| Popis: |
The paper aims to investigate some connections between scientific development in Russia and the image of the scientist in Russian literature. Among the different scientific areas, special focus will be drawn on medicine, biology and natural sciences. The development of medicine studies and the social role of the medical profession seem to proceed almost in parallel with the representation of physicians in Russian literature. At the beginning of the nineteenth century knowledge of the medical science is still primitive: the propensity to vodka is stronger than the Aesculapian commitment, inspiring very low confidence in a wide community of writers and literary characters, from Pushkin to Gogol. The first character who takes the medical profession seriously, in spite of his nihilist attitude, is Turgenev’s Bazarov, who is also well-known for his confidence in ‘frogs’, i.e. in scientific experiments. Such a radical change in the representation of the medical personnel reflects the significant improvement of Russian education in medical sciences, fostered by some outstanding personalities like Nikolai Pirogov, Ivan Sechenov, and Ivan Pavlov. From Bazarov to Bulgakov’s professor Preobrazhensky to Bogdanov’s inzhen’er Menni with his theory on blood transfusions, the medical profession is strongly linked with its experimental component, which in a wider sense is connected to the specific reception of the theories of Darwin and Marx in Russia. In this operation some central figures of the Russian radical intelligentsia are involved: Dmitry Pisarev, the main promoter of a special adapted version of Darwinism and Chernyshevsky, who rejected part of Darwin’s theory, considered too violent, for the sake of a good and optimistic science. From the second half of the nineteenth century to the great experiment of Russian bolshevism, science and ideology will be forced to walk arm in arm, with the latter always prevailing over the scientific method. If the case of Lysenko-Michurinism is the best known tragic example of this union, through characters of Bulgakov’s Sharikov and the Brothers Strugatsky’s clones Prof. Vybegallo and others, Russian Literature presents an even wider and more astonishing scenario, where the research on brain reflexes carried out by great scientists like Sechenov and Pavlov seems to be part of a broader experiment on the entire population of the Soviet Union. |
