Recommendations from our site
“This is about St. Petersburg at the end of the 19th century and what we would today call LGBT culture, in this specific time and place. It’s mostly about male homosexuality and the way people escaped the attentions of an absolutist monarchy and profited from newly found freedom in the first years of the 20th century. It’s also about the way this very private, very hidden culture influenced the public cultural sphere—because many were cultural figures: writers, dancers, poets, etc. It’s a book about a period that we think we know about because we call it the ‘Silver Age’ culture…It has all the charms of a doomed world. You read about it knowing that in another five or ten years, it will be crushed and completely obliterated out of existence. That is what gives it this specific brightness and visibility that is only given to doomed things.” Read more...
The Best Russia Books: The 2023 Pushkin House Prize
Ekaterina Schulmann, Political Scientist
