Authors

Discussion

A certain peculiarity in the development of psychiatry in the late Russian Empire was the unexpected, from today's perspective, interest in physiognomy. This rather old-fashioned method of diagnosis, historically being a part of medical semiotics, became a tool commonly considered appropriate for identifying and classifying the signs of external and, consequently, internal degeneration. The epitome of this tendency can be found in the nearly six-hundred-page compendium of the Kiev professor of mental and nervous diseases, Ivan Sikorsky. One of the chapters of his General Psychology and Physiognomy (1904) was a historiographical overview, covering both Aristotelian zoophysiognomy and a more "scientific", post-Darwinian one.

In modernist literature, one way of depicting a psychologically unbalanced person was to highlight the dissonance between the physical appearance and the character. Indicatively, the narrator of Nabokov's Despair (1934) examines the world through the prism of physiognomy, mistakenly believing that he can effortlessly “read” actual social reality. The main conflict of the novel, whose author was strongly influenced by the writings of Andrei Bely, is based on the theme of duplicity. Nabokov uses Hermann's physiognomic savvy as a means of emphasizing the disruption between the external and the internal, genuine talent and graphomania, art and life. In my paper, I will present a series of new commentaries on Nabokov's text, taking into account the relevant historical context.