When the King Loses His Head, and other stories is Leonid Andreyev's story of the French Revolution. Considered the father of Expressionism in Russian literature, Leonid Andreyev is regarded as one of the most talented and prolific representatives of the Silver Age period. His work was extensively translated in book form. To live through four different phases of Russian history was the fate of Andreyev. Each of these phases has contributed to the shaping of his art. Because of the cumulative portrayals of the weird and the horrible, Andreyev has been called the Russian Edgar Allan Poe. During the 1914-1929 period, America was eager for anything similar to Edgar Allan Poe. As Poe's Russian equivalent, translations of Andreyev's work found a ready audience in the English-speaking world.

Early in the twentieth century, Russia was experiencing a decadent period of cultural degeneration just as science was developing ways to identify medical conditions which supposedly reflected the health of the entire nation. Leonid Andreev, the leading literary figure of his time, stepped into the breach of this scientific discourse with literary works about degenerates. The spirited social debates on mental illness, morality and sexual deviance which resulted from these works became part of the ongoing battle over the definition and depiction of the irrational, complicated by Andreev’s own publicised bouts with neurasthenia. This book examines the concept of pathology in Russia, the influence of European medical discourse, the development of Russian psychiatry, and the role that it had in popular culture, by investigating the life and works of Andreev. It engages the emergence of psychiatry and the role that art played in the development of this objective science.