Sex in Public: The Incarnation of Early Soviet Ideology

by Eric Naiman

Overview

Sex in Public examines the ideological poetics and the rhetoric of power in the Soviet Union during the 1920s, a period of anxiety over the historical legitimacy of Soviet ideology and Bolshevik power. Drawing on a wide range of soruces—Party Congress transcripts, the classics of early Soviet literature, sex education pamphlets, the cinema, crime reports, and early Soviet ventures into popular science—the author seeks to explain the period's preoccupation with crime, disease, and, especially, sex. Using strategies of reading developed by literary scholars, he devotes special care to exploring the role of narrative in authoritative political texts. The book breaks new ground in its attention to the ideological importance of the female body during this important formative stage of Bolshevik rule.
Sex in Public provides a fundamentally new history of the New Economic Policy and offers important revisionist readings of many of the fundamental cultural products of the early Soviet period. Perhaps most important, it serves as a model for the sort of interdisciplinary work that is possible when historians take literary and ideology theory seriously and when ideology theorists seek to conform to the standards of documentary rigor traditionally demanded by historians. It thus becomes a study that can be read as both positivistic and postmodern.
Eric Naiman is Associate Professor of Russian and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley.

Originally published in 1997.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691655550
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	01/15/2019
Series:	Princeton Legacy Library , #5236
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	8.00(w) x 10.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Eric Naiman is Associate Professor of Russian and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Note on Transliteration, Citation, and Translation xi

INTRODUCTION 3

Menstruation and a New Pair of Glasses 3

Approaching NEP: Ideological Anxieties and the "Unarmed Eye" 5

Utopia and Its Infections 12

Sacrificing Culture / Reading Ideology 16

Things to Come 25

CHAPTER ONE The Creation of the Collective Body 27

Utopia, Misogyny, and the Russian Philosophical Tradition 27

The Signification of Sex 45

Fantasies of the War Communist Body 57

CHAPTER TWO "Let Them Penetrate!": Strategies against Dismemberment 79

CHAPTER THREE The Discourse of Castration 124

CHAPTER FOUR Behind the Red Door: An Introduction to NEP Gothic 148

CHAPTER FIVE NEP as Female Complaint (I): The Tragedy of Woman 181

CHAPTER SIX NEP as Female Complaint (II): Revolutionary Anorexia 208

CHAPTER SEVEN The Case of Chubarov Alley: Collective Rape and Utopian Desire 250

The "Facts" of the Case 250

The Corruption of the Innocent 257

The Corruption of the Experienced 263

Ideological Resonance 266

CONCLUSION 289

Index 301

What People are Saying About This

Svetlana Boyrn

An insightful, imaginative, and path-breaking work.... Naiman's work represents one of the most interesting attempts to bring together literature and history in years.
— "Svetlana Boyrn, Harvard University"

From the Publisher

"An insightful, imaginative, and path-breaking work.... Naiman's work represents one of the most interesting attempts to bring together literature and history in years."—Svetlana Boyrn, Harvard University

Editorial Reviews

"Naiman has written an original, thought-provoking, and well-researched book that is destined to become a classic study of the role of sex, crime, and disease in the ideological discourse that took place in the first decade of Soviet power.... Few can deny the insightful, ground-breaking quality of Sex in Public."—-Ronald D. LeBlanc, Slavic and East European Journal

"This is a big book—large in its scope and ambitions. Naiman offers a bold reassessment of early Soviet ideology.... This is not a book for the faint-hearted, since the graphic descriptions of real and imagined sex crimes can sometimes make for difficult reading. Like a prosecutor preparing for a case, Naiman uses this mass of evidence to make a dense argument for the centrality of sex to fears about the future of the revolution.... Nowhere has [the New Economic Policy] been depicted in such dark terms as in this book."—-Lynn Mally, Europe-Asia Studies

From the Publisher

This is a big book—large in its scope and ambitions. Naiman offers a bold reassessment of early Soviet ideology.... This is not a book for the faint-hearted, since the graphic descriptions of real and imagined sex crimes can sometimes make for difficult reading. Like a prosecutor preparing for a case, Naiman uses this mass of evidence to make a dense argument for the centrality of sex to fears about the future of the revolution.... Nowhere has [the New Economic Policy] been depicted in such dark terms as in this book.

Europe Asia Studies - Lynn Mally

Naiman has written an original, thought-provoking, and well-researched book that is destined to become a classic study of the role of sex, crime, and disease in the ideological discourse that took place in the first decade of Soviet power.... Few can deny the insightful, ground-breaking quality of Sex in Public.

Slavic and East European Journal - Ronald D. LeBlanc

This is a big book—large in its scope and ambitions. Naiman offers a bold reassessment of early Soviet ideology.... This is not a book for the faint-hearted, since the graphic descriptions of real and imagined sex crimes can sometimes make for difficult reading. Like a prosecutor preparing for a case, Naiman uses this mass of evidence to make a dense argument for the centrality of sex to fears about the future of the revolution.... Nowhere has [the New Economic Policy] been depicted in such dark terms as in this book.
— Lynn Mally

Europe Asia Studies

Naiman has written an original, thought-provoking, and well-researched book that is destined to become a classic study of the role of sex, crime, and disease in the ideological discourse that took place in the first decade of Soviet power.... Few can deny the insightful, ground-breaking quality of Sex in Public.
— Ronald D. LeBlanc

Slavic and East European Journal

This is a big book--large in its scope and ambitions. Naiman offers a bold reassessment of early Soviet ideology.... This is not a book for the faint-hearted, since the graphic descriptions of real and imagined sex crimes can sometimes make for difficult reading. Like a prosecutor preparing for a case, Naiman uses this mass of evidence to make a dense argument for the centrality of sex to fears about the future of the revolution.... Nowhere has [the New Economic Policy] been depicted in such dark terms as in this book.
— Lynn Mally

Europe-Asia Studies