After Proust: How Yves Saint Laurent fashioned his life on Proust

 

After Proust

How Yves Saint Laurent fashioned his life on Proust

By Jeff Koehler

In the opening of a documentary by David Teboul, filmed in 2002 while Yves Saint Laurent was preparing his final collection, the designer, then in his sixties, looks at images of his boyhood in French-ruled Algeria. “I had a wonderful childhood. I think those are the days when I was happiest of all”, he says. “Now, I’m thinking of Proust who wrote: ‘True paradise is one you’ve lost.’” More often than not, it seems, Saint Laurent was thinking of Proust.

In January, the Musée d’Orsay in Paris will mark the sixtieth anniversary of Yves Saint Laurent’s inaugural collection by exploring his connections with Proust. “Like Proust, I’m fascinated most of all by my perceptions of a world in awesome transition”, Saint Laurent wrote in the catalogue to a retrospective of his work at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1983, the first given to a living designer. “And my heart has always been divided between the vestals of constancy and the avatars of change.”

For four decades, Saint Laurent observed this dichotomy, producing revolutionary designs while continuing to work in long-standing haute couture traditions. Drawing on elements from the male wardrobe that projected confidence and authority without sacrificing femininity, he created some of fashion history’s most influential designs for women, including le smoking tuxedo, tailored trouser suits and safari jackets, jumpsuits and trench coats, sheer chiffon tops, the Mondrian shift and Catherine Deneuve’s entire wardrobe in Luis Buñuel’s Belle de Jour (1967).

In 1966, he revolutionized the industry when he launched his Rive Gauche ready-to-wear line and opened an extensive chain of dedicated boutiques to sell the more affordable clothes, the first couturier to do so. But this meant he was creating four collections a year. His designs had not only to offer a highly original vision each season, but also be wearable, a near-impossible combination. Work on the collections structured his year and took a heavy toll on his health. “Mon métier m’accapare, créer est douloureux, toute l’année je travaille dans l’angoisse”, he told Yvonne Baby, a journalist from Le Monde, in 1983. “Je me replie en ermite, je ne sors pas, c’est une vie dure et c’est pourquoi je comprends si bien Proust, j’admire tellement ce qu’il a écrit sur les misères de la création. Je me souviens d’une phrase dans les Jeunes Filles en fleurs; ‘Du fond de quelle douleur avail-il trouvé ce pouvoir illimité de créer?’” (“My job consumes me, creating is painful, every year I work in anguish. I withdraw like a hermit, I don’t go out, it’s a hard life and that’s why I understand Proust so well, I admire so much what he wrote on the miseries of creation. I remember a line in Within a Budding Grove: ‘From the depths of what pain had he found this unlimited power to create?’”: my translation.)

The ailing aesthete’s identification with Proust runs back through his youth. Born in Oran in 1936, Yves Saint Laurent was a shy, anxious child raised in a house of women with his two younger sisters, mother, grandmother and aunt. His father managed a chain of cinemas across North Africa and was often away. They were well-off enough to have French servants and to move for the summer to a beachside villa in Trouville among equally privileged friends of the extended family. Laurence Benaïm’s biography of 2002 (published in an English translation by Kate Deimling in 2019) is full of vivid scenes and details from a colourful childhood. Like Proust, he was indulged by his mother, who let him cut up her dresses to make clothes for dolls and had a local tailor sew up his first designs for his sisters. At the time of his retrospective in New York, he wistfully remembered her dressing for dinner parties and, when “about to leave for the ball, com[ing] to kiss me goodnight, wearing a long dress of white tulle with pear-shaped white sequins”. The vision recalls the first thirty-odd pages of Du Côté de chez Swann, where the narrator’s “sole consolation, when I went upstairs for the night, was that Mama would come kiss me once I was in bed … the moment when I heard her coming up, then the soft sound of her garden dress of blue muslin, hung with little cords of plaited straw, passing along the hallway with its double doors, was for me a painful moment” (Lydia Davis’s translation of 2003).

It comes as little surprise that on first reading À la Recherche as an adolescent, Saint Laurent – a delicate boy, who found it difficult to make friends – immediately identified with Proust’s hypersensitive author-narrator. Over time, the affinity grew into a kind of infatuation. In his mid-forties, he told Baby: “Je reprends souvent le livre sans l’achever, j’ai besoin d’avoir devant moi cette œuvre extraordinaire. Par une espèce de superstition, il me semble que si je vais jusqu’au bout de ma lecture quelque chose arrivera, rien de bon. La mort peut-être, pourquoi pas?” (“I often return to the book without finishing it, I need to have this extraordinary work in front of me. In a kind of superstition, it seems to me that if I reach the end of the book something will happen, nothing good. Death perhaps, why not?”.)

In 1954, at eighteen, Saint Laurent left for Paris to study at the Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture. Algeria’s brutal battle for independence from France had started (it would last until 1962 and leave one million dead), and Saint Laurent’s family fled with only what they could carry in cardboard suitcases. The speed of Saint Laurent’s ascent remains without parallel. After less than three months’ study, he was hired by Christian Dior as an assistant. When Dior unexpectedly died three years later, the timid prodigy was handed the reins of the world’s most famous fashion house. He was twenty-one (half the age Proust was when the first volume of his opus appeared). His inaugural Trapèze collection of 1958, which discarded his predecessor’s signature geometric shapes, tight constructions and cinch-waisted New Look for lighter, more fluid designs, was a resounding success, and the tall thin boy in Buddy Holly glasses shot to the top of the industry, where he remained unchallenged for decades.

Saint Laurent designed six collections for the House of Dior before being conscripted into the French army in 1960 to fight in Algeria. Within weeks he suffered a nervous breakdown and spent two and a half months in hospital undergoing electric shock therapy, being given heavy doses of tranquillizers and enduring abuse from other patients. While there, he was fired from Dior.

