Citizens and citizen ladies!
We present to you an audiobook about an era that made people throw themselves into debauchery and death—once again, convinced of the fateful clumsiness of the human breed, of its base and yet salvific lowliness.
The sexual revolution is considered a consequence of the social one: liberation leads to new forms of family, to unprecedented ease of morals… This audiobook proves that everything is exactly the opposite. Prose, poetry, and drama of the 1920s are a natural continuation of the Russian Silver Age, with its piquant eroticism and mania for suicide—usually flourishing in the era of reaction. The Russian sexual revolution was a result of despair, a consequence of global disappointment in the Bolshevik coup. The literature of the NEP—with its astonishing combination of sincerity, tastelessness, and unimaginable frankness in the USSR—remained a unique monument to this absurd and exotic age (Dmitry Bykov).
The collection includes prose, poems, and plays by Vladimir Mayakovsky, Andrei Platonov, Aleksei Tolstoy, Yevgeny Zamyatin, Nikolai Zabolotsky, Panteleimon Romanov, Leonid Dobychin, Sergei Tretyakov, as well as works from the 1920s that are being republished for the first time and have long become a bibliographic rarity.