Riccardo Nicolosi's 2017 monograph Degeneration: Literature and Psychiatry in Russia offers a deeply researched and carefully argued thesis about degeneration as a kind of masterplot in late nineteenth century Russian literature and culture. In Russia, psychiatry as a profession only really emerged in the 1880s, and as other researchers have also shown, when psychiatrists sought exemplars of the diseases they were seeing, they found them in literary characters. These two approaches to the human psyche, medical and literary, and their interrelationship in the Russian context at the end of the nineteenth century, form the subject of this comprehensive volume.

In his book, Nicolosi explores the differences in generic approaches between literary and medical “stories.” Key to this study is how the Russian reception of the novels of Émile Zola, starting in the 1870s, introduced the narrative of degeneration into the national conversation. Following the scientific narrative through its literary incarnations, Nicolosi demonstrates how the relationship between French naturalism, Russian psychological prose, and psychiatric medical discourses is mediated through theories of degeneration as well as Darwinian theory. The story culminates in a turn-of-the-century eugenic utopian novel, penned by Konstantin Merezhkovskii, which posits a cleansed future society akin to a colony of worker bees supporting idyllic lives for child-like humans and ruled by a class of patrons (pokroviteli) who engage in careful genetic selection to create and maintain this “utopia.” As Nicolosi argues, the ideas of racial hygiene and antisemitism present in Heaven on Earth (Rai zemnoi, 1903) find parallels in contemporary thinkers and respond to a general sense that Russian degeneration was a significant factor in late imperial times.

The primary “heroes” of Vyrozhdenie include novelists Dmitrii Mamin-Sibiriak, Ieronim Iasinskii, Piotr Boborykin, Alexander Amfiteatrov, Vladimir Giliarovskii, Vlas Doroshevich, and Alexei Svirskii, along with better known names like Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin, Fedor Dostoevskii, Lev Tolstoi, and Anton Chekhov. Examining the ways in which these authors represented deviant forms of social behavior, Nicolosi also explores the history of Russian psychiatry, including theorists of degeneration like the psychiatrists Pavel Kovalevskii and Vladimir Chizh, who saw social diseases as a danger to the empire and feared that criminal behavior signified an atavistic return to humanity's primitive state. In the end, the book demonstrates how the literary discourse of degeneration was supplemented by a medical/psychiatric discourse leading to the diagnosis of a “nervous century” (205).

On one hand, this book is exemplary of international scholarship at its very best. Nicolosi, educated in Italy and Germany, accesses English, Russian, Serbian, Croatian, German, French, and Italian-language scholarship and discourses, both scientific and literary, about psychiatry, mental illness, and degeneration. Comprehensive coverage of related topics and wide-ranging exemplars from world literary and medical narratives are matched by the depth of engagement with theory and scholarship. On the other hand, translated from German into contemporary Russian, the book requires patient and careful reading; in part due to the specialized vocabulary and even the sentence structure, Vyrozhdenie is not a page-turner. Those who persevere will receive a very thorough grounding in the literature of degeneration and some excellent insight into the Russian authors of the 1880s and 1890s.

Most fascinating of all, perhaps, is that each of the “heroes” of the book uses the discourse of degeneration in his own way, and their novels and narratives offer significant differences. And yet they are all contributing to the same project as they explore the concepts of nasledie, nasledstvo, nasledsvennost΄ (perhaps best rendered as heritage, inheritance, and heredity), and how they play out in generations of human beings. The political repercussions of these phenomena mostly lay outside the argument, although Nicolosi gives signposts to such events as the Great Reforms and the 1905 revolution that form an integral part of the picture. Reclaiming Russian naturalism in his detailed analysis of “half-forgotten” authors such as Dmitrii Mamin-Sibiriak, Feliks Iasinskii, and Petr Boborykin, Nicolosi forces a rethinking of the Russian novel of this period and convincingly explores the various epistemologies that come into conflict when they are examined in the context of more “canonical” authors (14); he also digs into the question of Charles Darwin in Russia, arguing that a process of “Darwinization of degeneration” took place (372). The results enrich our understanding of literary, scientific, and medical discourses and lead directly into parodic fiction of the twentieth century, including Mikhail Bulgakov's Heart of a Dog (1925), Alexander Beliaev's Amphibious Man (1928), and Sergei Tretiakov's I Want a Baby (1926). Given recent scholarly interest in the Russian reception of Darwin and in less canonical writers and texts, including Boborykin and Tretiakov, this book is essential reading.