Alexei Lalo

Exploring the Impetus of Russia’s Silver Age: Representations of Sexuality and Eroticism in Aleksandr Kuprin, Ivan Bunin and Georgii Ivanov

It is commonplace to think of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (1955) as one of the most provocative and influential literary works about human sexualities written in English, but Nabokov was a Russian émigré who had grown up in Russia in the Silver Age period and arguably was through-out his life a diligent student (a follower but also an opponent) of such giants of the Silver Age literature and philosophy as Vasilii Rozanov, Aleksandr Blok, Andrei Bely, Ivan Bunin, Fyodor Sologub, among many others. It is interesting, therefore, to note the close attention paid to sexual themes – and to deviant sexualities in particular –by Nabokov’s Russian predecessors both during the period (1890-1921) and in later émigré writing.

My focus in this essay will be on such Russian authors of the Silver Age as Aleksandr Kuprin, Ivan Bunin, and Georgii Ivanov, as they appear to have made the most significant contributions to developing the erotic and carnal discourses that emerged in the Silver Age as part of the general search for new discourses of sexuality for a modern Russian society. A common denominator for all these writers (and Nabokov as well) is that they engaged in a productive dialogue with Vasilii Rozanov’s revolutionary philosophy of sexualities: far from concurring with him on everything, they nonetheless were certainly inspired by and/or echoed his insights and intuitions.¹

I argue elsewhere that Lolita (if treated as a Russian, not an American, novel; both approaches are plausible) is a crowning achievement of Russian strategies for representing carnality and eroticism in post-Silver Age writing, but its success would not have been possible without Nabokov’s precursors. The specific works discussed in this essay that may have directly impacted certain poetic and thematic aspects of Lolita as a novel about sex and eroticism include Ivanov’s The Decay of the Atom, Kuprin’s Sulamith, and Bunin’s short stories.

Illicit Love in Aleksandr Kuprin’s Sulamith

Kuprin (1870-1938)² wrote a great deal about sexual love at the turn of the century and is still remembered as a neo-Romantic author of novellas about adventure and adventure-seekers, yet with a sentimental flavor: such works as The Garnet Bracelet, The Duel, and The Witch (Olessya) are widely read in Russia to this day. The short novel Sulamith (1908) is perhaps not so often referred to but is arguably an interesting phenomenon in the erotic prose of the Silver Age. The Pit (1915) is a serialized novel about the phenomenon of prostitution in Russia. These novels both explore pleasurable and deviant sexuality in unprecedented ways, quite different, as we will see, from earlier and contemporaneous contributions from Anton Chekhov, Leonid Andreyev or Fyodor Sologub.

It is not difficult to understand why Kuprin decided to turn to the Old Testament’s Song of Songs and retell the love story of King Solomon and a maiden from the town of Shunem (the present Sulam). First, this was a story addressed by his numerous predecessors and contemporaries in Russia and worldwide: from Gavrila Derzhavin’s 1808 poem “Solomon and Sulamith” and several poems of Pushkin to the French romantic composer Chabrier’s lyric piece “La Sulamite” and Akhmatova’s, Balmont’s and Voloshin’s poems written in the Silver Age. Second, it is the most erotic part of the Bible: a romantic love affair between the king of Israel and a girl of low social standing must have looked like an attractive story to retell at a time when Russian storytelling finally opened itself up to such seemingly artless but sexually charged plots. Indeed, Kuprin’s short novel would have seemed a little too melodramatic take on a trite biblical anecdote, had it not been for one eerie touch, one little nuance that the writer added to it: his Sulamith / Shulamite is just thirteen years old, whereas Solomon who finds the “love of his life” in her is about forty-five.³

The novel’s plot is very simple and somewhat melodramatic: it does not need to be retold here. It is more useful to turn to certain significant details that may point to Kuprin’s more complicated message that definitely transcends the plot’s simplicity. King Solomon (perhaps to enhance his allegorical “Russianness,” he is actually called a “tsar” in the novel) is portrayed as not just a very wise, shrewd man but also as a quite healthy, physically strong and extremely good-looking one. Even his famed wisdom often targets glorifying corporeality and sexuality as his witticisms often deal with eroticism and sexual life. One such episode takes place when Solomon “cruelly, hurtfully” makes mock of the Savvian Queen, a passionate lover who is famous for concealing her legs from view, even from her sex partners. A rumor was thus born that the queen had “feet like a goat or webbed ones like a goose’s.” To expose the queen, Solomon commanded a transparent crystal floor to be built in one of his chambers; the empty space underneath it was filled with water and stocked with live fish. As the woman enters the chamber to meet with Solomon, she doesn’t notice the glass and, thinking she has stepped into the water, she raises her skirts and exposes her “ordinary human legs” and reveals them as unshaven: “crooked and grown over with coarse hair.” The next morning the well-meaning king sends after her a runner with a bundle of some rare mountain herb – to remove the hair from her body. The very upset Savvian queen, however, beheads the runner and returns his head to Solomon in a “bag of costly purple” (Sulamith 109-113). This is of course a jocular anecdote with which Solomon meant to entertain Sulamith, but one can safely suppose that, after Pushkin, no one in Russian literature would dare to incorporate this sort of playful, sexually charged humor into a narrative.

Another episode of this very “non-Russian” celebration of the corporeal occurs in Solomon’s wrathful rebuke to castrates: “He that is castrated through ignorance or by force, or through accident or disease, is not abased before God… but woe be unto him that doth maim himself with his own hand” (Sulamith 130). This is a statement with contemporary reference, one that appears to be at odds with the fascination many Silver Age thinkers and literati had with the Russian sect of Skoptsy (castrates) and with their anti-corporeal ideology.

I would argue that for Kuprin, the antique setting and Old Testament plot are just allegorical ruses meant to disorient his vigilant censors and therefore manage to avoid their angry edits. Despite Sulamith’s tender age and her innocence, she is presented from the outset in an extremely sexualized and eroticized way – again, almost unheard of in post-Golden Age Russian writing – and this presentation of her body is contrasted with her age:

She straightens up quickly and turns her face to the king. A strong wind arises at this second and flutters the light garment upon her, suddenly making it cling tightly around her body and between her legs. And the king for an instant… sees all of her beneath the raiment, as though naked – tall and graceful, in the vigorous bloom of thirteen years; sees her little, round, firm breasts and the elevations of her nipples, from which the cloth spreads out in rays; and the virginal abdomen, round as a basin; and the deep line that divides her legs from the bottom to the top, and there parts in two, toward the rounded hips. (Sulamith 39; italics added)

A striking difference between this text and most other erotic prose of the Silver Age (Mikhail Artsybashev’s Sanin, Sologub’s novellas and The Petty Demon, etc.) is this constant attention to the physical aspect of attractiveness and mutual attraction: the text is so replete with sometimes excessively lengthy depictions of beautiful bodies and all kinds of exuberant verbal foreplay of the two lovers complimenting each other that one can suppose Kuprin must have intended his text to incite masturbation fantasies in his most impressionable readers. In my opinion, the author’s intent was more ironic than pornographic: he felt it would be an effective provocative move to saturate his prose with frank erotic descriptions.

From the very beginning of their love affair and to the end of Sulamith’s life seven days later, procreative sexuality is not mentioned or implied by Kuprin at all. Solomon and Sulamith’s pair bond seems to have been meant only for pleasurable intercourse. In other words, there is no link between sex for pleasure and sex for reproduction in this narrative (unlike, say, the writing of Rozanov, who was ready to recognize pleasurable sexuality, but only as subordinate to procreative acts). Still, there is a strong emphasis on marriage: Sulamith is destined to marry Solomon, and the idea of their marriage is developed throughout the narrative. Why did Kuprin have to insist on the marital character of their relationship: after all, Solomon already has 700 wives and concubines, and Sulamith is a commoner, a “vineyard girl,” not an ideal match for the king? Why, once again, is she just thirteen years old in the novel?⁴

A plausible explanation is that Kuprin consciously echoes Vasilii Rozanov’s philosophy of marriage: Kuprin and Rozanov, as we will see in the following section on The Pit, knew each other’s work fairly well. Rozanov, however, was preoccupied with procreative sexuality and corporeality (finding lactating breasts and pregnant bellies most charming). Likewise, Kuprin must have concurred with Rozanov’s famous prescription against masturbation and prostitution in the first “Basket” of his Fallen Leaves (“onanism” was heavily pathologized at the time, while prostitution was also seen as not just a socio-psychological sore but also a problem of biological degeneration):

A survey has shown that roughly from the 6th grade of gymnasium students enter the stage of onanism alternating with prostitution. One or the other. If not one, then the other. But aren’t both awful? [It is imperative that]… not only marriage between gymnasium students of both sexes should be allowed but that it be made compulsory for 16-year-old boys and 14.5-year-old girls (to make sure their imaginations are not spoiled yet)… and only upon this condition they should be able to get their graduation certificates. Indeed, “dream” and “romance” could well be placed inside marriage and occur “later on” in wedlock.⁵

This was written around the same time as Kuprin’s novel, which in this Rozanovian light appears to be an illustration of the thinker’s radical ideas, but in Sulamith the male partner is obviously much older, which makes this love story a precursor to the most famous age-inappropriate relationship in modern literature: that between 36-year-old Humbert and his twelve-year-old stepdaughter in Nabokov’s Lolita. In any event, the links between Rozanov’s belief in a pagan cult of flesh, his rejection of the New Testament as fleshless and sexless, his full embrace of the Old Testament and Kuprin’s short novel are conspicuous. In my judgment, they are revealed, first and foremost, in the way Sulamith’s eroticized body is presented: the text always mixes her bashfulness and desire to expose her nudity. Her clothes are meant to both conceal and reveal her body. This is arguably an implicit comment upon Rozanov’s famous lines from an earlier book, In the World of the Unclear and Undecided:

What is sex? What is the sexual?