Soon after, with his romantic partner Pierre Bergé handling the business side, Saint Laurent opened his own maison. The first collection, presented in January 1962, opened with a navy-blue wool pea coat, heralding a distinctive new liberated style for women. But the pressure was immense, and by the mid-1970s, Saint Laurent was addicted to cocaine and painkillers and, according to Benaïm, drinking up to two bottles of whisky a day. The addictions helped to fuel severe depression, explosive behaviour and high anxiety, and instigated a number of stays in a psychiatric hospital. All this sent him into a near-complete retreat from public life.

In 1983, he and Bergé bought Château Gabriel, a neo-gothic nineteenth-century villa in Bénerville-sur-Mer on the Normandy coast. “I sincerely believed that with this house he could be able to start a new life”, Bergé remembered in L’ Amour fou, Pierre Thoretton’s documentary of 2010. The plan was to see friends who lived nearby, including Marguerite Duras and Françoise Sagan. Instead, according to Francine du Plessix Gray, who profiled Saint Laurent in the New Yorker in 1996, he more or less shut himself in his room, saw few people, rarely even answered calls, and often did little but read Proust. (And what volumes he owned. Among them was a luxuriously bound edition of Du Côté de chez Swann that Proust inscribed to “his little darling”, the writer and painter Lucien Daudet; it sold at Sotheby’s in 2018 for €1.51 million, shattering the record for a French book.)

His conflation of the novel with his own life went beyond the imagination. Located ten miles up the coast from the seaside resort of Cabourg (fictionalized by Proust as Balbec), where Proust spent his summers, Château Gabriel had once belonged to Gaston Gallimard, and it was here that Proust had first met his future publisher. For Saint Laurent, the French interior designer Jacques Grange recreated a Proustian world, decorating the villa in the style of À la Recherche, with aquatic blue and green waterlily murals, heavy drapery and Napoleon III furniture. Each bedroom was named for a character: Bergé’s was Baron de Charlus, Saint Laurent’s was Swann. Beside Proust himself, it was with Swann – the sensitive, erudite hero with exquisite taste in art who was, as the son of a Jewish stockbroker, an outsider working for the highest echelons of society – that Saint Laurent felt the most affinity. When he travelled, the designer used the pseudonym Swann; in Normandy, he slept in his bedroom.

Shortly after buying Château Gabriel, Saint Laurent noted in the Met retrospective catalogue (the translator is uncredited): “‘The magnificent and pitiful family of the hypersensitive,’ Proust wrote, ‘is the salt of the earth. It is they, not the others, who have founded religions and produced masterpieces.’ That family is my second family, and whatever I have achieved that might approach a masterpiece I owe to that affiliation as much as to the first”. When the designer announced his retirement in 2002, he repeated those lines taken, and condensed, from Le Côté de Guermantes, and, understanding by then the true toll, continued the quotation: “Jamais le monde ne saura tout ce qu’il leur doit et surtout ce qu’eux ont souffert pour le lui donner”. (“The world will never know all it owes them and especially what they went through in order to create.”) He then cut to the novel’s final volume, Le Temps retrouvé: “On peut presque dire que les œuvres, comme les puits artésiens, montent d’autant plus haut que la souffrance a plus profondément creusé le cœur.” (“We could almost say that works of art, like artesian wells, rise even higher when suffering has dug deeper into the heart”.) Yves Saint Laurent died six years later.

Jeff Koehler’s books include Darjeeling: A history of the world’s greatest tea, 2015, and Where the Wild Coffee Grows, 2018

海外中国医学史｜罗维前：中国医学史研究方法、路径及趋势

胡冬敏 杨德秀

2021年11月6日，由复旦大学历史学系主办的“海外学者中国医学史研究系列讲座”第二场在线上举行。主题为“中国医学史研究方法、路径及趋势”，主讲人为伦敦大学历史系罗维前（Vivienne Lo）教授，南洋理工大学历史系教授徐源（Michael Stanley-Baker）、伦敦大学博士候选人林友乐（Luis F. B. Junqueira）担任本场讲座与谈人。此外，海内外学者共计约400人参与本场讲座。现择其概要录之，以飨读者。

主持人复旦大学历史学系高晞教授向听众详细介绍了罗维前教授的个人研究方向和兴趣。罗维前教授，现为伦敦大学历史系教授，伦敦大学中国仁康中心（China Centre for Health and Humanity）召集人。研究领域为中国史、医学史和科学技术史；在针灸的社会文化史、食物与药物、运动疗法等领域深耕多年，已培养了20多名从事中国医学史领域的硕士和博士研究生。通过翻译中国上古和中古时期的文献，发表她对丝绸之路上的科学知识传播的见解。此外，她对医学和保健的视觉文化充满兴趣。目前的研究项目为中国营养史。主要教授课程包括中国古代史、亚洲医学史、中国电影和身体史、中国营养学和民族药理学史等。荣获2017-2018年惠康基金会 （Wellcome Trust）奖等多项奖项。已出版七部专著及合著，如《影视中的中国医学人文》（Film and the Chinese Medical Humanities）、《中古中医学史》（Medieval Chinese Medicine: The Dunhuang Medical Manuscripts）等。数十年来，罗维前教授成功的建立起了中外医学史沟通的学术桥梁。

一、引言：何为中医？在讲座的开端，罗教授提问如何理解中医？中医处于何种发展阶段？传统中医和现代中医，又经历了哪些历史嬗变？本次讲座以时间为序，勾勒从上古时期到近现代中医医学发展历史进程，涉及研究话题广泛，包括中国古代医学传统和制度的形成、疾病与疗愈、食物和性、医学与宗教等多个话题，中国早期的解剖学和生理学、草药和食物、灵性和自我修养、医学现代性形成的历史进程等多个研究议题，探索两千多年来古代医学思想和实践如何塑造、改造和完善的脉络。以期聚焦当前学界的主要争论，旨在为学界提供域外医学史领域前沿综述，研究理论和研究方法，开拓研究者的研究视域。

