Love for Sale: Representing Prostitution in Imperial Russia 9781501758881

Citation preview

LOVE FOR SALE

A volume in the NIU Series in

Slavic, East Eu­ro­pean, and Eurasian Studies Edited by Christine D. Worobec For a list of books in the series, visit our website at cornellpress​.­cornell​.­edu.

LOVE FOR SALE

R E P R ESE NT I NG P R OST I T UT I O N I N I M P E R I A L R US­S I A

Colleen Lucey

NORTHERN ILLINOIS UNIVERSITY PRESS An imprint of Cornell University Press Ithaca and London

 Copyright © 2021 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. Visit our website at cornellpress​.­cornell​.­edu. First published 2021 by Cornell University Press Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data Librarians: A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN 978-1-5017-5886-7 (hardcover) ISBN 978-1-5017-5888-1 (pdf ) ISBN 978-1-5017-5887-4 (epub) Jacket illustration: Ivan Kramskoi, Neizvestnaia (Portrait of an Unknown Woman), 1883. Oil on canvas, 75.5 × 99 cm. State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

 For Ben

Co nte nts

List of Illustrations  ix Acknowl­edgments  xi Notes on Transliteration and Translation ​xiii

Introduction: Policing Rus­sia’s Public ­Women

1

1. Rus­sia’s Babylon: Prostitution in St. Petersburg 19 2. “Safety Valves of Social Passions”: Regulating Commercial Sex

48

3. Tricks of the Trade: Elite Prostitution and the Art of Seduction

78

4. The Dowerless Bride on Rus­sia’s Marriage Market

111

5. “Hyenas in Bonnets”: The Madam and Her Milieu

143

6. Commodifying Domestic Bliss: The Kept ­Woman in Rus­sian Fiction

167

Conclusion: Continuity through Change—­Sex Work from the Imperial Period to ­Today

194

Notes ​ 201 Bibliography ​229 Index ​ 247

vii

I l lu s tr at i o n s

I.1.  The Arrested Sweep the Streets, ca. 1840. 3 I.2. Aleksandr Lebedev, illustration from Fallen but Charming Creatures, 1862–63. 5 I.3. Illustration from The Alarm Clock, 1880. 8 I.4. G. Broling, Winter Garden in the Orpheum, 1871. 11 1.1.  Petersburg Firsthand, illustration from The Dragonfly, 1882. 25 1.2.  Petersburg Firsthand, detail. 26 1.3. Vladimir Makovsky, The Blessing of the Public House, 1900. 39 1.4.  Amusement Venues in St. Petersburg and Its Suburbs, illustration from World Illustrated,1879. 42 1.5.  Amusement Venues in St. Petersburg and Its Suburbs, detail. 43 1.6. Aleksandr Vakhrameev, A ­Couple on the Banks of the Moika, 1906. 47 2.1. Illustration from The Spark, 1867. 55 2.2. Viktor Shpak, Two Roads, illustration from The Dragonfly, 1878. 59 3.1. Mikhail Nevakhovich, illustration from Hodgepodge, 1847. 91 3.2. Aleksandr Lebedev, At the Masquerade, 1860. 92 3.3. Vasily Timm, illustration from Pictures of Rus­sian Mores, 1842–43. 94 3.4. Vasily Timm, illustration from Pictures of Rus­sian Mores, 1842–43. 95 3.5. Aleksandr Lebedev, illustration from Fallen but Charming Creatures, 1862–63. 97 3.6. N. Stepanov, A Meeting Between a Camellia and a ­ Simple Flower, illustration from The Spark, 1859. 102 3.7.  Commerce, illustration from The Spark, 1860. 103 3.8. Illustration by N. Stepanov, from The Spark, 1864. 105 3.9. Aleksandr Lebedev, illustration from Fallen but Charming Creatures, 1862–63. 106 3.10. Ilia Repin, A Pa­ri­sian Café, 1875. 108 3.11. Ivan Kramskoi, Portrait of an Unknown ­Woman, 1883. 109 ix

x I l lustrat ions

4.1. Nikolai Shilder, Wedding Collusion, 1859. 4.2. Vasily Pukirev, Unequal Marriage, 1862. 5.1. Nikolai Shilder, The Temptation, 1856. 5.2.  These Women Don’t Despair, illustration from The Alarm Clock, 1880. 6.1. Aleksandr Lebedev, illustration from Fallen but Charming Creatures, 1862–63. 6.2. Illustration from The Dragonfly, 1878. C.1.  All Types of Sport, illustration from The Alarm Clock, 1890.

127 128 150 166 170 171 198

A c k n o w l­e d g m e nts

I am indebted to a number of colleagues and friends who have supported work on this proj­ect over the years. Alexander Dolinin sparked my interest in the topic in a gradu­ate seminar at University of Wisconsin-­Madison and shepherded me through stages of writing and revising my dissertation, while offering insightful analy­sis and encouragement in the many years that followed. I likewise benefited from the insights of David Bethea and Karen Evans-­Romaine, who patiently read and generously commented on early stages of this work. My colleagues in the College of Humanities at the University of Arizona have provided unflinching support and challenged me to think deeper about this book’s subject m ­ atter. I owe a debt of gratitude to Denis Provencher, who was an early supporter of this book proj­ect and offered generous feedback and mentorship. My dear friends from the Summer Language School at Middlebury College witnessed my engagement with this research proj­ect very early in my c­ areer and never failed to offer a helping hand when needed. My first friend in the study of Rus­sian language, Alexis Peri, has been a bedrock since we met in Vermont over fifteen years ago. I am grateful for her comments and for the insights provided by colleagues, including Jennifer Donahue and Joela Jacobs, on this manuscript. I owe a ­g reat deal of thanks to Molly Thomasy Blasing, Jason Merrill, Melissa Miller, Larisa Moskvitina, Olga Permitina, Benjamin Rif kin, and Benjamin Sutcliffe for their help and guidance over the years. My former colleagues at the Moscow Art Theatre School, Larisa Tserazova, Elena Lisina and Sergei Zemtsov, always offered a helping hand during research trips and lifted my spirits with their warmth and good cheer. I feel blessed to have worked with Amy Farranto at Northern Illinois University Press; at all stages of the proj­ect she offered words of encouragement and guidance. I found a precise and sensitive reader in Christine Worobec, NIU series editor, who provided substantive feedback on the entire manuscript, for which I am deeply appreciative. Any remaining errors are, of course, my own. Research for this proj­ect was supported by an American Council Teachers of Rus­sian Title VIII Advanced Research Fellowship, which offered me the xi

xi i Ac know l­e d gments

chance to do archival research in Moscow and St. Petersburg in 2017. The members of the University of Illinois Urbana-­Champaign’s Summer Research Lab, especially the man­ag­er of the Slavic Reference Ser­vice, Joseph Lenkart, provided assistance in locating rare texts and images while preparing this book. I am grateful for the generosity of colleagues from the Rus­sian, East Eu­ro­ pean, and Eurasian Center at University of Illinois Urbana-­Champaign for a fellowship to complete portions of this manuscript during the summer of 2019. Segments of chapter 2 originally appeared as “Vio­lence, Murder, and Fallen ­Women: Prostitution in the Works of Vsevolod Garshin,” Canadian Slavonic Papers 58, no. 4 (2016): 362–85. Part of chapter 3 was first published as “Fallen but Charming Creatures: The Demimondaine in Rus­sian Lit­er­a­ture and Visual Culture of the 1860s,” in Rus­sian Review 78, no. 1 (2019): 103–21. I would like to thank my ­family for their encouragement over the years. I am grateful to my ­sister, Shawna Lucey, for providing constant support and enthusiasm. Most impor­tant, I want to express my sincere appreciation to Benjamin Jens, who never fails to inspire me with his kindness, generosity, and encyclopedic knowledge of the nineteenth-­century Rus­sian literary canon. This proj­ect would not have materialized without his emotional support and intellectual encouragement.

N ote s o n Tr a n s l i te r at i o n a n d Tr a n s l at i o n

I have followed a modified Library of Congress system when transliterating from Rus­sian to En­glish, adapting it when necessary to align with customary En­glish spelling. For example, first and last names ending in –­ii have been changed to –­y, such as Dmitry and Dostoevsky; soft signs have been omitted in names and places. However, all bibliographical references, including endnotes and parenthetical notations, follow the standard Library of Congress system. ­Unless other­wise noted, all translations from the Rus­sian are my own.

xiii

LOVE FOR SALE

Introduction Policing Rus­sia’s Public ­Women

In the predawn hours of May 18, 2016, residents of St. Petersburg’s Vasilevsky District who looked outside witnessed an eerie spectacle: an entourage of naked men and ­women passing by their win­dows.1 Initially some onlookers considered the mass of nude bodies an oddly timed, albeit interestingly staged, modern art installation. Quickly, though, the expressions of fear and shame from ­those walking past conveyed that this was not an avant-­garde per­for­mance but a forced public humiliation. Two heavyset, fully clothed men ushered the group forward along the city streets and shouted at curious bystanders to join them in the public shaming. Video footage of the incident soon surfaced on YouTube, revealing that the pair of bullies had raided a local brothel, forced the sex workers and their clients to disrobe, and proceeded to march them, naked, to the nearest police precinct. The mastermind b­ ehind the vigilante assault, the mixed martial arts fighter Viacheslav Datsik, better known as Red Tarzan, is no stranger to public scandal. In fact, he enjoys a certain notoriety for exposing clandestine prostitution on the popu­lar Rus­sian crime show Extreme cases (Chrezvychainoe proisshestvie). Given Datsik’s previous run-­ins with the law, which included a period of forced psychiatric hospitalization, he now relished the opportunity to “out” Rus­sian sex workers on live TV in a misplaced attempt to vindicate himself in the eyes of the public. Believing that his raids helped “cleanse” the city of the scourge of prostitution, Datsik set out on numerous occasions to promote his vigilante 1

