‘…Who saw his own sunset while still living…’ From the journal of the doctor Anton Dietrich

Abstract

A publication of journal entries left by the German psychiatrist A. Dietrich, who for years studied the poet K. Batyushkov’s mental illness (caused by multiple intermarriages in the family) and supervised his treatment at the Sonnenstein psychiatric asylum. The publication is compiled and supplied with a preface and comments by the poet and literary historian G. Shulpyakov. The level of detail in the doctor’s notes gives an idea of the sick poet’s condition and helps to reconstruct the hospital routine that surrounded Batyushkov in the 1820s. The comments shed light on the poet’s family life and his relationship with sisters Aleksandra and Yulia, his brother Pompey, and contemporaries such as V. Zhukovsky and N. Karamzin. Batyushkov mentions their names in his every interaction with the clinic’s staff — evidence of an unrelenting loss of sanity: at one point, he insists that Zhukovsky ‘has visited him accompanied by his wife’; at another, he takes a random visitor for his paternal half-brother.