 1927, put an end to
Yermakov’s publications at the State Publishing House. It is possible that
against the background of intensifying ideological debate and the ap-
proaching defeat of the Trotskyites, Schmidt and perhaps even Yermakov
tried to get out from under enemy fire, releasing a well-documented cri-
tique of psychoanalysis and setting a certain level of discourse beneath
which, they hoped, the discussion would not sink.
UCLA professor Vyacheslav V. Ivanov (the son of writer Vsevolod) was
the first to make a public announcement about the authorship of the work.
In the opening essay in a volume published in Tartu in honor of Bakhtin’s
seventy-fifth birthday, Ivanov asserted with confidence that the “base text”
in the book on Freudianism belonged to Bakhtin, while Voloshinov made
“only small additions and changes in a few places.”3° However, another
book commemorating Bakhtin’s birthday was released that same year, in
Saransk. In the introductory article, V. V. Kozhinov named the book,
Freudianism, as one of those written by Bakhtin’s friends.” The difference
in attribution of the book on Freudianism was due to the different roles the
two scholars conceded to psychoanalysis in Bakhtin’s creative life. Ivanov
asserted that psychoanalysis was the starting point for Bakhtin’s evolution,
and he described Bakhtin’s entire theory as “overcoming psychoanalysis
- from a semiotic point of view.” Kozhinov, on the other hand, considered
psychoanalysis insignificant to Bakhtin’s work.
This is all the more strange because both articles were written by people
who knew Bakhtin quite well and both were published simultaneously
while the subject was still alive. American biographers of Bakhtin have in-
formed us that not long before his death, Mikhail Mikhailovich categori-
cally refused to sign a document affirming his authorship of the work. This
refusal did not stop the All-Union Copyright Agency from issuing an offi-
cial demand that Bakhtin be mentioned on the title page of all foreign edi-
tions of Freudianism.38 Nevertheless, the editor of the translation published
in the United States is convinced that the book’s author was Voloshinov.
There is also a running debate about the identity of the author of another
of Voloshinov’s books, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, and sev-
eral of his articles; and also about the book by Pavel Medvedev, The
Formal Method in Literary Study: A Critical Introduction to Sociological
Aesthetics. All of these works were published at almost the same time, be-
tween 1928 and 1929. They differ from Bakhtin’s accepted bibliography in
their demonstrative Marxist slant, strangely combined with originality in
many places in the text. In general, a reading leaves the impression that the
works were composed according to the agenda of the day, adapting a natu-
rally evolving, powerful idea to the demands of political power. It also
seems significant that Bakhtin, who often returned enthusiastically to his
texts, made no attempt, as far as is known, to rework or even reissue these
disputed books. While he confessed that he had contributed in some way to
these works, he made it clear that he would have written them differently.*”
The reason why Bakhtin could not or would not publish the books under
his own name, if he was their author, remains a mystery. Before his arrest in
1929, he had not been persecuted. The most radical explanation for the
ambiguous authorship of at least one of these books was put forth by
Viktor Shklovsky: In an interview with Bakhtin’s American biographers in
March 1978, he asserted that the author had simply sold his manuscript of
The Formal Method to Medvedev.
Bakhtin had extremely effective connections, and they helped him in situ-
ations that were almost beyond help. After Bakhtin’s arrest, Gorky and
Alexei Tolstoy sent telegrams to the government in his support. The book
on Dostoevsky came out in May 1929, a few months after the author’s ar-
rest—a fact that is surprising in its own right. Lunacharsky immediately re-
sponded with a glowing review in Novyi mir, published in the tenth issue of
the same year—while Bakhtin was still being held in preliminary confine-
ment! During the investigation, he was accused of political crimes reminis-
cent of the legendary accusations against Socrates. It was alleged that
Bakhtin was a member of the monarchist Brotherhood of St. Seraphim,
that he had corrupted young people during public lectures, and that he was
named in a list of members of a hypothetical, future, noncommunist
Russian government. Bakhtin was sentenced to ten years in prison and sent
to a labor camp in Kustanai.
Bakhtin probably chose a strategy that would be most likely to ensure his
physical and spiritual survival. If all four books, including the monograph
on Dostoevsky, were signed by a single author, and those books struck the
central nerve of fierce ideological polemicism, then it stood to reason that
the measures taken to undermine his fame would most likely be harsh. An
intellectual living in Leningrad in the 1920s would have understood what
he had to fear in the near future. On the other hand, even in those classic
texts that Bakhtin signed himself, one often senses his desire to imbue the
The Intelligentsia in Search of Resistance o20
creations of his heroes—Dostoevsky and Rabelais—with his own, com-

pletely original philosophical thought. His writing style was unique in that
he clearly preferred to find his own thought in someone else’s text than to
write it down as coming from himself.
This oddity brings Yermakov to mind by way of comparison (see chapter
6). But Bakhtin’s gift was of another sort altogether. His talent is better
compared with the “surprising process” in Soviet history, noted by Yefim
Etkind, whereby “a number of the most important poets became profes-
sional translators. ... Deprived of the chance to have their say in original
creative work, Russian poets ... spoke with their readers through the
mouth of Goethe” and other great colleagues.4° This secondariness is a
characteristic trait of an artist accustomed to self-censorship. But it is also
typically found, and for different reasons, in the aesthetics of postmod-
ernism. Perhaps because of the intrinsic peculiarities of Bakhtin’s tastes and
methods, censorship and self-censorship not only did not bother him, they
might well have helped him proceed down his chosen path, along which
philosophical and ethical doctrine unfolded as literary history.
At the same time as Freudianism, in 1927, another book was released,
also remarkable in its own fashion: Konstantin Vaginov’s Goat Song. This
novel maliciously but probably accurately depicts the life led by the narrow
circle of intellectuals to which Bakhtin, Voloshinov, and their friend
Vaginov belonged. We see a repulsive, totally alienated existence, full of as
yet incomprehensible fear and a sense that any spiritual efforts were
doomed from the start. Some of the novel’s characters could be identified as
real people in Bakhtin’s entourage. Bakhtin himself is portrayed respect-
fully, as an anonymous philosopher who takes his own life at the end of the
novel. In the context of Goat Song, the problem of authorship seems rela-
tively unimportant. In any case, as befits Bakhtin’s logic of dialogue, we
have found no definitive answer to the riddle here.
Freudianism
If the supposition is correct that either Schmidt or Yermakov initiated this
critique of psychoanalysis, then it seems strange that either of them would
turn to Valentin Voloshinov with the proposal that he write it. In 1927,
Voloshinov had just graduated from the department of philology at the
University of Leningrad, and in the same year, as his wife recalled, had be-
come an ardent Marxist. Although the idea’s execution was technically suc-
cessful, the project was a political failure. The hammer of ideological de-
bate was falling hard and fast, and instead of restraining it or at least
mitigating the force of the blows, this publication in Yermakov’s series
served a different purpose altogether. The book was like a blacksmith’s
hammer, indicating the spot where ideological “apprentices” should direct
their crude blows. Its serious intellectual pages were soon forgotten, but its
anti-psychoanalytic accusations would be repeated a great number of
times and in the most primitive formulations imaginable. Even without
Bakhtin’s hypothetical authorship, Freudianism would remain the only se-
rious work among Soviet publications on psychoanalysis for the half-cen-
tury that began in the late 1920s. It is perfectly natural that this work be-
came a source and model for those that made their living at critiquing
“bourgeois philosophy.”
Freudianism begins with an acknowledgment of the growing influence of
psychoanalysis: “Anyone wishing to fathom the spiritual physiognomy of
modern Europe can hardly bypass psychoanalysis.”*! By breadth of influ-
ence, the author attested, only anthroposophy can compete. Even during
the apogee of their success, the followers of Bergson and Nietzsche were
never so numerous as were Freudians at that moment. The basic ideological
motif of Freudianism was that “a human being’s fate, the whole content of
his life and creative activity ... are wholly and exclusively determined by
the vicissitudes of his sexual instinct.”47 This motif, the author continued,
was as old as the hills. “It is the leitmotif of crisis and decline.” “A fear of
history, a shift in orientation toward the values of personal, private life, the
primacy of the biological and the sexual in man”—such are the features
common to a host of epochs: the fall of Rome and the Greek states, the time
before the French revolution, and the contemporary “degradation” of the
West.*? The author, however, failed to make clear exactly how these histori-
cal analogies were related to the popularity of Freudianism in his country.
He did introduce a new factor into the equation, a new concept: “The
content of our consciousness and of our psyche” was purely ideological,
Voloshinov wrote.** Even the vaguest thoughts and most indistinct desires
were ideological phenomena. Freudian censorship, for example, demon-
strated remarkable ideological subtlety; it carried out a purely logical, ethi-
cal, and aesthetic selection. None of the other psychic mechanisms de-
scribed by Freud were natural, either; they all derived from culture and
ideology. Freud’s conscious and unconscious “are ever at odds; between
them prevail mutual hostility and incomprehension and the endeavor to de-
ceive one another.”** There is nothing of the kind to be found elsewhere in
the elemental forces of nature. The conscious mind of a given human being
is nothing but the ideology of his behavior. “No ideology, whether of per-
son or class, can be taken at its face value or at its word”; every ideology
demands interpretation.*¢
Here Bakhtin and Voloshinov are of one mind, and their view was shared
also by Vygotsky. Theoreticians educated in the humanities who found
themselves in a postrevolutionary academic vacuum, these men cast their
direct personal experience into new fields of study, hoping to understand
the psyche, language, and art by analogy with familiar realities of Soviet
political and scholarly life. For instance, the author of Freudianism defined
“consciousness” as the commentary that every adult human being applies
to each of his actions. These authors’ main supply of analogies, as befits
those who had witnessed the final victory of Marxism, was found in the
mechanisms of social reality, which exerted a hypnotic effect on them. The
psyche was ideology; psychic mechanisms were ideological tools trans-
planted inside human beings. Ideology could be official or unofficial; any
Soviet person understood the difference between the two. The Freudian un-
conscious was easier to understand if it carried the title “unofficial con-
scious”; it occupied more or less the same position inside the person—an
existing but unrecognized reality—as did unofficial poets, philosophers,
and artists (recalling Goat Song!) within Stalin’s realm. The analogy is in-
teresting and comprehensible, a new take on the key Soviet problem of
doublethink. But either the author failed to follow this train of thought
through to the end or he understood too well the possible consequences, for
he took an extremely rigid and one-sided approach in exploring the prob-
lem: “Thought outside the bounds of possible expression does not exist.”
“Experience ... exists only in symbolic material.” “Symbolic material of
the psyche in essence is discourse—internal speech.” “Social environment
gave man discourse . .. the same social environment never ceases to define
and control verbal reactions as long as he lives”; “everything verbal in
man’s behavior ... belongs not to him, but to his social surroundings,”
wrote the author of Marxism and the Philosophy of Language.*’ In
Freudianism, the basic problem of analysis—the relationship between the
conscious and the unconscious—was interpreted with much more nuance
than is found in the simple formula of “a conflict between internal and ex-
ternal speech and between different layers of internal speech.”
In this regard, Voloshinov’s book Marxism and the Philosophy of
Language directly presaged the book Marxism and Issues in the Science of
Language, by Josef Stalin, with its characteristic speculations: “They say
that thoughts arise in a person’s head before they are expressed in speech,
that they arise without linguistic material, without a linguistic wrapping, in
naked form, so to speak. But this is totally wrong. Whatever thoughts
might arise in a person’s head and whenever they might arise, they can only
exist on the basis of linguistic material, on the basis of linguistic terms and
phrases. Naked thoughts, free of linguistic material .. . do not exist. 24°
The idea is consistent and completely totalitarian. There is nothing in
man that cannot be read. Society, which is identified with social power, acts
as a programmer, in total control of the computer’s processes. To suspect
that there might be some important information inside people’s heads that
cannot be read is to doubt the omnipotence of the powers that be. What a
person hides from himself, he hides from society as well. There is no room
for such doubts: Everything important must be under control; only what
can be read can be controlled; only what can be expressed in words can be
read; and for this reason, there was nothing in Soviet man that was inex-
pressible in words. “Naked thoughts do not exist,” to say nothing of emo-
tions. Nothing at all exists besides words. This is why a confession of guilt
was so important to Soviet investigators during the Stalinist era, as there
was no such thing as another, nonverbal reality.
The author of Freudianism, it seems, also believed that extrapersonal fac-
tors were much more important in human life than individual elements.
Freudianism was inferior to Marxism to the same degree that man was
fully controlled by society. The goal of social control was to create a
“healthy collective” and a “socially healthy personality.” In such collectives
and such people there was no distinction between conscious and uncon-
scious; in the authors’ terms, “there is no difference between official and
unofficial consciousness.” That is, there is no unconscious at all. If the lay-
ers that correspond to the Freudian unconscious remain distant from the
“reigning ideology,” and by the same token distant from the deeply ideolo-
gized individual consciousness, it is merely proof of a person’s loss of class
identity. The unconscious is evidence of the decomposition of the class to
which its bearer belongs.
Generally speaking, there is no particular difference between the clearly
expressed social ideal in this book and the ideas that were just as clearly de-
picted in Zamyatin’s We, published a short time earlier. Zamyatin con-
structed an anti-utopia; the book Freudianism contains the beginnings of a
perfectly serious, well-meaning, totalitarian utopia. It is difficult to imagine
that it was written by one of the heroes of Vaginov’s Goat Song—a work
built on the total opposition between a fictional society and a degraded pri-
vate life that nonetheless offered a flicker of hope. “I don’t like Petersburg,
my dream is over,” Vaginov wrote, in despair.
As Bakhtin would later write: “At any moment in the development of di-
alogue, there are huge, limitless masses of forgotten meaning.”*? But it was
during those years that either he or one of his friends transferred to psy-
chology the somber ideal of a state in which there is no discrepancy permit-
ted between official and personal ideology, because the latter must be infil-
trated and swallowed by the former.
The unconscious as Freud saw it was by definition inaccessible to social
control, if we do not consider psychoanalysis itself to be a form of social
control. The existence of such an opaque nucleus within man appears to be
an antidote for any social utopia, or for any totalitarian state. This is why
the Soviet critique of psychoanalysis following the publication of this book
became focused on proving that the unconscious did not exist. If there was
no unconscious, then everything important in man could be controlled by
his conscious, and consequently, by society and state.
331
The unparalleled irony of real life is that even the name of the book’s au-
thor remained unknown, such was the onerous weight of “official ideol-
ogy.” The mechanism that could be employed to push any reality back into
the bottomless depths of historical unconsciousness in this case operated
extremely effectively.
Freud, Lacan, and Bakhtin

At the same time, this attempt to overcome psychoanalysis, which contin-
ued in other works that did carry Bakhtin’s name, contained a foreshadow-
ing of one of the main branches that would sprout from psychoanalysis in
the second half of the twentieth century. A number of elements in Bakhtin’s
critique brought him paradoxically close to the conception of Jacques
Lacan and his interpretation of psychoanalysis.°° In contrast to Bakhtin,
Lacan is sure both of the existence of the unconscious and of the right that
others have to interpret its substance; but like Bakhtin, Lacan strives to pic-
ture the unconscious by analogy to a reality that humans can find more
comprehensible. For Lacan, this reality is language. The unconscious is
structured like a language, according to Lacan’s axiom. Psychoanalysis
wields only one tool: discourse. Each word is calculated with a response in
mind, even if that response is silence.
Bakhtin and Voloshinov wrote more or less the same thing. In general,
“Discourse is like a scenario of the immediate act of communication in the
process of which it is engendered,” and “all verbal utterances of the patient
... are also just such scenarios, scenarios, first and foremost of the immedi-
ate, small social event in which they were engendered—the psychoanalyti-
cal session.”>! The Freudian “unconscious,” they sensed, stood in opposi-
tion not to the patient’s conscious but to the doctor’s, as “resistance.” The
approach adopted by Bakhtin and his circle to discourse—which emerged
(another point of commonality with Lacan) in their assimilation and tran-
scendence of early Russian structuralism (of the formalist school)—was
predicated on an understanding of the entire verbal utterance addressed
from the self to the other as the minimal communicative unit. Although in
this approach Bakhtin and Voloshinov drew quite near to Lacan’s semantic
formulas, they veered off again in the opposite direction: Their own social
situation, the “scenario” that had also become their discourse, was com-
pletely different from Lacan’s.
Both psychoanalysis and formalism recognized the incapacity of man to
be cognizant of the laws governing his own feelings and affairs, and in this
regard both set limitations on the very possibility of transforming man. To
achieve utopia, these limitations had to be overcome. A new theory of con-
sciousness was needed—if something that recognizes no laws can be called
a theory. Bakhtin provided one option, the theory of ideology. Later, Alexei
Leontiev offered another option, one that would become established in
Soviet psychology for decades to come—the theory of activity.
Paraphrasing Lacan, one might say that for Bakhtin and his circle, the
conscious was structured as an ideology. Picturing the conscious and the
unconscious as ideology handed them over into the purview of ideological
control. Since “self-awareness is always verbal, always a matter of finding
some specifically suitable verbal complex,” it stood to reason that “any in-
stance of self-awareness .. . is an act of gauging oneself against some social
norm—[that] is,... the socialization of oneself and one’s behavior.”>*
However, Lacan showed that the stated precondition did not necessarily
give rise to the stated consequence: The semantic interpretation of the ego
was compatible with individualism, it raised the issue of the “other” and
the “big other” (society) but did not necessarily drown the individual ego in
them.
Voloshinov attributed more radical meaning to the socialization of the
conscious than just a correlation between the self and the other: “In becom-
ing aware of myself, I attempt to look at myself, as it were, through the
eyes of another person, another representative of my social group, my
class.”°? The gradual slide of this verbal transition (other-group-class) re-
flects the attempt to smoothly switch from speculations that are perfectly
acceptable to civilized European individualism over to speculations in the
spirit of radical Marxism. With the flow of the decades, Bakhtin himself
moved in the opposite direction.
The Philosopher Looks in the Mirror

The simple, “ideological” solution to the problem of the relationship be-
tween the ego and the greater society—a problem to which post-Freudian
thinkers, including Lacan, would return incessantly—may seem dated to-
day; but the analysis of a second problem, the relationship between the self
and the other, remains fresh and substantive.
According to Bakhtin, “the most important acts constituting self-
consciousness are defined by the relations with another consciousness,” but
at the same time, the mechanisms that drive self-awareness and conscious-
ness of the other are fundamentally different. The consciousness exists in
two forms: “self” and “other,” and the switch from one form to the other
involves sharp changes in content. Bakhtin credited Dostoevsky with the
discovery of the “other”: It was in Dostoevsky that “the role of the other
was revealed, and it is only in light of this role that any discourse about the
self can be built.”>4
Bakhtin’s intent was to use Dostoevsky’s works as material showing the
depth of the transformations through which the human image passes as one
333
moves from an external point of view to an internal point of view or vice

versa—transformations that are not so much structural as substantive, psy-
chological, and even ideological. “Dostoevsky had an exceptionally sharp
eye and sensitive ear for seeing and hearing the tense struggle between the
self and the other in every external expression of man (in every face, ges-
ture, and word).”*5
If for Lacan the relationship between the analyst and his patient was the
prototype for the universal human relation between the self and the other,
for Bakhtin this prototype, the dynamic of which he found more compre-
hensible than anything else, was the relationship between the author of a
work of literature and his characters. The author (Dostoevsky, for exam-
ple) was the self; the character (Raskolnikov, for instance) was the author’s
other. The author’s world is populated by characters, and through them, al-
beit not exclusively through them, he expresses everything he wants to say.
At the same time, literary characters enter into unliterary relations with one
another, by the author’s will or their own: Raskolnikov and his elderly vic-
tim, Raskolnikov and the prostitute, Raskolnikov and the investigator.
Conveying all this, the author shows his characters in the same way that
others see the self. Meanwhile, in a range of cases the author implants an
ego in his character, and then one of them becomes the “self,” while an-
other becomes the “other”—not in counterpoint to the author this time but
to the character.
Bakhtin commenced this analysis in a philosophical work evidently writ-
ten at the beginning of the 1920s but published only recently,*® and he re-
turned to it many times. In this essay, Bakhtin primarily argued for the dial-
ogism of the self and the other, the disparity between the mechanisms of
their existence, and the ineluctability of their positions within the frame-
work of human life. Other conceptions of man were monologic, giving pri-
ority to one or another position, a position that was passed off as that of
man in general: They were either theories of the self or theories of the other.
According to Bakhtin, all of psychology, which pretended to be scientific,
fell into this latter category. He would, of course, have been reluctant to
agree with Freud’s well-known formula, according to which parts of the
self can be unconscious, even the highest layers. Any speculation about the
unconscious for Bakhtin was the embodiment of the other’s point of view,
describing the self monologically from the outside. “Under the monologic
approach, . . . the ‘other’ remains wholly the object of consciousness, rather
than another consciousness.” .
The ego for Bakhtin was everything through which man discovered and
sensed himself and everything for which he was responsible. The ego begins
to diverge from the other when there is the perception of appearance. The
ego does not see its own aspect, this is something only the other can do.
Here, Bakhtin turned to the image of a mirror, an image he employed many
times, like Lacan, but with a different end: The mirror was for Bakhtin a
mechanical and illusory means to eliminate the opposition of the ego and
the other. He categorically refused to believe that such a mechanism could
work. The unnatural face of a person looking at himself in the mirror was
for Bakhtin proof that there was no middle ground between the opposite
poles of the ego and the other. And in point of fact, a philosopher for
whom “‘to be’ means to be for the other, and through him—for oneself”*”
had no problem with Narcissus because Narcissus did not exist. For Lacan,
the mirror is the symbol of self-awareness, and the meeting with the mirror
is the most important moment in the life of man.
For both Lacan and Bakhtin, the mirror is a reality, understood factually
as a mediator of opposition between the self and the other: Looking in the
mirror, man can come to know his identity, to see himself as someone else,
or to see himself as others see him. But Lacan and Bakhtin each viewed the
mirror in his own fashion: For Lacan, the “mirror stage,” when a child be-
gins to recognize himself in his reflection and call himself “I,” was the cul-
minating moment and the turning point in his development. For Bakhtin,
the mirror was an attempt to artificially overcome the opposition between
the self and the other, but it failed to do so and merely blurred the distinc-
tion. The only true mediator between the ego and the other, for Bakhtin,
was the living process of dialogue.
Nowhere did Bakhtin make a distinction between thought and emotion
or thought and action; he relied on a unitary category of experience.
Experience was “the imprint of meaning in existence,” and it existed only
on the threshold of transition from ego to other that occurs within man.
Narcissus, who persistently plays the role of the other in relation to himself,
was for Bakhtin just as anti-natural, just as disruptive of the natural course
of things as a psychologist who tried to make the other into an object.
“Dostoevsky categorically denies that he is a psychologist. In psychology he
saw a degrading materialization of the human soul,” Bakhtin wrote, as al-
ways linking his own ideas and feelings to Dostoevsky.°* But any experi-
ence (in the sense in which a person might say, “I feel .. .”) included a mo-
ment of self-observation. For this reason, Bakhtin asserted, experience
included the other’s point of view: It was as if the person were looking into
the mirror at his own internal state of being. “I experience the source of my
fear as frightening, the object of my love as beloved; in order to experience
fear or love as such, I have to become the other in relation to myself.”
Experience could only be analyzed on the boundary between self and other,
as the interaction between self and other.
The “other” here is not Lacan’s other, nor the generalized other of
George Herbert Mead, but a reflexive position defined by its external point
of view in relation to the subject. Bakhtin’s analysis constantly emphasized
the systematic distinctions between phenomenological pictures of the ego
335
and the other. “The other always opposes me as an object: its external im-
age in space, and its internal existence in time.” But the active self existed,
in Bakhtin’s opinion, outside of space and time; its unity was supported by
the categories of meaning and responsibility.
Toward the end of his life, Bakhtin repeatedly applied his early concepts
to an analysis of death. Death was tied to the other. Pronouncement of
death was always “the other’s prerogative.” “Death cannot be a fact of the
conscious itself. . . Beginning and end, birth and death are all part of man,
life, and fate, but not of consciousness. . . . Beginning and end lie in the ob-
jective world for others, not for the conscious itself. ... No one dies from
the inside, that is, no one is aware of his own death.” There were very few
deaths in Dostoevsky’s novels, he remarked; there were only “murders, sui-
cides, and madness,” for which man must answer himself. “Man left, hav-
ing said his piece, but the words he said remain in incomplete dialogue.”*?
And so, “foreign consciousnesses cannot be contemplated, analyzed, or
defined as objects, as things—one can only converse with them dialogi-
cally.” Dialogue was life, it was potentially endless, it was a perpetual mo-
tion machine, it was self-valuing and self-sufficient. “Everything is a means
to one end: dialogue. One voice finishes nothing and solves nothing. Two
voices are the minimum for life, the minimum for existence.” And “when
dialogue ends, everything ends.”
The Circle Is Broken

These ideas, by their very nature and by design, were not meant for practi-
cal application—a feature that distinguishes them most clearly from psy-
choanalysis. Bakhtin’s (and if one is to believe him, Dostoevsky’s) dialogism
can serve as subject matter for a novel or essay, but there is no method in it
that might help a specific person move from monologue to dialogue, nor
could there be. In a philosophical sense, any such method of education or
treatment must combine elements of monologue and dialogue; it must in-
- clude the privileged point of view of the other and at the same time, the
possibility of open and relatively equitable communication with the ego.
In psychoanalysis, the “privileges of the other” are tied quite firmly to
the analyst; to understand just how firmly, one need only recall Freud’s con-
flicts with his students. Jung’s pretensions toward Freud, for example,
evoke Bakhtin’s demand for dialogue: “You go around sniffing out all the
symptomatic actions in your vicinity, thus reducing everyone to the level of
sons and daughters who blushingly admit the existence of their faults ?..sLt
ever you should rid yourself entirely of your complexes and ... took a
good look at your own [weak spots] for a change, then I will mend a
ways and at one stroke uproot the vice of being in two minds about you.
In response, Freud broke off their correspondence. He probably would
have interpreted Bakhtin’s philosophy of dialogue as yet another expression

of the characteristic Russian ambivalence (see chapter 3).
With his patient, a psychoanalyst will begin to interpret these sorts of
ideas, complaints, and demands for equality as resistance, and step by step
he will disentangle the unfolding contradiction, which engenders material
for analysis. The procedures of psychoanalysis are conditional and asym-
metrical; the rare moments of dialogue, when the analyst and patient com-
municate as free and equal subjects, are strictly circumscribed by the algo-
rithm of role behavior. For example, the analyst may not discuss his own
problems or mistakes with the patient; for this he has his own analyst,
whose actions are limited in turn. And so on, through generations of ana-
lysts back to Freud himself. The dialogue breaks, changing from a ring into
a chain, or perhaps a spiral of mutually reproducing monologues. These
limitations are givens, and only by working through and beyond them can
the patient become ready for a new dialogue.
But Jung was never Freud’s patient. Generally speaking, his request was
relatively simple and reasonable: the right to independent commentary,
equality in mutual respect, “to stand by you publicly while maintaining my
own views.”°! It is striking, however, that in justifying his rights, Jung
found himself in such a vacuum that he was forced to accept Nietzsche as
his ally. The ideas of Bakhtin and other dialogical philosophers of that
time, most of all Buber, were completely new and, as we have seen, in step
with the times.°* Western philosophy—particularly on the European conti-
nent—would remain focused on the problem of the “other” for decades to
come. Sartre, one of Bakhtin’s younger contemporaries, and Emmanuel
Levinas in our own era, were among those who followed paths parallel to
Bakhtin’s, although they started out from different points of origin.
If psychoanalysis had developed in Russia under more normal condi-
tions, Bakhtin’s conception might have been assimilated in it and lent
Russian psychoanalysis its own national flavor, as Lacan’s did in France.
Along with an awareness of the role of language and linguistic structures,
this variant probably would have employed less restrictive therapeutic rela-
tions, allowing the analyst more freedom of action and less leeway for ma-
nipulation in therapy. Bakhtin’s dialogism would have articulated a concep-
tual framework for these technical details. Through Bakhtin, the Orthodox
philosophical tradition would have had an opportunity for contact with the
primary currents in twentieth-century European thought—psychoanalysis
and structuralism.
But the real Bakhtin lived in a genuinely Nietzschean world, awash in so-
cial experimentation. Ideas were directly implemented in this world, freed
of all complications and paradoxes, while resistance was overcome by
force. Under such conditions, Bakhtin’s dialogism was perceived most of all
as a philosophical reaction to that world, as resistance—or more accu-
337
rately, opposition—to it. Bakhtin saw very clearly that “[t]he unity of con-
sciousness, which replaces the unity of existence, is inevitably transformed
into the unity of a single consciousness.” It was irrelevant, the author
added, “what metaphysical form it takes: ‘consciousness in general,’ ‘the
absolute I,’ ‘the absolute spirit,’ ‘the normative consciousness.’” In practice,
it was the consciousness of a single person, who had transformed his mono-
logue into a cult. “Alongside this unified and inevitably single conscious-
ness is to be found a multitude of empirical human consciousnesses. From
the point of view of ‘consciousness in general’ this plurality of conscious-
nesses is accidental and, so to speak, superfluous.” Anything individual was
seen as deviant, erroneous. Error was the only principle of individuality
recognized by such a consciousness. And errors were to be punished. “A
single consciousness and a single mouth are completely sufficient for total
fullness of cognition; there is no need and no basis for a multitude of con-
sciousnesses. ”®?
Bakhtin’s particular “clinical” experience—the experience of life in totali-
tarian conditions—showed him plainly that in the realm of consciousness,
any privilege leads to monopoly. “Consciousness is far more frightening
than any unconscious complexes.” And indeed, what the “ideology” of the
day was saying, to his mind, was probably no less frightening than what it
was doing. The roots of what was going on around him could be traced
back to the rationalism of the Enlightenment. European utopianism, he
wrote, was based on the monologic principle of conscious conviction.
Moreover, faith in the self-sufficiency of a single consciousness was a struc-
tural peculiarity of the entire “ideological creation of the new times.”
Dostoevsky, in contrast, often interrupted his characters, but “never drowns
out a foreign voice.” His activity toward his characters is “the activity of
God to man, that allows man to discover himself to the final degree.”
His whole life, Bakhtin conversed with Dostoevsky and Rabelais, but his
lonely dialogue with world culture implicitly included a third partner—the
dead monologue, by which many of his contemporaries kept consciousness
alive. It is only in contraposition to this monologue that one can fully un-
derstand the origins and the originality of Bakhtin’s dialogism, and the ex-
aggerated pointedness with which he expressed it.
“At any moment in the development of dialogue there are huge, unlim-
ited masses of forgotten meaning, but . . . there is nothing absolutely dead:
every meaning will have its day of rebirth.”
The Rebirth of Dionysus

In Bakhtin, the religion of Dionysus took on a new cultural and historical
form, at the same time preserving its main features, as befits an eternally
self-renewing god. Ivanov’s Dionysianism, which existed outside historical
time and space, for Bakhtin found concrete and expressive embodiment in
culture. In his famous work on Francois Rabelais, Bakhtin revealed the uni-
versal play of “life-death—-birth” in European cultural tradition as a carni-
val in which all roles were inverted and all opposites were blended to-
gether. Bakhtin was attracted by the “great, common, popular body,” in
which individual births and deaths “are mere moments in its ceaseless
growth and rejuvenation.” The dichotomized, basic categories of human
consciousness were united by the mighty force of communal, popular expe-
rience. The prime force in this world was laughter, “the world’s cheery mat-
ter—something that is born, dies, and gives birth to itself; something that
consumes and is consumed, but which in the end always grows and multi-
plies.” The carnival was a drama of laughter in which a new world was
born as the old world died, and for this reason any image within this space
was ambivalent. For example, “images of urine and excrement are ambiva-
lent, as are all images of the low, bodily stratum: they die and are reborn si-
multaneously, they are at once blessed and debased, death and birth are in-
tertwined within them, labor pains and death throes.”®’ In the same sense,
ritual sacrifice, ridicule, and beatings were also ambivalent.
Bakhtin tried to further clarify the definition of this complex of images
that he found so attractive, describing it at one point as a carnivalesque
whole, elsewhere as a grotesque body, in another place as an unofficial
canon: “This body is fertilizing—fertilized, birthing—born, consuming—con-
sumed.” In contrast, modern man’s self-awareness—Bakhtin called it the
“new bodily canon”—had brought man to the brink of despair: It was “to-
tally rehearsed, completed, strictly cordoned off, locked, externalized, com-
partmentalized, and individualized.” The body of the new canon was an in-
dividual body, and everything that happened to it had unambiguous
meaning: Birth was birth, death was death. The grotesque or “popular”
body was bisexual: It could not conceive of itself in isolation; death was
birth, fertilization was conception, defecation was assimilation of the fright-
ening cosmos. “It should be emphasized that the motif of the ‘androgynous’
in this particular understanding was extremely popular in Rabelais’ time.”®*
We find all the basic motifs of Russian modernist culture in Bakhtin’s dis-
cussion of Rabelais: the idea of eternal rebirth, the romanticism of de-
individualization, the blending or effacing of basic rational categories, and
androgyny. These elements form the same kind of unitary “Dionysian”
complex in Bakhtin’s philosophy as in that of Vladimir Solovyoy,
Vyacheslav Ivanov, Sabina Spielrein, and Nikolai Berdyaev: If birth is
equated with death, then love becomes one with the attraction to death,
while the male gender is indistinguishable from the female.
Bakhtin probably borrowed these ideas from Ivanov. In the 1920s, long
before his book about the culture of laughter, Bakhtin said that “as a
thinker and a figure, Vyacheslav Ivanov had colossal influence. ... All of
339
his contemporaries were mere poets, while he was a teacher as well.”

