As the newly formed Czechoslovakia and Soviet Union confronted the wreckage of war and revolution, they found themselves heir to a public health crisis: syphilis. Both countries moved quickly to vanquish this scourge of the old world; in 1922 Czechoslovakia criminalized knowingly transmitting the disease, and in 1926 the Russian SFSR followed suit. As Julia Sutton-Mattocks argues in her valuable study Cures for Modernity, tackling public health challenges was a priority for both countries in their pursuit of a “healthy modernity.” Writers and filmmakers joined physicians and officials in projects to cure both the bodies of individual citizens and the social body as a whole. Medicine offered a meaningful discourse for imagining “regeneration” on levels both individual and collective, literal and metaphorical, realistic and fantastical.
Sutton-Mattocks defines regeneration as a specifically interwar-era response to the theories of degeneration that had shaped scientific, social, and cultural thought for more than half a century. In a challenge to popular narratives of progress, degeneration theorists had argued that humanity was devolving both physically and spiritually, and pathologized contemporary art as evidence of this decline. Avant-garde artists responded by channeling these ideas into an experimental aesthetics of deviance and fragmentation. As scholars have explored in other contexts, Sutton-Mattocks argues that these trends did not disappear in the interwar period; instead, they were integrated into a regenerative aesthetics of life and wholeness. Informed by state projects of medical renewal and the ubiquity of discourses such as psychoanalysis and eugenics, Czech and Russian writers and filmmakers positioned themselves as key players in the construction of a healthy modernity.
Sutton-Mattocks’s four central chapters offer sensitive readings of a wide array of prose and cinema from the 1920s and 1930s. The first examines how artists such as Vladislav Vančura presented syphilis as a metaphor for the old world. Yet whereas syphilis stood in for specific social ills such as prostitution, the second chapter argues that neurasthenia came to symbolize a wider crisis of human relations. The third chapter treats narratives of surgery as metaphors of the interwar aim to remake the world. Questions of medical ethics come to the fore in realistic portrayals of amputation, while in fantastical texts such as Mikhail Bulgakov’s A Dog’s Heart (1925–26), the hybrid dog-man Sharikov embodies the tension between visions of degeneration and regeneration. The final chapter portrays medicalized childbirth as both a literal procedure and a metaphorical birthing of the new world.
Medical metaphors were indeed everywhere, yet as Sutton-Mattocks observes, they did not function unproblematically. In the case of syphilis, the disease’s associations with the past clashed with its status as an ongoing health problem. An insightful analysis of Vančura’s reconfiguration of the film scenario Lethargus (1929) as the play Jezero Ukereve (1935) shows that the writer resolved this clash through a double remove. Not only did he set both works in Uganda, but he also had his hero treat trypanosomiasis (“sleeping sickness”) with Salvarsan, a drug for syphilis. Sutton-Mattocks reads this as wish fulfillment on Vančura’s part: if Salvarsan could cure trypanosomiasis—a disease which had no known safe cure—then perhaps there was a solution for the social problems that still plagued Czechoslovakia.
Sutton-Mattocks’s argument that the discourse of regeneration characterized a wide range of cultural production supports her polemic with conventional divisions between the interwar period’s Avant-garde and their formally more traditional contemporaries. She is also right to claim that the shared preoccupations of Czech and Russian cinema and literature challenge entrenched, and politically corrosive, narratives of exceptionalism. Contributing to the transnational turn within studies of the region, Sutton-Mattocks concludes that the presence of regenerative discourses in both Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union points to a shared modernity that is not confined to political borders.
Yet the transnational framework sometimes sits uncomfortably alongside Sutton-Mattocks’s evidence of specificity. For instance, the author observes that Russian works portray surgery in terms more radical—both literally and metaphorically—than their Czech counterparts, but only cursorily proposes “the sheer scale and ambition of the Soviet revolutionary project in comparison with the relatively modest project of regeneration undergone by Czechoslovakia” as “[o]ne possible explanation” (204–5). Indeed, Czechoslovakia was constructing a liberal democracy in the interwar years, while the Soviet Union was mobilizing all of society behind the utopian ambitions of a highly interventionist party-state. The study would have benefitted from a more sustained investigation of the differing ideological propellers behind the period’s common search for a healthy modernity.
