About the book: 2002 / The book examines the history of psychiatry through the prism of a special genre of medical literature - pathography, or the life stories of celebrities from the point of view of their illnesses, imaginary or real. In Russian culture, the writer was a particularly prominent figure - as a mouthpiece for society, a symbol of the times, or an object onto which readers projected their desires. It is not surprising that it was writers who attracted the attention of psychiatrists and became their absentee patients and heroes (or antiheroes) of pathographies. A lot of medical literature is devoted to the classics - Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Garshin and many other writers and poets. The author is looking for answers to the questions: how and why did psychiatrists diagnose writers, what did this mean for the development of psychiatry, how were pathographies met in society? Why did some doctors find various illnesses in Pushkin, for example, while others, on the contrary, considered him a model of mental health? And why, with the advent of a new generation of doctors, did these diagnoses change, sometimes to diametrically opposed ones? In this study, ideas about mental illness and mental health, about talent and genius are placed in the context of the turbulent socio-political life of Russia at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries. Irina Sirotkina’s book received a prize from the Modem Language Association, USA for the best work in the field of Slavic languages ​​and literature in 2001–2002. The text of the book has been revised and expanded.