According to Bakhtin, “the unification of love and death” was the funda-
mental theme in many of Ivanov’s poems. Bakhtin looked with approval
upon what he saw as a melding of love and death, aimed against individu-
ality: “The ecstasy of love inspires melancholy and a desire to break down
the borders of individualization, but it is death that destroys individualiza-
tion. Therefore, love invokes death.””°
Bakhtin, today the most influential representative of this line of develop-
ment in Russian thought, found just the subject matter to give his school
real significance. By skillfully applying Russian ideas to European exam-
ples, he won worldwide acclaim. Bakhtin’s reputation and ideas still enjoy
undisputed authority both among Russian philologists and among Western
Slavicists. Only in recent years did his most famous student, Sergei
Averintsev, subject Bakhtin’s ideas of carnival to critical attention, analyz-
ing their literal sense and their possible application to the Russian case. Just
how humane were medieval rituals of beating and ridicule? Did laughter al-
ways carry with it a deep truth about the world, about man; does it always
defeat fear and negate suffering? “The problem is that totalitarianism
knows very well how to make use of anything unrehearsed, unlocked, or
malleable; it has its own reasons for exaggerating these aspects of existence,
for stretching them and surrounding them with an emotional halo of am-
bivalent laughter and oblivious boldness.”7!
Averintsev demonstrated a surprising and ambiguous link between
Bakhtin’s concept of natural or medieval man—unrehearsed, unlocked, and
unfinished, like everything in life—and Soviet totalitarianism. This view of
man, Averintsev wrote, was a weapon against those who sought to com-
mandeer life and history. But in the same image there was something else
that Averintsev defined with remarkable accuracy: “The sense of oneself as
corpse and child at the same time.” As a child, because you are unfinished
and always ready to be remade; as a corpse, because you are frozen in mor-
tal fear, knowing that any transformation of man is nothing other than a
~ transformation of children into corpses. This dual sensation is the psycho-
logical substratum of the totalitarian regime. “The regime considers only it-
self complete. . . . Reality has to be plastic, so it can be sculpted and trans-
formed.”72
The regime in which Bakhtin lived, with all its terror, doublethink, and
pretensions to reshaping man, created in its citizens—even in people like
Bakhtin—characteristic distortions of self-perception that were projected
into their theory to the same degree as their poetry and love. “People
should be unprepared, unfinished, in the process of becoming, so they can
be trained and retrained, ‘reforged’; they shouldn’t be taken into considera-
tion, there’s no sense in taking them seriously, but they shouldn’t despair;
they have their whole life ahead of them, like children.” Averintsev asked a
rhetorical question: How was “a sense of yourself as corpse and child at the
same time” different from Bakhtin’s “ambivalence in death that gives
binth?77*
The epitome of the carnival master in Russian history was Ivan the
Terrible, who was adept at dethroning—crowning (as was equally adeptly il-
lustrated by Eisenstein, for our benefit and Stalin’s, in his film about the
bloody tsar). Despite his gloomy seriousness, Stalin also knew the meaning
of carnival laughter in his use of personal torture. The ethnography of the
Soviet Army and Soviet labor camps was composed of ridicule and beat-
ings, parodies of social hierarchy, and frightful grotesquerie performed on
the bodies of people, who were transformed into androgynes by force.
Bakhtin left no obvious trace in his books of his contact with this reality, al-
though he could hardly have remained unaware of it after all his wander-
ings. It remains unclear whether his admiration for the “popular body”
was the result of ignorance of Soviet reality, the likes of which one might
find only in the most eccentric intellectual; complete alienation from that
reality, when events around him ceased to bear any resemblance to culture
(which was probably the case with many people); or the upshot of a new,
intellectual romanticism.
Ivanov understood that “Dionysus in Russia is dangerous.” Rabelais
was also dangerous, although Bakhtin said nothing of the sort.
Nevertheless, in some of his ideas, most of all in the concept of dialogue,
Bakhtin overcame his heritage. At the end of his life, he found his own
answers to his own questions in Dostoevsky, much as Lacan found such
solutions in Freud. Bakhtin wrote of “Dostoevsky’s hostility toward the
kind of worldview that attributes a primary role to melding and dissolv-
ing consciousnesses in a single consciousness, to the removal of individu-
ality.” In essence, consciousness was plural and incomplete. This was the
key to overcoming the symbolist ideal of a lonely, eternal, self-engender-
ing consciousness with no need of individuality, development, or love. It
was also the point of entry into the contemporary philosophical, cultural,
and political problems of postmodernism—a school that accepts the
eclectic plurality and unblendedness of consciousnesses as a basic princi-
ple of modern life, turning away from systems and isms and back to
common sense.
A Soviet Man with a Soviet Analyst

After the rude reality of war and three revolutions, symbolism and
Dionysianism lost their attractiveness for both the general public and the
Russian intelligentsia. “Respected professional mystics and representatives
of science are shunning this girlish nonsense with equal suspicion,” Osip
Mandelstam wrote in 1922. He predicted that “Russian prose will move
forward only when it finally finds a prose writer who is independent of

Andrei Bely.””4
It is hardly by chance that one of the strongest images of the unbelievable
changes in Russian life was left us by a writer who emerged from the cul-
ture of the Silver Age having demonstratively rejected its basic components.
This author’s work reflected a peculiar blend of psychoanalytic vision and
common sense—an impossible, or at least officially unsanctioned, but fer-
tile mixture that infuriated the literary bosses of the time and enchanted
readers. For many decades Mihkail Zoshchenko was one of the most
widely read Soviet authors, and he retains his popularity to this day. After
all the ideological, futurist babble of Silver Age writers, Zoshchenko’s
short, primitive sketches produced and continue to produce a reaction of
shock. Their heroes entertained simple worries about things the Bolsheviks
had nearly forgotten: health and well-being most of all. They understood
the strangeness of their worries, as Zoshchenko wrote in his typical man-
ner, that of the apologetic clown: “I admit that in our days of instability, I
am really ashamed, downright uncomfortable coming out with such in-
significant ideas, with such routine conversations about an individual per-
son.” Amazed by the wonders of the new life but never losing sight of com-
mon sense, adopting the style of newspaper headlines but believing nothing
and accustomed to taking nothing on faith, Zoshchenko’s hero is infinitely
distant from the Nietzschean “new man.” However, he is no closer to the
confused man of European existentialism, alone in the world with his dark
thoughts.
Zoshchenko’s hero is none other than homo sovieticus, far from the
worst specimen of the human race. People like any other, as Bulgakov’s su-
perman Woland remarked. The burdens of life have annoyed them to the
point of permanent irritation, and so they feel no loneliness. Trained to
practice doublethink and deprived of any tradition of morality, these peo-
ple can the more easily permit themselves to be totally honest in their own
thoughts. Their predicament is unusual, and it calls for uncommon mea-
sures.
By illustration, let us paraphrase the following story by Zoshchenko.”
One day, a man is walking down the street when he suddenly notices that
women aren’t looking at him. That’s too bad, he thinks. Especially since a
bourgeois scholar once said that everything we do, we do for women. I’ve
got to eat better, the hero thinks to himself. He eats nonstop; then he does
calisthenics; finally, he decides to dress fashionably. Lo and behold, a
woman pays attention to him: He bought her stolen overcoat at the market.
Walking out of the police station, the hero thinks, “Ill get along without
the ladies. My personal life will be labor. I’m going to work. And the bour-
geois scholar’s words are just so much Western trash.” He spits on the
ground and turns his back on women passing by.
Here is yet another example, a story about psychoanalysis, which was

written in 1933—showing that psychoanalytic treatment was still practiced
at the time, although in extremely primitive form. The story so vividly de-
picts both the environment in which psychoanalysis struggled to survive
and the real patients of psychoanalysis that it deserves a short paraphrase
here.
The story’s protagonist goes for treatment to an outpatient clinic. The
place is packed with people, almost as full as the trolley. Most of the peo-
ple—thirty of them—are lined up to see the neurologist. Only one is wait-
ing to see the surgeon. Two women and one man have come to visit the gy-
necologist. The nervous patients are talking among themselves. The main
character says to them, “I’m surprised at how many nervous disorders
there are. Such a disproportionate number!” One of the patients shoots
back, “What’s surprising about that! People have a natural impulse to
trade, but here...” Another says to the first: “Well, don’t get too carried
away with your ideas, or I’ll call the cops. They’ll show you ‘natural im-
pulse.’” He doesn’t get the chance to call, though, because his turn comes
next. His words are audible from behind the screen: “Actually, I’m healthy,
but I can’t sleep. Give me some drops or pills.” The doctor responds that
pills will do him only harm, and that he subscribes to the latest method of
treatment. “I find the reason for the illness, and I fight it.” The patient
doesn’t understand what the physician is talking about. “Try to remember,”
the doctor tells him. “We’ll find the reason, we’ll overthrow it, and maybe
you'll be healthy again. You’ve suffered for ten years, and now you have to
tell me all about your suffering.” The patient recalls how he returned from
the Civil War and saw his nephew embracing his wife. “Sadness flares up
inside me when I see that he’s wearing my service jacket.” “All right,” the
doctor interjects. “I'll give you the pills.” The other patient, the one with
trade on his mind, hurries behind the screen—but medicine isn’t going to
help him, either.
Leaves Are Falling

The author of these stories, a cavalry officer in World War I who was deco-
rated with five medals for valor, was also seriously neurotic. His hypochon-
dria was deepened by periodic depression. Only his closest friends knew of
his disease; his acquaintances recalled him as a reserved, elegant gentleman,
always surrounded by women, upon whom he gazed with the fond atten-
tion of a “good neuropathologist.””6
Among a variety of conclusions made about him by army medics (field
hospital of the Mingrelian Grenadiers Regiment, toxic gas poisoning, June
1916; First Petrograd Medical Commission, September 1916, moderate
neurasthenia; senior physician of the Caucasus Division, February 1917,
343
cardiopathic neurosis and neurasthenia; Medical Commission, Petrograd,

February 1919, organic heart disease), he preserved in his archives the diag-
nosis he received on April 19, 1937, from Leningrad physician I.
Margolis.’”” Below I have quoted in full the two pages of hurried medical
handwriting:
The castration complex is corroborated by a series of valuable facts from the
patient’s early childhood. The patient has mentioned the persistent affect of
fear that he experienced during a surgical operation to correct an insignificant
ailment near the genitalia. This experience was completely forgotten (amnesia)
and covered over with a layer of less valuable affects. The interconnected
symptoms and their sources are so infused with pansexualism that they can be
overlooked only by someone who does not wish to see them. The patient finds
it unpleasant to return to this truly tragic theme, and discussion of the episode
always exacerbates his symptoms and his fear at the prospect of some deadly
chasm, terror that his “libido might stop.” The patient’s perception of libido
has crossed the boundary of healthy defense, and he reacts even to simple
physiological arousal with a pronounced indignation that is always visible in a
variety of symptoms (torturing himself and variegated symptomatic suffering).
The patient sublimates his libido and all pleasure along with it.
The patient honestly seeks some minimal understanding of his suffering in
the facts of his past. Resistance often keeps him from learning and seeing
everything. The extent of resistance is often incomprehensible to the patient.
The castration that has impoverished the libido has deprived his personality of
its renowned might, and this keeps him from pushing the attack to the last
stronghold of neurosis.
The patient is frightened by action (the gift of life)—particularly libidinal
action. He retreats and becomes passive and introverted. This cycle can be bro-
ken only through absolutely free penetration into all corners of the libido,
though the patient might have to see the strangest and most frightful things
there.
The patient’s constant fetish, the female bust, which so attracts and tortures
him, indicates an involvement of the oedipal complex.
This is not so much a diagnosis as a written continuation of the doctor’s

debate with a patient whose defensive concepts have to be overcome. There
is something unfair and superficial about the diagnosis; the use of the word
pansexualism, which Margolis underlined, having lifted it from Marxist
works on psychoanalysis, is malapropos. Not only does Dr. Margolis not
mask his analytic orientation, he enthusiastically underlines it and clearly
invites his famed patient to begin psychoanalytic treatment.
We do not know how Zoshchenko felt about this diagnosis or whether
he actually began analysis at that time. In any case, several years later he
commented respectfully about Freudians (see below), and he kept
Margolis’s diagnosis among his papers. After experimenting with different
types of treatment, Zoshchenko chose self-analysis, which he practiced for
decades. It stabilized his condition, allowing him to live a long, productive

life that would have been extremely difficult even for a healthy person. He
described the process and results of his self-analysis in three books.’® The
last of the series, Before the Sun Rises, is unarguably an exceptional work
of literature with the mark of psychoanalytic influence.
Zoshchenko wrote the book in 1942, after his evacuation to Alma-Ata,
where he lived at the same time as did Eisenstein. Many commentators
have spoken of the noticeable relaxation of ideological pressure from the
regime during the war. For a former combat officer, the war environment
could provide the bravery he otherwise lacked. Whether it was the war or
the therapeutic success of his self-treatment, Zoshchenko’s pen was freed
from both the idiocy of feuilletons and the prolixities of academic writing
with which he had attempted to conceal the underlying anxiety in his previ-
ous book, Youth Returned.
Before the Sun Rises was written almost entirely by a free man—free in
both senses of the word, political and psychological. The work had no
equal in Soviet prose in its degree of freedom, psychological depth, and ab-
solute clarity. At the same time, the work owed much to the literature of the
symbolists, whom Zoshchenko knew personally, despite being fifteen years
younger than Bely and Blok. Most of all, the structure and style of Before
the Sun Rises are reminiscent of Rozanov’s books: It contains the same self-
assured and unstylized first-person storytelling; the same sincerity in con-
veying the author’s own sexuality without appealing to the reader’s; the
same manner of breaking the text down into short chapters with elemen-
tary structure. Zoshchenko made no attempt to conceal his sympathies:
The central part of the story bears the same title as Rozanov’s most impor-
tant work, Fallen Leaves.
The story is constructed as a chain of free associations, each of which is
an isolated recollection. With their help, Zoshchenko delves, seeking the
reasons for his melancholy. How can the unfortunate incident be found?
One by one, he examines the recollections that cause him internal anxiety:
“Anxiety, like the light of a photo flash, illuminates photographs of the
past.” Zoshchenko shows them to the reader one after the other, from the
most recent to the very earliest. Women that seduced him; his father’s
death; battle portraits, scenes from daily life, commemorative sketches.
There are no explanations for any of it. He goes still deeper, to age five and
then two. But here the light fades, the author sees only emptiness and a
world of chaos that disappears at the first touch of reason. Zoshchenko has
no doubt that this is another world.
It is here, in the last part of the book, entitled Up to Age Two, that the
author turns to scholars for understanding: physiologists of the Pavlovian
school and Freudian analysts. The range, as we can see, is the very same as
the one found in the explorations of Trotsky and Eisenstein. But
345
Zoshchenko, fully aware of his own neurosis, is concerned with a practical

result. He introduces the reader to conditioned reflexes and tries to apply
their laws to his own early childhood. He goes back to the village where he
lived the first years of his life, but his melancholy intensifies, and he returns
home in an awful state. Conditioned reflexes, and bromide, for that matter,
are no longer any help to him. His sleep is haunted by nightmares. Before,
he either did not dream or forgot his dreams right away. Now his eyes had
barely closed before the visions began crowding in.
One doctor (it could have been our friend Dr. Margolis) told the author,
“only through dreams will you make sense of your illness.” He interpreted
one dream, proclaiming that the author was suffering from sexual trauma.
The author was indignant. The doctor declared: I interpreted the dream ac-
cording to Freud. I am his student. And there is no more accurate science that
would be helpful to you. The author consulted with other doctors. Among
them was another faithful Freudian. This was an extremely intelligent doctor.
The author almost became his disciple, but the doctor was a vociferous op-
ponent of Pavlov. He interpreted every dream as the dream of an erotoma-
niac. And so the author continued his self-analysis, which alternated with
popularized theoretical passages on the age-old theme, “Pavlov and Freud.”
The Last Victory

The story is not over. Such an analysis, of course, could never be com-
pleted. The inability of self-analysis to tap the contents of one’s own uncon-
scious is one of the most elementary truths of the Freudian method. In the
process of self-analysis, a person finds himself subject to the same distort-
ing mechanisms that engender his symptoms and dreams. Only in contact
with the conscious and unconscious of the other can authentic penetration
of the self occur. Strangely enough, in Russia Bakhtin documented this
truth brilliantly, even though he was critical about psychoanalysis in gen-
eral, while it was forgotten in the texts of those who sympathized with
Freud. In the works of Yermakov, Blonsky, and Trotsky, moments of
awareness attracted far more attention than moments of transference, de-
spite their equal importance for psychoanalysis. Incidentally, something
similar was also characteristic of Russian symbolists: The transformation
of the consciousness was understood as either an individual creative act or
a collective theurgical action, but never as a dynamic process undertaken
by a single person toward another in the struggle with resistance.
Zoshchenko took the same route, rejecting psychoanalytic treatment from
his “very intelligent” Freudian in favor of “Pavlovian” awareness of his
own reflexive connections.
“That which is blocked can be uncovered. This block can be lifted by the
light of logic, the light of higher consciousness.” This was the meaning of
Zoshchenko’s work, even in its socially useful sense. “After all, my texts
speak of the victory of human reason, of science, and of the progress of
consciousness. My work declaims the ‘philosophy’ of fascism, which says
that the conscious brings countless misfortunes to mankind.” It is surpris-
ing that Thomas Mann wrote almost the same thing to Jung’s coauthor,
Karl Kerenyi, in 1941: “Psychology is the means whereby myth may be
wrested from the hands of the Fascist obscurantists to be ‘transmuted’ for
humane ends.””?
In the person of Zoshchenko, Russian culture and psychoanalysis once
again crossed paths. Theirs was indeed a productive encounter, the result of
which, this time, was directed against fascism in all its guises: Before the
Sun Rises was not only an apologia of consciousness but also a testimony
to the value of the individual, with all his sufferings, hopes, and strivings.
Precisely for this reason, the book became the target of special persecu-
tion by Party authorities. In 1946, the Central Committee of the
Communist Party adopted a resolution “On the Journals Zvezda and
Leningrad,” turning its heavy ideological weaponry against two aging writ-
ers, living monuments to the Silver Age, Zoshchenko and Akhmatova. In
the decree, Zoshchenko was referred to as the most “vulgar and idiotic
man in literature,” his most heinous crimes against the state having been
“writing repulsive things like Before the Sun Rises.” As Zhdanov said in a
speech before the Central Committee: “It is difficult to find anything more
disgusting in our literature than the morality preached by Zoshchenko in
his novella Before the Sun Rises, where he portrays other people and him-
self as vile, lascivious beasts without shame or conscience.”
The Central Committee resolution, by linking Zoshchenko to
Akhmatova, put a symbolic end to the history of Russian modernism. The
Russian writer who was closest to psychoanalysis found himself in com-
pany with the heiress to the Silver Age, in their common resistance to state
terror. The ailing Zoshchenko managed to survive even the resolution of
the omnipotent Central Committee. He was one of the very few who found
in himself the courage and health to bear Party censure without dying or re-
penting, remaining true to himself. What he called psychoanalysis this time
proved stronger than what Zhdanov and his colleagues called communism.
Conclusion
The history of psychoanalysis gives testimony to the penetrability of na-

tional borders by ideas. Freud’s science of the individual gave rise to con-
cepts that were equally well apprehended by and bore identical significance
for different societies.! The fruits of human intellect—however specific and
unique the milieu in which they blossom and ripen—often take on an extra-
national flavor in their mature stages; and yet the universality coveted by so
many is attained by but a few.
One need only compare the history of psychoanalysis with that of
Marxism to understand how incredibly complex is the transnational pene-
tration of ideas and how deadly is their occasional perversion in the
process. The intentions of the ideas’ progenitors seem to have little effect on
their destinies: Freud cherished few illusions in that regard and was plagued
by many fears. Yet with each passing decade of the twentieth century, psy-
choanalysis has steadily expanded into an increasing number of national
cultures, taking on particular characteristics unique to each case (in France,
one finds an example of this process in the psychoanalysis of Jacques
Lacan; and in the United States, in the unusually deep interpenetration of
psychoanalysis and medicine). In Latin America, the last continent to be
conquered by Freud’s ideas, the downfall of each successive dictatorship in-
variably has been accompanied by a flowering of psychoanalysis. In sum,
despite its long history of internal disagreements and divisions, psycho-
analysis has maintained its essential traits. In striking contrast, the doctrine
of Marx, who proclaimed the inevitability and universality of his goals, ap-
_ pears to be in fatal decline.
Psychoanalysis might aptly be compared to a comet transecting various
solar systems: The comet is surrounded by a vacuum and encounters no
similar objects as it pursues its course. Yet it is accompanied through space
by gravitational and magnetic fields that distort its trajectory, whip its tail
into a vortex, and sheer away clouds of vapor, which are left behind to find
their own orbit in that solar system.
Psychoanalysis was so quickly and avidly adopted in turn-of-the-century
Russia that my readers might well be perplexed by the later events recounted
in this book: Could this really be the same Russia? Yes, indeed: In this coun-
try’s extraordinary intellectual and political atmosphere, psychoanalysis
underwent the greatest distortions it was ever to encounter in its develop-
ment, and in the end it was almost unrecognizable. The peculiar charac-
347
348 Conclusion
teristics of Russian culture, catalyzed by unique historical circumstances,

produced an unprecedented intellectual amalgam, and psychoanalysis
played a role in this process. The compactness of psychoanalytic doctrine,
the clear demarcations between what psychoanalysis is and what it is not,
afford us an unusually keen insight into the complex interplay of scientific
concepts, spiritual values, and political forces that shaped the intellectual
terrain of Russia in the twentieth century.
The evolution of Russian psychoanalysis was unique and multifaceted. In
the area of theory, one of its most intriguing aspects is the line that can be
traced from the Adlerian beliefs of Russian psychotherapists of the 1910s
to the Trotskyism of Soviet analysts of the 1920s. The places occupied by
sexuality in Freudian psychoanalytic theory and by transference in
Freudian analytic practice were usurped in Russian theory and practice by
questions of power and of consciousness. In clinical and applied work, the
problems of consciousness and unconsciousness were assigned much
greater importance than was transference, which was almost never men-
tioned by Soviet-era psychoanalysts, who had abandoned study of the sex-
ual libido in their eagerness to discover other forces motivating the human
psyche. Thus, psychoanalysis in Soviet Russia followed a trajectory exactly
opposite to that pursued by the rest of the psychoanalytic world.
“I can confidently state that a strong and productive psychoanalytic
movement could have developed in Russia, if the powers that be had not
waged such an aggressive war against it,” wrote Moisei Wulff, erstwhile
president of the Russian Psychoanalytic Society, living in Berlin.* Today, in
light of recent history and accumulated political experience, Wulff’s state-
ment seems oversimple. One cannot escape intellectual responsibility by
blaming the authorities’ ill will: In their struggle for political dominance,
Russian psychoanalysts subjected themselves to the most dramatic of men-
tal contortions. They were led astray by their own utopian illusions, failing
to note the points of logical divergence between such dreams and what they
knew of psychoanalysis. Adopting an attitude of hope and trust toward the
new regime that was emerging, regenerated, alongside them, they found it
most attentive and supportive—so long as it was peopled by those who
were congenial to psychoanalysis.
From Tatiana Rosenthal to Ivan Yermakov, the work of Russian analysts
was typified by the avoidance of all discussion of the libido, and at times by
bold-faced hypocrisy on sexual matters. A rather comical example was
Aron Zalkind, who so easily made the leap from Adlerian psychoanalysis
to official repression of sexuality in the name of class rule. Other traditions,
such as the enlightened eroticism of Lou Andreas-Salomé, Wilhelm Reich’s
sexual emancipation and social liberation, and Mikhail Bakhtin’s conceptu-
alization of discourse, were forgotten because they had no direct bearing on
the problematics of power. In its earliest stages, the cult of power—the
Conclusion 349
molten core around which the totalitarian consciousness revolved—sucked

in all kinds of spiritual matter, including even that with which it was most
incompatible, such as psychoanalysis.
The cult of power thus inevitably became a rite of death, regardless of
the circumstances. This explains why, beginning with Sabina Spielrein, the
theme of the death wish took on paramount significance for Russian ana-
lysts who were grappling with the same knotty problem that Solovyov and
Ivanov had encountered—the culture of their homeland. Death and power
made up the entire universe in which Russian psychoanalysis and its crea-
tures had their being. Death and power were the elements constituting that
black star with the gargantuan gravitational pull around which the comet
of psychoanalysis revolved until it was at last sucked in, to commingle and
fuse with dark oblivion.
The antinatural regime could achieve stability only by transforming the
very nature of its human subjects; and this it strove mightily to do, com-
manding them hourly to perform the metamorphosis. Observing these
machinations from a safe distance, the emigrant Fyodor Stepun wrote:
“State despotism is terrifying not so much for its political limitations as for
its educational and cultural impositions, its schemes to create a new man
and a new humanity.”? The idea of the “new man,” which had been a cen-
tral goal of Russian intellectuals from the symbolists of the 1900s to the
pedologists of the 1930s, had become official government policy. Later, as
the regime became progressively more liberal, the concept gradually lost all
meaning; but it survived until the Brezhnev era, if only as an empty slogan.
Early Soviet psychoanalysis was unprecedentedly politicized and unusu-
ally close to the regime. The leadership of the Russian Psychoanalytic
Society in the early 1920s consisted nearly entirely of Bolsheviks who
planned to use psychoanalysis to their own ends. Moscow in the 1920s saw
the organization of the State Psychoanalytic Institute (an otherwise un-
heard-of phrase in the history of psychoanalysis) and the Psychoanalytic
Orphanage, a specialized establishment for the children of high-ranking
party functionaries. Trotsky himself had a personal stake in psychoanalysis,
assigning it a prominent place in his new political agenda; and none other
than Stalin’s son, Vasily (who would later become an alcoholic and an air
force general), was among the children whose upbringing was overseen by
the Psychoanalytic Orphanage.
But their close relationship to the regime saved neither psychoanalysts
nor psychoanalysis. Just the opposite: The closer they moved to the center
of power, the closer they came to death. Recall Adolf Ioffe, a patient of
Adler’s who later provided psychoanalysis to convicts in Siberian penal
servitude. Ioffe committed suicide following the “liquidation of the
Trotskyist opposition,” among whose ranks he had figured prominently,
Aron Zalkind died of a heart attack following the denunciation of his
350 Conclusion
brainchild, pedology—the science of the “new man of the masses.”

Alexander Luria, one of the greatest psychologists of the Soviet period, be-
gan his career as academic secretary of the Russian Psychoanalytic Society
and then left that post on the eve of the purges to work on developing a me-
chanical lie detector. Sabina Spielrein, who had discovered the death wish
long before Freud, voluntarily returned to Bolshevik Russia and then re-
mained behind in Nazi-occupied Rostov. Max Eitingon, one of the most in-
scrutable figures in intellectual history, personified power in international
psychoanalysis.
In the history of psychoanalysis—that is, the history of ideas—the will to
power that was described by Adler and never acknowledged by Freud was
far removed from the death wish described by Spielrein and later rediscov-
ered by Freud. The history of psychoanalysis—that is, the history of peo-
ple—moves us to ask whether these two forms of desire are really so diver-
gent. After all, both point us back toward Nietzsche. And following full
circle, we sense a hidden, paradoxical logic: the cult of power ... the ser-
vice of death .. . the eros of the impossible.
Notes
Introduction
1. V. I. Ivanov, Sobranie sochinenii v 4-kh tomakh [Collected Works in Four
Volumes] (Brussels, 1971), vol. 1, p. 825.
2. There is a body of specialized literature dealing with the perception of
Nietzsche in Russia. Titles include: B. G. Rosenthal, ed., Nietzsche in Russia
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986); E. W. Clowes, The Revolution of
Moral Consciousness: Nietzsche in Russian Literature, 1890-1914 (DeKalb, IIL:
Northern Illinois University Press, 1988); R. Y. Danilevsky, “Russkii obraz
Fridrikha Nitsshe (predistoriia i nachalo formirovaniia)” [The Russian Image of
Friedrich Nietzsche (Prehistory and Early Formation)], in Na rubezhe XIX i XX
vekov (Leningrad: Nauka, 1991), pp. 5-43; and B. G. Rosenthal, ed., Nietzsche and
Soviet Culture: Ally and Adversary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1994).
3. A. Benois, Moi vospominaniia [Memoirs] (Moscow: Nauka, 1990), vol. 2, p. 48.
4. A. Grigoriev, Vospominaniia [Memoirs] (Moscow and Leningrad: Academia,
1930), p. 116.
5. A. A. Bogdanov, “Novyi mir” [New World], in Voprosy sotsializma [Issues in
Socialism] (Moscow: Politizdat, 1990), p. 28.
6. The Freud—Jung Letters, ed. W. McGuire (London: Hogarth, 1974), p. 495.
7.8. Freud, The Future of an Illusion (New York: Norton, 1961), p. 9.
8. The Letters of Sigmund Freud and Arnold Zweig, ed. Ernst L. Freud (New
York: New York University [NYU] Press, 1970), p. 25.
9. Nevertheless, Stalin- and Brezhnev-era ideologues were not alone in asserting
that psychoanalysis was incompatible with Russian society. After emigrating,
Alexander Pyatigorsky wrote that “Freudianism in all its permutations and stages
.. Mever was accepted by Russian culture”; see his article “O psikhoanalize iz
sovremennoi Rossii” [On Psychoanalysis from Contemporary Russia], Rossiia
[Russia], no. 3 (Rome, 1977), pp. 29-50. Boris Groys based his otherwise outstand-
ing reasoning on this misleading evaluation (see “Rossiia kak podsoznatel’noe
Zapada” [Russia as the West’s Subconscious], in Utopiia i obmen [Moscow: Znak,
1993], pp. 245-259).
10. M. G. Yaroshevsky, Istoriia psikhologii [History of Psychology], 2d ed.
(Moscow: Pedagogika, 1976); A. V. Petrovsky, Voprosy teorii i istorii psikhologii
[Problems in the Theory and History of Psychology] (Moscow: Pedagogika, 1984).
11. D. Joravsky, Russian Psychology: A Critical History (Oxford: Blackwell,
1989); L. Graham, Science, Philosophy, and Behavior in the Soviet Union (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1987).
12. Among the most important works on the subject are J. Marti, “La
Psychanalyse en Russie et en Union Soviétique de 1909 a 1930,” Critique 346
(March 1976), pp. 199-236; H. Lobner and V. Levitin, “A Short Account of
Freudism: Notes on the History of Psychoanalysis in the USSR,” Sigmund Freud
House Bulletin 2, no. 1 (1978), pp. 5-30; J.-M. Palmier, “La Psychanalyse en Union
354
352 Notes
Soviétique,” in Histoire de la psychanalyse, ed. R. Jaccard (Paris: Hachette, 1982),

vol. 2, pp. 213-270; E. Roudinesco, “Marxisme, psychanalyse, psychologie,” chap.
1.2 in Histoire de la psychanalyse en France, vol. 2 (Paris: Seuil, 1986); A.
Carotenuto, A Secret Symmetry (London: Routledge, 1984); J. L. Rice, “Russian
Stereotypes in the Freud—Jung Correspondence,” Slavic Review 41, no. 1 (Spring
1982): pp. 19-35; I. Maximov, “Histoire de la psychanalyse: La psychanalyse
russe,” L’Ane, no. 10 (1983), pp. 3-5; I. Manson, “Comment dit-on ‘psychanalyse’
en russe?” Revue internationale du psychanalyse, 1991, no. 4, pp. 407-422; A.
Mikhalevitch, “Premiére implantation et rejet (1904-1930),” Frénésie 2, no. 7
(1989), pp. 125-146; M. Ljunggren, “The Psychoanalytic Breakthrough in Russia
on the Eve of the First World War,” in Russian Literature and Psychoanalysis, ed.
Daniel Rancour-Laferriere (Amsterdam: Benjamin, 1989), pp. 174-191; M.
Ljunggren, The Dream of Rebirth: A Study of Andrej Belyj’s Novel “Petersburg”
(Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1982); M. Miller, “Freudian Theory Under
Bolshevik Rule,” Slavic Review, Winter 1985, pp. 625-646; M. Miller, “The
Reception of Psychoanalysis and the Problem of the Unconscious in Russia,” Social
Research 57, no. 4 (1990), pp. 876-888; J. Rice, Freud’s Russia: National Identity
in the Evolution of Psychoanalysis (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 1993).
Rice’s important volume came out after my study was completed and published in
Russian. There are important parallels and differences between the two books,
which are especially relevant to the discussion in chapters 3 and 4 of mine.
13. E. Pfeiffer, ed., Nietzsche, Rée, Salomé: Correspondance (Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France [PUF], 1979), p. 198.
14.S. Freud, “On the History of the Psychoanalytic Movement,” in The
Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (London:
Hogarth, 1957), vol. 14, p. 66.
15. M. Bakhtin, Dostoevsky’s Poetics (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1973).
16. M. Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita, tr. Mirra Ginsburg (New York:
Grove, 1967), p. 16.
Chapter One
1. There is a large and contradictory literature about the life of Lou Andreas-
Salomé. This account is based on the following sources: L. Andreas-Salomé, Ma
Vie, ed. E. Pfeiffer (Paris: PUF, 1977); R. Binion, Frau Lou, Nietzsche’s Wayward
Disciple (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968); H. F. Peters, My Sister, My
Spouse (London, 1963); A. Livingstone, Salomé: Her Life and Work (New York:
Moyer, 1984); P. Roazen, Brother Animal: The Story of Freud and Tausk (New
York: NYU Press, 1986); and Biddy Martin, Woman and Modernity: The (Life)-
Styles of Lou Andreas-Salomé (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991).
2. Lou Andreas-Salomé, Ma Vie, p. 24.
3. For more detail on these events, see James Billington, Fire in the Minds of
Men: Origins of the Revolutionary Faith (New York: Basic, 1980), pp. 492-495;
and E. A. Pavliuchenko, Zhenshchiny v russkom osvoboditel’nom dvizhenii
[Women in the Russian Liberation Movement] (Moscow: Mysl’, 1988).
4. Livingstone, Salomé, p. 18.
3. Ibids p, 22.
6. Ibid., p. 24.
Aplbidaiia2s
Salbid.. p27:
9. Ibid., p. 30.
Notes sc
10. Letter from A. I, Herzen to M. K. Reichel of October 17, 1853, Otryvki

iz
vospominani M. K. Reichel i pis’ma k nei A. I. Gertsena [Excerpts from the
Memoirs of M. K. Reichel and Letters to Her from A. I. Herzen] (Moscow:
Bukhgeim, 1909), p. 102.
11. Malwida von Meysenbug, Memoiren einer Idealistin (Frankfurt-am-Main
1985), p. 342. :
125 Ibid.
14. I. K. Khmelevsky, “Patologicheskii element v lichnosti i tvorchestve Fridrikha
Nitsshe” [The Pathological Element in the Personality and Work of Friedrich
Nietzsche], a speech given at the meeting of the Society of Russian Physicians on
February 22, 1903 (Kiev, 1904).
15. Letter from Freud to Paul Rée, March 21, 1882, in Peter Fuss and Henry
Shapiro, eds., Nietzsche: A Self-Portrait from His Letters (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1971), p. 59.
16. Friedrich Nietzsche, Joyful Wisdom (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1960).
17. Livingstone, Salomé, p. 40. (Rée called himself “Hiisung,” a word from his
local dialect.—Trans.)
18. Peters, My Sister, p. 120.
19. Letter from Freud to Peter Gast, July 13, 1882, in Fuss and Shapiro, eds.,
Nietzsche, p. 63.
20. Friedrich Nietzsche, Paul Rée, and Lou Andreas-Salomé, Correspondance,
ed. E. Pfeiffer (Paris: PUF, 1979), pp. 153-154.
2A ibid.pp. 135,230.
22. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Chicago: Gateway, 1957), p. 4.
23. Ibid., pp. 5-6.
24. E. Forster-Nietzsche, introduction to Also sprach Zarathustra, by Friedrich
Nietzsche (Leipzig, 1922), p. xvii.
25. Written in 1884; cf. Peters, My Sister, p. 142.
26. Lou Andreas-Salomé, “Fridrikh Nitsshe v svoikh proizvedeniiakh,” Severnyi
vestnik, 1896, nos. 3-5.
27. V. Zhirmunsky, Nemetskii romantizm i sovremennaia mistika [German
Romanticism and Contemporary Mysticism] (St. Petersburg, 1914), pp. 193, 13; V.
Zhirmunsky, Religioznoe otrechenie v istorii romantizma [Religious Rejection in
the History of Romanticism] (Moscow: Sakharov, 1919), p. 7.
28. Nietzsche, Reé, and Salomé, Correspondance, ed. E. Pfeiffer, p. 62. Vladimir
Solovyov considered Nietzsche Lermontov’s “closest heir.” See V. Solovyov,
Stikhotvoreniia, estetika, literaturnaia kritika (Moscow: Kniga, 1990), p. 444.
29. Demon was popular in Germany. In 1852-1876, the work was released in
four different German translations and the Russian version was reprinted seven
times in Germany. See Lermontovskaia entsiklopediia [The Lermontov En-
cyclopedia] (Moscow: Sovetskaia entsiklopediia, 1981), p. 393.
30. Mikhail Lermontov, “Demon,” in Charles Johnston, Rivers and Fireworks
(London: Bodley Head, 1980), p. 30.
312 1bid., p: 36.
32. Ibid., p. 54. | ape
33. Salomé’s act, however, was fully in keeping with the narodnik tradition of un-
consummated marriage, the early beginnings of which were signaled by
Chernyshevsky’s novel What Is to Be Done?—a tradition that remained important
for several subsequent generations. See I. Paperno, Chernyshevsky and the Age of
Realism: A Study in the Semiotics of Behavior (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
354 Notes
1988); and O. Matich, Dialectics of Cultural Return: Zinaida Gippius’ Personal

