Russian Erotic Prose of the First Half of the Twentieth Century Russian History and Culture
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The Birth of the Body: Russian Erotic Prose of the First Half of the Twentieth Century Russian History and Culture Editors-in-Chief Jeffrey P. Brooks The Johns Hopkins University Christina Lodder University of Edinburgh VOLUME 12 The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/rhc The Birth of the Body: Russian Erotic Prose of the First Half of the Twentieth Century A Reader Translated and edited by Alexei Lalo LEIDEN • BOSTON 2013 This publication was effected under the auspices of the Mikhail Prokhorov Foundation TRANSCRIPT Programme to Support Translations of Russian Literature. Cover illustration: drawing of nude woman by Leon Bakst, 1905. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The birth of the body : Russian erotic prose of the first half of the twentieth century : a reader / translated and edited by Alexei Lalo. pages ; cm. — (Russian history and culture ; volume 12) Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-90-04-23775-9 (hardback : alkaline paper) — ISBN 978-90-04-24206-7 (e-book) 1. Erotic literature, Russian—20th century—Translations into English. I. Lalo, Alexei, translator, editor. II. Series: Russian history and culture (Leiden, Netherlands) ; v. 12. PG3276.B57 2013 891.708’03538—dc23 2012031963 This publication has been typeset in the multilingual “Brill” typeface. With over 5,100 characters covering Latin, IPA, Greek, and Cyrillic, this typeface is especially suitable for use in the humanities. For more information, please see www.brill.com/brill-typeface. ISSN 1877-7791 ISBN 978-90-04-23775-9 (hardback) ISBN 978-90-04-24206-7 (e-book) Copyright 2013 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Global Oriental, Hotei Publishing, IDC Publishers and Martinus Nijhoff Publishers. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper. CONTENTS List of Illustrations ........................................................................................... vii Acknowledgments ........................................................................................... ix Translator and Editor’s Foreword ............................................................... xi PART ONE EROTIC SILVER AGE (1900–1922) Vasilii Rozanov, Selected Excerpts ............................................................... 3 Leonid Andreyev, In the Fog ......................................................................... 15 Aleksandr Kuprin, Seasickness ..................................................................... 45 Fyodor Sologub, The Tsarina of Kisses ....................................................... 69 PART TWO INHERITING SILVER AGE IN ÉMIGRÉ WRITING Vladislav Khodasevich, About Pornography ............................................. 79 Georgii Ivanov, The Decay of the Atom ...................................................... 85 PART THREE EARLY SOVIET EROTIC FICTION Panteleymon Romanov, Without Bird Cherry ......................................... 111 Vikentii Veresaev, Isanka ............................................................................... 123 Recommended Further Reading ................................................................. 153 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 1. Vasilii Rozanov ............................................................................................. 3 2. Leonid Andreyev ......................................................................................... 15 3. Aleksandr Kuprin ........................................................................................ 45 4. Fyodor Sologub ............................................................................................ 69 5. Vladislav Khodasevich ............................................................................... 79 6. Georgii Ivanov .............................................................................................. 85 7. Vikentii Veresaev ......................................................................................... 123 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank Katherine Arens, Stephen and Sandra Batalden, as well as Jeremiah Meagher, for their generous help in working on these translations. Nikolai Shchitov has been helping me in my work on sexu- alities for many years. Mark Leiderman offered his invaluable pieces of advice in the early stages of the project. Ivo Romein, of Brill Publishers, has been helpful and supportive over several years; without him, this anthology would not materialize. Last but not least, special thanks go to the Mikhail Prokhorov Founda- tion for supporting the translation of these important texts, most of which were previously unavailable in English. AL Tempe, AZ May 2012 TRANSLATOR AND EDITOR’S FOREWORD This concise, 8-author, reader/anthology of Russian and Soviet erotic prose written roughly between 1900 and 1940 consists of three parts, or chapters: Silver Age writings, interwar émigré literature, and early Soviet fiction. It was not my intention to offer an exhaustive encyclopedia of sex-related Russian literature of the period, nor did I purport to select the most accomplished works dedicated to the theme of sexuality and eroticism. Rather, the choice for the most part fell upon texts previously unavailable in English and thus less known to readers who do not happen to read in Russian. In addition, the works presented here arguably give a good idea of how the “birth of the body” in Russian literature and cul- ture actually happened and of the extremely laborious, difficult nature of this birth. Certain works previously unjustly overlooked in English-speaking Slavic studies—such as Georgii Ivanov’s The Decay of the Atom or Vladislav Kho- dasevich’s essay On Pornography—will undoubtedly interest readers who are fascinated by Russia’s Silver Age and its complex legacy as it was pro- jected both onto émigré and early Soviet writing. It is very important that many Silver Age authors and their followers felt that Russian culture had to liberate itself from the shackles of ubiquitous “spirituality” or self-imposed “chastity” that had pre-determined its deeply ingrained sexophobia. It is thus not a coincidence that this collection opens with a series of brief excerpts from Vasilii Rozanov’s “non-fiction.” His philosophy of sexuality’s lasting impact on most of his contemporaries and progeny— even on those who openly expressed their disdain for him, like Fyo- dor Sologub—from Aleksandr Kuprin and Leonid Andreev to Yevgenii Zamyatin and Andrei Platonov to Vladimir Nabokov and G. Ivanov has often been underestimated or misinterpreted by some Slavists. It is high time Rozanov’s legacy be retrieved from the Procrustean bed of his pro- fessed anti-Semitism, homophobia and/or misogyny and discussed in the context of Russia’s search of its own variety of modernized discourses of human sexuality. I do hope that the present anthology will augment and enrich the reader’s knowledge of Russia’s erotic prose, most familiar through such widely available works (in both English and Russian) as Mikhail Artsyba- shev’s Sanin, Fyodor Sologub’s The Petty Demon, Evdokia Nagrodskaia’s xii translator and editor’s foreword The Wrath of Dionysus, Mikhail Kuzmin’s Wings, Ivan Bunin’s Dark Avenues or Vladimir Nabokov’s The Enchanter and Lolita. These much bet- ter known (or even globally renowned, as in the case of Lolita) literary texts can be borrowed from almost any university library or bought in an online bookstore. This anthology can fulfill the role of further reading to those texts. The inclusion of two early Soviet texts, by Vikentii Veresaev and Pan- teleymon Romanov, serves a dual purpose: to contrast them with simul- taneous émigré endeavors and also show the pettiness of Soviet erotic thinking, the hypocrisy of Bolshevik/Communist concepts of gender equality and sexual freedom. One can only imagine the gruesome per- sonal tragedy of these two authors whose creative worldview was shaped during the Silver Age and who under the Soviet regime had to resort to the language of allegory and satire as they aimed to conceal their black- humorous sarcasm about the new society’s relapse into good old Russian trivialization, fear and ignorance of sexuality and corporeality. All the translations from Russian into English in this anthology are mine. Alexei Lalo, Melikian Center, Arizona State University PART ONE EROTIC SILVER AGE (1900–1922) VASILII ROZANOV SELECTED EXCERPTS Fig. 1 Vasilii Rozanov Rozanov (1856–1919) was a philosopher and essayist, literary critic and a religious thinker, one who is often referred to as a pioneering (or, as some argue, the only) Russian philosopher of sexualities. In his numerous books and articles he tirelessly debated his numerous contemporaries (including writers like Leo Tolstoy and philosophers like Vladimir Solovyov and Niko- lai Berdyaev) who thought that marriage was an anachronism, lust a dis- ease, and human sexuality to be dispensed with and replaced with some obscure rituals between the parties who had previously been known as Man and