2 I ntroduct ion

style of justice to the public. The midnight raid, however, differed from Datsik’s previous attacks in its scope and magnitude. But in the opinion of some local journalists, while Red Tarzan’s vigilantism was extreme, his heart was in the right place. A ­ fter all, this “fighter for pure morality,” as they affectionately called him, aimed to clean up the streets of St. Petersburg.2 Facing charges of battery and assault did not discourage Datsik or his supporters; in multiple posts they asserted their right to step in where the authorities had failed. Datsik continued warning followers and all who would listen that cleansing the northern capital of sexual deviants was a ­matter of national pride. As the police escorted Datsik to his trial, he shouted to the crowd of journalists and paparazzi, “St. Petersburg is Rus­sia’s cultural center, it’s not some red light district of Amsterdam!”3 Neither Datsik’s urge to humiliate sex workers nor his insistence that Eu­ ro­pean libertinism is at fault for the nation’s sexual proclivities is new to twenty-­ first-­century Rus­sia. Although Datsik is likely unaware of it, the “naked march” resembles the policies of Peter the ­Great, who in the 1700s ordered that prostitutes near the northern regiments be stripped naked to the waist and marched from the premises. Shaming ­women suspected of prostitution continued ­under Empress Anna, who had them flogged with cat-­o’-­nine-­tales and evicted from their homes. When Emperor Paul I ascended to the throne, he tempered the impulse to physically punish wayward ­women but kept prostitutes visibly marked by requiring them to wear yellow dresses when they appeared on the streets.4 In the nineteenth ­century the authorities replaced physical punishment with manual l­abor (see figure I.1). As the penal system evolved to implement more disciplinary—­rather than punitive—­punishments, the social category of the prostitute emerged as a new type of subject in need of spiritual redemption. By having such ­women sweep the streets, the imperial police ensured that the country’s sexual criminals atoned for their sins. This book examines the dif­fer­ent modes of policing Rus­sia’s sexually transgressive ­women. It does so by tracing con­temporary debates on prostitution to cultural production from the imperial period. Beginning in 1843 with the adoption of state-­regulated prostitution, Rus­sia’s cultural elite vigorously debated the po­liti­cal, aesthetic, and economic contours of sexual l­ abor. From the numerous street­walkers soliciting clients on St. Petersburg boulevards to the popu­lar courtesans who frequented the theater, Rus­sia’s “­women of ill repute” introduced new modes of sexual commerce into the cultural sphere. As the city’s population grew, the imperial authorities quickly realized they needed a system capable of supplying erotic l­abor and a means to control sex workers.5 The publication in 1836 of Alexandre Parent-­Duchâtelet’s sweeping study of prostitution in Paris offered a foundation for Lev Perovsky, Tsar Nicholas I’s minister of internal affairs, to propose a similar mode of regulation practiced

I n t r o d u c t i o n

3

Figure I.1. ​ Arestovannye metut ulitsu (The Arrested Sweep the Streets), ca. 1840. Print, 11 × 13 cm. State Museum of the History of St. Petersburg.

in France.6 The Rus­sian authorities thus settled on a cumbersome policy of tolerance modeled ­after the French police des moeurs and placed the nation’s prostitutes ­under the auspices of the medical police, whose job it was to quarantine, track, and discipline ­women through the infamous “yellow ticket”—­the official registration card required for prostitutes to ply their trade.7 Imperial authorities argued that keeping public ­women in ­houses of tolerance (doma terpimosti) was necessary in order to prevent the spread of venereal disease while preserving the sexual sanctity of marriageable ­women.8 While more than 150 years separate Datsik from the onset of regulation, his insistence that St. Petersburg be kept clean of prostitution echoes the demands of his imperial pre­de­ces­sors, who tied the health of the nation to containing commercial sex. To place Datsik’s raid in the historical context it deserves, we must come to terms with Rus­sia’s robust literary and artistic tradition founded predominantly on the image of the sold ­woman. Over the course of the nineteenth ­century the responsibility of shaming sexually transgressive w ­ omen shifted back and forth between the regulatory offices of the state and the intimate world of fiction. In order to make sense of her sexual difference, vari­ous writers contained the prostitute’s plot through endings that expelled her from the social order. Narrative techniques to sublimate anx­i­eties about ­women sexually active outside of marriage mirrored the system of regulation and tolerance. ­These “plots of containment,” to use literary critic Jann Matlock’s term, allow for the prostitute’s tale to be “interpreted, defined, and endowed with social significance” to channel and control unbridled desire.9

4 I ntroduct ion

Rus­sia’s authors wrote about the prostitute b­ ecause her sexual availability frustrated, confused, and excited them and their readers. The image of the wanton w ­ oman navigating her own commodification not only inspired novelists but played a prominent role in visual culture.10 Fine art, caricature, and popu­lar lithography explored the theme of transactional love by placing new modes of gender and sexuality on display for viewers. While the urge to condemn sexual transgression remained ever pre­sent, an undercurrent of excitement threatened to upend the sexual and social order. Lit­er­a­ture and visual culture offered Rus­sians images of sexually transgressive ­women that they might judge and enjoy. While repre­sen­ta­tions of extramarital love and transactional sex certainly leaned ­toward the moralistic and didactic, as the following chapters explore, images of elegant w ­ omen enjoying sexual and financial freedom attest to a celebratory tradition that resisted the dichotomization of prostitutes as e­ ither victims or villains. While imperial writers and artists of varying caliber viewed the destitute sex worker as the premier signifier of social in­equality, cultural figures appropriated the meta­phor of prostitution broadly, using it to describe new modes of transgressive female be­hav­ior. They pointed to the world of elite prostitution—­ the demimonde—as a dangerous phenomenon that beckoned to ­women of all social categories with the promise that their sexual sanctity could be exchanged for a luxurious apartment in the center of St. Petersburg. Print and visual culture ­imagined that even the most devout and chaste ­woman could abandon her traditional role as wife and ­mother when tempted with fine clothes and expensive jewelry. Mobilizing sex to accrue luxury items, as the demimondaine did, threatened to drain men’s emotional, financial, and sexual resources and leave families bankrupt. No less worrisome was the brokering of dowerless brides, who appeared in artistic reproductions as l­ittle better than chattel, brought to market by opportunistic matchmakers e­ ager to strike a profitable deal. Writers and artists saved their vitriol for brothel madams, who or­ga­nized and profited from transactional relations. Depicted as more heinous than the men who frequented the brothels or purchased brides, the procuress entered the cultural imagination as a predatory figure, a wanton ­woman who preyed on the vulnerable and impoverished.11 At stake, then, was not only the sanctity of Rus­sian marriages compromised by costly love affairs but the fate of the Rus­sian nation, which seemed hypnotized by the power of extramarital sex and beholden to the cap­i­tal­ist ingenuity of procuresses. As this book ­will show, the diverse range of responses to the question of transactional sex helped explode traditional beliefs about the contours of desire and the limits of fidelity. While strict censorship during the nineteenth ­century precluded any direct repre­sen­ta­tion of prostitution, graphic artists

I n t r o d u c t i o n

5

used innuendo to portray Rus­sia’s sexual subculture. In images like Aleksandr Lebedev’s 1862 lithograph (see figure I.2), a finely dressed, attractive ­woman bargains with her lover about the terms of their relations. She might acquiesce to monogamy, but only if he agrees to make it worth her while. The ­woman’s hand, the central focus of the image, beckons seductively to both her confidante and the image’s viewer. In this sense the cigarette she holds serves as allegory for the erotic plea­sure she promises. Images like this one helped solidify the importance of elite prostitution to Rus­sia’s burgeoning

Figure I.2. ​Aleksandr Lebedev, illustration from Pogibshie, no milye sozdaniia (Fallen but Charming Creatures), 1862–63. National Library of Rus­sia, St. Petersburg. I agree, but if you provide enough for an apartment and carriage, then I w ­ ill be yours alone.

6 I ntroduct ion

nineteenth-­century leisure culture. Moreover, it pictured transactional love without falling into traditional dichotomies of the prostitute as Madonna or whore, victim or villain. Bringing together the visual and literary explorations of transactional love shows the rich, differentiated repre­sen­ta­tions of prostitution in imperial Rus­sian culture.

Economies of Exchange Prostitution, broadly conceptualized as the exchange of sexual relations for financial or other rewards, drove nineteenth-­century discussions of ­women’s sexual and financial autonomy in Rus­sia. Language related to sexual commerce is, to paraphrase Jill McCracken, “fraught with difficulty” b­ ecause it “si­mul­ta­ neously creates and constrains ­those individuals it strug­gles to define.”12 Throughout this book, I have ventured to treat the subject of ­women’s sexual lives with care and a consistent awareness of the misogynistic, exploitative, and fetishistic writings that aimed to remove a w ­ oman’s agency in her decision to engage in transactional sex. My terminology, however, cannot be dis­ associated from the historical period u ­ nder study, and thus I interchangeably refer to prostitution and sex work, prostitute and sex worker. Although the terms “sex work” and “sex worker” w ­ ere not used in imperial Rus­sia, my analy­sis of transactional sex as depicted in literary and visual culture of the period is informed by a range of con­temporary scholarship that advocates for sex work as a legitimate form of l­abor.13 But given the wide reference to the “prostitute” (prostitutka) in imperial Rus­sian contexts discussed at length in this book, I use this term for its applicability in nineteenth-­and early-­twentieth-­century discourse. In ­doing so, I aim to faithfully represent the ideas of literati and prominent commentators from the period who considered the prostitute a separate social category. However, my usage of the term prostitution does not disavow the premise that sex work is work, quite the contrary. As I argue in the subsequent chapters, a number of writers and visual artists grappled with how to interpret the shifting norms of w ­ omen’s sexual subjecthood. While some found the increase in registered prostitutes in the nation’s major cities a sign of moral demise, o ­ thers celebrated the possibilities of anonymous sexual relations. Rarely, if ever, did Rus­sia’s cultural producers consider prostitution as a form of l­ abor for w ­ omen; instead, they diagnosed sexual commerce as a symptom of the commodification of the country’s w ­ omen. ­Whether a w ­ oman registered with the authorities as a prostitute or not, her sexual availability took on an economic value, a fact that numerous Rus­sian writers and artists problematized in their works.