即将由劳特利奇出版社出版，罗维前教授，徐源教授、杨德秀（Dolly Yang）合编，黄龙祥、韩嵩等五十多位专业学者共同参与撰写的《中国医学史手册》（Routledge Handbook of Chinese Medicine,2021），因应当下的研究趋势。该专著汇集大量从事历史学和人类学的研究人员最新研究成果，研究资料上利用大量古代医学文献，研究主题仍然具有当代学术和实践意义。本次讲座演讲主题也围绕该专著为核心开展。本次讲座以七个子话题为线索，抽丝剥茧，徐徐铺陈，即：1）医疗制度和传统的长期发展与形成，2）疾病与疗愈，3）饮食和性，4）灵性与正统宗教的修炼，5）汉语文化圈医学的世界：相互关联的传统的多样性，6）更大的移民社群，7）与现代性协商。

中医的范畴是什么？即地缘政治的“中国”和具有多元性概念的“医学”，这两者的意义是什么？在中国，在没有来自其他地方可以识别和具有不同形式的医学出现之前，并没有“中医”这个词汇。逮至十七和十八世纪，耶稣会士和外科医生带来的欧洲医学，迫使人们不得不承认本土和异域医学两者之间的差异性，并对本土医疗的认同造成冲击。在这种强大的外来医学传入中国之前，只有“医学”这样中立性的术语，尚未在该词前面冠上国家的名称。

二、中国医学史的研究趋势

《伊儿汗中国科学技术宝典》（Tansuqnama-i ilkhan dar funun-I'ulum-i khatayi）

事实上，早在耶稣会士到达中国之前，一种来自中国文化地区的药物已经被其他遥远的语言社群所识别。在14世纪的波斯，来自世界各地的医生、翻译家和学者们聚集在拉希德丁（Rashid al-Din）的宫廷里。他是伊尔汗国（Ilkhanate，1256年—1335年）的丞相，也是犹太教和穆斯林的学者。拉希德丁收集了大量医学知识，其中包括中文的著作。1313 年，他用波斯语编写成《伊尔汗中国科学技术宝典》（Tansuqnama-i ilkhan dar funun-I'ulum-i khatayi），包含一些现存最早的中医经典文献。

2.1 医疗制度和传统的长期发展与形成

从把中医经典描述为史前时期所揭示的真理，经由黄帝与大臣们的交谈中传达出来，历史学家的研究已经取得长足进步。许多医学文献的作者确实利用了黄帝与他的大臣的辩论作为一种修辞手段，目的不是要表达其争议的不同观点，而是将这些知识统一化。这些作者强调身体和国家为宇宙的小宇宙的观点，在这种情况下，皇权被视为是上天“自然地”授权给在位的统治者，这个权力可以触及到每个人的内心深处。李约瑟将这一观点描述为“有机体”：将身体的生理和功能与一国统一为主要政治目标联结成一致性，旨在消除对皇权施展威信的障碍，并将统治者置于该权力的中心，就像是心脏，而将明智的大臣及其执行功能想象为其它的五脏六腑及其活动。遗憾的是这本书里没有太多关于环境、气候或医疗经济学的内容，更多关注的是对医学和治疗的内部理论，强韧的中国式思维，社会规范和禁忌。但是，仅仅只有一册的篇幅，并无法让我们也可以同时关注环境、气候和经济变化。

即将出版的《中国医学史手册》这本书的章节基本上按照了时间的前后顺序排列，并指出某些突然的变化和造成这些变化的原因；同时关注与健康和疾病中反复出现的思维模式，和在医学实践上的多元认识论，以及自公元前221年以来，中国在大一统的格局下，两千多年渐进式的转变，也就是中国医疗实践的长期发展。

毫无疑问，我们现在认为的中医是在公元前和公元后几百年中发展出来的结晶，也就是从战国晚期和秦汉帝国时期开始。早期将晚周巫师、医生和占卜师的不同著作和信仰整理成一个整体并使其标准化的原动力无疑是在帝国统治时期将许多制度标准化（如日历、文字、度量衡、道路规格等等）中的一个项目。当时的医家将医学知识的来源托付给古代传说中的人物——圣人、文化英雄和传说中的统治者。比方说，赤帝或神农被描写为是尝试药物和食物这个传统的代表人物，成为本草和药物学的创始者（Goldschmidt 第8章）。而这两个医学传统在宋朝之后得到更彻底和系统性的发展，但仍然持续以神农为名（Chace 第9章）。然而对于医学有极大贡献的传说人物中最著名的是黄帝。作为一个文化创始英雄，传说他有许多发明，并且将古代的天文（宇宙论）与法律、刑罚、历法、占卜和医学的思想结合在一起，成为一个普遍通用的理论架构（Boyanton 第7章）。

新发现的考古资料彻底改变了我们对这个新的帝国医学以及产生它的社会文化背景的理解。过去半个世纪的研究见证了战国晚期和汉墓文献的挖掘，这一类文献，随着在城市建设热潮中所挖掘出新的古代墓地，依然不断陆续出土（罗维前和顾曼，第3章）。大量不同的文本大多刻在丝绸和竹简上，证实了各式各样的身体治疗、药物和配方的传统，而这些传统，至少对古代的贵族们来说是和他们的日常生活实践相互并存的。其中，出现了大量历史悠久的医学传统和身体修练实践的最早的证据，如药物采集、针灸、房中术、呼吸冥想和具有治疗效果的运动（导引）。有一些医学实践并没有成为正统医学而存留下来，但在其它方面，例如导引，按摩和针灸，被后来的帝国医疗机构（例如隋唐的太医署）采纳为官方医学教育制度中的学科（杨德秀 第6章）。挖掘出的文本也彰显无数匿名作者的声音，这些具有学术性声音的作品被摘录到黄帝内经的编辑中。证实到他们如何从日常生活各个方面中得到新的医学理论，例如阴阳，五行，和气的理论—他们观察和记录季节的变化和动物的作息、昼夜交替的规律性、以及主宰日常生活的仪式和极其普遍的与数字有关的命理学的重要性（Woolf 第4和第5章）。

