SLAV Lecture

The Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures

cordially invites you to a talk given by

Rebecca Reich

Harvard University

“Seeking Asylum: What Madness Meant in Late Soviet Culture”

Thursday, February 3, 2011


5:15–6:45 pm, Maple Room, IMU

The unsanctioned investigation of human rights abuses during the late Soviet period brought samizdat reports of the psychiatric diagnosis and compulsory hospitalization of dissidents for political reasons. This talk examines artistic reactions to the politicization of psychiatry through two prisms: Venedikt Erofeev’s 1985 play Walpurgis Night or The Steps of the Commander and the Soviet and post-Soviet receptions of Miloš Forman’s 1975 film One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Though different in time and place of origin, both works are set in psychiatric institutions and center on patient-heroes who question authority and defy social norms. The commonalities between the ways in which Erofeev’s madhouse was depicted and the ways in which Forman’s madhouse was understood indicate that art on psychiatric themes answered the need for a public sphere in which political, social and psychological deviance could be embraced.