Etkind impossible eros read. Eli Zaretsky “Eros of the Impossible” and the Problem of Freudo-Marxism

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Advantages: An excellent book, I read it back in school, it talks in great detail about the path of psychology as a science in the Soviet Union. And of course, about people. The book is educational and sad, about how life beckoned and promised but gave nothing.

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ALEXANDER E T K I N D

EROS OF THE IMPOSSIBLE
HISTORY OF PSYCHOANALYSIS IN RUSSIA

SAINT PETERSBURG

Content
Introduction. With. 3-12
2. Chapter I. On the brink of worlds and eras: the work and life of Lou Andreas-Salome. With. 13-46
3. Chapter II. Russian modern culture between Oedipus and Denis. With. 47-96
4. Chapter III. A case of neurosis in the generation of revolutionaries: Sergei s. 97-129
Pankeev, aka the Wolf Man.
5. Chapter IV. Psychoanalytic activity before World War I. p.130-158
6. Chapter V. Pure play with a Russian girl: Sabrina Spoelrein. With. 159-212
7. Chapter VI. Psychoanalysis in the country of the Bolsheviks. With. 213-268
8. Chapter VII. Between power and death: psychoanalytic
With. 269-310
hobbies of Leon Trotsky and other comrades.
9. Chapter VIII. Pedological perversions in the system. With. 311-341
10. Chapter IX. The Ambassador and Satan: William K. Bullitt
Bulgakov's Moscow. With. 342-376
11. Chapter X. Intelligentsia in search of resistance. With. 377-419
12. Conclusion. With. 420-424

Eros of the impossible
History of psychoanalysis in Russia
Alexander Etkind

Psychoanalysis developed quickly and uniquely in the atmosphere of the “Silver Age” and the first futurist experiments of the Bolsheviks. Its history in Russia unusually intertwined the intellectual influences of Freud and Nietzsche. The book consists of chapters devoted to different periods of development of Russian psychoanalysis, which are interspersed with life stories of famous Russian analysts and patients. The love affair of C. Jung with the Russian psychoanalyst Sabina Shpilreya is explored in detail. In the light of new materials about M. Bulgakov’s friendship with the first US Ambassador to the USSR and Freud’s patient William Bullitt, a new interpretation of “The Master and Margarita” is given. The author has found new archival materials.
The book reveals a fascinating, previously almost unknown line of development of Russian thought. Psychoanalysts and symbolist poets, anthroposophists and Marxists, stars of European modern culture and NKVD agents - they all meet again on these pages.
The author of the book is Alexander Markovich Etkind, born in 1955, candidate of psychological sciences, author of 80 scientific works in the field of social and clinical psychology, political sociology, Russian intellectual history, as well as the monograph “The psychogy of Post-Totaitarism in Russia”, London, 121 p (together with L.Ya. Gozman). Published in the magazines “October”, “Neva”, “Zvezda”, “XX Century and the World”, “Questions of Philosophy”, “Questions of Psychology”, “Time and We”, “Systemic Research”, “Man”, “Frenesie” , "L"Ane", "Cahier du monde russe et sovietique", "Partizan revue".

Introduction
The intellectual history of Russia in the 20th century within the country turned out to be falsified to no less extent than its political history. The results of research by Western historians and emigrant historians, free from ideological pressure, are still, unfortunately, little known in Russia. However, these studies in some cases also turned out to be limited, both due to the inaccessibility of archives and as a result of the distance between their authors and the Soviet experience of interest to them. Unhappy is society, the truth about which is written by others; but even this truth can be flawed - incomplete and monological.
History written from within - and, especially, from within a global historical crisis - is inevitably subjective. But this is exactly the kind of subjectivity that a changing society needs. Direct experience of the historical process distorts perspective; but also enriches it with the experience of people who know exactly what their History has led them to today.

The Russian tradition did not know and still does not know such specialization of professionals as is usual in the West; academic and artistic cultures were fused in it by the same spiritual influences and political ideas. The history of psychoanalysis in Russia involves not only doctors and psychologists, but also decadent poets, religious philosophers and professional revolutionaries.
The rise of Russian culture in the short decade and a half between the turn of the century and the First World War produced its peaks and troughs in the humanities as well as in politics and social thought, painting and poetry. Russia of the Silver Age was one of the centers of high European civilization. Although among the refined representatives of modern culture there was no shortage of prophets who foreshadowed the imminent flowering of barbarism, the most modern trends in the sciences and arts developed in the capitals and provinces. The arguments of the Slavophiles retreated before the pressure of the West, but at that time the reforms were not destined to come true. A series of military defeats, the endless mistakes of the tsar, disappointment in the possibilities of changing the real course of things, a premonition of an imminent catastrophe - all this aroused interest in esoteric secrets and forced one to take romantic dreams on faith. “Eros of the impossible” - this is how the leader of Russian symbolism Vyacheslav Ivanov formulated the mood of the era. The stormy life of the intelligentsia gave rise to increasingly amazing fruits, from table turning to Freemasonry, from the orgies of the court whips to the political underground of the Socialist Revolutionaries...
Thought was directed immediately to the ultimate questions of existence, passing through the concrete diversity of life along the way. Love and death have become the main and almost the only forms of human existence, the main means of his understanding; and having become such, they merged with each other in a kind of supernatural unity. The intuition of the unity of love and death has become an invariant of this culture, embracing such different manifestations as the philosophy of Vl. Solovyov, late stories by L. Tolstoy, poetry by Vyach. Ivanov, novels by Dm. Merezhkovsky, dramas by L. Andreev and psychoanalysis by S. Spielrein.
Friedrich Nietzsche was as popular as anywhere else in Russia at the turn of the century. His contempt for everyday life and his call for a revaluation of all values ​​had a long-term, still not fully comprehended, impact on Russian thought. According to the most authoritative witness, Alexandre Benois, “Nietzsche’s ideas then acquired a directly topical character (much like how Freud’s ideas subsequently acquired the same character).”
Nietzsche's passionate preaching was not at all designed for practical implementation. But on Russian soil it acquired specific features that seemed visible and accessible for implementation in everyone’s life. As Fyodor Stepun wrote: “Dostoevsky’s remark that the Russian idea lies in the implementation of all ideas is true not only in relation to public, but also to personal life” (4). What for Nietzsche and most of his European readers was a flight of the spirit and an exquisite metaphor, which only a barbarian can take literally, in Russia became the basis for social practice.
A new man, a Superman, trampling with his existence the outdated common sense, must be created and will be created here. Orthodox philosophers, starting with Vladimir Solovyov, called for building God-manhood on earth, remaking created man. Then this impulse was exhausted in the magical abstractions of the anthroposophy of Rudolf Steiner, which promised the same thing, but in an easier way. Leaders of the future Soviet intelligentsia such as Gorky, Mayakovsky, Lunacharsky were strongly influenced by Nietzsche in their early years, and their later Bolshevism may have borrowed much more from Nietzsche than from Marx. The political extremism of Russian Marxists then coexisted with the spiritual extremism of Nikolai Fedorov, who demanded that all human pursuits be abandoned for the sake of his “philosophy of the common cause,” which consisted in the scientific method of resurrecting all people who lived on earth. Now, almost a century later, it is easy to judge that these spiritual currents that seemed completely different to their contemporaries are common in their utopianism, based on faith in science and a disdain for the existing order of things, akin to Nietzsche.
The program book of A. A. Bogdanov, the only serious theorist among the Bolsheviks (and a psychiatrist by training), under the precise title “New World,” began with epigraphs from the Bible, Marx and Nietzsche. “Man is the bridge to the superman,” Bogdanov quoted and continued from myself: “The man has not yet arrived, but he is close, and his silhouette is clearly visible on the horizon.” It was 1904.
Man as he is turns out to be not a goal and an unconditional value, but a means for building some future being. As Nietzsche taught: “Man is something that must be overcome.” This idea seems to us today, based on the experience of the past century, not only dangerous, but also, in the literal sense of the word, misanthropic. At the beginning of the century, many agreed with it. Writers -decadents and Orthodox theosophists, high-ranking masons and ideologists of terrorism irreconcilably argued about the means of the future transformation of man and humanity - mystical or scientific, aesthetic or political... But the very goal and necessity of changing human nature was questioned by few.
The Orthodox ideal of conciliarity - a special non-democratic collectivism based on a priori consent and obedience - added its own nuance to ideas about the goals and means of transformation. The spiritual tradition, which developed under the diverse and seemingly incompatible influences of Nietzscheanism, Orthodoxy and social extremism, acquired a special, instructive integrity even today. The victorious Bolsheviks, in their programs for the mass remaking of man, brought the idea to its embodiment - the embodiment of what was barbaric and suicidal for this culture, but perhaps within its framework the only one that could actually be realized.

