Pure, Strong and Sexless explores the representation of gender and sexuality of peasant women in turn of the century Russian culture through the writings of populist writer Gleb Uspensky. Uspensky's numerous works address a range of issues related to sexuality, including infanticide, abortion, prostitution, adultery and venereal disease. This is the first comprehensive study of populist's fantasies in regard to the peasant woman's body as a non-sexed utopian body within Russian fin-de-siecle sexual discourse. Included in this book is the first English translation of the diary of Uspensky's...

Exemplary Bodies: Constructing the Jew in Russian Culture since 1880s explores the construction of the Jew's physical and ontological body in Russian culture as represented in literature, film, and non-literary texts from the 1880s to the present. With the rise of the dominance of biological and racialist discourse in the 1880s, the depiction of Jewish characters in Russian literary and cultural productions underwent a significant change, as these cultural practices recast the Jew not only as an archetypal "exotic" and religious or class Other (as in Romanticism and realist writing), but as a...