The Keys to Happiness

Know about the book -

The Keys to Happiness is written by Laura Engelstein and published by Cornell University Press. It's available with International Standard Book Number or ISBN identification 0801499585 (ISBN 10) and 9780801499586 (ISBN 13).

Throughout the decade that followed the Revolution of 1905, in the salons of the artistic and intellectual avant-garde, in the pages of popular romances, in the staid assemblies of physicians, psychiatrists, and legal men, the talk everywhere was of sex. This book marks the first serious attempt to understand the intense public interest in sexuality as a vital dimension of late tsarist political culture. Drawing on a strong foundation of historical sources, Engelstein shows how Western ideas and attitudes towards sex and gender were transformed in the Russian context, as imported views on prostitution, venereal disease, homosexuality, masturbation, abortion and other themes took on distinctively Russian hues. Engelstein shows Russian liberals caught between autocracy and revolution as they struggled to define a civic world in which desire was tempered by self-discipline and where the right to privacy, self-expression, and personal happiness was more than a utopian dream.--publisher.