From Tolstoy to Playboy
SHUB, ANATOLE
From Tolstoy to Playboy The Sexual Revolution in Russia: From the Age of the Czars to Today By Igor S. Kon Translated by James Riordan Free Press. 337 pp. $25.00. Reviewed by Anatole Shub Author...
...Kon's treatment of the hypocritical sexual climate of the Brezhnev era is definitively mordant...
...Russian scholars still study Pushkin's fatal duel with his wife's lover...
...And why not...
...Instead, he follows George Orwell's 1984 in attributing Soviet "sexophobia" to the Party's suspicions of personal loyalties and passions transcending politics, and to its allegedly conscious desire to incite mass hysteria and war fever...
...from the sexual hypocrisy and repression—what he calls the "sexophobia"—imposed by Stalin and his successors...
...Rather, he secs"alongseriesof interrelated—albeit discontinuous, contradictory and unfinished—social and cultural processes that have been only loosely associated with specific political events...
...the earlier chapters, by comparison, are derivative and somewhat sketchy...
...That might be reassuring, except that at present, he says, "Russia is taking from the West mainly what is bad, cheap or easily attainable...
...Appropriately, a Russian edition of Playboy has just come out...
...With various social science vocabularies appearing to offer at least some partial truths, he often ends up with "on the one hand" and "on the other hand," a strategy with inevitably diminishing returns...
...Kon tries to relate sexual trends in Russia to broader historical, political and social contexts, but such efforts are eclectic and not always illuminating...
...It might have been wiser to concede, with Tolstoy, that few contemporaries ever fully understand the history they are living through, or to recognize, with Goethe, that "theory is gray, but the tree of life is ever green...
...But such flaws may well be inherent in any attempt to describe and define a scene not altogether unlike the Mississippi in the midst of a flood...
...Kon finds the current sexual scene similar in some respects to the atmosphere of earlier Russian revolutionary upheavals...
...The Moscow sociologist Igor S. Kon...
...Andrei Konchalovsky's The Inner Circle, withabrilliantperformance by Bob Hoskins as Lavrenti P. Beria, evoked the sexual tensions in and beyond Stalin's court...
...His more extended survey of the last seven years includes informative chapters on the pervasive sex-ism in Russian life, on the state of love and marriage, on abortion and contraception, on sexual activity among teenagers, sexually transmitted diseases, and homosexuality...
...Kon is strongest on the Leonid I. Brezhnev andperestroika periods...
...Although the book is subtitled From the Age of the Czars to Today, the second half, dealing with the last 30 years and based partly on his own scholarly involvement, is pioneering work...
...The literature has given us Dostoyevsky's Grushenka, Chekhov's lady with the dog, Nabokov's Lolita...
...Yet despite the fact that much of what these sources disclose is grim, Kon's intellectual high spirits, human sympathies and critical faculties make this a lively, sensible book—well worth reading by anyone interested in Russia or comparative sexual mores...
...Francine du Plessix Gray's incisive Soviet Women conveyed much of their anguish and stoicism...
...One hopes that this reflexive pessimism (itself, perhaps, a historical bequest of the murderous Stalin and stupefying Brezhnev eras) is not justified by future events...
...Tchaikovsky and the ballet impressario Sergei Diaghilev exemplify varying styles of homosexuality...
...That interpretation has always struck me as more of a literary insight than a historical explanation...
...Filmmakers and journalists have explored parts of the experience...
...Stalin in 1932 driving his wife to suicide in the Kremlin...
...he observes that, in this area as in others, Russia is partly recapitulating the earlier experience of the West...
...Consider the impl ications of two of Stalin's most vicious "achievements": the destruction of the peasant family through the forced collectivization of agriculture (millions of men and women who did not perish in the famine or the Gulag were driven into exhausting industrial work and communal apartments...
...high" aristocratic, "low" peasant—and the influence of the Orthodox Church but does not pause, for example, to consider the separate worlds of the Old Believers, Dukhobors, flagellants, and other dissenting sects...
...The author describes the prerevolutionary dual heritage...
...often misleading) police and public health statistics...
