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A future revolutionary, Alesha Karamazov is, at nineteen, an inexperienced boy who lives in a monastery and who has been considered strange since birth. Fedor Dostoevskii endows him with hysteria—then a serious psychopathology with convulsions that were clinically seen as analogous to epilepsy, themorbus sacer fromwhich Dostoevskii himself suffered. Recognized as an epidemic problem, hysteria in this novel is elaborately deployed as a symbol of Russia's social ills and the underlying cause of farreaching personality changes in Alesha (for better or worse), preparing him for a heroic destiny. Although hysteria was soon altered and later eliminated as a clinical syndrome, James L. Rice enables us to read the novel for the first time in the light of documented medical history.

—V. P. Turgeneva to Ivan Sergeevich, Spasskoe, 30 July 1838On the eve of World War I the St. Petersburg Public Library acquired, from an anonymous donor, 124 letters from V. P. Turgeneva to her son, Ivan Sergeevich, written from 1838 to 1844. His side of the correspondence is not extant, but his youthful personality is often vividly evoked by his mother's words, and his letters are reflected and occasionally quoted in hers. These letters from the hand of V. P. would comprise, an archivist once observed, a thick book.1 During the era they represent, I. S. ("Milyi drug i syn, Vanichka," somewhat more frequently "Mon cher Jean") entered Berlin University to study philosophy, traveled in Europe, published twenty short poems and the comic verse narrative Parasha, met Vissarion Belinskii and became his friend, began his lifelong friendship with the Viardots, was first stricken with gallstones and other complaints, published his first story (already mature and polished, "Andrei Kolosov"), and wrote part of a work of fiction now seen as a key to his creativity ("Perepiska," published in 1856).

Your Russian (and I must tell you again how I admire your patience, or rather your resignation) probably has some Utopian dream of a world-benefiting therapy and feels the work is not getting on fast enough. I believe their race more than any other lacks the knack for self-inflicted drudgery. By the way, do you know the story about the "glass rear end"? A practicing physician should never forget it.Freud to Jung, June 3, 1909From 1906 to 1914 C. G. Jung and Sigmund Freud exchanged 360 personal letters, most of them mailed between Zürich and Vienna. These years saw the consolidation of an international Freudian school by 1909 and multiple schisms within the movement, from the defection of Adler in 1911 to the final alienation of Jung himself. Given the era and the specific localities, it is not surprising to find that Russians and Russian political issues now and then figure, oddly and elliptically, among the welter of topics raised in the Freud-Jung Briefwechsel. Out of the fragmented data an incident of sorts emerges, with a Russian cast in the role of seductress (later heroine), Jung as victim (and unwitting villain), and Freud himself intervening "Sherlock Holmes-like" (as he put it) to help solve the case. Beyond its intrinsic and eccentric appeal, the material holds a three-fold historic significance for the Slavicist.