Synopses & Reviews
Ronald LeBlanc's remarkable work 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 examines how authors Nikolai Gogol, Ivan Goncharov, Grigory Kvitka-Osnovianenko, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Lev Tolstoy used eating in their works as a trope for male sexual desire. At the end of the nineteenth century the treatment of carnal desire in these classic works of fiction finally 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. Although the writings of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy have attracted much more critical attention for what they can tell us about the mind and the spirit than about the body and its animal urges, LeBlanc's noteworthy book makes startling and important connections between the erotic and the gastronomic in Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, shedding new light on the significance of their literary creations.
Synopsis
A path-breaking "gastrocritical" approach to the poetics of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and their contemporaries in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Russia
Synopsis
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.