Gender and Sexuality in Russian Civilisation considers gender and sexuality in modern Russia in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Chapters look individually at gender and sexuality through history, art, folklore, philosophy or literature,but are also arranged into sections according to the arguments they develop. A number of chapters also consider Russia in the Soviet and post-Soviet periods. Thematic sections include: *Gender and Power *Gender and National Identity *Sexual Identity and Artistic Impression *Literary Discourse of Male and Female Sexualities *Sexuality and Literature in Contemporary Russian Society

Gender and Sexuality in Russian Civilisation considers gender and sexuality in modern Russia in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Chapters look individually at gender and sexuality through history, art, folklore, philosophy or literature,but are also arranged into sections according to the arguments they develop. A number of chapters also consider Russia in the Soviet and post-Soviet periods. Thematic sections include: *Gender and Power *Gender and National Identity *Sexual Identity and Artistic Impression *Literary Discourse of Male and Female Sexualities *Sexuality and Literature in Contemporary Russian Society

The first full-length study of same-sex love in any period of Russian or Soviet history, Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia investigates the private worlds of sexual dissidents during the pivotal decades before and after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. Using records and archives available to researchers only since the fall of Communism, Dan Healey revisits the rich homosexual subcultures of St. Petersburg and Moscow, illustrating the ambiguous attitude of the late Tsarist regime and revolutionary rulers toward gay men and lesbians. Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia reveals a world of ordinary Russians who lived extraordinary lives and records the voices of a long-silenced minority.

The revolution of 1905 challenged not only the social and political structures of imperial Russia but the sexual order as well. Throughout the decade that followed-in the salons of the artistic and intellectual avant-garde, on the pages of popular romances, in the staid assemblies of physicians, psychiatrists, and legal men—the talk everywhere was of sex. This eagerly awaited book, echoing the title of a pre-World War I bestseller, The Keys to Happiness, marks the first serious attempt to understand the intense public interest in sexuality as a vital dimension of late tsarist political culture. Drawing on a strong foundation of historical sources—from medical treatises and legal codes to anti-Semitic pamphlets, commercial fiction, newspaper advertisements, and serious literature—Laura Engelstein shows how Western ideas and attitudes toward sex and gender were transformed in the Russian context as imported views on prostitution, venereal disease, homosexuality, masturbation, abortion, and other themes took on distinctively Russian hues. Engelstein divides her study into two parts, the first focusing on the period from the Great Reforms to 1905 and on the two professional disciplines most central to the shaping of a modern sexual discourse in Russia: law and medicine. The second part describes the complicated sexual preoccupations that accompanied the mobilization leading up to 1905, the revolution itself, and the aftermath of continued social agitation and intensified intellectual doubt. In chapters of astonishing richness, the author follows the sexual theme through the twists of professional and civic debate and in the surprising links between high and low culture up to the eve of the First World War. Throughout, Engelstein uses her findings to rethink the conventional wisdom about the political and cultural history of modern Russia. She maps out new approaches to the history of sexuality, and shows, brilliantly, how the study of attitudes toward sex and gender can help us to grasp the most fundamental political issues in any society.

A 1990s study on how the indigenous people in the northern Kamchatka peninsula in the Russian Far East experienced, interpreted, and struggled with the changing living conditions of post-Soviet Russia. The book describes how Koriak women and men actively negotiated the manifold historical and social process, from tsardom, to Soviet state to democracy, by protesting, accommodating and reinterpreting the factors by which their conditions were made and remade. Special emphasis is on how the women in this culture are adjusting and combating their oppressed position in society. Annotation copyrighted by Book News Inc., Portland, OR

After the Bolshevik Revolution sx and sexuality became a battleground for debates about Soviet future, and literature emerged as a way in which sex could be imagined and discussed. This work challenges Western portrayals of revolutionary Russia as prudish or hedonistic; examining what circulated in Bolshevik culture and why.

After a decade of conducting interviews, as well as observing and analyzing plays, books, pop music, and graffiti, Essig presents the first sustained study of how and why there was no Soviet gay community or even gay identity before "perestroika." 9 photos.