Deadline: December 1, 2022
At the turn of the 20th century, Russian and Western intellectuals were much taken by the mystical, the enigmatic, and the transcendental, not least, Helen Blavatsky with her Theosophical quest and Rudolf Steiner with his elaboration of Anthroposophy— the latter, according to Nikolai Berdiaev, being “one of the most interesting tendencies… attracting cultivated people such as Viacheslav Ivanov and Andrei Belyi.” By the early 1880s Russian translations of occult authors, such as Louis Jacolliot, Charles Richet, and Frank Podmore were already appearing, Russian writers like Aleksandr Butlerov with his “Stat’i po mediumizmu” and Aleksandr Aksakov with his Animizm i spiritizm following rapidly . Esoteric periodicals Rebus, Izida, and Vestnik Teosofii also mushroomed, coinciding with new interpretations of Orthodoxy as well as scientific investigations into the human psyche and the nervous system. In particular, mental illness, as another state of consciousness, formed a cardinal subject of both scholarly and artistic inquiry, a tendency which left a deep imprint on writers such as Leonid Andreev, Anton Chekhov, and Vsevolod Garshin.
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