This paper looks at the particular relationship between madness and
sanity in a dictatorship specifically in Soviet Russia as analyzed in Mikhail Bulgakov’s
Master and Margarita and in Alexander Zinoviev’s The Madhouse. In both
cases, albeit in different ways madness is regarded as a form resistance to communism
(Stalin’s and Brezhnev’s) as a particular kind of sanity and finally as a
creative vocation. The relationship between madness and sanity is seen as reversible
and can change depending on different perspectives—which are mostly political in
the two novels As illustrated by the two authors the modern literary discourse on
madness can be metaphorically shaped by the writer, as a generic category which
can refer to various forms of resistance and deviation from the established social,
political and cultural norms.

EB00000002968K

Available

• In praise of madness: the landmarks of a cultural pathology