First of all, a point covered by darkness and horror, beauty and disgust; a point we don’t even dare to call by its name and in special literature use an alien term from Latin – a language that we don’t feel keenly.⁶ A stunning instinct; the stunning feeling, with which a person is “struck dumb,” he/she is not “finding the words,” doesn’t “dare” to speak as he/she approaches the root of his/her being… Our clothing is only a development of sexual covers; there are two astonishing things about clothes: it covers – that’s its concept – but it also reveals, marks down, points out, decorates – and again it does it all to the sexual in us. A tendency to conceal oneself, to flee and the tendency to reveal oneself and conquer are amazingly combined in clothes…what we call sexual shamefulness is a psychological extension of clothing: we shamefully hide in sex… But equal to this fear of being seen, open to the other, there exists also a remarkable craving of sex for opening up, attract to and expose itself. A girl who chastely blushes when someone looks at her would never want to live any longer the very second she would learn that nobody will ever look at her any more before the grave.⁷

Rozanov’s complex dialectic of sexuality echoes Foucault’s rejection of the “repression hypothesis”: indeed, as one tries to suppress the sexual, the opposite could result because it will thrive under this prohibitive “cover” as a body under provocative clothes. From the description of Sulamith quoted above, it is clear that Kuprin’s narrator could be consciously following Rozanov’s dialectic of sexuality.

After seven days of unbridled passionate love, Sulamith is, rather predictably, killed by Eliab, a young lover of Solomon’s most influential (and jealous) wife, Queen Astis, as the girl tries to shield her royal lover from the sword of the “young warrior” (Sulamith 151). But in contrast to Sologub’s novellas, the violent death of the female protagonist is not presented as a fatalistic outcome of love and sexual passion. Before the murderous scene takes place, the wise Solomon tells Sulamith that she should not fear death as it is all about a natural course of things and that their affection set an example to be repeated by future generations (Sulamith 146-7).

Sexless, Child-Like Prostitutes in The Pit

Kuprin’s most scandalous work, a serialized novel Яма (The Pit,1915), is a relatively lengthy and complex literary work; it is not my objective to discuss all of its motifs and themes, but only some of its chief references to sexuality. I will start with its intertextuality, that is, the conversation Kuprin sets up in the text with his predecessors (most notably, Anton Chekhov and Fyodor Dostoevsky) and contemporaries (first and foremost, Vasilii Rozanov). Then I will move on to Rozanov’s critical take on Kuprin’s novel and briefly dwell on its sexual and gender-related motifs (such as the representation of female sexuality).⁸ Finally, I will try to conclude with some thoughts on how Kuprin’s novel transcends the social and cultural problem of prostitution per se via positing the prostitute as a central figure of modern city life.

Kuprin’s authorial voice in the novel is Platonov, a reporter who, in accordance with intellectual trends of his times, quits his job at a petty newspaper and moves closer to the common people, to the muzhik, by taking up all kinds of hard, physical odd jobs. Characteristically, Platonov is presented as unattractive and asexual: he frequents Anna Markovna’s brothel in the Yamki and befriends many girls working there (most notably, Zhenya), but his goal is not to have sexual intercourse but rather to observe and produce social commentary based on his observations. One of the most interesting exchanges takes place when Platonov is invited to drink and party with a group of young students that includes Vasilii Likhonin who will later figure prominently in the novel. Their drunken conversation quickly turns into a lecture the older man gives to his young buddies. Platonov marvels at the absence of truthful and realistic treatments of prostitution in Russian writing:

But our Russian artists of the word – the most conscientious and sincere artists in the whole world – for some reason have up to this time passed over prostitution and the brothel. Why? Really, it is difficult for me to answer that. Perhaps because of squeamishness, perhaps because of pusillanimity, out of fear of being signalized as a pornographic writer; finally, from the apprehension that our gossiping criticism will identify the artistic work of the writer with his personal life and will start rummaging in his dirty linen. Or perhaps they can find neither the time, nor the self-denial, nor the self-possession to plunge in head first into this life and watch it right up close, without prejudice, without sonorous phrases, without a sheepish pity, in all its monstrous simplicity and everyday activity.⁹

Indeed, one of the main reasons why, for instance, Rozanov was so heavily demonized in his lifetime by his “colleagues” of the literary beau monde was that he was not afraid to write about sex and make the philosophy of sexuality central to many of his projects. The reporter goes on to single out Chekhov’s 1888 story “An Attack of Nerves” in a tribute to the older author who happened to be Kuprin’s close friend:

They [Russian writers] do write [about prostitution]… but it is all either a lie, or theatrical effects for children of tender years, or else a cunning symbolism, comprehensible only to the sages of the future. But life itself no one as yet has touched. One big writer – a man with crystal pure soul and a remarkable talent for delineation – once approached this theme, and then all that could catch the eye of an outsider was reflected in his soul, as in a wondrous mirror. But he could not decide to lie and to frighten people… He passed with his wise exact gaze over the faces of the prostitutes and impressed them on his mind. But that which he did not know he did not dare to write. (The Pit, 99)

One might dare to disagree with Platonov here: as is evident from his correspondence with Suvorin, Chekhov did know the life of brothels rather well, so his indecision about delving deeper into the problem of prostitution should be explained by other reasons: for example, by his misogyny. But Kuprin’s observant reporter obviously thinks otherwise:

This same writer [Chekhov] looked at the muzhik… more than once. But he sensed that both the tongue and the turn of mind, as well as the soul of the people, were for him dark and incomprehensible… And he, with an amazing tact, modestly went around the soul of the people, but refracted all his fund of splendid observation through the eyes of the townsfolk… there are two singular realities – ancient as humanity itself: the prostitute and the muzhik. And about them we know nothing save some tinsel, gingerbread, debauched depictions in literature. I ask you: what has Russian literature extracted out of all the nightmare of prostitution? Sonechka Marmeladova alone. (The Pit, 99-100)

This linking together of the prostitute and the muzhik is extremely important in the Russian cultural context: the Russian prostitute at the turn of the centuries was most typically of poor peasant background and thus directly related to the muzhik, in many ways his female counterpart. However, Platonov sees Sonya Marmeladova of Crime and Punishment “underneath the drunken, hideous exterior” of every Russian prostitute: it is difficult for me to share this vision as well. He finally gets “heated” (up to this point he spoke “wearily,” “as if unwillingly”) and arrives at a conclusion that Rozanov deemed central to the whole Kuprin novel:

The fate of a Russian prostitute – oh, what a tragic, piteous, bloody, ludicrous and stupid it is!… Why, all of them, whom you [Platonov is addressing his younger male friends – A.L.] take into bedrooms – look upon them, look upon them well, – why they are all children; why, each of them is but eleven years old. Fate has thrust them upon prostitution and since then they live in some sort of a strange, fairy-like, toy existence, without developing, without being enriched by experience, naïve, trusting, capricious, not knowing what they will say and do half an hour later – altogether like children. (The Pit, 100-101)

This equation of prostitutes with children is really the novel’s leitmotif: it ends with another somewhat melodramatic comparison as the narrator echoes the protagonist Platonov lamenting the disintegration of the Yamki brothels into “solitary,” street prostitution:

And all these… women – always naïve and foolish, often touching and amusing, in the majority of cases deceived and perverted children, – spread through the big city, were dissolved within it. Out of them was born a new stratum of society… strolling, street prostitutes-solitaries. (The Pit, 406)

It would also be interesting to determine to what extent Kuprin’s views on prostitutes as childish and indifferent to sexual intercourse were influenced by his exposure to the ideas of Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso put forward in Criminal Woman, the Prostitute, and the Normal Woman (1893, Russian translation 1902).¹⁰ The book was quite popular in Russia and in Europe at the turn of the century.

Its impact on Russian society is explored in detail by Laura Engelstein in the chapter “Female Sexual Deviance and the Western Medical Model” of her book on sexuality in Russia during the period The Keys to Happiness (1992). She points out, among other interesting facts, that Lombroso and Ferrero, his co-author, were “themselves indebted to a Russian physician, Praskovia Tarnovskaia, for much of the material…” Tarnovskaia’s study of Russian prostitutes was published in Paris in 1889; almost all her findings found its way into the 1893 Lombroso’s book.¹¹

Lombroso thought women have a much lesser physiological need for sex than men: prostitution, for him, “exists, so to speak, totally for the benefit of men, while for women there is no equivalent: they simply have no natural need.” It is a phenomenon that proves that “men have greater sexual needs” (Lombroso 60-61). Lombroso’s conclusions really echo the stance of Kuprin’s novel: prostitutes – or “female degenerates” – are “less perverse” and less harmful to society than male criminals; prostitution would not exist “without male vice, for which it is a useful, if shameful, outlet”; the more women become prostitutes and thus degrade themselves, the more “they are helping society” (Lombroso 37). Lombroso also thought that prostitutes have a “weak sex drive” and are “sexually frigid.” Prostitution “originates not in lust but in moral insanity.” The main problem is that these “fallen women” devote themselves to “vice at an age when they are barely physically ready for sexual intercourse” (Lombroso 213: cf. Kuprin’s insistence on prostitutes as “eternal children”).