...Lest we forget, the century started with a "land hunger" caused by peasant families having "too" many children and is concluding—after wars, revolution and Bolshevism brought 65 million unnatural deaths—with life expectancy declining and natural deaths (not to speak of ubiquitous abortions) exceeding live births year after year...
...As a somewhat accidental founder of Russian "sexology," whose interest was originally stirred by the Kinsey Report, he is authoritative on the uphill struggle of Soviet sexual studies since 1967...
...That, in a nuclear power, might be the least of it...
...Kon's real subject is Russia's release, since about 1988...
...One wonders what an ideological free-swinger like Camille Paglia might make of that soci-ologese...
...Indeed, he seems to have stuffed every last report and survey he could find into this book, making it sometimes seem as dynamic and disorderly as its subject matter...
...The ideology of such a regime, he says, "will be strongly antidemocratic...
...He is a moderate liberal, as wary of sexual radicals as he is critical of Russian medical conservatives and ideological reactionaries...
...Kon concludes on a pessimistic political note...
...Like many older Moscow intellectuals, he is distressed at the current unruly state of Russian society and fears a return to authoritarian rule and repressive traditions...
...Aleksandr Kerensky, amid the storms of 1917, pursuing a love affair with his wife's cousin (moving her into the Winter Palace's Aleksandr III bedroom...
...Little Vera and Interde-vochka portrayed joyless sex in the late-Soviet youth culture and among young hard-currency prostitutes...
...and the mass terror of 1934-41...
...After a nice quotation from Montaigne?He who has hail raining down on his head thinks that the whole world is engulfed in storms and tempests"—Kon concedes that the "revolution" in his title "is perhaps the wrong word" for what has been going on sexually in Russia...
...Andrei Tarkovsky's Andrei Rublev contrasted Russia's conflicting pagan and Christian traditions...
...resumed in 1951-53...
...the morganatic marriage of Aleksandr II...
...Sexophobia, along with anti-Semitism, will be a very powerful propaganda weapon again...
...On the one hand...
...No single work could begin to do justice to this multicolored experience, even in this century...
...Fortunately, Kon's real passion is for empirical facts, whenever they can be unearthed...
...It is as fashionable among some Muscovites these days to sneer at Snickers candy bars as it used to be for Paris literati to fume against Coca- Cola...
...However, the brutality of Stalin's policies, including a ban on abortions, produced the very opposite effects...
...Some of the oddest bits turn up in the Notes...
...It is expected to be at least as successful as the Russian Cosmopolitan, already selling more than 100,000 copies per issue...
...and especially the recent findings of atti-tudinal and other survey research...
...Kon does not dwell on the social consequences of such momentous actions (partly, perhaps, because research on such matters in Stalin's day was punishable by death and the archives of the NKVD-KGB have only begun to be opened—or shredded...
...who has lectured at several American universities, deals only in passing with individual lives and loves, real or imagined...
...the undoing of the dynasty by the dissolute monk Rasputin...
...Commendably, Kon's sober final chapter devalues the publisher's hype implicit in the book's title...
...His focus is more often on official records, laws and decrees...
...Reviewed by Anatole Shub Author "An Empire Loses Hope " SEX IN RUSSIA is a theme as vast as the country and as various as its people...
...On the other hand...
...anti-Western and anti-American...
...Nor has sex failed to color Russian politics: the lusty empresses Elizabeth and Catherine II...
...The ban was repealed by Nikita S. Khrushchev, with sad consequences in the absence of reliable contraceptives...
...Stalin's "sexophobia" can more plausibly be explained by his adoption of the Russian imperial-nationalist agenda, with its military-based need for higher birthrates and stabler families...
...A single marriage, that of Lev and Sofya Tolstoy, continues to provoke new books (the latest, posthumously, by William L. Shirer...
...that habitually punished wives and children for the sins of "enemies of the people...
...Not surprisingly, he does not find a single right word...
...He also knows as much as any man about the findings of such research, which is in its early stages, roughly where Kinsey was in 1951...
Vol. 78 • June 1995 • No. 5
