The Keys to Happiness: Sex and the Search for Modernity in Fin-de-Siecle Russia.

Taking Michel Foucault's hypothesis concerning the interrelationship between sexuality and power within Western Europe as her starting point, Laura Engelstein brings a novel twist to Western historiography's preoccupation with Russian liberalism and its failure to bring about a viable constitutional system in Russia. This work hinges upon a redefinition of liberalism as the pursuit of happiness by the individual rather than a specific agenda of political ideas. Instead of rehashing the well-known history of constitutional reform projects and the Kadet Party that emerged from the heady days of the 1905 Revolution, Engelstein focuses instead on the writings and proposed legal reforms of Russia's lawyers, doctors, and psychiatrists. These professional men and women engaged the autocratic state of late Imperial Russia in debates about issues of sexuality, including marriage, prostitution, and sexual deviance, that touched individual lives at all levels of Russian society. According to Engelstein, the reformers formed the basis of a budding bourgeoisie and civil society frustrated by an autocracy that refused to limit its authority through the rule of law. The autocracy clung instead to the outmoded system of Polizeistaat in which administrative fiat with a paternalistic bent constrained society. By posing modern notions of legality and emphasizing principles of individual autonomy, equality, privacy, and the rule of law in their reconceptualization of sexuality, liberal professionals were not only challenging the political order. They also sought to carve out for themselves a power base that permitted them, rather than the state, to define and regulate social relations.

The first part of the book analyzes the discourse of legal codes and reform projects with regard to sexual matters in nineteenth-century Russia up to the Revolution of 1905. Ever conscious of the ongoing influence of Western European ideas on professionals within Russia, Engelstein correctly insists that these educated men and women were operating within a different cultural context and were not blind imitators of their European counterparts. This difference is most vividly expressed in the reluctance of Russian civil society to denigrate the Russian peasantry. Russia's medical and legal professionals resisted the Western European notions that the sexual behavior of the lower social orders and women demonstrated biological inferiority. While opposed to the regulation inherent within the patriarchal system of the peasant family, doctors placed the Russian peasant woman on a pedestal, presenting her as a paragon of virtue and motherhood and thus inherently incapable of sexual deviance or crime. They thus chose to attribute high rates of syphilis in the countryside to nonvenereal contagion. Unable to dismiss entirely the sexual transmission of the disease, they faulted corruption and self-indulgence inherent in modern urban living and culture and hence in upper-class values. They were more comfortable with portraying peasant women who murdered spouses or aborted children and prostitutes as victims of poverty and social circumstance than as actors wishing to better their lot. While Russian professionals infused the never-enacted 1903 law code with liberal values, reorienting sexual deviance away from the traditional institutional basis of the family and kin relationships to the interpersonal aspect of sexual life, they, like the Western bourgeoisie, were unable to escape the grasp of patriarchalism entirely. According to Engelstein, they were reluctant to champion women's autonomy in sexual matters, preferring to leave women in their traditional subordinate position. They were also uncomfortable with the radical individualism of the modern conjugal family. Despite such limitations, however, the author strongly feels that the professionals' insistence on the rule of law and their modification of the law regarding sexual and gender issues according to liberal principles would have created a more humane and more modern political system that would have rescued the Russians from the arbitrariness of the autocracy as well as of the communist system that replaced it.

Painting much broader strokes, Part Two looks at the public discourse on sexuality within educated Russian society as a whole, as the 1905 Revolution ushered in a turbulent period that questioned some of the presumptions of the earlier period. The virtuous non-threatening lower classes had turned the world upside down by becoming actors in a spontaneous revolution that reeked of uncontrollable passions and violence. Educated society's preoccupation with sexual matters and experimentation with sexual deviation as expressed in masturbation, homosexuality, and lesbianism, in the opinion of liberal professionals, needed to be disciplined by scientific rationalism. Otherwise, anarchy would prevail. Engelstein demonstrates how this call for restraint was out of step with the popular boulevard literature that arose after 1905 with the liberalization of censorship laws. Geared toward the marketplace, this pulp fiction, symbolized by Anastasiia Verbitskaia's six-volume biography, The Keys to Happiness, from which Engelstein derived the title of her book, celebrated the power of sexual desire. In the end, however, the professionals and other members of educated society converged in their abhorrence of the autocracy, whose moral decay manifested itself in the repulsive figure of Grigorii Rasputin. Rasputin's sexual perversities smacked of the contradictions in Russian society and the inability of the political system to "guarantee either sexual or political virtue." (421)

Engelstein's book presents a new way of looking at the intricacies of power relationships through the discourse on sexuality among members of a growing civil society. From a social history perspective, however, the study falls short in its methodological approach. This is densely written intellectual history that relies heavily on the voluminous published records left by Russian professionals. While the author reconstructs the thinking of educated society on sexual matters in the post-1905 period from other sources, including boulevard fiction, elite culture, and newspaper advertisements, she ignores the social reality of the bottom ranks of Russian society, namely the sexual practices and mores of the peasantry and working class. Engelstein clearly states that she is not interested in writing about actual sexual practices, noting that the professionals who studied them so muddied the facts with their cultural biases that the historian may never know the exact nature of those practices. Yet, her dissection of professional writings encourages readers to assume that the sex lives of the masses were extremely varied. Such conjecture is unsatisfying. The author does not explore archival documents that might shed light on actual practice and the ability of the masses to effect change, even with regard to laws concerning sexuality. This omission is particularly acute in her discussion of the Russian Orthodox Church's position on divorce. Engelstein attributes the Holy Synod's belated decision to approve marital reform in 1910 to either the disappearance of the reactionary Pobedonostsev from leadership of the church or the changed political climate after 1905. There is no acknowledgement here of the fact that by the early twentieth century the Holy Synod was inundated with petitions from factory women demanding divorce on uncanonical grounds and unable to expedite the paperwork and necessary investigations effectively. Many of these petitions are replete with descriptions of sexual practices among the working class. Unpublished psychiatric hospital records and ethnographic reports could shed a great deal of light on popular practices. Knowledge of the latter would help students of Russia to evaluate better the writings of the educated elite. These criticisms should not, however, deter the reader from mining the abstract and at times murky prose of this book for its nuggets of wisdom. Engelstein clearly challenges specialists to rethink conventional conceptualizations of history. Notions of gender can illuminate the intricacies of power relations in the past and present. However, the historian should be cautious about reading too much of the contemporary discourse regarding sexuality back into the past.

Christine D. Worobec Kent State University