EKATERINA IVANOVNA AND SALOMÉ: CULTURAL SIGNPOSTS OF DEGENERATIVE ILLNESS

By the first decade of the twentieth century, Russia was experiencing its own decadent period of cultural degeneration. Into the breech of medical discourse stepped Russian writers as well, among them Leonid Andreev. An individual stigmatized as an acute neurasthenic, Andreev produced literary works littered with deviants and degenerates. The production of his play Ekaterina Ivanovna (1912), in which a wife and mother succumbs to sexual licentiousness, seemed like yet another sign of the times. The spirited social debates on mental illness, morality and sexual deviance which followed from this play have since faded, and little is now written about this significant signpost of Russian societal degeneration. Here, White reconstructs the discourse surrounding Ekaterina Ivanovna as a work representative of a much larger debate on degeneration theory, which, although widely discussed in its European context, has not yet been afforded the same level of scholarly attention in Russian cultural studies. He argues that Andreev correctly validated psychiatric theories on degenerate behavior, thereby turning seeming fact into fiction, which Russian psychiatrists cited as proof that social degeneration was pernicious.