The idea that love – especially the unrequited variety – and the passion associated with it could render one physically ill goes way back on the cultural-historical timeline. According to Valeria Sobol, a UI professor of Slavic languages and literatures, scholars have traced the concept of “lovesickness” all the way back to the Greeks.
Before exploring the topic in her recently published book “Febris Erotica: Lovesickness in the Russian Literary Imagination” (University of Washington Press) – “Febris Erotica” translates as “love fever” – Sobol said she was unaware that “there was this whole long, ancient history behind this concept of lovesickness, with elaborate theories of how you develop this disease, and the ‘scientific’ mechanisms behind that.”
As it turns out, the connection made between love and illness – in both literature and medicine – is not limited to Western thought and philosophy.
Russian literature – most notably, 19th-century novels – tends to be overpopulated with doctor characters, as well distraught young women (and some men) consumed with so much passion that their bodies just couldn’t physically tolerate the heat.
“I became intrigued by the use of physiology and the use of medical metaphors in Russian literature because it was such a big deal in the 19th century,” Sobol said. The themes and language were so pervasive – in works ranging from Nikolai Karamzin’s “Letter of a Russian Traveler” and Aleksander Herzen’s “Who Is to Blame?” to Leo Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina” – that “we often take lovesickness for granted in those novels.”
“In real life, today, we may talk about depression” being the outcome of stress and anguish attributed to matters of the heart,” she said. “But the fact that you could develop tuberculosis and die as a result of love is too much for contemporary readers.”
Not so, among readers of 19th-century Russian fiction, said Sobol, who noted that novels typically were published in thick journals, which also included a mix of scientific and philosophical articles, along with translated works.
“The interesting thing about tuberculosis,” she noted, “was that bacillus wasn’t discovered until 1881. So up until then, they really didn’t know what caused the disease, and often attributed it to the effects of lovesickness.”
As she studied the cultural, philosophical and scientific theories in vogue in Russia during the 19th century, as well as the early modern period that preceded it, Sobol discovered that the metaphors and literary devices employed by Russian writers could be traced to changes occurring within Russian society.
“In Russia and, in general, in Western Europe, there was such a rapid development of empirical sciences, starting from the 1840s on. It immediately pervaded literary works,” she said, adding that “Russian literary writers were always interested in other developments outside of literature.”
“They always tried to be more than just artists; they wanted to be preachers or philosophers or moral leaders, like Tolstoy, famously.”
In her book, Sobol argues that “through the use of lovesickness – because it engages the issues of mind, body and human nature – writers were able to indirectly address some of the most pressing issues of their time.”
Among the issues Sobol confronted in her research was the tension that appeared to exist between developments in the real world – where modern scientific and philosophical concepts were slowly beginning to gain acceptance – and the fictional realm, where love fever was still the rage.
“What justification did they have to perpetuate that? There must have been some view of the human being and the relationship between the physical and emotional realms to justify that connection, because emotion or passion from unfulfilled or rejected love, can kill you – at least in the fictional accounts of the day,” Sobol said.
Some of the enduring conflict, she believes, was borne from the reality that 19th-century Russia was an Orthodox Christian monarchy; therefore, science – including the disciplines of anatomy and physiology – was still regarded as suspect, and fraught with politically charged connotations.
In that swirl of competing, changing ideologies, the location of the human soul – to which the emotion of love was often thought to be anchored – remained a conundrum. And in many respects, Sobol noted, the mind-body connection continues to be a philosophical and cultural enigma, even today.
While the lovesickness eventually ran its course in Russian fiction, and “splinters into different paradigms,” Sobol added that “the theme itself doesn’t really go away.”
Curiously, Cupid continued to make his rounds – at least occasionally, on the Russian literary circuit.
“There was a novel published in the 1990s, ‘Medea and Her Children,’ by Liudmila Ulitskaia, about a woman in the 1970s who develops strange allergies,” Sobol said. Lovesickness appears to be the likely cause for the character’s afflictions, which also include a high fever when touched by a man.