From the beginning of the 1990s until the 1930s, psychoanalysis was one of the important components of Russian intellectual life. In the multicolored mosaic of a rapidly developing culture, the unusual ideas of Sigmund Freud were accepted quickly, without the fierce resistance they met in the West. In the years preceding the First World War, psychoanalysis was more known in Russia than in France and even, according to some evidence, in Germany. In Russia, Freud wrote in 1912, “a genuine epidemic of psychoanalysis seems to have begun.”
The eternal Russian “longing for world culture” found natural satisfaction in those times when O. Mandelstam and B. Pasternak, V. Ivanov and A. Bely, N. Evreinov and S. Diaghilev, I. Ilyin and L. Shestov, L. Andreas-Salome and S. Spielrein lived, studied and worked abroad for years (the next Russian generation will be deprived of this luxury of leaving and returning home). Today it is difficult to even imagine how closely the intelligentsia of those years was connected with the intellectual life of Europe, how accessible they were for people from Russian capitals and towns, the best universities, salons and clinics in Germany and France, Austria and Switzerland.
Returning home, the young analysts found an interested clientele in a society that was freeing itself from old addictions with unprecedented speed. The first Russian psychoanalysts occupied prestigious positions in the medical world, were closely connected with literary and political circles, had their own journal, university clinic, sanatorium, and moved towards the institutionalization of psychoanalysis according to the best European models. Among their patients were prominent figures of the “Silver Age.” Psychoanalysis, which Emilius Medtner and Ivan Ilyin underwent in the 10s, was one of the underlying reasons for the split in symbolism, which influenced the fate and work of its leaders. Under the influence of numerous translations of Freud in In the language of Russian intellectuals, from Vyacheslav Ivanov to K. Stanislavsky, the word “subconscious” (specific to psychoanalysis, in contrast to the older word “unconscious”) is spreading.
The history of psychoanalysis is full of amazing people from Russia who became outstanding figures in the psychoanalytic movement. The brilliant and cosmopolitan Lou Andreas-Salomé, a psychoanalyst and close friend of Freud, was one of the brightest stars of pan-European modern culture and at the same time retained clear traces of the influence of Russian philosophy in her work. Max Eitingon, Freud's closest student, headed the International Psychoanalytic Association for many years, financing its activities with money controlled by the Bolshevik government. Sabina Spielrein, the most romantic figure in the history of psychoanalysis, returned to Russia in 1923 to contribute to the construction of a utopia, and lived the second half of her life in poverty, loneliness and fear...
These and other immigrants from Russia, who maintained various connections with their country and often returned to it, formed an important part of the circle of Freud and his first students. Analysts in Vienna, Zurich and Berlin had been treating wealthy Russian patients for years. As in other European countries, in Russia in the 10-20s, its own psychoanalytic tradition began to form. Nikolai Osipov, Moses Wolf, Tatyana Rosenthal, Mikhail Asatiani, Leonid Droznes were psychoanalysts who studied or consulted with Freud himself, Jung or Abraham; all of them returned to Russia before the revolution to begin active work as practitioners and popularizers of psychoanalysis.
Their further fate was different. Rosenthal committed suicide in 1921. Asatiani abandoned psychoanalysis, and the Institute of Psychiatry in Tbilisi bears his name. Osipov and Wulf again, and forever, left for the West in the 20s. Wulf, together with Eitingon, laid the foundation for psychoanalysis in Israel. In Prague, Osipov, with his student Fyodor Dosuzhkov, founded the local psychoanalytic movement, so that even now psychoanalysis in Czechoslovakia has continuity from Russian analysts. In Russia itself, the next generation of psychoanalysts, which came into force in the West at the end of the 20s, failed to realize itself.
Freud carefully, first with hope, then with fear and finally with despair and disgust, followed the developments of events in Soviet Russia. He, however, sought to refute the easily arising impression that his “The Future of an Illusion,” like other sociological works of the 20s, was brought to life precisely by the Soviet experience: “I am not going to evaluate the enormous cultural experiment that is currently takes place over vast areas between Europe and Asia,” Freud wrote in 1927. But three years later he admitted to S. Zweig that what was happening in these spaces concerned him as a personal problem: “The Soviet experiment... deprived us of hope and illusion, without giving anything in return. We are all headed for hard times... I regret my seven grandchildren." Among those with whom Freud discussed Russian problems for decades was his patient and co-author William Bullitt, the first US Ambassador to the USSR. He left his characteristic mark on “The Master and Margarita” and the unexpected mutual intersections of the destinies of Freud, Bullitt and Mikhail Bulgakov allow us to read this novel in a new way.
The problems addressed by emerging psychoanalysis many times found themselves at the center of the searches of the Russian intelligentsia. One of the most unusual Russian thinkers, Vasily Rozanov, gained scandalous fame by trying to solve the mysteries of gender. The greatest writer of the era, Andrei Bely, tried to reconstruct the experience of early childhood in his novels in such a way that researchers, starting with the no less famous Vladislav Khodasevich, resort to psychoanalysis when analyzing his work. And in the Soviet period we find the same unexpected intersections. Mikhail Bakhtin, whose literary works received worldwide recognition, continued an explicit or implicit dialogue with Freud throughout his long life. Mikhail Zoshchenko, the famous satirist, treated himself for decades with self-analysis, which he practiced under the direct influence of Freud; with his help, he was able to win the spiritual struggle against the power of the regime directed personally against him. Sergei Eisenstein, the greatest film director of the era, was also fascinated by psychoanalysis and used its ideas in his work.
The work of Moscow analysts was at one time supported and supervised by the country's highest political leadership and most of all by Leon Trotsky, whose history of relations with psychoanalysis deserves special discussion. Pedology, a specifically Soviet science about methods of remaking a person in childhood, was created by people who had undergone more or less serious psychoanalytic training. Psychoanalysis had a certain influence on the ideas that emerged in the 1920s, which became decisive in the development of psychology in the country for half a century to come. The largest psychologist of the Soviet period, A. R. Luria, began his long journey in science as the scientific secretary of the Russian Psychoanalytic Society. Freud's books had a significant influence on the works of L. S. Vygotsky and P. P. Blonsky. Communication with S. N. Spielrein, who brought to Moscow the living traditions of the Viennese, Zurich and Geneva psychological schools, apparently had a key influence on the formation of the psychological views of Vygotsky, Luria and their circle.
Russian medicine accepted psychoanalysis less readily than the general public. Freud's books were systematically translated into Russian from 1904 to 1930, but they were rarely reflected in university courses in psychiatry and psychology. The physiology of I. P. Pavlov and the psychoneurology of V. M. Bekhterev, who fought among themselves for primacy in the field that is today called neuroscience, periodically showed some interest in psychoanalysis, but remained far from it. Soviet psychiatry developed along the path of mechanical classifications and repressive methods of treatment, to which psychoanalysis was alien. In Soviet psychotherapy, in full accordance with the spirit of the times, hypnosis dominated.
After the fall of Trotsky, the psychoanalytic tradition in Russia was abruptly and permanently interrupted. Some analysts found refuge in pedology, but this opportunity was closed in 1936. Now, at the very end of the 20th century, we are again faced with a task that was solved with apparent ease by our ancestors at the beginning. Only now the task of renewing the psychoanalytic tradition seems almost insurmountable to us.
The peculiarities of psychoanalysis make its history specific. The history of psychoanalysis is a separate area of ​​research with its own authorities, traditions, journals and its own International Association. The Russian reader will easily notice differences in the style and content of this book from the Russian histories of psychology known to him. My approach also differs from those dominant views today on the characteristics of Russian and Soviet psychology, which are presented in the works of American historians.
Histories of psychoanalytically related sciences such as psychology and medicine are more focused on the analysis of scientific ideas, methods and categories and are less interested in the people of science, their personalities, biographies and relationships. In the history of psychoanalysis, the development of ideas is closely intertwined with the destinies of people; both partly absorb the features of their time, and partly resist its changing influences. I was more interested in what can be called the historical and, even more broadly, human context of psychoanalytic theory and practice: the deep and, for political reasons, often underestimated continuity between the Soviet and pre-revolutionary periods of the spiritual history of Russia; mutual influences of psychoanalysis and contemporary Russian philosophy, literature, artistic culture; the relationship between the content of science and the lives of the people involved in it.
The lives of people - both analysts and their patients - are no less interesting in the history of psychoanalysis (and, perhaps, more) than the fate of their scientific ideas. Such is the nature of analysis that the biographies of these people, their words and actions, the choices they made in life, and their relationships with each other were affected by psychoanalytic values, views, goals, means, methods. Through people, the very course of History influenced the essence of analytical ideas. The interaction of ideas, people and eras is what will interest us here, in the history of psychoanalysis in Russia.
This methodology is neither generally accepted nor, moreover, the only possible one. We can only insist that it corresponds to the views of many of the characters in this book. Nietzsche wrote in 1882, Andreas-Salome: “My dear Lou, your idea of ​​​​reducing philosophical systems to the personal lives of their authors (is good) ... this is exactly how I taught the history of ancient philosophy, and I always told my audience: the system is refuted and is dead - but if you don’t refute the personality behind it, then you can’t kill the system. Arguing with Jung, Freud concluded his history of psychoanalysis: “People are strong as long as they defend a great idea; they become powerless when they go against it." Jung, for his part, wrote to the Russian writer Emil Medtner in 1935: "your philosophy is akin to your temperament, and that is why you always consider personality in the light of an idea. This fascinated me." Vladislav Khodasevich spoke “about the attempt to merge life and creativity... as the truth of symbolism.” This truth will remain with him, although it does not belong to him alone. This is the eternal truth." Mikhail Bakhtin formulated: "An idea is a living event that plays out at the point of dialogical meeting of two or more consciousnesses." And Bulgakov’s Woland understood the task this way: “I am a historian... Tonight there will be an interesting story at the Patriarch’s!”
This book, in its composition, attempts to match the complex historical fabric. The story about the people who made the history of psychoanalysis in Russia alternates with the story about successive periods of this history. The chapters of the book follow each other in such a way that after a monographic chapter dedicated to the life story of one of our heroes, there follows a review chapter devoted to a particular era in the perception, development and transformation of psychoanalysis in Russia.
In Western and, above all, French and American, as well as English, German, Italian, Hungarian, Bulgarian, Swiss and Swedish literature, a lot of research has been devoted to the history of psychoanalysis in Russia. In Russian literature, this book essentially opens this rewarding topic.