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7

When Nikolai Karamzin introduced the theme of the victimized female into Rus­sian prose in his story “Poor Liza” (“Bednaia Liza,” 1792), he did so by connecting class and gender with the sexual commodification of w ­ omen. The story’s aristocratic hero, Erast, encounters the peasant maiden Liza selling lilies of the valley at a Moscow market. He rightly assumes that by buying her flowers, he can have her as well. When he abandons Liza for a bride of his own class, she drowns herself in a nearby pond. “Poor Liza” thus confirms the patriarchal social order in which the scorned, deflowered ­woman upholds the ideal of female chastity through her suicide. That Liza sells lilies of the valley only to find herself sold on the market confirms the circulation of w ­ omen as the foundation of social exchange. It likewise affirms Walter Benjamin’s succinct formulation on the commodification of ­woman, most clearly represented in the sex worker’s body. For Benjamin, the prostitute is “seller and sold in one.”14 Karamzin’s Liza is no prostitute, but she is coded as one in the text through the theme of commodity exchange. In what feminist scholar Luce Irigaray first outlined in her study This Sex Which Is Not One, the commodification of ­women hinges on their exchange between men: “Participation in society requires that the body submit itself to a specularization, a speculation, that transforms it into a value-­bearing object, a standardized sign, an exchangeable signifier, a ‘likeness’ with reference to an authoritative model. A commodity—­a ­woman—­is divided into two irreconcilable ‘bodies’: her ‘natu­ral’ body and her socially valued, exchangeable body, which is a particularly mimetic expression of masculine values.”15 Irigaray’s insight into the status of w ­ omen as commodities helps explain the under­pinnings of Rus­sian repre­sen­ta­tions of prostitution. Nineteenth-­century authors imagine the registered prostitute as a signifier of social in­equality and patriarchal excess by depicting her as a sexual commodity sold through the mechanisms of state-­ sanctioned brothels. Writers like Fyodor Dostoevsky, Vsevolod Garshin, and Vsevolod Krestovsky descended into the brothel to narrate sex workers’ stories as a means of humanizing ­these w ­ omen to readers. But the omnipresence of prostitution complicated their beliefs about who could be sold, and when, where, and to whom. To borrow from Gayle Rubin’s foundational study on po­ liti­cal economy and gender, Rus­sia’s cultural producers showed that imperial society was founded on the traffic in w ­ omen.16 Rus­sian writers located the conversion of ­women into capital in nearly all aspects of social exchange. The central conflict of much nineteenth-­century Rus­sian lit­er­a­ture revolves around the circulation of ­women: parents eagerly bartering ­daughters into profitable marriages; geriatric bridegrooms capitalizing on their wealth to purchase young brides; demimondaines exchanging companionship for furs and diamonds; and

8 I ntroduct ion

madams paying traffickers for new brothel workers. Rus­sia’s literati noted that not only men but also w ­ omen participated in this system of economic exchange. ­Whether forced, coerced, or of their own volition, w ­ omen exchanging sex for financial benefit challenged the Rus­sian intelligent­sia to reconsider its ingrained beliefs about the sexual and social order. Following historian Nina Kushner, who describes the phenomenon of elite prostitution in France, I argue that repre­sen­ta­tions of Rus­sian ­women leveraging their “sexual capital” show a far more nuanced and complex picture of gender and sexuality than scholars have traditionally considered.17 A ­woman like the one featured in an illustration from the popu­lar satirical journal Budil’nik (The Alarm Clock) exudes confidence that befuddles her male counterpart (see figure I.3). The ­woman harnesses her sexual capital by signaling

Figure I.3. ​Illustration from Budil’nik (The Alarm Clock), 1880. Slavic, East Eu­ro­pean, and Eurasian Collection, University of Illinois Urbana-­Champaign. He: Shura, ­you’re wrong to wear that décolleté. She: Stop being silly, Vasily Vasilievich. You have no idea what ­you’re talking about.

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9

through her provocative dress and exposed décolleté that while the man, with his disheveled hair and worn slippers, may be content to stay home sipping his tea, she certainly is not. As the image suggests, new modes of femininity appeared in visual and print culture that eschewed traditional demarcations between illicit and condoned forms of love. The man, while clearly hoping to control the ­woman’s be­hav­ior as a husband might, could just as easily be her lover as a lawful spouse. Most of the texts I examine herein deal specifically with this type of slippage, where bound­aries between wife and prostitute, spouse and mistress, victim and villain fluctuate in ways that signal a restructuring of relations between the genders. Helpful in this context is Alain Corbin’s pioneering study of prostitution in France, which outlines the ramifications of the sexual “double standard” whereby middle-­class men ­were granted sexual license to engage in extramarital sex to keep the purity of bourgeois ­women intact. Clients demanding love based “on the conjugal model” paid for a fantasy that mimicked the seduction of courtship. In late imperial Rus­sia, similar modes of relational contiguity appear in cultural production that signal “a trickling down of aristocratic tastes” as “more con­spic­u­ous forms of consumption” encouraged mixing plea­sure and leisure.18 Images like the one featured in Budil’nik reflected to viewers the shifting be­hav­iors of ­women who could find sexual and financial liberation by controlling the desires—­and pocket­books—of male benefactors. Focusing on works produced between the 1840s and 1905, I show how the topic of prostitution grew in social and cultural significance. The book’s periodization charts the beginning de­cades of state-­regulated prostitution through the first years of the twentieth ­century. While the image of the fallen ­woman continues to appear in works by writers and artists coming of age in the final de­cades of tsarist rule and well beyond, the repre­sen­ta­tions of commercial love differ significantly from ­those of the nineteenth c­ entury and thus fall outside the scope of this book.19 A number of ­factors, including the relaxation of censorship and the freer press, the advent of new media like cinema, and the loosening of sexual and social mores, make post-1905 depictions of venal love quite dif­fer­ent from the works of realist writers who grappled with the question of commercial sex within more strict moral and aesthetic paradigms. As Rus­sians of the nineteenth c­ entury eagerly discussed the nature of sex work, they witnessed the debate expanding beyond the realm of the brothel to include other types of transactional relations haunting the institution of the ­family. What began as an attack on state-­sanctioned prostitution broadened to encompass a wide swath of the female population that survived, and in many cases thrived, by harnessing sexual l­abor. Street­walkers, demimondaines, kept

10 I ntroduct ion

­ omen, dowerless brides, and procuresses all lived and profited by mobilizing w sex for financial benefit. In ways analogous to what Jill Smith outlines in her study of the Berlin coquette, Rus­sian ­women who exchanged money for sexual ­favors appeared in lit­er­a­ture and art as part of a bourgeoning discourse on new womanhood. According to Smith, between 1890 and 1933 “prostitution became a central vehicle through which social activists, artists, and cultural critics negotiated gender and ­labor division in the modern metropolis.” Finding inspiration in Smith’s nuanced readings of street scenes featuring erotic exchanges, this book locates moments in visual and print culture in which ­women pre­sent themselves as “self-­conscious commodities” and proj­ect “an image that appeals” in order “to reap financial benefits.”20 Literary and artistic production offered careful study of an emerging erotic speciation. Hierarchical in structure, but not without moments of egalitarianism, this female population formed a separate polis that mirrored many of the traditional relations between men and ­women while offering new forms of erotic plea­sure outside marriage. While the heterosexual, monogamous, married ­couple rested at the top of the social hierarchy, an entire subset of sexual relations facilitated by economic exchange clamored for recognition. Rus­sia’s cultural elite proved resistant to integrating sexually transgressive ­women into its social core; advocating for more humane treatment of street­ walkers was one ­thing, but embracing adultery and extramarital love was another. As Leo Tolstoy showed in Anna Karenina (1875–77), a ­woman of wealth who abandons husband and son for a life of sexual fulfillment might circulate among her own in the demimonde, but she has no place sitting next to an aristocratic w ­ oman at the theater. The St. Petersburg Imperial Theatre, which Tolstoy uses as the backdrop of Anna’s humiliation in book 5, chapter 23 of the novel, is but one of the numerous locations in the northern capital where sexual categories collided in the nineteenth ­century. Far more Eu­ro­pean in design than the nation’s other metropolises, St. Petersburg’s topography provided ample spaces for the city’s inhabitants to barter and trade sex in venues built to resemble Pa­ri­sian dance halls and cafés. A drawing of one such establishment called the Orpheum depicts pairs of men and ­women drinking and relishing the indoor garden’s plush vegetation and gushing fountains (see figure I.4).21 The ­women featured in the image’s center engage in playful flirtation. One of the w ­ omen holds a fan coquettishly across her face, coyly signaling a game of seduction. Standing beside her is a representative of a new class of w ­ omen who resisted traditionalism and embraced sexual and emotional freedom. In a knee-­length dress provocative for the period, she takes a drag of her cigarette and openly flirts

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Figure I.4. ​G. Broling, Zimnii sad v Orfeume (Winter Garden in the Orpheum), 1871. Print, 23 × 32 cm. State Museum of the History of St. Petersburg.

with the man. The w ­ omen might be arranging a tryst with the gentleman and his acquaintance, or they might not. That the w ­ omen smoke, flirt, drink, and enjoy themselves in the bustling atmosphere attests to new possibilities for social and sexual be­hav­ior in 1870s St. Petersburg. Cultural production responded to ­these new modes of womanhood by showing how transactional relations typically reserved for the brothel moved into public and private domains of St. Petersburg. Like Berlin, London, and Paris, Rus­sia’s northern capital appeared in urban chronicles as a haven for sexual vice and licentious be­hav­ior. Analogous to prostitution in late Victorian London, as studied by Judith Walkowitz, St. Petersburg became a site of contested sexual, social, and aesthetic exploration. Like Walkowitz, who argues in City of Dreadful Delight that London “provided a fitting imaginative landscape for sensational narratives,” I show that St. Petersburg metropolitan life inspired similar investigations into sexual danger and urban adventure.22 The possibilities of sexual exchange in the context of St. Petersburg’s nascent cap­i­tal­ist market produced complex and often contradictory images of urbanization in fin de siècle Rus­sia.

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Womanhood u ­ nder Reform Beginning with the “­Great Reforms” of the mid-­nineteenth ­century through the final de­cades of tsarist rule, Rus­sia’s men and ­women experienced profound socioeconomic changes brought by the emancipation of the serfs in 1861, the adoption of a new ­legal code, and rapid industrialization and urbanization. T ­ hese mutually influencing forces not only restructured the individual’s relationship to the state but significantly altered ­women’s roles in the social order. As the Rus­sian intelligent­sia strug­gled to make sense of the changes taking place in the public sphere, it found its domestic authority challenged as ­sisters, wives, and ­daughters demanded more personal, sexual, and financial autonomy. Leading the debate on w ­ omen’s emancipation ­were early Rus­sian activists who s­ haped the constellation of ideas and manifestos that became known as “the ­woman question” (zhenskii vopros). Initially prompted by calls for better access to education, the ­woman question expanded into a full-­ blown reassessment of gender identity and w ­ omen’s in­equality.23 Discussions of female emancipation quickly turned to the issue of sexual libertinism, the sexual double standard, fidelity, and respectability. The regulation of prostitution by the state became a flash point to discuss w ­ omen’s emancipation and the need to reform society more broadly. Historians of imperial Rus­sia have studied how cultural and po­liti­cal life changed in the wake of emancipation by drawing par­tic­u­lar attention to the reconstitution of womanhood in the late imperial era. As a number of scholars have shown, the changes implemented in the second half of the nineteenth ­century accelerated some social change while keeping much of the population removed from po­liti­cal power.24 What made Rus­sia dif­fer­ent from western Eu­rope was not only its system of estates (sosloviia), which originally encompassed four categories (nobility, clergy, peasantry, and townspeople), but that the large majority of the male population remained just as excluded from po­liti­cal power as their female counter­parts. As Laura Engelstein explains in her groundbreaking work The Keys to Happiness: Sex and the Search for Modernity in Fin-­de-­siècle Rus­sia, men of Rus­sia’s amorphous “­middle estate”—­a motley crew of professionals, merchants, teachers, and ­lawyers—­“recognized the plight of ­women as analogous to their own disenfranchised state.” While Rus­ sian professionals enlisted “education and social reform in the b­ attle against communal control and the tyranny of accepted custom,” they often “rejected the Western bourgeois regard for self-­interest and the goal of self-­fulfillment.”25 Thus, while the country looked westward for models of socioeconomic change that elevated ­women’s status, Rus­sians remained highly ambivalent about Eu­ro­pean attitudes ­toward sex.