It is this “moral insanity” (or “moral degeneration”) that Lombroso blames for the sexual frigidity of prostitutes. He suggests that women with strong sexual drives never become prostitutes but prefer to be adulterers. In his opinion, these women can retain “modesty,” whereas prostitutes are completely immodest. Therefore,

when women, despite their innate sexual coldness, become prostitutes, the determinative cause is not lust but moral insanity. Lacking modesty, indifferent to the infamy of vice, even attracted to all that is forbidden by a taste for the pathological, they give themselves to prostitution because it offers a way to support themselves without working. Sexual coldness is in fact an advantage for them, almost a Darwinian adaptation. For a sexually excitable woman, prostitution would be exhausting. But for prostitutes, coitus is an insignificant act, morally and physically. They sell themselves to men because they get money in return. (Lombroso 216)

Of course, from a today’s perspective, we are sure to find these views naïve and empirically invalid, but it is intriguing to hypothesize that Kuprin (and Rozanov) could have been digesting the ideas of the Italian founder of criminology.

In any event, Kuprin’s likening of a fallen woman to a child is singled out for endorsement by Rozanov in his 1909 review of the initial parts of The Pit, entitled “Kuprin.” In addition, Rozanov praises Kuprin’s “main observation” – that of “weak sexuality” or even “sexlessness” of prostitutes:

What is this [“fallen”] girl like in her nature? Weak-sexed or altogether sexless! The very “fall” occurred due to a certain indifference to her sexuality – because sex was not perceived by its subject as something large, important, valuable, worth being preserved! “Just something, like anything else in a human being,” just like “hands,” “legs,” and “head” necessary for a craft. Whenever sex is not immanently valuable, a natural “prostitute” is born; just as men who don’t have a serious idea of their sexuality are, in essence, male prostitutes, i.e., they do exactly the same thing as these girls. But execution by society for some reason befalls not those who are on top, who are ringleaders of all this, who are buyers but on the purchased merchandise that is truly wretched.¹²

Rozanov concludes that prostitution can be “defeated” only as a social phenomenon, not a personal problem. In other words, although he echoes Kuprin in finding the prostitute child-like, he doesn’t see her as a moral aberration, as a product of some sort of degeneration, which would be the dominant Western anthropological / criminological perspective at the time, influenced by Lombroso. He therefore seems to be trying to mollify Kuprin’s glum, pessimistic vision of prostitution as a major social sore, by not seeing the prostitute as a degenerate. He is making an analysis of prostitution far apart from more psychological explanations that existed in Western Europe at the time and more in line with a social-constructivist perspective.

Kuprin, however, seems to be a little more skeptical than Rozanov as to any prospects of curing the sore of prostitution. Zhenya/Jennie is portrayed as the most attractive, intelligent and freedom-loving girl in the brothel but her contracting of syphilis and subsequent suicide symbolize the decay and destruction of institutionalized prostitution (brothels) into the chaos of pimps and street hookers. Liubka’s unsuccessful reformation at the hands of Likhonin and his friends (it is quite symptomatic that both Rozanov and Kuprin emphasize the destructive role of males, i.e., the clientele of brothels, in maintaining prostitution in its most piteous forms – just as Lombroso is quick to point out that it is men who perpetuate prostitution) epitomizes not only the futility of trying to rescue an individual “fallen woman” but also the male hypocrisy involved in such endeavors.

There seems to be another crucial issue on which Rozanov and Kuprin disagree. Kuprin seems to blame male “itch to copulate” for the existence of the problem, along with female passivity and absence of resistance to it. In other words, his take on commercial sex and sex workers is ultimately anti-carnal and anti-corporeal. In the second part (“The Second Basket”) of his Fallen Leaves (1915), Rozanov, on the contrary, condemns prostitution in its current state (“Love for sale is really a disgrace… that should be erased by sword, artillery and gunpowder.”) but realizes that it is very hard to exterminate. He proposes (quite outrageously!) that the state should try to organize prostitution differently and thus “cleanse its depraving, defiling image”:

Once a thought crossed my mind: during a certain part of the evening, from 7 to 9 p.m., all available women (unmarried and not of “moonlight” [Rozanov coined this term to euphemistically denote gays and lesbians – A.L.]) go out to the street and sit on wooden benches, each one in front of her house, dressed modestly – and each with a flower in her hand. Their eyes should be modestly dropped down; they must not sing or say anything. Neither should they call anyone up. A passer-by will stop by the one he liked and will greet her thus: “Hello. I am with you.” After this she stands up and, without looking at him, goes inside her house. This evening she will become his wife. Specific days of the week should be allocated for this, during every month throughout the year. Let’s call them the “days of the absolved sinner” – in her honor.

These women will include all those dwellers of a town or a city incapable of a monogamous marriage… They should not be praised or condemned. They should just exist as a fact. They must take good care of themselves [probably R. means their looks and sexual hygiene – A.L.], watch out for their bodily cleanness, as well as have fully calm nerves. They must always be fresh: the ones who take two in one night (nowadays a common thing) should be banished, along with those who take one during their monthly period or on “undesirable days” in general. Through this, the raging of prostitution will be halted, while the soul of prostitution¹³ – that does in fact exist – will emerge to the surface from all the rubbish. It goes without saying that [these women] will bear children… They should act as though they were family women but “widowed” every morning and every evening “getting married again.” (Opavshie listya 433-434)

Today’s readers will, of course, be taken aback by some of the wildest products of Rozanov’s imagination: his “project” of reforming prostitution is purely speculative and designed for the sake of argument only. What is his argument? The thinker wants to imagine a world in which women are active agents and in which there exist venues for their sexual expression, along with men’s. This may have been a new sensitivity about gender equality in a Russian cultural context. While there was a lot of intellectual cross-pollination going on in the Silver Age, it is hardly questionable that the main source of inspiration for these authors were Rozanov’s provocative, often deliberately absurdist ideas and projects.

Kuprin’s keen observations of the life of Russian/Ukrainian prostitutes in the early twentieth century, collected in his novel The Pit (hailed by Rozanov), are an important development in literary discourses of sexualities and eroticism of the Silver Age. For the first time in Russia’s literary history, a full-fledged attempt to imagine and compose a compendium of sex workers’ life and subculture was made. Kuprin managed to at least partially depathologize this social group, which had been considered “degenerate,” aberrant and incorrigibly wayward before The Pit. Kuprin therefore both developed the realistic tradition of representing prostitutes in a literary medium started by Gogol (“Nevsky prospect”), Dostoevsky (The Idiot and Crime and Punishment), and Chekhov (“An Attack of Nerves”) and broke away from it by demythologizing the prostitute as a soulful creature always prepared to become an intelligent’s compassionate (bed)mate (as in Dostoevsky) and representing prostitution as a societal sore that has nothing to do with inborn defectiveness or hypersexuality/ “nymphomania.”¹⁴ Kuprin’s novel thus echoes and creatively elaborates Vasilii Rozanov’s philosophy of family, gender and sexualities. Rozanov, in his turn, was able to incorporate Kuprin’s insights and intuitions into his own late oeuvre (most notably, Fallen Leaves). However, in not allowing his protagonist Platonov to fall in love with Zhenya/Jennie, the female deuteragonist of the novel, in having his Likhonin resist Liubka’s charms and try to abstain from having sex with her, Kuprin, in my judgment, reveals his own utopianist vision of “intellectuals of the future” as being ready to tackle social problems of sexuality via talking about them but not actually having sexual experience per se. In this, Kuprin’s novel is a transitional, not fully modern, text.

Moving the figure of the prostitute to the center of his novel Kuprin shows her importance for the onslaught of modernity. The Silver Age was a unique period in Russia’s history when the muzhik and the intelligent finally appeared to start understanding each other. The prostitute highlighted by Kuprin (most notably, via the characters of Liubka and Zhenya) is a female counterpart of the muzhik, and this writer has to be given credit for attempting to enrich the intellectual panorama of Silver Age literature by adding a gender-sensitive dimension to it. In this regard, Kuprin simultaneously follows the poetics of Chekhov’s “An Attack of Nerves” and breaks away from its pathologization and marginalization of deviant women.

Bunin’s Stories: A War Between the Sexes or Against Sex?

Ivan Bunin is an author whose work has been highly rated and thoroughly studied both in Russia and elsewhere, yet it has rarely been set into the intertextual context that I have been developing here. I will discuss three stories of different periods of his long career –Легкое дыхание (Light Breathing, 1916), Дело корнета Елагина (The Elagin Case, 1925), and Чистый понедельник (Pure Monday, 1944) – aiming to shed light on the ways sexualities and eroticism are represented in Bunin’s œuvre. My overall argument is as follows: while there is little doubt that Bunin indeed “keenly appreciated the material world”¹⁵ and certainly developed a Tolstoyan sensitivity to the corporeal, his ideas about human sexuality remain very much connected to the pre-modern discourse traditions.

This may sound like a really bold statement: after all, Bunin is often hailed as a champion of depicting love and affection; his late collection, Темные аллеи (Dark Alleys), has been even accused of excessive erotic explicitness. But a closer reading, focusing on the distinction between what is represented and what is implied, reveals that his work is built around anti-sexual and anti-erotic ideologies and strategies.