The author is grateful to everyone who helped him during several years of work on this book. If Galina Kozlova (Progress publishing house, Moscow), Irina Manson (Radio France) and Aan de Mijoa (International Association for the History of Psychoanalysis, Paris) had not shown interest in publishing it at one time, it might never have been completed .
M. G. Yaroshevsky (Institute of the History of Natural Science and Technology of the USSR Academy of Sciences, Moscow), B. M. Firsov (Institute of Sociology of the Russian Academy of Sciences, St. Petersburg), Cemens Heer (House of Human Sciences, Paris) supported the author in various, sometimes difficult circumstances showing trust and tolerance. N. P. Snetkova, M. I. Spielrein, N. N. Trau-gott, M. I. Davydova, E. A. Luria, A. I. Lipkina, Efim Etkind, Ronad Gree, James Rice, Boris Kravtsov, Gennady Obatnin, Leonid Ionin, Pau Roazen, Valery Maksimenko, Yuri Vinogradov, Eugenia Fischer, Ferenz Eros, Michae Monar, Vera Proskurina, Elena Kostyusheva provided me with various kinds of information, in some cases absolutely invaluable.
I am especially grateful to the employees of the Central State Archive of Russia.
I sincerely thank everyone who read the entire manuscript or its individual parts and helped me with their comments and their very interest: E. Etkind, Y. Kagan and M. Kagan, M. Khmelev, I. Kona, I. Manson, B. Kolonitsky, L. Fleischman, A. Samues, N. Zacman, 3. Domich, L. Gozman, L. Mikhailov, Y. Gordina, E. Golynkin, L. Bycking, E. Gordeev u.
And finally, my special thanks go to Anna Etkind.

Leningrad - Paris - St. Petersburg.
1992

On the brink of worlds and eras: the life and work of Lou Andreas-Salomé In 1861 in St. Petersburg, in the General Staff building on Palace Square, a woman was born who was awaiting fame in the big world and complete obscurity in her homeland. Her father, a general in the Russian service, Gustav von Salome, was a Baltic German, and by religion a French Huguenot; Having received a military education in Russia, he made a fast career under Nicholas I. His mother, of Danish German descent, was born in Russia. The newborn was given the Russian name Lelya.
Contemporary of Vera Zasulich

She lived in St. Petersburg for the first 20 years of her life. Talking about her childhood, she found it difficult to name the language that was native to her. The family spoke German, but Lelya had a Russian nanny and a French governess, and she studied at a private English school. “We had the feeling that we were Russian,” she recalled, immediately noting that the servants in the house were Tatars, Swabians and Estonians. For her, St. Petersburg “combined the charm of Paris and Stockholm.” Recalling its imperial splendor, reindeer carts and ice palaces on the Neva, she said that, despite all this originality, St. Petersburg was a cosmopolitan city.
Salome, a general and privy councilor, was close to Nicholas, and now observed the reforms of Alexander II with distrust and caution. His six children - Lelya was the younger sister of five brothers - grew up in an atmosphere whose intellectual and political richness was almost unparalleled in Russian history. The novels of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky were written during these decisive decades. At the same time, the first revolutionary movements were formed... Women played a significant role in them. According to historians, a total of 178 women were convicted in the political trials of the 70s and 80s. Most of them belonged to the terrorist organization "People's Will", which, on the seventh attempt, carried out a successful assassination attempt on Alexander II: the Tsar-Liberator was killed on the eve of signing the first Russian Constitution. Women played a key role in this conspiracy, one of them was executed. We don’t know how passionate Lelya was about all this, but it is known that all her life she kept a photograph of Vera Zasulich, who was acquitted by a jury after an attempt on the life of the St. Petersburg mayor. Then Zasulich was named by one French magazine the most popular person in Europe. Including In 1878, the first women's university in Russian history was opened in St. Petersburg.
Lelya was very friendly with her father and brothers. She later recalled that as a child she was so accustomed to being among older men that when she went abroad, “the whole world seemed to me populated by brothers.”
As far as one can judge from her memories, the girl grew up independent, self-absorbed and very dreamy. She didn’t play with dolls, but she always made up different stories: she talked to the flowers growing in the garden in Peterhof, where she spent every summer, and made up fairy tales about the people she saw on the street. She remembered that for a long time she could not believe that the mirrors correctly reflected her appearance; she did not feel separate from her surroundings. The world was probably kind to her. But traces of her childhood quarrels with her mother also remained in her memories. Her early memories include both her childhood faith in God and her early loss of that faith. True, the Protestant religion did not burden her with rituals, and Lelya believed insofar as she herself needed faith. At some point in her childhood, God “disappeared,” but what remained was “a vaguely awakened feeling that never disappeared - a feeling of boundless fellowship ... with everything that exists.”

First meeting

The idyll, if there was one, would soon end. We have reached us a letter that Lelya Salome wrote to Pastor Guyot, a stranger to her, whose sermons she liked: “A seventeen-year-old girl is writing to you, who is alone in her family and among her circle, alone in the sense that no one shares her views and craving for the authentic. knowledge. Probably my way of thinking separates me from most girls of my age and my circle. There is hardly anything worse for a girl than to be different from others in my character and views, in what I like and what I don’t like. But it’s so bitter to lock everything inside yourself, because otherwise you’ll do something indecent, and it’s so bitter to feel completely alone, because you lack the pleasant manners with which it’s so easy to win trust and love” (ibid.).
The pastor apparently responded politely, and they met. This meeting was the first of those that changed her life. Guillot loaded the girl with lessons: philosophy, history of religion, Dutch... The main characters of their communication were Kant and Spinoza. Guillot freed her from the dreams that were painful for her in a way the meaning of which she understood much later: he demanded that she tell them to him - all in full. They met in secret from her parents. One can imagine how difficult and stormy this was, which had no name, for a closed and passionate girl. In Guillot, she recalled, she saw God and worshiped him as God. They were getting closer and closer, and it was hard for both of them. One day she passed out while sitting on the pastor's lap.
In 1879, Lelya's father died. At Guillot's insistence, she told her mother about their lessons. Having met his mother, Guillot proposed to Lou. The girl was in shock; she experienced it as the second loss of God. “With one blow, what I worshiped left my heart and became a stranger to me” (ibid.). Sexual intimacy would be impossible for her for many years to come; Guillot was only the first of a long line of men who would experience delight in the intensity of spiritual intimacy with this girl and despair at her bodily coldness and immaturity, combined with extraordinary attractiveness.
The story with Guillot ended with a quarrel with his mother, refusal of confirmation and pulmonary hemorrhage. A solution was found in going abroad. Guillot helped her get a passport - it was difficult because she had no religion. Her passport bore her new name: Lou. Under this short name she will go down in history.

