concept
Spiritualism and séance craze
séance craze
also: спиритический сеанс, table-tapping, spirit-rapping
The fashionable 1880s Russian (and pan-European) parlor craze for séances, saucer-tapping, and communicating with spirits, imported largely from Western spiritualism; Chekhov repeatedly satirized it as fashionable nonsense that nonetheless preyed on educated nerves -- the whole plot of "Nerves" turns on an evening of séance talk curdling into real terror.
Reading notes
- Nerves §1 séance
Spiritualism -- table-tapping, saucer-writing, and communicating with the dead -- was a fashionable Western import that swept educated Russian drawing rooms in the 1880s. Chekhov treated the craze as a recurring satirical target (see also "At a Magnetic Séance" and "A Terrible Night"), mocking both its pseudo-scientific pretensions and its very real power to unsettle the nerves of otherwise rational men.
- The Bride §45 spiritualism
The fashionable late-nineteenth-century Russian vogue for séances and communication with spirits; one of Nina Ivanovna's pastimes, alongside homeopathy, that Nadya once mistook for a sign of hidden depths.
- A Secret §26 ``Repent...''
The saucer-and-alphabet method (turning a tilted saucer or glass to spell out answers letter by letter) was the standard home séance technique of the period; the comic anticlimax is that the vague, portentous answers the Navagins receive from their invented spirits read exactly like the deacon's own ready-made pieties.
- A Secret §30 Hypnotism, mediumism, Bishopism, spiritualism, the fourth dimension
"Бишопизм" (Bishopism) refers to the American mentalist and "muscle-reading" performer Washington Irving Bishop, whose sensational European tours in the early 1880s made his name a byword for supposed mind-reading and thought-transference feats; Chekhov lumps it in with hypnotism, mediumism, and pseudo-scientific talk of a "fourth dimension" as part of the same fashionable cloud of unreason that spiritualism belonged to.