SOURCE: "Sex and Eros," in Aspects of Modernism: From Wilde to Pirandello, Books for Libraries Press, Inc., 1968, pp. 141-59.

In the following essay, which was originally published in 1935, Lavrin discusses the writings of the Russian thinker Vassily Rozanov and Weininger's Sex and Character, observing the influence of both on D. H. Lawrence.

I

Among the pioneers of the erotic trek in recent European literature two writers can be mentioned who are so conspicuous as private "cases" that they cannot help arousing a general interest. One of them is the Russian thinker and publicist, Vassily Rozanov; and the other—the Jewish renegade Otto Weininger whose book, Sex and Character (as well as his subsequent suicide at the age of twenty-four), had caused a considerable stir at the beginning of the century.

What surprises one, at the very outset, in the work of Rozanov and Weininger is their all-absorbing scrutiny...