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Early Soviet society featured clear nutrition guidelines and a robust plan for streamlined logistics in food processing, distribution, and consumption, all of which was aimed at building a stronger state through a virtuous transformation of calories into labor power. Such rhetoric appeared even in children's illustrated books, such as Vladimir Maiakovskii and Nikolai Kupreianov's Story of Petia, Fat Boy, and of Sima, Who is Skinny (1926). This paper shows how in the 1920s authors such as Viktor Shklovskii and Iurii Olesha turned that rhetoric on its head and pushed back against the early Soviet obsession with planning and mastering nature and the human body by employing metaphors of food, digestion, and agriculture. In Shklovskii's memoirs A Sentimental Journey (1923) and Knight's Move (1923) and Olesha's novel Envy (1927), the October Revolution itself emerges as a metabolic process on a vast scale: prerevolutionary aesthetic threads, motifs, and concepts are broken down and processed, reassembled, and repurposed into a seemingly new society and worldview, in which the individual original components are still recognizable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This Introduction provides a description of the cluster, complete with the background and rationale for it, the research questions it poses, and an article‐by‐article succinct presentation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article introduces the subject and approach of our forum on Russian, Literature, and the Arts. Our forum is devoted to the rich intersections of Russian literary, film, and theater production with the world of medical knowledge and practice, both institutionalized and not, and all the bodily metrics, functionalities, illnesses, diseases, disorders, and disabilities that medicine encompasses. The articles in our forum approach these intersections from a range of critical and theoretical angles as they both revisit hallowed scholarly conversations within the Medical Humanities and stake out new territory in this field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the wake of fin-de-siècle discoveries in the field of endocrinology, bodily glands and the hormones they produced featured prominently in the literary works, visual arts, and popular culture of early twentieth-century Europe. Experimental surgery promised rejuvenation and intellectual vitality through gland transplantation and grafting, while phenomena of all sorts began to be associated to hormone production in causal links--from bodily rhythms to behavioral patterns, from the pace of history to the trajectory of nations. Italo Svevo was fascinated by Basedow and Graves's discoveries on the thyroid, a gland that was supposed to determine the speed and promptness of one's body according to the amount of hormones it produced--hypothyroidism, or scarcity of hormones, would entail lethargic behavior and slow movements, while hyperthyroidism, or the abundant production of hormones, would lead to excessive activity and consumption. Through the analysis of an early short story by Svevo, "Doctor Menghi's Drug" (ca. 1904), this paper addresses how the activity of the thyroid affects not only bodily rhythms, but also narrative time--intended as both the time of the story (diegetic time) and the pace of storytelling--and it explores how metabolic processes act as constraints for literary creativity by complicating narrative time and raising questions of narrative agency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]