Though one of the less heralded from the Silver Age canon of authors, Evdokiia Nagrodskaia in fact merits special acclaim. Through her novels, short stories, and screenplays, she brought complex philosophies and aesthetics to a middlebrow audience in search of answers to, not just an escape from, concerns about personal identity at the turn of the twentieth century. Indiscriminately accused of sensationalism, she created complicated characters whose sexual identities were not confined to biological imperatives. Because she understood that a person's sexuality was but one of many aspects of individuality, she distinguished herself from those contemporaries who used sex to raise political issues--including two of the most popular writers of the era, Mikhail Petrovich Artsybashev and Anastasiia Alekseevna Verbitskaia, as well as two others who created homosexual characters, Mikhail Alekseevich Kuzmin and Lidiia Dmitrievna Zinov'eva-Annibal. In a culture burdened by a tradition of using literature to advance socially...