If one looks at the way sexual attraction and sexual behavior in general are presented in “Light Breathing” (LB) and “The Elagin Affair” (EA), two things become conspicuous: the morbid and labored portrayal of female characters and the strange similarities (one could even say authorial ‘self-repetition’ of social types) between major male ones. Both stories produce the impression that the author lacked imagination in representing eroticism and sexuality (we will see that both plots and protagonists resemble each other to a significant degree) and that he clearly struggled to adequately describe women. Why do the first sexual experience and the sexual development of men and women in their late teens (Olia Meshcherskaya, Shenshin in LB) and early to late twenties (the Cossack officer in LB; Elagin and Sosnovskaya in EA) have to be seen in this glum, over-dramatized fashion? Why, as so many times before in Russian writing, does Eros have to be inseparably merged with Thanatos, i.e., sexual intercourse and experience of love and affection lead directly to (self)destruction and death? If these two stories impress readers at least with the drama of femmes fatales dying themselves and attempting to cause deaths of their partners, as in “Pure Monday” (or “The First Monday in Lent”), that drama disappears, as communication between the sexes and sexual relationships are simply travestied and burlesqued. The drama in these two stories comes from the deaths of the femmes fatales and their attempts to cause the deaths of their partners, as in “Pure Monday” (or “The First Monday in Lent”), but there is no drama in the communication between the sexes and sexual relationships, which are simply travestied and burlesqued.

Alexander Zholkovsky writes at length about the “hybridization of ‘sexy’ vitality with lifelessness” and the “juxtaposition of episodes bubbling with life and those bringing or symbolizing death” in LB (Zholkovsky 103). He also aptly points out Bunin’s “reluctance to morally judge his heroine” and the fact that, unlike his mentor Lev Tolstoy, the writer is not afraid to “relish the shallowness” of the girl’s emotions (Zholkovsky 105). But why do sexual behavior and sex-related emotions have to be necessarily shallow? Julian Connolly, discussing “Pure Monday,” praises Bunin’s “admiration for the uncommon breadth of the human soul”.¹⁶ But is it really necessary to consistently equate sexual temptation with decay and death, both spiritual and material? Maybe this recurrent motif implies the writer’s rather narrow, limited understanding of human sexuality and – by extension – of the “human soul”?

This equation may seem even stranger if one realizes that in “Light Breathing,” the earliest story of all the three, Bunin is recycling the Greek myth of Psyche, famously retold by Apuleius in Metamorphoses. In Greek, psyche means not just soul, but also breathing. Lightness, in its turn, implies Psyche/Olia’s frivolity, i.e., light-mindedness, her sexual changeability: she first flirts capriciously with Shenshin who, as rumor has it, has even attempted suicide, then seduces Maliutin (who is certainly an early prototype – one of many, of course – of Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert), and finally breaks the heart of the Cossack officer by lying to him that she is in love with him. Her sexuality is thus portrayed as a character defect, a lack of depth rather than as a serious part of her life. Even after her death, this femme fatale continues to be an object of attraction – if we allow for a second (as Bunin may have wanted us to) that the class teacher’s keen interest in her student has really been erotic (in this case, homoerotic). The latter hypothesis may appear farfetched, but Bunin may have hinted at the fact that some people – both women and men – are in the habit of amusing themselves with seeing their sexual orientation as a continuum.¹⁷ In this analysis, sexuality is less managed by social norms, as it would have been in Western literature, than predicating certain (unacceptable) social types.

No wonder, then, that at the text’s outset, Bunin describes Olia’s reputation using the adjective [она была] ветрена ([she was] frivolous). Incidentally, ветреный in Russian means “windy,” which can be understood as “being of the same nature as the wind.” Aleksei Losev reminds us that the third meaning of psyche in Greek (along with “soul” and “breathing”) is “butterfly.”¹⁸ Olia Meshcherskaya is thus a “human butterfly,” “light breathing” anthropomorphized.

In making such analogies, Bunin obviously was evolving a strange theory of human appearances that seems to be a curious mixture of social Darwinism, Buddhism, and Lombroso’s criminology. Some of these analogies may be intended to be sarcastic or arch, but they recur in his own characteristic reuse of these foreign references. Most famously, his views on genius evolve in parallel to his representation of the prostitute, as they are expressed in his memoir Tolstoy’s Liberation (1937), in which he compares Mahomet, Tolstoy, Solomon and Buddha to none other than gorillas:

Gorillas in their young and mature days are horrifying in their physical strength, limitlessly sensual in their perception of the world, pitiless in satisfying their lust in every possible way… in their older days though they become irresolute, despondent, mournful, and pitiful. One can actually find numberless saints and greats who are exactly like gorillas even in the way they look! Everyone knows Tolstoy’s brow arches, Buddha’s gigantic height and a lump on his head, and Mahomet’s epileptic fits…¹⁹

Elsewhere in this book, Bunin again ascribes to Tolstoy this rare, “abnormal” type of “high breeding,” to which, as he argues, certain commoners (muzhiks) and all aristocrats belong. Having the book on Tolstoy in mind, let us recall some of the male characters from the stories in question who are presented as “degenerates” in this Russian variety. In these passages, I believe, the author is engaging in a kind of high intellectual burlesque about a society that has few resources to integrate sexuality into its core as a serious part of modern humanity.

Taking a cue from Lombroso, the Cossack officer who shoots Olia Meshcherskaya at the railway station is portrayed an “unattractive, plebeian-looking man who had nothing in common whatsoever with the circles to which Olia belonged” (Izbrannaya proza 176). The twenty-two-year-old hussar Elagin in the other story is seemingly more complicated; the prosecutor nonetheless argues that he is a typical degenerate and a born criminal (“enemy of society” ) whose (moral) insanity is not temporary but incurably permanent. The narrator objects to the prosecutor as he mentally observes that, though he was a degenerate, a poorly built and skinny man, Elagin was a good soldier/officer and drank six shots of vodka and other alcohol drinks prior to killing Sosnovskaya but remained perfectly sober.²⁰ New vocabulary has not done much to redefine old social types.

We learn a lot about Elagin’s looks, his drinking prowess and aristocratic pedigree, but does Bunin give him a more modern psychological portrait? I would argue no: all the readers get to know is that, unlike “normal” people, he has had real trouble living through his “first love,” his first sexual experience. Even though at some point Bunin switches to first-person narration and provides in full Elagin’s statement (testimony) in which he describes the history of his infatuation with Sosnovskaya, by the end of the story one still wonders about its credibility, i.e., could anything of this sort really happen and why did these two partners act in this bizarre, idiosyncratic way? These stories show little sense of sexuality as part of a Western-style subject, integrated with a discernable (even if degenerate) motivational structure, and instead seem to offer newly dressed variants of traditional social types.

The female protagonists of the two stories – Olia Meshcherskaya and Maria Sosnovskaya – have quite a bit in common too: they are both very good-looking, almost infinitely attractive, but in both cases their exquisite looks are destined to lead to self-destruction and death, as those believing in sexuality as evil would expect. It would be probably an overstatement to accuse Bunin of misogyny and fear of women, but his imagination definitely appears limited when he faces an arduous task of representing female characters in his fiction. Just as in many of Sologub’s stories, the two women are traditional stereotypes: powerful and manipulative, they both use their lovers as tools for implementing their self-destructive urges. Somewhat predictably (if taken as a historical reference), both women were sexually abused as teenagers: Olia was seduced by the fifty-five-year-old Maliutin who took advantage of her flirting with him and deflowered her at the age of about fifteen (Izbrannaya proza 176-177); Maria is deflowered by a wealthy Galician landowner who makes her smoke hashish, drink wine and engage in some sort of group sex with his concubines (she is past eighteen at that point, though). Interestingly, both Olia and Maria were evidently attracted to these men; Maria is even described as being “in love” with this “scoundrel” (Povesti i rasskazy 216).

It may seem to a modern Bunin reader that, for this author, there existed some sort of initiation ritual (or maybe an algorithm or a template?), in which very attractive women were to be molested by much older men (handsome but aging) and then go on to abuse young but much less attractive males of the “degenerative type” in their rather obscure quests for (self)destruction. In addition, despite all the age-old popularity of narratives about rivalry between the sexes in many national literatures, can one really buy Bunin’s argument that this “rivalry” should necessarily evolve into mutual contempt and antagonistic animosity between women and men? This narrative logic seems perverse from the Western point of view, but it very much parallels the traditional stories of "typical" Russian men and women that we have encountered to this point. There is, then, a possible gap in how these stories are to be read, with Russian readers perhaps taking a different moral stance from Western readers. How these men behave may reflect more the stereotypes of their classes and age, especially because the women seem to participate in the same scripts (and thus express sentiments that some Westerners, with their assumption that women are the "angels of the house," would find less acceptable).