那么，为什么一个具有中国文化特质，与中华帝国同源的医学在今天仍然适用？阴阳、五行、气，这些术语塑造了我们对中国悠久、连贯的医学传统想象的语言粘合剂（陈韵如 第1章；Stanley-Baker 第2章）。但是，在北京、台北、东京、伦敦和旧金山街头提供的中医在多大程度反映了古代宫廷的医学或中世纪的道教或佛教徒的治疗方式呢？对这一类开放性问题可以透过在社会学和文化学的学术领域已经发展出来的分析架构中，作更进一步的研究。

2.2 疾病与疗愈

某些医学知识是从汉代才开始衍生出来的。这些知识来自于对身体的组织、骨骼和内脏的观察（李建民 第13章）。这是一个重要的观察结果，从根本上改变了比较身体观的历史。因为在此之前，传统观点认为解剖学源于古希腊，是在他们的知识系统中所独有的，并且在启蒙运动之后加速发展。然而中国其实很早就存在着探察内在身体的传统。

正如在古希腊和其他有着悠久医学传统的文化中一样，众所周知，深度手术在以往是不可能有很大的治疗效果，除非在极端条件下，例如战争和分娩。在治疗人的身体的时候，将生理学和解剖学想象成与外在世界的秩序是同源的话更为实际和有效。这个观点，比方说，在针灸模型人和图像中所描绘的阴阳经脉中可以得到证明（黄龙祥和王芳 第12章）。

中国早期的医学描绘在宇宙之中，健康的身体与自然法则是融合在一起的；观察到天地之间不同的周期和阶段，人一旦与这些周期不协调就会产生疾病（芦笛第 14章）。能够感知和识别这些失调的医生会用诊脉、触诊和面诊作较基本的诊断和预测疾病，从而治疗他们的患者，包括患者的心理和行为举止的病变（Loi-Koe 第10章；陈秀芬 第15章）。中国医学传统的多元性在某些现存的文献中得到了生动的体现，这些文献没有经过后来编辑们的加工，因而更真实地反映出来自底层的医学、例如地方上的医者、妇女和江湖医生等多种混杂的医学（Kirk 第18章）。医案是一种在中华帝国晚期（14世纪末至20世纪）快速增长的书写体裁，这一时期也出现了越来越多的流行病记录，而流行病的历史是一个具有争议的课题，在这本书中激发了细腻的史学史的反思（Hanson 第16和17章）。2.3 食物和性

史学史的反思也是“食物和性”这一部分的一大特色，追溯了在医学和性学中性别化身体的出现（Rocha 第25和26章；Wang Yishan 第23章；Wu Yi-Li 第24章）。对于性的书写无疑是最早在感官方面藉由阴，阳和气发展出来的思维模式（Pfister 第22章）。性器官的解剖和功能是需要深度钻研的课题，但更重要的是，阴，阳和气这些概念在成为正统医学的基石之前已经把他们拿来作为内在身体感官中的术语。火热、激情、痛苦以及所有的情感和健康或不健康的状态都可以用这些术语来表达。在中国，无论是性、烹饪还是灵性上的乐趣，也是许多禁忌的来源，尤其是在如何克制和进行某些特殊修炼方法上（罗维前 第20章； 罗维前和Junqueira 第19章； Buell 第21章）。道教徒透过房中术的修炼得到健康和追求长生不老，是这个传统里非常重要的遗产，用来训练和克制女性的欲望（Valussi 第30章）

2.4 灵性与正统宗教的修炼

这本书大部分的内容都涉及和我们现在可能认为的宗教治疗以及受到某宗教团体启发的新的治疗方法有关。尽管他们的治疗方法也许没有专业化或受到官方的认可，而他们仍保留住在他们原本的传统中的身体和宇宙观：从唐朝开始，佛教徒和道教徒被禁止与医生竞争。而在与神祗和神灵的交流，寻求他们的加持达到更大的疗效或是干预疾病的起因，这在中医里早已司空见惯（Junqueira 第31章）。

唤起神灵权威的占卜和术数文化是早期中国医学构建的核心，并构建了选择吉祥日进行医疗治疗的悠久实践。操纵时间也是中国炼丹术实践中的一项关键技术，它影响了追求长生不老药的物质合成和提炼身体精华的内在修炼（Pregadio 第29章）。宗教又在多大程度上影响医学的发展呢？占卜在道教中占有显著的地位。道教的治疗手段通常会以斋醮科仪的方式消除邪魔对身体的侵扰，然而这种道教医学一定是目前在网路上看到的那样吗？虽然各种各样的治疗和修身方式被道教所吸收，并在随后的传统中发展，但“道教医学”这个名称是一个现代的名词。在国外，道教医学是上世纪下半叶欧美反主流文化运动的产物。该术语被广泛应用，甚至代替了整个中国传统医学和养生文化，因为“道教医学”对于那些身心灵疗愈感兴趣的人具有某些意义。因此，那些对东方灵性修炼感兴趣的人经常将道教与中医混为一谈。而在中国，道教医学被视为一个政治认可的标签，以便与“模棱两可”的气功划清界限，在透过经典授权修炼的保护伞下，庇护着广泛的地区性和口传的实践方式（Stanley-Baker 第27章）。剖析中国宗教和治疗史，迫使我们拥抱相互关联的多样性传统。通过佛教的引入，印度医学对中国医学和当地宗教形式产生极其深远的影响（Salguero 第28章）。僧侣在寺院中为病人提供医疗服务，僧侣和尼姑用的准非法的（quasi-illicit）药物以及具有超凡魅力的治疗师和神灵的力量，例如药师佛，使得我们有必要质疑所谓单一化的，文化界定十分清楚的属于道教或中国的医学。

2.5 汉语文化圈医学的世界：相互联系的传统的多样性

当你看到这本手册中涵盖了众多文化的影响和其治疗方式，就会更了解中国的医疗是多样化和与其他文化相互关联的。而矛盾的是，由于它的宏伟和兼容并蓄的学术文献同时可以包容和垄断这种多样性（赖立立和甄艳 第37章）。因此，地方（民族）医学和治疗史必须放在一个更广泛的框架内，不能局限于今天被认为是“中国”的政治或语言界限。反而，它随着迁徙、适应和转变延伸到附近地区。其中一些连续性地域的产生是由于地缘上的毗邻、政治历史或贸易促成的，而其他地区则是因为使用共同的书面语言，或者使用不同的方言。

