“Learn the language of earthly love”

“This book, it seems to me, is destined for a long life, since it returns the erotic, the erotic, to the orbit of scientific humanitarian discourse. Although, I must admit, it did not immediately, like a hand in a glove, into the system of my ideas (and texts) about love. As a psychologist and psychotherapist, I could not understand the author: having declared the theme of love, he then writes almost exclusively about eros, “earthly love” for almost 500 pages. Both the title and the general beginning of the book turned out to be broader than its actual subject. However, it is necessary to give it its due: this book is a chance to see and evaluate in a new way that plan of love relationships, which in the modern world is rapidly involution into sex, into the field of pure physiology. This is the real erotica training course that most of us skipped for good reasons at the school called life. Mikhail Epstein offers the reader a whole scattering of essays – about the diversity of love experience and the four sides of love (desire, tenderness, inspiration, pity), about pleasure and touch, about the bisexual nature of creativity, the intelligibility of the body and the eroticism of the female wrist, about “erotology” (as opposed to sexology ) and erotonymy (poetics of a love name). The author is primarily a philologist, and therefore the study of the language of love in his textbook is given almost the main place. But after all, our forced erotic self-education must begin with something. It is very valuable that Mikhail Epstein does not moralize, does not reason abstractly: he equips the reader with a real arsenal of means of seeing, understanding and expressing the erotic plan of life.

Bribes and his benevolent, trusting, sometimes piercing in its intuitive truthfulness and personal confession intonation. The author manages to find such a language for this specific problem that is autonomous in relation to both the medical dictionary of sexology and the vulgar practice of colloquial erotic speech. But by and large, this book torments the channel of love as such – in all its fullness and grace. That power, the most acute and chronic deficiency of which is experienced by all of us, modern culture and the modern world as a whole.