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Febris Erotica: Aleksandr Herzen's Post-Romantic Physiology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Abstract

This article explores Aleksandr Herzen's use of the lovesickness topos in his novel Kto vinovat? (1847) in the context of the long literary and medical traditions of lovesickness and the specifically Russian situation of the 1840s. Valeria Sobol argues that Herzen was among the first Russian writers to exploit the semiotics and diagnostics of lovesickness in order to address the questions of human spirituality and the status of scientific knowledge. Given Herzen's frequentiy proclaimed antispiritualist and antidualist position and the novel's apparent anti-Romantic pathos, one would expect him to reject the essentially dualist notion of lovesickness as a “malady of the soul,” but the novel presents a far more complex picture. Herzen's struggle to reconcile the new scientific spirit of his age with the Romantic heritage reflects the transitional nature of the decade in which the novel was written.

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Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 2006

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References

1. Alexander Herzen, Who Is to Blame? trans. Margaret Wettlin (Moscow, 1978), 98.

2. For a useful examination of the scientific doctrine of lovesickness and its interaction with the literary tradition of the love malady in the west, see Ciavolella, Massimo, La “Malattia d'Amore“ dall'Antichità al Medioevo (Rome, 1976).Google Scholar

3. The physiological doctrine of the love malady was elaborated in medieval medicine. According to medieval physicians, the image of the beloved becomes imprinted on the lover's brain, which leads to an imbalance of the humors and “spirits,” desiccation of the body, sleeplessness, anorexia, and other disorders, potentially even to madness and death. For more detailed descriptions, see Ciavolella, Massimo, “Mediaeval Medicine and Arcite's Love Sickness,” Florilegium: Papers on Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages 1 (1979): 222-41Google Scholar; Heffernan, Carol Falvo, The Melancholy Muse: Chaucer, Shakespeare and Early Medicine (Pittsburgh, 1995)Google Scholar; and Heiple, Daniel L., “The ‘Accidens Amoris’ in Lyric Poetry,” Neophilologus 67, no. 1 (1983): 5564.CrossRefGoogle Scholar The cures suggested to alleviate this condition vary widely from bloodletting, to healthy diet and exercise, to such purely psychological therapies as separation from the object of love, listening to music, walking in a pleasant, soothing environment, and conversation with friends. Ciavolella, “Mediaeval Medicine,” 232- 33. In the most desperate cases, the consummation of love is recommended as “the last refuge and surest remedy.” Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621; New York, 2001), pt. 3:228.

4. Notably, Ivan Sechenov opens his famous tract Reflexes of the Brain (1863) with a reference to the body-soul debate (“Without a doubt, my dear reader, you have happened to be present at disputes about the essence of the soul and its dependence on the body“) and offers his scientific perspective on the problem. I. M. Sechenov, Izbrannye proizvedeniia (Moscow, 1958), 34-36. The turmoil surrounding the publication of Sechenov's tract, from the change of the work's tide to court action against the scientist, reflects the philosophical and ideological ramifications of scientific investigation at the time. For materials documenting Russian censorship's dealing with Sechenov's tract, see Nauchnoe nasledstvo (Moscow, 1956), 3:56-77.

5. The illness and recovery of Kitty Shcherbatskaia in Anna Karenina and Katia Polozova in What Is to Be Done? exemplify Lev Tolstoi's and Nikolai Chernyshevskii's uses of the epistemological potential of the lovesickness topos. For a more detailed analysis, see Valeria Sobol, “Reading the Invisible: The Mind, the Body, and the Medical Examiner in Lev Tolstoy's Anna Karenina,” in Helena Goscilo and Petre Petrov, eds., Studies in Slavic Cultures, no. 2, Anna Karenina on Page and Screen (2001): 9-29.

6. I deliberately limit my analysis to Herzen's Who Is to Blame? here and exclude Ivan Goncharov's An Ordinary Story. Although the two novels, published in the same year, clearly share a number of themes and concerns (most notably, an opposition between a Romantic idealist and a materialist pragmatic, lovesickness, as well as the tubercular female and the male doctor figures), the scope of this article would not allow me to do justice to both novels and treat them equally in depth. For a discussion of Goncharov, see Valeria Sobol, “Febris erotica: Love-Sickness and the Mind-Body Problem in Russian Literature and Culture” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 2003), 171-96.