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The medical discourse developed by Western prac­ti­tion­ers to codify prostitutes within a biological system of degeneracy was likewise treated with skepticism by Rus­sia’s leading physicians and social commentators. To be sure, the emergence of criminal anthropology and the intensified study of Rus­sia’s registered prostitutes informed the writings of Rus­sia’s preeminent specialist on venereal disease, Veniamin Tarnovsky. As Siobhán Hearne has noted, the system of regulation “emphasized the infectious potential of registered prostitutes,” with the “one-­sided nature of the medical examinations [reinforcing] the perception that female bodies and be­hav­ior required surveillance in order to protect public health.”26 While abolitionists viewed prostitutes as passive victims of unbridled male sexual desire, Tarnovsky and his like-­minded colleagues proposed the opposite: prostitutes w ­ ere predisposed to vice and sexual deviance and thus w ­ ere predators, not prey.27 The theories of Cesare Lombroso and criminal anthropologists of the Italian school informed Tarnovsky’s thinking about prostitutes. But Tarnovsky’s wife, the influential physician Praskovia Tarnovskaia, stressed the need for social reform, not the demonization of prostitutes. Although she adhered to some of Lombroso’s theories, she stressed the importance of tempering such absolutism with a careful eye to social context.28 Despite their differing approaches to Lombroso’s theories, the Tarnovskys nevertheless agreed that commercial sex was an abomination.29 Rus­sian writers w ­ ere not only aware of the theories of Lombroso and the Tarnovskys but polemicized openly with them in their works of fiction. Assessing how literary works responded to the medicalization of sex work helps provide a more thorough understanding of late imperial culture and the politicization of sex work in cultural production.

Methodology and Structure This book examines how Rus­sian writers and artists used the theme of prostitution to tackle issues of public hygiene, fidelity, and the commodification of sex. Rather than collapse all types of sex work into one generic category as scholars have in the past, I show the plurality of sexual commerce and the new types of erotic be­hav­ior produced and presented in imperial Rus­sia. The following chapters engage with the seminal studies on prostitution by historians of imperial Rus­sia and likewise draw upon the scholarship on the repre­sen­ta­ tion of prostitution in literary works, including studies by Olga Matich and Alexander Zholkovsky.30 The pre­sent study, however, is more expansive in analy­sis, both in terms of subject m ­ atter and media studied. In her article “A Typology of Fallen W ­ omen,” Matich rightly points to the stratification of

14 I ntroduct ion

male-­female relations in imperial lit­er­a­ture as “marked by a hierarchical distribution of power.” As Matich notes, the prostitute’s tale appealed to writers ­because her narrative merged the themes of “moral integrity and socio-­economic status.”31 In exploring the dif­fer­ent types of prostitution that appear in works by major and lesser-­known writers of the period, Matich provides a system of demarcation grounded in four types of power relations. While acknowledging the use of this taxonomy, I approach the topic of prostitution from a dif­fer­ent theoretical and methodological perspective. The following chapters argue that the true power for writers and artists rested in their appropriation of prostitution as a meta­phor to explore shifting economies of desire founded on transaction. Profiling the importance of economic exchange—­including fiscally informed narratives, the mercantile logic of Christian salvation, and the repre­sen­ta­tion of ­women as consumers and objects of consumption—as this book does opens a gateway to understanding the multifaceted depictions of commercial sex in imperial Rus­sia. Challenging assumptions about prostitution and w ­ omen’s sexuality requires a language capable of describing a range of transactional relations that can account for both the exploitative and the emancipatory ele­ments of erotic exchange. I look to Gayle Rubin’s “radical theory of sex,” as other prac­ti­tion­ers discussing sex work have, b­ ecause Rubin offers, in a Foucauldian sense, a means of understanding the systems of power that cloak sexual conflicts. In “Thinking Sex,” Rubin describes how sexuality and erotic life become contested during social movements aimed to root out vari­ous “vices” deemed inappropriate to the social core. Among the “despised sexual castes,” prostitutes operate alongside fellow erotic dissidents (­others include homosexuals, transsexuals, transvestites, and fetishists) and navigate social, medical, and economic sanctions that work continuously to keep them at the bottom of the sexual hierarchy. In imperial Rus­sia, state authorities placed the registered prostitute at the bottom of the social order; she was a “safety valve” of social passions, an outlet to contain men’s lust. Yet while the medical police could track and regulate a certain population of prostitutes, other ­women selling sex and companionship evaded detection. As lit­er­a­ture and visual culture codified for audiences, ­women of all social categories—­from street prostitutes to ­women of the aristocracy—­could utilize their sex appeal as a way to accrue financial autonomy and move upward in the hierarchy. In this regard, the imperial period correlates to a historical moment when, in Rubin’s assessment, “the domain of erotic life is, in effect, renegotiated.”32 In describing nineteenth-­century social apparatuses that evolved in the wake of industrialization, Rubin points to the creation of “a new sexual system characterized by distinct types of sexual persons, populations, stratification, and

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po­liti­cal conflict.” She adds, “The emergence of new kinds of erotic individuals and their aggregation into rudimentary communities” is the foundation of “the modern sexual system.” While she focuses on homo­sexuality to illustrate her point about erotic speciation, the prostitute’s social position is equally informative when studying the constitution of a “value hierarchy.”33 As this book demonstrates, Rus­sia’s cultural elite came to understand this hierarchy through works of lit­er­at­ure and art that i­magined transactional relations as moving into nearly e­ very sphere of existence. The job of Rus­sian writers and artists was to identify and explain the be­hav­iors and motivations of sexually transgressive ­women, thereby defusing the threat they posed to the social order. The need to control female sexuality produced a wide range of responses, from caricature that mocked the vanity of demimondaines to lengthy novels that sublimated the “fallen w ­ oman” through plots that culminated in her death. Artistic production not only defined the contours of debate on sexual licentiousness but at times also drove the public discourse in unexpected ways. Images of sexually provocative ­women who engage in acts of con­spic­u­ous consumption avoided overt moralization or demonization. Allowing for space to see the playful and the pleasurable—­without ignoring the oppressive and the misogynistic—­ acknowledges the varied repre­sen­ta­tions of commercial love in the final years of tsarist rule. My analy­sis of prostitution likewise takes into account the intricate power structures that inform, regulate, and inculcate expressions of “bodies and pleasures,” to use Michel Foucault’s terms. Foucault argues that the medicalization of sex helped categorize “unproductive sexualities,” and while his History of Sexuality (1978) does not engage extensively with prostitution, it nevertheless proves useful for the study of sexual norms more broadly. As Foucault argues, desires are not biologically determined, but socially constructed and informed by historical context. “Since the classical age,” he writes, “­there has been a constant optimization and an increasing valorization of the discourse on sex; and . . . ​this carefully analytical discourse was meant to yield multiple effects of displacement, intensification, re­orientation, and modification of desire itself.”34 In late imperial Rus­sia, the proliferation of discourses concerning sex revealed how the nation’s citizens considered transactional relations between men and ­women as a product of modernity. I use the term modernity in a broad sense to describe the changes in social norms, the shifting concepts of appropriateness, and the mixing of dif­fer­ent social strata in public spaces, all of which created a new sense of self hood for men and ­women. While Foucault’s attention is devoted to western Eu­rope, since the publication of his work scholars of Rus­sia have noted the applicability of his conceptual framework to their context, while acknowledging gaps in suitability.

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Identifying the pivotal moments of sexual identity formation, as Foucault does, helps elucidate similar proj­ects in the Rus­sian cultural landscape. What is the significance of prostitution in imperial culture? This book aims to show that love as a commodity operated as a vehicle to explore how Rus­sia’s men and w ­ omen navigated the social, po­liti­cal, and economic changes taking place in the last de­cades of the nineteenth ­century. Far from unan­i­mous, the era’s writers and critics debated how sexual commerce should look, where it should take place, and who could sell what and to whom. While devoting attention to canonical texts by writers like Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, I also discuss works by ­women authors to show the complex perspectives on the question of venal love. Unlike their male counter­parts, ­women writers of the nineteenth c­ entury did not feel compelled to discuss the prostitute’s trade; they neither sought out the com­pany of demimondaines nor interviewed brothel workers in the hope of better depicting urban depravity. Yet a cadre of female authors, including Avdotia Panaeva and Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaia, used their prose to discuss ­women’s sexual freedom. T ­ hese female writers provide a much-­needed counterpoint to the male-­centric redemption plot found in works by their contemporaries. Returning the voices of female authors to the conversation sheds light on how w ­ omen offered power­f ul and compelling alternatives to the moralistic prose of the period that enshrined femininity in codes of honor, duty, and self-­sacrifice. Each chapter of this book focuses on a par­tic­u­lar type of commercial sex. In adopting the era’s interest in scientific speciation, I aim not to replicate the same patterns of strict categorization as the subjects of this book did. Instead I wish to show how the writers and artists of this period a­ dopted scientific inquiry in their study of prostitution only to find familiar categories of womanhood evaporating before their eyes. Examining types of commercial sex and the corresponding discourses reveals the contested debates over the contours of venal love. Chapter 1 explores how writers allegorically connected the city of St. Petersburg to the urban, registered prostitute. Built to resemble the capitals of western Eu­rope, St. Petersburg looked and felt distinctly alien in the Rus­sian landscape. Peter the ­Great’s “Win­dow to Eu­rope” functioned symbolically as a passageway through which vice—­and particularly prostitution—­ entered Rus­sia. Cultural production turned to the image of the “fallen ­woman” (padshaia zhenshchina) to amplify the city’s status as “fallen” in the eyes of God and the nation. But sexual commerce on the city streets, in par­ tic­ul­ar Nevsky Prospect, and in the numerous cafés and taverns also offered St. Petersburg citizens a chance for adventure and sexual excitement. Examining the body of lit­er­a­ture on prostitution in St. Petersburg shows how visual

