Leonid Andreev’s Krasnyi smekh: Four Locations of Collective and Individual Mental Illness

Abstract

<p>Andreyev’s story <i>Krasnyi smekh</i> (The Red Laugh, 1905) describes mass madness as a combat-related contagious epidemic engulfing an unnamed country (at war with another unnamed country). It thus predicts the Great War and the imminent East/Central European revolutions. Moreover, the story retained its significance up until the late Soviet period and can also be read as a proto-zombie apocalypse scenario, still resonant today in the context of a triumphant onslaught of illiberal populism. How to explain such an extraordinary clairvoyance and long-lasting relevance? A spaces-of-illness approach may give us a clue. <p>Four such spaces are identifiable in <i>Krasnyi smekh</i>, two objective and two subjective. The objective ones consist of, first, the Russo-Japanese war of 1904-05 as an inspiration for the story’s unspecified military conflict; and second, the spreading of mass madness from the frontline to behind the lines and further, to areas thousands of miles away from the actual fighting. The subjective ones include, first, an inverted perception of reality from a madman’s point of view (exemplified by an insane military doctor doing a handstand); and second, Andreyev’s diagnosis as a neurasthenic with a hospitalization history, which undoubtedly “played a part in those of his stories which give us a presentment of the psychology of certain of his mentally unbalanced characters’ (Lindén 1906). <p>Andreyev did not personally take part in the war, but his nervous disposition, tentatively defined as a combination of neurasthenia and hyper-empathy syndrome (under the influence of degeneration theory, see White 2014), afforded him a deep insight into the psychotic state of those suffering from phenomena acknowledged only later as shell shock and mass hysteria. Krasnyi smekh’s medical background is revealed and interpreted through the professional psychiatric publications by both Andreyev’s and our contemporaries. Andreyev’s masterful generalization of a particular military conflict and its psychiatric consequences – presented as a heterotopia (Foucault 1984), i.e. simultaneously a real place and a placeless place – has secured <i>Krasnyi smekh</i>’s continuing importance.