Something almost unfeminine
Together with her mother, Lou ended up in Zurich. For some time she attended a philosophy course at the university. A professor who read the history of religion spoke of her as “a completely pure creature who has extraordinary energy, focused exclusively on spiritual quest,” and even saw in this “something almost unfeminine.” Another memoirist recalled her as “the most charming, all-conquering, truly feminine creature who discarded all the means that women use and uses exclusively the weapons with which men conquer the world.” In photographs surviving from this time, Fraulein Salome looks arrogant and very beautiful: a flat black dress, smoothly combed back hair, a pale, concentrated face.The girl had just turned 20 years old, and she came to Europe for the first time.
But her health again fails, and her mother takes her to Italy. Lou meets in Rome the famous Malvida von Meysenbug, a writer who promoted the liberation of women and spent her whole life looking for new, “noble” relationships between the sexes. Malvida was a close friend and long-term correspondent of A. I. Herzen, raised his daughter and lived for a long time in his house in London. A quarter of a century before the events described, Herzen wrote in one letter: “I want to test and take Mademoiselle Meisenbug to us. She is unusually smart and very educated, very ugly and 37 years old.”
In her “Memoirs of an Idealist,” Meisenbug recalled how she wanted to found an educational union in order to lead adults of both sexes to the free development of their spiritual life, “so that they would then enter the world as sowers of a new, spiritualized culture.” In Malvida's project, the familiar forms of a secular salon were combined with the just beginning search for a new person and new relationships between people. This is not about theory; for Malvida, as for some of her contemporaries and many followers, this idea was of a completely practical nature. A new person can be created. To do this, you only need... The answer to this question was an important, perhaps defining part of the culture of modernity.
Friedrich Nietzsche was a frequent guest in Malvida's salon. His interlocutor was thirty-two-year-old philosopher Paul Re. The author of books on moral philosophy, in which he argued that the principles of ethics are reducible to practical utility, rationality and Darwinism, Re was a passionate and completely impractical person. He had attacks of completely irrational melancholy, and he could not overcome his love for roulette. Moreover, he was a Jew, terribly ashamed of his Jewishness.
...Malvida continued: “This idea found the warmest response among the interlocutors. Nietzsche and Re were ready to immediately take part as lecturers. I was convinced that it was possible to attract many students to whom I wanted to devote my special care in order to create from them the noblest defenders of the emancipation of women."
Lou did not become a feminist in Italy, just as she did not become a revolutionary in Russia. She walked her own path, passing through the intellectual currents of her time, absorbing something of her own from them and moving where her refined intellectual curiosity and equally sophisticated feminine intuition led her.
Re met Lou while giving a lecture to a group of educated girls in Malvida's salon. He immediately fell in love with her and, although he believed that getting married and having children in this bad world was irrational, he hastened to propose to her. Lou rejected him as firmly as she had rejected Guillot a little earlier. But now she felt strong enough for more. There is no need to run away from a man who was unable to control his feelings; it is necessary to defeat these feelings in him, forcing him to suppress them in the same way as she suppressed them in herself. As a reward, Re received the opportunity to see Lu and even live with her. This was the girl's plan. Re renounces all claims. Then they will be able to live by common spiritual interests. She didn't care about public opinion. Re, once again violating the principles of his moral philosophy, agreed. It remained to overcome the understandable resistance of the others: the mother, Pastor Guillot and even Malwida von Meisenbug, whose ideas were no longer modern enough. Lou wrote to the pastor: “Malvida is also against our plan... But it has long become clear to me that even when we agree with her, we have different things on our minds. Usually it is expressed like this: we shouldn’t do this, we should achieve this, and I have no idea who we are, probably some kind of ideal or philosophical party. I only know my self."
In 1882, Nietzsche stood on the threshold of another turning point, after which he would reach his highest peak and then his final collapse. He was seriously ill. Doctors and historians have still not been able to determine the diagnosis. Some believe that it was syphilis, others (like the Odessa doctor I.K. Khmelevsky, who devoted a special study to this, argued that progressive paralysis could also have a different, non-syphilitic origin. By the time of his meeting with Lou, Nietzsche was almost blind and suffered seriously from headaches pain, which he dealt with with ever-increasing doses of drugs and constant travel. The illness had a periodic course, and in those intervals when its attacks subsided, he wrote continuously and a lot. He was lonely and unusually attached to his sister Elizabeth. Several times he asked friends to find him a wife. When he began to go blind, he needed at least a secretary. There were rumors about him, as if he had never known women. Least of all, he was like his favorite hero - a superman. He was a romantic who lived the ethereal life of his patient and a genius spirit.
This spring he felt better than ever. When Re and then Meisenbug wrote to him about Lu, he understood them in his own way: “Say hello to this Russian girl for me, if you see the meaning in this: I am attracted to such souls... I need them for what I intend done within the next ten years. Marriage is a different matter - I would agree to marry for about two years,” he easily answered Re, unaware of the consequences.
The three of them met in April 1882 in Rome. Nietzsche read to Lou and Re his just completed book “The Gay Science,” his most cheerful work, in which the strength and splendor of the extraordinary man of the future is affirmed - the superman. Man, as we humans know him, does not satisfy Nietzsche. “Another ideal entails us to itself, a wonderful, tempting, fraught with dangers ideal..., for which everything higher, in which the people rightly see their measure of values, would represent nothing more than a fall, humiliation, danger, or at least a means of self-preservation." And he added quite accurately: his ideal “quite often seems almost inhuman.” Nietzsche had little time left to see his ideal in this life. He expected tragedy, but only managed to experience melodrama: the meeting and breakup with Lou.
The three of them travel through the mountains of Northern Italy, Switzerland and the three of them are going to settle in Paris. Together they successfully repel the attack of Lou's mother, who, horrified by what is happening, tries to take her daughter back to Russia and even calls Lou's beloved brother, Evgeniy, to help her.
____________Don't forget the whip!
An amazing photograph has survived, taken in those days in Lucerne, with the Alps in the background. Nietzsche and Re stand harnessed to a gig in which Lou sits and holds a whip. Re poses confidently and feels in place. Nietzsche with his huge mustache directs his unseeing eyes into the distance. There is no mockery on the face of Lu, who has just built this mise-en-scène. Indeed, this is all serious. Less than a year will pass before, after a painful breakup with Lou, Nietzsche will write his famous: “Are you going to a woman?” Don't forget the whip!"
Waving her whip, Lou dreamed of building a small intellectual commune, “holy as the Trinity,” in which men, renouncing their claims on her for her sake, would embody them in a common spiritual quest in which she would have an equal role. Re accepted this project “Brother Re,” she called him, praising him for his “unearthly kindness.” In his letters to her, he called himself “your little home” and considered her well-being “the only task of my life, except for my book.” Re, indeed , took the place of her former home filled with brothers in her new life.She developed a different relationship with Nietzsche.
In August 1882, Lou wrote to Re: “Talking with Nietzsche, as you know, is very interesting. There is a special charm in the fact that you encounter similar ideas, feelings and thoughts. We understand each other completely. One day he said to me in amazement: I think the only difference between us is age. We live the same and think the same. It is only because we are so alike that he reacts so violently to the differences between us - or to what seem to him to be differences. That's why he looks so upset. If two people are as different as you and me, they are happy that they have found common ground. But when they are as alike as Nietzsche and I are, they suffer from their differences."
For his part, Nietzsche wrote that “there has hardly ever been greater philosophical openness between people” than there was between him and Lou. To his friend Peter Gast, he described her like this: “The daughter of a Russian general, she is 20 years old, she is sharp like an eagle, strong like a lioness, and yet a very feminine child who will not live long... She is amazingly mature and ready for my way of thinking... She also has an incredibly strong character and knows exactly what she wants, - without asking anyone’s advice and without caring about public opinion.” And Nietzsche even wrote this to Lou herself: “I don’t want to be lonely anymore and I want to rediscover how to be human.” There’s no point in guessing what Zarathustra would have taught if the relationship with Lou had turned out differently, but it seems Nietzsche stood then on the threshold of completely different discoveries.
Perhaps Nietzsche’s sensual desires were just as suppressed as Lou’s still unawakened feelings, and that is why it was so good for them to feel their incredible closeness in the rarefied heights of the spirit. In any case, experts on the issue agree with his sister Elizabeth that the feeling for Lou was the strongest in his life, and none of the women managed to evoke anything like that in the famous philosopher. A letter with a formal proposal was sent to Lou's mother in St. Petersburg. For some time, the lover Nietzsche broke off relations with his sister and mother, which Lou naturally hated. For Nietzsche, breaking up with his family was an act of heroism, consistent with his philosophy, but completely impossible in practical life.