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and print culture of the period mapped the duality of the city onto the prostitute’s physical body and spiritual state. Chapter 2 also examines depictions of urban prostitution, but does so from the perspective of medical, judicial, and so­cio­log­ic­ al discourses. Rus­sian writers, including Vsevolod Garshin, Leo Tolstoy, and Leonid Andreev drew upon stories from a­ ctual sex workers to debunk the theories of prominent sociologists and criminologists like Cesare Lombroso who argued that prostitution was necessary to preserve the social order. Yet t­hese Rus­sian writers, while sympathetic to the registered prostitute, nevertheless engaged in moments of voyeurism and fetishization. Unable to determine whether the prostitute’s body should evoke empathy or titillation, their texts vacillate between eroticism and revulsion. Chapter 3 moves to the image of the elite prostitute, the demimondaine (dama polusveta). Unlike her corollary working in the brothel, the demimondaine freely moved about the city space and blended in with ­women of the cultural elite. The source texts for this chapter include the numerous repre­ sen­ta­tions of elite prostitutes in print by the day’s leading lithographers as well as depictions in famous paintings by Ilia Repin (A Pa­ri­sian Café, 1875) and Ivan Kramskoi (Unknown ­Woman, 1883). T ­ hese works codified the new be­hav­iors of demimondaines as part of an emerging leisure culture modeled on Eu­ro­ pean trends. Whereas writers and artists looked to the demimondaine to express both the promises of nonreproductive sex and the fears associated with ­women who avoided traditional roles of wife and ­mother, the image of the dowerless bride conjured up a dif­fer­ent set of emotional triggers for the Rus­ sian intelligent­sia. As detailed in chapter 4, the dowerless bride operated as proof that the country faced a marriage crisis. A w ­ oman’s dowry (or lack thereof ) came to signify the mercantile self-­interest that threatened the sanctity of marriage. Lacking the right to marital choice, impoverished w ­ omen found themselves bartered by parents on the bridal market or coerced into brothel ser­vice by madams. Comparing genre paintings by artists like Nikolai Shilder with con­temporary literary works by Aleksandr Ostrovsky and Avdotia Panaeva, this chapter contends that artistic production likened unequal marital u ­ nions to a new kind of social prostitution driven by market capitalism. Chapter 5 contends that the figure of the procuress and madam garnered universal hatred not only among writers but also doctors, sociologists, and abolitionists, who drew upon anti-­Semitic rhe­toric and fears of “white slavery” to galvanize the public against the go-between and her profession. As this chapter demonstrates, at the heart of condemnations of Rus­sia’s “hyenas in bonnets” (as procuresses w ­ ere known) was a deep distrust of w ­ omen entrepreneurs who acquired social and financial capital. The procuress became a

18 I ntroduct ion

repository for male frustration at ­women who managed, despite their reproductive irrelevance, to gain a cultural relevancy in their roles as go-­betweens. The kept w ­ oman (soderzhanka) occupied the most fluid position in imperial Rus­sia and thus appears as a highly complex figure in lit­er­at­ ure and art of the period. Chapter 6 looks at the ambiguity of the kept w ­ oman’s status as representative of new changes in ­women’s position at the turn of the c­ entury. Works by Dostoevsky, Khvoshchinskaia, and Tolstoy feature kept ­women at vari­ous stages of spiritual agony. T ­ hese writers question to what degree economic in­de­pen­dence is predicated on sexual autonomy, and they depict the kept ­woman ­because of her social status as an outcast. Operating within a parallel polis and mirroring aspects of marital monogamy while possessing none of the ­legal rights of matrimony, the kept ­woman came to symbolize the promise of extramarital relations and the threat venal love posed to the traditional f­ amily unit. Rus­sia’s cultural elite eagerly debated the segmentation of society, pointing to new classes of w ­ omen as evidence of broad social change. For cultural producers, the question became how to categorize ­women who traded in sex in order to identify them, explain their importance, and curtail dangerous, nonnormative sexual desires. Yet as the following chapters elucidate, the inquiry into love as commodity produced a range of visual and print repre­sen­ta­tions. Varied in form, contested in the cultural sphere, and evocative of modern forms of transactional sex, the works explored in the following chapters showcase the changing perceptions of prostitution in imperial Rus­sia.

Ch a p ter 1

Rus­sia’s Babylon Prostitution in St. Petersburg

While prostitution existed throughout the Rus­ sian Empire, St. Petersburg appeared to nineteenth-­century commentators as the country’s epicenter of sexual vice. To the dismay of the Rus­sian intelligent­ sia, the city’s public ­houses, dance halls, boulevards, and taverns offered ample space for mercenary sex and, presumably, the spread of syphilis. Writing in 1872, the critic and historian Serafim Shashkov emphatically warned that St. Petersburg, “with its massive quantity of soldiers and bachelors and countless number of prostitutes working in secret,” had become “no less debauched than Paris or London.” With the number of registered prostitutes in St. Petersburg more than doubling between 1843 and 1867, Shashkov and his contemporaries presented a stark vision of a decrepit city full of street­walkers, drunkards, and beggars. “Society f­aces one of two choices,” warned Shashkov; “either to die slowly from sin, crime, anarchy, self-­destruction, and syphilis” or to “root out the evil” of prostitution and thus “be reborn for a new, rational, and ­free life.”1 While a group of dedicated professionals, Shashkov among them, hoped to galvanize Rus­sians to combat commercial sex, it was the nation’s writers who ultimately ­shaped discourse on the issue.2 A number of authors saw the proliferation of commercial sex in the northern capital as evidence of a hyper-­ Westernization that threatened the foundation of Rus­sian society. Fiction became the platform to expose the cold, scientific logic of the authorities who 19

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claimed that regulating prostitution was necessary for the preservation of public health. As Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov puts it in Crime and Punishment (Prestuplenie i nakazanie, 1866), “They say that it’s necessary. A certain percentage [of w ­ omen] ­every year must go, that way, to the devil. It’s necessary so that the o ­ thers remain fresh and healthy and are not both­ered. A percentage! Such refined words they use. So reassuring and scientific.”3 Indignation at the policy of regulation paved the way for the St. Petersburg sex worker to become a power­ful archetype that signified the dual matrix of state oppression and sexual exploitation. The notion that she was sacrificed for the public good vindicated her in the eyes of Dostoevsky as well as his compatriots, including Nikolai Chernyshevsky, Vsevolod Garshin, and Vsevolod Krestovsky. The urban prostitute not only functioned as a signifier of patriarchal excess and w ­ omen’s unequal position in Rus­sian society but also allegorically represented the city of St. Petersburg. Like the metropolis she inhabited, the sex worker was seen by contemporaries as “fallen.”4 She signaled the venality of the northern capital, and the growing belief that every­thing, and every­one, could be bought and sold on the streets of St. Petersburg. The connection between the sex worker and the northern capital was solidified in the cultural imagination b­ ecause the city ­housed the administrative center of the system of administrative supervision (nadzor) ­under the Ministerstvo vnutrennikh del (Ministry of Internal Affairs), which was tasked with regulating commercial sex. When in 1843 the ministry’s Medical Department outlined the procedures of tolerance and regulation, the authorities intended for ­these practices to be ­adopted in the nation’s major cities.5 In this sense, St. Petersburg offered a model for other Rus­sian metropolises to emulate as local authorities attempted to govern their citizens’ sexual desires. Writers studied St. Petersburg, Peter the ­Great’s “Win­dow to Eu­rope,” and focused on the inherent dualism in the promises of a modern Westernized city that operated as the nation’s capital but looked and felt distinctly non-­Russian. A number of scholars have analyzed the repre­sen­ta­tion of St. Petersburg as codified in cultural production and argued, following Vladimir Toporov’s seminal study, that this corpus of works constitutes a tradition of its own, typically referred to as the Petersburg Text.6 Vari­ous critics have shown that works by Aleksandr Pushkin, Nikolai Gogol, and Dostoevsky—­among o ­ thers—­share similarities in their perception of the city as a space of apocalyptic doom, magnificent destruction, and infectious venality. While not contesting the richness of the Petersburg Text tradition nor the scholarship that has studied it, this chapter argues—­both methodologically and theoretically—­for a dif­fer­ent approach, one that allows for a robust exploration of gender and sexuality in an urban context. As a space of contested desires and unexpected sexual ad-

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venture, St. Petersburg operated on a symbolic level in imperial culture as both a place of sexual fulfillment and, by extension, a locus for projecting fears of sexual deviance and cultural decline. On the one hand, the city provided a Eu­ ro­pe­anized vision of a modern Rus­sia, where plea­sure and leisure could be pursued along St. Petersburg’s Nevsky Prospect, or in the city’s arcades, shopping centers, theaters, and cafés. On the other hand, ­these spaces allowed for new ave­nues of sexual and social exchange between Rus­sia’s men and ­women, which challenged long-­standing beliefs about respectability and the contours of extramarital love. St. Petersburg offered unparalleled anonymity to its citizens, and thus helped to break the spell of close-­knit rural existence and ­free the city’s inhabitants to explore the seductive rhythm of “external and internal stimuli,” to paraphrase Georg Simmel.7 The mixture of excitement and fear felt by St. Petersburg dwellers registered in lit­er­a­ture and art, affirming Rita Felski’s assessment that in the nineteenth c­ entury “the prostitute was the ultimate symbol of the commodification of eros” and came to symbolize “the abyss of a dangerous female sexuality linked to contamination, disease, and a breakdown of social hierarchies in the modern city.”8 But unlike their counter­parts in ­England and France, Rus­sian writers considered sexual commerce to be a vice a­ dopted from western Eu­rope. That the system of regulation was founded in St. Petersburg signaled not only the city’s Westernized value system but the metropolis as a modern-­day Babylon that had turned its back on Rus­sian Orthodox values in pursuit of sexual gratification. Like the image of Babylon found in the book of Revelation, St. Petersburg appeared to commentators as having betrayed itself for the pleasures of the flesh, and thus bore the mark of the beast.9 Yet as writers evoke apocalyptic imagery in their depictions of St. Petersburg’s sex trade, they seek to humanize the suffering of the urban sex worker. As this chapter ­will show, the city of St. Petersburg features as the main enabler in the cultivation of transactional sex for nineteenth-­century commentators. As writers amplify the sex worker’s narrative by drawing on biblical imagery, their depictions testify to the fact that they are torn between the corporeal and spiritual. This tension manifests itself in both literary and visual culture as Rus­sian artists and thinkers amplify fears of St. Petersburg as a debauched capital modeled on Eu­ro­pean mores, as an access point through which evil flooded the Rus­sian land. Yet while apocalyptic imagery certainly informs depictions of the St. Petersburg sex trade, cultural texts also call into question the allegorical connection between the sold w ­ oman and the threat of damnation. Not unlike what Judith Walkowitz describes in late Victorian London, ­toward the end of the nineteenth c­ entury depictions of transactional sex in St. Petersburg offer “conflicting and overlapping repre­sen­ta­tions of sexual

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danger” in which “stories of sexual possibility and urban adventure” come to represent life in Rus­sia’s northern capital.10

