By Melanie Jones
The North American Dostoevsky Society stands with all the people of Ukraine, Russia, and the rest of the world who condemn the Russian invasion of Ukraine. See our statement here.
Over the past decade, scholars in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies have shifted their study of disability from the realm of metaphor or medical essentialism to more sustained engagements with both Disability Studies and the Medical and Health Humanities. From Valeria Sobol’s Febris Erotica: Lovesickness in the Russian Literary Imagination (2010), to Rebecca Reich’s State of Madness: Psychiatry, Literature, and Dissent After Stalin (2018), to Konstantin Starikov and Melissa L. Miller’s Russian Medical Humanities: Past, Present, Future (2021), literary scholars, in particular, are increasingly asking what meditations on disability can tell us about the political positions, cultural norms, socio-economic views, and existential stakes of authors, their works, and their time. These scholars are also exploring how literary works can complicate or enrich our understanding of what ability, health, and normality mean.
At the 2025 MLA, the North American Dostoevsky Society’s Dostoevsky and Disability panel engaged with a multitude of disabled characters in Dostoevsky’s works–from the physically handicapped, to the mentally ill, to the chronically diseased–to examine how issues as varied as medical misogyny, labor rights, and care networks are framed, utilized, and reimagined through the lens of disability. Organizer Melanie Jones and her panelists hope this session will be a springboard for further interventions into the largely Anglophone disciplines of Disability Studies and Medical Humanities, as well as provoking greater awareness of how dis/ability and ill/health inform the works they study.
Our first panelist was Melissa L. Miller (Colby College), who specializes in Medical Humanities and Russophone Literature from the nineteenth century onwards, with a special focus on depictions of women’s health. Building off research for her first book, Wise Women: How Midwives Reconceived Birth in Russophone Literature and Culture, her paper was titled “Pregnancy and Chronic Illness in Dostoevsky.” In her paper, Miller discussed how pregnancy was historically figured as a debilitating, chronic condition that rendered women disabled and encouraged male physicians (and city-trained midwives) to view it as something to be hidden from view and corrected as soon as possible. Literary depictions of pregnancy followed this trend, treating it as a vaguely shameful, mentally disabling condition and purposefully hiding it from readers. Miller argues that the childbirth scene in Dostoevsky’s Demons writes against this grain. In addition to exposing how traumatizing birthing could be when viewed through this denigrating lens, Dostoevsky also depicts childbirth in action, centering Maria Shatova’s perspectives and experiences in a radical departure from previous birth scenes. Her transformation into a mother is still utilized mainly to further her husband Ivan Shatov’s storyline; nonetheless, by depicting labor itself as a process of spiritual communion and transcendence, Dostoevsky counters medicalized readings of labor as an illness to be endured.
Our second panelist was Ruth Lévai (University of Miskolc, Hungary), whose paper was titled “‘Who Sinned? This Woman or Her Husband?’: Maria Timofeevna Lebyadkina and Disability as Penance.” In her paper, Lévai argued that a cultural reading of disability that recognized how “impairments and disabilities are structuring culture(s) and at the same time are structured and lived through culture” ( Waldschmidt 20) could shed new light on how Maria’s physical and mental disabilities are indebted to the concept of yurodivye or holy fools. The contrast in Demons between Maria’s supposed handicaps, which are mocked and shamed by the town, and the way Nikolai Stavrogin’s “moral disability” is encouraged by his peers and indulged by his elders, exposes the moral abyss of contemporary Russian society. Maria’s ability to see Stavrogin’s true colors as an “imposter” and predict his destructive spiral, meanwhile, supports her assertion that rather than be pitied for her conditions, she “ought rather to pity” the supposedly healthy, able townsfolk around her.
Our third panelist, Chloe Papadopoulos (University of Southern California) examined the tremendous degree to which physical handicaps and chronic illness inform Dostoevsky’s depiction of labor and poverty in his oeuvre in a paper entitled “‘I Can’t Work Forever’: Disability, Dependence, and Labor in Dostoevsky’s Novels.” Examining his first and last novels, Poor Folk and Brothers Karamazov, Papadopoulos traces how each novel’s critique of poverty is bound up in vicious cycles of illness: “one works, one gets sick, one can’t work, one becomes poorer and needs to work more, one works through the illness, one gets sicker, one can’t work, one ultimately dies.” It is only by incorporating the constant disabling effects of this overwork that the desperate choices in Poor Folk and the depths of despair in Brothers Karamazov can be understood. Papadopoulos also draws on disability theories of interdependency to examine how care needs were met within families with disabled members, and how these care networks inform Dostoevsky’s developing idea of the “ideal” family.
Panel organizer Melanie Jones received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2021. Dr. Jones works at the intersection of Disability Studies and the Global Health Humanities, and has taught Russian and Comparative Literature courses at UCLA and for the Bard Prison Initiative. In addition to a monograph on trauma and mental illness, Dr. Jones’s next projects will include an edited volume on Disability Studies in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Literature. Interested chapter contributors are encouraged to reach out to her at feuillyjones@gmail.com.