‘Belles-lettres with a Touch of Filth’: On the Contemporary Reception of Leonid Andreev’s Stories, ‘The Abyss’ and ‘In the Fog’

Abstract

The two decades from about 1890 witnessed a remarkable broadening of the range of permissible sexual topics in Russian literature. They mark the beginning of a short spell of extraordinary freedom of expression and sexual tolerance in Russia, before this liberty disappeared again under Soviet rule. Paradoxically, the new openness on sexuality was sparked off by an attempt at moral rearmament, Tolstoi’s story The Kreutzer Sonata (1889), in which the grand old man of Russian letters strongly condemned sex even within marriage. In 1907, the year after the abolition of preliminary censorship, the book market seemed to have been flooded with fiction and popular science on sexual desire, including Artsybashev’s succès de scandale, the novel Sanin. These two works mark the beginning and the high tide, respectively, of sexuality as a theme per se in Russian literature and embrace a period of drastic change in attitudes towards this particular issue in Russian intellectual life. The quest for sexual liberalization that Sanin shared with its immediate contemporaries — works by modernists like Kuzmin, Zinov’evaAnnibal and Sologub — would have been unthinkable in 1889.¹