由于文字的共通性，医学理论可以在韩国、日本、前殖民时期的越南以及当代的新加坡，得到更直接地分享、协调和本土化（De Vries 第33章；Kang 第34章；Triplett 第35章；Yang Yan 第36章）。透过与蒙古、西藏、印度以及通往波斯和更遥远的地区和文化的陆上物质文化的交流（陈明 第32章），清楚的刻画出过往对于“亚洲”的想象和狭隘的“东亚”文化内涵之间的紧张关系。

将中医史从中国地理边界的束缚中解放出来，并考虑到不同地域多样性的形式，进行更细微的叙述和比较。往西边观看，我们在敦煌藏经洞发现中世纪多样化和多种语言交流的书写记录。这些丰富的史料，使我们能够以“边缘”和“中心”的概念进行研究。近年来对于这些大部分收藏在大英图书馆和法国国家图书馆的敦煌医学写本的研究中，证明了在历代宫廷中所编制的官方医学文献一直受到广泛的流传，也同时印证了充满活力的当地医学文化和材料，以及不同区域之间的交流，这在官方经典和广泛流传的文本中几乎是只字不提的。2.6 更扩大的移民社群从蒙古帝国时期的第一批大型移民到近现代中医在欧洲的传播和翻译，到20世纪与西方现代医学的多重相遇，中医在全球化进程中，根本上已经在许多方面被彻底的重新塑造。我们发现它与18世纪法国关于脉学的新争论交织在一起，与越南南北精英阶层之间的分歧交织在一起，在早期面临殖民和技术统治的新加坡，透过知识和组织能力，支撑着不同种族族群的生存。近代以来，作为中国软外交和非洲共产主义国家发展的媒介，医学也成为世界各地的后西班牙殖民地以利润驱动的西方现代医学的不公平现象所做的文化和经济上的反击（Marie 第38章；Candelise 第39章；Mei Zhan 第40章；Barnes 第46章；Kadetz 第41和42章）。

2.7 与现代性协商

大胆的新社会主义医学观也是一种物质实体观，可以同时接受现代还原论的植物化学方法（Springer 第48章）。它非常适合在与20世纪早期药物学的相遇中生存下来，新与旧的结合最终导致提取一种物质的生物活性代谢物，拿来制造一种带有传统力量的现代医学。尽管有了新的物质现代性，中国古代气的修炼和其精神层面在武术和治疗运动的全球文化中，以及在静坐冥想的修炼里，仍然褒有生机。他们继续存在于当代中国性学家寻找性健康的整体概念的著作中（Rocha第26章）。以及对身体保健具有共同兴趣的团体之中（Dear 第49章）。研究对于药方和方书的翻译和分析是很有用处的，可以更多地了解这一方面知识的传播。在翻译有形有状的细节和内容的过程中，现代翻译者也面临和过去的商人，学者、专家，或仅是使用这些药材的人一样，他们对于药材的鉴定，成分和方法的诠释感到同样的困扰（Pritzker 第43章）。

具有讽刺意味的是，正是这种具有易变倾向的特质，同时能够适应当代情况和汲取国外影响的内在能力，确保了这种正统又非正统的帝国医学的持久性。从某种程度上来说，正是中医术语的多义性确保了医学实践的连续性，就像“气”这样的术语可以轻易地转化为“能量”在我们身体中流动的一种想象，好像我们可以把自己像插电一样插入国家电力网一样。同样地，我们庆祝中国医学的“宝库”，及其对数以千计的植物作为药物的经验使用，为我们提供了治疗疟疾的最新神奇药物——青蒿素——尽管药物本身、疾病的认知、疗效的解释和用药的方式都已全然变改了。

因此，对于中国传统是一个十分连贯，极其普遍，又容易识别，这样的假想是虚幻的，是短暂的。那些试图捕捉它作为与西方传统对比的人，不可避免地要冒着以十分粗略的方式讨论这个话题而又无法自圆其说的风险。考虑到在中国生活和流动的人口数量如此庞大，中医的起源肯定不完全是中国的，因此历史学家必须接受在中医里有各式各样的医者和不同种类的治疗方法。

三、中医的“传统”与“现代”

回溯讲座伊始提出的问题，也是贯穿这整本书的问题，即是中医或者传统中国医学的界限是什么？这不仅仅是一个语义之谜，而更是一个重要的学术问题，奠基于语境化的定义，因此必须明确表达出是在什么语境的领域里才能真正理解它 （Heinrich等 第51章）。

自1911年，虽然没有多少新的“天然”材料被添加到中药里，但是我们必须思考是否还能发现新的中药，从而发展传统中药。毫无疑问，几千年来，许多材料，诸如乳香、丁香和西洋参等药物被引入中国传统药材里，并赋予了新的特性。例如，最近中医医生开始使用原产于南美洲的玛卡作为新的药物。尽管中国药典尚未为玛卡作正式的专书出版，但中医界，透过中医理论，普遍认为它是属于温补肾阳的药材。在中国境外工作的中国移民也借用他们接触的当地治疗传统，并将其融入中国的食谱和传统中。例如，马来半岛的土生华人移民使用当地植物的时候，会用福建话和其他中国南方方言来描述它们。