7. The story is narrated in Plutarch's Life of Demetrius (75 CE).

8. B. P. Reardon, ed., Collected Ancient Greek Novels (Berkeley, 1989), 430.

9. Ibid., 430-31.

10. Ibid., 431. Emphasis mine.

11. It is pre-Romantic literary heroes from the western tradition—Jean-Jacques Rousseau's St. Preux and especially Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Werther—that provided models for the irresistible, sweeping kind of love found in Russian sentimentalist and Romantic fiction. Aleksandr Klushin's novella “Neschastnyi M-v” (The unfortunate M-v, 1793) reveals the literary genesis of the kind of love that takes over the enure person and often results in both mental and physical destruction. The young hero, consumed with a passion that will eventually lead to his suicide, makes an emphatic choice of reading: “He threw aside Young and Pope. Werther and La Nouvelle Héloise lay on his longing breast.” P. A. Orlov, ed. and comp., Russkaia sentimental'naia povest’ (Moscow, 1979), 124.

12. This tendency originates with sentimentalism: many sentimentalist heroes carefully stipulate that, although lovesickness might resemble a physical illness, it is nonetheless a separate phenomenon. For example, in Jean-Francois Marmontel'sLa Veillée (1790), translated by Nikolai Karamzin, the young hero, separated from his beloved, denies the commonplace interpretation of his ailment and alludes to its special status: “I know my illness and know that there is no medicine for it.” The young man's two interlocutors, a sophisticated society marquise and her naive sister, react differently to this statement. The latter interprets his statement as referring to a physical illness (“No cure! At your age!“), while the marquise correctly assesses his condition as lovesickness. See Marmontel', Vechera, in Moskovskoi zhurnal, pt. 5, bk. t (1792): 113. The “Russian Werther” of Mikhail Sushkov's eponymous novella (Rossiiskii Verier, no later than 1792), in describing his passion, also, clearly distinguishes between fever and love, in spite of their identical symptoms: “I am ill, completely ill, and a feverish man does not have my heat.” Orlov, ed. and comp., Russltaia sentimental'naia povest', 210. This distinction is preserved in Romanticism, as evident from the characterization of Nina, the heroine of Evgenii Baratynskii's Romantic poema Bal (The ball, 1828): “She has the heat of an inebriated Bacchante, / The heat of fever, not of love” (V nei zhar upivsheisia vakkhanki, / Goriachki zharne zhar liubvi). See E. A. Baratynskii, Stikhotvoreniia. Poemy (Moscow, 1982), 191.

13. To Tat'iana's insistent questions about the nanny's romantic experience in her youth, the old woman answers, “Oh, come! Our world was quite another! We'd never heard of love, you see.” Alexander Pushkin, Eugene Onegin, trans. James E. Falen (Oxford, 1995), 65. The nanny's “cultural incompetence” in the face of lovesickness makes explicit the status of this topos as a certain literary (and medical) convention developed mostly in the realm of high culture in Russia.

14. Ibid., 66.

15. Ibid. The Russian original is cited from A. S. Pushkin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, ed. B. Tomashevskii, 10 vols. (Moscow, 1962-66), 5:64.

16. Sakharov, V. I., comp., Russkaia romanticheskaia povest' pisatelei 20-40 godov XIX veka (Moscow, 1992), 245-46.Google Scholar

17. On the popularity of Schellingian natural philosophy in Russian science, see Alexander Vucinich, Science in Russian Culture (Stanford, 1963), 1:208-10 and 283-85.

18. A. I. Gertsen, Sobranie sochinenii, 30 vols. (Moscow, 1954-66), 3: 97. Emphasis in the original. It would be erroneous, however, to see Herzen as a pure empiricist or an orthodox positivist. As Irina Sirotkina points out, Herzen's own notion of physiology was significantly indebted to Schellingian natural philosophy. For an insightful discussion of Herzen's complex attitude toward science, see Irina Sirotkina, “A Family Discussion: The Herzens on the Science of Man,” History of the Human Sciences 15, no. 4 (2002): 1-18.

