Erotic utopia

"The first generation of Russian modernists experienced a profound sense of anxiety resulting from the belief that they were living in an age of decline. The premised it on a decadent view of history according to which every culture passes through the stages of growth, stagnation, and death. A similar urgency informed their fear of degeneration, the fin-de-siecle European malady that claimed a growing number of individuals and whole nations. What made the early Russian modernists unique was their utopian prescription for overcoming the inevitability of decline and death both by metaphysical and physical means. They theorized their defiance of death in the context of the apocalyptic religious revival at the turn of the twentieth century, suggesting the immortalization of the body through the power of erotic love. Yet they intertwined their mystical erotic discourse with European degeneration theory and its obsession with the destabilization of gender." "In Erotic Utopia, Olga Matich suggests that same-sex desire underlay their most radical utopian proposal of abolishing the traditional procreative family in favor of erotically induced abstinence. By means of an ideological and rheto