Copied from the story tank and roughly translated by Systranet.net. May be a bit hard to read, but most of it came through and I don't have time to clean it up.

Russian history

By: boyboy

Ways of the degradation the fear of the sexualitaet in the Russian culture.

Ways of the degradation, The fear of the sexuality in the Russian culture.

By Mikhail Schischkin

"Sex is something natural, it makes joy, is easy and pleasant and not shaming from the outset; with sexual intercourse everything is both disgusting-exciting as well as shaming and painful. No, that is not anything natural!" Leo Tolstoi Posdnyschew put these words into the mouth, which Protagonists of its "Kreutzersonate", which killed his wife and in the railway told, how he came to it. The text is a challenge to the nature and its creator, which said there, is fruitful and mehret you. A declaration of war to inexorably forward of striving lives.

The difficult relation of the large Russian writer to the sexuality gives a western reader astonishment, in the reason is however the entire Russian culture filled of a Sexphobic. On the one hand tremble before the women the male heroes of the Russian literature in 19th Century, usually, and prove in each case in the crucial moments as failures. On the other hand the 'holden Turgenjew' girls and women, who prefer a striving for high ideals to the valleys of the sinful joys, shaped the thought patterns and conceptions of whole generations of Russian readers.

HATE OF THE BODY

True love is not compatible in the space of the classical Russian literature with sexual intercourse. In the text of the texts, i.e. in Puschkins ", Tatjana and Onegin love Eugen Onegin" each other, but physical proximity is not possible between them. A healthy measure does not seem to be in Russia. On the "Kreutzersonate", Tolstois Mrs. Sophia Andrejewna with its own novel answered this passionierten call to the self release by sexual Abstinenz, in which a pure female nature striving for soul welfare by a man and its sexual greed are down-pulled into the sump of the carnal love. Wouldn't it have been married with the author of "war and peace" and "Anna Karenina", perhaps then from it a successful novel authoress would have become, but like it can wanting itself to try in the feather/spring art who into person divides the desk with Tolstoi? You in its type remarkable book, which is coined/shaped not less by distrust, hate on the "animal sex union", never found a broad reader set.

Tolstoi's final speech for the abstention SAMENESS, its challenge to the physical love, in which he saw a sin, was only the point of the iceberg, among them an inherent hate hid itself to the entire Russian culture on the body. Constant expecting of the world fall, encouraged by the endless chain of the military conflicts within and outside of the Imperiums as well as by daily physical force in family and state, formed the fertile soil for the dislike verwurzelte deeply in Russian consciousness opposite the sexual one. The Russian search for the welfare way prospered in religious sparkling wines, those was inexorable against the physical desire. Into Europe it could probably hardly have come to the movement of the Skoptzy, those in the Russia 19th Century its own phenomenon represented. The Russian farmers understood cutting (circumcising?) Jesus Christ as castration, they wanted to imitate Christ, by freeing themselves from the bad one in the own body. In the castration they saw the necessary prerequisite for the Salavation of their own souls.

The Amputation of the sex organs became with the Skoptzy ritual practice. There were two levels of sterilizing. With string the testicles were together-tied and cut off with a glowing-hot rod.

But that was only the first level, since thereby the Desire was not yet defeated. In order to finally free itself from the desire to, the Penis was cut off equally at the root, and in order uncontrolled going off urine by the opening of the urethra to prevent, was put in a tin tap.

Cutting the Mrs. the ideal for sake the purity sake permitted larger variety of surgical interventions: The nipples were cut off or cut out completely away-burned, often the chests amputiert, the Klitoris, which removes small and large schamlippen. Also national pursuits could not stop the Skopzen movement. It spread in the central Russian Gouvernements, in addition, until Siberia and into the metropolises Moscow and pc. Petersburg. In the opposite: The fact that the tsarist government tried to suppress the sparkling wines lent the aura of the Maertyrertums to this. Their trailers could count on sympathies in practically all social classes.

Which many ungebildete Russians designed and transferred for their own type, the formed layers understood as guidance for concerning in a transferred sense. The socialist ideas, to which over so long time away so many Russians succumbed devotedly, created also such a thing in the reason like religious sparkling wines. At the price of the self sacrifice the acquisition of the soul welfare in the fight for a light future was promised. Also these ideas called according to a type of castration, however no surgical, but a mental. The fanatische terrorist Sergei Netschajew formulated the sex relationship as follows for the Russian Intelligenzia: A revolutionary cannot have a family, it is married with the revolution. In this sense the entire progressive Russian culture of the before-revolutionary epoch is skopzisch. The revolutionary moral of the self denial was held out to the out-curving life of the Russian Bourgeoisie.