Myth—Cultural Mythologies of Russian Modernism (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1992), pp. 52-72.
34. Letter of May 9, 1926, in R. M. Rilke, B. Pasternak, M. Tsvetaeva, Letters:
1926, ed. Yevgeniy Pasternak (Orlando, Fla.: Harcourt-Brace, 1985), p. 81.
35. Letter of May 18, 1899, cited in K. Azadovsky, Rilee und Russland (Berlin-
Weimar, 1986), p. 95.
36. The unpublished memoirs of S. N. Shil are kept at the Scientific Library of
Moscow University, file 1004.
37. Lou Andreas-Salomé, “Russische Philosophie und Semitischer Geist,” Die
Zeit, no. 172 (January 15, 1898).
38. Friedrich Nietzsche, Po tu storonu zla i dobra [Beyond Good and Evil], in
Sochineniia v dvukh tomakh (Moscow: Mysl’, 1990), vol. 2, p. 370.
39. Boris Pasternak, Safe Conduct: An Autobiography and Other Writings (New
York: New Directions, 1958), p. 13.
40. Rainer Maria Rilke, Selected Works, tr. J. B. Leishman (London: Hogarth,
1960), voln2; p67:
42. Lou Andreas-Salomé, Die Erotik (Frankfurt, 1910).
43. Sigmund Freud and Lou Andreas-Salomé: Letters, ed. E. Pfeiffer (New York:
Norton, 1985), p. 7.
44. See Livingstone, Salomé, p. 148.
45. See Roazen, Brother Animal; also Stefan Zweig, Vrachevanie i psikhika
[Healing and the Psyche] (St. Petersburg: Gamma, 1992).
46. E. Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, 3 vols. (New York: Basic,
1955):
47. Sigmund Freud, “Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood,” in
The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud
(London: Hogarth, 1957), vol. 11, p. 69.
48. Ibid., p. 74.
49. Ibid., p. 69.
50. The Freud-Jung Letters, ed. W. McGuire (London: Hogarth, 1974), p. 478.
51. Paul Roazen, Freud: Political and Social Thought (London: Hogarth, 1969),
pp. 84-85; R. L. Rudnytsky, Freud and Oedipus (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1987), pp. 198-199.
52. Sigmund Freud, “Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego,” in The
Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud
(London: Hogarth, 1957), vol. 18, p. 67.
53. See Livingstone, Salomé, p, 152.
54. E. Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, vol. 2, p. 421.
55. Paul Roazen, Brother Animal.
56. Ibid., p. 140.
57. L. Andreas-Salomé, Mein Dank an Freud (Vienna: Internationaler Psy-
choanalytischer Verlag, 1931), p. 19; L. Andreas-Salomé, L’Amour du narcissisme
(Paris, 1980).
58. V. Solovyov, “Smysl liubvi” [The Meaning of Love], in Sochineniia [Works],
vol. 2 (Moscow: Mysl’, 1988).
59. According to Berdyaev, the Russian symbolist poets differed from Solovyoy,
whom they considered their teacher, in that they “believed in Sophia far more than
in Christ”; incidentally, even Solovyov himself “allowed for the possibility of con-
fusion in Sophia-ist moods.” See Nikolai Berdyaev, “Smysl tvorchestva: Opyt
ae
Notes
opravdaniia cheloveka” [The Meaning of Art: The Experience of Justifying Man’s

Existence], in Sobranie sochinenii [Collected Works], vol. 2 (Paris: YMCA, 1989).
60. V. Solovyov, “Ideia sverkhcheloveka” [The Idea of the Superman], in
Sochineniia [Works] (Moscow: Mysl’, 1988), vol. 2, pp. 626, 633.
61. V. Solovyov, “Smysl liubvi,” in Sochineniia, vol. 2, pp. 516, 546.
G22 bid. ppso21y 52295317
63. L. Andreas-Salomé, “Russische Philosophie und Semitischer Geist.”
64. L. Andreas-Salomé, “The Dual Orientation of Narcissism,” Psychoanalytic
Quarterly 31, no. 1 (1962), pp. 5, 28.
652 Ibid-; p19.
66. Ibid., p. 10.
67. L. Andreas-Salomé, “Russische Dichtung und Kultur,” Cosmopolis (August
1897), p. 574.
68. L. Andreas-Salomé, Looking Back: Memoirs (New York: Paragon, 1990), p. 35.
69. Livingstone, Salomé, p. 161; Biddy Martin, Woman and Modernity: The (Life)-
Styles of Lou Andreas-Salomé (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), pp. 202-203.
70. L. Andreas-Salomé, Looking Back, p. 36.
71. Ibid., p. 38.
72. Ibid., p. 39.
73. Ibid., p. 38.
74. L. Andreas-Salomé, Fenitschka, ed. E. Pfeiffer (Frankfurt-am-Main: Ullstein,
1982), p. 45.
75. Ibid.
77. L. Andreas-Salomé, Fenitschka.
78. L. Andreas-Salomé, Looking Back, pp. 39-40.
79. Ibid., pp. 38-39.
80. See R. Fueloep-Miller, Geist und Gesicht des Bolschewismus (Zurich:
Amathea, 1926), available in English translation as R. Fueloep-Miller, The Mind and
Face of Bolshevism (New York: Harper, 1965).
Freud’s article, “Dostoevsky and Patricide,” contains a reference to Fueloep-
»”»
Miller; see J. Rice, Dostoevsky and the Healing Art (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1985), pp.
218-219.
82. Ibid:, p. 39:
83. Ibid., p. 41.
85. Livingstone, Salome, p. 168.
86. Ibid. i
87. Sigmund Freud and Lou Andreas-Salomé: Letters, ed. E. Pfeiffer, p. 32.
88. Ibid., p. 185.
89. Ibid., p. 57.
90. See Lou Andreas-Salomé, Mein Dank an Freud.
92) Ibid.,.p.203;
Chapter Two
1. A. Blok, “Est? igra: Ostorozhno voiti,” in Sobranie sochinenti (Moscow:
Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1963), vol. 2, p. 181.
1990),
2. A. Benois, Moi vospominaniia [My Recollections] (Moscow: Nauka,
29.
vol. 1, p. 631; L. Mendeleeva-Blok, Byli i nebylitsy (Bremen, 1977), p.
356 Notes
3. K. Mochulsky, Andrei Bely: His Life and Works (Ann Arbor: Ardis’ 1977); ps 2).
4. FE, Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, p. 30.
5. FE. Dostoevsky, Biografiia, pis’ma, i zametki iz zapisnoi knizhki (St. Petersburg,
SS) p.
1883), ps 373.
6 .M. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1973),
pp. 49-50.
7. V. 1. Ivanov, Sobranie sochinenii (Collected Works] (Brussels, 1987), vol. 4,
5 ones
; 8. V. Rozanov, “Opavshie list’ia” [Fallen Leaves], in Uedinennoe (Moscow:
Politizdat, 1990), pp. 347, 148.
9.1. Annensky, “O sovremennom lirizme” [On Contemporary Lyricism],
Apollon, 1909, vol. 3, p. 55.
10. L. Szilard, “Neskol’ko zametok k ucheniiu Vyacheslava Ivanova o katarsise”
[A Few Notes on Vyacheslav Ivanov’s Study of Catharsis], in Cultura 1 Memmoria:
Atti del terzo Simposio Internationale dedicato a Vjacheslav Ivanov, vol. 2, Testi in
Russo (La Nuovo Italia Editrice, 1986), p. 146.
11.N. Berdyaev, “Samopoznanie (Opyt filosofskoi avtobiografii)” [Self-
Knowledge: The Experience of Philosophical Autobiography], in Sobranie sochi-
neni, vol. 1 (Paris: YMCA, 1989), pp. 167, 185.
12. V. Rozanov, “Opavshie list’ia.”
13. V. A. Fateev, V. V. Rozanov: Zhizn’, tvorchestvo, lichnost’ [Rozanov: Life,
Work, Personality] (Leningrad, 1991), p. 231.
14. V. Rozanov, Liudi lunnogo sveta: Metafizika khristianstva [Moonlight
People: The Metaphysics of Christianity], 2d ed. (1913; reprint, Moscow: Druzhba
narodov, 1990), pp. 73-74.
P57 ibid.
16. Ibid., p. 130.
17. Rozanov discussed “themes of Aphrodite” at great length with Alexander
Benois, most of all confiding in him observations about his own wife. Benois re-
called that there was no trace of tastelessness in Rozanov’s comments, that they
were marked with a combination of “sophisticated, subtle observation and almost
childlike naiveté” (A. Benois, Moi vospominaniia, vol. 2, p. 249).
18. A. Sinyavsky, Opavshie list’ia V. V. Rozanova [Rozanov’s Fallen Leaves]
(Paris: Sintaksis, 1982), p. 33.
19. Freud, “Leonardo da Vinci,” p. 101.
20. It is possible that Rozanov’s ideas of homosexuality obliquely influenced
Freud’s interpretation of Leonardo da Vinci. In his essay on Leonardo da Vinci,
Freud mentioned Merezhkovsky as one of his primary sources. Merezhkovsky, in
turn, had been strongly influenced by Rozanov.
21. “Perepiska Rozanova i Gershenzona” [Correspondence Between Rozanov
and Gershenzon], ed. V. Proskurina, Novyi mir 3, 1991, p. 231. The publisher is
wrong in considering Weininger and Krafft-Ebing, whom Rozanov cited liberally,
psychoanalysts.
22. D. H. Lawrence, Selected Literary Criticism, ed. A. Beel (New York: Viking,
1956), Paaaos
23. V. Rozanov, “Opavshie list’ia,” p. 343.
24. V. Khodasevich, Izbrannaia proza [Selected Prose] (New York: Russica, 1982).
25. A. Bely, “O teurgii” [On Theurgy], Novyi put’, 1903, p. 9.
26. A. Bely, Nachalo veka [The Beginning of the Century] (Moscow, 1933), p. 276.
27. Bely recounted that Briusov practiced hypnosis as well as spiritualism: “He
was never squeamish about the dubious atmosphere surrounding experiments in
re
Notes
hypnosis; . . . for a long while, he practiced hypnosis on me, Solovyov, and Ellis”
(A. Bely, Vospominaniia o Bloke (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1969], p. 258).
28. Bely wrote, in early 1904: “Instead of the mystery, the brotherhood and sis-
terhood of which I had dreamed, there was mere romance. I was bewildered; more
than that, I was stunned. . . . I had tried so hard to explain to Nina Ivanovna that
Christ was between us; she agreed; and then, suddenly, this. My breakthrough to
mystery, to ‘theurgy’ has been beaten back” (S. S. Grechishkin and A. V. Lavrov,
“Biograficheskie istochniki romana Briusova ‘Ognennyi angel’” [Biographical
Sources of Briusov’s Novel ‘Fire Angels’], Wiener Slawistischer Almanach, 1978,
vol. 1, p. 85). This story has been retold in detail many times. See also Konstantin
Mochulsky, Andrei Bely: His Life and Works; Khodasevich, “Konets Renaty,” in
Serebrianyi vek: Memuary (Moscow: Izvestiia, 1990); Magnus Ljunggren, The
Dream of Rebirth: A Study of Andrej Belyj’s Novel “Petersburg” (Stockholm:
Almavist & Wiksell, 1982).
29. Cited in M. Ljunggren, The Dream of Rebirth, p. 138.
31. B. Vysheslavtsev, review of the first volume of Carl Jung’s collected works on
analytical psychology, Put’, February 20, 1930, pp. 111-113.
32. The idea that the story of Ivan Bezdomny is an encoded repetition of the
Masonic initiation rite, a kind of “second birth,” was articulated by Léna Szilard in
her talk “Bulgakov and the Symbolists,” given at the International Colloquium on
Bulgakov in Paris, June 1991.
33. A. Bely, Pochemu ia stal simvolistom (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1982), p. 51.
34. A. Bely, Vospominaniia o Bloke, p. 117.
35. S. Averintsev, introduction to Stikhotvoreniia i poemy [Verse and Long
Poems], by V. Ivanov (Leningrad: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1978), p. 47.
36. A. Naiman, Rasskazy ob Anne Akhmatovoi [Stories of Anna Akhmatova]
(Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1989).
37. N. Berdyaev, Samopoznanie, p. 177.
38.In A. Blok: Novye materialy i issledovaniia, Literaturnoe nasledstvo
(Moscow: Nauka, 1982), vol. 3, p. 340.
39. Y. Gertsyk, Vospominaniia [Memoirs] (Paris: YMCA, 1973), p. 53.
40. S. Averintsev, introduction to Stikhotvoreniia i poemy, by V. Ivanov, p. 45.
41. V. Ivanov, “Daby v dushe chuzhoi,” in Stikhotvoreniia i poemy (Leningrad:
Sovetskii pisatel’, 1976), p. 222. (Excerpt translated by Rebecca Ritke.)
43. V. Ivanov, Po zvezdam [Stars] (St. Petersburg, 1909).
44.N. Berdyaev, Samopoznanie, p. 173.
45.N. Berdyaev, Sobranie sochinenii [Collected Works] (Paris: YMCA, 1990),
vol. 4, p. 119.
46. V. Ivanov, Po zvezdam.
47.8. Bulgakov, Avtobiograficheskie zametki [Autobiographical Notes] (Paris:
YMCA, 1946), p. a3 pete
48. Ivanov, Po zvezdam, p. 97-100.
49. O. Mandelstam, aes [Stone] (Leningrad: Nauka, 1990), pp. 206-207.
50. B. Zaitsev, Dalekoe [Distant] (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1991), p. 484.
51. V. Ivanov, “Da, sei pozhar,” in Stikhotvorentia 1 poemy, p. 285. (Excerpt
translated by Rebecca Ritke.) dey
p. 45.
52. S. Averintsev, introduction to Stikhotvorenta i poemy, by V. Ivanov,
53. V. Ivanov, Po zvezdam, p.153. ated
1322
54. V. Ivanov, “Ni granei, ni godin,” in Stikhotvorentia 1 poemy, p.
358 Notes
55. Ibid., p. 413.

56. Ibid., p. 125.
57.N. Berdyaev, “Smysl tvorchestva: Opyt opravdaniia cheloveka” [The
Meaning of Creativity: The Experience of Justification of Man], in Sobranie sochi-
nenii, vol. 2.
58. V. Ivanov, “Dukhovnyi lik slavianstva,” in Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 4, p. 668.
59. W. J. McGrath, Dionysian Art and Populist Politics in Austria (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1974).
60. The Freud—Jung Letters, pp. 293-294.
61. Ibid., p. 293.
62 Ibids pr295:
63. C. G. Jung, Essays on Contemporary Events (London: Kegan Paul, 1947).
64.1. M. Kogan, “Weltuntergangserlebnis und Wiedergeburtsphantasie bei einem
Schizophrenen,” Internationale Zeitschrift fiir Psychoanalyse, 1932, 18, pp. 86-104.
65. L. Mendeleeva-Blok, Byli i nebylitsy, p. 50.
66. A. Blok, Sochineniia, vol. 2, pp. 476, 716.
67. V. Orlov, “Sny i iav” [Sleeping and Waking], in A. Blok, Pis’ma k zhene
(Moscow: Nauka, 1876), p. 21.
68. “A. Blok: Novye materialy i issledovaniia,” in Literaturnoe nasledstvo
(Moscow: Nauka, 1980), vol. 92, part 1, pp. 358, 369, 394.
69. F. Stepun, Byushee i nesbyvsheesia (New York: Chekhov, 1956), vol. 1, pp.
269-270.
70. A. Bely, Nachalo veka, p. 89.
71. M. Ljunggren, The Dream of Rebirth, p. 86.
72. L. Ivanova, Vospominaniia: Kniga ob otse [Memoirs: A Book About My
Father] (Paris: Atheneum, 1990), p. 217.
73. V. Ivanov, “Anima,” in Iz istorii russkoi filosofskoi mysli kontsa XIX i
nachala XX vekov: Antologiia (Washington: Interlanguage Literary Associates,
1965), pp. 183-197; V. Ivanov, Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 4, pp. 367-385.
74. The sonnet “Porog soznaniia” [The Threshold of Consciousness] and the history
of its dedication can be found in V. Ivanov, Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 3, pp. 562, 845.
75. L. Ivanova, Vospominaniia, pp. 217-218.
76. Leonid Ionin, personal communication.
77. L. Ginzburg, Literatura v poiskakh real’nosti [Literature in Search of Reality]
(Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1987), p. 221.
78. From the letters of C. G. Jung to E. K. Metner [in German], Archives of the
Russian State Library (Moscow), fund 167, file 14, p. 62. These excerpts from the
Jung—Metner correspondence were first published in Eros nevozmozhnogo (the
Russian edition of this book). They now are available also in M. Ljunggren, The
Russian Mephisto: A Study of the Life and Work of Emile Metner (Stockholm:
University of Stockholm Press, 1994), pp. 213-230 [in German and in English].
Here, I have quoted from Ljunggren’s English translation.
79. C. G. Jung, Izbrannye trudy po analiticheskoi psikhologii, ed. Emile Metner,
3 vols.: vol. 1, Psikhologicheskie tipy (Zurich: Musaget, 1929); vol. 2, Libido, eia
metamorfozy i simvoly; vol. 3, Opyt izlozheniia psikhoanaliticheskoi teorii i drugie
stat’i (Zurich: Psikhologicheskogo kluba, 1939).
80. A. Carotenuto, A Secret Symmetry: Sabina Spielrein Between Freud and Jung
(London: Routledge, 1980), pp. 56, 124.
81. E. Metner, preface to Izbrannye trudy po analiticheskoi psikhologii, vol. 1.
82. B. Vysheslavtsev, review of C. G. Jung, Izbrannye trudy po analiticheskoi
psikhologii, vol. 1, Psikhologicheskie tipy, Put’ 20 (February 1930), pp. 111-113.
Notes 359
Sara from Jung to Metner, quoted in M. Ljunggren, The Russian Mephisto,

p. :
84. M. Ljunggren, “The Psychoanalytic Breakthrough in Russia on the Eve of
the First World War,” in Rancour-Laferriere, ed., Russian Literature and
Psychoanalysis (Amsterdam: Benjamin, 1989), pp. 174-191.
85. Y. Gertsyk, Vospominaniia, p. 154.
86. This is an allusion to the Russian idiomatic expression “behind seven locks,”
that is, something absolutely inaccessible.—Trans.
88. L. Ivanova, Vospominaniia, p. 63.
89. A. Bely, “Mezhdu dvukh revoliutsii,” p. 312.
90. N. Berdyaev, “Koshmar zlogo dobra” [Nightmare of the Evil Good], Put’ 4,
June-July 1926.
91.1. Ilyin, Religioznyi smysl filosofii: Tri rechi, 1914-1923 [The Religious
Meaning of Philosophy: Three Speeches, 1914-1923] (Paris: YMCA), pp. 29-30.
92. Ibid., pp. 60-63.
93.1. A. Ilyin, Aksiomy religioznogo opyta [Axioms of Religious Experience]
(Parisy 1953)) vol.1:
94.N. Poltoratsky, Ivan Aleksandrovich Iliin: Zhizn’, trudy, mirovozzrenie {Ivan
Alexandrovich Ilyin: Life, Work, Worldview] (New Jersey: Hermitage, 1989).
95.“Ustami Buninykh: Dnevniki” [From Bunin’s Lips: Diaries], Posev, 1981,
vol 2. ps 239.
96. See Poltoratsky, Ivan Aleksandrovich Iliin.
97. A. Bely, Nachalo veka, p. 101.
98. John Malmstad, ed., “Andrei Bely i antroposofiia” (Andrei Bely and
Anthroposophy], Minuvshee 8, 1989, p. 416.
99.N. A. Frumkina, L. S. Fleishman, “A. A. Blok mezhdu ‘Musagetom’ i
‘Sirinom’” [Alexander Blok between ‘Musaget’ and ‘Sirin’], in Blokovskii sbornik,
vol. 2 (Tartu: Tartu University Press, 1972), p. 387.
100. EF. Stepun, Byvshee i nesbyvsheesia, vol. 1, p. 269.
101. A. Bely, Vospominaniia o Steinere [Recollections of Steiner] (Paris, 1982),
. 33-34.
PP OD.V. N. Voloshinov, Freudianism: A Marxist Critique (New York: Academic
Pressel 726).
103. N. Osipov, “Psychoanalysis of the Prejudices,” International Journal of
Psychoanalysis, vol. 4, 1932, p. 482.
104. Malmstad, “Andrei Bely i antroposofiia,” p. 380.
105. I. lyin, Religioznyi smysl filosofti, p. 63.
106. V. Khodasevich, “Andrei Bely,” Serebrianyi vek: Memuary (Moscow:
Izvestiia, 1990), p. 217.
107. A. Bely, Pochemu ia stal simvolistom, p. 3.
108. Ibid., p. 8.
109. A. Bely, Kotik Letaev, trans. G. Janecek (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1971), p. 3. _
110. A. Steinberg, Druz’ia moikh rannikh let [Friends of My Early Years] (Paris:
Sintaksis,1991), p)125.
111. V. Khodasevich, “Ableukhovy—Letaevy—Korobkiny,” in Izbrannaia proza,
pp. 151-181; and “Andrei Bely,” Serebrianyi vek, pp. 207-227.
112. A. Bely, St. Petersburg, trans. J. Cournos (New York: Grove, 1959), pp.
80-81.
113. N. Berdyaev, Smysl tvorchestva, pp. 216-240.
114. Pamyat’ 5 (1989).
360 Notes
115. N. Berdyaev, “Dukhovnye osnovy russkoi revoliutsii” [Spiritual Roots of

the Russian Revolution], in Sobranie sochinenit, vol. 4, pp. 105, 201, 205.
116. B. Zaitsev, Dalekoe, p. 487.
119. N. Berdyaev, Smysl tvorchestva, p. 426.
120. B. Vysheslavtsev, Etika preobrazhennogo erosa [Ethics of Eros Trans-
formed] (Paris: YMCA, 1931), p. vi. His review “Religiozno-asketicheskoe znache-
nie nevroza” (Put’ 5, 1926, pp. 100-102) also deserves attention. A brief overview
of Freud’s and Adler’s ideas ends with the statement, “neuroses are punishment for
sins.”
121. Ibid.
122. Ibid:, p69;
123.S. Frank, “Psikhoanaliz kak mirovozzrenie” [Psychoanalysis as a World-
view], Put’ 25, December 1930, pp. 22-50.
124. N. Lossky, “Dr. N. E. Osipov kak filosof” [Dr. N. E. Osipov as a
Philosopher], in Zhizn’ i smert’: Sbornik pamiati D-ra N. E. Osipova (Prague,
1935), vol. 1, pp. 46-54.
125. N. Lossky, Istoriia russkoi filosofii [History of Russian Philosophy] (Mos-
cow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1991), pp. 384-385.
126. Ibid., p. 384.
127. Lossky, “Dr. N. E. Osipov kak filosof,” p. 51.
128. N. Baranova-Shestova, Zhizn’ L’va Shestova [The Life of Lev Shestov]
(Paris, 1983),;voled, p. 239.
129. Ibid., p. 242.
130. A. Steinberg, Druz’ia moikh rannikh let, p. 248.
131. Ibid.
132. This could have been the German translation of Shestov’s book about
Chekhov, Tvorchestvo iz nichego [Creation out of Nothing], or parts of his long
treatise Na vesakh Iova [In Job’s Balances], which came out a little later, in 1929, as
excerpts of the latter were published separately in German.
133. E. Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud (New York: Basic, 1955),
vol. 3, p. 140.
134. N. Baranova-Shestova, Zhizn’ L’va Shestova, vol. 1, p. 22.
135. Ibid., vol. 2, pp. 62-63.
136. Ibid., vol. 2, pp. 207-208.
137. A. Blok, Sochineniia v dvukh tomakh, vol. 2, p. 564.
138. V. Khodasevich, “Konets Renaty,” p. 179.
139. V. Khodasevich, Izbrannaia proza.
140. V. Khodasevich, “Konets Renaty,” p. 179.
141. This document was discovered by Vera Proskurina. See V. Proskurina, “K
izucheniiu literaturno-bytovogo konteksta tvorchestva V. Ivanova v 1915 (zhurnal
Bul’vary i perekrestki: neizdannye materialy),” a paper presented at a colloquium
dedicated to Vyacheslav Ivanov in Geneva in June 1992.
Chapter Three
1. E. Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, vol. 2 (New York: Basic,
1955), Dp. 274s
2. P. Roazen, Freud and His Followers (New York: Knopf, 1975), p. 155.
3. K. Obholzer, The Wolf-Man Sixty Years Later (London: Routledge, 1980), p. 167.
Notes 361

