Jakobson’s Hypothesis, Gleb / Ivanovich, and Perversion: G. Uspenskii’s Madness and His Short Story “Straightened”

ABSTRACT

This article analyzes the discourse of G. Uspenskii’s mental illness. Drawing on R. Jakobson’s hypothesis that the writer’s insanity was associated with his tendency toward metonymy, I analyze Uspenskii’s hallucinations and delusional ideas. The dissociative identity disorder observed during his illness is explained in terms of the effect of a metonymic cognitive pattern that split the writer’s conception of sexuality. After determining that his ambivalent attitude toward sexuality is a semantic core of his delirium as narrative, I turn to the short story “Straightened,” which was written before his illness, and argue that its semantic structure was dictated by an attempt to find a non-contradictory way of looking at sexuality.

KEYWORDS:

• madness
• sexuality
• Gleb Uspenskii
• metonymy

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

^1. This investigation was carried out in 2019 under the NRU HSE’s Basic Research Program. The author wishes to express gratitude to his colleagues, the psychologists I. Zislin, M. Novikova-Grund, S.Iu. Mazur, L. Rozin, and the philologists S.N. Zenkin, A. Vdovin, A. Fedotov, and A. Shel’a.

^2. The history of how this text, which synthesizes worship of Venus de Milo and of the people, remains beyond the scope of this article.