19. Cited in Vucinich, Science in Russian Culture, 1:283. As Vucinich points out, Pavlov and other Russian Schellingians did not deny the usefulness of empirical data but rather promoted “the coalescence of empirical facts and theoretical postulates as a coalescence of science and philosophy.” Ibid., 1:284. Herzen attended Pavlov's lectures and, in his memoir, credits Pavlov with “grafting” German philosophy “on Moscow University.” Herzen, Alexander, My Past and Thoughts, trans. Garnett, Constance, rev. Higgens, Humphrey (New York, 1968), 2:396.Google Scholar

20. V. F. Odoevsky, Russian Nights, trans. Olga Koshansky-Olienikov and Ralph E. Matlaw (New York, 1965), 205. Emphasis in the original. It must be noted that the Russian word opyt can signify, among other things, both “experience” and “experiment.” Therefore, in this context, it is not always clear whether writers are referring to pure empiricism, where only data observable from experience are taken into consideration, with no underlying theoretical assumptions, or to experimentation (which may imply testing of a certain theory). The two meanings of the word became conflated, so when the idealists in their polemics refer to an experiment, they have an inductive approach in mind, as in the case of Odoevskii's doctor, where an accidental experiment/experience leads to a false dieory. Vladimir Dal“s dictionary confirms the broader use of die term: “In general, opytnyi, opyt (practice) is opposed to speculation [umozrenie, umozakliuchenie] (theory) and is based on reality [delo], on empiric, material conviction [chuvstvennom, veshchestvennom ubezhdenii].” Vladimir Dal', Tolkovyi slovar’ zhivogo velikorusskogo iazyka (Moscow, 1956), s.v. “opytyvat'.“

21. Vucinich, Science in Russian Culture, 1:336.

22. In the first Russian physiology textbook, published in 1836, the Schellingian Daniil Vellanskii proclaims the advent of “true physiology,” based largely on speculative and theoretical principles: “One can say positively: there has been no real Physiology at all until our times…. The eternal and infinite essence of the physical and psychogenic world consists of conceivable ideas discovered only by speculation, and not in actual forms of phenomena subject to sensory investigation.” Cited in Koshtoiants, Kh. S., Essays on the Mislory of Physiology in Russia (Washington, D.C., 1964), 29.Google Scholar In spite of this, the experimental approach soon prevailed, as later the same year another textbook on physiology appeared—Aleksei Filomafitskii's Fiziologiia, izdannaia dlia rukovodstva svoikh slushatelei (Physiology, published for the guidance of my students, 1836). This book, rich in factual material, drew on the author's numerous experimental data, as well as on the latest theoretical trends in western physiology, and contained a critical assessment of this new field. Filomafitskii's work, which promoted the experimental method and was received with great appreciation in Russian scientific circles, dealt a significant blow to Vellanskii's Schellingian physiology. When in 1847 Aleksandr Zagorskii—a proponent of experimental physiology—took Vellanskii's place as professor of physiology at the Medical and Surgical Academy, the triumph of the experimental method was all but complete. See Koshtoiants, Essays on the History of Physiology in Russia, 29, 66, and Vucinich, Science in Russian Culture, 1:337.

23. V. G. Belinskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 13 vols. (Moscow, 1953-1956), 10:26. The primary meaning of the word nravstvennyi (moral), in nineteenth-century Russian, was “opposite to the carnal; spiritual, relating to the soul.” See Dal', Tolkovyi slovar', s.v. “nrav.“

24. Tseitlin, A. G., Stanovlenie realizma v russkoi literature (russkii fiziologicheskii ocherk) (Moscow, 1965), 100.Google Scholar

25. Including, for instance, S. Soloshenko's articles on respiration and the physiology of the brain in vol. 39 (1845); the review of the Meditsinskii entsiklopedicheskii leksikon in vol. 43 (1845); and an article on the physiology of nutrition in connection with the problems of respiration and animal heat in vol. 44 (1846).

26. The genre, which took shape in France in the 1830s and early 1840s and established itself in Russian literature of the 1840s, strove to dissect k corps social, just as physiology examines organic bodies. Each sketch typically focused on a particular “slice” of life—a social or professional group, a specific neighborhood, or even one floor of a multistory building. This literary technique was clearly influenced by the reigning analytical trend in contemporary science. See Tseitlin, Stanovlenie realizma v russkoi literature, for an illuminating discussion of the physiological sketch and its literary and cultural context, both in France and Russia.

27. For a more detailed discussion of the natural school, see Kuleshov, V. I., Natural'naia shkola v russkoi literature XIX v. (Moscow, 1965)Google Scholar, and Mann, Iu. V., “Filosofiia i poetika ‘natural'noi shkoly,“’ in Stepanov, N. L. and Fokht, U. R., eds., Problemy tipologii russkogo realizma (Moscow, 1969), 241305.Google Scholar

28. Malia, Martin, in Alexander Herzen and the Birth of Russian Socialism (Cambridge, Mass., 1961)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, argues that Herzen's views in the 1840s remained essentially idealist (in the sense that he believed in the development of humankind and the universe as the unfolding of a rational principle, or Idea), although in this period Herzen adopts a largely rationalist, atheist, and monist position often mistaken for a pre-Marxian materialism.