5. S. Freud, “From the History of an Infantile Neurosis,” in Three Case Histories
(New York: Collier, 1963), p. 298. The basic sources on the Pankeev case are this
monograph by Freud, which was written mainly in the winter of 1914-1915 and
later fleshed out and annotated by the author before its publication; the memoirs of
Pankeev himself; and several clinical descriptions produced by psychoanalysts who
worked with Pankeev after Freud. Many of these writings are collected in M.
Gardiner’s book, The Wolf-Man and Sigmund Freud (London: Karnac Books,
1989). Another important source is a book of interviews with Pankeev conducted
near the end of the 1970s (K. Obholzer, The Wolf-Man Sixty Years Later).
6. Confession sexuelle d’un anonyme russe (Paris: Usher, 1990). The text attracted
Nabokov’s high praise after it appeared in Havelock Ellis’s Psychology of Sex.
7. Referring to Gorky’s work The Life of Klim Samgin.—Trans.
8. E. Erikson, Childhood and Society (New York: Norton, 1950), p. 402.
9. For an analysis comparing Pankeev with Lermontov and his characters (partic-
ularly with the Demon), see E. Halpert, “Lermontov and the Wolf Man,” American
Imago, 1975, vol. 32, no. 4, pp. 315-329.
10. M. Gardiner, ed., The Wolf-Man and Sigmund Freud: The Memoirs of the
Wolf-Man (New York: Basic, 1971).
11. A. Blok, “Pis’ma k zhene,” in Literaturnoe nasledstvo (Moscow: Nauka,
17S). Vol.S89sp; 112.
12. Gardiner, The Wolf-Man and Sigmund Freud, p. 50.
13. This brings to mind one of Freud’s early theories, which he later abandoned:
“In more than half of the severe cases of hysteria, obsessional neurosis, etc. which I
have treated psychotherapeutically, I have been able to prove with certainty that the
patient’s father suffered from syphilis.” This is an excerpt from Three Essays on the
Theory of Sexuality, written by Freud in 1905. It was expurgated from later edi-
tions by the author. Cited in Roazen, Freud and His Followers, p. 110.
15. Freud, “From the History of an Infantile Neurosis.”
16. Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, vol. 2, p. 274.
17. Freud, “From the History of an Infantile Neurosis,” p. 191.
18. Ibid., p. 192.
20. J. L. Rice, “Russian Stereotypes in the Freud—Jung Correspondence,” Slavic
Review, vol. 41, no. 1 (Spring 1982), pp. 13-35.
21. S. Freud, The Complete Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (New York:
Norton, 1966), p. 369.
22. O. Mandelstam, “Susal’nym zolotom goryat ...,” in Stone, trans. R. Tracy
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), p. 47.
23. It was unfortunately after completing this book that I learned of an impor-
tant work by Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok, Cryptomanie: Le Verbier de
Homme aux Loups (Paris: Flammarion, 1976); tr. ed. with foreword by J. Derrida,
The Wolf Man’s Magic Words (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986).
In this work, the story of the Wolf-Man is interpreted in a thoroughly unconven-
tional manner, In a way, the suppositions in the authors’ analysis of the case coin-
cide with mine, but they come to completely different conclusions. The authors take
the fact that Pankeev was multilingual as the starting point in decoding his dreams,
and, in general, his entire life. The verbal material left by the patient and known to-
day from Freud’s German transcription is “played back” in Russian and English
(one of Pankeev’s governesses was English) and “translated” by consonance. For
362 Notes
example, the sound of the German word wolfis perceived by Russian ears, say the
authors, as gul’fik, the Russian word for a kind of Renaissance jock-strap. This be-
ing so, the authors assert, one can assume that the childhood perception of the word
gul’fik, along with its symbolic meaning, was pushed back into the subconscious,
from whence it broke through into a distorted and “translated” (into German, and
then into the language of images) dream about wolves. In the same dream, the au-
thors read “walnut” (orekh) as akin to “sin” (grekh), and they see the row of old
walnut trees as a row of long-forgotten sins. The content of the wolf dream, from
the authors’ point of view, is not the result of a Sergei peeping on his parents in the
act, but of the child overhearing an argument between his Russian mother and
English governess concerning his erotic games with his sister. This complicated
analysis is flawed in that it stretches a whole series of points and allows a number of
incongruities obvious to the Russian ear. For instance, the word gul’fik, although it
appears in Russian dictionaries, is extremely rare and belongs to a lexical category
that a child could not possibly have known. The authors attest that the word “six”
(shestero), referring to the number of wolves, is consonant with the word “sister”
(sestra), although the two words sound much less alike than one would think from
reading dictionary transcriptions. Caught up in their own new reading method, the
authors even see the name Rank, written in Cyrillic, embedded in Sergei’s last name,
even though this claim would then lead us to believe that Pankeev himself was the
product of Freud’s imagination during his conflict with Rank. In general, one gets
the impression that playing with words in three languages provides unlimited possi-
bilities that might serve to propel one’s interpretation in any direction. However, the
conclusion suggested by these authors is quite interesting. It has to do with Sergei’s
taboo on the word “rub” (teret’), which signified the games with his sister. The
word was pushed back into the subconscious as a meaningless word-thing but later
became the root of a plethora of Sergei’s images, symptoms and actions: his attrac-
tion to women washing (in Russian, rubbing) floors, his trip to the Terek river in
Georgia after his sister poisoned herself with mercury (rtut’), his choice of a lover
with the name Therese, and his paranoia about the scar (a rubbed spot, according
to the authors’ interpretation) on his nose.
24. Obholzer, The Wolf-Man Sixty Years Later, p. 5.
25. Maxim Gorky was the pseudonym of Soviet literary figure Alexei
Maximovich Peshkov.—Trans.
26. E. Erikson, Childhood and Society (New York: Norton, 1950), p. 353.
27. Ibid., p. 368.
28. Ibid., p. 369.
29. Incidentally, Freud characterized Pankeev’s nanny in the same way that
Pushkin’s Arina Rodionovna is described in Russian schoolbooks: as “an unedu-
cated old woman of peasant birth, with untiring affection for him. He served her as
a substitute for a son of her own who had died young.” (Freud, “From the History
of an Infantile Neurosis,” p. 196.)
30. V. Rozanov, “Opavshie list’ia,” in Uedinennoe (Moscow: Politizdat, 1990),
pp. 184 and 351.
31. A. Bely, Na rubezhe dvukh stoletii (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura,
1989), p. 184.
32. Sergey Diaghilev (1871-1929) was the impresario of the Ballets Russes and
the editor of the Russian modernist journal Mir iskusstva (World of Art).—Trans.
33. S. Freud, “From the History of an Infantile Neurosis,” p. 232.
34. Ibid., p. 256.
35. Ibid., pp. 303, 284.
Notes 363
37. Letter of October 19, 1920, in Letters of Sigmund Freud, ed. E. Freud (New
York: Basic, 1960), p. 333.
38. Ibid.
39. S. Freud, “Dostoevsky and Patricide,” in Collected Papers (New York: Basic,
IDS? )avoleS, pe222.
41. Ibid., p. 312.
42. Ibid., p. 294.
Aswibid., p=251,
44. Ibid., p. 257.
45. Ibid., p. 311.
46. Ibid., p. 260.
47. A. Blok, Sochineniia v dvukh tomakh (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia liter-
atura, 1955), vol. 2, p. 653.
48. A. Blok, Selected Poems, tr. Alex Miller (Moscow: Progress, 1981),
pp. 320-321.
49. Ibid.
50. Blok, Pis’ma k zhene, p. 112.
51.M. Chekhov, Literaturnoe nasledie [Literary Heritage] (Moscow: Iskusstvo,
1986), vol. 1, p. 184.
52. A. Bely, Na rubezhe dvukh stoletii, p. 194.
53. E Stepun, Byvshee i nesbyvsheesia (New York: Chekhov, 1956), vol. 1, p.
319. Compare E. V. Barabanov, “Russkaia filosofiia i krizis identichnosti,” Voprosy
filosofti, no. 8, 1991, pp. 102-116.
54. C. Tomlinson, Versions from Fyodor Tyutchev, 1803-1873 (London: Oxford
University Press, 1960), p. 44.
55. C. Fourier, The Utopian Vision of Charles Fourier: Selected Texts on Work,
Love and Passionate Attraction, tr. J. Beecher and R. Bienvenu (Columbia:
University of Missouri Press, 1983), p. 353.
56. Obholzer, The Wolf-Man Sixty Years Later, p. 139.
Otulbids: px137.
59. Ibid., p. 88.
60. Paraphrase of Gardiner, The Wolf-Man and Sigmund Freud, p. 89.
61. See Obholzer, The Wolf-Man Sixty Years Later.
63. Freud—Andreas-Salomé: Letters, p. 80.
64. Freud, “From the History of an Infantile Neurosis,” p, 192.
65. Ibid., p. 316.
66. Roazen, Freud and His Followers, p. 172.
68. Ibid., p. 328.
Chapter Four
1. E. Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud (New York: Basic, 1955),
vol. lap: 3.
2. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 338.
3. Ibid., yol..2, p. 14.
4. Letters of Sigmund Freud, ed. E. L. Freud (New York: Basic, 1960), p. 177.
364 Notes
5. L. O. Darshkevich, Kurs nerunykh boleznei (A Course on Mental Illnesses), 3

vols. (Kazan, 1904-1917).
6. Ibid., vol. 3, p. 549.
7. One important source of knowledge about Russia was a book by a profes-
sional Slavicist who was connected to Freud: René Fueloep-Miller: The Mind and
Face of Bolshevism (New York: Harper, 1965); the original German edition was
published in Zurich in 1926. Fueloep-Miller’s travelogue gave a shockingly original
glimpse of the Russian revolution; the author, who had written earlier about
Rasputin and Dostoevsky, emphasized the religious and, particularly, sectarian
roots of Bolshevism. Fueloep-Miller was the editor of Freud’s essay “Dostoevsky
and Patricide” and might well have influenced the conception of the work. For
more on this connection, see J. Rice, Dostoevsky and the Healing Art (Ann Arbor:
Ardis, 1985), pp. 218-219.
8.S. Freud, Gesammelte Werke, Nachtragsband [Complete Works of Sigmund
Freud, Supplement] (Frankfurt-am-Main, 1987), p. 669.
10. J. L. Rice, Dostoevsky and the Healing Art, p. 217. Russian associations ac-
companied the idea of the death wish even later. In 1923, psychoanalyst Wilhelm
Reich, who tried to combine analysis and Marxism (see chapter 7), wrote an article
in which he developed his ideas about the death instinct. According to Freud,
Reich’s assertion that the death wish was a product of the capitalist system was
senseless. Although he recommended the article for publication, Freud attached a
critical response in which he denied any involvement of psychoanalysis in politics.
Eitingon, however, prevented the publication of this critical response, while his
close associate Siegfried Bernfeld announced that the note’s publication would be
tantamount to a declaration of war on Soviet Russia (E. Jones, The Life and Work
of Sigmund Freud, vol. 2, p. 166).
11. Letter from Freud to Stefan Zweig of October 19, 1920, in Letters of
Sigmund Freud, p. 333.
12. M. P. Polosin, “N. E. Osipov: Biograficheskii ocherk na osnove biografi-
cheskikh zapisok” [N. E. Osipov: A Biographical Essay Based on Biographical
Notes], in Zhizn’ i smert’ [Life and Death], eds. A. L. Bem, FE. N. Dosuzhkov, and N.
O. Lossky (Prague, 1935), vol. 1, p. 11.
13. The Freud-Jung Letters, ed.W. McGuire (London: Hogarth, 1974), p. 283.
14. Fyodor Stepun, Byvshee i nesbyvshees’ia (New York: Chekhov, 1956), vol. 1,
p.3ic:
15. L. M. Rosenstein, “O sovremennykh psikhiatricheskikh techeniiakh v
Sovetskoi Rossii,” in Psikhogigienicheskie i nevrologicheskie issledovaniia, ed.
L. M. Rosenstein (Moscow: Narkomzdrav, 1928), pp. 115-121.
16. J. Marti, “La psychanalyse en Russie et en Union Soviétique de 1909 a
1930,” Critique 346, 1976, p. 201.
17. L. M. Rosenstein, “O sovremennykh psikhiatricheskikh techeniiakh v
Sovetskoi Rossii.”
18. M. P. Polosin, “N. E. Osipov: Biograficheskii ocherk na osnove avtobiogra-
ficheskikh zapisok,” p. 11.
19.1. Yermakov, “V. P. Serbsky: Nekrolog” [Obituary of V. P. Serbsky],
Psikhonevrologicheskii vestnik, August 2-4, 1917.
20.S. Freud, “On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement,” in The
ee’ Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 14,
puss.
21.E. Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, vol. 2, p. 110.
Notes 365
22. A Psycho-analytic Dialogue: The Letters of Sigmund Freud and Karl

Abraham, 1907-1926 (London: Hogarth, 1965), pe one
23.L. Y. Droznes, Zadachi meditsiny v bor’be s sovremennoi nervoznost’iu
(Odessa, 1907), p. 15.
24. The Freud-Jung Letters, p. 263.
25. Rumors that Bekhterev was killed after his psychiatric diagnosis of Stalin cir-
culated in psychiatric and Kremlin circles beginning in the 1930s. Such legends are
documented in L. Shatunovskaya, Zhizn’ v Kremle [Life in the Kremlin] (New
York: Chalidze, 1982), pp. 180-184; A. Antonov-Ovseenko, The Time of Stalin
(New York, 1983), p. 254; A. Vaksberg, Stalin’s Prosecutor: The Life of Andrei
Vyshinsky (New York: Grove, 1990), pp. 41-42. Many prominent Soviet psychia-
trists were convinced of the veracity of these rumors, including even the most con-
servative minded, such as A. V. Snezhnevsky, A. A. Lichko, and V. N. Timofeey.
Bekhterev’s students also believed the story, including Vladimir Myasishchev and
Samuil Mnukhin; as did the Bekhterev family, including his granddaughter,
Academician Natalia Bekhtereva. A survey of later accounts can be found in E. D.
Volkov, Vzlet i padenie Stalina [The Rise and Fall of Stalin] (Moscow: Spektr,
1992), pp. 294-295. For intellectual history, this oral tradition is important. During
the glasnost period, however, the question was often debated in its more concrete
dimensions; physicians and historians discussed the circumstantial evidence point-
ing toward Bekhterev’s poisoning, such as the incomplete official diagnosis of cause
of death and the fact that the requisite autopsy was never performed (Literaturnaia
gazeta, 12/9/87 and 9/28/88; Ogonek, 1988, no. 11, p. 7; Meditsinskaia gazeta,
11/11/88). The evidence is not conclusive in the juridical sense, but we are not in
court. Naturally, Bekhterev’s diagnosis does not mean that Stalinist policy on the
whole can be interpreted in psychiatric terms (a critical overview of this theme can
be found in D. Rancour-Laferriere, The Mind of Stalin: A Psychoanalytical Study
{Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1988], ch. 2; and in W. Laqueur, Stalin:
The Glasnost Revelations [London: Unwin Hyman, 1990], pp. 134-135).
26. The names of Russian psychiatrists have taken more than their share of abuse.
One Moscow institute that for many years was the center of extrajudicial psychiatric
repression bears Serbsky’s name. Another institute in Leningrad specializing in psy-
chotherapeutic methods and “appeal to personality” is named for Bekhterev.
27. V. Khodasevich, Izbrannaia proza [Selected Prose] (New York: Russica,
2932).
oe B. I. Nikolaevsky, Russkie masony i revoliutsiia [Russian Masons and the
Revolution], ed. Y. Fel’shtinsky (New York: Chalidze, 1990).
29. E. Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, vol. 2, p. 286. 2 eee
30. N. Osipov, “O ‘panseksualizme’ Freida,” Zhurnal nevropatologii i psikhiatrii
imeni S. S. Korsakova 5-6, pp. 747-760.
31. A. O. Edelstein, Psikhiatricheskie s’ezdy i obshchestva za polveka
(1887-1931) (Moscow: Medgiz, 1948), p. 46.
32. I. Maximov, “Histoire de psychanalyse en Russie,” L’Ane, 1983, 10, pp.
3-5.
33. Y. Kannabikh, “Evoliutsiia psikhoterapevticheskikh idei v XIX veke”; N.
Osipoy, “O psikhoanalize”; N. Vyrubov, “K voprosu 0 geneze i lechenii nevroza
trevogi kombinirovannym gipnoanaliticheskim metodom,” Psikhoterapiia 1, 1910.
34. S. Freud, “Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego,” in The Standard
Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 18, p. 89.
35. S. Freud, “On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement,” in The Standard
Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 14, p. 16.
366 Notes
36. O. Feltsman, “K voprosu o sushchnosti gipnoza po sovremennym pred-

stavleniiam,” Psikhoterapiia 3, 1910, pp. 125-132.
37. O. Mandelstam, “Egipetskaia marka,” in Shum vremeni (Leningrad: Priboi,
1928), pp. 138-143.
38. In 1910, Pevnitsky, like Osipov, Feltsman, and others, embarked on a tour of
the European centers of psychotherapy. He met Freud, Jung, Bleuler, and Dubois
and presented a paper, “Manifest Phobias as Symbols of a Patient’s Hidden
Phobia,” in Paris, where little, if anything, was known about psychoanalysis. The
paper was delivered at the Paris Society of Hypnology and Psychology on January
18, 1911, and published in the journal Sovremennaia psikhiatriia [Modern
Psychiatry] 1, 1910. Also relevant to our analysis of the Russian situation are re-
ports that Pevnitsky made immediately upon his return, to the Society of Petersburg
Psychiatrists (“Several Cases of Psychoanalysis,” January 29, 1911) and the Society
of Normal and Pathological Psychology (“Personal Impressions of Psycho-
therapeutic Schools in the West,” February 1, 1911).
39. A. Pevnitsky, “O psikhoanalize pri lechenii alkogolikov,” Psikhoterapiia 1,
1912, pp. 21-28.
40. N. Vavulin, “Snovideniia pri svete nauki,” Novyi zhurnal dlia vsekh 1, 1913,
pp. 79-86.
41. A. Pevnitsky, “O psikhoanalize pri lechenii alkogolikov.”
42.N. V. Krainsky, “Pedagogicheskii sadizm” [Pedagogical Sadism], Sov-
remennaia psikhiatriia, 1912, vol. 6, pp. 655-659.
43. Ibid.
44. Sovremennaia psikhiatriia, 1912, vol. 7, and 1913, pp. 77-80. After emigrat-
ing, Krainsky published a brochure in which he accused Tolstoy of facilitating the
Russian revolution (N. Krainsky), Lev Tolstoi kak iurodivyi [Leo Tolstoy as God’s
Fool] (Belgrade: Russkaia tipografiia, undated), as well as a collection of bitter
memoirs (N. Krainsky, Bez budushchego: Ocherki po psikhologii revoliutsii i emi-
gratsii [Without a Future: Outlines of the Psychology of Revolution and
Emigration] [Belgrade, 1931]; the affair with Kosakovsky is not mentioned there.
45. Mikhail Chekhov: Literaturnoe nasledie [Mikhail Chekhov: Literary
Heritage] (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1986), vol. 1, p. 184.
46. Ibid., p. 176.
47.K. Stanislavsky, “Rabota aktera nad soboi,” Sobranie sochinenii (Moscow:
Iskusstvo, 1989), vol. 2, pp. 436-437.
48. N. Yevreinov, Fotobiografiia: S materialov, sobrannykh A. Yevreinovoi, ed. E.
Proffer (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1981).
49.N. Yevreinov, Proiskhozhdenie dramy: Pervobytnaia tragediia i rol’ kozla v
istorii ee vozniknoveniia (Petrograd: Petropolis, 1921); N. Yevreinov, Azazel i
Dionis (Petrograd: Academia, 1924).
50. N. Yevreinov, Teatr dlia sebia [Theater for Oneself] (Petrograd, 1915), vol. 1.
51. N. Yevreinov, “Teatroterapiia” [Theater Therapy], Zhizn’ iskusstva, October
9-10, 1920.
$2. See J. E. Kombs and M. W. Mansfield, eds., Drama in Life (New York:
Hastings House, 1976).
53. N. Yevreinov, P’esy iz repertuara “Krivogo Zerkala,” 3 (Petrograd: Academia
[undated]); see also D. Zolotnitsky, Zori teatral’nogo Oktiabria (Leningrad:
Iskusstvo, 1976), p. 161.
one Eisenstein, Izbrannye proizvedeniia (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1964), vol. 1,
Ds :
5S.N. Yevreinovy, Teatr dlia sebia (Petrograd, 1917), vol. 3, p. 34.
Notes 367
56. A. Kashina-Yevreinova, Podpol’e geniia: Seksual’nye istochniki tvorchestva

Dostoevskogo (Petrograd: Tret’ia strazha, 1923).
57. N. Yevreinov, Taina Rasputina (Petrograd: Byloe, 1924).
58. N. Yevreinov, Samoe glavnoe (Petersburg: Gosudarstvennoe, 1921).
59. Yevreinov’s Azazel served as a direct prototype for Bulgakov’s Azazello, by
occupation as well as name. Yevreinov cited the apocryphal Book of Enoch, accord-
ing to which Azazel is a “seducer of women who teaches them to enhance their
physical aspect by means of rouge and ceruse” (N. Yevreinov, Azazel i Dionis, p.
167). In The Master and Margarita: A Comedy of Victory (Birmingham: University
of Birmingham Press, 1977, p. 32), Lesley Milne suggests that Bulgakov’s character
harks back to Enoch via Yevreinov.
60. N. Yevreinov, Teatr u zhivotnykh (o smysle teatral’nosti s biologicheskoi
tochki zreniia) (Petrograd: Kniga, 1924), p. 10.
61. M. Shaginyan, Svoia sud’ba (Moscow: Frenkel’, 1923).
62. A. Zalkind, “Individual’no-psikhologicheskii analiz 3-kh sluchaev somnam-
bulizma,” Psikhoteraptia 3, 1914, p. 130.
63. A. Carotenuto, A Secret Symmetry: Sabina Spielrein Between Freud and Jung
(London: Routledge, 1980), p. 125.
64. “Letopis’ zhizni i tvorchestva M. A. Chekhova,” in Mikhail Chekhov:
Literaturnoe nasledie (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1986), vol. 2.
65. M. Wulff, “Opyt psikhoanaliticheskogo razbora sluchaia psikhonevrologi-
cheskogo zabolevaniia,” Sovremennaia psikhiatriia, 1914, vol. 8, pp. 197-225.
Chapter Five
1. From Sabina Spielrein’s diary, date unknown; cited in A. Carotenuto, A Secret
Symmetry: Sabina Spielrein Between Freud and Jung (London: Routledge, 1980), p. 3.
2. C. Weizmann, V poiskakh puti [In Search of a Path] (Jerusalem: Biblioteka
Alii, 1983), vol. 1, p. 60.
3. Ibid.
4. Carotenuto, A Secret Symmetry, p. 140.
6. Ibid., pp. 8-9.
8. From the diary of Sabina Spielrein, August 27, 1909. Cited in Carotenuto, A
Secret Symmetry, p. 120.
9. The Freud-Jung Letters, pp. 12-13.
LOSIbids p..72.
11. Ibid.
12. A. Pushkin, “A Little Bird,” in Pushkin Threefold, trans. Walter Arndt (Ann
Arbor: Ardis, 1972), p. 183. ;
13. A. Pushkin, “The Captive,” in Selected Works in Two Volumes, trans. Irina
Zheleznova (Moscow: Progress, 1974), vol. 1, p. 21.
14. Ibid. '
15. The Freud—Jung Letters, p. 82.
16. E. Jones, - Lifeand Work of Sigmund Freud (New York: Basic, 1955), vol.
22, {Oy lle
17, From Sabina Spielrein’s diary, September 21, 1909. Cited in Carotenuto, A
Secret Symmetry, p. 6.
19. Ibid., p. 90.
368 Notes
20. J. Rice, “Russian Stereotypes in the Freud—Jung Correspondence,” Slavic

Review 41, no. 1 (Spring 1982), pp. 13-35.
22. Ibid.
23. Ibid., p. 95.
24. Ibid.
25. Ibid., p. 207.
26. From the diary of Sabina Spielrein, August 28, 1909. Cited in Carotenuto, A
Secret Symmetry, p. S.
28. Contemporary legend had it that Jung was a direct descendant of Goethe.
30. Ibid., p. 135.
33. Ibid., p. 226.
34. From the diary of Sabina Spielrein, cited in Carotenuto, A Secret Symmetry, p. 5.
36. Ibid., pp. 230-231.
37. Ibid., p. 145.
38. A. de Mijolla, “Quelques figures de la situation de ‘supervision’ en psych-
analyse,” Etudes Freudiennes 31, May 1989, pp. 117-130.
41. Ibid., p. 235.
43. Ibid., p. 94.
44, Ibid., p. 99.
45. Sigmund Freud, “Observations on Transference-Love,” in The Standard
Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (London: Hogarth,
1958), vol. 12, p. 162.
46. Ibid., p. 161.
47. Ibid., p. 165.
48. Ibid.
49. Ibid.
50. Lydia Ginzburg told a similar anecdote from Soviet life: “Malevich was dying
of cancer. For a long time, a doctor visited him at home. The doctor neither cured
him nor even attempted to effect a cure (Malevich was hopelessly ill), but Malevich
taught him to appreciate leftist painting.” Quoted from Lydia Ginzburg, Literatura
v poiskakh real’nosti [Literature in Search of Reality] (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’,
1987), p. 242.
51. From the diary of Sabina Spielrein, September 11, 1910. Cited in Carotenuto,
A Secret Symmetry, p. 11.
53. Ibid.
54. Ibid.
55. Carotenuto, A Secret Symmetry, pp. 114-115.
57. Ibid., p. 241.
58.C. G. Jung, “Freud and Psychoanalysis,” Collected Works (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1961), vol. 4, p. 166.
iy,
Notes
59. From the diary of Sabina Spielrein, around 1909. Cited in Carotenuto, A
Secret Symmetry, pp. 107-108.
60. S. Spielrein, “Die Destruction als Ursache des Werdens,” Jahrbuch fiir psy-
choanalytische und psychopathologische Forschungen, vol. 4 (1912), pp. 465-503.
62. Alexander Pushkin’s “Song of Oleg the Wise” (1822) was a poetic rendering
of the legend from the Primary Chronicle of ancient Rus’. According to the story, a
medieval Russian prince named Oleg was told by soothsayers that his favorite horse
would be the cause of his death, so he ordered the animal taken away. Many years
later, the horse died, and Oleg went to view his old friend’s bones. The prince
stepped on the horse’s skull, and a deadly snake slithered out and bit him. The
prince died.—Trans.
63. Spielrein, “Die Destruction als Ursache des Werdens.”
65. S. Freud, “Civilization and Its Discontents,” The Pelican Freud Library (New
York: Penguin, 1985), p. 311.
66.S. Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, in The Standard Edition of the
Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (London: Hogarth, 1955),
vol. 18, p. 55.
67. Roazen, Freud and His Followers (New York: Knopf, 1975), p. 290.
68. Spielrein, “Die Destruction als Ursache des Werdens.”
69. See C. Jung, Psychology of the Unconscious: A Study of the Transformations
and Symbolisms of the Libido, a Contribution to the History of the Evolution of
Thought, tr. Beatrice Hinkle (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1946).
70. P. Federn, review of Spielrein, “Die Destruction als Ursache des Werdens,”
Internationale Zeitschrift fiir Arztliche Psychoanalyse, 1913, no. 1, pp. 92-93.
Spielrein certainly was not alone in focusing on this “mystical modality.” By 1910,
Max Weber and his Heidelberg circle (which included the young Gyorgy Lukacs
and Frieda Gross, the widow of Freudian dissident Otto Gross) were inspired by
“Slavic mysticism,” and specifically by the reading of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and
Solovyov in German translation, as well as by contacts with the Russian student
community. (In characteristic fashion, a depressed Weber once said that if he ever
held a seminar again he would accept only Russians, Poles, and Jews.) Fyodor
Stepun, a Heidelberg student and a prominent Russian religious philosopher, was
mentioned as belonging to this milieu (Arthur Mitzman, The Iron Cage: An
Historical Interpretation of Max Weber [Transaction, 1985], pp. 272-275).
71. V. Ivanov, Po zvezdam (St. Petersburg, 1909), p. 64.
72. Ibid., p. 413. ;
73. A. Bely, “Epopeia,” Vospominaniia o A. A. Bloke (Munich: Wilhelm Fink,
1969).
2s Later, the idea of the death instinct became quite widespread among Russian
analysts. Osipov based his later works on the concept (see chapter 6). At the meet-
ing of the Russian Psychoanalytic Society held in May 1926, Vinogradov of Kiev re-
lated the story of a young woman who had committed suicide by self-immolation.
Vinogradov interpreted the case as an example of the destructive instinct. In
November 1927, Dr. Holz of Moscow, who worked as a physician during the recent
Crimean earthquake, reported on the mental reactions of those who lived through
the disaster. She singled out those individuals who evidenced indifference to danger.
According to Holz, surveys of these people revealed their unconscious attraction to
death.
75. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, pp. 58-59.
370 Notes
76. Ibid., p. 59.

77. P. Roazen, Freud and His Followers.
80. Ibid., p. 469.
81. Ibid., p. 470.
82. Ibid., p. 500.
83. Ibid., p. 495.
84. Ibid., p. 210.
SSa1bid. paces:
86. Ibid., p. 296.
87. Ibid. ck 490-492.
88. Ibid., pp. 492-493.
89. Ibid., p. 492.
90. Ibid., pp. 526-527.
91. Ibid., p. 529.
92. Ibid., pp. 534-535.
93 slbidap.535:
95. Ibid., pp. 119-120.
96. Ibid., p. 190.
97. Ibid., pp. 116-117.
98. Ibid., p. 71.
99. Ibid., pp. 116-117.
100. Ibid., pp. 120-121.
101. Ibid., pp. 82-85.
102. Ibid., p. 112.
103. Ibid., pp. 121-122.
104. Ibid., p. 145.
105. Ibid.
106. Rice, “Russian Stereotypes in the Freud—Jung Correspondence,” p. 3.
107. S. Spielrein, “On the Origin and Development of Speech,” International
Journal of Psychoanalysis, 1920, no. 1, p. 359.
108. S. Spielrein, “Quelques analogies entre la pensée de l’enfant, celle de l’aphas-
ique et la pensée subconsciente,” Archive de psychologie, 1923, no. 18, pp. 305-322.
109. S. Spielrein, “Die Zeit im unterschwelligen Seelenleben,” Imago, 1993, no.
9, pp. 300-317.
110. J. Piaget, “La psychanalyse et ses rapports avec la psychologie de l’enfance,”
Bulletin de la Société A. Binet, 1920, no. 20, pp. 18-34 and 41-58.
111. S. Spielrein, “Die drei Fragen,” Imago, 1923, no. 9, pp. 260-263.
112. S. Spielrein, “Kinderzeichnungen bei offenen und geschlossenen Augen,”
Imago, 1931, no. 16, pp. 259-291.
114. Ibid., pp. 57, 184.
115. S. Spielrein, “L-Automobile: Symbole de la puissance male”; “Réve et vision
des étoiles filantes,” International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 1923, no. 4, pp.
128-132.
117. Ibid., p. 74.
118. Ibid., p. 127.
119. Obholzer, The Wolf-Man Sixty Years Later (London: Routledge, 1980), p. 48.
Notes 371
120. M. I. Spielrein, personal communication.

121.1. N. Spielrein, D. I. Reitynbarg, and G. O. Netsky, Yazyk krasnoarmeitsa
[The Language of a Red Army Soldier] (Moscow, 1928).
(122.1. N. Spielrein, “O Peremene imen i familii: Sotsial’no-psikhologicheskii
etiud” [On Change in First and Last Names: A Sociopsychological Study] ’
Psikhotekbnika i psikhofiziologiia truda, 1929, no. 4, pp. 281-285.
123. M. I. Spielrein, personal communication.
124. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 1924, vol. 5, p. 258.
125. Central State Archives of Russia, fund 2307, section 9, file 222, p. 1.
126. Central State Archives of Russia, fund 2307, section 23, file 13, pp. 19-20.
127. Central State Archives of Russia, fund 259, section 9a, file 3, p. 159.
129. The rough draft is in the personal collection of A. R. Luria.
130. See Vygotsky’s autobiography, published in A. A. Leontiev, L. S. Vygotsky
(Moscow: Prosveshchenie, 1990).
131. R. van der Veer and J. Valsiner, Understanding Vigotsky: A Quest for
Synthesis (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991).
132. In his List of Works for 1915-1923 there are only short literary reviews, a
manuscript on Hamlet, and unpublished speeches for teachers’ conferences (see
L. S. Vygotsky, Sobranie sochinenii v 6 tomakh [Collected Works in Six Volumes]
[Moscow: Pedagogika, 1984], vol. 6, p. 366).
134. S. Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, p. 55.
135. J. Piaget, “Kommentarii k kriticheskim zamechaniiam L. S. Vygotskogo”
[Commentary on the Critical Comments of L. S. Vygotsky], Khrestomatiia po ob-
shchei psikhologii (Moscow: Izd. MGU, 1981), pp. 188-193.
136. For a psychoanalytical reading of Vygotsky’s works, see A. Wilson and L.
Weinstein, “An Investigation into Some Implications of a Vygotskian Perspective on
the Origins of the Mind,” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association,
1992, vol. 40, pp. 349-380, 725-760.
137. The interview was conducted in 1990.
138. In Russia, the Christmas tree is called a “New Year’s tree.” Generally con-
sidered a nondenominational symbol, the New Year’s tree is often erected in Jewish
homes as well as Christian ones during the winter holidays.—Trans.
Chapter Six
1. K. Tsetkin, O Lenine [On Lenin] (Moscow, 1955), p. 44.
2.S. Yermolinsky, Iz zapisok raznykh let [From the Notes of Various Years]
(Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1990), p. 38.
3. N. Mandelstam, Vtoraia kniga [The Second Book] (Moscow, 1990), p. 67.
4. A. Voronsky, “Freidizm i iskusstvo” [Freudism and Art], Krasnaia nov’, 1925,
book 7, p. 260. am
5. F Stepun, “Mysli o Rossii” [Thoughts About Russia], Sovremennye zapiski,
1924, vol. 19, p. 324.
6.N. Gumilev, Sobranie sochinenii v 4 tomakh [Collected Works in Four
Volumes] (Moscow: Terra, 1991), vol. 2, pp. 101, 104.
7. V. Shklovsky, Sentimental’noe puteshestvie [Sentimental Journey] (Moscow:
Novosti, 1990), p. 76. i.
8. K. Chukovsky, Dnevnik, 1901-1929 [Diary, 1901-1929] (Moscow: Sovetskii
pisatel’, 1991), pp. 275-277. Chukovsky worked in one of the State Publishing
372 Notes
House’s offices, and probably read “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” which first
came out in Russian translation in 1925. .
9.N. A. Bogomolov, “Vokrug ‘Foreli’” [Around “The Trout”], in Mikhail
Kuzmin i russkaia kul’tura 20-go veka (Leningrad, 1990), p. 208.
10. L. S. Vygotsky and A. Luria, introduction to the Russian translation of
“Beyond the Pleasure Principle” in Sigmund Freud, Psikhologiia bessoznatel’nogo
[Psychology of the Unconscious] (Moscow: Prosveshchenie, 1989), p. 29.
11. Another example:
There once was a student in Leningrad,
Who lived by Freud’s teachings, and messed things up bad.
He rode in the trolley but forgot to pay,
It was because of a meeting he skipped yesterday.
He blew his whole fortune at the drop of a hat,
A colic in childhood was the cause of all that... .
(N. Traugott, personal communication, 1992).
13. Literally, “Mountain Pass.” A literary group that coalesced in 1923-1924
around the journal Krasnaia nov’. Some prominent members were Mikhail Svetlov,
Eduard Bagritsky, and Andrei Platonov.—Trans.
14. G. Belaya, Don-Kikhoty 20-kh godov [Don Quixotes of the 1920s]
(Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1989).
15.O. Mandelstam, Slovo o kul’ture [A Word on Culture] (Moscow: Sovetskii
pisatel’, 1989).
16. Cited in G. Belaya, Don-Kikhoty 20-kh godov, pp. 124-125.
17. Proletarskie kul’turno-prosvetitel’skie organizatsii: the Proletarian Cultural
and Educational Organizations, founded in 1917 by Bogdanov and Lunacharsky to
develop a distinctly proletarian literature and art.—Trans.
18. G. Belaya, Don-Kikhoty 20-kh godov, pp. 124-125.
19. See Kratkaia literaturnaia entsiklopediia (Moscow, 1962), vol. 1, p. 1047. A
member of the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party from 1904 onward,
Voronsky was the creator and editor in chief of the first Soviet literary journal,
Krasnaia nov’. He was a member of the Trotskyist opposition in 1925-1928, later
arrested, readmitted to the Communist Party after a confession, and arrested for the
last time in 1937.
20. G. Belaya, Don-Kikhoty 20-kh godov, pp. 124-125.
21. Kak my pishem [How We Write] (Leningrad: Izd. Pisatelei, 1930), p. 437.
22. Y. Zamyatin, Sochineniia (Moscow: Kniga, 1988), p. 575; this fragment was
published by E. Barabanov.
23. The Serapion Brothers was a literary group that emerged in 1921 and in-
cluded Konstantin Fedin, Nikolai Tikhonoy, Mikhail Zoshchenko, among others.
They espoused creative pluralism and discussed literary craftsmanship at their meet-
ings. The group disintegrated in 1929.—Trans.
24. Vsevolod Ivanov, Vozvrashchenie Buddy—Chudesnye pokhozhdeniia port-
nogo Fokina—U [The Return of Buddha, The Wondrous Travels of Fokin the
Tailor, and U] (Moscow: Pravda, 1991), pp. 150-152.
25. Ibid.
26. Ibid., pp. 187, 423, 386, 302.
27. Y. Zamyatin, Sochineniia, p. 437.
28. A. Platonov, “Schastlivaia Moskva” [Happy Moscow], Novyi mir, 1991, no.
9, pp. 21, 40.
Notes 373
Do Nietzsche in Russia (Princeton: Princeton University Press,

