According to Laurie Sheck's article "Bakhtin's Freedom", the Russian literary scholar Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975) lived from his youth with chronic osteomyelitis. For me, Sheck's juxtaposition of Bakhtin's thinking and disability immediatelyechoed the biography of Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900). Later, Sheck quotes a passage from Fyodor Dostoevsky's "The Idiot" (1868-1869), the epileptic Prince Myshkin's arrival in Switzerland: "I awoke from this state for the first time in Basel, one evening; the bray of a donkey aroused me [...]." This quotation from Dostoevsky (the subject of a book by Bakhtin) also echoes Nietzsche, a professor in Basel who had a mental breakdown in Turin in 1889 after witnessing the flogging of a horse. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 31 March 2026)