29. Gertsen, Sobranie sochinenii, 3:32.

30. Ibid., 3:111. Several scholars have commented on Herzen's reductive view of Romanticism and his near-obsession with dualism as the most characteristic feature of Romantic sensibility, in spite of the fact diat certain Romantic philosophers (such as Schelling) and poets (Samuel Taylor Coleridge) strove to overcome the duality. These scholars mostly agree that the explanation for this view should be sought in Herzen's political views, as well as in his personal experience with Romantic idealism in the 1830s. As Malia points out, the dualist worldview posed more of a threat to Herzen's political ideals than to his philosophical views: “Herzen castigates the ‘dilettantes’ for failing to recognize the unity of the universe with such virulence that one might think that ‘dualism’ and not autocracy was the chief impediment to progress in Russia. The reason for this alarm was that dualism furnished the philosophical basis for all retreats from reality into abstract idealism and religion.” Malia, Alexander Herzen and the Birth of Russian Socialism, 242. In Lidiia Ginzburg's view, attacking “belated Romanticism” in literature and the “Schellingianism” of the Slavophiles in philosophy was, in the 1840s, an indispensable polemical move toward asserting the new ideology (materialism, political liberalism, and “new morality“). It is indicative, then, that for his characterization of Romanticism Herzen selects the most spiritualist—and politically conservative—features of Romanticism, including its fascination with the Middle Ages and its strong ties to Catholicism. See L. la. Ginzburg, “Gertsen i voprosy estetiki ego vremeni (stat'ia ‘Diletanty-romantiki’),” in Iu. G. Oksman, ed., Problemy izucheniia Gertsena (Moscow, 1963), 122-46. A contemporary Russian scholar shows that Herzen perceived dualism at a more universal level—as a fundamental perceptive and discursive model of European civilization, a secularized form of the Christian myth, and the basis for the major metaphors and philosophical and social doctrines of the west. He also notes the political implications of the dualist worldview for Herzen: “Dualism has become, in Herzen's opinion, the universal and legitimizing foundation of all contemporary forms of subjugation of the human being [nasiliia nad chelovecheskoi lichnost'iu].” Ruslan Khestanov, Aleksandr Gertsen: Improvizatsiia proliv doktriny (Moscow, 2001), 273. On the Romantics’ search for unity, see M. H. [Meyer Howard] Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York, 1971), esp. 179-83.

31. A. I. Gertsen v russkoi kritike: Sbornik statei (Moscow, 1953), 169.

32. See Ia. Elsberg, Gertsen: Zhizn' i tuorchestvo (Moscow, 1956), 155.

33. Mann, “Filosofiia i poetika ‘natural'noi shkoly,'” 266.

34. Markovich, V. M., “O roli dialogicheskogo konflikta v romane Gertsena ‘Kto vinovat?“’ Studia Slavica Hungariana 23 (1977): 125-36.Google Scholar

35. Crenier's excellent close analysis of the novel's rhetorical strategies is presented in her article, Svetlana Grenier, “Herzen's Who Is to Blame?The Rhetoric of the New Morality,” Slavic and East European Journal 39, no. 1 (1995): 14-28.

36. Grenier does point out the use of scientific discourse as one of the author's rhetorical techniques aimed at absolving his protagonists from moral judgment, but she does not focus on this aspect of the novel.

37. Herzen, Who Is to Blame? 98.

38. Ibid., 101.

39. Ibid., 99.

40. See Foucault, Michel, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception, trans. Sheridan Smith, A. M. (New York, 1994), 180-81.Google Scholar In chapter 10, Foucault also analyzes medicine's movement from the ontological and classificatory approach to illnesses (including fevers) to the study of pathological reactions. A pivotal role in this transition was played by François Broussais (1772-1838) who, in the early nineteenth century, explained the phenomenon of fever not in terms of symptoms and organs but as a functional disorder: the inflammation of a tissue in reaction to an irritant. See ibid., 183-92. In Russia, however, the nosological approach to fever was still alive in the 1840s. A bibliographical note in the Otechestvennye zapiski discusses the book Kratkoe svedenie o vodolechebnom zavedenii v Lopukhinke (Brief information about a hydropathic institution in Lopukhinka, 1846). Various types of fevers are listed among the illnesses that have been especially successfully treated in this institution. See Otechestvennye zapiski 46, no. 6 (1846): 83.

