Book Review: by Jonathan Jones__Laura Engelstein, The Keys of Happiness: Sex and the Search for Modernity in Fin-de-Siècle Russia (Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY, 1992). xiii 461 pp.__The original, The Keys of Happiness, by Anastasiia Verbitskaia, was a romance novel in six volumes of 1,400 pages. Written after the 1905 Russian Revolution, the author, who thought herself a feminist, addressed Tsarist morality through fiction. Engelstein’s book, intended as a scholarly work, explores the nature of sexuality and gender issues, in Russia, at the turn of the century.--The book begins with a detailed discourse on how the power of the Tsarist Russian state defined the legal categories of gender, the nature of sexuality, and the moral/ethical crimes of homosexuality and prostitution. Engelstein portrays a quagmire of problems that resembles a cat’s cradle of interlocking, and often contradictory, bureaucracies.
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