Places of Tenderness and Heat: The Queer Milieu of Fin-de-Siècle St. Petersburg

"This is about St. Petersburg at the end of the 19th century and what we would today call LGBT culture, in this specific time and place. It’s mostly about male homosexuality and the way people escaped the attentions of an absolutist monarchy and profited from newly found freedom in the first years of the 20th century. It’s also about the way this very private, very hidden culture influenced the public cultural sphere—because many were cultural figures: writers, dancers, poets, etc. It’s a book about a period that we think we know about because we call it the ‘Silver Age’ culture. It is very much a cult in Russia. We cherish the memories and the aesthetics and the heritage of this epoch. The ‘Golden Age’ is Pushkin’s era, and the Silver Age is this period of decadence. It has all the charms of a doomed world. You read about it knowing that in another five or ten years, it will be crushed and completely obliterated out of existence. That is what gives it this specific brightness and visibility that is only given to doomed things. I have read a couple of reviews of the book which criticize it for not revealing anything new. But what is known to some people is absolutely unknown to others. I certainly did not know most of what I read in the book and made a lot of discoveries. It captures a unique moment in Russian history from an angle that we seldom see described in print. Maybe this surprise shows me to be Russian. This book will certainly not be published in Russia anytime soon because of our specific legislation."