Scandal and Controversy in Russian literature - Episode 4: A pornographic novel of ideas Artwork

Matters of Humanities

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Arabist Maurits Berger talks about the history of the Islam in Europe: going back to the first Muslim who set foot in Europe, and seeing what kind of interactions have taken place between Muslims and Europeans since then.

Season 2: Scandal and Controversy in Russian literature
Senior lecturer Otto Boele examines eight notorious texts in Russian literature, paying particular attention to the commotion that they created.

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Scandal and Controversy in Russian literature - Episode 4: A pornographic novel of ideas

May 15, 2024 • Leiden University Faculty of Humanities • Season 2 • Episode 4

The fourth episode of the podcast is about “Sanin” by Mikhail Artsybasjev (1878-1927), published in 1907. In this year, Russia was swept by a wave of moral panic caused by Artsybashev’s novel “Sanin”. Russian youth was said to have united in secret sex clubs and eagerly indulge in debauchery. Where did these stories come from? And was any of it true? This episode takes the listener back to an extremely tumultuous period in Russian history in which literature, rumours and news reporting merged creating the lasting impression of a society desperately in search of its moral compass.

Sources used in this episode of "Scandal and Controversy in Russian Literature":

- Anemone, Anthony. 2010. “Introduction,” in: Just Assassins: The Culture of Terrorism in Russia, edited by Anthony Anemone (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press), pp. 3-23.

- Beer, Daniel. “The Morality of Terror: Contemporary Responses to Political Violence in Boris Savinkov's The Pale Horse (1909) and What Never Happened 1912),” Slavonic and East-European Review 85, no. 1 (Jan. 2007), pp. 25-46.

- Boele, Otto. 2009. Erotic Nihilism in Late Imperial Russia. The Case of Mikhail Artsybashev’s “Sanin” (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press).

- Engelstein, Laura. 1992. The Keys to Happiness. The Search for Modernity in Fin-de-Siècle Russia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press).

- Kelly, Aileen.1987. “Self-Censorship and the Russian Intelligentsia, 1905-1914,” Slavic Review, Vol. 46, No. 2 (Summer), pp. 193-213.

List of translations used in this episode of "Scandal and Controversy in Russian Literature":

- Artsybashev, Mikhail. 2001. Sanin. Translated by Michael R. Katz (Ithaca/London: Cornell University Press, 2001).

- Stirner, Max. 1995. Stirner: The Ego and its Own. Revised translation by Steven Byington (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

All other translations were done by Otto Boele.