Abstract

The paper analyzes Dr. Rybakov’s article O prevratnykh polovykh oshchushcheniiakh
(About Perverse Sexual Sensations) from the widest circulated medical journal
Vrach (The Physician) in late Imperial Russia. The article, published in two parts in
sequential issues, presents a hybrid genre of a scientific paper and a patient’s love story.
The author uses excerpts from the patient’s diary as evidence to support his argument
about her neurological disorder. Yet Rybakov’s selections of diary passages turn him
into a plot-maker, who embellishes his scientific investigation with the romanticized
representations of lovesickness, commonly found in literature of the period. Due to the
aesthetics of high sensibility, the patient’s identity becomes socially normalized. Yet,
the reader can witness the narrator’s conflicted attitude. On the one hand, Rybakov
creates a sympathetic narrative about the patient’s suffering. On the other, the doctor
wants to share the successful story of her recovery with the readers. In this article, I
seek to answer the following questions: How does the doctor’s writing differ from
psychiatric texts about female homosexuality of the time and how does the diffused
narrative authority (the presence of two narrators) relate to Rybakov’s scientific argumentation?