Erotic Utopia: The Decadent Imagination in Russia’s Fin De Siecle

The first generation of Russian modernists experienced a profound sense of anxiety resulting from the belief that they were living in an age of decline. What made them unique was their utopian prescription for overcoming the inevitability of decline and death, by metaphysical and physical means. They intertwined their mystical erotic discourse with European degeneration theory and its obsession with the destabilization of gender. In Erotic Utopia, Olga Matich suggests that same-sex desires underlay their most radical utopian proposal of abolishing the traditional procreative family in favor of erotically induced abstinence. The author focuses on the later works of Tolstoy, Vladimir Solov'ev, Zinaida Gippius, Alexander Blok, and Vasilii Rozanov, whose writings are situated in the Russian as well as European fin de siecle.