Slavic Sins of the Flesh
ISBN: 9781584658245
Platform/Publisher: Project MUSE / University of New Hampshire Press
Digital rights: Users: Unlimited; Printing: Chapters; Download: Chapters
Subjects: Russian fiction; Sex in literature.; Food in literature.; Desire in literature.; Pleasure in literature.;

This remarkable work by Ronald D. LeBlanc is the first study to appraise the representation of food and sexuality in the nineteenth-century Russian novel. Meticulously researched and elegantly and accessibly written, Slavic Sins of the Flesh sheds new light on classic literary creations as it examines how authors Nikolay Gogol, Ivan Goncharov, Grigorii Kvitka-Osnovyanenko, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Lev Tolstoy used eating in their works as a trope for male sexual desire. The treatment of carnal desire in these renowned works of fiction stimulated a generation of young writers to challenge Russian culture's anti-eroticism, supreme spirituality, and utter disregard for the life of the body, so firmly rooted in centuries of ideological domination by the Orthodox Church.

RONALD D. LEBLANC is Professor of Russian and Humanities at the University of New Hampshire and Research Associate at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University. He is the author of The Russianization of Gil Blas: A Study in Literary Appropriation and many scholarly book chapters, articles, and book reviews.

hidden image for function call