Toxic relationships: how poisons have been reflected in science and culture
The main idea that Elina Stoyanova, a scientific journalist and biologist, carries out in her book on poisons is the ambivalent, ambivalent nature of various toxic substances, which can be both deadly and life—saving, depending on whose hands they fall into: "Poisons embody the boundary between life and death, protection and danger, medicine and weapons." In this context, of course, there was also the famous quote from Paracelsus.: "Everything is poison, and everything is medicine. Only a dose makes a medicine a poison and a poison a medicine." Critic Lidia Maslova presents the book of the week, especially for Izvestia.
Elina Stoyanova
"Poisons: between life and death"
Moscow: MIF, 2025. 176 p.
Stoyanova mainly talks about poisons of natural, most often plant, origin, which even primitive people had to unwittingly encounter when searching for and collecting food, and therefore "learning to identify poisons became a necessity for survival." A little later, it turned out that poisons and poisoning as an effective dramatic engine are absolutely necessary in culture, as proof of which Stoyanova cites a wide range of examples: "... without poisons, teenage mutant ninja turtles will remain ordinary turtles, and not childhood heroes of several generations. And Laertes won't risk hitting Hamlet with a poisoned blade. You won't have to cry over Romeo and Juliet anymore either. A good half of the novels about Mrs. Marple (Stoyanova probably turns the spinster Miss Marple into a married woman with the best intentions — L.M.) and Hercule Poirot will not be written. Several deaths in the Song of Ice and Fire series will have to be deleted altogether, bringing the characters back to life to spite George Martin."
Stoyanova divides her book into chapters according to geographical principle: starting with the Eastern philosophy of poisons (primarily ancient Chinese medicine), moves on to the poisons of South America (meaning mainly the martial and ritual practices of the Amazonian tribes), then examines European poisons (including Russian folk and ancient Greek), poisons of the New World (more precisely, North America), and finally, African.
Starting a conversation about eastern poisons, the author of the book makes an important emphasis on the difference between Western and Eastern medicine in relation to poisonous components and methods of their application. While Western medicine is afraid of poisons and avoids, at least officially declares, their rejection ("It is forbidden to add substances defined as toxic to medicines, although in practice it is not completely possible to avoid this"), Chinese medicine looks more broadly and adheres to a flexible "inclusive" and "dialectical" approach, not shunning the use of many materials considered toxic.
In the eastern chapter, Stoyanova mentions the puffer fish, which is well-known among fans of Japanese cuisine, and also asks a rhetorical question: "...how did people come to the decision to regularly cook and serve puffer fish as a delicacy?", however, unfortunately, it does not offer a clear culturological answer to it.
The theme of ambivalence of poisons, located on the border between life and death, good and evil, death and salvation of the world, is developed in the Indian fragments of the book, which deals with the legendary poison of Hindu mythology — Halakhal, obtained by churning the Ocean of Milk, when gods and demons united in search of amrita— the drink of immortality. However, instead of him, Halakha was first received, threatening to destroy the whole world if Shiva did not selflessly drink it, which turned blue: "Thanks to this act of self-sacrifice, Shiva became known as Nilakantha, or Blue-Throated. The story of Halakha symbolizes the struggle between good and evil and the sacrifice necessary to protect the world."
In the Indian chapter, the eastern tradition intersects with the colonial European one, when the author recalls Arthur Conan Doyle, who enjoyed using Asian poisons, sometimes fictional, in his works. According to Stoyanova, Conan Doyle's poisons "serve as a source not only for studying the literary thought of that time, but also for understanding what the Victorians thought about poisons, especially Indian ones and, as a result, about India."
One of the poisons mentioned by Conan Doyle, the famous curare— appears in Stoyanova's book in connection with the book by another British favorite of Elizabeth I, Sir Walter Raleigh, who in 1596 published the treatise "The Discovery of the rich, Vast and beautiful Guianan Empire." It contains, among other things, a description of arrow toxins used by South American Indians, but which white people did not understand very well and therefore combined them under a common collective name: "... such poisons had many names, including "urari, vorari and curare". As we will see later, the word "curare" is a general term that (along with many others) has been applied indiscriminately to any arrow poisons."
The chapter on European poisons has the sublime subtitle "symbols of power, science and beauty" and offers a guided tour of the entire botanical garden, where many beautiful, dangerous and mysterious plants bloom and bear fruit. For example, yew is the "poisonous tree of doom and eternity", which in Scandinavian mythology was, on the one hand, a symbol of death, and on the other, a source of strength and protection, and in modern medicine, the anticancer substance paclitaxel is isolated from it. No less colorful are such North American botanical "characters" as datura (also known as the "devil's trumpet"), which acts in culture as "an image of something both beautiful and dangerous," and belladonna, which has many names like a fugitive adventurer: "devil's grass." "diwale", "dvai berry" and "naughty man's cherry".
Poisons in general often reflect and reveal "naughty", vicious human nature — Stoyanova's book pushes to this conclusion, concluding by noting: "In different eras and in different parts of the world, poisons were perceived in different ways: as an instrument of treachery, as a means of protection, as a symbol of power, and even as a source of strength and life."
But the most amusing philosophical moments in the book are connected with the writer's desire to expand the concept of poison as much as possible, extrapolating it, for example, to those works of classical Russian literature in which there seem to be no poisoners in the literal sense: "The symbol of the decomposition of the soul is the inner poison of conscience, which torments Raskolnikov, the hero of the novel Crime and Punishment by F. By M. Dostoevsky. In Alexander Pushkin's The Queen of Spades, poisoning becomes a symbol of death caused not by a physical substance, but by the destructive effect of human passion and greed." Perhaps, some examples from more modern Russian pop culture are missing in this associative series, for example, from the film "Peculiarities of national hunting", the characters of which call ordinary vodka "evil poison".
Переведено сервисом «Яндекс Переводчик»