现代科学很少有能够测试多种成分药物的方法；传统草药，如枸杞、人参和银杏，以及藏药Padma等药物，因其作为中药的形象而打入市场。然而，它们都脱离其原始的使用方式，因此与前现代中医之间只有微弱的联系。当源自中国本草的单味草药或物质，不在中医或前现代中医的概念和实践框架内使用时，它们显然就不是任何传统意义上的中医了。同时，我们必须能够分辨已经融合了中医理论的新的诊断方法，例如用电子设备刺激针灸“穴位”和使用乙醚等技术提炼生物活性代谢物。后者不是在中医背景下发明的，亦非从事中医工作者常用的方法。古代本草中的果类和草药被提炼成植物性成药，其用法受到现代科学验证的支持，但却很少或根本没有按照传统理论的使用方法，除非是为了要打广告促销所以唤起了具有古老权威性的情怀。“北方国家”医疗保健品中的冬虫夏草和枸杞的现代用途，已经被转化为某种能量食品或食品补充剂，不再是传统的中药（Heinrich等 第51章）。此外，一旦将某种中药提炼出它的活性成分或取出它的精华，将其物质包装并以注射剂、萃取物或丸剂的形式作为大量运输的方式，而这种方式却又不曾出现在古代文本或现代中医里。尽管这些药材有中医的名称和历史，是否还可以将它们视为中国或传统医学呢？有没有办法弥合现代医学和传统医学之间在认识论上的差距（Butler 第50章），或者中医是否有自己的现代性来对抗这种黑白分明的二元论？这本手册不可能详尽无遗地介绍中医。我们覆盖的越多，就越意识到遗漏的更多。最后，这些问题以及许多我们尚未解决的问题的答案，将留给未来的研究人员，希望他们能够从这本手册里的研究中对他们自己的研究有所助益。

四、答辩：中国医学史未来研究的可能性？

在与谈环节，伦敦大学历史系博士研究生林友乐认为该讲座总结了医学史研究最新研究成果，对专业研究人员，医生的研究具有重要启发意义。林友乐依据罗维前教授的演讲，延伸出三个问题。罗维前教授多年来一直关注老官山，并承担此项目的研究工作。第一个问题是，考古发现，如老官山对中国医学史的书写有何意义？老官山出土了大量的医简和汉墓织机。罗教授认为成都老官山汉墓现在面临的主要问题是老官山是如何形成的？这是目前悬而未决之谜。抄写时代，知识来源复杂，更加难以辨别竹简书写信息的来源。老官山出土的医书有极大的研究价值，如医书中的“经脉穴”与《黄帝内经》书写的穴位，二者之间，相互联系。其次，林友乐问及，“中西”二分概念对于医学史的书写容易出现何种问题？如何看待中西医的比较历史研究？罗教授认为仅仅将中医和西医简单二分，是不合理的。整合医学指的是将医学思想、药物和技术整合在一起。古代中医与宗教实践，宗教禁忌交织在一起。但是历史上的中医并不仅仅指的是中国的医学，它囊括中国及其周边地区，如印度，阿拉伯医学等世界上其他地区的医学。因而在研究中医的时候，还需要将研究主题延伸到中国以外的区域。如何从文化上定义中国医学呢？答案仍然是中国医学是错综复杂的。根据历史文献的记载，在工业革命的影响下，解剖学起源于西方，而不是东方。中国人对外科手术并不感兴趣，因为外科手术伤害身体，致人死亡。

第二位访谈人南洋理工大学徐源博士抛砖引玉，以理解当代本草知识为主题参与访谈。本册书中以五个章节，分别讨论了自宋以降至现代，本草学知识发展史。徐源展示了利用陶弘景的本草经集注、名医别录、神农本草经等文本呈现的药材产地所制成的图谱。在汉语文化圈：相互联系的世界多样性章节中，涉及波斯、越南、日本、新家坡和少数民族医学。值得注意的是，如何定义“汉语文化圈”（sinographic）概念，汉语文化圈指的是共有的汉语拼读、书写文化，以及传统文化中的天文知识等，而不是简单的翻译。扩大的移民社群涵盖欧洲、美国，古巴、危地马拉、非洲，通过语言的转译，医学和本草的知识得以跨国流通。以《华夷通语》为例，文本中所载药材、射香、鹿茸、砒霜等，用汉字为马来语注音的，马来语和华语相互对照。随着书写区域位移，药名的发音和书写模式发生转变。中国传统药材的发音、名称、书写模式作用在不同时期，不同区域，产生跨文化、跨区域、跨时间的转译。当前，中药遭遇的主要困境是如何得到科学界乃至世界医学的认可。新冠疫情爆发以来，中国传统中药发挥的有效作用引起了全世界的广泛关注，西方学者屡次召开研讨会探讨中药在新冠预防、增强免疫力，临床治疗中发挥了有效作用，并对中药的有效作用给予了极大的支持和赞赏。西方学者尤其关注中药知识在中国、韩国、美国和新加坡等多个国家的跨国流通转译和接受度。令人欣喜的是，新冠疫情期间中医知识也吸引了国际医学界的研究热潮，《亚洲医学》期刊通过翻译、应用以及研究一些中医药物，如覆盆子等，推动了中国医学的发展。

最后一位合作者杨德秀介绍到《中国医学手册》的研究范围并不仅仅指的是中国医学，而是一个广义上的中国医学。这本手册收纳了51位长期从事中医学领域研究的学者，提供了他们最新的研究成果，极具参考意义和研究价值，也希望给更多的学者和研究人员带来新的思考空间。

此外，与会诸位专家学者也就如何定义“中国医学”（Chinese medicine）和“传统医学（TCM）”展开讨论。此次讲座取得圆满成功，也希冀诸位学者从中获得裨益。

Two new biographies delve into Dostoyevsky’s relationship with his long-suffering wife

 

A Spouse Divided

Two new biographies delve into Dostoyevsky’s relationship with his long-suffering wife

REBECCA PANOVKA

THE SINNER AND THE SAINT: DOSTOEVSKY AND THE GENTLEMAN MURDERER WHO INSPIRED A MASTERPIECE BY KEVIN BIRMINGHAM. NEW YORK: PENGUIN PRESS. 432 PAGES. $30.

THE GAMBLER WIFE: A TRUE STORY OF LOVE, RISK, AND THE WOMAN WHO SAVED DOSTOYEVSKY BY ANDREW D. KAUFMAN. NEW YORK: RIVERHEAD. 400 PAGES. $30.

