The Bacchante

An erotic novella by one of the most popular writers of pre-revolutionary Russia, Lidia Charskaya. This “novel without romance,” as she herself characterized it, was for a long time banned by censorship. The public was stirred up by such an outspoken work from an author of children’s literature. And it’s no coincidence that the novella begins with an epigraph from the Gospel of John: “Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her.”