Sexuality and the body in Russian culture

Because sexual practices and images of the body have received scant treatment by Russian scholars until very recently, the introduction investigates why Russian culture has treated questions of sexuality and the body with reticence, traces how this reticence itself became a myth of Russian culture, and provides background and historical context. The essays draw on a wide range of approaches - from postmodern and Foucault-influenced theories to more traditional historical and philological readings - but all are informed by feminist theory and practice in studying how gender has shaped the representations of bodies and sexual pleasures in Russia.^

Among the topics covered are: the language of sexual taboo in the medieval period, the figure of the prostitute in early Soviet writing, travel narratives about eighteenth-century Russian manners, the trial of the artist Natalia Goncharova for pornography, the critical reception accorded lesbian poet Sofia Parnok, the lyrics of motherhood and sexuality by Maria Shkapskaya, the misogyny of the popular puppet spectacle Petrushka, representations of the maternal breast in nineteenth-century literature, and the contemporary writer Tatiana Tolstaya's use of gender stereotypes. Familiar writers, such as Tolstoy, Chekhov, Tsvetaeva, Berdyaev, and Platonov, appear in a new light when seen through the prism of gender and sexuality.