Analyzing a variety of sources - medical reports, social treatises, legal codes, newspaper articles, fiction, private documents left by suicides - Irina Paperno describes the search for the
meaning of suicide.
Paperno focuses on Russia of the 1860s-1880s, when suicide was at the center of public attention. Because Russian thought was influenced by Western European models, she examines how Western
European science in the nineteenth century discussed suicide and human action in general. Throughout her book, Paperno offers glimpses of the men behind the interpretations, from Fyodor
Dostoevsky and the German pathologist Rudolf Virchow to the anonymous journalists who reported suicides in Russian newspapers and magazines.
