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The territory this book covers is as vast as is Russia herself. It is a poetic and scholarly book. The author, a professor of Russian at the University of California, Davis, presents rich and fascinating material from history, politics, folklore, cultural anthropology, and Russian literature to demonstrate and support his thesis that masochism, specifically moral masochism, is ingrained in Russian people. This book is particularly interesting for psychoanalysts to study at a time when the connection between culture and psyche is once again becoming the focus of many studies and books (e.g., Altman, 1995; Foster, Moskowitz & Javier, 1996) and brings to mind the works of such earlier analysts as Horney, (1937/1964), Erikson (1950/1963), and Fromm (1941/1965).
Although disclaiming that only Russians, or all Russians, have a masochistic mentality or even that the slave mentality is the most important feature of a significant number of Russians, Rancour-Laferriere does contend that there is a vast agreement among diverse observers—native Russians and foreign visitors, literary artists, rigorous scholars—that there exists a widespread attitude of submissiveness to authority and a tendency toward self-defeating and self-destructive behavior in many individual Russians: “Russians do not merely suffer. They have concocted for themselves a veritable cult of suffering” (p. 5).
The Russian author Grossman, in his novella, Forever Flowing, sees Russians as unique in that they cannot overcome their self-defeating slavishness. Rancour-Laferriere was inspired to research this premise, reasoning that, if Grossman is correct, then the psychoanalytic theory of moral masochism ought to apply to the Russians. The author asserts, “Nearly one thousand footnotes later, I have