Sexuality, the first sexual experience in both stories, for both men and women, is in fact presented in very parallel ways: to use a key phrase from “Light Breathing,” as “something horrible that is now associated with the name of Olia Meshcherskaya.” How can one combine this horror, the narrator asks, with the “purity of the look of her eyes” as seen in the medallion photo on the tomb cross (Izbrannaya proza 177; emphasis added)? For Bunin, sexual experience is this “something horrible” that happens to some people (male and female alike), something that instantly makes them impure, dirty and doomed for premature death (same is true for Sosnovskaya and her boyfriend Elagin who will be executed for murdering her ).²¹ Only people who avoid passionate carnal love can live peacefully and for a longer time – this is why Olia’s school teacher is called немолодая девушка (“a maiden no longer young”) – a terribly sarcastic expression in Russian, implying that the woman is a celibate old maid (Izbrannaya proza 178). In other words, people who have sexual intercourse this way or the other are denied “normalcy” (in Bunin’s modified Lombrosian / social-Darwinist understanding of it), intellect and spirituality (they are shallow, to use Zholkovsky’s word again), while those who abstain from overt sexual passion (Olia’s school teacher, several minor characters in EA) may indulge in different kinds of spiritual pursuits (such as the teacher’s eerie cult of “light breathing” associated with the dead Olia, but, as has been hinted, it may actually have been the cult of Psyche, with Olia being just a reincarnation of it). Needless to say, from the perspective of modern psychology, this is a very schematic, unconvincing portrayal of the role sexual attraction and love play in human lives. Bunin’s approach is certainly a step forward from this position, as the narrator is quick to alert the reader of EA that the Elagin-Sosnovskaya relationship was not about getting married at all (in response to the prosecutor’s ludicrous accusation of Elagin not willing to marry his lover), but at the same time he remains faithful to the traditional strategy of pathologizing sex for pleasure – not as guilt, but as straight-line social negation.

“Pure Monday,” a key story in the Dark Alleys collection, which is often called a masterpiece of erotic fiction in Russia, amplifies the distinction I am making here: it strikes one as being extremely anti-erotic and promoting an anti-sexual ideology, even as it represents sex. The seventy-four-year-old writer who had been living in exile for several decades by then was obviously nostalgic about the pre-Bolshevik Moscow of the early 1910s he knew so well. Nonetheless, it is not quite clear why he had to create these two unnamed characters – a male narrator and a female – and an explicitly sexual metaphor to express his nostalgia for uncontaminated, “pure” Russian culture, unless it was to recreate an older discourse logic that had belonged to the era.

To modern eyes, the female protagonist appears particularly stilted. She is a wealthy young woman, obviously a virgin, who combines the over-indulgent lifestyle of an aristocrat with a keen appreciation of things Russian (history, religion, literature) and a decadent habit of frequenting artists’ and actors’ parties. She is unbelievably well-educated, stunningly brilliant and able to quote large excerpts from literary works verbatim from memory: e.g., from Tolstoy’s War and Peace (Izbrannaya proza 531). The woman is invariably on target with her profound observations, simultaneously biting and analytical, about everything: from the vulgarity of Chekhov’s tombstone to Old Russian chronicles (Izbrannaya proza 533, 535). This virgin, then, is no naïve, as she would most likely be in a Western novel. Affirming the social logic I have been tracing here, she keeps repeating that the only thing she is not cut out for is marriage and family life. For some opaque reason, she refrains from having sexual intercourse with the narrator. One is led to start suspecting that having and enjoying sex and being intelligent and broadminded at the same time was as unthinkable for Bunin in his late period as it was when he wrote LB and EA. Enlightenment and being freethinking about sexuality was not in his narrative vocabulary, as it was in many Western texts of his time.

Sexuality, passion, and social roles are in fact held in very predictable relationships. The male narrator is passionately in love with the woman, but for some reason he is very timid in his attempts to seduce her. Incidentally, both the woman and the man are described as gorgeously beautiful, close to perfection, without a single shortcoming in their respective looks. The story culminates in the woman finally having sex with the man once (losing her virginity to him), and on the following day fleeing Moscow for a remote monastery to take religious vows and become a nun for the rest of her life. Connolly comments on this: “Having enjoyed all the pleasures of the secular world, she decides to spurn life’s empty distractions and enter upon a path of renunciation and peace” (Connolly 128). The additional question raised by my reading of the Russian traditions of sexual discourse is this: does having sex only once in one’s life imply that the person “has enjoyed all the pleasures of the secular world”? Or, in other words, why was having sexual intercourse just once a necessary pretext for taking the vows?

Having sex (or, rather, блуд [“fornication”], as Bunin’s heroine puts it) is equivalent to dirtying oneself, but not necessarily in the sense of guilt and culpability: after all, Bunin knew very well that on “pure Monday” Russians would traditionally go to the bath to cleanse their bodies from carnal sins. For the woman, this “pure Monday” bath right after her first and only sexual intercourse with her “first and last” man (Izbrannaya proza 530) entails her abandoning the secular world for the rest of her life. She is not atoning, she is finished with that social option, as she thought she would be.

In other words, the Bunin story is not only extremely depressing in its presentation of sexual relationships but also farfetched and unconvincing in terms of Western ideas about the relationship of sexuality and personality. I am not speaking here of how individuals behave in real life: it is very hard to imagine that anything like that could happen in Moscow at the time. The problem I have with this text is not that of verisimilitude (or lack thereof), but of an adequate portrayal of (discourse for explaining) the life of the upper classes in the period. This story can only be judged successful or sufficiently motivated if the reader participates in the older horizon of expectation about discourses of sexuality – that “taking sex seriously” in that earlier era meant either renouncing it, accepting family life, or death.

In contrast, the last decade of the Silver Age was characterized by the emergence of more modern Russian literary discourses of sexuality and corporeality: I have already discussed Kuprin’s contributions to those. While Bunin was undoubtedly a masterful literary artist, however, I believe that he had not absorbed these changes in narrative arc and stereotypes that would usher in a new discourse horizon: his texts no longer appear to have reflected the realities of his time and place in any meaningful, rewarding way, as newer discourse horizons would have defined those terms. The “chronotope” of this story thus appears to be not the Moscow of the 1910s, but the writer’s own memory and imagination stifled by his treatment of sex as trivial and impure.²² The horizon of expectation that he imputes to his readers is closer to that of Tolstoy than to his contemporaries in the revolutionary era.

Bunin’s strategy of representing sexualities appears to be an apt example of modernist literary artistry combined with traditional Russian evasiveness and uneasiness about expressing the sexual and the erotic. His fiction, therefore, does not so much reflect the modernizing tendencies of depathologizing sexualities that is observable in Mikhail Kuzmin, Sologub or Kuprin, and thus probably seemed rather archaic to readers who had been exposed to other discourse logic. Quite the opposite, such stories reveal Bunin’s affinity with Gogol, Dostoevsky and Chekhov’s distrust and fear of female sexuality resulting in his utter inability to portray women other than as self-destructive femmes fatales: in the final analysis, this is who Meshcherskaya, Sosnovskaya and the unnamed “nun” of “Pure Monday” all are. Their male lovers all seem to experience a deep crisis of masculinity given that they are all in love, embarrassed by admitting this love, and prepared to be manipulated by their powerful female partners. This one-sided, predictably gloomy and dull representation of sexual experience, as we will see in the next section, differs drastically from that of the crowning achievement of one of Bunin’s attentive readers and younger contemporaries – Georgii Ivanov (in The Decay of the Atom).

Anatomizing Gogol in G. Ivanov’s Formative Text of Russian Modernity

In his preface to Ivanov’s masterpiece, Aleksandr Shchuplov, the editor of a collection of Silver Age erotic writings in which this text first appeared in Russia in the early 1990s, proposes the following lines from a 1928 Ivanov poem as a possible epigraph to The Decay of the Atom:

По улицам рассеянно мы бродим,
На женщин смотрим и в кафе сидим,
Но настоящих слов мы не находим,
А приблизительных мы больше не хотим

We wander absently along some streets
Staring at women and sitting in cafes
But we never find genuine words,
While we don’t want approximate ones any more.²³

What kind of “genuine words” are the poet and his companions, Russian exiles in Paris, short on, and why are the old, “approximate” ones no longer adequate?

In one sense, Ivanov is arguably looking for the words to describe his forced flânerie, which he is experiencing as a gap between Russian and Western states of being. On the most literal level, that gap existed: obviously, many Russian émigrés simply could not afford enjoying the life of Paris or Berlin to the full (after all, it is difficult to stroll idly in the downtown area and persuade yourself that you are a flâneur when you are hungry and not dressed well enough), so their aimless wandering is in fact absent-minded, almost somnambular, hobo-like. But the words they are looking for as they are gazing at attractive women also need to be “real” or “genuine” in new ways, they see, because there are more shades of relationships between men and women in this Paris, revealing as inadequate the roundabout, opaque and “approximate” ones they previously used for verbalizing sexual attraction and having sexual experience. The text I will discuss below, The Decay of the Atom, appears to be a pioneering attempt at developing this new, modern, “genuine” vocabulary for carnal and corporeal desires in terms recognizable to a contemporary Russian audience.

The short poem’s final strophe is not quoted by Shchuplov, but I will provide it here:

И что же делать? В Петербург вернуться?
Влюбиться? Или Ореrа взорвать?
Иль просто — лечь в холодную кровать,
Закрыть глаза и больше не проснуться…

So what’s to be done? Return to Petersburg?
Fall in love? Or blow up the Opera?
Or simply lie down on the cold bed,
Close one’s eyes and never wake up again…²⁴

The poet’s situation is truly desperate: to resolve his spiritual stalemate he considers four equally outrageous options: return to Bolshevik Russia (and probably end up dying in the Solovki labor camps); carry out a terrorist attack on Paris’s major theater; commit suicide (probably by taking a conscious drug overdose); or fall in love with someone. Clearly, for Ivanov the émigré (although he was married to the young poet Odoevtseva, their relationship was quite tumultuous at the time), falling in love is about as insane and ultimately unthinkable as blowing up the Opera de Paris. Maybe the reason for this utter impossibility of the poet’s falling in love is that he lacks “genuine words” for expressing the kind of love that his Paris experience and situation requires of him. One can speculate that Ivanov thus recognizes that the modern Russian erotic discourse has not yet been generated, in that he cannot conceive of a love that would lead to life rather than death, and so he implicitly sets himself the task to create it. Shchuplov is absolutely right: this poem would make a wonderful preamble to The Decay of the Atom, in which a more modernist discourse of the carnal and corporeal is in fact being created by generating new options for poets like Ivanov – love cannot simply lead either to death or family.

