Wrath of Dionysus

Evdokia Nagrodskaia's novel "The Wrath of Dionysus", with its theme of gender roles and sexual identity, became a sensational and controversial bestseller soon after it hit Russian bookstores in 1910. Long before postmodernism suggested that gender was a social construct rather than a biological absolute, Nagrodskaia's novel put this issue before the growing middle-class Russian audience hungry for popular fiction. "The Wrath of Dionysus" describes the creative life and romantic entanglements of Tatiana Kuznetsova, an artist who temporarily forsakes her long-term lover and soon-to-be-husband for a sexual affair with an Englishman she meets on a train. Narrated by its heroine, the novel reveals a self-sufficient, emancipated woman wrestling with the issue of how to reconcile an artistic career with the demands of love and, eventually, of motherhood. Male beauty (Tatiana's masterpiece, "The Wrath of Dionysus" is a portrait of her English lover, Edgar Stark) and homosexual love (as a 'feminine' man, Stark appeals to the 'masculine' Tatiana) figure prominently. A consummate story of the search for personal identity, this novel raises issues as relevant at the end of the twentieth century as they were in Russia when the century began.