by Vlas Tenin

One of the few top-quality books to emerge from the American Olympia Press, Moscow Nights recalls the heady, early days of the Bolshevik Revolution, when free love was all the rage. Half a century later, we meet Timur, a dealer in the underground mortuary biz, who with his gang offers top-notch burial in the right cemetary... for a price. Of course, Timur and his friends are also involved in prostitution and drug dealing while indulging repeatedly, as publisher Maurice Girodias himself put it, 'in the priapic delights.' The success of the work had Girodias dreaming of selling untold volumes of Russian-language pornography to the Motherland, all smuggled in by the agency of sailors. Little is known of author Tenin, but Maurice was one of a kind.