1986).
30. Pitirim Sorokin said of Kollontay that “the woman’s revolutionary enthusi-
asm is nothing other than indirect gratification of her nymphomania” (Pitirim
Sorokin, “Boinia: revoliutsiia 1917 goda” [Slaughterhouse: The Revolution of
1917], in Chelovek, Tsivilizatsiia, Obshchestvo [Man, Civilization, and Society]
[Moscow: Politizdat, 1992], p. 236).
31. For the debate around Kollontay’s essay, see A. Kollontay, “Dorogu kry-
latomu ROSE,” Molodaia gvardiia, 1923, no. 3; P. Vinogradskaya, “Voprosy
morali, pola, byta i tov. Kollontay,” Krasnaia nov’, 1923, no. 6, pp. 179-214; A.
Lunacharsky, “Moral’ i svoboda,” Krasnaia nov’, 1923, no. 7, p. 134.
32. L. Ginzburg, Literatura v poiskakh real’nosti [Literature in Search of Reality]
(Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1987), p. 156.
33. O. Mandelstam, Slovo o kul’ture, p. 200.
34. See the research of S. Fitzpatrick, “Sex and Revolution: An Examination of
Literary and Statistical Data ...,” Journal of Modern History, no. 50 (1978),
pp. 253-278.
35. Ibid.
36. L. Ginzburg, Literatura v poiskakh real’nosti, p. 158. (“I say, let it be
Vanechka”: In other words, Ginzburg observed a shift in authors’ interest and in-
volvement in psychoanalysis from adults to children.—Ed.)
37. Internationale Zeitschrift fiir Psychoanalyse 7, 1921, p. 385.
38. T. K. Rosenthal, “Stradanie i tvorchestvo Dostoevskogo,” Voprosy izucheniia
i vospitaniia lichnosti (Petrograd) 1, 1919, pp. 88-107.
39. In her 1923 book on Dostoevsky (see chapter 4), A. Kashina-Yevreinova
maintained the opposite: that Dostoevsky’s epilepsy became aggravated in prison.
The application of psychoanalysis to Dostoevsky was also discussed in 1924 by
Boris Griftsov (B. A. Griftsov, Psikhologiia pisatelia [The Psychology of the Writer]
[Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1988]). Some time later, the same question
was addressed by Yermakov (see below), whose archives contain the unpublished
manuscript of a book on Dostoevsky.
40. Rosenthal, “Stradanie i tvorchestvo.”
41. In 1927, Odessa doctor Yakov Kogan wrote in the introduction to his trans-
lation of a book by Anna Freud: “In the Institute of Pediatric Examination . . psy-
choanalytical observation is a mandatory part of the general research done on all
of the children” (Y. M. Kogan, foreword to Vvedenie v tekhniku detskogo
psikhoanaliza [Introduction to the Technique of Child Psychoanalysis] by Anna
Freud [Odessa, 1927]). It is likely that this statement was inaccurate, even as early
as at the time of Tatiana Rosenthal’s death.
42. International Journal of Psychoanalysis 1, 1920, p. 208.
43. A. R. Luria, “Puti razvitiia sovetskoi psikhologii: Po sobstvennym vospomi-
naniiam” [Paths of Development in Soviet Psychology: According to His Own
Recollections], transcript of a March 25, 1974, speech to the Moscow Section of
the Soviet Psychological Society, from the archives of Elena Luria. ,
44. Luria’s letters are in the Freud archives in the United States and will not be
available to researchers until the year 2000. Freud’s brief replies can be found in the
archives of E. A. Luria in Moscow. ;
46. Central State Archives of Russia, fund 2307, section 2, file 412, p. 1; also
in these archives is the Charter of the Russian Psychoanalytic Society, adopted
on September 30, 1922, as well as the model of the organization’s official
stamp: Central State Archives of Russia, fund 2307, section 1, file 294, pp. 4-7.
374 Notes
47. I. I. Glivenko, G. G. Weisberg, O. Y. Schmidt, I. D. Yermakov, M. V. Wulff,

Y. V. Kannabikh, P. P. Blonsky, A. A. Sidorov, A. G. Gabrichevsky, V. A. Nevsky,
N. G. Uspensky, S$. T. Shatsky, A. K. Voronsky, and Dr. Beloborodov (Central State
Archives of Russia, fund 2307, section 1, file 294, p. 7).
48. For a history of the ministry of education, see Sheila Fitzpatrick, The
Commissariat of Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970).
49. L. Ivanova, Vospominaniia: Kniga ob otse [Memoirs: A Book About My
Father], ed. J. Malmstad (Paris: Atheneum, 1990), p. 81.
51. This side of Schmidt’s multifaceted career remains underestimated by histori-
ans. Loren Graham, who dedicated a whole section of his book to Schmidt (Loren
Graham, Science, Philosophy and Behavior in the Soviet Union [New York: Col-
umbia University Press, 1987]), did not even mention his psychoanalytical interests.
52. M. I. Davydova and I. D. Yermakov, Psikhologicheskii zhurnal [Psy-
chological Journal], 1989, vol. 10, no. 2, pp. 156-159; M. I. Davydova,
“Nezavershennyi zamysel: K istorii izdaniia trudov Z. Freida v USSR” [Unfinished
Project: On the History of the Publication of the Works of Sigmund Freud in the
USSR], Sovetskaia biografiia, 1989, no. 3, pp. 61-64. Yermakov’s daughter, M. I.
Davydova, holds his personal archives.
53. Pod znamenem Marksizma, 1929, nos. 10-11, p. 12.
54.1. D. Yermakov, “O beloi goriachke,” Psikhonevrologicheskii vestnik,
Januarylo l7enow lapel
55. For more on Shatsky, see V. I. Malinin and F. A. Fradkin, S. T. Shatsky:
Rabota dlia budushchego (Moscow: Prosveshchenie, 1989).
56. Ibid., pp. 91-99, 24.
57. See A. F. Losev, Iz rannikh proizvedenii [From His Early Works] (Moscow:
Pravda, 1990)/p:3.
58. P. P. Blonsky, “Kak ia stal pedologom i imenno takim, kakim stal” [How I
Became a Pedologist, and the Kind That I Am], in I. I. Rufim, ed., P. P. Blonsky v
ego pedagogicheskikh vyskazivaniiakh [P. P. Blonsky in His Pedagogical Statements]
(Moscow: Rabotnik prosveshcheniia, 1928); also published in P. P. Blonsky,
Izbrannye pedagogicheskie i psikhologicheskie sochineniia [Collected Pedagogical
and Psychological Works] (Moscow: Pedagogika, 1979), vol. 1, pp. 30-39.
59. P. P. Blonsky, “Ocherki detskoi seksual’nosti” [Outlines of Infantile
Sexuality], in Izbrannye pedagogicheskie i psikhologicheskie sochineniia, vol. 1, pp.
202-277.
60. C. Read, Culture and Power in Revolutionary Russia (New York: St.
Martin’s, 1990), p. 135.
61. N. Mandelstam, Vtoraia kniga, p. 51.
62. Cited in M. Chudakova, Zhizneopisanie Mikhaila Bulgakova (Moscow:
Kniga, 1988), p. 242.
63. J. Marti, “La psychanalyse en Russie et en Union Soviétique de 1909 a
1930,” Critique, 1976, no. 346.
64. A. R. Luria, “Puti razvitiia sovetskoi psikhologii.”
65. Ibid.
66. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 1923, vol. 4.
67. Ibid., pp. 240-241.
69. The fact of this trip is known to us from the Schmidts’ travel documents, held
in the Central State Archives of Russia, fund 2307, section 9, file 222, pal9:
70. Cited in J. Marti, “La psychanalyse en Russie et en Union Soviétique,” p. 220.
Notes
375
TAN NAG TE Astvatsaturovy, Psikhoterapiia i psikhoanaliz (Leningrad, 1924),

p. 54.
74. Several different curriculum proposals for the State Psychoanalytic Institute
are on file in the Ivan Yermakov archives.
76. V. Schmidt, “Education psychanalytique en Russie,” Temps modernes,
March 1969; M. Higgins and C. Raphael, eds., Reich Speaks of Freud (London:
Condor, 1967). An analysis of the reaction of the International Psychoanalytic
Association to Vera Schmidt’s experience can be found in E. Roudinesco, Histoire
de la psychanalyse en France, vol. 2, ped5:
77. “Psikhoanaliticheskii institut-laboratoriia ‘Mezhdunarodnaia Solidarnost’,”
in the archives of I. D. Yermakov. Further referred to as “The Yermakov Report.”
78. Kept in the Central State Archives of Russia.
79. “The Yermakov Report.”
80. Ibid.
81. A. R. Luria, Puti razvitiia sovetskoi psikhologii; Luria’s account is corroborated
by his interview with M. G. Yaroshevsky. See M. G. Yaroshevsky, “Vozvrashchenie
Freida,” Psikhologicheskii zhurnal, 1988, vol. 9, no. 6, pp. 129-138.
82. “The Yermakov Report.”
84. J. Marti, “La psychanalyse en Russie et en Union Soviétique.”
86. Ibid.
88. Y. P. Sharapov, Iz istorii ideologicheskoi bor’by pri perekhode k NEPu [From
the History of the Ideological Struggle During the Transition to the NEP] (Moscow:
Nauka, 1990), p. 57.
90. Central State Archives of Russia, fund 259, section 86, file 81.
95. Cited in J. Marti, “La psychanalyse en Russie et en Union Soviétique.”
97, Ibid., p. 39.
98. N. N. Traugott, personal communication, September 1992.
100. Ibid., p. 82.
101. Marti, “La psychanalyse en Russie et en Union Soviétique.”
102. Personal conversation with M. I. Davydova, 1990.
104. Ibid., p. 76. :
107. Found in the archives of I. D. Yermakov.
110. M. Miller, “Freudian Theory Under Bolshevik Rule,” Slavic Review (Winter
1985), p. 641.
376 Notes
111. B. Khersonsky, introduction to Tolkovanie snovidenii [Interpretation of

Dreams] by Sigmund Freud, trans. Y. M. Kogan (Odessa, 1991). ;
112.1. A. Perepel, Psikhoanaliz i fiziologicheska ia teoriia povedentia [Psy-
choanalysis and the Physiological Theory of Behavior], introduction by A. A.
Ukhtomsky (Leningrad, 1928), p. 132.
113. M. V. Wulff, “Po povodu nekotorykh psikho-patologicheskikh iavlenii u av-
tobusnykh shoferov” [On Several Psychopathological Phenomena in Bus Drivers],
in Psikhologigienicheskie i nevrologicheskie issledovaniia (Moscow, 1928), pp.
194-200.
114. Boris Pilnyak, Rasplesnutoe vremia [Splashed Time] (Moscow: Sovetskii
pisatel’, 1990), p. 144.
115. In 1929, Luria met with Horace Meyer Kallen, an American philosopher
and Zionist who was then visiting the USSR. The translation of Luria’s book that
came out soon afterward in the United States bore a dedication to Kallen
(Aleksandr R. Luriia, The Nature of Human Conflicts; or Emotion, Conflict, and
Will, an Objective Study of Disorganization and Control of Human Behavior (New
York: Liveright, 1932). The book contained, among other things, some curious ar-
gumentation for and against psychoanalysis. In 1963, Luria was more than willing
to affirm his previous affection for psychoanalysis to another American guest. See
Lewis S. Feuer, “Freud’s Ideas in the Soviet Setting: A Meeting with Aleksandr
Luriia,” Slavic Review, 1987, vol. 46, no. 1, pp. 106-112.
117. E. Perepel, “The Psychoanalytic Movement in the USSR,” Psychoanalytic
Review, 1939, vol. 26, p. 299.
118. J. L. Rice, “Russian Stereotypes in the Freud—Jung Correspondence,” p. 34.
119. E. Perepel, “The Psychoanalytic Movement.”
120. Personal conversations with N. N. Traugott and L. A. Chistovich, 1991.
121. A. I. Belkin, “Freid: Vozrozhdenie v SSSR?” [Freud: Reborn in the USSR?],
preface to S. Freud, Izbrannoe [Selected Works of Sigmund Freud] (Moscow:
Vneshtorgizdat, 1989), pp. 19-20.
122. Ibid.
123. Information on the Russian translations of Freud is provided in an essay by
I. Manson, “Comment dit-on ‘psychanalyse’ en russe?” Revue internationale de
histoire de psychanalyse, 1991, no. 4, pp. 407-422.
124. The transcript of the May 6, 1922, meeting of the Psychoanalytic Club for
the Study of Artistic Creativity may be found in the archives of I. D. Yermakoy, in
Moscow.
125.1. D. Yermakov, Etiudy po psikhologii tvorchestva A. S. Pushkina [Sketches
on the Psychology of A. S. Pushkin’s Works] (Moscow-Petrograd: GIZ, 1923); I. D.
Yermakov, Ocherki po analizu tvorchestva N. V. Gogolia [Outlines of the Analysis
of N. V. Gogol’s Works] (Moscow-Petrograd: GIZ, 1924).
126. Yermakov, Ocherki po analizu tvorchestva N. V. Gogolia, p. 171.
127. N. Berdyaev, Dukhi russkoi revoliutsii.
128. A. Akhmatova, “Kamennyi gost’ Pushkina” [Pushkin’s Stone Guest] in
Sochinentia (Moscow: Panorama, 1990), vol. 2, p. 84.
129.1. Ehrenburg, Neobychainye pokhozhdeniia Julio Jurenito i ego uchenikov
[The Extraordinary Adventures of Julio Jurenito] (Moscow: GIZ, 1923).
130. Osipov’s obituary was published in the Internationale Zeitschrift fiir
Psychoanalyse, 1934, no. 20, p. 277. Books that came out later include: A. L. Bem,
EN. Dosuzhkov, and N. O. Lossky, eds., Zhizn’ i smert’ (Prague, 1935); A. L. Bem,
Dostoevskii: Psikhoanaliticheskie etiudy (Berlin, 1938), dedicated to the memory of
Notes 377
N. E. Osipov. See also Osipov’s article “Dvoinik: Peterburgskaia poema Dostoev-

skogo (zametki psikhiatra)” in O Dostoevskom, ed. A. L. Bem (Prague, 1929), vol.
1.
131. M. P. Polosin, “N. E. Osipov: Biograficheskii ocherk na osnove avtobiogra-
ficheskikh zapisok,” in A. L. Bem, E. N. Dosuzhkoy, and N. O. Lossky, eds., Zhizn’
i smert’, vol. 1, pp. 9 and 11.
fsZalbidep. 12:
133. N. O. Lossky, “N. E. Osipov kak filosof” [Osipov as a Philosopher], in
Lhizn’ i smert’, vol. 1, p. 52.
134. FN. Dosuzhkov, “N. E. Osipov kak psikhiatr” [Osipov as a Psychiatrist],
in Zhizgn’ i smert’, vol. 1, p. 33.
135. N. E. Osipov, “Strashnoe u Gogolia i Dostoevskogo” [The Frightful in
Gogol and Dostoevsky], Zhizn’ i smert’, p. 134.
136. Ibid., p. 127.
137. N. E. Osipov, “Strakh smerti,” cited in Dosuzhkov, “Nevroz boiazni, strakh
smerti i strakh prividenii” [The Neurosis of Fear, Fear of Death and Fear of Ghosts],
in Zhizn’ i smert’, vol. 2, p. 127.
138. Ibid., p. 134.
139. N. E. Osipov, “Revoliutsiia i son” [Revolution and Dreams], Nauchnye
trudy Russkogo narodnogo universiteta v Prage, vol. 4, 1931, pp. 175-203.
140. Letter of August 11, 1930, from Osipov to M. P. Polosin, cited in M. P.
Polosin, “N. E. Osipov,” p. 17.
141. Osipov, “Revoliutsiia i son,” p. 188.
142. Osipov, “Strashnoe u Gogolia i Dostoevskogo,” p. 131.
143. Bem, Dosuzhkov, and Lossky, eds., Zhizn’ i smert’.
Chapter Seven
1. The reader may wish to refer to the following analyses of the ideological de-
bates surrounding Freudomarxism: M. Miller, “Freudian Theory Under Bolshevik
Rule,” Slavic Review, Winter 1985, pp. 625-646; M. Miller, “The Reception of
Psychoanalysis and the Problem of the Unconscious in Russia,” Social Research S57,
no. 4 (1990), pp. 876-888; E. Roudinesco, Histoire de la psychanalyse en France
(Paris: Seuil, 1986), vol. 2, pp. 50-71; A. Mikhalevitch, “Premiére implantation et
rejet,” Frénésie, no. 7, 1989, pp. 125-146; D. Joravsky, Russian Psychology: A
Critical History (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989); and A. V. Petrovsky, Voprosy istorii i
teorii psikhologii [Issues in the History and Theory of Psychology] (Moscow:
Pedagogika, 1984), pp. 111ff.
2. E. Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud (New York: Basic, 1955), vol.
Bape ts.
5 B. Naarden, “Marx and Russia,” History of European Ideas, vol. 12, no. 6
(1990), pp. 783-797. Na
4. James L. Rice, “Dostoevsky and Freud’s Russia,” presentation given at a sym-
posium in Ljubljana on July 26,1989.
5. M. Krull, Sigmund, Fils de Jacob (Paris: Gallimard, 1983.)
6. Freud and Andreas-Salomé: Letters, ed. E. Pfeiffer (New York: Norton, 1985),
aie
: 7. The reference here is to Civilization and Its Discontents. See The Letters of
Sigmund Freud and Arnold Zweig, ed. E. L. Freud (New York: NYU Press, 1970),
Peek. e is
286.
? 8. E. Kurzweil, The Freudians (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), p.
9. C. G. Jung, Dream Analysis (London: Routledge, 1984), p. 175.
378 Notes
10. For more discussion of the intersection between psychoanalysis and left-
leaning political movements in the West, see: H.-P. Gente, Marxismus,
Psychoanalyse, Sexpol (Frankfurt-am-Main, 1970); C. Lasch, “The Freudian Left
and the Cultural Revolution,” New Left Review, no. 129, September 1981, pp.
23-34; B. Richards, Images of Freud (London: Dent, 1989); P. Roazen, Freud and
His Followers (London: Allen, 1976); E. Roudinesco, Histoire de la psychanalyse en
France, vol. 2 (Paris: Seuil, 1986); E. Kurzweil, The Freudians (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1989); B. Harris and A. Broack, “Otto Fenichel and the Left
Opposition in Psychoanalysis,” Journal of the History of Behavioral Sciences, no.
27 (April 1991), pp. 157-165.
11. Marx et Lenine, Freud et Lacan: Colloque de la Découverte Freudienne
(Presses Universitaires du Mirail, 1991).
12. Notation of November 7, 1912, in L. Andreas-Salomé, In der Schule bei
Freud: Tagebuch eines Jahres, 1912-1913 (Zurich, 1958), p. 25. Alfred and Raisa
Adler had four children. The eldest daughter Valentina went off to Soviet Russia to
build communism, was arrested in 1937, and perished in the gulag in 1942. Their
other daughter, Alexandra, like Anna Freud, became the inheritor of her father’s
psychological ideas and the president of the International Association of Individual
Psychology (S. Gardner and G. Stevens, Red Vienna and the Golden Age of Psy-
chology, 1918-1938 [New York: Praeger, 1992], p. 131).
13. E Eros, “‘Instincts’ and the ‘Forces of Production’: The Freud-Marx Debates
in Eastern and Central Europe,” paper presented at the Sixth European CHEIRON
meeting in Brighton, England, September 2-6, 1987.
14. Paul Federn, Zur Psychologie der Revolution (Vienna: Die Osterreichische
Volkswirt, 1919).
15. This document is missing from all known Soviet archives. Here it is cited
from the research of a French historian, who relied on émigré sources: J. Marti, “La
psychanalyse en Russie et en Union Soviétique de 1909 a 1930,” Critique, no. 46
(1976); p. 230:
16. B. Bykhovsky, “O metodologicheskikh osnovaniiakh psikhoanaliticheskogo
ucheniia Freida” [On the Methodological Basis of Freud’s Psychoanalytical
Doctrine], Pod znamenem marksizma, no. 12, 1923.
17. A. B. Zalkind, Ocherki kul’tury revoliutsionnogo vremeni [Outlines of the
Culture of the Revolutionary Era] (Moscow, 1924).
18. L. Trotsky, “Kultura i sotsializm” [Culture and Socialism], Sochineniia
(Moscow, 1927), vol. 21, pp. 430 and 260.
19. M. A. Reisner, “Problemy psikhologii i teorii istoricheskogo materializma”
[Issues in Psychology and the Theory of Historical Materialism], Vestnik sotsialist-
icheskoi akademii, 1923, no. 3; M. A. Reisner, “Freid i ego shkola o religii” [Freud
and His School on Religion], Pechat’ i revoliutsiia, 1924, no. 2.
20. Psikhologiia i Marksizm (Leningrad, 1925).
21.L. S. Vygotsky, “Istoricheskii smysl psikhologicheskogo krizisa” [The
Historical Meaning of the Psychological Crisis], in Sobranie sochinenii (Moscow:
Pedagogika, 1982), vol. 1, p. 331. A current view of the correlation between
Vygotsky and psychoanalysis can be found in A. Wilson and L. Weinstein, “Psycho-
analysis and Vygotskian Psychology,” Journal of the American Psychoanalytical
Association, 1992, vol. 40, no. 2, pp. 349-380, and no. 3, pp. 725-760.
22. “Deiateli SSSR i revoliutsionnogo dvizheniia Rossii” [Public Figures in the
USSR and the Russian Revolutionary Movement], Entsiklopedicheskii slovar’
Granat (1927; reprint, Moscow: Sovetskaia entsiklopediia, 1989), pp. 152-156.
The memoirs of loffe’s wife, who worked in Moscow as Trotsky’s personal secre-
tary, are also intriguing (M. M. Ioffe, Vospominaniia [Tel Aviv: Vremia i my, 1977),
Notes Aer
23. L. Trotsky, “Ioffe,” in Y. Fel’shtinskii, ed., Portrety revoliutsionerov (Benson,

Vt.: Chalidze, 1988), pp. 370-376.
24. On March 6, 1907, Adler spoke on Ioffe’s case at the meeting of the Vienna
Psychoanalytic Society (Minutes of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society [New York:
International University Press, 1962], vol. 1, pp. 139-143). From this presentation
we know quite a number of curious details of loffe’s fears and dreams, but Adler
said nothing of his revolutionary ideas. Two years later, on March 10, 1909, Adler
gave a talk before the same society “On the Psychology of Marxism” (Minutes of
the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, vol. 2, pp. 173-178), in which the ideological
influence of Trotsky and Ioffe is evident. For more on the development of Adler’s
political views, see S$. Gardner and G. Stevens, Red Vienna and the Golden Age of
Psychology, 1918-1938.
25. Letter from Trotsky to academician I. P. Pavlov [in Russian], in L. Trotsky,
Sochineniia [Works] (Moscow, 1927), vol. 21, p. 260.
26. Trotsky, “Ioffe.”
27. Ibid.
28.1. Deutscher, Trotskii v izgnanii [Trotsky in Exile] (Moscow: Politizdat,
1991), pp. 214, 254, 284. For example, in May 1935 Trotsky was reading Fritz
Wittels’s book on Freud and commented on it in his journal with an expert tone, “A
poor little book by a jealous student” (L. Trotsky, Dnevniki i pis’ma {Journals and
Letters] [New York: Ermitazh, 1990], p. 119).
29. Trotsky, “Ioffe.”
30. A. A. Ioffe, “Po povodu bessoznatel’nogo v zhizni individuuma” [On the
Unconscious in the Life of the Individual], Psikhoterapiia, 1913, no. 4, pp.
234-238.
31. The Smolny Institute in St. Petersburg served as the Bolshevik headquarters
during the October revolution.—Trans.
32. Trotsky, “Ioffe,” p. 371; L. Trotsky, Moia zhizn’ [My Life] (Moscow:
Panoramas 99 I) pa217:
33. Trotsky, “Ioffe,” pp. 373-374.
34. See V. I. Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii [Complete Works] Sth ed.
(Moscow, 1963), vol. 52, pp. 99-101. (Tseka is the acronym for Tsentral’nyi
komitet, the Central Committee of the Communist Party.—Trans.)
35. V. A. Shishkin, Tsena priznaniia [The Price of Recognition] (St. Petersburg:
Nauka, 1991), p. 107.
36. Y. Fel’shtinskii, “Trotsky,” in Portrety revoliutsionerov, pp. 384-402.
37. Ibid.
38. Ibid.
39. Ibid.
40. Ibid. auhene beret
41. L. Trotsky, Literature and Revolution (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, 1960), pp. 254-255. .
42. L. Trotsky, “O kul’ture budushchego” [On the Culture of the Future], in
Sochineniia, vol. 21, p. 110.
43. L. Trotsky, Literature and Revolution, p. 254. ee
44. L. Trotsky, “A Few Words on How to Raise a Human Being,” in Problems of
Everyday Life and Other Writings on Culture and Science (New York: Monad,
1973), p. 140. ; re
45.K. Mannheim, Man and Society in an Age of Reconstruction (London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980), p. 217.
46. Trotsky, Literature and Revolution, p. 255. oar
47. L. Trotsky, “A Few Words on How to Raise a Human Being,” p. 140.
380 Notes
48. L. Trotsky, Leon Trotsky Speaks (New York: Pathfinder, 1972), p. 269.
49. Chrezvychainyi komitet, the “extraordinary committee,” was a predecessor
of the KGB.—Trans.
50. V. Samoilov and Y. Vinogradov, “Ivan Pavlov i Nikolai Bukharin,” Zvezda,
1989S moO WOE
51.N. I. Bukharin, “O mirovoi revoliutsii, nashei strane, kul’ture i prochem
(Otvet professoru I. Pavlovu)” [On the Global Revolution, Our Country, Culture,
and So Forth (Reply to Professor I. Pavlov], Krasnaia nov’, 1924, nos. 1-2; the arti-
cle was condensed and reprinted in N. I. Bukharin, Metodologiia 1 planirovanie
nauki i tekhniki [The Methodology and Planning of Science and Technology]
(Moscow: Nauka, 1989), pp. 225-259.
52. Letter from Trotsky to academician I. P. Pavlov [in Russian], in L. Trotsky,
53. M. G. Yaroshevsky, “Vozvrashchenie Freida” [The Return of Freud],
Psikhologicheskii zhurnal, 1988, no. 9, pp. 129-138.
54.8. N. Davidenkov, Evoliutsionno-geneticheskie idei v nevropatologii
[Evolutionary and Genetic Ideas in Neuropathology] (Leningrad: GIDUV, 1947), p.
153. Another example is the experiments done in 1934 that combined the study of
complex conditioned reflexes among children with the Jungian associative experi-
ment (N. N. Traugott and V. K. Faddeeva, “O vliianii zatrudnennogo ugasheniia
pishchedobyvatel’nykh uslovnykh refleksov na obshchee i rechevoe povedenie
rebenka,” in Na puti k izuchentiu vysshikh form neirodinamiki rebenka (Moscow:
Gosudarstvennoe meditsinskoe izd. 1934), pp. 316-405.
55. Trotsky’s letter gave birth to a legend: The authors of a book on Pavlov (V.
Samoilov and A. Mozzhukhin, Pavlov v Peterburge—Petrograde—Leningrade
[Pavlov in St. Petersburg—Petrograd—Leningrad] [Leningrad: Lenizdat, 1988], p.
266), quoting the letter apparently from memory, ascribed the following words to
Trotsky: “I studied psychoanalysis with Freud for eight years.” However, I located
no documentary evidence of such a text, and while Trotsky might have known
Freud, he was not his patient or student. The original letter is still in the archives of
the Pavlov Commission of the Russian Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg. The
versions of the letter in Trotsky’s Complete Works and in Pavlov’s personal archives
correspond, so there is no reason to doubt their authenticity.
56. L. Trotsky, Literature and Revolution, p. 220.
57. G. Malis, Psikhoanaliz kommunizma [Psychoanalysis of Communism]
(Kharkov: Kosmos, 1924), pp. 24, 74-79.
59. M. Higgins and C. M. Raphael, eds., Reich Speaks of Freud (New York:
Noonday, 1967), p. 115. ;
60. “Leon Trotsky and Wilhelm Reich: Five Letters,” International Socialis
Review, 1967, no. 5.
61. Letter from Sergey Eisenstein to Wilhelm Reich, in L. Ionin, ed.,
Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniia, 1977, no. 1, pp. 176-179.
62. Higgins and Raphael, eds., Reich Speaks of Freud, p. 49.
63. W. Reich, “Die Stellung der Psychoanalyse in der Sowjetunion,” Die psycho-
analytische Bewegung, 1929, no. 4, pp. 359-368.
64. M. Wulff, “Zur Stellung der Psychoanalyse in der Sowjetunion,” Die psycho-
analytische Bewegung, 1930, no. 1, pp. 70-75.
ous W. Reich, Mass Psychology of Fascism (New York: Simon and Schuster,
66. M. Higgins and C. M. Raphael, eds., Reich Speaks of Freud, p. 114.