IN THE FALL OF 1866, FYODOR DOSTOYEVSKY FOUND HIMSELF barreling toward every writer’s worst nightmare: a deadline he couldn’t ignore. Having signed an ill-advised contract to avoid a trip to debtor’s prison, he now owed the publisher Fyodor Stellovsky a new novel of at least 160 pages by November 1. If he failed to deliver, Stellovsky would be entitled to publish whatever Dostoyevsky wrote over the next nine years free of charge. A more practical man might have spent his summer on the project for Stellovsky, but Dostoyevsky was simultaneously preparing segments of Crime and Punishment for serialization, and his plan to write one novel in the morning and another at night hadn’t panned out. By the beginning of October, he had not produced a single page of the promised novel. Staring down the literary equivalent of indentured servitude, he decided to try a new method to pick up the pace: hiring a stenographer and writing by dictation.

Dostoyevsky was forty-four, a compulsive gambler, epileptic, recently widowered, and saddled with what would now be hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt as well as several greedy dependents. He was “hitting bottom,” he said. What he needed was not just someone to help him speed-write a novel, but someone to manage his career, his emotions, his family, and his finances. What he needed, in other words, was a professional wife. He found an ideal candidate for the job in Anna Grigoryevna Snitkina, the twenty-year-old stenographer who arrived at his home in early October. After three weeks, the manuscript for The Gambler was complete. Another week later, Anna and Dostoyevsky were engaged.

Their “meet-cute,” such as it was, serves as a pivotal plot point in two new books, one a biography of Dostoyevsky and the other of Anna herself. In the first, Kevin Birmingham’s The Sinner and the Saint: Dostoevsky and the Gentleman Murderer Who Inspired a Masterpiece, Anna is the titular saint whose love rescues Dostoyevsky from near-certain ruin. (The “sinner,” presumably, refers to both of the men in the subtitle.) Though Anna is a central character, she does not appear until late in the narrative, which primarily focuses on the intellectual context for Crime and Punishment. As Dostoyevsky put it, the novel is about a young man named Raskolnikov who, “after yielding to certain strange, ‘unfinished’ ideas floating in the air,” murders a pawnbroker and her half-sister. The premise, Birmingham claims, was partially based on Dostoyevsky’s research into the trial of Pierre-François Lacenaire, a well-educated French poet who had committed murder on hazy ideological grounds some thirty years earlier.

At the time, it was widely reported that Lacenaire was reading Rousseau’s The Social Contract—a convenient fact for Dostoyevsky. After a youthful dalliance with liberalism, he had been sentenced to hard labor in Siberia and returned as an anti-Enlightenment reactionary determined to protect Russia from the pernicious influence of the West. Philosophes like Rousseau had located free will in the expression of individual desires and impulses, but for Dostoyevsky, they had it backward: the Christian value of self-sacrifice represented “the highest form of self-mastery, the greatest freedom of one’s own will.” Behind young radicals’ talk of a future utopia in which individual selfishness would be channeled toward the greater good, Dostoyevsky detected something darker. He worried that they would resort to violence in service of their lofty ideas. Far from creating a perfect society, he warned, righteous murder would merely serve to flatter the egos of the perpetrators—a supposition he dramatizes in Crime and Punishment. Like Lacenaire, Raskolnikov conceptualizes his murder in vague philosophical terms, but his reasoning is unsound, a set of justifications masking his ambition to be like a Napoleon, a man to whom rules and laws do not apply. As Birmingham puts it, “Raskolnikov grabs the ax to prove he is extraordinary.”

Birmingham sets out to provide the first “sustained attention to what Lacenaire meant to Dostoyevsky.” But amid summary and analysis of the novel, Dostoyevsky’s life up to the point of its completion, and the intellectual climate in Russia, Lacenaire gets comparatively little real estate. The evidence of Dostoyevsky’s engagement with the French murder case is simple—his journal, Vremya, published a lengthy report on the subject, and he was planning an additional essay on Lacenaire the year before he started work on Crime and Punishment—and Birmingham’s continued interweaving of the two stories can feel belabored. As Birmingham admits, the murder in Crime and Punishment is actually an amalgam of several cases: the man who took an ax to a cook and a washer-woman, the student who got expelled and decided to kill a postman, the seminarian who murdered a girl in a shed.

Anna Grigoryevna Dostyevskaya in the Dostoyevsky Room of the Historical Museum of Moscow, 1916. The Collection of State Central Literary Museum, Moscow.

After Birmingham establishes the connection between Lacenaire and Dostoyevsky, his narrative spins off into their separate fates: the guillotine for Lacenaire, romance and redemption for Dostoyevsky. Within this structure, Anna is straightforwardly framed as Dostoyevsky’s savior, their future family his salvation—and even Crime and Punishment is transformed. Though Dostoyevsky had planned to end the story with Raskolnikov’s suicide, something about his relationship with Anna made him change his mind. Instead, Raskolnikov meets Sonya, Dostoyevsky’s paradigmatic self-sacrificing woman, who has been driven to prostitution to help her family. At her urging, Raskolnikov confesses, not for moral reasons but in order to open up what Birmingham characterizes as “the possibility of a new life with Sonya.” It is this denouement that Birmingham emulates in a final chapter titled “The Wedding.” With Anna, Birmingham writes, Dostoyevsky was “choosing marriage and a new life.” Readers of The Sinner and the Saint might be forgiven for interpreting it as a happy ending. Soon enough, Anna’s dowry, her wedding ring, and even her underwear would be pawned to support her husband and his roulette addiction—but Birmingham cuts off his thread before the love story curdles into something less wholesome.

If the wedding provides an easy conclusion to Birmingham’s narrative, it is a point of departure for Andrew D. Kaufman’s The Gambler Wife: A True Story of Love, Risk, and the Woman Who Saved Dostoyevsky. In Kaufman’s telling, Anna and Dostoyevsky’s courtship is drained of its romance. Hardly taken with his stenographer at the start, Dostoyevsky repeatedly forgot her name, and, mid-proposal, called her “not a real beauty, perhaps.” His phrasing was so awkward, in fact, that Anna assumed he was asking her advice on whether to marry an entirely different young woman. As it turns out, Dostoyevsky had recently ventured marriage proposals to three other women, two of whom go unmentioned in The Sinner and the Saint. “He does not need a wife like me,” said one of the objects of his affection. “His wife needs to devote herself entirely, entirely to him.”

