Libertinage in Russian Culture and Literature

Book excerpt: Much of the previous scholarship on Russia's literary discourses of sexuality and eroticism in the Silver Age was built on applying European theoretical models (from psychoanalysis to feminist theory) to Russia's modernization. This book argues that, at the turn into the twentieth century, Russian popular culture for the first time found itself in direct confrontation with the traditional high cultures of the upper classes and intelligentsia, producing modernized representations of sexuality. This Russian tradition of conflicted representations, heretofore misassessed by literary history, emerges as what Foucault would call a full-blown “bio-history” of Russian culture: a history of indigenous representations of sexuality and the eroticized body capable of innovation on its own terms, not just those derivative from Europe.