title: Febris Erotica: Lovesickness in the Russian Literary Imagination (Literary Conjugations)
author:  Valeria Sobol 
description: "One of the great contributions Sobol makes is her attention to the mutual influence of the languages of science and literature."Lonny Harrison, <i>Canadian Slavonic Papers</i>, Summer 2011<P>"One of the book's key strengths, its full-blooded engagement with the scientific contexts that inform the (mostly) novels at hand, shows Sobol to be of the best sort of humanities scholar, not fighting shy of the 'extraneous' intellectual matter that underpins creative praxis."B.D. Morgan, <i>Slavonic and East European Review</i>, October 2011<P>"In this excellent study, Valeria Sobol explains its [lovesickness] central importance first in the west (starting with ancient Greek culture), and then in different Russian literary movements from its entrance into Russia in the Petrine period.The book alternates between close textual analysis and literary history so as to situate each text and author within a mostly vanished past."<i>Slavic Review</i><P>"In this book, Valeria Sobol takes a well known factthat 'lovesickness' plays a significant role in the Russian literary imagination and makes it the nexus of a fertile study with stunning depth and breadth. . . . The book is so rich and full of information, and written in such clear and masterful prose. . . come away with understanding Russian literary culture in new and profound ways."<i>The Russian Review</i><P>"Throughout the book is well grounded in both Greek and early modern philosophy and in relevant psychological and medical theories of the 19th century."<i>Choice</i>
zlib_text: ![](images/00001.jpg)
  
  * * *
  
  
    
    
  Count Tolstoi and the Public Censor  
    
  
  
  This page copyright © 2001 Blackmask Online.
  
  
  
  
  
  http://www.blackmask.com
  
  
  * * *
  
  # Count Tolstoi and the Public Censor
  
  
  ### Isabel Hapgood
  
  
  
  
  
  This page copyright © 2001 Blackmask Online.
  
  
  
  
  
  http://www.blackmask.com  
    
  
  
  
  
  
  IT is a well-known fact that the sympathy between Count Lyof Tolstoi and the
  censor of the Russian press is the
  
  
  reverse of profound. Nevertheless, the manner in which the two men are working
  together, unwittingly, for the
  
  
  confusion of the count's future literary executors and editors, furnishes a
  subject of interest, not unmixed with
  
  
  amusement, to spectators in a land which is not burdened with an official
  censor. The extent of the censorship
  
  
  exercised over the first eleven volumes of his works will probably never be
  known. But the twelfth volume is a
  
  
  literary curiosity, which can be appreciated only after a comparison of its
  contents as printed there with the
  
  
  manusc