Notes 381
67. E. Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, vol. 3, jp, IML,
68. P. Roazen, Freud and His Followers, p. 333; J. Chemonni, Freud et
le sion-
isme (Paris: Solin, 1988), p. 156.
70. E. Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, vol. 2, pales:
rales: Roazen and B. Swerdloff, eds., Heresy: Sandor Rado and the
Psychoanalytic Movement (Northvale, N.J.: Aronson, 1995), p. 101.
ee: Freud—Andreas-Salomé: Letters, ed. E. Pfeiffer (New York: Norton, 1985), p.
73.E. Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, vol. 2, p. 145.
74. Cited in Roazen, Freud and His Followers, p. 330.
75. Internationale Zeitschrift fiir Psychoanalyse, 1931, vol. 17, p. 283.
76. Sidney L. Pomer, “Max Eitingon,” in Franz Alexander et allamecdce
Psychoanalytic Pioneers (New York: Basic, 1966), pp. 51-62.
77. E. Roudinesco, Histoire de la psychanalyse en France, vol. 1, p. 157.
78.E. Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud (New York: Basic, 1955),
vol. 3, p. 165.
79. Ibid., p. 182.
80. The Palestinian Society initially numbered six members, four of whom—
Eitingon himself, Moisei Wulff, E. Shalit, and A. Smelyanskaya—were Russians (J.
Chemonni, Freud et le sionisme).
81. Roazen and Swerdloff, eds., Heresy, p. 110.
82. P. Broue, “La main-d’oeuvre ‘blanche’ de Stalin,” Cahiers Léon Trotsky,
December 1985, no. 24, pp. 75-84; J. J. Dziak, Chekisty: A History of the KGB
(New York: Heath, 1987); S. Schwartz, “Intellectuals and Assassins: Annals of
Stalin’s Killerati,” New York Times Book Review, January 24, 1988, pp. 3 and
30-31. For the fierce polemic around this article, see T. Draper, “The Mystery of
Max Eitingon,” New York Times Book Review, April 14, 1988; replies by Stephen
Schwartz and Vitaly Rappoport, another reply by Draper, a letter by Walter
Laqueur (New York Times Book Review, June 16, 1988), and a roundup analysis
by Robert Conquest (New York Times Book Review, July 3, 1988). Max Eitingon’s
defenders, relying on information received for the most part from his descendants,
convincingly demonstrated that the German psychoanalyst Eitingon and the Soviet
intelligence officer Eitingon were not brothers. Other aspects of this story remain, it
seems to me, open to further discussion. The information from Sandor Rado on the
sources of Max Eitingon’s fortune was not brought to bear in the 1988 debate. It is
difficult to agree with Draper’s easy explanation of Eitingon’s financial relations
with the Skoblins, writing the money off to pure philanthropy: The unusual magni-
tude of these donations was established by the Paris trial and confirmed by
Plevitskaya’s prison journal, which is kept in the Filonenko Papers at the
Bakhmeteff Archive, Rare Book and Manuscript Department of the Columbia
University Library. Neither was Draper able to explain the story of the “Green
Bible,” the book containing secret codes, although he admitted that the Skoblins re-
ceived it from Max Eitingon. In all, the polemic around this affair seems far too
charged with family and professional interests. Pavel Sudoplatov, Naum Eitingon’s
former boss, also denied that the German doctor participated in NKVD operations.
As proof he offered a story of recent contact with Eitingon’s relatives and a refer-
ence to Draper’s “model research.” However, Sudoplatov suggested that Max
Eitingon’s London heirs and Leonid Eitingon’s Moscow heirs still consider each
other “distant relatives” (P. Sudoplatov and A. Sudoplatov, Special Tasks: The
Memoirs of an Unwanted Witness—A Soviet Spymaster [Boston: Little, Brown,
382 Notes
1994], p. 37). On the whole I agree with Robert Conquest: There is no proof that
Max Eitingon was a Soviet agent; however, there are sufficient grounds for such a
hypothesis. “In many cases while in strict law we would need complete proof, his-
tory often has to go without such certainty” (R. Conquest, “Max Eitingon, Another
View,” New York Times Book Review, July 3, 1988.
83. The NKVD was the immediate predecessor of the KGB.—Trans.
84. V. Rappaport and Y. Alekseev, Izmena rodine: Ocherki po istorii Krasnot
armii [Betrayal of the Motherland: Outlines of Red Army History] (London:
Overseas, 1989), pp. 502-504. This book, published by dissident historians in 1985
in English and later in Russian, contains more complete background on Naum
Eitingon; his brother, a Berlin doctor, is also mentioned. New information about
General Eitingon’s activities will probably continue to emerge and captivate our
imaginations. On July 31, 1991, the newspaper Izvestiia stated that “right up until
the 1950s, the General was directly linked to the KGB’s secret chemical laboratory,
where various poisons were developed to be used against ‘enemies of the people’
slated for elimination. For this connection, he was sentenced to a long prison term
after Beria’s condemnation.”
85. Glavnoe razvedyvatel’noe upravlenie [Main Intelligence Directorate] (GRU),
the organ of Soviet military intelligence —Trans.
86. See N. Grant, “A Thermidorian Amalgam,” Russian Review, July 1963, vol. 22.
87. A. A. Mosolov, Pri dvore poslednego imperatora (St. Petersburg: Nauka,
1992), p. 83.
89. J. J. Dziak, Chekisty: A History of the KGB.
90. The diary can be found in the Filonenko Papers, Bakhmeteff Archive, Rare
Book and Manuscript Department, Columbia University. See also V. Maksimova,
“Delo Plevitskoi” [The Plevitskaya Affair], Moskovskii nabliudatel’, 1993, nos.
2-3, pp. 59-72. In her diary, Plevitskaya recorded the events that took place during
the criminal investigation. On January 17, 1938, she wrote that Y. F Semyonoyv, ed-
itor in chief of the Paris-based newspaper Vozrozhdenie, had been called to testify.
Semyonov stated that the Skoblins became acquainted with the “Bolsheviks” in
1920 at Max Eitingon’s house in Berlin. When asked to name his source, Semyonov
implicated Ivan Lukash, whom Eitingon had commissioned to write Plevitskaya’s
memoirs, Dezhkin Karagod. Plevitskaya continued: “Semyonov went on talking at
length about the Eitingons’ fur trade with the Bolsheviks, how the furs were bought
up in Siberia and then shipped off to London.” For her part, Plevitskaya wondered:
“What does international trade have to do with Miller’s disappearance? I informed
S[emyonoy] that our friend M. E. Eitingon was a learned psychiatrist and took no
interest either in international trade or in politics.” Elsewhere, Plevitskaya described
Eitingon in these words: “He’s educated, rich—what use would he have for the
Bolsheviks? . . We’ve been friends for 15 years. They’ve given us material support”
(p. 27). At the inquest, Plevitskaya denied any intimate association with Eitingon,
but readily confirmed that the émigré Lukash was writing her memoirs and that
Eitingon was paying him. She tried to use the latter fact as evidence of Eitingon’s in-
nocence: “The contents of my book,” Plevitskaya said, were such that no
“Communist sympathizer or operative” would support the effort financially (p. 27).
Plevitskaya affirmed that Eitingon had come to Europe after emigrating to Palestine
(p. 28) and that after Miller disappeared she had spent the night at the apartment of
L. I. Raigorodsky, a relative of Eitingon’s in Paris (p. 23). Raigorodsky, for his part,
denied that Max Eitingon was a participant in the Miller affair or in the family’s
trade with the USSR. Also brought into evidence during the trial were letters from
Notes
383
the renowned psychoanalysts Princess Marie Bonaparte and Dz. R. Loewenste

in,
who gave testimony to Eitingon’s upstanding character. Further witness to the
cir-
aaa surrounding the trial is provided by documents connected with
evitskaya s attorney, Maximilian Filonenko, which are found in the personal
archives of Georgii Polyansky. Polyansky wrote (February 12, 1939) that, according
to Filonenko’s wife, the attorney was convinced Plevitskaya was guilty and was try-
ing to get her to confess. To accomplish the latter, Filonenko had told her that
Skoblin had called him from the Soviet envoy’s residence in Paris, where he had
holed up. Plevitskaya supposedly broke down under this pressure and admitted to
collaborating with the NKVD. “After she confessed, Plevitskaya begged Max
[Filonenko] to appeal directly to the Soviet envoy to procure whatever funds were
necessary in order to secure her pardon.” Moreover, Filonenko reportedly had said
that Plevitskaya assumed from the very start that he was under the direct orders of
the Soviet envoy (see the G. A. Polyansky folder in the Filonenko Papers,
Bakhmeteff Archive). Even more interesting was the way in which Plevitskaya
talked Filonenko into representing her: “‘Money is no object’—after all, she said,
money just flies right out of Palestine and into her pockets” (Letter from Barbara
Shakhovskaya, Filonenko’s wife, to Polyansky, September 29, 1937). Finally,
Plevitskaya herself wrote to Filonenko from prison December 19, 1938, pleading
with him to “have a talk with the Russian bigwigs,” especially Raigorodsky, in or-
der to procure the means for her defense.
91. N. Berberova, Kursiv moi [In My Own Hand] (Munich: Fink, 1972).
92. “Deiateli SSSR i revoliutsionnogo dvizheniia Rossii,” in Entsiklopedicheskii
slovar’ Granat (Moscow, 1989), p. 452; see also Shishkin, Tsena priznaniia, p. 134.
93.8. Schwartz, “Intellectuals and Assassins: Annals of Stalin’s Killerati.”
94. N. Baranova-Shestova, Zhizn’ L’va Shestova [The Life of Lev Shestov] (Paris,
1983), vol. 2.
95. V. Samoilov and Y. Vinogradov, “Ivan Pavlov i Nikolai Bukharin,” p. 108.
97. N. Berberova, Kursiv moi, p. 165.
99. A. Steinberg, Druz’ia moikh rannikh let [Friends of my Early Years], ed. G.
Niva (Paris: Sintaksis, 1991), p. 248.
100. Trotsky’s two children, who emigrated with him, died under circumstances
that might lead one to suspect their physicians of causing their deaths. In 1938,
Trotsky’s son Lev Sedov died in a Russian surgical clinic in Paris; and Russian histo-
rians generally concur that General Eitingon’s team took part in his death (although
Sudoplatov denied it in Special Tasks, p. 83). On January 5, 1933, Trotsky’s daugh-
ter Zinaida Volkova committed suicide. She had been undergoing psychoanalysis in
Berlin (I. Deutscher, Trotskii v izgnanii, p. 214). Nothing more specific is known
about the circumstances surrounding her death, and, unlike her brother’s death,
they attracted little attention. When she perished, Zinaida’s analysis had been going
on for over a year. She had made it out of Russia in 1930 and suffered from depres-
sion. Trotsky, taking advantage of his connections and constricted by his limited
funds, managed to arrange for her to meet with a certain psychoanalyst, who ac-
cording to the memoirs of Trotsky’s secretary, “spoke Russian fluently” (J. van
Heijenoort, With Trotsky in Exile: From Prinkipo to Coyoacan [Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1978], p. 35; see also D. Volkogonoy, Trotskii [Moscow:
Novosti, 1992], vol. 2, p. 157). In February 1932, Zinaida was deprived of the right
of reentry into the USSR, as was the rest of the Trotsky clan. Despite this, her psy-
choanalyst, supposedly for medical reasons, firmly recommended that she return to
384 Notes
her homeland. As Trotsky wrote in an open letter to Stalin: “Psychiatrists have de-
clared unanimously that only her immediate return home to normal conditions, to
family and labor might save her. But your decree has snatched away this very possi-
bility” (L. Trotsky, “Po povodu smerti Z. L. Volkovoi” [Concerning the Death of
Z. L. Volkova], Biulleten’ oppozitsii, March 1933, pp. 29-30). The creation of this
double bind brought the patient to the brink of despair. Trotsky could have been
right when he blamed his daughter’s death (and later his son’s) on Stalin, viewing
them as acts of political vengeance. Zinaida’s therapist might not have been Max
Eitingon himself (since he hardly ever practiced), but it was certainly one of his
close associates. It is difficult to imagine that in Berlin of 1931-1932 there might be
Russian-speaking, pro-Soviet analysts who were not connected to Eitingon.
Volkova’s letters are kept in the Trotsky Archives, Houghton Library, Harvard
University. They reveal astonishing details: Zina suffered from an incestuous delu-
sion. On the peak of it, she was convinced that her father had fallen in love with
her, that they were engaged in some kind of erotic liaison and that, after the treat-
ment, she would be reunited with him. Trotsky forwarded some of the letters that
he received from Zina to her analyst in Berlin. Subsequently the analyst informed
Zina about it. This eventually brought Zina to her final decision.
101. A. Steinberg, Druz’ia moikh rannikh let, pp. 248-252.
102. Letter from M. Gershenzon to L. Shestov, June 16, 1924, Minuvshee, no. 6,
jo SO.
103. We know this fable also from Steinberg’s retelling.
104. A. Steinberg, Druz’ia moikh rannikh let, p. 249.
105. L. Trotsky, Speech to the First All-Union Congress of Scientific Workers,
106. V. Shklovsky, Sentimental’noe puteshestvie [Sentimental Journey] (Moscow:
Novosti, 1990), p. 197.
107. W. H. Auden, “Psychology and Art Today,” in E. Kurzweil and W. Phillips,
eds., Literature and Psychoanalysis (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983),
p. 130.
108. A. Falk, “Freud and Herzl,” Midstream, January 1977, p. 19.
109. Ibid.
Chapter Eight
1. Pedologicheskaia entsiklopediia (Moscow, 1929), vol. 3.
2.L. S. Vygotsky, “K voprosu o pedologii i smezhnykh s nei naukakh” [On the
Question of Pedology and Similar Sciences], Pedologiia, 1931, no. 3.
3. P. Efrussi, Uspekhi psikhologii v Rossii [The Successes of Psychology in
Russia] (Petrograd, 1923), p. 7.
4. V. M. Bekhterev, “Sub’ektivnyi ili ob’ektivnyi metod v izuchenii lichnosti”
[Subjective or Objective Method in the Study of Personality], Molodaia gvardiia,
1924, no. 5; V. N. Osipova, “Shkola V. M. Bekhtereva i pedologiia” [The School of
V. M. Bekhterev and Pedology], Pedologiia, 1928, no. 1, pp. 10-26. For more on the
history of the creation of the Pedological Institute and on V. T. Zimin, see I. Guber-
man, Bekhterev: Stranitsy zhizni [Bekhterev: Pages from a Life] (Moscow, 1977).
S.N. Nikitin, “Estestvennaia nauka o cheloveke i sotsializm” [The Natural
Science of Man and Socialism], Pod znamenem marksizma, 1933, no. 6, po 217:
Dneprostroi, a dam and hydroelectric power plant on the Dnieper river, was a mas-
sive early Soviet construction project that later came to symbolize the monumental
achievements of communism.
re
Notes
6. P. P. Blonsky, Pedologiia (Moscow: Rabotnik prosveshcheniia, 1925).

7.L. S. Vygotsky, “Psikhotekhnika i pedologiia” [Industrial Psychology and
Pedology], Psikhotekhnika i psikhofiziologiia truda, 1931, nos. 2-3, p. 173.
8.1. N. Spielrein, “Psikhotekhnika v SSSR v_ poslednie gody” [Industrial
EeYEso logy in the USSR in Recent Years]. Pod znamenem marksizma, 19305nor 5;
p. :
9. “Iz rechei N. K. Krupskoi, N. I. Bukharina, A. V. Lunacharskogo, i N. A.
Semashko po osnovnym voprosam pedologii: 1 Pedologicheskii s’ezd” [From the
speeches given by N. K. Krupskaya, N. I. Bukharin, A. V. Lunacharsky, and N. A.
Semashko on basic issues in pedology at the First Pedological Conference], Na puti-
akh k novoi shkole, 1928, no. 1, p. 10.
10. A. B. Zalkind, “O metodologii tselostnogo izucheniia v pedologii” [On the
Methodology of Comprehensive Study in Pedology], Pedologiia, 1931, no. 2, p. 3.
11.N. A. Rybnikov, Yazyk rebenka [The Language of the Child] (Moscow-
Leningrad, 1926), p. 15.
12.1. S. Kon, Rebenok i obshchestvo [The Child and Society] (Moscow:
Pedagogika, 1988).
13. A. Blok, “Intelligentsiia i revoliutsiia” [Intelligentsia and Revolution], in
Sobranie sochinenii (Moscow, 1962), vol. 6, p. 12.
14. Bekhterev, “Sub’ektivnyi ili ob’ektivnyi metod v izuchenii lichnosti.”
15. V. Samoilov and Y. Vinogradov, “Ivan Pavlov i Nikolai Bukharin,” Zvezda,
HONS tayo, 1K,
16. N. I. Bukharin, “O mirovoi revoliutsii, nashei strane, kul’ture i prochem
(Otvet professoru I. Pavlovu)” [On Global Revolution, Our Country, Culture, and
Other Things (Reply to Professor Pavlov)], Krasnaia nov’, 1924, no. 1, pp.
170-178, and no. 2, pp. 105-119; reprinted in condensed form in N. I. Bukharin,
Metodologiia i planirovanie nauki i tekhniki (Moscow: Nauka, 1989), pp.
225-259,
17. “From the speeches given by N. K. Krupskaya, N. I. Bukharin, A. V. Luna-
charsky, and N. A. Semashko on basic issues in pedology at the First Pedological
Conference” [in Russian], Na putiakh k novoi shkole, 1928, no. 1, p. 10.
18. Ibid.
19. Ibid.
20. Ibid., p. 14.
21. P. P. Blonsky, Pedagogika (Moscow, 1922), p. 31.
22. “From the speeches given by N. K. Krupskaya, N. I. Bukharin, A. V. Luna-
- charsky, and N. A. Semashko on basic issues in pedology at the First Pedological
Conference” [in Russian], Na putiakh k novoi shkole, 1928, no. 1, p. 10. .
23. M. V. Wulff, “Fantaziia i real’nost’ v psikhike rebenka” [Fantasy and Reality
in the Child’s Psyche] (Odessa, 1926), p. 24.
24. S. Freud, The Future of an Illusion, pp. 7-8.
Do, Ibid: pas.
26. N. K. oe “Sistema Teilora i organizatsiia raboty sovetskikh uchrezh-
denii” [Taylor’s System and the Organization of Work in Soviet Institutions],
Krasnaia nov’, 1921, no. 1, pp. 140-145. uy ran
27. E. Yenchman, Vosemnadtsat’ tezisov o teorit novot biologii [Eighteen Theses
on the Theory of New Biology] (Rostoy-on-the-Don, 1920; Pyatigorsk, 1920),
p. 17; E. Yenchman, Teoriia novoi biologii i marksizm [The Theory of the New
Biology and Marxism], 2d ed. (Petrograd, 1923).
386 Notes
28. “Avtobiograficheskaia proza M. S. Al’tmana” [The Autobiographical Prose

of M.S. Altman], Minuvshee, 1990, no. 10, pp. 208, 220. Ivanov’s poem dedicated
to Altman can be found in Vyacheslav Ivanov, Stikhotvoreniia [Poetry] (Leningrad:
Sovetskii pisatel’, 1978), p. 295.
29.N. I. Bukharin, “Yenchmaniada (k voprosu ob ideologicheskom pererozh-
denii)” [The Yenchmaniad (On the Question of Ideological Degeneration)], Krasnaia
nov’, 1923, no. 6, pp. 145-178; if one is to believe Yenchman himself, he enjoyed the
support of Pokrovsky and Timiryazev, both senior members of the Academy.
30. M. Levidov, “Organizovannoe uproshchenie kul’tury” [The Organized
Simplification of Culture], Krasnaia nov’, 1923, no. 1, p. 318.
31. I. Khodorovsky, “Osnovnye cherty sovremennogo sostoianiia narodnogo
prosveshcheniia vy RSFSR” [The Basic Features of the State of Popular Education in
the RSFSR], Krasnaia nov’, 1923, no. 7, p. 140.
32. Ibid.
33. P. O. Efrussi, Uspekhi psikhologii v Rossii [The Success of Psychology in
Russia] (St. Petersburg, 1923).
34. “From the speeches given by N. K. Krupskaya, N. I. Bukharin, A. V.
Lunacharsky, and N. A. Semashko on basic issues in pedology at the First
Pedological Conference” [in Russian], Na putiakh k novoi shkole [On the Means
Toward a New School], 1928, no. 1, p. 10.
35. Khodorovsky, “Osnovnye cherty sovremennogo sostoianiia narodnogo
prosveshcheniia v RSFSR.”
36. L. Ginzburg, Literatura v poiskakh real’nosti, p. 230; an expressive descrip-
tion of this intelligentsia is provided in Ginzburg’s essay “Eshche raz o starom i
novom (pokolenie na povorote)” [Once More on the Old and the New (A
Generation at the Turning Point)], published in Tynianovskii sbornik: Vtorye tyni-
anovskie chtentia (Riga: Zinatne, 1986), pp. 132-140.
37. Taken from “Pedagogicheskaia Moskva,” a reference calendar for 1923, p. 435.
38. N. A. Rybnikov, “Pedologicheskie uchrezhdeniia respubliki” [Pedological
Institutions of the Republic], Pedologiia, 1928, no. 1, p. 181.
39. Pedologiia, 1931, no. 4, p. 103.
40. A. I. Lipkina, personal communication, 1987.
41.S. S. Molozhavy, “Testirovanie i pedagogicheskii protsess” [Testing and the
Pedagogical Process], Prosveshchenie na transporte, 1927, no. 2, p. 22.
42. M. A. Levina, “Contributions to the debate,” Pedologiia, 1932, no. 4.
43. A. B. Zalkind, “K voprosu o sushchnosti psikhonevrozov” [On the Question
of the Essence of Psychoneuroses]; and “Individual’no-psikhologicheskii analiz
trekh sluchaev somnambulizma” [Individual-psychological Analysis of Three Cases
of Somnambulism], Psikhoterapiia, 1913, no. 3. ;
44. Zalkind, “K voprosu o sushchnosti psikhonevrozov,” p. 178.
45. Spisok meditsinskikh vrachei [Directory of Medical Physicians] (Moscow:
Narkomzdrav, 1925).
46. A. B. Zalkind, Ocherki kul’tury revoliutsionnogo vremeni [Outlines of the
Culture of the Revolutionary Period] (Moscow, 1924), p. 29.
47. A. B. Zalkind, “O iazvakh vy VKP(B),” in Ocherki kul’tury revoliutsionnogo
vrement (Moscow, 1924).
48. A. B. Zalkind, Polovoi vopros v usloviiakh sovetskoi obshchestvennosti [The
Sexual Question in the Conditions of Soviet Society] (Leningrad, 1926).
49.G. Dayan, “Vtoroi psikhonevrologicheskii s’ezd” [The Second Psy-
choneurological Conference], Krasnaia nov’, 1924, no. 2, p. 155.
Notes 387
50. A.B. Zalkind, “Psikhonevrologicheskie nauki i sotsialisticheskoe stroitel’stvo”

[Psychoneurological Sciences and Socialist Construction], Pedologiia, 1930, no. 3,
pp. 309-322.
$1. Announcement published in Pedologiia, 1931, no. 1, p. 69.
52. A. B. Zalkind, “Differentsirovka na pedologicheskom fronte” [Differ-
entiation on the Pedological Front], Pedologiia, 1931, no. 3, p. 11.
53. N. K. Krupskaya, “Contributions to the debate,” Pedologiia, 1932, no. 4, p. 103.
54. A. B. Zalkind, “O metodologii tselostnogo izucheniia v pedologii” [On the
Methodology of Research Synthesis in Pedology], Pedologiia, 1931, no. 2.
55. M. G. Yaroshevsky, personal communication, 1987.
56. A. Bely, “O teurgii” [On Theurgy], Novyi put’, 1903, no. 9.
57. D. Azbukin, “Psikhologiia shkol’nikov v nachale Oktyabr’skoi revoliutsii”
[The Psychology of Schoolchildren at the Beginning of the October Revolution],
Pedologicheskii zhurnal, 1923, no. 3, pp. 60-72.
58. L. S. Geshelina, “Sreda i sotsial’no-biologicheskaia kharakteristika sovre-
mennogo doshkol’nika” [The Environment and Sociobiological Characteristics of
the Contemporary Preschooler], Pedologiia, 1928, no. 1, pp. 113-136.
59.1. A. Perepel, Freidizm i ego akademicheskaia oppozitsiia [Freudianism and
Its Academic Opposition] (Leningrad [published by author], 1936), p. 19.
60. Y. I. Kazhdanskaya, “Sotsial’no-politicheskie predstavleniia detei—shkol’nikov
pervogo kontsentra trudovykh shkol goroda Odessy,” Pedologiia, 1928, no. 2, p. 94.
61. This was the date of the “Bloody Sunday” massacre, which sparked the first
Russian revolution in 1905.—Trans.
62. N. A. Rybnikov, “Ideologiia sovremennogo shkol’nika” [The Ideology of the
Contemporary Schoolchild], Pedologiia, 1928, no. 1, pp. 150-158; N. A.
Rybnikov, Derevenskii shkol’nik i ego idealy: Ocherki po psikhologii shkol’nogo
vozrasta [The Rural Schoolchild and His Ideals: Outlines of School-age Psychology]
(Moscow, 1916).
63. P. V. Arkhangel’skii, “Derevenskii shkol’nik i trud” [The Rural Schoolchild
and Labor], Pedologiia, 1928, no. 2, pp. 110-135.
64.R. G. Vilenkina, “K kharakteristike nastroeniia rabochego podrostka”
[Toward a Description of the Mood of the Working-class Teen], Pedologiia, 1930,
no. 1, pp. 81-97.
65. E. Kol’man, “Pis’mo tovarishcha Stalina i zadachi fronta estestvoznaniia 1
meditsiny” [Comrade Stalin’s Letter and the Tasks on the Natural Sciences and
Medical Front], Pod znamenem marksizma, 1931, nos. 9-10, p. 169. The author of
this virulent article, one of the organizers of the deadly debates of those years,
would later emigrate and publish his memoirs under the title My ne dolzhny byli tak
zhit’ [We Shouldn’t Have Lived Like That] (New York: Chalidze, 1982).
66. Pedologiia, 1931, no. 1, p. 4.
67. Pravda, July 5, 1936.
68. See Petrovsky, “Zapret na kompleksnoe issledovanie detstva,” pp. 131-132.
69. Sbornik prikazov i rasporiazhenii po Narkomprosu RSFSR [Collected
Decrees and Orders of the RSFSR Ministry of Education], 1936, no. 15, p. 4.
70. Sbornik prikazov i rasporiazhenii po Narkomprosu RSFSR, 1936, no. 23, p. 17.
71. A. S. Bubnov, Osnounye napravleniia bor’by za pod’em sovetskoi shkoly i
pedagogicheskogo obrazovaniia [Basic Directions in the Struggle for the
Improvement of the Soviet School System and Pedogogical Education] (RSFSR
Ministry of Education, 1936), p. 27; I. M. Kogan, ed., Dobit’ do kontsa pedologiiu
(Leningrad: Oblono, 1936), pp. 68-70.
388 Notes
72. M. G. Yaroshevsky, “Stalinizm i sud’by sovetskoi nauki” [Stalinism and the

Fates of Soviet Science], in Repressirovannaia nauka (Leningrad: Nauka, 1991).
Chapter Nine
1.S. Freud and W. C. Bullitt, Thomas Woodrow Wilson: A Psychological Study
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1967).
2. Many books have been written about Bullitt, notably B. Farnsworth, William
C. Bullitt and the Soviet Union (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1967); and
W. Brownell and R. N. Billings, So Close to Greatness: A Biography of William C.
Bullitt (New York: Macmillan, 1987). Bullitt’s correspondence with Roosevelt has
also been published: Orville H. Bullitt, ed., Personal and Secret: Correspondence
Between FE. D. Roosevelt and W. C. Bullitt (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1972).
3. S$. Freud and W. C. Bullitt, Thomas Woodrow Wilson, p. 253. See also: The
Bullitt Mission to Russia, testimony before the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign
Relations by W. C. Bullitt (1919; Hyperion, 1977).
4. W. Brownell and R. N. Billings, So Close to Greatness, p. 10S.
5.8. Freud and W. C. Bullitt, Thomas Woodrow Wilson, p. 271.
6. W. C. Bullitt, It’s Not Done (New York, 1926). The title of this novel on the
life of American socialists alludes, curiously enough, to Chernyshevsky’s novel
What Is to Be Done?
7. W. Brownell and R. N. Billings, So Close to Greatness, p. 113.
8. Letter of December 7, 1930, from Freud to Arnold Zweig, in The Letters of
Sigmund Freud and Arnold Zweig, tr. W.D.R. Scott (London: Hogarth, 1970), p. 25.
9. S. Freud and W. C. Bullitt, Thomas Woodrow Wilson, p. vi.
10. Even though some postulates of this book appear naive, they are comparable
to later attempts at Wilson’s psychobiography. See: A. L. George and J. L. George,
Woodrow Wilson and Colonel House: A Personality Study (New York, 1956);
Alexander L. George, “Some Uses of Dynamic Psychology in Political Biography:
Case Materials on Woodrow Wilson,” in Fred I. Greenstein and Michael Jerver,
eds., A Source Book for the Study of Personality and Politics (Chicago: Markham,
1971), pp. 78-98.
11. S. Freud and W. C. Bullitt, Thomas Woodrow Wilson, p. viii.
12. Ibid., p. 254.
13. George Kennan, Memoirs, 1925-1950 (New York: Pantheon, 1967), p. 79.
14. Ibid., pp. 81-82.
15. “Reminiscences of H. A. Wallace,” Office of Ora! History at Columbia
University, Part 5, pp. 893 and 429.
16. “Reminiscences of J. P. Warburg,” Office of Oral History at Columbia
University, Part 4, p. 894. ’
17. Ibid., p. 429.
18. A. I. Utkin, Diplomatiia Franklina Ruzvel’ta [The Diplomacy of Franklin
Roosevelt] (Sverdlovsk: Izd. Ural’skogo Universiteta, 1990), p. 47.
19. W. Brownell and R. N. Billings, So Close to Greatness, p. xi.
20. C. W. Thayer, Bears in the Caviar (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1950), p. 156.
21. Elena Bulgakova, Dneunik Eleny Bulgakovoi (Elena Bulgakova’s Diary]
(Moscow: Knizhnaia palata, 1990), p. 95.
22. Other Bulgakov scholars also have suggested that the Spring Festival at the
American embassy served as a prototype of Satan’s Rout. See V. Chebotareva,
“Prototip bulgakovskoi Margarity” [The Prototype for Bulgakov’s Margarita],
Literaturnyi Azerbaidzhan, 1988, no. 2, pp. 117-118; L. Parshin, “Velikii bal u sa-
Notes
389
tany” [Satan’s Ball], Nauka i zhizn” 10, 1990, pp. 93-99; B. V. Sokolov, Roman M.
Bulgakova “Master i Margarita” [Bulgakov’s Novel Master and Margarita]
(Moscow: Nauka, 1991), p. 121; V. Losev and L Yanovskaya, “Kommentarii,” in
Dnevnik Eleny Bulgakovoi. In his book Chertoushchina v amerikanskom posol'stve
v Moskve ili 13 zagadok Mikhaila Bulgakova [Deviltry in the American Embassy,
or the 13 Riddles of Mikhail Bulgakov] (Moscow: Knizhnaia palata, 1991), Leonid
Parshin drew on details about the embassy reception contained in Elena
Bulgakova’s diaries. The author reiterated the conclusion about the connection be-
tween Satan’s ball in the novel and the embassy reception. His further analysis took
a path different from the one I have taken here: Following in Elena Bulgakova’s
footsteps, Parshin reconstructed a historical prototype of Baron Maigel, one of the
Muscovites in the novel.
23. V. Losev and L. Yanovskaya, “Kommentarii,” in Dnevnik Eleny Bulgakovoi,
[Ds SB.
24. O. H. Bullitt, ed., Personal and Secret, pp. 116-117.
25. C. W. Thayer, Bears in the Caviar, p. 156.
26olbids p58:
27. C. W. Thayer, Diplomat (New York: Harper, 1959), pp. 230-231.
28. C. W. Thayer, Bears in the Caviar, p. 162.
29. O. H. Bullitt, ed., Personal and Secret, p. 116.
30. Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita, tr. Michael Glenny (New
York: Harper & Row, 1967), p. 269.
31. Those Bulgakov scholars who have found numerous prototypes of each pair
at the ball do not, however, comment on the idiosyncrasy of their peculiar gather-
ing. To the best of my knowledge, only Mikhail Kreps has paid attention to this
problem, coming to different conclusions from mine here (see Mikhail Kreps,
Bulgakov i Pasternak kak romanisty [Bulgakov and Pasternak as Novelists] [Ann
Arbor: Hermitage, 1984], p. 79).
32. Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita, pp. 267-268.
33. L. Parshin, Chertovshchina v amerikanskom posol’stve.
34. V. Losev and L. Yanovskaya, “Kommentarii,” p. 359.
35. Ibid.
36. Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita, p. 294.
38. O. H. Bullitt, ed., Personal and Secret, p. 6S.
39. “Reminiscences of H. A. Wallace,” p. 2057.
41. B. Farnsworth, William C. Bullitt and the Soviet Union, p. 153.
42. M. Chudakova, Zhizneopisanie Mikhaila Bulgakova [The Life of Mikhail
Bulgakov] (Moscow: Kniga, 1988), p. 340.
43. Ibid., p. 350.
44. Dnevnik Eleny Bulgakovoi, pp. 77-78.
45. Ibid., p. 86.
46. The Collection of Manuscripts of the Institute of Russian Literature
(Pushkinskii Dom), fund 369, file 351.
47. Ibid., file 307.
49. Dnevnik Eleny Bulgakovoi, pp. 48-49. MM .
50. Intourist was the Soviet state travel agency for foreign visitors, which pro-
vided a wide variety of services.—Trans.
51. Dnevnik Eleny Bulgakovoi, p. 63.
390 Notes
52. C. W. Thayer, Bears in the Caviar.

54. Ibid., pp. 113, 114, 118.
55. Ibid., pp. 96, 92, 97.
58. Ibid., p. 107.
59. Ibid., p. 114.
60. Ibid., p. 117.
61. Ibid., p. 118.
62. Ibid., pp. 60-61.
63. Ibid., p. 74.
64. M. Chudakova, Zhizneopisanie Mikhaila Bulgakova, p. 407.
66. L. Yanovskaya, Tvorcheskii put’ Mikhaila Bulgakova [Mikhail Bulgakov’s
Creative Path] (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1983), pp. 265, 277. Vulis, who knew
Bulgakov’s circle of friends, believed that Woland’s prototype was Stalin. The case
for this does not seem very convincing (A. Vulis, Roman M. Bulgakova Master i
Margarita [Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1991)).
67. Kreps, Bulgakov i Pasternak kak romanisty, p. 164.
68. A. Barkov pinpointed the action of the novel as taking place in May-June
1936, relying on a number of indirect indications (A. Barkov, “O chem govoriat
paradoksy” [What Paradoxes Tell Us], Literaturnoe obozrenie 5, 1991, p. 66).
70. Cited in M. Chudakova, Zhizneopisanie Mikhaila Bulgakova, p. 164.
71. M. Bulgakov, Journal confisqué (Paris: Solin, 1992).
73. Ibid., p. 121.
74. Vyacheslav Ivanov, Sobranie sochinenii [Collected Works] (Brussels, 1987),
vol. 4, p. 153.
75. Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita, p. 205. The experiments of Professor
Woland and his retinue at the Variety Theater, as well as some other scenes from
The Master and Margarita (the confiscation of foreign currency on stage in Nikanor
Ivanovich’s dream, Koroviev’s tricks, and so on) seem a practical extrapolation of
Yevreinov’s ideas on monodrama and the theatricalization of life, the continuation
of his train of thought in a different format (see chapter 4).
7 (Abid. pd2ss
78. Bezdomny is the Russian word for “homeless.” —Trans.
79. Osip Mandelstam, Slovo’i kul’tura [Discourse and Culture] (Moscow:
Sovetskii pisatel’, 1987), p. 200.
80. Letter from S. L. Tseitlin to Bulgakov dated April 10, 1938. Collection of
Manuscripts of the Institute of Russian Literature (Pushkinskii Dom), fund 369, file
502. Tseitlin ended his letter with a pun alluding to Woland: “Should you wish to
use your consultant (without quotation marks) in future, I will be glad to assist
you.”
81. Dnevnik Eleny Bulgakovoi, pp. 85-86.
82. Ibid., p. 108.
83. M. Chudakova, Zhizneopisanie, pp. 354, 356.
84. William Bullitt, It’s Not Done (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1926).
Notes
391
86. Ibid., pp. 380-381.