41. Fordyce, George, Five Dissertations on Fever (Boston, 1815), 1516.Google Scholar Cited in Candace Ward, “'Cruel Disorder“: Female Bodies, Eighteenth-Century Fever Narratives, and the Sentimental Novel,” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 32 (2003): 96.

42. “O likhoradkakh voobshche (Sochinenie Aglinskogo vracha),” Sanktpeterburgskie vrachebnye vedomosti, pt. 2, no. 41 (1794): 117. Emphasis mine.

43. Ward, “'Cruel Disorder,'” 97.

44. Sir Richard Manningham, The Symptoms, Nature, Causes, and Cure of the Febricula, or LittleFever: Commonly Called the Nervous or Hysteric Fever; the Fever on the Spirits; Vapours, Hypo, or Spleen (London, 1746), vi. Cited in Ward, “'Cruel Disorder,'” 97.

45. Cited in Foucault, Birth of the Clinic, 178.

46. See Sobol, “Febris Erotica,” 96-97.

47. “Glauberova sol'” or Sal glauberi, was a traditional remedy for fever. Its curative effect is mentioned, for example, in “O triasuchkakh ili peremezhaiushchikhsia likhoradkakh,” Sanktpelerburgskie vrachebnye vedomosti, pt. 2, no. 44-48 (1794): 141-70.

48. See, for example, the narrator's statement, “He [Doctor Krupov] may have been a good physician for the body, but he had too heavy a hand for treating spiritual illnesses.” Therefore I cannot completely agree with Malia's interpretation of the Doctor Krupov figure (which reemerges in some of Herzen's other works) as “one of his author's favorite spokesmen, in fact Herzen himself in his Voltairian moments.” Malia, Alexander Herzen and the Birth of Russian Socialism, 271. Although Doctor Krupov's rationalism and practicality do offer a sobering and refreshing perspective on other major characters’ exalted idealism or intense introspection, the crude empiricism of his worldview (at least as presented in this novel) was nearly as unacceptable to Herzen as the dreamy idealism of the likes of Krutsiferskii. Both in his Dilettantism in Science and in Letters on the Study of Nature, Herzen criticizes one-sided empiricism (although he does attack the other extreme—Romantic idealism— more vigorously).

49. Herzen, My Past and Thoughts, 2:845.

50. This split, described in book 4 of My Past and Thoughts where Herzen dates it to 1846, the same year in which the novel Who Is to Blame'? was completed, is caused precisely by Granovskii's rejection of his friend's monist views: “I shall never accept your dry, cold idea of the unity of soul and body, for with it the immortality of the soul disappears.” Ibid., 2:586.

51. The young Chernyshevskii, as Irina Paperno demonstrates, had to grapple with a similar problem at approximately the same time. When recording and analyzing his emotions in his diary from 1848, Chernyshevskii, in order to overcome the dualism inherent in the love discourse, often employs a realized metaphor: he literalizes such expressions as “the feeling heart” or “movements of the heart,” interpreting the heart as an anatomical organ, and turns these common figures of speech into descriptions of physiological processes. See Irina Paperno, Chernyshevsky and the Age of Realism: A Study in the Semiotics of Behavior (Stanford, 1988), 68-72.

52. Herzen, Who Is to Blame? 83.

53. Ibid., 233. The theory of miasmas—noxious exhalations, especially foul odors— was a common explanation for infectious illnesses before the germ theory developed in the second half of the nineteenth century. The contemporary understanding of miasmas can be inferred from the “Uchenye izvestiia” (Scientific news) subsection of Otechestvennye zapiski, where miasmas are defined as “infectious elements that cause illnesses” and as “a product of fermenting and rotting of a substance that remained from a living being.” “lady, iazvy, zarazy: Izsledovaniia libikha,” Otechestvennye zapiski 39, no. 4 (1845): 133 and 135.

54. Herzen, Who Is to Blame? 233. Emphasis mine.

55. Dal“s dictionary gives three meanings of this word: “forgetting,” “oblivion,” and “pathological sleep” (boleznennaia spiachka). Dal', Totkovyi slovar', s.v. “zabyvat“'. Herzen clearly uses this word in the third sense, but the theme of forgetting is implicitly present thanks to its etymological associations.

56. Herzen, Who Is to Blame? 232. Emphasis mine.

57. Here is where I somewhat disagree with Grenier's interpretation. Krutsiferskaia's intense psychogenic reaction to her infidelity demonstrates that Herzen does not entirely exempt his characters from moral responsibility: they (unconsciously) admit their guilt through their physical responses.