Erotic Exchanges on Nevsky Prospect When Nikolai Gogol codified the image of the enigmatic neznakomka (unknown ­woman) in his short story “Nevsky Prospect” (“Nevskii prospekt,” 1835), he connected femininity with a dangerous, demonic force that immobilized men. Readers familiar with “Nevsky Prospect” ­will remember the hustle and bustle that Gogol outlines in the story’s opening pages. While during the day the city’s collegiate assessors, petty bureaucrats, and office clerks go about their business with vigor, by nightfall, explains the story’s narrator, young bachelors stroll along Nevsky Prospect with “some kind of goal.” In dreamlike, hypnotic states, ­running with hurried steps to “peek ­under a lady’s hat,” ­these same men seek out the w ­ omen “whose thick lips and rouge-­plastered cheeks appeal to so many.” Gogol’s naive and idealistic artist, Piskarev, falls prey to the enticing atmosphere of Nevsky Prospect at sundown. When Piskarev spots a beautiful w ­ oman in the distance, she ignites his fantasies of chivalrous love and conquest. He pursues “this divine being,” excited to discover “where this lovely being dwelt.” Piskarev’s ­g reat expectations are dashed as the neznakomka leads him to her lodgings in a brothel. When she opens her lovely lips, he is repelled to hear something “so stupid, so trite” that he is beside himself and flees.11 Having fallen u ­ nder the spell of love, Piskarev turns first to reverie and eventually opium to sustain his vision of the neznakomka. When he musters up the courage to propose marriage to her—­for this, he imagines, is the only way to save the fallen w ­ oman—­she refuses his offer. Devastated by the rejection, Piskarev returns home and slits his throat. Despite the robust critical lit­er­at­ure on Gogol’s Petersburg Tales, one ­understudied aspect of “Nevsky Prospect” is how the writer looked to French prose of the littérature frénétique tradition for inspiration in characterizing the neznakomka.12 An outgrowth of both Romanticism and the Gothic novel, the “frenetic” style mixed passion and vio­lence to produce rather lurid narratives. The genre had an impact on Gogol’s writing, and he turned to Jules Janin’s The Dead Donkey and the Guillotined W ­ oman (L’Âne mort et la Femme guillotinée, 1829) for inspiration.13 Janin’s gory tale follows Henrietta, a ­woman of ill repute, who is executed for murdering the man who took her virginity. Men love Henrietta’s body—­judged by the narrator as both beautiful and horrifying—­with a frantic, murderous passion. Sexual desire mixes with sadistic urges to mutilate her. Midway through the novel the narrator watches a surgery to remove signs

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of venereal disease on her sex organs; l­ater she is marched—­emaciated, jaundiced, and sickly—­before a tribunal of madams deciding w ­ hether to employ 14 her in their cheap brothels. A morbid depiction of a public ­woman and the men who worship her, Janin’s novel offered Gogol a language to discuss the dichotomy of attraction and revulsion in relation to the eroticized female body. “Nevsky Prospect” ushered in the theme of commercial sex in Rus­sian lit­er­a­ture and did so by connecting the sold ­woman with the image of St. Petersburg—­itself a horrifying and awe-­inspiring metropolis. As an emblem of the city, Gogol’s neznakomka represents at once the venality of the northern capital and the phantasmagorical space of Nevsky Prospect, where, as the narrator reminds, “nothing is what it seems to be.” Touched by the demonic, the city of St. Petersburg has its streetlamps lit by none other than the devil himself. ­Under the seductive allure of the “deceptive light of the streetlamp,” the neznakomka—­like Janin’s Henrietta—is both alluring and deadly. Gogol captures this duality linguistically by describing the neznakomka as dvusmyslennoe sushchestvo, literally as a being who has “two meanings.” When Piskarev initially encounters her on Nevsky Prospect, he sees her as a celestial being, with divine features (bozhestvennye cherty) and heavenly eyes (nebesnye glaza). Once Piskarev realizes that she is a streetwalker, not the “perfect Bianca of Perugino” he ­imagined her to be, the narrator intervenes to explain the shock dealt to the tale’s hero, and by extension any man, upon realizing that his ideal ­woman is but a fantasy. In the “den of vice,” ­woman, “turns into some strange, ambiguous (dvusmyslennoe) being, where she is deprived of all her feminine charms and adopts all the repulsive mannerisms of a man.”15 Linking sexual desire with masculinity, as Gogol’s text does, helps to underpin the image of the St. Petersburg sex worker as the quin­tes­sen­tial phallic ­woman who, to quote Helena Goscilo, “both seduces through beauty and dooms through sexual indifference.”16 The epistemological questions raised in “Nevsky Prospect” refer to Gogol’s perception of St. Petersburg as inherently dualistic.17 The story’s narrator—­ the source of information about both the characters and St. Petersburg life—­ offers a dualized vision of the city to support this vision. Prone to exaggeration and conflation, he offers one maxim only to subsequently rephrase it and state the opposite. The instability of the narrator’s perception of St.  Petersburg space comes across most clearly in the discussion of beauty. When confronted with the neznakomka’s profession, the narrator shares Piskarev’s horror: “indeed, we are never as sad as when we see beauty ruined by the putrid breath of depravity.” ­Later, however, the narrator contradicts his ­earlier statement, concluding, “Beauty performs miracles. All internal weaknesses in a beautiful ­woman, rather than inspiring disgust, somehow take on an extraordinarily attractive quality.”18 The reader is left to won­der which is true—­does vice

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corrupt beauty or enhance it? The answer for Gogol’s characters is neither: female beauty, inherently connected to forbidden pleasures, is never what it appears to be, and it typically brings about death or destruction. Femininity is connected to commodification in “Nevsky Prospect” in ways that reveal broader cultural associations linking desire with forms of consumption. The artistic deployment of the sex worker to signal shifts in consumer culture aligns Gogol’s text with similar investigations into the image of sexually transgressive urban ­women in Eu­ro­pean lit­er­a­ture of the period.19 The vivid descriptions of attractive advertisements and glamorous signposts in “Nevsky Prospect” are meant to resemble the shop signs in Berlin, London, and Paris of the same period. Gogol’s accompanying images of ­women, who are caught between the shop win­dow and the ave­nue, connect femininity with consumption. Shops along Nevsky Prospect beckon to ­women, who appear especially susceptible to the power of consumption: “a young lady turns her ­little head to the sparkling shop win­dows like a sunflower turns t­oward the sun”; nannies explain to their wards the meaning of the “signs over the shops”; an attractive blond ­woman who catches the eye of the story’s other male protagonist, Pirogov, “­stopped in front of each shop win­dow to stare at the displays of ­belts, handkerchiefs, earrings, gloves, and other sundries.”20 But in “Nevsky Prospect” Gogol conveys that ­women are not only consumers but also objects of consumption. When Pirogov chases the young lady as she views the shop win­dows, he believes that he can obtain her as he would one of the trifles on display. The signs and symbols on Nevsky Prospect convey a myriad of possibilities for commercial exchange in which w ­ omen are placed side by side with other products for purchase on the nation’s premier ave­nue for trafficking in consumable goods. Gogol’s depiction of Nevsky Prospect as a space that stimulates both consumer and sexual desire aligns with historian Abby Schrader’s assessment of the capital’s burgeoning nineteenth-­century consumer culture, where “­women strolling through Nevsky’s fash­ion­able district” attracted the attention “of men who objectified them and perceived their bodies and their com­pany to be as much for sale as the objects on display in the cases and win­dows that lined the ave­nue.”21 Visual culture of the mid-­nineteenth ­century likewise solidified the image of Nevsky Prospect as a locus for transactional sex. The popu­lar St. Petersburg weekly journal The Dragonfly (Strekoza), captured the sexualization of the city’s major boulevard through the image of a well-­dressed coquette with a parasol resting on her shoulder (see figure 1.1). Titled Petersburg firsthand (Peterburg voochiiu), the illustration features the city’s dif­fer­ent social “types” by connecting categories of urban dwellers to specific locales. The image proves in­ter­est­ing not only for its repre­sen­ta­tion of social estates but for how the artist

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Figure 1.1. ​ Peterburg voochiiu (Petersburg Firsthand), illustration from Strekoza (The Dragonfly), 1882. Print, 43 × 29 cm. State Museum of the History of St. Petersburg.

conveys the sexualization of par­tic­u­lar spaces in St. Petersburg. At the image’s center is a ­woman reclining, with a lapdog who sits obediently on her thigh. With her décolleté and wide-­brimmed hat, she could easily be one of the ­women described in Gogol’s “Nevsky Prospect.” But she is designated as “Bol’shaia morskaia,” a slightly more prestigious area of the city; she thus represents a member of the demimonde, a class above the streetwalker. The urban streetwalker who

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Figure 1.2. ​ Peterburg voochiiu, detail.

is visualized in the lower left corner is labeled “Nevsky Prospect” (see figure 1.2). A look of brazen suggestion and open flirtation signals her status as a sex worker. She is not, however, portrayed as a social victim. In contrast to the impoverished ­woman featured slightly above her, the streetwalker accentuates her voluptuous figure by placing her hand on her hip and coyly looking at the viewer. Locating Nevsky Prospect both as a place of consumption and luxury, as the image does, conveys a tenuous balance among titillation, adventure, and sexual fulfillment. While meant as social satire, images like this one nevertheless communicated a social anxiety that could be interpreted by both men and w ­ omen as dangerous as it was emancipatory.