Even that world view in the Russian culture, which faced the sexualitaet openly, the symbolism of the silver age around the turn of the century, let Erotik apply only in words. If one takes this movement more exactly under the magnifying glass, one detects the same abhorrence against the animal-adhered in humans. The real life of these Kuenstlerbohème let the old Skoptzy moral obsiegen. Thus the two most famous marriages of the silver age, between the pair of writers Dmitri Mereschkowski and Sinaida Gippius as well as between the poet the Aleksandr Blok and Ljubow Blok, structure those the prototype of Bloks of "beautiful lady", completely on a asexuel connection for example. In the hierarchy of the symbolism was completely above the term of the "eternal femaleness". It not the picture of the woman was the basis itself as a erotisches nature, but the conception of a devoted nature of the woman, who had been taken over from the Russian Slawophilentum. "the eternal femaleness" was the symbol for one excluding mental union. The main topic of many best-seller novels written by women was at the beginning 20. Century the free death of the heroine, who rather dies to descend than with the loved man to the Pfuhl of the desire.

NEW HUMANS

The Skoptzy body-despising adjustment held with the seizure of power of the communists chute into the state ideology. As model for the new sex relations naturally Lenin served and its wife, the Krupskaja. At Lenin few male was, few feminine at Nadjeschda Krupskaja - and they had naturally also no children. Something of first, which did the new communist government, was, to kastrieren the language: The addresses "gentleman" and "woman" were abolished and but the neutral "Towarischtsch" (comrade) was introduced. The symbol for the Geschlechtslosigkeit of "new humans" the leather commissioner jacket became. The commissioner did not have the function to eliminate all enemies of the revolution and provide for the light future, however, to have any primary or secondary sex features. One of the most popular revolution plays was the "optimistic tragedy" from Wsewolod wiping new ski. In it those stops the communist ideas devotedly zugetane clerk sarin being a erotisches nature: "now, who would like to try still the commissioner body?", the heroine, playing with a Mauserpistole over the corpse of a sailor, asks who had tried to entice her. Clearly that none announces more desires. If it concerns the release of the world and the personal soul welfare, there is no sex: Sex lots sailors and their sexless clerk sarin pull into the battle and fall, with which Unsterblichkeit is entitled to them - reason to the optimism -.

Only in the sixties the director Askoldow answered the clerk sarin "to wiping new skis piece with the very self-willed film". It supplied such a thing like the continuation of the "optimistic tragedy", but it let the "iron" clerk sarin their leather jacket take off, to bring a child to the world and return it with it to the universally human values. The film was well-known in the west, in which Soviet Union it remained forbidden.

In the thirties, when Europe zusteuerte on the war, the cult of the healthy arischen body, a future fodder for the cannons, witnessed by patriotic mothers, flowered in Germany. Also on the canvas of the Soviet artists and film directors Turner and doing gymnastics gutters with exposed bodies appeared. Again it concerns a form "kastrierten itself" body. The sport was understood in the totalitarian regime of the thirties not as more personal, non-standard shapable pastime, but as social twisting in the service of the world revolution. The Athleten marching at the communist holidays in strict columns to thousands over Red Square was symbolic soldiers, the mass sport demonstrations, which were ordered, was a theatralische exhibition of the readiness of these humans to bring collective a victim. Which one got to see, was a parade of creatures, which walked unanimously to the altar and radiated, despite their nakedness, no Erotik. Their bodies were exposed, but they did not seem to have genital organs, the pants "entsexualisierten" them. The German national socialism had there fewer difficulties: Many sculptures and paintings showed, even if idealizes, naked bodies. "arische humans" with its power to child wars became a presenting object.

While and after the Second World War the naked body was banished completely from the Soviet mass media. Joseph Brodsky writes the accommodation in the Komsomol "into its" Lenin grader memories ", as strong in the puritanischen atmosphere at that time the four of centimeters exposed thigh of the young party lady in the picture", which hung at that time in almost each school, which excited pupils sexually. Also I can remember, how a photograph shifted us in pioneer stocks boys in unrest. Whereupon Soja Kosmodemjanskaja was to be seen, one in the Second World War Partisanin erhaengte imprisoned taken by the Germans and, after which also pioneer stocks were designated: In the snow is situated a young woman, for who the cord is appropriate still around the neck and a chest from the blouse looks - you had cut the other one off German butchers.

The official Soviet culture was thoroughly asexuell. The body and the joys of the sinnlichen love were brought with the seduction arts of the capitalistic west in connection. Remarkable it is also that the antisoviet background culture it - in view of the atrocities of the system, which had made to criticize it it's duty - likewise considered immoral to realize the own sinnlichkeit. Schalamows or Solschenizyns descriptions of the stocks love only cause in the reader aversion and disgust. With the Perestroika the naked body conquered the cinema canvas in rapid speed after the model of the west. But it is defining that in the largest part of the new Russian films dear scenes resemble rapes.

From the Russian of Franziska Stoecklin. - Mikhail Schischkin lives as a writer in Zurich. In the Limmat publishing house its book appears "Montreux, Missolunghi, Astapowo in August. On the tracks of Byron and Tolstoi: A literary migration of the Geneva lake in Bernese the upper country ".