New books about sexual history – Weekend – Kommersant
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Other Victorians
Stephen Markus
publishing house Humanitarian Academy
Translation Olga Korchagina
It so happened that the book of the American literary critic Stephen Marcus remained in the memory of readers in many respects as the object of mockery by Michel Foucault, opening the first volume of his famous “History of Sexuality”. These two authors frankly did not like each other, but in some ways they were similar. Markus is also a scientist-activist who participated in the protests of 1968, also an academic provocateur who had problems with the law, and, most importantly, the same archaeologist of the verges of modern culture. This applies to the “Other Victorians” in the first place. A hit in the late 1960s, this book opened up readers to the world of 19th-century European sex in many ways. Marcus’ idea: sex ran rampant behind a prim Victorian façade; great efforts were required to restrain him, push him into special ghettos, and at the same time describe him. The book is an analysis of such descriptions: medical manuals for the fight against onanism and sociological essays on prostitution, cheap pornographic novels and autobiographies of sophisticated libertines. In the efforts of Victorian culture and science, Marcus sees, first of all, an attempt to ride this dark force, to show it its low place, which gave rise to neuroses in the representatives of this culture and kept most of them in the dark about the true structure of sexuality. In this task, medicine, pedagogy, and pornography work together: they all serve to repress sex, establish a sanctimonious norm, block search, and mechanize desire. Marcus has often been criticized for his somewhat naive Freudian snobbery, although now his enlightened arrogance looks charming in its own way. Even if the ideas of this book seem dated, it remains a fascinating and witty guide to the nooks and crannies of European erotic history.
Love, Passion and Despair – Russian Crimes of the 18th Century
Alexander Kamensky
publishing house Aletheia
The appeal of one of the main experts in Russian XVIII century Alexander Kamensky to the history of sexuality looks unexpected, but in fact it follows directly from his studies of everyday life – this is a transition from the visible side of everyday life to the invisible. The main material here is court documents, and the main plots, respectively, are all sorts of deviations that help to understand what the ideas about the norm were. In the 18th century, this distinction acquires a fundamentally new character. In the pre-Petrine era, everything that concerned the sexual life of a person belonged to the department of the church; accordingly, all sorts of perversions and deviations from traditional forms were classified as a sin. With the birth of the modern state and its systems of control, sins become crimes, and intimate life falls into the field of view of punitive bodies. For the most part, Kamensky’s book consists of a detailed analysis of individual cases. Plots: fornication (fornication), rape, incest, illegal marriages, bestiality, sodomy (it is worth noting: the Peter’s empire inherited from the Russian kingdom an extremely tolerant attitude towards homosexuality). A separate chapter is devoted to the new consciousness of romantic love emerging in the 18th century. Another topic related to the main text of state control over private life is suicide and the problems that voluntary death posed for the police.
Other story
Dan Healy
publishing house MSI “Garage”
Translation Tatyana Klepikova
The book by British Slavist Dan Healy seems to be the most famous study of Russian and Soviet homosexuality. “Another History” was published in 2001, a few years later a Russian translation appeared, but the author was not too pleased with it, and for this edition the book was translated anew. Healy begins the story in the 1870s, when an urban homosexual subculture begins to take shape in Russia with its own traditions, code of conduct, jargon, meeting places (first of all, of course, baths) and so on. From that moment on, male and female homosexuality become not separate flashes of passion, the subject of church care and facts of private life, but a clearly visible social phenomenon. The question arises about its study, explanation, cure, suppression or, conversely, embedding in the social system. Sexuality turned out to be a subject lying at the intersection of the interests of social science, medicine and law. Healy explores the changes in relations between the state and homosexuals, as well as transvestites and other, as he calls them, sex-gender dissidents: from the indecisive hesitation in pre-revolutionary Russia through the utopianism of the 1920s with their pathos of changing human nature, including the bold scientific experiments with gender, to the Stalinist conservative turn and the sodomy law. In some places his book looks too publicistic, in some places the narrative, on the contrary, is drowning in an abundance of facts, but in any case, this is one of the main texts about Russian queer history.
Who is guilty?
Leonid Sevli
publishing house Vatnikstan
A wonderful artifact from the era of the early Soviet battles for the sexual issue. Little is known about Leonid Larionov, who wrote under the pseudonym Sevli: a young communist, he graduated from agitator courses, worked as a journalist, was arrested three times, went through camps, but survived. After 1956, his traces are lost. In 1928, the twenty-five-year-old Savley published his only book; it caused a slight scandal, but on the whole it got lost in the stream of similar literature and was soon forgotten. “Who is guilty?” – not quite an independent work, but part of Savley’s failed project called “The Wisdom of Life”, and this already says a lot. This book is a curious fusion of ideas and styles: scientific data and superstition, stories about the life of fellow communists and digressions into the class history of protozoa, avant-garde utopianism of social engineering and sentimental lyrics about how spring awakens feelings, biological determinism and harsh moralizing. Like many of his contemporaries, Savley was looking for true communist love. In his interpretation, the path to it was abstinence (in this sense, his views were directly inherited by the Victorian educators about whom Marcus wrote). The task of the future is to separate love, which is intended for procreation and therefore beautiful, from the social ugliness of regular sex (and at the same time destroy the institution of marriage in which sex nests). Savley can hardly be called an original thinker. His book is a strange montage of commonplaces and views of his era. But in the way they are paired, he sometimes reaches delusional virtuosity (example: reasoning about menstruation as an evolutionary effect of property relations). He resembles a character that is not Platonov, not Zoshchenko, if he wrote about intellectuals – a funny and nervous little man, hastily solving the main issues using all available means.
man giving birth
Natalya Mitsyuk, Natalya Pushkareva, Anna Belova
publishing house UFO
This book does not deal directly with the history of sexuality, but is directly related to it. In Russia, the history of maternity culture is an area practically unexplored. For a long time only ethnographers and historians of medicine dealt with this topic; the former were interested in folklore (and, accordingly, the peasants as its main carriers), the latter in technology. Childbirth as a social phenomenon turned out to be invisible. The research of Natalia Mitsyuk, Natalia Pushkareva, and Anna Belova compensates for this failure in as much detail as possible. Time – from the 18th to the beginning of the 20th century, the heroes are representatives of the educated class, those from whom the most documents remain: case histories, obstetrics manuals, diaries and letters from women in labor. The authors write about the gradual transition of childbirth from the sphere of traditional rituals to the sphere of professional medicine, about the attitude towards pregnant women and young mothers in the noble and urban environment, about the roles of husbands, parents, doctors and midwives. Despite the strict scientific tone and abundance of information, this book also contains an activist pathos, characteristic of the entire trend of women’s history: to make the semi-invisible reproductive labor visible, to discover in an allegedly marginal sphere one of the central events of human life and culture.
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