When the book was initially published in 1938, The Decay of the Atom was predictably attacked by V. Sirin, a.k.a. Vladimir Nabokov, and Vladislav Khodasevich, who had had an ongoing “war of camps” with Ivanov and his colleague Georgii Adamovich. Nabokov was especially upset with Ivanov’s “banal descriptions of urinals that can embarrass only the most inexperienced readers”.²⁵ It is quite symptomatic that Nabokov picked “urinals” out of so many unsavory images of The Decay of the Atom for his denunciation of the book: this author seems to have been really ill-at-ease with all representations of the physiology of human excretions.²⁶

From today’s perspective, it is indeed hard to believe that by recurrent references to urinals, Ivanov really wanted to “embarrass” his inexperienced but impressionable readership – shaking up the bourgeoisie had been a tactic of Western literature for forty years at the time. As we will see, however, he clearly wanted to show that for a modern writer there should be no taboo themes and that everything in life – without any limitations – can be expressed via a literary medium: something that had been consistently denied throughout the history of Russian literature as authors like Gogol, Dostoevsky, or Turgenev felt they had to silence certain things, particularly those pertaining to the corporeal and the carnal. That is, Ivanov is less trying to shock an audience than to take reality into his texts. As we just saw in the example of Ivan Bunin, many of Ivanov’s contemporaries could be short of words – and ideas – in representing sexual experience, as well as other facets of a now inevitable modern life.

Roman Gul’, perhaps a less subjective critic than Nabokov, praised the book but noted that “aiming to shock [his readers], Ivanov stuffed his book with intentional and coarse pornography, competing in this with Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn” (Nikolyukin 42). Yet that evaluation may be incomplete. What the critic refers to as “pornography” is in reality something else: namely, the narrator’s attempts to verbalize his sexual desires, daydreams, and masturbatory fantasies. This narrator’s sexual emotions (mostly of an imaginary nature) are inseparable from the text of the book as these are played out against Ivanov’s overall alienation from the hostile environment of forced emigration: he is confronted with many experiences for which he has no Russian words, but which France seems to discuss.

For example, the text’s frequent references to “onanism,” that is, solitary sex, are really an extended metaphor for the loneliness and boredom the émigrés are suffering from in their Paris existence. Sex with prostitutes, on the other hand, is a surrogate for all the diverse and rewarding sexual and erotic experience these Russian men used to have access to when they lived in Petersburg. This kind of lifestyle is no longer attainable, and the author is being bitterly nostalgic about it.

But there is yet another, deeper meaning of all the explicit sexual imagery of this text: Ivanov is wrestling with the mystery of sex, the irrationality of sexual attraction and the powerful grip it can have on a “respectable” and “presentable” person’s behavior and thoughts. All his exuberant, deliberately hideous descriptions of sex-related violence can thus be read as tricks of his literary imagination, forced to enhance the force behind his message by way of shock. He tries to make it apparent to his Russian readers that an artist can no longer silence, distort or travesty sexual themes in situations that are now in flux, where earlier they were settled as matters of class expectation. Not to take up sex with new strategies will impoverish his or her work of art and ultimately devalue this sort of sexless, “sterile” writing in the eyes of her/his reading audiences:

Copulating with a dead girl. The body was very soft, only a little chilly, as after a bathing. With intensity, with a special delight. She was lying there as if asleep. I did no malice to her. Just the opposite, for these several spasmodic minutes the life was still continuing around her, if not for her. The star was growing pale outside the window; the jasmine was withering. The seed had dripped out, and I wiped it off with a handkerchief. I lit a cigarette off the thick wax candle. Missed. Missed. (Raspad atoma 258)

This necrophilic fantasy may be an implicit allusion to both Gogol and Sologub, as the narrator fancies having sex with a dead teenage girl, whose body is “soft, but a bit cold, just like after a swim” and then is upset about wasting his semen that way. This episode certainly echoes the young soldier having sex with dead Mafalda’s body in Sologub’s “The Tsarina of Kisses” (1921). Most critically, it moves from burlesque to biting, bitter satire of a pool of narratives about personal experience that seem necrophiliac relics from a by-gone age.

That Ivanov is working within the framework of literary language is here critical to note. Two literary giants of the past are repeatedly mentioned in the text who personify these discursive/creative strategies: Gogol and Tolstoy. This author must again turn back to go forward, to find ways to valorize these great precursors as still valid, while showing that they are functioning in a discourse world that no longer exists.

The Decay of the Atom is replete with explicit and implicit allusions to Nikolai Gogol’s life, his oeuvre (“The Overcoat,” the Ukrainian stories, etc.) and, most importantly, his legacy. To exemplify how Ivanov uses Gogol to move beyond him, I will focus only on the ones that are interwoven with the motifs of “masturbating Russian consciousness” and of misogyny, i.e., irrational fear and hatred of women. These passages, I believe, make the case for a conscious negotiation with traditional Russian discourses, as Ivanov figures out a productive way to revalue his world.

Early in the text the narrator declares that sexual love in this book will be presented from a man’s point of view, as a woman’s one “doesn’t exist.” Woman, he argues, is just the “body and reflected light”:

Only man’s standpoint can exist. There is no such thing as woman’s standpoint. Woman, as such, does not exist at all. She is the body and reflected light. (Raspad atoma 254-5)

The text’s most extensive and important reference to Gogol begins toward the end of the book as Ivanov, in an almost post-modern fashion, deconstructs and re-writes the novella “Overcoat” (1842) via eroticizing and sexualizing the plot and thereby anatomizing Gogol’s creative imagination.²⁷ In other words, I believe he is consciously trying to adapt Gogol’s compelling story for his world. I will now try to show that this complex allusion is really aimed at commenting upon the key differences between the Gogol and Pushkin lines of succession in Russian intellectual and literary history – at allowing Ivanov to diagnose the shortcomings in his own intellectual legacy. Ivanov’s take on these ever-bifurcating lines is, I believe, also a conscious development of Vasilii Rozanov’s argument in his essays “Pushkin and Gogol” (1891) and “How the Akakii Akakievich Type Has Arisen” (1894).

Ivanov begins his rewriting of Gogol with an apocalyptic reference to “Sunsets, thousands of sunsets… upon Russia, upon America, upon future, upon perished centuries” (Распад атома 271). Sunset for him means global decline, both politically and culturally. He quite understandably links his apocalyptic vision to the Bolshevik revolution and to the potentially disastrous outcomes of World War One. The rise of German Nazism and its threat to Europe and the world is not mentioned, but certainly implied. As he is writing this text in 1937, the explicit reference to the Lubianka (the NKVD headquarters in Moscow) is inevitable: Stalinism is as dangerous as Nazism, neither of which will answer to the persistence of the past in the future. “The Decay of the Atom” (with its implication of developing nuclear weapon technology, as well as to the problem of nuclear half-lives, as consequences thereof) is prophetically related by Ivanov to this overall feeling of impending catastrophe and to the problems that will remain. But the narrator is quick to personalize the experience of this global sunset/decline and demonstrate how it reveals itself at the level of the intimate, the sexual. He sees the cataclysm of the era on a personal level, as he tries to recoup and recast tradition rather than to overthrow it in misplaced revolutionary zeal.

Here is where the contradistinction between Pushkin and Gogol comes into his world. The narrator writes a passage alluding to the poet’s death in the duel in 1837: “The injured Pushkin is leaning on his elbow lying in the snow, the red sunset is gushing into his face.” This is followed by a harrowing (if not darkly humorous in part) vision of a young soldier (perhaps of the WWI period) masturbating in an outhouse. Then comes the time for Akakii Akakievich Bashmachkin “groping his way” home from work through dark Petersburg streets (Raspad atoma 271). His “masturbating consciousness” is focused on getting a new overcoat, but in Ivanov it is a sexual metaphor: this is his search for a woman. A new woman is bound to deceive him, but he is looking for her anyway. His phantasmal search is accompanied by recurring quoting from an 1859 popular love song by Veinberg: “Он был титулярный советник, она генеральская дочь.” (“He was a titular counselor, she was a general’s daughter.”) Needless to say, this is what Bashmachkin’s rank is in Gogol: the lowest civilian rank in Russia.

