"The sexual revolution is considered a consequence of the social: emancipation leads to new forms of family, to unprecedented simplicity of morals... This book proves that everything is exactly the opposite. Prose, poetry and drama of the twenties are a natural continuation of the Russian silver age with its spicy eroticism and suicide mania, which usually flourish in the era of reaction. The Russian sexual revolution was the result of despair, the result of global disillusionment with the Bolshevik coup. The literature of the NEP with its amazing combination of sincerity, bad taste and frankness unrepresentable in the USSR remained a unique monument of this absurd and exotic era." Dmitry Bykov.