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Narratives of Salvation: Gogol, Nekrasov, and Chernyshevsky on Fallen ­Women In “Nevsky Prospect,” Piskarev offers the neznakomka his version of marital bliss: she w ­ ill obediently sit at his side, “embroidering or d­ oing some sewing,” and serve as a complacent muse as he toils at a canvas. Rather than ­eager contrition and heartfelt admiration, she responds with utter indignation, exclaiming, “I’m not a laundress or a seamstress to do that kind of work!” Her friend, who overhears the conversation, makes fun of Piskarev and his proposal. To the neznakomka’s g­ reat amusement, her friend pretends to be the complacent wife of Piskarev’s fantasy. Miming a “stupid grimace” and “pathetic face,” she mocks Piskarev’s romanticized vision of a wife.22 The ­women’s laughter is both potent and prophetic, for this scene not only instigates Piskarev’s suicide but also sets into motion a resilient trope of nineteenth-­century Rus­sian lit­er­at­ure. Gogol’s narrative ushers in a quin­tes­sen­tial paradigm, wherein a male figure intervenes in the life of a fallen w ­ oman and, in offering her marriage, believes he ­will redeem and save her from damnation. While it is true, as George Siegel claims, that “in one way or another all the ‘literary prostitutes’ in nineteenth-­century Rus­sian lit­er­a­ture come out of ‘Nevsky Prospect,’ ” how subsequent writers reinterpreted Gogol’s tale is far more nuanced and polemical than scholars have proposed.23 In his survey of literary texts, Siegel convincingly demonstrates a number of parallels between writers’ depictions of fallen w ­ omen, including an emphasis on the “brazenness” of such ­women and their proposed rehabilitation through marriage. Although he succinctly outlines the transmission of ideas from one generation of writers to the next, Siegel combines all types of fallenness into one generalized category and thus overlooks the variety of sexual commerce that interested authors and readers. Most impor­tant, Siegel and subsequent critics have yet to articulate what depicting the sex worker did for male writers of the period. What Gogol, and ­later Chernyshevsky, Dostoevsky, and Nikolai Nekrasov locate in the fallen w ­ oman’s tale is an incredibly rich story of salvation amplified within the setting of St. Petersburg. Rus­sian authors focus on the image of the sex worker ­because by speaking on behalf of the marginalized w ­ oman they position themselves—­via their male characters—­not only as her advocate, but also her judge and savior. In telling her story, paragons of nineteenth-­century Rus­sian prose accomplished several goals si­mul­ta­neously: they codified sex work as an exploitative practice inherent to St. Petersburg living; they eased social scrutiny by romanticizing fallen ­women; and they upheld the social order by pointing t­oward marriage as the means of returning a ­woman’s lost honor. Rus­sian writers placed themselves as the true

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arbiters of ­women’s lives, as the rightful o ­ wners of the sex worker’s story. In this regard, male writers could trou­ble the hierarchies of power established in depictions of fallen w ­ omen, but on their terms. The image of the urban sex worker redeemed by a male savior comes to the fore in Nekrasov’s poetry. It is worth examining his “When from the darkness . . .” (“Kogda iz mraka . . . 1846”) and “Whenever I’m driving down dark streets at night” (“Edu li noch’iu po ulitse temnoi”), from 1847, not only ­because they evoke St. Petersburg as a site of urban depravity but ­because the two poems pre­sent a salvation paradigm for fallen ­women that subsequent writers, Dostoevsky in par­tic­ul­ar, ­will grapple to refute. Bestowing absolution, as the male speaker does in “When from the darkness . . .” elevates the narrator to the position of her redeemer. The poem, which describes how a man listens to a fallen ­woman’s confession, pays witness to her spiritual suffering, and ultimately invites her to be his companion, develops the salvation narrative first codified in Gogol’s “Nevsky Prospect.” In Nekrasov’s poem the speaker uses the plight of a fallen w ­ oman to convey his own magnanimity. Out of the darkness of error (iz mraka zabluzhden’ia), his words pull her from damnation: “I saved a soul from eternal doom.” He becomes the ­woman’s confessor: “You narrated to me / every­thing that came prior,” “I avidly took in e­ very sound . . . ​, / I understood it all, child of misfortune! / I pardoned and forgot it all.” The three sequential instances of “I” underscore the male speaker’s agency in absolving the ­woman’s sins. The central focus remains on the male speaker, who assuages the ­woman’s doubt and worry by inviting her to be his life companion: “Into my ­house come bold and f­ ree / Its rightful mistress ­there to be.”24 While the speaker beckons to the ­woman to enter his ­house, a closer reading of the poem’s formal qualities underscores that she lacks a corporeal presence. In this sense, Nekrasov’s poem conveys that the w ­ oman’s salvation comes at the cost of her physical erasure. In the poem, the lack of concrete description of the ­woman’s physical presence allows the male speaker (and by extension the poem’s reader/listener) to proj­ect meaning onto the sex worker. In this sense, Nekrasov’s poem aligns with Luce Irigaray’s description of the specularization of a ­woman’s body. “Just as a commodity has no mirror it can use to reflect itself,” explains Irigaray, “so ­woman serves as reflection, as image of and for man, but lacks specific qualities of her own.”25 In “When from the darkness . . .” we never see the ­woman’s face (she covers it with her hands), nor hear her voice; she merely reflects back to the lyrical persona a romanticized vision of fallenness. The erasure of the female figure in “When from the darkness . . .” is paralleled in another popu­lar Nekrasov poem, “Whenever I’m driving down dark streets at night.” The speaker recalls how he and his former mistress, crushed

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by poverty, watch as her son falls deathly ill; the male speaker solaces her with the thought that they, too, ­will “just as deeply and sweetly fall asleep” as they brace for death. The ­woman leaves dressed “as for a wedding” and returns an hour ­later with “A coffin for the child and dinner for the f­ather.”26 The man realizes that his companion has exchanged sex for money; in contrast to the male speaker’s impotence, the w ­ oman’s action is seen as a proactive, necessary sacrifice. The c­ ouple part ways, and the male speaker is left to won­der what path the w ­ oman’s life has taken. The crux of “Whenever I’m driving down dark streets at night” rests in the symbolism of the commodities bought thanks to the w ­ oman’s sexual l­abor. ­Here the trafficking in ­women links with the traffic of merchandise, joining together the commodification of ­woman with the ultimate misogynistic signifiers of femininity: consumption and death. The man gains sustenance thanks to the w ­ oman’s “fall,” thus connecting the profits of commercial sex with the physical consumption of food. The coffin holds symbolic value not only as a tomb (and antipode for a womb) but as a signifier of the w ­ oman’s “death” into the sex trade. She is dressed as if for a wedding, but the bridal imagery is replaced with that of a funeral. But the w ­ oman’s descent is accompanied by a spiritual resurrection; her sacrifice is meant not only to atone for her “sin” but to elevate her morally in the eyes of readers. In both Nekrasov poems the frame narratives remove the stigma associated with fallen w ­ omen, only to replace it with a new restrictive image of a saintly whore. The sex worker is sanctified as a social victim, morally better than t­ hose who would condemn her trade. Projected as ­silent and penitent, she ­either graciously accepts absolution from her male counterpart or exchanges sex to obtain money to feed him. While the poems question the social structures that push w ­ omen to commercial sex, they nevertheless articulate a soundly misogynistic vision of spiritual ecstasy predicated on female sacrifice. Nekrasov’s image fits nicely within Barbara Heldt’s critique of canonical Rus­sian lit­er­a­ture and the “terrible perfection” granted to classic heroines. Although the male narrators align with Heldt’s general characterization of “the visual trope of ­woman objectivized and named by man” who does “the fictive viewing and the narrative commentary,” Nekrasov’s poems go a step further by erasing the physicality of the sold w ­ oman.27 Following in Nekrasov’s legacy, the tale of a fallen ­woman’s redemption becomes the new commodity trafficked among the literary elite. In depictions of sex workers, the w ­ oman’s body dis­appears completely to make room for the circulation of her story. While Nekrasov pop­u­lar­ized the image of the fallen w ­ oman, it was the next generation of radical critics, particularly Chernyshevsky, who succinctly codified her tale within a reformist paradigm. Chernyshevsky’s utopian novel What

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Is to Be Done? (Chto delat’? 1863), written as the author sat imprisoned in the Peter and Paul Fortress, offered a blueprint to completely transform Rus­sian society based first and foremost on the equality of ­women. What the work lacked in artistic merit it made up for in progressive-­minded ideology, as generations of “new ­people” began living by the maxims outlined in the narrative.28 Set in St. Petersburg, the narrative centers on the emancipation of the heroine, Vera Pavlovna, who initially finds liberation through a fictitious marriage and ­later via her organ­ization of a sewing cooperative. The novel spawned heated debate between radicals and their more moderate counter­parts among the intelligent­sia for de­cades ­after its publication.29 Deeply influenced by utopian socialist thought, What Is to Be Done? resoundingly condemns w ­ omen’s economic, po­liti­cal, and social subjection within the patriarchal structures of mid-­nineteenth-­century Rus­sia.30 Although Vera Pavlovna’s evolution drives the narrative, her path ­toward enlightenment is mirrored by her social inferior, the consumptive sex worker, Natasia Kriukova, who takes up work in Vera’s sewing collective. Analy­sis of Chernyshevsky’s depiction of Kriukova shows that while he hoped to pre­sent a new model for gender relations, he nevertheless succumbed to a heavy-­handed paternalism when it came to the question of commercial sex. What Is to Be Done? conveys the theme of commercial sex both directly, through Kriukova’s story, and also figuratively, by showing arranged marriages to be just as transactional as relations between clients and sex workers. The novel presumes that marital contracts formulated according to the traditional model exploit w ­ omen in ways similar to the sex trade. In What Is to Be Done?, ­whether as wives or sex workers, ­women ­under the old system remain the property of men. For instance, when Vera is courted by their landlady’s son, Storeshnikov, he wishes to make her his mistress, but ­after she outwits him, he ­settles on possessing her as a wife. Exposing Storeshnikov’s fantasies and the “notion he would ‘possess’ Verochka” prompts the narrator to critique men’s be­hav­ior ­toward w ­ omen: “almost e­ very one of us men possesses one of you, our s­ isters. Again, I say, what nonsense: how are you our s­ isters? You are our lackeys!” In stark contrast to men like Storeshnikov, whose intentions are to own ­women, the novel’s “new ­people” put egalitarian ideals into practice and re­spect “the rights of man” and “the freedom of the individual you live with.”31 Chernyshevsky uses the novel to demonstrate how such equality is achieved through the princi­ples of egalitarianism and rational egoism. While Vera’s marriages—­first to Lopukhov and eventually to Kirsanov—­illustrate how to put ideals into practice, the reformation of Kriukova proves far more problematic. In a pattern familiar to romantic works on the fallen ­woman, Kriuko-

