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Preface This book has been a long time in the writing. The first impetus came at a Russian literature conference held in Berkeley in 1987 (“From the Golden Age to the Silver Age”), where my claim that symbolist life creation emerged in part from Chernyshevsky’s What Is to Be Done? was well received by colleagues. The paper on Zinaida Gippius, with whom I have had a lifelong scholarly relationship, and her unacknowledged link to the nihilist 1860s marked the beginning of my efforts to revise our view of Russian symbolist culture. I suggested that below the utopian surface of symbolist life creation was a hidden layer that had as yet not been recovered. Further examination of the historical and cultural context of the turn of the twentieth century has led me to recognize other unexpected layers in early Russian modernism, among them European degeneration theory. In rethinking some of the scholarly assumptions about decadence, symbolism, and their predecessors, I have concluded that early modernist writing in Russia, like elsewhere in Europe, was imbricated with the fin-de-siècle medical myth of degeneration . I hope that this claim, as well as the juxtaposition of the later Tolstoy and the apocalyptic visionaries, will receive favorable support from my readers. Over the years, I have received very generous support from colleagues , friends, students, and academic institutions to whom I express my sincere gratitude. I am indebted to Carol Emerson, Robert Hughes, Hugh McClean, Irina Paperno, Harsha Ram, Yuri Slezkine, Sven Spieker , Viktor Zhivov, and Alexander Zholkovsky, who read individual chapters of this book or the whole manuscript. The book has profited from their valuable comments and criticisms. I would also like to thank my students and colleagues for engaging with me in timely discussions xi of the different aspects of early modernist culture that I explore here. I am especially grateful to Evgeny Bershtein, John Bowlt, Boris Gasparov , Beth Holmgren, Marsha Kinder,Aleksandr Lavrov, Eric Naiman, Anne Nesbet, William Nickell, Margarita Pavlova, Roman Timenchik, and Yuri Tsivian. I would like to single out two colleagues in Russia— Alexander Sobolev and Nikolai Bogomolov—who have generously shared both their knowledge of the period and archival materials with me. I don’t know how to acknowledge adequately the role of Charles Bernheimer, scholar of French and comparative literature who shared my fascination with the fin de siècle and who read those chapters that were written before his untimely death. When we met in the early nineties , we were both beginning to write books on the fin de siècle in our respective literatures of choice. The conception of Erotic Utopia owes a great deal to our frequent discussions, especially of decadence, which expanded my European perspective on Russian literature at the turn of the twentieth century. These discussions were an irritant to thought in the best meaning of the phrase. I only wish that Charlie were here to see the publication of his book and of mine. I also wish to thank my research assistants Polina Barskova, Aleksei Dmitrenko (in Petersburg), Mike Kunichika, Jonathan Stone, and especially Jeff Karlsen, whose careful work, including editorial revisions and translations from Russian, has made this a better book. Last but not least, I am indebted to the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the International Research and Exchanges Board, the Woodrow Wilson Center of International Studies, the University of Southern California, and the University of California, Berkeley, including the Institute of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, for major financial support. They funded both the research and the writing stages of this project. Without the necessary time off from teaching, I could not have written this book. xii Preface ...

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