‘He thinks he is inspired, and he is mad’

Abstract

During the last decades of the eighteenth century, knowledge about Siberia inspired Catherine II to create the main character of one of her comedies, The Siberian Shaman. Taking Foucault’s dispositif-concept as its theoretical premise, the present paper discusses the historical context in which The Siberian Shaman was written, deconstructs the identity of the comedy’s main character, and explores the socio-political purposes for which the comedy was written. By utilising the perspective of entangled history of religions and the methodology of historical discourse analysis, this paper shows that the comedy’s alleged “shamanic” content and “anti-shamanic” purpose cannot be taken for granted. Rather, the discourse in The Siberian Shaman should be read as Catherine II’s own engagement with the themes of unreason and madness within the philosophical, socio-political and religious context of the period.