ABSTRACT
In an inversion of the title of this volume which some would, no doubt, have found impudent, I originally thought to call my contribution “Russian Civilisation in Gender and Sexuality”. Although I eventually opted for a rather less subversive wording, I should like to retain the force of the original idea. For my paper has to do less with the application of notions of gender to Russian culture, than with what Russian culture, more specifically, the work of two twentieth-century metaphysicians — Aleksei Losev and Pavel Florenskii — has to contribute to gender studies. The encounter between gender studies and metaphysics of the Russian variety is in many ways a dialogue between cultures. If the first words in that dialogue have been spoken by western scholars rightly eager to uncover the sexual repressions and oppressions perpetrated under a succession of regimes in Russia, then we might ask what Russian culture has to say in response, what, if anything, it has to contribute to the discourse whose very existence it has only recently begun to acknowledge.1