A little more than a year has passed since their first meeting when, once again under the influence of his sister, Nietzsche curses Lou. “If I leave you, it is solely because of your terrible character... You brought pain not only to me, but to everyone who loves me... I didn’t create the world, I didn’t create Lu. If I created you, I would give you more health and something that is much more important than health - maybe a little love for me." In his letters to Lou, threats of a final break are replaced by repentance: "My dear Lou and Re, no worry about these flashes of my paranoia or wounded pride. Even if one day in a fit of despondency I take my life, there should be no reason for sadness. I want you to know that I am nothing more than a half-lunatic, tormented by headaches and crazed from loneliness. I achieved this, as I now think, reasonable understanding of the situation after taking a solid dose of opium, which saved me from despair."
At the height of despair, he writes the main book of his life, “Thus Spoke Zarathustra.” The first part of it was written in just 10 days. Man is something that should be surpassed. Man is not a goal, but a bridge leading to the goal, to the superman. “What is "A monkey in relation to man? A laughing stock or a painful shame. And a man must be the same thing for a superman: a laughing stock or a painful shame." Superman is the meaning of the earth, and man is just a dirty stream. Only the sea can absorb a dirty stream and not become unclean. “Look, I teach you about the superman: he is the sea where your great contempt can drown.” People’s contempt for themselves, the author’s contempt for people, the author’s contempt for himself.
His sister Elizabeth recalled: “Some kind of evil fate wished that it was at this time, when his brother’s health had somewhat recovered, that he would be visited by difficult personal trials. He experienced deep disappointments in friendship... and for the first time knew loneliness." In her opinion, the image of Zarathustra embodied his dream of a perfect friend, whom he could not find in this last period of his life. This was written for the public. In private In a letter written in November of that same year, 1882, Elisabeth expressed herself more clearly: “How skillfully she uses Fritz’s maxims to tie his hands!.. I cannot deny that she is truly the embodiment of my brother’s philosophy.” In another document that has come down to us, Elizabeth speaks of Lou as a predator who must be crushed at any cost.
Peter Gast, a friend of Nietzsche and a neutral witness to his affair with Lou, spoke about all this more calmly: “For a certain time, Nietzsche was truly fascinated by Lou. He saw something extraordinary in her. Lou's intelligence and femininity carried him to the heights of ecstasy. From his illusions about Lu the mood of Zarathustra was born. The mood, of course, belonged to Nietzsche, but it was Lou who elevated it to the Himalayan heights of feeling."
Did Nietzsche really find his ideal of a superman in a twenty-year-old Russian girl, and Zarathustra is the missing “perfect friend,” the coded beautiful Lou? It is difficult to judge to what extent this interpretation, strangely going back to Nietzsche’s sister, can be taken literally. It is enough that It was precisely love for Lou, love that was not satisfied and not overcome, that aroused in the suffering Nietzsche that intensity of feelings with which his book still burns. Lou herself, in her monograph on Nietzsche’s philosophy, will talk about it this way: “When Nietzsche no longer rapes his soul, when he freely expresses his desires, it becomes clear in what torment he lived, a cry for deliverance from himself is heard... In complete despair, he seeks within himself and outside himself a saving ideal, the opposite of his inner being.”
Elizabeth Nietzsche spent her entire life trying to appropriate first her brother himself, and then his inheritance. He rebelled, but with the increasing severity of his suffering, he became more and more dependent on her. Yet two years after the break with Lou, he wrote to Malvida von Meisenbug about his sister: “There can be no reconciliation between me and the vindictive anti-Semitic goose. Later, much later, she would understand how much evil she brought me at the most decisive period of my life...” Elisabeth persecuted Re as a Jew; much later, in old age, she would declare Lou a Jew too. In 1885, she married Förster , an activist in the German nationalist movement, famous for collecting a quarter of a million signatures on a petition to Bismarck demanding that Jews be banned from entering Germany and fired from government service.Failing to find the truth in his homeland, he and his wife left for Paraguay to build a new Germany there. leadership led to a settler rebellion, and he shot himself in June 1889. Elisabeth returned home and took care of the estate of her brother, who had just died in a mental hospital (where his physician was Otto Binswanger, uncle of Ludwig Binswanger, a close friend of Freud). The compilation of Nietzsche’s unfinished manuscripts she published, entitled “The Will to Power,” has been recognized by historians as a fake. It was Elisabeth Fehrster-Nietzsche who was responsible for the primitive and racist understanding of the superman, which was adopted and canonized by the Nazis. The pinnacle of her activity was Hitler's visit to the Nietzsche archive in Weimar in November 1935. Racism and, especially, anti-Semitism were completely alien to Nietzsche himself. His superman was a pure hypothesis, not so much a myth as a project of a myth, a call that did not include any recipes. Nietzsche did not consider himself a German at all, tracing his family and unusual surname to the Polish gentry.
In Russia, Nietzsche was understood as a romantic and a prophet. “Perhaps it was in Nietzsche that the romantic desire to accept the whole world manifested itself most strongly” and to see in it “the presence of the infinite in the finite,” wrote V. Zhirmunsky in 1914. It is among the romantics that “life and poetry come together; the life of a poet is like poetry; “life in the era of romanticism is subordinated to poetic feeling... Experience becomes the theme of poetic depiction and, through this depiction, the experience receives form and meaning.” According to Zhirmunsky’s precise formulation, this may have expressed “mass delirium”; “But from a psychological point of view, in any case, delirium is the same state of consciousness as the others.”
In this romantic light, the love of Nietzsche and Salome could not have ended otherwise. Played out among Alpine peaks and Mediterranean resorts, this love is strangely reminiscent of the romantic stories of Russian literature. Before meeting Lou, Nietzsche read Lermontov and wrote to a friend: “a country so unfamiliar to me, and disappointment in the Western spirit, all this is described in a charming manner, with Russian naivety and with the wisdom of a teenager.” The exoticism of Russian life did not interfere, but rather helped to see Lermontov has the same familiar problems as in Byron or Novalis. In Nietzsche's letters from the time of his affair with young Lou, there are no references to the naivety and immaturity of Russians. Lou was well prepared. Nietzsche's feelings obeyed the rules known to her - the international code of romantic experiences in which happiness unattainable, love merges with death, and the finite person matters only as a reflection of infinity.
Perhaps Nietzsche’s enthusiastic review of Lermontov refers to Lermontov’s most amazing creation, inspired half a century before Zarathustra, but strangely reminiscent of it. Banned by tsarist censorship, the poem “The Demon” was published in Germany earlier than in Russia, and was translated into German more than once (for the first time in 1852 by F. Botenstedt, who personally knew both Lermontov and Nietzsche, “The Demon” strikes the same as Nietzsche’s famous book, romance brought to the point of absurdity - the poetics of loneliness, contempt for everyday life, the dream of rebirth in love and lack of interest in the technical details of the realization of this dream. The author of Zarathustra, perhaps with amazement, found himself, his dreams, anxieties and the guilt he felt in the strange hero of the Russian poem. Gloomy symbols of the masculine principle, from the outside invading the established feminine everyday life, the heroes of Lermontov and Nietzsche is full of forebodings of a “new life.” Heirs to the classical devils of Goethe and Byron, both of them turn out to be distant predecessors of the new demons of Russian literature - “The Demons,” Julio Jurenito, Woland.
It is enough to open Lermontov’s “Demon” to find out how love stories begin and end in romantic culture. Lermontov’s hero, a creature of an incomprehensible nature, neither god nor man, “sowed evil without pleasure... And everything that he saw before him "He despised or hated." This is how he would have lived if he had not met an earthly woman who transformed his very being: “The feeling in him suddenly began to speak in a language that had once been native. Was this a sign of rebirth?” He tells the beauty about his extraordinary ideas and outrages her thought with “a prophetic and strange dream.” Finally, he seduces her with the total transformation happening to him: “I want to love, I want to pray, I want to believe in goodness.” But the satisfaction of demonic passion leads to the death of the beauty.
After the meeting between Nietzsche and Salone, another twenty years would pass, and the idea of ​​the equivalence of love and death, outlined in “The Demon” (and at the same time in Pushkin’s “Egyptian Nights”), would become a common theme throughout “decadent” Russian culture. This idea will be considered adopted from Nietzsche , but will uniquely fit into the Russian context, oversaturated with traditional and new romance.
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Eli Zaretsky - Professor stories New schools social research(New- York, USA), author books“Capitalism, the Family and Personal Life” (1976), “Secrets of the Soul: A Social and Cultural History of Psychoanalysis” (2005), “Why America Needs a Left: An Historical Argument” (2013).

