Only be honest with yourself!Sexual Morality and the Liberation of the Individual in Russian and Ukrainian Literature (1907–17)
During the years immediately following the revolt of 1905 many
representatives of Russia's intelligentsia regarded their time as a
period of cultural decline and moral deprivation. While opinions
differed on the real cause of the crisis, people on both sides of the
political divide struggled to come to grips with the situation by
constructing a grand narrative of the radical intelligentsia from the
1860s onwards. This narrative could be realized in one of two
ways. Either the perceived immorality of the present generation was
regarded as the inevitable outcome of a ruthlessly materialistic world
view—epitomized by Turgenev's hero Bazarov (S. Frank
1909)—or, as a betrayal of the legacy of the
razno&chachek;innaja intelligencija (Vorovskij 1909). Either way, for
many observers history seemed to have come full circle after
1905. They noted with alarm that a new generation of New
People
had emerged that rejected the value system of their
fathers and proposed a radical new sexual ethics.
Fiction featuring these New New People
has long been
regarded as a vulgarization of nineteenth-century realism (Zorkaja
1982) and Nietzschean philosophy (Clowes 1986). Its popularity among
readers of the time suggests, however, that it was nonetheless
perceived as serious
literature. It may well be argued
that authors like Mixail Arcyba&shachek;ev, Anatolij Kamenskij and
Vladimir Vinni&chachek;enko (to name only the most notorious) created
such a sensation precisely because they purported to chronicle the
life of the intelligentsia—thus continuing the tradition of the
tendentious
novel. In effect, their literary portraits
of the post-revolutionary intelligentsia supplied critics and readers
alike with a semiotic framework—a tool that enabled them to
explain
and understand
life in a society
traumatized by revolution.
The purpose of this paper is to describe the behavioral paradigm
associated with the turn-of-the-century New People, specifically by
paying close attention to the demand for absolute sincerity
with oneself
as expressed by Kamenskij and the
Ukrainian-Russian writer Vladimir Vinni&chachek;enko. I will argue
that although sincerity (iskrennost&soft;) was also a crucial concept
in the sixties—when it meant the ability to acknowledge man's
inherent egotism—it now took on a far more personal dimension
because it became intertwined with the debate on sexuality. To
illustrate this point I will discuss Kamenskij's scorned essay,
overtly and honestly
visiting prostitutes.