Psychopatic personality and peculiarities of its image in A. V. Amfiteatrov’s book «Psychopaths: truth and fiction»

The article analyses the cultural and historical content of Psychopaths: Truth and Fiction written by A.V. Amfiteatrov. It considers the problem of the popularity of a psychopathic personality in Russian literature at the turn of the 19th-20th centuries. It also discusses its conditionality due to the explosive growth in the number of popular science works in this branch of medicine. The book contains a gallery of various psychopathic types starting with Judas and ending with contemporary personality patterns of the author. The article considers the dependence of the genre originality of the story on the character images. It singles out such varieties as an idyll, a detective story, a duel story and a portrait in the form of an internal monologue. Based on the analysis of the texts of the stories included in the book, the author comes to a conclusion about A. V. Amfiteatrov’s inclination for Russian naturalism. One of the unconditional signs of naturalism is the determinism of the personality structure by its biological principle. The arsenal of means and techniques used by A. V. Amfiteatrov allows us to attribute the book to mass literature. Secondary literature designed for quick oblivion in the history of literature plays an important role in recreating the integral cultural and historical context of the era. This makes the significance of the book «Psychopaths: Truth and Fiction» which is a vivid example of mass literary production at the turn of the two centuries.