58. Herzen, Who Is to Blame? 122. Emphasis mine.

59. The concept of the “sensitive person” as both emotionally and physically fragile was a commonplace of sentimentalist literature and medicine, both in Russia and in the west. See, for example, Mrs. Donnellan's letter to Samuel Richardson, in which she links his refined sensibility as a writer with his delicate and sickly physical constitution: “Misfortune is, those who are fit to write delicately, must think so; those who can form a distress must be able to feel it; and as the mind and the body are so united as to influence one another, the delicacy is communicated, and one too often finds softness and tenderness of mind in a body equally remarkable for those qualities.” Cited in G. S. Rousseau, “Nerves, Spirits, and Fibres: Towards Defining the Origins of Sensibility,” in Studies in the Eighteenth Century III: Papers Presented at the Third David Nichol Smith Memorial Seminar, Canberra, 1973 (Toronto, 1976), 152. In Russia, Aleksandr Radishchev explains humans’ innate predisposition toward sympathy by their “tenderness [nezhnost’] in the nervous constitution and irritability in the structure of the fibers.” A. N. Radishchev, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 3 vols. (Moscow-Leningrad, 1941), 2:54; emphasis mine. Articles in Sanktpeterburgskie vrachebnye vedomosti frequently refer to people of “gentle and sensitive constitution” (nezhnogo i chuvstvitel'nogo slozheniia) as requiring special therapies and medications. See, for example, “O triasuchkakh,” 157, and “O krovopuskanii,” Sanktpeterburgskie vrachebnye vedomosti, pt. 1, no. 4 (1792): 157 and 25. Emphasis mine.

60. Herzen, My Past and Thoughts, 2:900.

61. Herzen, Who Is to Blame? 236. In another polemical gesture against pre-Romantic physiological discourse, Herzen consistently uses “irritability,” with its more materialist connotations, rather than the more spiritualized “sensibility,” which had been compromised by its associations with the sentimentalist movement. On the philosophical implications of the two terms, see Vila, Anne C., Enlightenment and Pathology: Sensibility in the Literature and Medicine of Eighteenth-Century France (Baltimore, 1998), pt. 1.Google Scholar Interestingly, Herzen's monist orientation is, in fact, akin to the sentimentalists’ preoccupation with the body-soul union, but he is more concerned with asserting the primacy of the corporeal aspect in human life and therefore distrusts the sentimentalists’ physiological vocabulary and their tendency to “spiritualize” physiology.

62. Herzen, Who Is to Blame? 242.

63. Ibid.

64. Ibid., 263.

65. As noted above, separation from the beloved object was among the traditional remedies proposed for lovesickness from antiquity on. In Petrarch's Secretum meum (1342-43), an imagined dialogue with St. Augustine structured as a conversation between the patient and the doctor, St. Augustine prescribes this particular treatment: “What else can I say, then, but this slighdy changed line from Vergil: ‘Ah! Flee this beloved land, this shore so dear to you'? For how can you ever be safe here, where there are so many reminders of your wounds and where you are oppressed by the sight of things present and the memory of the past? You will have to be cured by a ‘change of scene, just as the sick who are not responding to treatment.'” [Francesco Petrarca], Petrarch's Secretum: With Introduction, Notes, and Critical Anthology, trans, and ed. Davy A. Carozza and H.James Shey (New York, 1989), 118. Burton, in his Anatomy of Melancholy, also mentions the removal of the object of love as one of the ways to cure love-melancholy (pt. 3:195).

66. Herzen, Who Is to Blame? 208.

67. As Lidiia Ginzburg has repeatedly pointed out, the young Herzen (as well as Belinskii) was greatly influenced by Romantic idealism in the 1830s and therefore had a personal stake in his struggle with Romanticism. See Ginzburg, “Gertsen i voprosy estetiki ego vremeni,” 132, and Ginzburg, “Belinskii v bor'be s zapozdalym romantizmom,” O starom i novom: Stat'i i ocherhi (Leningrad, 1982), 229-44.

68. In another article, Grenier shows Tolstoi's deep involvement with Herzen's ideas and discusses both die fundamental differences and a certain affinity between the two writers’ worldviews. Svedana Grenier, “Tolstoj's Dialogue with Gercen in Anna Karenina,” Russian Literature 51, no. 4 (May 2002): 371-401.