MOSCOW — Russian prosecutors have sent a dissident performance artist best known for having nailed his scrotum to Red Square to a psychiatric hospital for evaluation, his partner, Oksana Shalygina, said on Thursday.

The artist, Pyotr Pavlensky, was taken on Wednesday to the Serbsky State Scientific Center for Social and Forensic Psychiatry, notorious for giving insanity diagnoses to political dissidents in the Soviet period, raising worries about a revival here of politicized psychiatry.

Mr. Pavlensky had been in pretrial detention since Nov. 9, when he ignited gasoline splashed on the main door of the Lubyanka Square headquarters of Russia’s Federal Security Service, or F.S.B., the main successor of the K.G.B., for a piece titled “Threat: Lubyanka’s Burning Door.”

He has described his art as consisting of two parts: his action and the reaction of the government, which he says tend to be mutually reinforcing.