This event will be hosted online.
Surgery, bacteriology, psychiatry … medicine fascinated writers and filmmakers in the 1920s and 1930s. But why did medicine capture the creative imagination at precisely that moment, and what does the prevalence of medical imagery in works of the period tell us about interwar culture? These are the questions at the heart of Sutton-Mattocks's Cures for Modernity (Peter Lang, 2023), which takes the Russian and Czech literary and cinematic contexts as case studies for interrogating the wider phenomenon.
In this talk, Sutton-Mattocks will present some key findings from her research before discussing one comparative case study in more detail: an analysis of the Russian doctor-writer Vikentii Veresaev's play In the Sacred Forest (1918) alongside the Czech writer Anna Maria Tilschová’s novel Alma mater (1933). Written fifteen years apart and in two different cultural contexts, these two works - both narratives about surgical practice, heart surgery and surgeons’ hearts - reveal striking similarities that speak not only to the anxieties and preoccupations of the interwar period, but also to ethical debates that are ongoing in 2025.
Dr. Julia Sutton-Mattocks is Senior Lecturer in Russian and Czech Literature and Culture at the University of Bristol, UK. She completed her undergraduate degree in Russian (with a lot of Czech) at Bristol in 2009, after which she briefly entertained the idea of becoming a primary teacher before moving sideways into educational consultancy for a few years and then returning to academia. Dr Sutton-Mattocks has an MA in Russian and East European Literature and Culture from the School of Slavonic and East European Studies (University College London) and obtained her PhD - on which her first monograph is based - from Bristol in 2019. When she's not teaching or writing, she can usually be found in a rehearsal or performing with one of any number of choirs.
