How to cure melancholy?

The book of Jean Starobinski (L'encre de la mélancolie) was published in Paris in 2012. The company of brilliant translators from French under the general editorship of Sergei Zenkin prepared and released this work at the UFO publishing house.

In the preface of the editor, the author’s quarry is described in detail. Starobinsky-“ recognized classic of the Geneva School of New Criticism, formed in the 1950s and prepared the emergence of structuralism and poststructuralism in literary criticism and cultural theory ,” the preface said. The date means that Starobinsky began to reflect and write about melancholy as a cultural phenomenon in those years when in Russia, of course, there was someone to think about it, but the worshiper and socialist realism that won in everything did not allow publications of labor on this exciting topic. Now this is a particularly interesting reading in the context of the history of emotions.

Starobinsky has a unique qualifications: he is a psychotherapist and a historian of literature and culture. This gives clinical accuracy in the analysis of texts and phenomena. Therefore, the book begins with work called the "History of the Healing of Melancholy." The author traces as ideas about the disease and treatment changed from antiquity to the 20th century and how stubbornly medicine went to the scientific method of cognition. It is a pity, but the book does not contain a recipe for curing from melancholy.

Until the second half of the 18th century, in Europe, melancholy was treated mainly by bloodletting, vomiting and laxative, since it was believed that it comes from an excess of black humor and it should be removed from the body. Supporters of humoral theory with their methods for treating melancholy somatized the patient, bodily imitated the process of catharsis and sought recovery. This explains the long life of the theory.

Quotes from many sources tell what melancholy is found in the writings of Homer, Hippocrates, Celsius, Galen, Paracelsus, as the Renaissance melancholy healed and how they saved from it in Versailles under King Louis XV. And how much courage needed in the article “Melancholy” in the “Encyclopedia” to doubt the theory of the Gumors, in the second half of the 18th century.

But in England they orientated earlier. There, even at the Elizabethan court, they began to get bored, suffer from the noise of the big city, hide the village joys and go to Italy, which perfectly cures the soul from melancholy.

“... Goras Walpol, Smollet, Boswell, Beckford, Goldsmith, Stern ... Do they really suffer from depression? Spleen is a neurosis and “social pose”, a product of culture , ”writes Starobinsky. The fashion for melancholy was stable and quickly spread to the rest of Europe. From the medical phenomenon, she successfully retrained into cultural and lived a large and diverse life.

All subsequent texts in the book are about how it happened. In the "Anatomy of Melancholy", Starobinsky considers the idea that melancholy is the reverse side of exclusivity. And everyone who shines in the science of government, philosophy, poetry or art is obvious to melancholy. One of the main features of melancholy is described here: “ ... in a word, everywhere where melancholy is found, the split begins ,” writes Starobinsky. Reflection is born from this duality. And the "anatomy of melancholy" illuminates the ideological consequences of this phenomenon in European culture.

In the chapter “Lesson of Nostalgia”, the author reflects on the fact that historians and philologists are available for study only when they are embodied in words. “Thus, the history of feelings is nothing more than the history of words in which emotion is expressed. In this area, the historian and the philologist have similar tasks; It is necessary to be able to identify different “states of the language”, style, through which personal or collective experience is expressed: historical semantics should be held ready, ” writes Starobinsky. The danger is that, explaining the past with the language of our time, we distort it; But we have no other language. Starobinsky gives a great example - "Neron's sadism." At the same time, the emperor of the word "sadism" did not exist.

“Therefore, in my sketch of the history of nostalgia, I will provide the languages ​​of past eras and will avoid the explanatory apparatus of modern psychological science to explain the documents of the past,” the author promises. But he understands that, “no matter how we seek to achieve the reality of the past, we can do this only with the help of the language of our time, thereby constructing what will become knowledge of our era, and possibly the following.”

Starobinsky shows in his work how the word “nostalgia” was understood in different cultural eras since it was invented by the doctor Johann Hoffer in 1688.

In the name of the chapter "Salvation through the irony?" The irony has already been concluded. But in the text of this chapter, the keyword is the same as in the previous one - nostalgia. Because of her, Gozzi extended the existence of the theater del arte. “For this person, the disappearing folk traditions turned into an object of nostalgia for this person, made as if non -existent, inevitable death endowed them with purity, reported aesthetic value,” writes Starobinsky. And he further explains that the plays of Gotsi were accused of Acedia’s sin - “removal from reality characteristic of laziness and melancholy”.

A fairy tale and sleep in culture are very close. The next part is called "sleep and immortality in melancholy." And he talks about the misadventures of the poet Baudler, a large specialist in the melancholy, who at that time was usually called a split. According to Starobinsky, Baudelaire not only portrayed the main features of melancholy in his poetry, but even managed to “describe feelings that will become the property of“ science ”only a lot later.”

The last part is called the same as the whole book - "Chernoli of Melancholy." It is about melancholy in the life of Baudelaire, Montten, Cervantes, Madame de Steel and others. The consequences will be different each time. Madame de Steel, for example, invented sweet melancholy, into which sensitive souls plunged after the crash of personal happiness.

It is useful and interesting to read Starobinsky, because he leads the reader without arrogance to the heights of his complex constructions. The abundance of quotes, names and links does not blind, but only fascinates. The book is a great opportunity to get acquainted with how European culture understands itself.