{"id":4668,"date":"2025-06-18T04:56:34","date_gmt":"2025-06-18T08:56:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dostoevskydev.wpengine.com\/2025\/06\/18\/dostoevsky-and-disability-the-north-american-dostoevsky-society-at-the-2025-modern-language-association-convention\/"},"modified":"2025-06-18T04:56:34","modified_gmt":"2025-06-18T08:56:34","slug":"dostoevsky-and-disability-the-north-american-dostoevsky-society-at-the-2025-modern-language-association-convention","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dostoevsky.org\/society\/dostoevsky-and-disability-the-north-american-dostoevsky-society-at-the-2025-modern-language-association-convention\/","title":{"rendered":"Dostoevsky and Disability: The North American Dostoevsky Society at the 2025 Modern Language Association Convention"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Melanie Jones<\/em><\/p>\n

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\u00a0<\/em>here<\/em><\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

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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\u2019s\u00a0Febris Erotica: Lovesickness in the Russian Literary Imagination<\/em> (2010), to Rebecca Reich\u2019s State of Madness: Psychiatry, Literature, and Dissent After Stalin<\/em> (2018), to Konstantin Starikov and Melissa L. Miller\u2019s Russian Medical Humanities: Past, Present, Future<\/em> (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.<\/p>\n

At the 2025 MLA, the North American Dostoevsky Society\u2019s Dostoevsky and Disability <\/em>panel engaged with a multitude of disabled characters in Dostoevsky\u2019s works\u2013from the physically handicapped, to the mentally ill, to the chronically diseased\u2013to 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s health. Building off research for her first book, Wise Women: How Midwives Reconceived Birth in Russophone Literature and Culture<\/em>, her paper was titled \u201cPregnancy and Chronic Illness in Dostoevsky.\u201d 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\u2019s Demons <\/em>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\u2019s 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Our second panelist was Ruth L\u00e9vai (University of Miskolc, Hungary), whose paper was titled \u201c\u2018Who Sinned? This Woman or Her Husband?\u2019: Maria Timofeevna Lebyadkina and Disability as Penance.\u201d\u00a0In her paper, L\u00e9vai argued that a cultural reading of disability that recognized how \u201cimpairments and disabilities are structuring culture(s) and at the same time are structured and lived through culture\u201d (\u00a0Waldschmidt\u00a020) could shed new light on how Maria\u2019s physical and mental disabilities are indebted to the concept of\u00a0yurodivye<\/em>\u00a0or holy fools. The contrast in\u00a0Demons\u00a0<\/em>between Maria\u2019s supposed handicaps, which are mocked and shamed by the town, and the way Nikolai Stavrogin\u2019s \u201cmoral disability\u201d is encouraged by his peers and indulged by his elders, exposes the moral abyss of contemporary Russian society. Maria\u2019s ability to see Stavrogin\u2019s true colors as an \u201cimposter\u201d and predict his destructive spiral, meanwhile, supports her assertion that rather than be pitied for her conditions, she \u201cought rather to pity\u201d the supposedly healthy, able townsfolk around her.<\/p>\n

Our third panelist, Chloe Papadopoulos (University of Southern California) examined the tremendous degree to which physical handicaps and chronic illness inform Dostoevsky\u2019s depiction of labor and poverty in his oeuvre in a paper entitled \u201c\u2018I Can\u2019t Work Forever\u2019: Disability, Dependence, and Labor in Dostoevsky\u2019s Novels.\u201d Examining his first and last novels, Poor Folk <\/em>and Brothers Karamazov, <\/em>Papadopoulos traces how each novel\u2019s critique of poverty is bound up in vicious cycles of illness: \u201cone works, one gets sick, one can\u2019t work, one becomes poorer and needs to work more, one works through the illness, one gets sicker, one can\u2019t work, one ultimately dies.\u201d It is only by incorporating the constant disabling effects of this overwork that the desperate choices in Poor Folk<\/em> and the depths of despair in Brothers Karamazov <\/em>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\u2019s developing idea of the \u201cideal\u201d family.<\/p>\n

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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\u2019s next projects will include an edited volume on\u00a0Disability Studies\u00a0in\u00a0Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Literature. Interested chapter contributors are encouraged to reach out to her at\u00a0feuillyjones@gmail.com<\/a>.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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\u00a0here. Over the past decade, scholars in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies have shifted their study of disability from the realm of metaphor […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":340,"featured_media":4669,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4668","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-bloggers-karamazov"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dostoevsky.org\/society\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4668","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dostoevsky.org\/society\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dostoevsky.org\/society\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dostoevsky.org\/society\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/340"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dostoevsky.org\/society\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4668"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dostoevsky.org\/society\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4668\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dostoevsky.org\/society\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4669"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dostoevsky.org\/society\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4668"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dostoevsky.org\/society\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4668"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dostoevsky.org\/society\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4668"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}