“Eros of the Impossible” is probably the most interesting history of psychoanalysis written in Russia. The reason for this is that Etkind pays the least attention to issues that typically preoccupy historians of psychoanalysis: the founding of psychoanalytic societies, the dates and locations of important conferences, or theoretical debates about pre-Oedipal sexuality. For Etkind, psychoanalysis is a kind of prism through which Russian intellectual life in the 20th century is refracted. As a result, he manages to describe the nature of both the general cultural and political crisis of the country itself, which it experienced in the 20th century, and the crisis of Russian intellectuals.

If you read Etkind in this way, it becomes clear: his interest in psychoanalysis is deep, but secondary. The author's main passion is not just Russian history, but communism, or, as he often calls it, totalitarianism. Etkind wrote a book about psychoanalysis because such a book can say a lot about the mechanisms of domination and suppression, about how a person can be suppressed - not so much from the outside, through external political pressure or economic deprivation, but from the inside, through the creation of a feeling of insecurity and dependence . That is why hypnosis becomes one of the main tropes for Etkind’s understanding of Soviet psychoanalysis and Russian culture of the 20th century. Hence Etkind’s often-repeated remark that true psychoanalysis - as Freud intended it - can lead to human freedom.

It is well known that before the First World War, more Freud was translated into Russian than into any other language. As Etkind clearly shows, this interest in Freud continued after the revolution, but led to attempts to connect Freud with Marx, or at least with Pavlov and neurophysiology (in its then form). Etkind is generally skeptical of these attempts and seems to agree with Freud himself, who in 1930 wrote to his Prague Russian translator Nikolai Osipov:

“The Bolsheviks got the idea from somewhere that psychoanalysis was hostile to their system. You know: the truth is that our science cannot be forced to serve any party. It requires a liberal mindset ( Freiheitlichkeit)» .

Indeed, the question of the compatibility of Freud and Marx arises in Etkind’s chapter on Leon Trotsky. Trotsky defended psychoanalysis until his exile and was a key figure in the history of not only Bolshevism, but also the phenomenon that Etkind rightly calls Freudo-Marxism.

Etkind acknowledges the merits of the Freudo-Marxist tradition, which includes not only Wilhelm Reich's attempts to understand the psychosexual and familial roots of Nazism ("Mass Psychology and Fascism", 1933), but also, for example, the desire of Frantz Fanon to show how the trauma of colonial conquest infected the "Third World" "racist violence (Black Skin, White Masks, 1952). Herbert Marcuse used psychoanalysis to describe the cultural revolution that preceded the emergence of the New Left (Eros and Civilization, 1956), and Juliet Mitchell saw psychoanalysis as a patriarchal theory rooted in clan structures that were eroding in the modern world (Psychoanalysis and Feminism ", 1974).

In my brief response to Etkind's brilliant book, I want to turn to the experience of another Freudo-Marxist, Richard Wright. An African American, Wright became a communist during a period when Bolshevik leaders decided that African Americans were at the forefront of the coming world revolution. It must be said that Wright’s experience overlaps with the Soviet experience: he, like Etkind, began with an interest in post-traumatic states. Only in the first case was this state post-slavery, and in the second - post-communist. Etkind wrote “Eros of the Impossible” because he wanted to better understand the Russian situation after the trauma of communism. Wright used both communism and psychoanalysis to deal with the trauma of slavery.

Slavery in the United States, like communism in Russia, left behind a community that experienced “a sudden loss of identity and meaning, a tear in the social fabric.” This loss was “repeated again and again in the individual consciousness.” African Americans were forcibly separated from their homeland and family, torn from their linguistic and tribal environment, sold and resold, kept in ignorance, beaten, raped and killed at the whim of their masters. At best, they were mocked and treated condescendingly. It is impossible to accept such a story without a feeling of pain and humiliation, in whatever form this occurs - memory, grief, the desire to understand it or come to a more honest and humane awareness. More often than not, this gave rise to violent anger. Wright drew on Marxism and psychoanalysis to form what we would now call the “collective memory” of the era of slavery. Could Wright's experience be of any use to Etkind and other researchers of modern Russia?

If you place Wright's Freudo-Marxism in the context of, for example, the history of the blues, it becomes clear that Wright was dealing with the history of an entire people. First appearing in the United States at the end of the 19th century, the blues became a response of the working class and lower social strata to the history of slavery, exile and the violated dignity of African Americans. As is clear from the word itself blues(sadness), the blues implied pain. But it also meant something new. The blues evolved from the collective work of spirituals, work songs, protest songs, and work-hall songs, but was the first overtly personal form in the history of African-American music. In doing so, it became a landmark in the cultural history of African Americans and, as a mechanism for the emancipation of the individual from the group, was very much in tune with psychoanalysis.

The traumatic origins of African American society were manifested in the dominant, wistful intonations characteristic of blues vocals, the prevalence of themes such as blindness, old age and impotence, as well as a general sense of impasse, passivity and standing still time. When "Blind" Willie Johnson moans, "My mother is dead," or Fred McDowell describes himself as lost, humiliated, and without courage, or Ma Rainey mourns the lover who betrayed her, they all have no self-pity. Ralph Ellison was probably right when he wrote:

“The blues was a desire to keep the painful details of a brutal experience from dying in the pained mind. It was necessary to feel the rough surface of this experience and overcome the pain, not consoled by philosophy, but turning the pain into both tragic and comic lyrics."

As a musical form, the blues, according to Ellison, was "an autobiographical chronicle of personal disaster in lyrical expression." This does mean, however, that ultimately the blues affirmed the triumph of the hero over his sorrow - that is, of art over reality. Reflecting on a distinct sense of hurt or grief, bluesmen dealt with the pain through art, music and humor, but did not offer a path forward.

It took both Marxism and psychoanalysis for Wright to break out of this blues impasse. The kinship between psychoanalysis and Marxism lies in the general idea that obstacles to progress arise within the movement towards progress itself. While 20th-century liberals believed that the inevitable movement toward equality was impeded only by external, counter-liberal forces such as fascism and communism, Marxists saw the obstacle to equality in the same internal dynamics of capitalism, liberalism, and democracy that drove the most progressive movement toward equality. . Freud thought like Marx, believing that the obstacles to rationalism and progress are not external factors - ignorance, backwardness and prejudice. The obstacles are hidden within rationalism itself. Communists in their revolutionary struggle, like psychoanalysts in their desire to help the patient, encountered resistance. The same thing happened to writers like Wright as they tried to understand the violence, disharmony, and negativity in the African American experience. Thanks to analytics of this kind, it became possible to understand that the road from the past cannot be straight, that it must be passed, overcoming internal resistance, through shame, guilt and anger. Perhaps this is true for modern Russia as well.

Wright was born in 1908 on a plantation near Natchez, Mississippi. His father, a sharecropper farmer, left the family, and his mother and her relatives were religious fanatics. To understand the quasi-totalitarian environment in which Wright spent his childhood, we turn to Orlando Patterson and his theory of slavery as social death. Patterson argued that slavery was the result of military defeat. The slave was incorporated into society as an internal enemy, as something non-existent. His real death was only delayed. Therefore, the slave existed in a social sense only through the owner, experiencing his own powerlessness and dishonor.

How did the son of a sharecropper and the grandson of slaves respond to this condition? In response, Wright consciously rejected any message coming from society, including his own family. According to Abdul Janmohamed, Wright "mirrored society's attempt to reject him." “How else could the South allow me to be myself,” Wright asks in his autobiography Black, “if not through denial, rebellion and aggression?”

In 1925, at the age of 17, Wright left Mississippi for Memphis, Tennessee, and two years later moved to Chicago. With his sick mother in his arms, Wright in the Windy City again faced the internal violence familiar to him from childhood. As Janmohamed wrote: “his inability to drive away contempt from his face or somehow hide it led to frequent dismissals: the owners simply did not like the way he looked.” He was once fired for saying “Yes, sir, I understand” with more dignity than was expected of an African-American Southerner. Wright himself wrote:

"I couldn't do the favor automatic. I had to feel and think through every tiny detail of racial experience in the light of the racial problem, and to every detail I attached my whole life."