Ivanov’s avatar of Bashmachkin is in fact cast in terms quite different from Gogol’s original one. He is likened to a “static atom,” but if one tried to split it, huge energy (“horrible explosive force”) would be released. This energy is precisely the essence of his “secret dreams,” i.e., his sexual drive. Following the line from the song, he is lusting after the General’s daughter, and she now has a name: Psyche.²⁸ In Gogol’s novella, however, she is unnamed and enjoys just a “cameo appearance” in the narrative: all we know about her is that she is sixteen years old and fairly good-looking (миловидная) – her nose is pretty but a little “curved.”²⁹ We also are told by Gogol that she greets her Dad every morning by saying “bonjour, papa.” These scanty details are sufficient for Ivanov to develop his Bashmachkin’s masturbatory fantasy, amplifying Gogol’s story to reveal the narrative material tacitly embedded in it:

Akakii Akakievich… leaves the fuss and the surface and descends to the essence of things. His secret dreams surround Psyche’s image… he slowly slides along the empty sleeping city, sneaks into the apartments of his excellency… ghosts his way toward the bedroom of the little angel. He opens the door… and sees the “paradise that does not exist even in heavens.” He sees her underwear thrown around the chair, her sleepy little face on the pillow, a little bench on which she puts her little foot (ножку) every morning in order to pull on her white stocking…

He then materializes Psyche in his… morbid imagination, makes her come to his attic, lie down on his bed… she raises her laced skirt, spreads her naked satin knees. He was a titular counselor; she was a general’s daughter. Every time he had met her before he would slavishly bow to her, not daring to raise his eyes from his patched boots. And now, having spread her knees broadly, smiling an innocent smile of a little angel, she submissively waits for him to enjoy himself with her to the maximum, completely, completely. (Raspad atoma 272-3)

As in most of (auto)erotic fantasies of the book, this one involves the teenage girl, which may lead one to suppose that the narrator had a strong sexual interest in post-pubescent young women of sixteen to eighteen years old (i.e., that he was an ephebophile). That reading of the passage, however, begins to criminalize or at least pathologize what was most often seen in the old days as a social opportunity – operating in the continuing gray zone between a seduction and a rape.

More importantly, this passage reveals that Ivanov understands very well that the only way of modernizing Russian literary discourses of sexuality and eroticism is not to be silent, tonguetied about them, not to be afraid to verbalize most private, intimate thoughts and dreams.³⁰ Yet the story’s fantasy ends where it has started – with another electrifying opposition of Gogol and Pushkin (he quotes the latter’s long poem Медный всадник (“The Bronze Horseman”):

“Stand in your beauty and do not yield,” contrary to his foreboding, cheerfully exclaims Pushkin who has scored so many on his Don Juan’s list. “Never mind, never mind, silence,” Gogol mumbles having rolled his eyes into emptiness, masturbating under a cold bed-sheet. (Raspad atoma 273; emphasis added)

What Ivanov seems to be saying here – following Rozanov – is that most post-Gogolian Russian literature has had to wrestle with Gogol’s silencing, suppressing and distorting human sexualities in his works – with the stories that he didn’t tell behind the stories that he did tell. His Rozanovian argument may thus be a clear point about discourse and experience: Russian literature must revive Pushkin’s tradition of “light touch” in representing the carnal and the corporeal to extend itself into the present and keep it relevant.

Part of the current Russian predicament (a horrifying vision of the Solovki labor camps is one of the final ones in the text) – the Bolshevik rule that Ivanov ascribes to the dominance of мировое уродство (“global hideousness”) – is that Russian culture has not managed to come to terms with embracing many of its own horrors, not just the sexual and the erotic that had never been raised above the level of an implicit masturbatory fantasy: “Chasing his overcoat, Akakii Akakievich just swept by, with his bird’s profile,³¹ in canvas underpants soiled by the semen of an onanist” (Raspad atoma 276).

One may, of course, find Ivanov’s masturbation metaphor morbid and extreme, but in fact he is modernizing the discourse on masturbation familiar from Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground or The Demons. Ivanov in exile, therefore, has reached back deeply into Russian traditions to put them into perspective as resources to speak about the present, to try to create a modern Russian literary language of sexualities and eroticism.

Achieving the Silver Age: Coming to Terms with the Limits of Russian Discourse

What this analysis argues, therefore, is that Ivanov’s best prosaic work (albeit written in the 1930s) should be considered a Silver Age phenomenon for several reasons. One is that it was produced in implicit dialogue with major thinkers and writers of the period (first and foremost, Rozanov). Second, following such literary giants of the period as Leonid Andreyev and Sologub, Ivanov modernized Russian writing by demonstrating the infinite possibilities of the erotic and sexual imagination at work, without fearing or trivializing the carnal and the corporeal – without sticking to the restrictions present in the Russian traditions. Just like Kuprin or Mikhail Kuzmin, he was keen on exploring the most extreme, deviant, illicit cases of sexual attraction.³²

Unlike Ivan Bunin, however, Ivanov did not see sex as something akin to and intermingled with death and decay: Ivanov’s work helps confirm my assessment that Bunin actually aligns more closely with the older generation. Quite the opposite, following Rozanov (and probably the lives he saw in Parisian exile), Ivanov sees destruction and death in the absence of sexual intercourse. Quite tellingly, in what might be read as an implied polemic with Bunin, Ivanov completes one of the most lurid sexual fantasies of his book with a quote from none other than young Tolstoy’s diary: “‘This was so beautiful that it cannot end with death,’ Tolstoy wrote after his wedding night” (Raspad atoma 268). Ivanov seems to be reminding Bunin that, after all, Tolstoy had not always been an adversary of pleasurable sexuality and an advocate of the soul’s “liberation” from the body: Tolstoy’s own experiences contradicted his philosophy. On the other hand, Ivanov issues a warning to his audiences that, by rejecting sexual intercourse, by stripping sexuality of its potential multiple meanings and making it look banal and/or shameful, Russian culture will sink into what his narrator would call the morass of “global hideousness.” Russian culture will be, in short, irrelevant to expressions of current experience.

Thus overall, it is the rethinking of Gogol’s legacy that makes Ivanov’s book pertinent to the Silver Age sensitivities. Coming to terms with Gogol’s role in Russia’s intellectual and literary history was central to the projects of many key figures of the period as Merezhkovsky, Rozanov, Bely, and Sologub (and later Nabokov) – figures of the interwar period and early postwar period who are the lights of the Silver Age, yet not always considered modern. If we take Ivanov’s example seriously, however, that generation took the task of modernizing Russian literary culture seriously – not by refuting Gogol or Tolstoy, or in undermining their enormous aesthetic achievements, but in correctly positioning their anti-sexual, misogynist stance as an ideological alternative to Pushkin and his line of succession, i.e., by reclaiming a voice that early put forward the concept of Russian libertinage.

It is my argument, therefore, that in the literary medium, The Decay of the Atom appears to be the most successful reappraisal of the Gogolian tradition of silencing and burlesquing sexual and erotic experiences. It is at the same time an anti-utopian text, in which socio-political freethinking is finally reconciled and intermingled with sexual and erotic freethinking. And it is a text that represents the project of his generation of authors: finding the limits and applications of Russian literary traditions for the present age, a project that will also allow Ivanov’s readers a new insight into Nabokov’s Lolita.

Notes

1. Rozanov’s direct influence on Nabokov has been noted by Olga Skonechnaya and Aleksandr Etkind: they highlight Rozanov’s metaphor “moonlight people” (used to denote homosexuality) that recurs in many Nabokov’s texts, from Mary to Look at the Harlequins! Nabokov’s long-standing appreciative interest in his father V.D. Nabokov’s pioneering liberal stance on homosexuals in the early 1900s (the latter proposed decriminalizing homosexuality in Russia in 1902) is clearly at odds with Nabokov’s obvious animosity toward his homosexual younger brother Sergei. The question of Rozanov’s influence on Nabokov is very complex, but it is clear that it is not reducible to both authors’ quaint forms of homophobia (as Etkind seems to believe). Rather, Nabokov was likely to have learned from, or shared with, Rozanov a deep intellectual curiosity in everything related to pleasurable sexuality and was keen on exploring it without traditional Russian reticence and suspiciousness. Olga Skonechnaya, “People of the Moonlight: Silver Age Parodies in Nabokov’s The Eye and The Gift,” Nabokov Studies 3 (1996): 33-52. Aleksandr Etkind, “Taynyi kod dlia zabludivshegosya pola: literaturnyi diskurs o gomoseksualnosti ot Rozanova do Nabokova” in V poiskakh seksualnosti. Edited by I. Zdravomyslova and A. Tyomkina (St. Petersburg: Dmitrii Bulanin, 2002), 79-87.
2. Kuprin’s best-known biography in English is Nicholas Luker, Alexander Kuprin (Boston: Twayne Publishers 1978).
3. One could suppose that there exists a direct link between Kuprin’s conception of Sulamith and the famous lines from Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin (1833):

   Любви все возрасты покорны;
   Но юным, девственным сердцам
   Ее порывы благотворны,
   Как бури вешние полям:
   В дожде страстей они свежеют,
   И обновляются, и зреют –
   И жизнь могущая дает
   И пышный цвет, и сладкий плод.
   Но в возраст поздний и бесплодный,
   На повороте наших лет,
   Печален страсти мертвой след…
   
   All ages are resigned to love,
   But to youthful, virginal hearts
   Its gusts are as beneficial
   As spring rainstorms to fields:
   They freshen up in the rain of passions
   And get renewed, and ripen
   While powerful life gives them
   Both magnificent bloom and sweet fruit.
   But in later, more fruitless life,
   As we enter the middle age,
   The deathly passion’s imprint is sad…

