Sexuality in 19th Century Russian Literature Anonymous College

In his article “Literature,” David M. Bethea explains how “the pagan concept of “mother Earth” and the Christian concept of “Holy Russia” … were telescoped again, made extension of each other. As a result, perhaps the greatest of all modern Russian literary plots, expressed in a stunning variety of works over the past two centuries, involves the rescuing/redeeming of a heroine, who represents the country’s vast potential, by a Christ-like paladin” (173). Bethea’s thesis of the Eros-cum-myth is illustrated in Nikolai Karamzin’s “Poor Liza,” Alexander Pushkin’s “The Postmaster,” Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Poor Folk, and Leo Tolstoy’s Childhood. The representation of women in each of these stories is meant to represent the treatment and fate of “Mother Russia.” Though each of these stories take a different approach on love and sexuality in their female protagonists (as undoing for Liza in “Poor Liza” and as a beautiful, warm means to procreation in Tolstoy’s Childhood), each one refuses to accept sexuality of the heroine as meaningless, in accordance to Bethea’s thesis: “the national Russian myth has, at its core, become profoundly eroticized and at the same time strangely sublimated/abstracted: personal love cannot have meaning outside...