87. Boris Gasparoy, in his classic article (“Iz nabliudenii nad motivnoi strukturoi
romana Bulgakova Master i Margarita” [From Observations of the Motivational
Structure of Bulgakov’s Novel The Master and Margarita], Slavica Hiero-
solymitana, 1978, no. 3, pp. 198-251), constructed a logic matrix, into which he fit
the characters of the novel and their prototypes. According to Gasparov’s conclu-
sions, the novel developed on three historical planes: ancient Jerusalem, the begin-
ning of the nineteenth century, and Moscow of the 1930s. The characters were pro-
jected into each of these historical strata, changing their appearance but preserving
continuity. Gasparov conjectured that Woland’s equivalents were Afrany in
Jerusalem and the opera Mephistopheles in the early nineteenth century.
Furthermore, he concluded: “Most of the Muscovite characters ... have corre-
sponding prototypes as their main projections. It is therefore natural to investigate
the question whether Woland also has such a prototype.” Analyzing the text,
Gasparov noted that Woland’s Moscow prototype must be the “famous foreigner”
who “is feared ... and even suspected of being a spy. At the same time he is ex-
pected to voice his approval of the new Moscow and Muscovites” (pp. 237-238).
Gasparov investigated the problem deductively, but lacked the historical data to
complete this section of his matrix. He mentioned several Western writers who vis-
ited Soviet Moscow as possible prototypes for Woland. It seems, however, that
Bullitt as we know him fits this role much better than H. G. Wells or André Gide.
The correlation between Gasparov’s logical prediction and the historical facts that
became known after the publication of Elena Bulgakova’s diaries is a rare and in-
spiring episode in the humanities.
89. M. Kreps mused that since the Master received a promise that he would be
able to write his novels, walk under the cherry blossom with Margarita, and listen
to Schubert, “we can only guess what the light looks like if mere peace is so attrac-
tive” (M. Kreps, Bulgakov i Pasternak kak romanisty, p. 93).
91. Mikhail Bulgakov, Pis’ma [Letters] (Moscow: Sovremennik, 1989), p. 213.
92. A. Schwartz, Zhizn’ i smert’ Mikhaila Bulgakova [Life and Death of Mikhail
Bulgakov] (Ann Arbor: Hermitage, 1988), p. 91.
93. J. E. A. Curtis’s characterization of Woland alluded to the diplomatic profes-
sion, but he had an entirely different power structure in mind: “Woland figures in the
novel as a kind of plenipotentiary ambassador from the supernatural realm”
(J. E. A. Curtis, Bulgakov’s Last Decade: The Writer as Hero [Cambridge University
Press, 1987], p. 173). Overall, the connection between Bulgakov and Bullitt has been
underestimated by scholars, and the context of emigration often has been significantly
downplayed. See also: Ellendea Proffer, Bulgakov: Life and Work (Ann Arbor:
Ardis, 1984); Andrew Barratt, Between Two Worlds: A Critical In-
troduction to The Master and Margarita (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987); M. Chudakova,
Zhizneopisanie Mikhaila Bulgakova (Moscow: Kniga, 1988); Lesley Milne, Mikhail
Bulgakov: A Critical Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
94, M. Chudakova, Zhizneopisanie, p. 462.
95. V. Vilenkin, “Nezabyvaemye vstrechi” [Unforgettable Encounters], in
Vospominaniia o Mikhaile Bulgakove (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1988), p. 298.
97 Ibid. p- 25.1:
99. Ibid., p. 183.
392 Notes
100. On Bullitt’s policy in France, see William W. Kaufmann, “Two American

Ambassadors: Bullitt and Kennedy,” in G. A. Craig and F. Gilbert, eds., The
Diplomats (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), pp. 649-681.
102. In his postwar books, Bullitt speculated about geopolitics, about America’s
role in the world, and about the world government of the near future.
Chapter Ten
1. Vekhi: Sbornik statei o russkoi intelligentsti, 2d ed. (Moscow, 1909), p. 81.
2.V. Rozanov, Apokalipsis nashego vremeni—Mimoletnoe. Moscow:
Respublika, 1994.
3. Kolyma is a region of Siberia in which many prison labor camps are situated.
4. V. Shalamov, “Novaia proza” [New Prose], Novyi mir, 1989, no. 12, pp. 3 and 61.
5. V. Ivanov, Dionis i pradionisiistvo [Dionysus and Pre-Dionysianism] (Baku,
1923), p. 157.
6. V. Nabokov, “Chto vsiakii dolzhen znat’” [What Everyone Should Know], in
Priglashenie na kazn’: Rasskazy (Moscow: Kniga, 1989), p. 412. This is a short
satirical piece advertising a patented formula called “Freudianism for Everyone”
(pp. 393-395).
7. N. Y. Mandelstam, Vospominaniia [Memoirs] (Moscow: Kniga, 1989), p. 126.
8. M. Bakhtin, Estetika slovesnogo tvorchestva [The Aesthetics of Speech
Genres] (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1986), p. 331.
9. V. Adrianova-Perets, “Simvolika snovidenii Freida v svete russkikh zagadok”
[Freud’s Dream Symbolism in Light of Russian Riddles], in Akademiku N. Ya.
Marru (Moscow: AN SSSR, 1935), pp. 497-505. I am grateful to academician D.
S. Likhachev for pointing out this source.
10. V. V. Ivanov, Ocherki po istorii semiotiki v SSSR [Outlines on the History of
Semiotics in the USSR] (Moscow: Nauka, 1976).
11. S. Eisenstein, Izbrannye proizvedeniia v 6 tomakh [Collected Works in Six
Volumes] (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1964), vol. 1, pp. 82 and 657.
12. Eizenshtein v vospominaniiakh sovremennikov [Eisenstein in the Rec-
ollections of His Contemporaries] (Moscow, 1978), p. 204.
13. S. Eisenstein, Izbrannye proizvedeniia, vol. 1, p. 657.
14. Ibid., p. 415.
TS .lbidsipwa0S:
16. Ivanov, Ocherki po istorii semiotiki, p. 93.
17. Marie Seton, Sergei M. Eisenstein (London: Dennis Dobson, 1952), p. 134.
18. Ivanov, Ocherki po istorii semiotiki, pp. 113-114.
19 .Ibids p?-213.
20. S. Eisenstein, Izbrannye proizvedeniia, p. 657.
21. Ibid., p. 508.
22./Ibid..:ps85.
23. Ibid.
24. Ibid., p. 657.
25.1. Montegu, With Eisenstein in Hollywood (New York: International
Publishers, 1967), p. 105.
26. Eisenstein, Izbrannye proizvedeniia, p. 83.
27. Montegu, With Eisenstein in Hollywood, p. 345.
28. K. Clark and M. Holquist, Mikhail Bakhtin (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1984), p. 117.
Notes
393
205M. Bakhtin, Estetika slovesnogo tvorchestva, pp. 329-330.

30. M. Bakhtin, Problemy poetiki Dostoevskogo [Problems of Dostoevsky’s
Poetics] (Moscow: Sovetskaia Rossiia, 1979), p. 48.
31. Ibid.
32. V. Ivanov, “Mysli o simvolizme” [Thoughts on Symbolism], Trudy i dni,
72.10, 15. p. 6:
33. V. N. Voloshinov, Freidizm: Kriticheskii ocherk [Freudianism: A Critique]
(Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe, 1927), p. 118.
34. See V. V. Ivanov, Ocherki po istorii semiotiki v SSSR; V. V. Ivanov,
“Znachenie idei M. M. Bakhtina 0 znake, vyskazyvanii i dialoge dlia sovremennoi
semiotiki” [The Meaning of M. M. Bakhtin’s ideas of the Symbol, Expression, and
Dialogue for Contemporary Semiotics], in Trudy po znakovym sistemam (Tartu,
1973), vol. 6; and Clark and Holquist, Mikhail Bakhtin. Another point of view can
be found in G. S. Morson and C. Emerson, “The Disputed Texts,” in Rethinking
Bakhtin (Evanston: University of Chicago Press, 1989).
35. Bakhtin, Estetika slovesnogo tvorchestva, pp. 394-404.
36. V. V. Ivanov, “Znachenie idei M. M. Bakhtina.”
37. V. Kozhinoy and S Konkin, “Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin: Kratkii ocherk
zhizni i deiatel’nosti” [Mikhail M. Bakhtin: A Short Outline of His Life and
Career], in Problemy poetiki i istorii literatury (Saransk, 1973).
38. K. Clark and M. Holquist, Mikhail Bakhtin.
39. Bocharoy, “Ob odnom razgovore i vokrug nego,” Novoe literaturnoe
obozrenie, 1993, 2, p. 75.
40. Y. Etkind, Zapiski nezagovorshchika [Notes of a Nonconspirator] (London:
Overseas Publications, 1977), p. 257.
41. V. N. Voloshinov, Freudianism: A Marxist Critique (New York: Academic,
1976), p38:
42. Ibid., p. 10.
43. Ibid., p. 11.
44. Ibid., p. 86.
45. Ibid., p. 77.
46. Ibid.
47. V. N. Voloshinov, “Marksizm i filosofiia iazyka” [Marxism and the
Philosophy of Language], in Osnounye problemy sotsiologicheskogo metoda v
naukakh o iazyke (Leningrad, 1929). . .
48. J. V. Stalin, Marksizm i voprosy iazykoznaniia [Marxism and Issues in the
Science of Language] (Moscow, 1949).
49, Bakhtin, Estetika slovesnogo tvorchestva.
50. J. Lacan, Ecrits (Paris: Point, 1975); “L’Ethique de la psychanalyse,’ in Le
)
Seminaire 7 (Paris: Seuil, 1986).

51. Voloshinov, Freudianism: A Marxist Critique, p. 79.
52. Ibid., p. 86.
§3.1bids p. 82-
54. M. Bakhtin, Problemy poetiki Dostoevskogo.
55. M. Bakhtin, Estetika slovesnogo tvorchestva, p. 339. ;
56. M. Bakhtin, “Avtor i geroi v esteticheskoi deiatel’nosti ” [Author and
Character in Aesthetic Activity], in Estetika slovesnogo tvorchestva.
57. M. Bakhtin, Estetika slovesnogo tvorchestva, p. 339.
58. M. Bakhtin, Problemy poetiki Dostoevskogo, p. 50.
59. M. Bakhtin, Estetika slovesnogo tvorchestva, pp. 333, 345,
61. Ibid.
394 Notes
62. In Russian philosophy, a historical overview of the problem can be found in

M. S. Kagan, Mir obshcheniia [The World of Communication] (Moscow: Politizdat,
1988).
63. M. Bakhtin, Problemy poetiki Dostoevskogo, p. 65.
65. Ibid., p. 393.
66. M. Bakhtin, Tvorchestvo Fransua Rable i narodnaia kul’tura srednevekov’ta 1
Renessansa [The Work of Francois Rabelais and the Popular Culture of the Middle
Ages and Renaissance] (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1990).
67. Ibid., p. 167.
68. Ibid., p. 356.
70. Ibid., p. 402.
71.S. S. Averintsev, “Bakhtin, smekh, khristianskaia kul’tura” [Bakhtin,
Laughter, Christian Culture], Rossiia/Russica, 1988, no. 6, pp. 119-130.
72. Ibid.
73. Ibid.
74. O. Mandelstam, Slovo i kul’tura [Word and Culture] (Moscow: Sovetskii
pisatel’, 1987), pp. 255 and 200.
75. M. Zoshchenko, Izbrannye proizvedeniia v dvukh tomakh [Selected Works in
Two Volumes] (Leningrad: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1968).
76.1. Metter, Ne porastet byl’em [It Won’t Become Overgrown with Fact]
(Leningrad: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1989), p. 635.
77. Collection of manuscripts of the Institute of Russian Language and Literature
of the Russian Academy of Sciences, M. M. Zoshchenko Archives, fund 501, sec-
tion 2, file 16.
78. M. Zoshchenko, Vozvrashchennaia molodost’ [Youth Returned], Golubaia
kniga [The Blue Book], Pered voskhodom solntsa [Before the Sun Rises]
(Leningrad: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1988).
79. Letter of February 18, 1941 from Thomas Mann to Karl Kerenyi, in
Mythology and Humanism: The Correspondence of Thomas Mann and Karl
Kerenyi, tr. A. Gelley (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975), p. 100.
Conclusion
This chapter was translated by Rebecca Ritke.
1. The transnational character of psychoanalysis was amusingly confirmed by
Igor’ Shafarevich, an aggressive anti-Semite who nonetheless made recourse to
Freud in his analysis of socialism as a manifestation of the death instinct (see I.
Shafarevich, Sotsializm kak iavlenie mirovoi istorii [Paris: YMCA, 1977]).
2.M. Wulff, “Zur Stellung der Psychoanalyse in der Sowjetunion,” Die psycho-
analytische Bewegung, no. 1 (1930), p. 75.
3. FE Stepun, Byvshee i nesbyvsheesia (New York: Chekhov, 1956), vol. 1, p. 276.
About the Book
and Author
Marxism was not the only Western idea to influence the course of Russian history.
In the early decades of this century, psychoanalysis was one of the most important
components of Russian intellectual life. Freud himself, writing in 1912, said that “in
Russia, there seems to be a veritable epidemic of psychoanalysis.” But until
Alexander Etkind’s Eros of the Impossible, the hidden history of Russian involve-
ment in psychoanalysis has gone largely unnoticed and untold.
The early twentieth century was a time when the craving of Russian intellectuals
for world culture found a natural outlet in extended sojourns in the West, linking
some of the most creative Russian personalities of the day with the best universities,
salons, and clinics of Germany, Austria, France, and Switzerland. These ambas-
sadors of the Russian intelligentsia were also Freud’s patients, students, and collab-
orators. They exerted a powerful influence on the formative phase of psychoanaly-
sis throughout Europe, and they carried their ideas back to a receptive Russian
culture teeming with new ideas and full of hopes of self-transformation.
Fascinated by the potential of psychoanalysis to remake the human personality in
the socialist mold, Trotsky and a handful of other Russian leaders sponsored an
early form of Soviet psychiatry. But, as the Revolution began to ossify into
Stalinism, the early promise of a uniquely Russian approach to psychoanalysis was
cut short. An early attempt to merge medicine and politics forms final chapters of
Etkind’s tale, the telling of which has been made possible by the undoing of the
Soviet system.
The effervescent Russian contribution to modern psychoanalysis has gone unrec-
ognized too long, but Eros of the Impossible restores this fascinating story to its
rightful place in history.
Alexander Etkind is professor of the history of ideas and Russian literature in the
European University, St. Petersburg, Russia, and a visiting fellow in the Woodrow
Wilson Center in Washington, D.C.
a95
Index
Abraham, Karl, 115, 133, 199, 210 Anxiety, 118, 150, 344
Abraham, Nicholas, 361(n23) “Aphasic and Infantile Thought” (Spielrein),
Abstinence, 146, 274. See also Asceticism; 171
Sexuality, asexuality Apocalypse of Our Time, The (Rozanov),
Activity, theory of, 332 312
Actor Prepares, An (Stanislavsky), 124 Apollo, 53, 54, 318
Adler, Alfred, 25, 120, 154, 157, 162, 227, Aptekman, Esther, 137
231-232, 235, 348, 349, 350 Asatiani, Mikhail, 4, 112, 142
children of, 378(n12) Asceticism, 24, 26, 43, 44, 73
and Joffe, 231, 379(n24) Assassinations, 9, 116, 248, 251
Adler, Victor, 54 Astvatsaturov, M. I., 200
Akhmatova, Anna, 48, 60, 186, 220, 307, Auden, W. H., 257-258
315, 346 Austria, 3, 54, 103, 106
Albert-Lazard, Loulou, 36 Authoritarian character structure, 244
Alcoholism, 121, 288 Authorship, 324, 333
Alexander II, 9 “Automobile as a Symbol of Masculine
All-Russian Conference on Caring for Power, The” (Spielrein), 165-166
Mentally Handicapped Children Averbukh, Roza, 45, 191, 199, 201, 215,
(1920), 189 228
All-Russian Psychoanalytic Union, 199 Averintsev, Sergei, 48, 51, 339-340
All-Union Scientific Research Institute for Azazel and Dionysus (Yevreinov), 125
the Comprehensive Study of Mankind, Azbukin, D., 278
260
Altman, Moisei, 266-267 Babel, Isaak, 181, 313
Ambivalence, 95, 96, 97-98, 109, 138, 149, Bakhtin, Mikhail, 5, 7, 40, 153, 315, 317,
Thoyily WSs WI), sh, Selo, SNS) 321-340, 345, 348
American Psychopathological Association, arrest and sentence, 326
116 and Dostoevsky, 321, 324, 325, 327,
Anal-sadistic phase, 93 332-333, 334, 335, 337, 340
Andreas, Fred, 18-19, 20 and Vyacheslav Ivanov, 338-339
Andreas-Salomé, Lou, 4, 8-38, 104, 168, Bakhtin, Nikolai, 322
227, 246, 348 Bakst, Leon, 94, 153
death of, 38 Baltic republics, 287
and Nietzsche, 7, 12, 13-15, 16-17, 19, Barkov, A., 390(n68)
20527. Basov, M. Y., 270, 281
parents of, 8, 9, 10, 13 Batum (Bulgakov), 309
and Rilke, 20, 22-23, 25, 34, 36, 60 Bazhenoy, Nikolai, 117
sexuality of, 10, 18, 19-20, 24, 353(n33) Bears in the Caviar (Thayer), 292
See also under Freud, Sigmund Beauty, 235, 236
Andreev, Leonid, 2 Before the Sun Rises (Zoshchenko), 344,
Andreichin, Georgy, 296 346
Andrianova-Perets, V., 315 Behind the Backdrop of the Soul
Androgyny, 71, 94, 99, 153, 317, 318, 338, (Yevreinov), 126
340 Bekhterev, Vladimir, 6, 83, 115-116, 127,
Annenkovy, Yury, 126 167, 188, 229, 260, 263, 269, 270,
Annensky, Innokenty, 41 313
Anthroposophy, 2, 59, 64, 65-68 death of, 116, 260, 365(n25)
and psychoanalysis, 66-67 Bekhterev Brain Institute, 189
Anti-Semitism, 16, 131 Belaya, Galina, 180
396
Index
397
Belkin, Aron, 217 Bulgakov, Mikhail, 5, 7, 17, 47, 50, 128,

Belorussia, 287 150, 296-297
Belousoy, A., 201 and Bullitt, 286, 298-300, 301, 305-306,
Bely, Andrei, 5, 42, 46-47, 48, AD e/a o 307, 309, 391(n93)
63, 64, 65-70, 94, 98, 182, 188, 277, and Zamyatin, 308
341, 356(n27), 357(n28) See also Master and Margarita, The
and Medtner, 57, 65-66, 67 Bulgakova, Elena, 290-291, 292, 294-295,
Bem, A., 224 298, 299, 300, 301
BemaOul,, 207, Bullitt, William, 5, 286, 295-296, 392(n102)
Benois, Alexander, 2, 40, 356(n17) death of, 311
Berberova, Nina, 250, 252 resignations of, 287, 311
Berdyaev, Nikolai, 24, 30, 42, 49, 50, 52, role in France, 310
53, 63, 70-73, 94, 153, 219-220, 238, See also Spaso House reception; under
252, 317, 338, 354(n59) Bulgakov, Mikhail; Freud, Sigmund
Berdyaeva, Lydia, 78 Bunin, Ivan, 65, 76
Berg, Sergei, 297, 306 Bykhovsky, Bernard, 229
Beria, Lavrenti, 248
Berlin, 168, 245, 251 Carotenuto, Aldo, 166-167
Berlin, Isaiah, 60 Castration anxiety, 87, 92, 343
Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute and Clinic, 245 Caucasus, 287
Bernfeld, Siegfried, 364(n10) Censorship, 110, 154, 244, 293, 319, 327,
Bernheim, Hyppolite, 118 328
Bernstein, Nikolai, 120, 200, 257 self-censorship, 327
Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Freud), 110, Central Pedological Institute, 277
151-152, 153, 173-174 Change, 264-265, 302, 303, 305, 331, 339,
Binswanger, Ludwig, 245 341
Bisexuality, 95, 96, 317. See also Cheerful Brothers (Gumilev), 179
Homosexuality Cheka, 238
Bjerre, Paul, 36 Chekhoy, Anton, 131, 312
Bleuler, Eugen, 113, 133, 218 Chekhov, Mikhail, 98, 123-124, 131
Blok, Alexander, 29, 39, 49, 50, 54, 57-58, Chelpanoy, G., 123
76, 81, 84, 97-98, 99, 100, 131, 263 Child Institute (Moscow), 188
Blonsky, Pavel, 5, 185, 192, 195-196, 206, Children, 5, 26, 41, 68, 163-164, 187-188,
207, 208, 259, 261-262, 265, 267, 189, 195, 203-204, 209, 227, 244,
270, 280, 281, 284, 345 VA, BY)
Bogdanov, Alexander, 2-3, 100, 184, 185 childbearing, 53
Bohlen, Charles, 299 and nannies, 93-94
Bohme, Jakob, 71 of revolutionary era, 277-280, 313, 349
Bolshevism, 2, 3, 34-35, 128, 142, 168, See also Education; Pedology;
178, 197, 256, 261, 364(n7) Psychoanalytic Orphanage-Laboratory
and patriarchy, 228 Chistovich, A. S., 217
See also Marxism; under Freud, Sigmund Christianity, 58, 73, 82. See also God;
Bolt (Mr.), 66 Orthodoxy; Religion
Bonaparte, Marie, 154, 202 Chukovsky, Kornei, 180, 188, 313, 371(n8)
Boulevards and Crossroads, 78 Class issues, 223, 274, 279, 330, 332, 348
Brecht, Bertolt, 313 Clinical Psychotherapeutic Institute
Briusov, Valery, 47, 356(n27) (Petrograd), 188
Briusova, Nadezhda, 192, 201 Cohen, Hermann, 169
Brothers Karamazov, The (Dostoevsky), 109 Cold War, 296
Brunswick, Ruth Mack, 104, 105, 107 Collectivism, 50, 51, 159, 279, 330
Bryan, Douglas, 198 Communism. See Bolshevism; Communist
Bryant, Louisa, 287, 292 Party; Marxism; War communism
Buber, Martin, 24, 322, 336 Communist Academy, 280
Bubnoy, Alexei, 270, 281, 284, 290 Communist Party, 234, 235, 244, 296
Buddhism, 217-218 Central Committee, 233, 234, 280,
Bukharin, Nikolai, 184, 185, 238, 240, 262, 281-282, 283, 284, 346
264, 265, 267, 268, 283, 290 health of leaders, 273
398 Index
Politburo, 234 Draper, T., 381(n82)

Conciliarism, 3, 50, 51 Drawings, 164-165
Concise Literary Encyclopedia, 181 Dreams, 62, 77, 86-87, 90-91, 92, 97, 126,
Conditioned reflex, 209. See also Pavlov, Ivan 165-166, 181-182, 345, 362(n23)
Conference on the Study of Human Behavior and revolution, 223-224
(1930), 275 Drozhzhin, Spiridon, 22
Conquest, Robert, 382(n82) Droznes, Leonid, 4, 85, 104, 115, 117
Consciousness, 236, 255-256, 320, 322, Durov (animal trainer), 291
B2/803295.3380) 3315 3324335,0 575 Dziak, J., 249
340, 345, 346, 348
altered states of, 318 Ebbinghaus, Hermann, 18
Council of Ministers, 208, 209, 214, 250 Economic issues, 183, 237, 279, 289. See
Counterrevolution, 181 also New Economic Policy
Creativity, 272-273 Education, 189, 195-196, 203, 204,
Crimea, 287 261-262, 264, 254, 268
Culture, 3, 90, 95, 111, 121, 328, 338. See spending on, 267
also under Russia Efron, Sergein, 251
Efrussi, Polina, 259, 268
Darshkevich, Leopold, 109, 191 Ehrenburg, Ilya, 220-221, 305, 313
Davidenkovy, Sergei, 234, 239 Ehrlich, Paul, 120
da Vinci, Leonardo, 26, 45, 317, 356(n20) Eidelman, Nathan, 119
Days of the Turbins, The (Bulgakov), Eisenstein, Sergey, 5, 60, 126, 243, 315-321,
298-299 340, 344
Death, 29, 54, 99, 310, 335 Eitingon, Max, 4, 74-75, 76, 162, 168, 215,
death wish, 110, 150-154, 155, 166, 177,
216-217, 244-248, 250, 252, 253,
180, 223, 349, 350, 364(n10), 350, 364(n10), 381(n82), 382(n90).
369(n74), 394(n1). See also
See also under Freud, Sigmund
Eros/Thanatos; under Love
Eitingon, Nadezhda, 253
“Death of Russian Illusions, The”
Eitingon, Naum (General), 248, 249, 251,
(Berdyaev), 50
de Mijolla, A., 144
252, 381(n82), 382(n84), 383(n100)
Electra, 56
Demon (Lermontoy), 17, 34, 353(n29)
Ellis, Havelock, 81
Dependency, 82, 85, 86, 210, 211, 212, 306,
307, 309 Emigrés, 65, 73, 248, 249, 250, 251, 253
Desire, 304, 350 England, 130
“Destruction as the Reason for Becoming” Enlightenment era, 254, 255, 337
(Spielrien), 150-153 Environmental influence, 262, 265
Deutscher, Isaac, 232 Epstein, M. S., 281
Dewey, John, 195 Epstein-Adler, Raisa, 120
Diaghilev, Sergey, 94 Erikson, Erik, 82, 93
Dialectics, 98 Ermler, F. M., 315-316
Dialogism, 322-323, 324, 330, 333, 334, Ern, Vladimir, 78
335, 336, 337, 340 Eros, Ferens, 227
Dionysus, 30, 48-53, 54, 55-56, 94, 125, Eros/Thanatos, 30, 150. See also Death,
53. 154, SHIG oTiltse RVAU), 337-340 death wish
Division of labor 266 Erotic, The (Andreas-Salomé), 24
Dog’s Heart, A (Bulgakov), 47 Ethics of Eros Transformed (Vysheslavtsev),
Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 17, 40, 43, 50, 189, 73
222, 223 Etkind, Yefim, 327
epilepsy of, 189, 373(n39) Evolution, 235, 237, 239, 254
See also under Bakhtin, Mikhail; Freud, Executions, 283
Sigmund Existentialism, 341
“Dostoevsky and Patricide” (Freud), 109 Exoticism, 100-101, 138
“Dostoevsky’s Suffering and Art”
(Rosenthal), 189 Famine, 116
Dosuzhkoy, Fyodor, 4, 190, 224 Fantasies, 89-90, 95
Dovbnya, Yevgeny, 112, 120 Fascism, 244, 346
Index B99
Fear, 220, 222-223, 224, 297, 300, 309, and Pankeey, 81, 85-92, 103, 104, 105,
327, 334, 339, 343 361(n5), 362(n29)
Pedern) Paula 27a 302274228 parents of, 108, 111
Feltsman, Osip, 119 and Pavlov, 239, 240, 243
Feminism, 32 political views of, 226, 228, 364(n10)
Fenitschka (Andreas-Salomé), 33, 34 private life of, 25
Ferdinand (Crown Prince), 103 and Reich, 364(n10)
Ferenczi, Sandor, 116, 228, 245, 246 and Rozanoy, 44
Filonenko, Maximilian, 383(n90) and Russian national traits, 81, 88, 95,
Filosofov, Dmitry, 129 96-97, 98-100, 109, 111-112, 143,
Finland, 287 225, 336
First All-Russian Conference of sexuality of, 26
Psychoneurology, 268 and Shestov, 75-76
First Conference of Neurologists and and Soviet Russia, 5
Psychiatrists, 260 and Spielrein, 134, 141-142, 143, 144,
First Experimental Educational Research 145, 148, 151-152, 153, 154-155,
Center, 195 159, 160-161, 162, 166, 168, 173
First Pedological Conference (1927), 260, translations of, 130, 217, 218, 266
DUS trip to America, 259
Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 287, 292, 302 Freudianism: A Marxist Critique
Flagellants, 46 (Voloshinov), 325, 327-331
Fliess, Wilhelm, 141 Freudomarxism. See Psychoanalysis, and
Florensky, Pavel, 42, 257 Marxism
Following the Stars (Ivanov), 153 Friedmann, Boris, 172, 174, 199, 200, 201,
Formal Method in Literary Study, The: A 215, 228, 230, 240
Critical Introduction to Sociological Fromm, Erich, 227
Aesthetics (Medvedev), 326 “From the History of an Infantile Neurosis”
Forster, Bernhard, 16 (Freud), 81, 89, 103, 110
Fourier, Charles, 101 Fueloep-Miller, René, 35, 355(n80), 364(n7)
France, 3, 115, 116, 130, 227, 287, 310, 347 Future of an Illusion, The (Freud), 5, 266
Frank, Semyon, 73-74 Fyodoroy, Nikolai, 2, 52, 53
Frazer, James, 53, 239, 318
Freud, Anna, 27, 154, 202 Gabrichevsky, Alexander, 196-197
Freud, Joseph, 226 Gannushkin, Pyotr, 113, 280
Freud, Sigmund, 3, 7, 24-28, 30, 39, 44-45, Gardiner, Muriel, 105, 107
A! SAN. G83, TA, WI, ND, IS. oe) Gasparov, Boris, 391(n87)
210, 258, 303, 315, 324, 345, Gast, Peter, 15
361(n13) Gastev, Alexei, 169, 257
and Andreas-Salomé, 24-25, 27-28, 32, Gender, 42-43, 70-71, 78, 153, 338
35, 36-37, 103 German Association for the Sexual Politics
and Boshevism, 184-185, 187, 215, 225, of the Proletariat, 243
226. See also Psychoanalysis, and Germany/Germans, 3, 21, 27, 37-38, 54,
Marxism iS, aS, sh, SS), 7 20s), APT,
and Bullitt, 288-289 228, 242, 287
and da Vinci, 26, 45, 318, 356(n20) German Communist Party, 243, 244
and Dostoevsky, 70, 90, 95, 96, 109, 110, See also Berlin; Nazis
189 Gershenzon, Mikhail, 45
and Eisenstein, 315-317 Gertsyk, Yevgeniia, 63, 72
and Eitingon, 137-138, 245-246, 247, Geshelina, L. S., 278
252 Gillot (Pastor), 9-10, 33
and hypnosis, 118-119 Ginzburg, Lydia, 176, 186, 188, 269,
interest in Russia, 108-109, 115 368(n50)
and Jung, 54, 55, 133-134, 135, Glass House, The (Eisenstein), 320-321
136-137, 139, 140-141, 142-143, Glivenko, P. I., 207
143-144, 144-145, 147-149, Gnedin, Yevgeny, 217-218
155-160, 335, 336 “Goat Song” (Vaginov), 125, 327
and Nietzsche, 26-27 God, 9, 31, 34, 43, 44, 96
400 Index
Goebbels, Joseph, 319 Infantilism, 69