That kind of all-encompassing devotion came easily to Anna Snitkina. In the early days of their marriage, Kaufman reports, Dostoyevsky was far from an ideal husband. He picked fights, minimized their relationship in secret correspondence with an old flame, ran off to gamble and then begged Anna to send him more money, and went back to sleep when she was in labor with their first child and needed him to summon the midwife. He was jealous, both romantically and professionally, and lashed out whenever a man kissed her hand too enthusiastically or she achieved any form of independent success. Yet no matter how Dostoyevsky treated her, Anna idolized him. She referred to her husband as “my sun, my god!” Kaufman writes, “He was her life’s work.”

Most biographies of Dostoyevsky, according to Kaufman, have implied that “Snitkina was put on this earth for the sole purpose of rescuing a great man from his self-destructive tendencies and bringing glory to his name.” Such accounts, he argues, have “failed to acknowledge her agency.” In contrast, Kaufman wants to acknowledge Anna’s au-tonomy in choosing to rescue Dostoyevsky. He congratulates her on “fulfilling her lifelong mission: supporting her husband’s fiction career.” And he claims, “She created a model of female agency that still has the power to inspire those of us—women and men alike—who seek meaning and fulfillment in our own troubled times.” In moments like these, The Gambler Wife feels less like a biography than a hagiography—a defense of Anna against the opinions of her critics.

Kaufman bends over backward to give Anna the credit she has historically been denied. Her resolution to store Dostoyevsky’s notebooks with her mother and brother, thereby saving them from confiscation, merits a paragraph of applause: it is “one of many such crucial, culture-shaping decisions she would make in the years to come.” Such effusiveness has the unfortunate side effect of cheapening Kaufman’s praise for Anna’s more substantive accomplishments. She not only continued assisting with Dostoyevsky’s novels, but also negotiated with his creditors and started an in-house operation to publish his works—a skillfully operated business that dug the family out from under its debts.

Anna seems not to have engaged significantly with the content of her husband’s work, but Kaufman overemphasizes the contributions she did make. He notes that when she wanted a character’s hair or clothing changed, Dostoyevsky trusted her judgment, and that anecdotes she told him sometimes found their way into his fiction. But there is no documentation of a more serious collaboration, apart from Anna’s role as the moral backbone of Dostoyevsky’s fiction, “the ideal behind his creations.” In her relationship with her husband, Kaufman writes, she embodied “the principles of Russian courage, moral integrity, and active love that had become central to his worldview.”

Kaufman is keenly aware that Anna’s self-abnegating form of love may not be legible to a present-day audience, and he toggles between the language the Dostoyevskys used to describe their marriage and the anachronistic vocabulary of contemporary therapy. Dostoyevsky’s “pathologies” are of particular interest. His father was “emotionally abusive,” and roulette is a “psychological security blanket.” At various points throughout, Dostoyevsky is diagnosed with “narcissism and abusive tendencies,” “emotional insecurity after years of traumatic relationships,” and a tendency to “seek out relationships with emotionally unavailable or even abusive women.” His marriage to Anna, meanwhile, had “the trappings of an unhealthy codependency.” Some scholars, Kaufman chides, have accused Anna of “enabling” or failing to “restrain Dostoyevsky more forcefully.” Still, it would be unfair “to paint Anna’s behavior purely in terms of pathology.”

Kaufman’s gravest concern is reserved for Anna’s feminist bona fides. He calls Dostoyevsky “a reflexive misogynist” and criticizes him as at times “condescending, even patriarchal.” In shaping her life around her husband’s, Kaufman admits, “Anna did behave in ways that are unlikely to inspire the admiration of contemporary feminist readers.” But he makes much of the fact that Anna called herself a “girl of the sixties,” a term popular among the Russian feminists of her generation, women who smoked, cut their hair short, and became politically active. A traditionalist at heart, Anna did none of those things. Her affinity with feminism, according to her daughter, did not extend beyond the desire for independence—an ambition she had dispensed with before the age of twenty-one, when she married Dostoyevsky. But Kaufman seems to view any choice Anna made as in some sense feminist, simply by virtue of a woman’s having chosen. Her decision to marry Dostoyevsky, for example, was one of a handful of “risks that place her squarely in league with other daring nineteenth-century Russian feminists.” A question Kaufman deems “worthy of nuanced consideration” is: “In dedicating herself to her husband’s work, for instance, was Anna betraying her longtime dream of becoming an emancipated woman?” Straining to see Anna on her own terms, he aims to undermine “the implicit bias readers and scholars alike have brought to their understanding of the Dostoyevskys’ relationship.” But it is hard to understand the Dostoyevksys’ relationship as anything other than a patriarchal arrangement, even if it was one to which Anna willingly acceded.

If Birmingham’s way of dealing with that arrangement is to fashion it into a neat happily-ever-after, it’s not clear to me that Kaufman’s approach is ultimately more feminist. Husbands can fairly be blamed for underappreciating their wives, but the same isn’t true of historians: not every woman who is overlooked by history is overlooked for a bad reason. Being married to a brilliant and abusive man does not in itself make a woman interesting.

What would a feminist account of the great novelist and his unfortunate wife entail? Counterintuitive as it sounds, we might look to the man himself for a hint. Dostoyevsky makes for a strange case study in the extent to which we should separate the work from the life, because he insisted that ideas be judged on the basis of the behavior they allow us to justify. This was a career-long preoccupation, and perhaps his central subject matter—how ideas interact with personalities, how ideological disputes can function as emotional proxy battles, how we sometimes use grand theories to obscure our most demonic impulses. If Raskolnikov’s crime is an indictment of the Western liberal values he internalized, what does Dostoyevsky’s treatment of Anna say about his own set of illiberal ideas? By the standards he set himself, it might be fair to evaluate his philosophy of self-sacrifice in light of the fact that another person renounced her will for his, sacrificing herself on the pyre of his ambition, while he sacrificed nothing in return. But that is a suggestion that would take a more Dostoyevskian biographer to make.

Rebecca Panovka is a writer and the coeditor of The Drift.