Cures for Modernity

Medicine in Interwar Russian and Czech Literature and Cinema

Author: Julia Sutton-Mattocks, Christian Emden and David Midgley Series: Cultural History & Literary Imagination

Why did medicine fascinate writers and filmmakers in the 1920s and 1930s? This book traces the prevalent medical themes in interwar Russian and Czech literature and cinema: syphilis, nervous illness, surgery and childbirth. It offers new perspectives on major writers like Bulgakov and Zamiatin as well as lesser known counterparts.

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«This monograph makes an original and significant scholarly contribution, in addition to being a gripping read. Not only is it the first book in English to compare Russian and Czechoslovak literature and film of the interwar period in such a comprehensive way, but it does so via the growing discipline of the medical humanities. The book’s greatest strength is its attention to detail, exemplified by Sutton-Mattocks’s close readings of the medical implications of the creative works she selects.»

(Melissa Miller, Modern Language Review 120.1, January 2025)

«Her comparative approach using Czech and Russian work enriches the field by moving beyond national boundaries to show how interwar medical discourses were both locally specific and transnationally resonant. It also expands the scope of medical humanities beyond its usual Anglo-American and Western European focus, demonstrating the importance of Eastern European contributions.»

(Dylan Mohr, Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema 1-2, 2025)

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 Machatý and Vladislav Vančura) as well as familiarizing readers with more obscure works by some of their lesser-known counterparts, such as Vladimír Raffel, Vikentii Veresaev, Nikolai Aseev and Noi Galkin.

About the Author

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.