Goethe, Johann von, 302-303, 304 Inhibition, 239
Gogol, Nikolai, 219-220, 222, 223 Institute of Experimental Medicine
Gorbovy, Dmitry, 181 (Leningrad), 260
Goring, M. H., 247 Institute of Psychology, Pedology, and
Gorky, Maxim, 2, 50, 82, 93, 182, 184, 188, Industrial Psychology, 275
19852385 3134526 Intellectuals/intelligentsia, 3, 21, 30, 39, 41,
Grandmothers, 93 48, 50, 54, 60, 64, 72, 81, 82, 99, 110,
Gratitude to Freud (Andreas-Salomé), 37 125; 129 71795 ISS RISA SIO G2 25;
Great Gatsby, The (Fitzgerald), 292 236, 251-252, 253, 255, 263, 267,
Great Soviet Encyclopedia, 194 269, 274, 290, 314, 315
Griboedov, A. S., 188 collaboration with authorities, 312-313
Grigoriev, Apollon, 2 Internationa! Congress of Psychiatry and
Gross, Otto, 138, 139, 143 Neurology (1907), 136-137
Groys, Boris, 351(n9) International Journal of Psychoanalysis,
GRU, 248 190, 198, 199, 200, 201, 205
Guevara, Ernesto “Che,” 228 International Psychoanalytic Association, 4,
Guilt, 104, 107, 330 116,130, 190F 1942 198720262105
Gumilev, Nikolai, 179 212, 215, 244, 245, 246
International Psychoanalytic Congress
Hall, G. Stanley, 259 (1922) 165
Happy Moscow (Platonovy), 183-184 International Solidarity Psychoanalytic
Healing of the Psyche (S. Zweig), 316 Institute and Laboratory, 203-214, 218
Hegel, G.W.F., 40 finances for, 205
Heidegger, Martin, 39 proletarian children at, 208, 209
Hemingway, Ernest, 287
teachers at, 205, 210-212, 213
Herzen, Alexander, 11
See also Psychoanalytic Orphanage-
Herzl, Theodor, 258
Laboratory
Hippius, Zinaida, 48
“Introduction to Psychoanalysis, An”
History of Corporal Punishment in Russia
(Freud), 88
(Yevreinov), 124
Hitler, Adolf, 16, 249
Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis
Freud), 187
Hitschmann, Eduard, 26, 63
Holz (Doctor), 369(n74) Ioffe, Adolf, 227, 230-235, 250, 349,
Homosexuality, 44, 45, 48, 78, 86, 95, 96, 379(n24)
99, 156, 187, 310, 317, 356(n20) IQ testing, 270, 271
Homo sovieticus, 304, 305, 341 Israel, 4
How We Write (Zamyatin), 182 Italy, 116
Human nature, 183, 185, 235, 236, It’s Not Done (Bullitt), 288, 307
237-238, 243, 244, 264-265 Ivanoy, Ilya, 192
Hungary, 228 Ivanov, Lydia, 59, 60, 64
Hypnosis, 6, 118-120, 123, 215, 297, 306, Ivanov, Vsevolod, 182-183, 305, 325
356(n27) Ivanov, Vyacheslav, 1, 2, 39, 41, 42, 48-52,
mass, 319 52=60;)\62, 635 24975127, USdeulos,
sexual, 127 192, 253, 267, 304, 313, 314, 318,
Hysteria, 133, 135 323, 340
and Bakhtin, 324-325
Id, 31. See also Subconscious; Unconscious daughter of, 192
“Idea of the Superman, The” (Blok), 29 Ivanov, Vyacheslav V., 315, 317, 325
Ideology, 328, 329, 330, 332, 337 Ivan the Terrible (Eisenstein), 319-320, 340
Ilyin, Ivan, 3, 4, 63-65, 66, 67, 76, 78, 238 Izvestiia, 382(n84)
Imago, 75, 253
Individualism, 50, 51, 82, 318, 332, 339 Jews, 11, 1521692.1,38; 206, 1109415,,132,
Industrial psychology, 169, 170, 257, 262, S35 e7 GOS IGI 1GOM Sal sss
268, 269, 283, 284 226, 246, 247, 253, 350
Industrial Psychology and Psychophysiology Job, 304
of Labor, 281 Jocasta complex, 56
Index
401
Jones, Ernest, 26, 27-28, 80, 85, 108, 07, Krasnaia nov’, 267, 274, 372(nn 13, 19)
1307187, 1985199; 239,242, 244, Kreps, Mikhail, 301, 389(n31), 391(n89)
245, 246, 247 Krupskaya, Nadezhda, 184, 194, 195, 207,
Joyful Wisdom (Nietzsche), 12-13 Mga INOS, PNAS, NST, OME
Jung, Carl, 25, 26, 27, 47, 54-55, 58, 73, Kryukovo sanatorium, 129, 130-131
Soe 30100 1591565216. 22) Kutepov, Alexander, 249
and Bolshevism, 226-227 Kuzmin, Mikhail, 48, 180
and Eitingon, 138, 245
and Ivanov, 59-60 Lacan, Jacques, 227, 331, 332, 333, 334,
and Metner, 59, 60-61, 61-63 347
and Nazi movement, 161, 247 Language, 77, 169, 263, 329-330, 331, 336,
and Nietzsche, 152, 156, 157, 336 361(n23)
and Spielrein, 133-134, 136, 139, 145, native vs. acquired, 91
149° 15051595 1605161, 1652 1173 Language ofaRed Army Soldier, The (I.
and Spielrein’s mother, 145, 147 Spielrein), 169
translations of, 165 Language ofthe Child, The (Rybnikov), 263
See also under Freud, Sigmund Larikova, R. V., 205
Jurenito Julio (Ehrenburg), 305 Latin America, 347
Laughter, 338, 339, 340
Kadets, 81-82 Lawrence, D. H., 45
Kafka, Franz, 111 League of Nations, 287
Kallen, Horace Meyer, 376(n115) Ledebour, Georg, 20
Kameney, Lev, 313 Lenin, V. I., 101-102, 109, 179, 183, 212,
Kameneva, Olga, 192 238, 242, 247, 255, 286-287, 300
Kannabikh, Yury, 57, 58, 98, 118, 120, 131, and Ioffe, 233-234, 235
192, 215, 234 wife of. See Krupskaya, Nadezhda
Kapitsa, Pyotr, 313 Leningrad, 214, 215, 260, 272, 287
Karpoy, P. V., 205 Leningrad Teachers’ Institute, 269-270
Kashchenko, V. P., 188 Leontiev, Alexei, 332
Kashina-Yevreinova, A., 373(n39) Lepeshinskaya, Lelya, 292
Kashpirovsky, Anatoly, 306 Lermontov, Mikhail, 16, 17, 83, 136
Kautsky, Karl, 228 Lesser Fridays, 118, 272
Kazan, 191 Leventuyev, P., 281
Kazan Psychoanalytic Society, 198, 199, Levidov, Mikhail, 267, 268
228 Levinas, Emmanuel, 336
Kazhdanskaya, Y. I., 278, 279 Life and Death (Bem, Dosuzhkovy, and
Keller, Therese, 84, 85, 102, 103, 106 Lossky), 224
Kennan, George F.,, 289 Life of Monsieur de Moliére (Bulgakov),
KGB, 251, 382(n84) 300, 307, 309
Khlebnikov, Velimir, 49, 266 Lipkina, Anna, 271
Khlysty sect, 49, 127, 249 Literacy, 267, 268, 279
Khodasevich, Vladislav, 5, 46, 67, 69-70, Literature, 113, 180-183, 186, 188, 215,
Ue WAY DAN), SD Be)
Khvostov (minister), 127 Literature and Revolution (Trotsky), 240
Kirov, Sergei, 169 Little Tragedies (Pushkin), 220
Kliuyev, Nikolai, 249 Liuvers’s Childhood (Pasternak), 40-41, 188
Kogan, Yakov, 56, 216, 373(n41) Livingstone, Angela, 32
Kollontay, Alexandra, 186, 373(n30) Ljunggren, Magnus, 167
Kol’man, E., 387(n65) Losey, Alexei, 195
Kopp, Viktor, 197, 215, 241, 250-251, 252 Lossky, Nikolai, 74, 224
Korniloy, K., 207, 230, 280 Love, 29, 30, 71, 74, 82, 97-98, 101, 166,
Korsakoy, Sergei, 113 186, 187, 334
Kosakovsky (inspector), 122 and dearh, 2, 17, 18, 30, 34, 52-53, 56,
Kotik Letaev (Bely), 68-69, 188 DM MSs WN, DUS SIG See)
Kozhinoy, V. V., 325 between doctor and patient, 140
Kraepelin, Emil, 83, 84, 106, 113, 114 and narcissism, 28, 31
Krainsky, Nikolai, 121-122, 366(n44) and transference, 135, 146, 309
402 Index
white love, 57, 58 Mercader, Caridad and Ramon, 248

Lovtskaya, Fanya, 74, 75, 168 Merezhkovsky, Dmitry, 2, 26, 42, 48, 109,
Lunacharsky, Anatoly, 21, 49, 50, 184, 185, 153, 356(n20)
186, 209, 214, 238, 265, 268, 314, 326 Messing, Wolf, 306
Luria, Alexander, 5, 6, 170, 171, 172, Meyerhold, Vsevolod, 313, 316, 317
173-174, 180, 190-191, 197, 199, Meynert, Theodor, 54
200, 201, 203-204, 208, 215, 216, Military commanders, 290
222, 228, 230, 240, 350, 373(n44), Miller, Yevgeny, 248, 249, 251, 382(n90)
376(n115) Mind and Face of Bolshevism, The (Fueloep-
Lysenko, Trofim, 265, 312 Miller), 35, 364(n7)
Ministry of education, 185, 191-193, 196,
McDougall, William, 218 202-203, 205, 207, 209, 210, 214,
Mahler, Gustav, 54 253,267, 268,270,275, 280,
Malis, Georgii, 240-241 283-284, 314
Mandelstam, Nadezhda, 119, 179, 196, Minorities, 280
314-315 Modernism, 40, 42, 48, 50, 70, 153, 346
Mandelstam, Osip, 51, 90, 118-120, 174, Modern Psychiatry, 130, 131
181, 186, 188, 305, 313, 340-341 Molozhavy, S. S., 2712
Mann, Thomas, 76, 346 Monodrama, 125-126
Mannheim, Karl, 236 Montegu, Ivor, 320, 321
Marcuse, Herbert, 227, 229 Moonlight People: The Metaphysics of
Margolis, I., 217, 343 Christianity (Rozanovy), 43, 45
Marriage, 43, 187 Moscow, 188, 214, 215, 251, 271, 278, 303
Marti, Jean, 114, 197, 202, 210 higher learning institutions in, 269
Martin, Biddy, 32 scientific organizations in, 270
Marx, Karl, 40, 74 U.S.embassy in. See Spaso House
view of Russia, 225-226 reception
See also Marxism See also Russian Psychoanalytic Society
Marxism, 175, 180, 208, 236, 254, 265. See Moscow (Bely), 69, 70
also Bolshevism; Marx, Karl; under Moscow Psychological Society, 76
Psychoanalysis Moses, 26
Marxism and Issues in the Science of Most Important Thing, The (Yevreinov),
Language (Stalin), 329 128-129
Marxism and the Philosophy of Language Musaget publishing house, 59, 62
(Voloshinoy), 326, 329 Muthmann, Arthur, 140
Masochism, 96, 151 Mystery novels, 317
Masons, 117, 357(n32) Mystery of Rasputin, The (Yevreinov), 126,
Masses, 142, 223, 264, 318, 319. See also L27,
under New man Mystical horror, 222, 224
Mass Psychology and Fascism (Reich), 244 Mysticism, 29-30, 50, 64, 66, 99, 159,
Master and Margarita, The (Bulgakov), 5, 369(n70)
47, 128, 290-291, 292-295, 298, 301,
303, 304, 306, 308-309, 309-310, Nabokov, Vladimir, 136, 314, 315
311, 389(n22), 390(nn 66, 68, 75), Naidich, Sara, 180, 188, 189-190
391(nn 87, 89, 93)) Nannies, 92, 93-94, 362(n29)
Masturbation, 83, 92, 93, 187, 214, 219 Na postu, 181
Materialism, 74, 222, 229, 237 Narcissism, 28, 31-32, 33, 34, 56, 95, 223,
Mayakovsky, Vladimir, 2, 313 224, 334
Mead, Margaret, 263 Nationalism, 35
“Meaning of Love, The” (Solovyov), 152 Nazis, 37-38, 106, 119, 132, 161, 178, 184,
Medtner, Emile, 4, 59. See also under Bely, 226, 242, 247, 249, 252. See also
Andrei Germany/Germans
Medtner, Nikolai, 59 Nechkina, Militza, 172, 191, 228
Medvedev, Pavel, 326 Necrophilia, 219
Memoirs of an Idealist (von Meysenbug), 11 Neo-Kantians, 118
Mendeleeva-Blok, Liubov’, 40, 57 NEP. See New Economic Policy
Index
403
Neruda, Pablo, 251, 313 Outlines of the Culture of Revolutionary

Neurosis, 45, 75, 89, 135, 149, 157, 222, 273 Times (Zalkind), 273
and sexuality, 114
See also Sexuality Palestinian Psychoanalytic Society, 217
Nevsky, V. I., 196 Pankeey, Konstantin, 81, 84
New Economic Policy (NEP), 242, 273 Pankeev, Sergei, 80-107, 168, 361(n23)
New man, 46, 47, 341, 349 relatives of, 82
of the masses, 170, 185, 186, 265, 268, view of psychoanalysis, 101-102
272, 275, 284, 350 See also under Freud, Sigmund
See also Ubermensch Paranoia, 105, 107, 116, 119, 123
Nicholas II (Czar), 108, 249 Parshin, Leonid, 294, 389(n22)
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 2,3, 11, 19, 21, 26-27; Parvus, Leonid, 217-218
HONG 2 As 05035 555664 113s) 127, Pasternak, Boris, 22, 40-41, 169, 181, 188,
154, 237, 317, 318, 350 3135315)
and Bolshevism, 184, 185 Pasternak, Leonid, 22
sister Elisabeth, 14, 15-16, 37 Patients, 4, 108, 140, 342
See also under Andreas-Salomé, Lou; and analysts, 333, 335, 336. See also
Jung, Carl; Spielrein, Sabina Transference
NKVD, 248, 249, 292, 383(n90) Bolshevik, 273-274
Noise of Time, The (Mandelstam), 119 Patriarchy, 228, 244
Notes on Cuffs (Bulgakov), 128 Pavlov, Ivan, 6, 209, 214, 216, 229,
Novyi mir, 2-3, 326 238-240, 251, 263-264, 344
Novyi zhurnal dlia vsekh, 120-121 Peasants, 33, 93-94, 279
“Pedagogical Sadism” (Krainsky), 121-122
“Observations on Transference-Love” Pedagogy, 284. See also Education
(Freud), 146 Pedology, 5, 6, 41, 171, 176, 188, 196, 216,
Odessa, 83, 103, 115, 187, 215, 278 229, 241, 244, 257, 259-285, 303,
Oedipus/Oedipal, 55-56, 69, 70, 94, 97, 99, 349, 350
Sy end of, 281-284
Old Moscow, 195 of ethnic minorities, 280
Oleg the Wise, 151, 369(n62) First Pedalogical Conference (1927), 260,
“On Change in First and Last Names” (I. DUS
Spielrein), 169 and industrial psychology, 262
“On Delirium Tremens” (Yermakoy), 194 practical functions performed, 271
“One Schizophrenic’s Experience of the End principles of, 262-263
of the World and Fantasies of Rebirth” and psychoanalysis, 259-260
(Kogan), 56 surveys/questionnaires used, 277-280,
One’s Own Fate (Shaginyan), 129-130 DWN. PRS), BVA
On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Pedology (journal), 275, 281
Movement (Freud), 114 Perepel, Ilya (Elias), 116, 188, 216, 217, 278
“On the Origin and Development of Speech” Pereval movement, 180, 181
(Spielrein), 163 Perversion, 44
On the Psychology of Revolution (Federn), Petersburg (Bely), 69, 70
228 Petrograd, 188
“On Ulcers in the Russian Communist Petrov, N. E, 208, 214
Party” (Zalkind), 273 Petrovskaya, Nina, 46-47
Orel Pedological Society, 270, 278, 321 Petrov-Vodkin, Kuz’ma, 188
Origins of Drama, The: Primitive Tragedy Pevnitsky, A., 120, 121, 366(n38)
and the Role of the Goat in Its Philosophy, 65, 113, 283, 336
Organization (Yevreinoy), 125 Philosophy of Plotinus, The (Blonsky), 195
Orpheus, 318, 320 Physiology, 257
Orthodoxy, 2, 3, 33, 43, 73 Piaget, Jean, 162-165, 173, 174, 175
Osipov, Nikolai, 4, 66-67, 74, 112-113, Pieron, Henri, 170
114, 117-118, 168, 190, 194, 218, Pilnyak, Boris, 181, 216, 252, 313
221-224 Pinkevich, A. P, 212-213, 214
Other. See Self and other Planning, 256, 257
404 Index
Planning Commission for Pedological Psychoneurological Academy (Petrograd/St.

Research in Russia, 275 Petersburg), 188
Plato, 52, 73, 74, 94, 153, 154, 195, 316, Psychoneurological News, 194
317, BG Psychoneurology, 260, 268, 274, 275
Platonoy, Andrei, 183-184, 186, 315 Psychotherapy, 112, 116, 117, 118, 120,
Pleasure principle, 204 1215 130, A913232 2272)
Plevitskaya, Nadezhda, 249-250, 253, 254, Pushkin, Alexander, 40, 50, 93, 136, 153,
382-383(n90) 219, 220, 222, 369(n62)
Pokrovsky, Mikhail, 192, 206, 207 Put’, 62
Poland, 287 Pyatigorsky, Alexander, 351(n9)
Political criminals, 293-294
Political prisoners, 217 Rabelais, Francois, 321, 325, 327, 338,
Political trials, 9, 330 340
Populism, 32, 33, 35, 54 Racism, 16
Postmodernism, 322, 327, 340 Radek, Karl, 197, 240, 242, 290, 292
Potemkin (Eisenstein), 319 Rado, Sandor, 245, 247, 250
Power, cult of, 348-349, 350. See also Raigorodsky, L. I., 382(n90)
Sexuality, vs. power; Will to power Rank, Otto, 26, 91, 210, 317
Prague, 4, 190
Rasputin, Grigory, 127
Pravda, 231, 250
Rebirth, 95, 99, 152, 317, 338
Primal scene, 87-89, 95, 100
Rée, Paul, 11-12, 13, 16, 18
Reed, John, 287
Proletkult, 181, 184, 185
Reflexology, 229
Property, 256
Reich, Wilhelm, 202, 229, 243-244, 348,
Protestantism, 82
364(n10)
Psychoanalysis, 101-102, 158, 284, 342
Reich, Zinaida, 313
critique of, 325, 327-331
Reik, Theodor, 190
intellectuals’ resistance to, 60
Reisner, Larissa, 197
and literary discourse, 180-183
Reisner, Mikhail, 197, 229, 230
and Marxism, 214, 227-235, 236-237,
Reiss, Ignaz, 248, 251
239, 240, 241-242, 243-244, 257,
Religion, 72, 73, 78, 95-96. See also
274, 277, 347. See also Freud,
Christianity; God; Orthodoxy
Sigmund, and Bolshevism Remizoy, Alexei, 49
and pedology, 259-260
Resistance, 146, 324, 331, 336, 343
self-analysis, 323, 343-344, 345
two meanings of, 313-315
and symbolism, 76-78 Return: The Third Symphony (Bely), 57
See also Freud, Sigmund; Patients Revolution, 226, 228, 275
“Psychoanalysis and Its Relations to Child global, 263-264
Psychology” (Piaget), 163 See also Sexuality, sexual revolution;
“Psychoanalysis as Worldview” (Frank), 73 under Dreams; Russia
Psychoanalysis of Communism (Malis), “Revolution and Dreams” (Osipov), 223
240-241 Y Reynolds (Doctor), 320
Psychoanalytic Orphanage-Laboratory, 194, Rice, James, 110, 163, 226
200, 201, 202-203, 349. See also Rilke, Rainer Maria, 20-21, 111, 318. See
International Solidarity Psychoanalytic also under Andreas-Salomé, Lou
Institute and Laboratory Roazen, Paul, 28, 105, 154
Psychological and Psychoanalytic Library Rockefeller McCormick, Edith, 61, 62
Series, 203, 218, 325 Rodionovna, Arina, 93
Psychology, 40-41, 44, 113, 181, 237, 268, Rohr, Wilhelm, 215
333 Romanov, Panteleimon, 186
testing, 272 Romanticism, 2, 16, 17, 18, 53, 100, 236,
See also Industrial psychology 338
Psychology and Marxism (Korniloy), Roosevelt, Franklin D., 300, 310, 311
229-230 Rosenstein, L. M., 113, 114
Psychology of the Unconscious: A Study of Rosenthal, Tatiana, 4, 116, 130, 137, 168,
the Transformations and Symbolisms 188-190, 348
of the Libido (Jung), 55, 62, 152, 157 Roudinesco, Elisabeth, 246
Index
405
ROVS. See Russian Inter-Army Union Selected Works in Analytical Psychology

Rozanoy, Vasily, 5, 41, 42-45, 52, 53, 94, (Jung), 62
215, 219, 312, 344, 356(nn 17, 20) Self-analysis. See under Psychoanalysis
Rubinstein, Sergei, 169 Self and other, 322, 323, 332-333, 334-335,
Rumania, 287 345
Russia, 3-4, 5, 32, 33, 34, 54, 108-109, Self-awareness, 323-324, 332, 334
115, 225-226 Semashko, Nikolai, 214, 265
culture in, 1, 18, 70, 93-94, 115, 153, Semyonoy, Y. E., 382(90)
187, 338, 346, 347-348, 349 Serapion Brothers, 182, 372(n23)
daily existence in, 39-41, 185, 186-187, Serbsky, Vladimir, 112, 113-114, 117, iLife},
305, 341 194, 221, 272
revolution in, 37, 83, 114, 225, 226, 252, Settlement (children’s colony), 194-195
255, 387(n61) Severnyi vestnik, 20
Russian idioms, 92 Severtsova, Natalya, 196-197
Russian stereotypes, 138, 142. See also Sexpol, 243
Freud, Sigmund, and Sexual Confessions of an Anonymous
Russian national traits Russian, 81
Russian Inter-Army Union (ROVS), 248 Sexuality, 30, 31, 42-43, 44, 53, 70-73,
“Russian Philosophy and the Semitic Spirit” 111, 114, 118, 122, 127, 137, 150,
(Andreas-Salomé), 21 184, 216, 302, 328
Russian Psychoanalytic Society, 117, 165, of analyst and patient, 140, 146
1WG26 HAO, IAN, 172, 73, ISXO), asexuality, 52, 57, 67, 94. See also
191-193, 194-198, 199, 200, 202, Abstinence
ZAON 21 222 415242) 2502548 of children, 209, 211, 214
349 and class interests, 274
elections in 1924, 215 and culture, 45
end of, 217 in 1920s, 186-187
Russian Union of Neuropathologists and pansexualism, 72-73, 318, 344
Psychiatrists, 116, 117 vs. power, 314, 348
Rybnikov, Nikolai, 188, 263, 270, 277, 279 promiscuity, 49
Rykov, Alexei, 209 of Russians, 138
sexual repression, 244
Sachs, Hanns, 225 sexual revolution, 243
Sadism, 96, 121-122, 151 See also under Andreas-Salomé, Lou;
St. Petersburg, 115-116, 120, 260 Freud, Sigmund; Neurosis
Salvarsan, 120 Shafarevich, Igor’, 394(n1)
Sartre, Jean-Paul, 313, 336 Shaginyan, Marietta, 59, 129-130
Satz, Natalya, 313 Shalamoy, Varlam, 312
Savinkov, Boris, 248-249 Shalevskaya, Fanya, 137
Scheftel, Nina, 167, 176, 177 Shatsky, Stanislav, 192, 194-195, 201,
Scheftel, Pavel, 160, 165, 175, 176 206-207, 267
Schizophrenia, 140, 219 Shatsky Experimental Pediatric Clinic, 201
Schmidt, Alik, 202, 204 Shestov, Lev, 74-76, 245, 253, 254
Schmidt, Otto, 192, 193-194, 197, 199, Shil, Sophia, 20
200, 201, 207, 209-210, 212, Shklovsky, Viktor, 174, 180, 256, 326
213-214, 238, 251, 280, 325 Shterenberg, David, 192
Schmidt, Vera, 199, 200, 202, 209-210, Shulgin, Vasily, 248-249
ONO TARTS 2 Lose li 25)k Siberia, 287
Schmidt, V. V., 197 Sinani, Boris, 119-120
Schopenhauer, Arthur, 40 Sinyavsky, Andrei, 44
Science, 2, 184, 185, 186, 206, 237, 243, Siquieros, David, 251
254, 256, 257, 261, 262;.263,.277, Skoblin, Nikolai, 249, 250, 253, 381(n82),
280, 284, 285, 346 382(n90)
organizations/research centers, 269, 270 Social democrats, 228
Second Psychoneurological Conference Sodomy, 44, 99. See also Homosexuality
(1924), 274 Sokolnicka, Eugenie, 154
Sedov, Lev, 248, 251, 383(n100) Solovyoy, Sergei, 58, 131
406 Index
Solovyov, Vladimir, 2, 24, 29-30, 44, 46, Suicide, 28, 83, 84, 106, 122, 154, 187, 189,
KOS, O74 TAs tSililey2 shil7e Sst. 231, 232, 235, 288, 309, 349,
353(n28), 354(n59) 383(n100)
Sophia, 29, 354(n59) Sumbayey, I. S., 217
Sorokin, Pitirim, 373(n30) Suvchinsky, P. P., 252, 253
Soviet Union, 119 Switzerland, 3, 115
recognition by United States, 295 Symbolism (movement), 1, 4, 42, 46, 47, 48,
See also Russia 55, 62, 66, 68, 76-77, 94, 125, 129,
Spaso House reception (1935), 290-295, 152, 154, 303, 313, 340, 344, 345,
388(n22) 349, 354(n59)
Speech formation, 163-164, 171, 174, 175 Syphilis, 120, 219, 361(n13)
Sphinx, 97-98, 99, 100 “Sythians, The” (Blok), 97-98, 100
Spielrein, Isaac, 132, 168-170, 173, 174, Sytin, Ivan, 195
176, 2635381
Spielrein, Naftul, 145, 175, 176 Tausk, Viktor, 28, 151
Spielrein, Sabina, 2, 4, 5, 26, 30, 53, 55, 61, Taylor system, 266
74, 95, 132-178, 190, 198-199, Teachers, 241, 267-268, 271, 272, 274,
200-201, 208, 211, 217, 272, 280, 282, 284
338 teacher training, 268-269
daughters/stepdaughter of, 163, 167, 176, See also under International Solidarity
We Psychoanalytic Institute and
death of, 132, 350 Laboratory
and death wish, 110, 150-153, 155, 349, Ten Days that Shook the World (Reed), 287
350 Terror, 279, 314-315, 346
and Jung-Freud relationship, 155, 156, Thayer, Charles, 291, 292, 294, 298, 299,
159, 160; 162, 166 300
marriage of, 160, 165, 168, 175 Theater, 123-126, 290, 390(n75)
and Nietzsche, 151, 152-153 theater therapy, 125, 128, 183
return to Russia, 167-168, 170-172, 175 Theater for Oneself (Yevreinov), 125
and speech formation, 163-164, 171 Theory of the New Biology (Yenchman),
work history of, 171 266
See also under Freud, Sigmund; Jung, Carl Theurgy, 46, 47, 78, 357(n28)
Spring Festival. See Spaso House reception Thomas Woodrow Wilson (Bullitt and
Stalin, Josef, 6, 116, 184-185, 193, 212, Freud), 288, 311
227, 234, 242, 248, 249, 255, 295, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality
296, 297, 298, 300, 307, 309, 313, (Freud), 113, 361(n13)
315, 319, 320, 329, 340, 365(n25), “Three Questions, The” (Spielrein), 164
384(n100) Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Nietzsche), 14-15.
Stalin, Vasily, 204, 349 See also Zarathustra
Stanislavsky, Konstantin, 123-124, 309 Tolstoy, Alexei, 313, 326
State Psychoanalytic Institute, 170, 171, Tolstoy, Leo, 2, 22, 53, 109, 113, 366(n44)
194, 200, 201, 202, 212, 213, 214, Tonnies, Ferdinand, 18
215, 221, 245, 251, 349 Torok, Maria, 361(n23)
State publishing house, 193, 203, 221, 325 Totalitarianism, 119, 128, 261, 284, 314,
Steiger, Boris, 290, 294, 296, 302 3295S 308339"349
Steinberg, Aaron, 68-69, 75, 252, 253-254 Totem and Taboo (Freud), 127
Steiner, Rudolf, 2, 39-40, 66. See also Transference, 96, 102, 104, 127, 135, 138,
Anthroposophy 146, 147, 210-211, 212, 345, 348
Stepun, Fyodor, 59, 66, 100, 113, 179, 349, countertransference, 104, 105, 143-146
369(n70) Translations, 218, 327. See also under
Stern, William, 169, 170 Freud, Sigmund
Sternberg, L., 239 Traugott, Natalya, 180, 212, 240, 269
Structuralism, 331, 336 Trauma of Birth, The (Rank), 317
Subconscious, 4, 97, 124, 126, 181, 256. See Trotsky, Leon, 5, 45, 111, 129, 181, 183,
also Unconscious 184, 185, 209, 210, 227, 228,
Sublimation, 31, 45, 73, 133, 160, 229, 241 235-238, 252, 255, 256, 313, 344,
Sudoplatov, Pavel, 381(n82) 345, 349
Index
407
and Adler, 231-232 Voroshiloy, Kliment, 295, 313

children of, 383(n100). See also Sedov, Vulis, A., 390(n66)
Lev Vygotsky, Lev, 5, 6, 173-175, 180, 200, 230,
death of, 248, 251 ZS W2C2 2 /0ND Sie? 8430/8
and Ioffe, 231, 232-233, 235 Vyrubov, Nikolai, 112, 117, 118, IAD, WAAL
and Pavloy, 238-239 131
and psychoanalysis, 197, 229, 236-238 BS Vysheslavtsev, Boris, 62, 73
240, 241, 242, 243, 250, 379(n28), Vyshinsky, Andrey, 257
380(n55)
son of. See Sedov, Lev Wagner, V. A., 270
wife of, 192 Wallace, Henry, 289, 296, 302
Trubetsky, Paolo, 22 Warburg, J. P., 289-290
Tsvetaeva, Marina, 20, 22, 251 War communism, 256
Tsvetkov, I. L., 205, 206 We (Zamyatin), 181, 186, 321, 330
Tukhachevsky, Mikhail, 249, 292 Weber, Max, 369(n70)
Tyutchev, Fyodor, 100 Wedekind, Frank, 18
Weininger, Otto, 44, 71
U (Vs. Ivanov), 182-183, 305 Weisberg, G. P., 193, 201
Ubermensch, 2, 3, 12-13, 14-15, 19, 27, 29, Weizmann, Chaim, 133
40, 51, 100, 152, 184. See also New White, William Alanson, 218
man Wiley, Irena, 291, 299
Uglich Teachers’ Vocational School, 270 Will to power, 16, 120, 231, 350
Ukhtomsky, Alexei, 216, 322 Will to Power (Nietzsche), 16
Ukraine, 287 Wilson, Woodrow, 287, 288, 289
Unconscious, 111, 324, 328, 329, 330, 331, Witt (Comrade), 203
333, 348. See also Subconscious Wolf, Toni, 61
Underground of Genius, The: Sexual Wolf-man. See Pankeev, Sergei
Sources of Dostoevsky’s Oeuvre Women, 8-9, 11, 24, 26, 45, 187, 296
(Kashina-Yevreinova), 126-127 psychoanalysts, 154
Under the Banner of Marxism, 194, 229, World culture, 3
243, 280 World War I, 102
Union Coalition of German Manual and Wotan, 55
Intellectual Laborers, 203 Wulff, Moisei, 4, 115, 130, 131, 192, 200,
United States, 115, 116, 252, 287, 347 MOI, X02, PS, PUSS, AINS, ODL.
recognition of Soviet Union, 295 241, 244, 265-266, 348
Urals, 287
Utopianism, 2, 46, 227, 236, 268, 313, 330, Yanovskaya, L., 301
331, 337, 348 Yegorov (Marshal), 292
Yenchman, Emmanuel, 266, 267, 386(n29)
Vaginoy, Konstantin, 125, 327, 330 Yenukidze, 313
Vakhtangov, Yevgeny, 131 Yermakoy, Ivan, 114, 171, 185, 192, 194,
. Vargyas, N., 197 200, 201, 202, 204, 205, 206,
Vavulin, N., 121 210-211, 212, 214, 218-221, 222,
Versailles peace agreement, 287 266, 325, 345, 348
Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, 25, 227 death of, 221
Vilenkina, R. G., 271, 279 Yermolinsky, Sergei, 179
Vinogradov (of Kiev), 369(n74) Yesenin, Sergei, 187
Violence, 255, 284 Yevreinov, Nikolai, 124-129, 183, 367(n59),
Volin, B. M., 281, 283 390(n75)
Voloshinov, Valentin, 66, 325, 326,
327-330, 331, 332 Zaitsev, Boris, 51, 72
Volynsky, Akim, 21 Zalkind, Aron, 116, 120, 130, 131, 170,
von Bodenstedt, Friedrich, 17 175, 185, 186, 187, 188, 197, 229,
von Gebsattel, Emil, 36 244, 259, 260, 262, 272-277, 281,
von Meysenbug, Malwida, 10-11, 12 284, 348, 349-350
Voronsky, Alexei, 179, 181, 186, 196, 201, death of, 277
241, 252, 372(n19) and Freudianism, 276-277
408 Index
Zamyatin, Yevgeny, 181-182, 183, 186, Zhirmunsky, Victor, 16

308, 321, 330 Zimin, V. T., 260
Zarathustra, 19, 50, 317. See also Nietzsche, Zinovieva-Annibal, Lydia, 48
Friedrich, Thus Spoke Zarathustra Zoshchenko, Mikhail, 217, 305, 341-346,
Zasulich, Vera, 9 372(n23)
Zborovsky, Mark, 251
Zweig, Arnold, 27
Zelinsky, Faddei, 322
Zhdanoy, A. A., 282, 346 Zweig, Stefan, 226, 316

Eros of The Impossible - The History of Psychoanalysis in Russia

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Copyright © 1997 by Westview Press, A Division of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.

First published in Russian as Eros nevozmozhnogo: Istoriia psikhoanaliza v. Rossi in 1993 by

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

At the Crossroads of Worlds and Centuries:

Russian Modernist Culture:

A Case of Neurosis in the Revolutionary Generation:

Psychoanalytic Activity Before World War I

Back to Russia: Sabina Spielrein

Psychoanalysis in the Land of the Bolsheviks

Between Power and Death:

The Ambassador and Satan:

10 The Intelligentsia in Search of Resistance

ieee phe 23 ined

Velo hl. Stele

Contemporary thought hastened toward the questions of existence that

From the 1910s to the 1930s, psychoanalysis was an important component

schools of psychology to Moscow, seem to have exerted an influence on

The peculiarities of psychoanalysis lend a certain specificity to the history

Something Almost Unwomanly

sionate advocate of women’s liberation, devoted to the establishment of

ductive, and potentially dangerous ideal... , in comparison with which all

Don’t Forget the Whip!

If I am leaving you, it is only thanks to your horrible disposition . . . Not only

Yet, the threats of a decisive breakup at times gave way to second

It was, indeed, on the exalted heights of despair that Nietzsche penned

Could it be that Nietzsche found his Ubermensch in a twenty-year-old

Zarathustra Gets Married

corresponded with Russian poets; at one time, he even intended to emigrate

Fiction in the Mass of Reality

Extinguish both my eyes: I can descry you;

The correspondence between Rilke and Lou Andreas-Salomé fills a thick

Moses and Magdalene

for various reasons demonstrated their dependence on Nietzsche, and this

The Origin of Optimism

affective identification with existence, with everything. Narcissus, she

Narcissism, Feminism, and Nationalism

The national dimension of Salomé’s ideas is significant but underappreci-

sult of this fundamental uniqueness of the Russian soul, closer simultane-

Strangely enough, Freud’s amicable comparison promised fulfillment of

The Science of Daily Existence

Steiner were bound together by a common creative impulse—to decipher

1900s as Vyacheslav Ivanov, Vasily Rozanoy, and Andrei Bely. However,

numerous other aspects of life to gender in this all-embracing sense. For

Dissatisfied with his predecessors’ treatment of gender in the fields of phi-

Alchemy of the Soul

The Religion of Dionysus

I'd pluck one of my love’s bright stars;

This straightforward, aggressive male sexuality, this urge to achieve as

ity and conciliarism. In Ivanov’s interpretation, the Ubermensch took on

bious reputation.°2 In other words, Ivanov’s anti-individualism went hand

Of borders, years, and “you” and “I”

“She” was a nymph, dryad, or maenad. The borders in the conventional

erned by an Apollonian “concord and order, secured through strict external

Dionysus and Oedipus

Symbolists on the Couch

Another friend of Bely’s, Emile Medtner, had a different medical history,

Vyacheslav Ivanov’s interest in Jung. According to his daughter, Ivanov fol-

Probing mind, a lighthouse shining