Only literature allowed him to remain “alive in a very important negative sense.” His greatest inspiration was Henry Louis Mencken. As Wright wrote in Black: “This man fought, fought with words. Words were weapons for him, he used them like a club.”

During the Great Depression, Wright faced a problem that Ellison later defined as "invisibility." Working as a bellhop at a hotel, he went on call to rooms where white people walked around naked, not paying attention to him, as if he did not exist.

“Blacks were still not considered people... I was not a person, but something that vaguely knew that it was a person, but did not feel it... I felt doubly rejected.”

Experience as a nurse at the Chicago Institute for Medical Research showed how important voice or language is in the experience of trauma:

“On Saturday mornings I helped a young Jewish doctor cut the vocal cords of another pack of stray dogs... I held the dogs, one after another, and the doctor injected Nembutal into their veins; then I opened their jaws, and the doctor stuck a scalpel into the mouth and cut the vocal cords. Later, when the dogs regained consciousness, they raised their muzzles to the ceiling and began to howl silently. This sight was imprinted in my mind as a symbol of silent suffering."

Only communism helped Wright break out of his “mirror” relationship with society:

“Communism was deeper than just a political strategy... It was a strategy life, which made political methods its instruments... Its essence was a voluptuous and deep sensuality that recognized fundamental human needs and gave answers to them... It was a non-economic concept of existence.

Communism, Wright added, helped him for the first time “see fully the life of the Negro in America.” In the essay “Failure God,” he admitted that the Party gave him “the first long-term relationship in his entire life.”

To further understand the appeal of communism to African-American intellectuals who joined or sympathized with the Communist Party—among them Claude McKay, Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Alain Locke, Paul Robeson, Chester Himes, Ralph Ellison, and W.E. B. DeBoys - It is important to understand that communist ideas in the United States relied heavily on debates around notions of culture and identity. Of course, the communist movement in America was emboldened by the sharp rise in strikes during the First World War. African Americans were both participants and strikebreakers. But what attracted Wright and many others to the party was not its connection to the labor movement, but the contribution it made to the cultural renaissance of African Americans. Since the outbreak of the Russian Revolution, the "national question" had largely absorbed the "labor question," and Wright's favorite reading for a time was Stalin's Marxism and the National and Colonial Question. Wright later recalled:

“Of all the events in the Soviet Union, what struck me most was how many backward peoples were brought to national unity. I read with trepidation about how the communists sent phonetic specialists to the vast regions of Russia... For the first time in my life, I was completely emotionally captivated when I read how these specialists gave language, newspapers, and institutions to languageless peoples. I read how these forgotten people were helped to preserve their ancient culture, helped to see in their customs the same deep meanings and values ​​as those hidden in a way of life that seems to us more developed.

Communism also helped African American intellectuals shift their attention away from elitist art and toward what Maxim Gorky (who greatly influenced Wright) called “the bottom.” The short story "The Long Black Song," written by Wright in the late 1930s, well illustrates his understanding of lower-class culture. The story features a white traveling salesman who sells phonographs with watches. He seduces a black woman, Sarah, by playing spiritual records for her. When Silas, Sarah's husband, finds out what happened, he beats his wife, kills the traveling salesman and waits for them to lynch him - while he is ready to kill several more of his oppressors. In The Long Black Song, spirituals are no longer the resource for African Americans that they were during the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. They are now part of a commercial culture based on racism and violence. It is not just Sarah who is raped, but the entire African-American folk culture. Rejecting the early "idealistic" view of African American culture, Wright attacks the "campy hangers-on" writers of the 1920s who, he says, "entered the Court of American Public Opinion in the short trousers of servility and bowed low to prove that the Negro was not a lower beings, but people, and their lives are quite comparable with the lives of other people.”

Communism ushered in a new era in African American literature. Wright's characters are often illiterate people and not prone to introspection. They often resort to onomatopoeia: rifles clang “clack!”, whips make “click!”, and steam goes “ssssss!” This onomatopoeia often characterizes lynching, rape, murder, and the fugitive's futile attempts to escape. It “presses the surface of reality (the surface of the text) so as to force it to tell the whole story in its entirety and in the right words.” Wright's characters are only capable of subjective self-awareness after they commit an act of violence. This is the significance of his novel "America's Son", which became a key text for the movement of African-American consciousness beyond the blues form.

The hero of the novel, Bigger Thomas, strangles the tipsy daughter of his owner - a liberal communist - only because he is afraid that he will be found in her room, and then rapes his girlfriend while fleeing. Thomas became a symbol of the struggle of African Americans for freedom of identity. His situation is truly tragic: an accidental murder forces Thomas, for the first time in his fearful life, to take responsibility and experience a sense of moral guilt. After the murder, he experiences "deep calm and a release of tension."

“The thought of what he had done, the terrible horror of the murder and the audacity associated with it [allowed him to build] a barrier between himself and the world he feared. He killed and thereby began a new life. It was entirely his own life. For the first time in his life, he had something that others couldn’t take away from him.”

Sentenced to death, Bigger begins to understand how his experiences of oppression shaped his view of himself and his racist society. To the horror of his lawyer, Bigger tells him at the last meeting:

“If a person becomes a murderer, it’s for a reason... I didn’t know that I was really alive until I felt what I killed for... It’s true, Mr. Max. I can say this now because I will die soon. I know this for sure when I say it, and I know what it means. But I'm fine. Everything is fine if you look at it like this.”

After American Son, Wright wrote two autobiographical works: How Bigger Was Born and Black (American Hunger). Returning to one of his most memorable childhood memories, he recounts how he and his friend Carlotta once “stood in the schoolyard and chatted, and I was happy. Suddenly a strong wind blew back the black curls of her hair and revealed... a long ugly scar.” Wright could not forget the feeling of pain and violence at this spectacle. At the same time, in "Black," he reflected on how much his traumatic past had shaped African-American identity:

“After I had recovered from the shock of my own childhood, after I had acquired the habit of reflection, I often wondered why there is so little real kindness in the Negroes, why our tenderness passes so quickly, why we are so lacking in true passion and great hope, why our joy is so timid, our traditions so meager, our memories so empty. How little we have of those intangible feelings that unite people, and how petty even our despair is! After I saw another life, I often reflected on the unconscious irony of those who believe that the Negro's life is full of passion. I realized that what others perceive as our emotional strength is actually our confusion, our fears, our flight and the frenzy into which we fall under pressure.”

Here, captured with painful honesty, is an unprecedented reflection on the toll that our traumatic past exacts on African Americans.

The year Black was published, Wright was only thirty-two years old. After a few years, he left the Communist Party and became an anti-Communist, but not a neoconservative. During the Cold War, Wright did not support US policies. After leaving the party, he increasingly read Freud and other psychoanalysts: Wilhelm Reich, Wilhelm Stekel and Theodor Reik. In 1945, in the preface to St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton's book Black Capital, Wright wrote:

“We know what these facts look like through a Marxist lens, but the full power of the Western mind has yet to penetrate the lost jungle of black life. What would life look like on the South Side of Chicago through the eyes of Freud, Joyce, Proust or Pavlov?”

“I am convinced that the next great discovery that Negroes will make is in the darkness of their own consciousness, realizing what life in white America has done to them. Oh, what this search will reveal! Enough to change the foundations of life for all mankind.”

The issue that was of great interest to Wright - the influence of the traumatic past - was also central to Freudo-Marxism, if the movement is understood more broadly, including such figures as Wilhelm Reich, Karen Horney, Erich Fromm and the theorists of the Frankfurt School. Wright began to answer this question by meeting two left-liberal Jewish psychiatrists, Benjamin Karpman and Frederick Wertham, and the African American sociologist Horace Caton. In April 1943, Karpman, a psychiatrist at St. Elizabeth in Washington and a lecturer at African-American Howard University - wrote to Wright that he "saw Bigger Thomas among his students before [Wright] thought of writing about him." Wright approached various foundations and city commissions, asking them to finance the publication of Karpman's books about black criminals. Karpman hoped that “in science they will do the same thing that Black did.” Frederick Wertham (real name Wertheimer) was an emigrant from Germany and one of the little-known employees of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research. In Germany, Wertham observed how Kraepelin and other doctors used psychiatry to stigmatize left-wing activists. While working as director of the Mental Hygiene Clinic at Bellevue Hospital in New York, Wertham became Wright's physician, in part to help him avoid being drafted into the Army during World War II. Together they made an unsuccessful attempt to reform the New Jersey state prison system. In June 1944, at the annual session of the American Psychopathological Association, Wertham made a presentation on “The Determination of the Unconscious in “Son of America.” According to him, the work done was unique: “Never before has a psychoanalytic study of a literary text been undertaken based on an analytical study of its author.”

