Cures for Modernity: Medicine in Interwar Russian and Czech Literature and Cinema Christian Emden 9781800792937

Surgery, bacteriology, psychiatry ... medicine fascinated writers and filmmakers in the 1920s and 1930s. But why did medicine capture the creative imagination at precisely that moment, and what does the prevalence of medical imagery in works of the period tell us about interwar culture? These are the questions at the heart of this book, which takes the Russian and Czech literary and cinematic contexts as case studies for interrogating the wider phenomenon.

Contributing to an emerging body of scholarship bringing the Medical Humanities and Slavonic Studies into dialogue, the book focuses on four particularly prevalent medical themes in the literature and cinema of the period: syphilis, nervous illness, surgery and childbirth. It offers new perspectives on works by well-known figures of interwar Russian and Czech culture (e.g. Mikhail Bulgakov, Evgenii Zamiatin, Gustav Machaty and Vladislav Vancura) as well as familiarizing readers with more obscure works by some of their lesser-known counterparts, such as Vladimir Raffel, Vikentii Veresaev, Nikolai Aseev and Noi Galkin.

Julia Sutton-Mattocks is a Lecturer in the Department of Russian and Czech at the University of Bristol, where she received her PhD. She was co-supervised by the University of Exeter and funded by the South, West and Wales Doctoral Training Partnership. Her research interests are in the literary and visual culture of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the practice and networks of translation and publishing, and intermedial connections, especially between literature, cinema and art.