Appraises the representation of food and sexuality in the nineteenth-century Russian novel. Meticulously researched and elegantly and accessibly written. The book examines how authors Nikolay Gogol, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Lev Tolstoy and others used eating in their works as a trope for male sexual desire. The treatment of carnal desire in these renowned works of fiction stimulated a generation of young writers to challenge Russian culture's anti-eroticism, supreme spirituality, and utter disregard for the life of the body, so firmly rooted in centuries of ideological domination by the Orthodox Church. Slavic Sins of the Flesh offers a magisterial new reading of the Russian classics." The Journal of Food and Culture. "Well-written, lively, and provocative, the volume satisfies a third kind of appetite, the intellectual."--Slavic and East European Journal