   
   Aleksandr Pushkin, Yevgenii Onegin: roman v stikhakh (St. Petersburg: Akademicheskii proekt, 1993), 201. Italics added. All translations from the Russian are mine, unless marked otherwise. Not only Kuprin tries to breathe new life into Pushkin’s oft-quoted lyric, he actually pushes its message a step further, “modernizes” it via polemicizing with the Gold Age poet: young age is extended to include a pubescent girl, while the middleaged man seems far from experiencing a “deathly passion” or feeling sad about his affection for the girl. They both feel quite happy and elated in the course of their seven-day-long love. However, there is a hint of sadness as well: throughout the narrative, it is emphasized that this is his first, greatest, and “last love.” Alexandre Kuprin, Sulamith: A Prose Poem of Antiquity, Translated from the Russian by B. Gilbert Guerney (New York: Nicholas L. Brown, 1923), 100.
4. It is also important that in Kuprin’s time it was considered to be a universal truth that the age at menarche is significantly lower in hotter climates. Now it is usually discarded by many scientists as a highly debatable assumption since a variety of genetic, nutritional and even socio-economic factors are also at work (Leona Zacharias and Richard Wurtman, “Age at Menarche: Genetic and Environmental Factors” http://web.mit.edu/dick/www/pdf/97.pdf). Kuprin’s choice of ancient Israel as a setting of the novella may have been thus correlated with Sulamith’s tender age. And yet it is unlikely that Kuprin made his heroine 13 years old due to this “hot climate factor” or the age of consent in ancient Israel. It is much more plausible that he had other things on his mind.
5. Vasilii Rozanov, Opavshie listya (Moscow: Sovremennik, 1992), 237.
6. Rozanov means that the Russian language uses the word пол for ‘sex’: the latter term is, for him, foreign and alien. Interestingly, the primary meaning of пол in Russian is ‘half,’ a fifty percent part of something. The idea of incompleteness of sex, its “unfinalizability” (to use a Bakhtin term) is thus somewhat fatalistically encrypted in the Russian language. This etymological nuance may well be related to the striking shortage of existing linguistic means to express carnality and eroticism meaningfully in Russian culture.
7. Vasilii Rozanov, V mire neyasnogo i mereshennogo. (Moscow: Respublika, 1995), 21-22.
8. For a discussion of the theme of prostitution in The Pit, see Olga Matich, "A Typology of Fallen Women in Nineteenth-Century Russian Literature," American Contributions to the Ninth International Congress of Slavists 2. Ed. Paul Debreczeny (Columbus: Slavica, 1983), 325-43.
9. Alexandre Kuprin, Yama [The Pit]: A Novel in Three Parts. Translated from the Russian by B. Gilbert Guerney. (New York: Privately Printed, 1927), 98-99.
10. Cesare Lombroso and G. Ferrero, Criminal Woman, the Prostitute, and the Normal Woman (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004).
11. Laura Engelstein, The Keys to Happiness: Sex and the Search for Modernity in the Fin-de-Siecle Russia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), 133. Interestingly, Engelstein notes that Dr. Tarnovskaia was an aunt of V.D. Nabokov, Vladimir Nabokov’s father. The writer was very much aware of his famous ancestor and was appalled at Chekhov’s misogynistic treatment of her in one of his 1888 letters (Engelstein 144).
12. Vasilii Rozanov, “Kuprin” (1909). O pisateliakh i pisatelstve. http://bibliotekar.ru/rus-Rozanov/51.htm.
13. Here Rozanov seems to be echoing Kuprin’s (or, rather, Platonov the protagonist’s) philosophizing about the soul of Sonechka Marmeladova still living in every Russian prostitute (Yama 100): although Rozanov found Dostoevsky’s portrayal of women in general and prostitutes in particular melodramatic and untruthful, at this moment he appears to be under the spell of the author of Crime and Punishment.
14. As was a dominant belief at the time. In this, Kuprin clearly does not succumb to Lombroso’s influence but it must be said that Lombroso divided prostitutes into two types: “born” and “occasional.” All the main female characters of the novel (Jennie, Liubka, etc.) are definitely “occasional” prostitutes, i.e., they are not afflicted with “moral insanity” but, rather, are “temporarily insane” (Lombroso 222).
15. Alexander Zholkovsky, Text Counter Text: Rereadings in Russian Literary History (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 104.
16. Julian Connolly, Ivan Bunin (Boston: Twayne, 1982), 105.
17. Ivan Bunin, Izbrannaya proza (Minsk: Mastatskaya litaratura, 1984), 178.
18. Aleksei F. Losev, “Psikheya, Psikhe” in Mifologicheskii slovar'. Edited by Ye. Meletinskii. (Moskva: Sovetskaya entsiklopedia, 1990), 672.
19. Ivan Bunin, Osvobozhdenie Tolstogo (Paris: YMCA Press, 1937), 68. Tolstoy – just like Bunin – took the idea of being “liberated from flesh” very seriously. This explains the title of Bunin’s memoir – Tolstoy’s Liberation – implying both writers’ yearning for some sort of fleshless existence. It is not surprising then that all the three stories under consideration here are ultimately about precisely this: exploring different strategies for liberating oneself from flesh, i.e., from the carnal and the corporeal.
20. Ivan Bunin, Povesti i rasskazy (Moskva: Russkii yazyk, 1990), 211.
21. According to Thomas Marullo’s account of Buddhism in Bunin’s poetics, they are “individuals who become hopeless victims of desire and fail to achieve Nirvana.” Thomas Gaiton Marullo, If You See the Buddha: Studies in the Fiction of Ivan Bunin (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1998), 153.
22. One can productively compare Bunin’s young woman with a character named Hannibal Lector of the famous American novel and movie The Silence of the Lambs (1988). Just as Dr. Lector was both charming, extremely intelligent on the one hand and pure evil on the other, the woman is simultaneously brilliant, beautiful, and “pure virtue” (in Bunin’s sense). Both characters seem superhuman, almost supernatural. No one has ever classified Bunin’s Dark Alleys as “science fiction” or a “thriller” though. I am thankful to Dr. Nikolay Shchitov for this comparison.
23. Georgii Ivanov, Raspad atoma. In Eros. Rossia. Serebryanyi vek. Edited by А. Shchuplov (Moskva: Serebryanyi bor, 1992), 251.
For analysis of Ivanov’s poetry, see Vladimir Markov, “Georgy Ivanov: Nihilist as Light-Bearer” in The Bitter Air of Exile: Russian Writers in the West 1922-1972. Edited by Simon Karlinsky and Alfred Appel, Jr. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), 139-163; Irina Agushi, “The Poetry of Georgij Ivanov” Harvard Slavic Studies V (1970). The Decay of the Atom remains much less known than Ivanov’s poetry in both Russia and English-speaking countries.
24. Georgii Ivanov, “Po ulitsam rasseyanno my brodim…” (c. 1928). http://zivunin.livejournal.com/275923.html
25. A.N. Nikolyukin, Literaturnaya entsiklopedia russkogo zarubezhya (1918-1940) V. 3. Part 2 (Мoskva, 1999), 42.
26. Indeed, why didn’t Nabokov single out the dead rat afloat in the garbage can or lengthy descriptions of suicides’ corpses or multiple rape fantasies of the narrator as examples of “embarrassing” and disgusting elements of the book (Raspad atoma 257, 260, 262)? The answer may well be simple: although he clearly was at ease with explicit depictions of violence and eroticism, this author was rather prudish about representing the corporeal and physiological functions, both in his own work and in the work of others. In his lectures on Joyce’s Ulysses, for example, he would criticize Joyce for relishing the scenes of Bloom’s defecation, arguing those were redundant and unnecessary for the book he called the leading masterpiece of the century (Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita Annotated. Edited by Alfred Appel, Jr. [New York: Vintage, 1991], lii-liii). Nabokov was, therefore, advocating that the lines of the existing discourses be redrawn, but in different terms than those his contemporary was using.
27. In other words, Ivanov is much less interested in unveiling some hidden “symbolism” of Gogol’s novella than in imagining what the story could have become had Gogol not been an advocate of repressing and silencing the sexual and the erotic.
28. One might speculate that this is a hidden reference to Bunin’s “Light Breathing” discussed above: we saw that Olia Meshcherskaya in that story is clearly a Psyche as well but I do not think there is enough textual evidence to claim Bunin’s direct influence or even any parallels between these works. As I have tried to make clear, Ivanov’s approach to representing the sexual and the erotic is quite different from Bunin’s: definitely less evasive and elliptical, more modern.
29. As with most Gogol’s texts, “Overcoat” does not reveal much information about sexual portraits of the characters. All we learn is that the General did have a lover or a “female friend” and that Bashmachkin clearly did not approve of placing pictures of attractive women in shop windows. See Nikolai Gogol, Peterburgskiye povesti (St. Peterburg: Nauka, 1995), 107, 99.
30. In this respect, Ivanov has been influenced by Proust, Joyce and Henry Miller.
31. This is most probably a reference to the Gogol monument (by N.A. Andreyev) in Moscow: in 1909 when it was opened, the critic Yablonovski wrote in Russkoye slovo that the sculpture is really depressing, portraying Gogol as a sickly-looking, gloomy man with a “bird’s profile.” Not the right way to present a great Russian writer, according to the critic. See Irina Pilishek and Vladimir Bakalyarov. “Pamyatnik Gogolyu.” http://www.m-mos.ru/10/06.htm
32. On the reception of Kuzmin’s homoerotic novel in Russia, see John Malmstad, “Bathhouses, Hustlers, and Sex Clubs: The Reception of Mikhail Kuzmin’s Wings” Journal of the History of Sexuality 9.1-2 (2000), 85-105.

© Aleksei Lalo [an error occurred while processing this directive]