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Abstract:

The article analyses L.N. Andreyev’s short story “Mysl’” (“Thought”, 1902) both on the formal-compositional level and on that of its ‘clinical’ history. After having premeditatedly murdered his friend Savelov, Doctor Kerzhentsev, the protagonist, asks himself and the psychiatrists carrying out his clinical evaluation the question: when he killed Savelov, was he crazy or did he simulate madness to escape justice? The question remains unanswered both in the story and in the play with the same title (1914). Between 1903 and 1914, numerous, often eminent, scholars — psychiatrists and neurologists — tried to answer this question, but were unable to come to any definitive conclusion. In the 1980s, an Italian Jungian psychiatrist explained why it was impossible to subject a literary character to an objective psychiatric analysis, and in the early 2000s a Canadian literary critic turned the problem on its head, stating that it was Andreyev who was mentally ill; it was not Kerzhentsev who simulated madness, but rather his author who simulated sanity. Kerzhentsev’s question therefore remains unanswered, but over time “Mysl’” has also been enriched with a historical and sociological value, becoming representative of the Russian cultural and social atmosphere of the early 1900s, the years defined as the “Little Apocalypse” and the “Nervous Century”.

Keywords: Andreyev, “Mysl’”, Kerzhentsev, Literary Analysis, Psychiatric Diagnoses.