Horace Cayton (Jr.) was one of two authors of the sociological work Black Capital: A Study of Negro Life in a North American City (1945). Wright was very impressed by Caton's honest approach to how racism affected his own personality. Wright, who considered fear to be the basic emotion that determined the personality and behavior of the African American, wrote:

“I like Horace: he’s scared and doesn’t hide it, just like me. […] None of us wants to admit that fear, so deep inside us that we do not notice it, is the dominant feeling for American Negroes. But if we admit that we are afraid and know what caused the fear, can't we contain it and turn it into useful knowledge? No, we are afraid and do not want to admit to ourselves that we are afraid - that would be painful. So we cherish our fear, thinking that we have killed it. He is nevertheless alive and crawls out under the mask of what is called “the Negro’s laughter.”

Caton wrote to Wright in response:

“I would very much like to talk with you in more detail about all the problems of psychoanalysis. […] I would especially like to raise the question of what is the deepest basis of the existence of blacks and the structure of their personality: in their psychological adaptation in the family or in their reaction to oppression? I believe that these two factors are fused together in a wonderful way, so that one supports the other, and this leads to monstrous results. I would like to discuss this further with you. This is not described anywhere in the literature, and we could make a really important contribution if we could explore this.”

In A Psychological Approach to Race Relations, Caton described the "guilt-hate-fear complex" of white Americans: "The white man suffers from the psychosis of the oppressor - from the fear that he will be retaliated against by those whom he has tortured and humiliated."

Cayton was the personal psychoanalyst of Dr. Helen McLean for a long time. McLean was a proponent of the idea that psychoanalysis should be included in discussions of race relations in the United States. Through MacLean, Caton arranged for Wright to be allowed to lecture at the Chicago Institute of Psychoanalysis. The topic of the lecture was the usefulness of psychoanalysis in understanding the fear and hatred of African Americans. Analyzing himself, Cayton wrote that at first race seemed to him “a convenient general term [ catchall]”, a way to rationalize one’s own inadequacy in order to “not go deeper.” Ultimately, he concluded that race “reaches deep into the personality” and “forms a central locus of uncertainty.” “I probably absorbed it with my mother’s milk,” Caton concluded.

In 1945, Wright and Wertham opened a low-cost therapy center in Harlem. They named it the Lafargue Clinic, after the son-in-law of Karl Marx, an Afro-Cuban socialist born in France. The clinic became a cutting-edge experiment in “mass therapy.” Treatment there cost 25 cents per hour; the clinic did not pay psychiatrists salaries. Ralph Ellison called the Lafargue Clinic "the most successful attempt in the entire country to give the underprivileged sections access to psychotherapy" and "one of the few institutions striving to realize the deep meaning of the life of the American Negro." General Omar Bradley, while serving as head of the Veterans Administration, recommended the Lafargue Clinic to all war veterans, regardless of skin color. Wright wrote numerous articles promoting the clinic's experience. In one of them, “Psychiatry Comes to Harlem,” he described the “manufactured psychological problems” of African Americans:

“The intense internal conflicts generated in the Negro by the constant sabotage of his democratic hopes for housing, employment, education, and social mobility create a climate of anxiety and tension that easily tips the emotional scale toward neurosis.”

The clinic embodied “a socio-psychoanalytic approach, professing that changes in the social environment will necessarily affect the very idea of ​​\u200b\u200bthe Negro soul.” Wright believed that the clinic "extends the very concept of psychiatry into a new field, applies it to the masses, and turns Freud upside down." The fact that the clinic was located in the basement of the Episcopal Church of St. Philip's, gave Wright the opportunity to present it as a literal and figurative "underground" institution.

Ralph Ellison was also closely associated with the work of the clinic. Born in Oklahoma City, Ellison moved to New York in 1937, where he began working as a secretary for psychoanalyst Harry Stack Sullivan. Sullivan, like Horney and Fromm, was a “neo-Freudian,” that is, he followed Reich in insisting that psychoanalysis must be placed in social and cultural contexts. Like Wright, Ellison explained the “Negro soul” through the “Great Migration” of African Americans to Northern cities. The visible psychological disorders of African Americans, Ellison believed, conceal deeper intellectual impulses suppressed by oppression in the South. When an African-American Southerner, realizing the injustice of his subordinate position, moves to the North, his life “disintegrates, the church community splits, folk wisdom has to be discarded, since it is mistakenly believed that it is not suitable for life in the city.” However, there is a “sharp increase in intelligence”, a release of energy that takes the form of nervous tension, anxiety and hysteria. In a letter to Wright in September 1944, Ellison also takes this approach:

“I actually heard a rumor that you have a neurosis again, first with Bigger, and then with you. You know the technique: “if you can’t control a nigga, call him crazy.”

In Harlem Is Nowhere (1948), Ellison expressed his hopes for the Lafargue Clinic. Harlem, he wrote, is a ruin:

The people of Harlem live in a social, geographical and psychological no man's land:

“They feel alienated, and their whole life has become a search for answers to the questions: who am I, what am I, why am I and where am I? It is significant that in Harlem, when asked “How are you?” They often answer “I’m nowhere.” This phrase expresses a position so clear to everyone that it has become commonly used and trivial.”

According to Ellison, the phrase “I'm nowhere” expresses the inherent feeling of many African Americans that they do not have a stable and recognized place in society. Black identity is adrift within a capricious reality that challenges even the most universally accepted assumptions. In the literal sense, man, of course, exists, but he is nowhere. A “forced migrant” of American democracy wanders in the labyrinth of the ghetto. There is devastation on the streets of Harlem, and in contrast, Ellison believes, “the clinic is much more important than just a center for psychotherapy, it is an underground extension of democracy.”

After Wright left the Communist Party, influenced in part by psychoanalysis and existentialism, he developed a new theory of the "outsider" ( outsider). This idea was based on an analysis of the situation of African Americans after the Great Migration, as well as Jews and other immigrants. An “outsider,” Wright wrote, lives several lives at the same time and, although “born in the Western world, is not quite a part of it.” In his 1953 novel The Outsider, Wright writes:

“Whether a person becomes a fascist or a communist depends on how integrated he is into his culture. The more alienated he is, the more likely he is to lean toward communism.”

One of his characters is disabled, that is, also an “outsider,” explains:

“When the Negro enters our culture, he will inherit our problems, but not in the same way as we ourselves. He is an outsider and therefore will know that these problems exist. He will be self-aware and endowed with double vision. Being a black man, he will find himself at the same time inside And outside our culture... He will become a psychologist, like a Jew.”

Although Wright wrote movingly about his negative experiences in the Communist Party in The Loser God, he never accepted the reality of the Cold War. He remained faithful to the principle of mirroring, need and alienation, which gave consistency and unity to his life. Speaking at the 1955 Bandung Conference of the Non-Aligned Movement, Wright described African and Asian elites as follows:

“These are people without language... I'm talking about psychological language. For them there is a “hole” in history, and in the heart there is a storm that they cannot describe. For a whole series of centuries, only the white people of the West interpreted for them, who captured and subjugated their country, introduced martial law, another language, another religion, and they themselves could not interpret all these events... Their elites do not have their own vocabulary to describe history. They have yet to express what happened to them.”

Wright also did not accept the idealized view of the Negritude theory on pre-colonial Africa, which can be considered an analogue of Slavophilism. Speaking at the first congress of African artists and writers in Paris in 1956, attended by Aimé Césaire, Léopold Senghor, James Baldwin, Jean-Paul Sartre, Claude Lévi-Strauss and Frantz Fanon, Wright admitted: “I have an unsettling and almost terrifying the feeling that militant white Christian Europe and ancestor cults in Africa fatally complement each other.”

It is clear from Wright's life and writings that he had little value for psychoanalysis itself, and that communism disappointed him and left him bitter. But by combining the first with the second, Wright was able to freely borrow their individual elements and be inspired by them in his books. Communism and psychoanalysis were united by the understanding that the problems of gaining freedom arise within the process of liberation itself - either politically or through self-reflection. A traumatic past, no matter where the trauma was inflicted by slave owners—on Mississippi plantations, in Tsarist Russia, or under a communist dictatorship—leaves scars. There is no direct path to overcoming this past; you have to go through it. "Eros of the Impossible" is one of the beautiful works that confirm this fact.

Translation from English by Vladimir Makarov