Book Description
This digital document is an article from New Statesman (1996), published by New Statesman, Ltd. on September 20, 2004. The length of the article is 525 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.Citation Details
Title: Where de Sade and the SS live on.(Latvia)
Author: Mark Almond
Publication: New Statesman (1996) (Magazine/Journal)
Date: September 20, 2004
Publisher: New Statesman, Ltd.
Volume: 133 Issue: 4706 Page: 19(1)Distributed by Thompson Gale
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Shortly before his death, Gyorgy Lukacs remarked gloomily that if communism failed, it would lead not to the rebirth of bourgeois liberalism, but the triumph of Sadism. Go to Latvia and you may think he was right. Certainly, post-communist reality there conforms more to the Marquis de Sade's vision than to Adam Smith's.
The capital, Riga, is a riot of prostitution without constraints. At the once-grand Hotel Riga, opposite Wagner's old opera house, a club called Dolls offers rooms by the hour and see-through bathrooms. In the park around the nearby monument to Latvia's freedom, glue-sniffing boys offer same-sex services. For the more discreet gay man, there is the subtly named Purvs.
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