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va’s spiritual enlightenment grows as her health declines. Made virtuous through her love of Kirsanov, she physically fades, succumbing to tuberculosis, and thus liberates her male savior from what would be, according to the narrator, a stifling, unsatisfying ­union. “Naturally,” explains the narrator, “Kriukova was no match for [Kirsanov], ­because they ­were ­really no match for each other as far as their development was concerned. When he outgrew his youth, he could feel sorry for her, but no more.”32 In a similar way to the erasure of the female figure in Nekrasov’s poems, ­there is ­little left to develop in Kriukova’s narrative ­after she attains her reformation, and thus Chernyshevsky eliminates her from the text. With no direct mention of her death, she swiftly fades from Kirsanov’s memory to make way for his rightful partner, Vera. The ideological message in Kriukova’s story affirms that while a St. Petersburg sex worker might attain goodness of heart and clarity of mind, she nevertheless remains tainted by feminine pollution that has no permanent place in the world of “new ­people.” Not unlike the reformed Fleur-­de-­Marie from Eugene Sue’s The Mysteries of Paris (Les Mystères de Paris, 1842–43), Kriukova must internalize her transgressions in order to be redeemed. But Chernyshevsky replaces the religious vocabulary of romanticism with a solid work ethic that liberates through ­labor. First u ­ nder the tutelage of Kirsanov, l­ater as an actress’s maid, and fi­nally as a seamstress in Vera’s collective, Kriukova manages to shed her past vices—­drinking, debauchery, and slovenliness—­and become modest and upright. But it is Kirsanov’s love that proves most transformative, for it allows Kriukova complete unity with another person. As Kriukova explains to Vera, “[Kirsanov] no longer seems to be another person; ­we’ve become one and the same. It’s as if he ­weren’t looking at me, but I was looking at myself, as if he w ­ eren’t kissing me, but I was kissing myself.”33 Chernyshevsky suggests that the tragic flaw in Kriukova’s character rests in this kind of intense passion presumably cultivated during her life in the brothel. When the narrator explains that a­ fter two years of cohabitation, Kriukova’s consumption returned and she thus had to separate from Kirsanov, the implication is that her sexual appetite exacerbated her already failing health. In a manner typical of the period, the social compassion for sex workers Chernyshevsky expounds upon in What Is to Be Done? exists alongside entrenched beliefs about the supposed unquenchable libido of w ­ omen in the sex trade. This is not to say the text ­wholeheartedly condemns nonreproductive sex, but it does align Kriukova with a sexual voracity that drains the energy needed to revolutionize society. Contextualizing the basis for Chernyshevsky’s depiction of Kriukova in the novel helps elucidate the source for t­ hese inherent contradictions. Chernyshevsky, at least in part, drew from the experience of

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radical critics who put their egalitarian ideals into practice and attempted to marry (or cohabitate with) former sex workers.34 ­There is reason to believe that the relationship between Kirsanov and Kriukova was informed by the experiences of Chernyshevsky’s close friend and fellow critic, Nikolai Dobroliubov, who fell deeply in love with a St. Petersburg brothel worker, Therese Grünwaldt.35 When Dobroliubov proclaimed his intention to propose to Grünwaldt, Chernyshevsky urged his friend in the strongest pos­si­ble terms to rethink the decision.36 As Irina Paperno explains, “the sympathies and passions of the new men w ­ ere divided between the world of fallen ­women, whom the idealistic youths tried to save and reform, usually with tragic results, and that of society ladies, glamorous, enticing, and unattainable.”37 Although infatuations with fallen w ­ omen could be expounded upon in lit­er­a­ture and applauded as socially righ­teous, when the question of marriage arose, the “new men” wavered or failed in their attempts to merge ideals with real­ity. The narrative of What Is to Be Done? illustrates how sex workers can, with appropriate mentorship, find their way out of the trade. Kriukova relays to Vera that ­after Kirsanov paid her debts to the brothel madam, she moved to an apartment of her own, where she sees a ­limited number of clients. “You may think it was difficult ­because I had many male friends—­five or so,” Kriukova tells Vera, “But I was fond of them all.” Echoing sex-­positive outlooks of the twenty-­first c­ entury, Chernyshevsky even goes so far as to have Kriukova convey that “if ­you’re fond of a man, then ­there’s no harm.”38 While the narrative evokes an attitude of tolerance ­toward Kriukova, it nevertheless reinforces a patronizing view of sex workers as intellectually and emotionally inferior. What Is to Be Done? solves the “prob­lem” of prostitution by replacing the trafficking of w ­ omen with the economic benefit of communal l­abor. Instead of servicing St. Petersburg men, Kriukova and the other former sex workers employed in Vera’s collective take up needle and thread. Chernyshevsky underscores that this transformation occurs not only in terms of character development but through a remaking of the urban landscape. As Olga Matich perceptively observes, Vera’s “network of dressmaking shops all over Petersburg” links “the city—­and its map—to the novel’s plot of female emancipation.”39 To develop this point further, the specific locale of Vera’s flagship store holds the key to Chernyshevsky’s rethinking of commercial sex. By combining resources with another collective, Vera eventually manages to open a shop on Nevsky Prospect. In ­doing so, she spatially assumes the cityscape formerly worked by Kriukova—­and, by extension, the multitude of street­walkers she stands for. As Kriukova reminds Vera, it is on Nevsky Prospect where she first encounters Kirsanov: “I used to walk along Nevsky Prospekt . . . ​a student went by and I accosted him . . . ​I ran up to him and seized his hand.”40 Vera’s

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sewing cooperative thus absorbs the city’s wayward w ­ omen found on Nevsky Prospect and replaces their sexual potency (which is coded as aggressive and frenetic) with a passion for work; this enterprise not only removes the streetwalker from the urban setting but also sets out to alter the city’s sexual topography. Through a delicate sleight of hand, Chernyshevsky manages to remove Kriukova’s body from Nevsky Prospect and replace it with a sign for Vera’s shop: “Au bon travail. Magasin des Nouveautés.” Rightly sensing the socialist under­pinnings of “Au bon travail” as a veiled allusion to the socialist le droit au travail (the right to work), a government authority insists they change the shop’s name. The implication remains that a new type of work has set root in the northern capital that reappropriates w ­ omen’s sexual l­abor for the benefit of egalitarian-­minded socialist enterprise. By harnessing the symbolic meaning of Nevsky Prospect, Chernyshevsky concludes both Kriukova’s story of redemption and Vera’s emancipation. The preeminence of the sewing collective and its commercial success reinforces the notion that only by tempering sexual passion through cooperative ­labor can the city—­and by extension, the family—be fully transformed. In What Is to Be Done? the liberation of registered sex workers from the country’s brothels is equally impor­tant as freeing w ­ omen like Vera from the shackles of loveless matrimony. But while Vera proves herself capable of intellectual growth, Chernyshevsky’s formulation shows a deep ambivalence t­ oward w ­ omen of Kriukova’s ilk. Like Gogol before him, Chernyshevsky turns to Nevsky Prospect b­ ecause of the varying possibilities it poses for social and sexual exchange. While it is true that Gogol, Nekrasov, and Chernyshevsky all predicate their image of fallenness on ste­reo­typical beliefs about sex workers, their works contain inherent contradictions that resist any attempt at essentialist readings. For instance, while Gogol’s “Nevsky Prospect” might seem vague in its depiction of a fallen w ­ oman, ­there is a rich tension in the text revealed through the ­women’s laughter. The communal laughter between the neznakomka and her female friend shows a solidarity between the w ­ omen, thus demonstrating an example of what feminist scholar Jo Anna Isaak calls the “liberating potential of laughter” for w ­ omen.41 Moreover, their laughter cuts through Piskarev’s romanticized vision of an ideal wife and allows them—if only briefly—­a moment to reclaim their autonomy. In the case of Nekrasov’s poems the restrictive image of femininity offers ample ground to explore the po­liti­cal economy of commercial sex and the overlay between the exchange of ­women and the exchange of goods. Chernyshevsky’s What Is to Be Done? promises a blueprint to remove ­women’s social subjugation and even suggests a radical revision of sexual life. Keeping in mind the revelatory aspects of ­these texts and their inner oppositions shows

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how ­these Rus­sian thinkers presented to the public new modes of gender relations that could at times blur traditional assumptions about the types of ­women involved in commercial sex.

Den of Depravity and Site for Redemption: The St. Petersburg Brothel While in Gogol’s “Nevsky Prospect” the boulevard represents a modern urban space where Rus­sia’s men and w ­ omen engage in flirtation and adventure, the image of the brothel—­also referred to as a ­house of tolerance (dom terpimosti) or public h ­ ouse (publichnyi dom)—­evokes an anxiety of enclosure and entrapment in literary works. Officially, brothels operated ­under the system of nadzor, which made h ­ ouses of tolerance an uncomfortable reminder to tsarist authorities of their role in facilitating commercial sex.42 Although the careful eye of the censor precluded any detailed depictions of brothels in prose fiction, a handful of writers nevertheless addressed the subject, albeit rarely in extensive detail. When authors did portray brothel life, they typically focused on destitute sex workers trapped in a cycle of poverty and forced to live out their days in squalid quarters. Such is the image in Petr Boborykin’s novel Eve­ning Sacrifice (Zhertva vecherniaia, 1868), whose upper-­class heroine ventures into the St. Petersburg slums with the aim of saving wayward w ­ omen. As she tours a public ­house close to St. Petersburg’s infamous Haymarket Square, she “is engulfed by horrendous smell and fumes” and repelled by the sight of the brothel workers, who are in a drunken stupor.43 Boborykin’s depiction of St. Petersburg brothels stands apart from works of the nineteenth c­ entury not only in the amount of detail it offers but in its categorization of dif­fer­ent tiers of public ­houses for readers. At one end of the spectrum is the flop­house, which employs drunken, rowdy, but emotionally sensitive Rus­sian w ­ omen; on the other is a chic bordello with coy, finely dressed ­women hailing from ­England, France, and Germany who cater to foreigners and affluent Rus­sians. Run by an orderly, self-­righteous German madam, this upscale brothel offers clientele such comfort and luxury that even Boborykin’s heroine cannot help but initially see the space as appealing. A ­ fter interviewing the ­women at both establishments, she concludes that t­here are “two worlds for fallen w ­ omen: the madam’s elegant ­house full of contentment, and the cheap and dirty Rus­sian ­houses full of tragic revelry. The former is a kingdom of death, but in the latter, ­there is hope for regeneration.”44 As Boborykin’s heroine suggests, the dilapidated brothel provides a charged space in which to explore the possibility of spiritual rebirth for the impover-

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ished sex worker. Yet Dostoevsky’s novels, particularly Notes from Under­ ground (Zapiski iz podpol’ia, 1864), call into question the motivations of t­ hose individuals bent on “saving” brothel workers. Examining Dostoevsky’s treatment of the brothel space in Notes from Under­ground illustrates how he critiques such salvation narratives espoused in Nekrasov’s poetry and Chernyshevsky’s What Is to Be Done?45 Dostoevsky portrays the public h ­ ouse as a uniquely “other” space in St. Petersburg ­because it both mirrors and distorts the image of domesticity, of sexual and spiritual fulfilment, and of heterosexual relations more broadly. This par­tic­u­lar quality of brothels to function as a “world within worlds” is what prompts Michel Foucault to classify them as “heterotopias.” Like other contested, inverted sites (Foucault lists a number of places, including cemeteries, asylums, and prisons), the brothel functions as a heterotopia in that it creates “a space of illusion that exposes e­ very real space, all the sites inside of which ­human life is partitioned, as still more illusory.”46 In Notes from Under­ground, Dostoevsky contrasts the space of the brothel with its referent, the domestic apartment, to explore how ­these two sites reflect one another. In ­doing so, he exposes the impulse to transfer fallen ­women from the public ­house to the domestic realm, from brothel work to marital life, as part of a larger pattern of exploitation. Keeping in mind Foucault’s concept of the illusory nature of the brothel as a heterotopia helps unlock Dostoevsky’s nuanced critique both of the “new men” who propose to save fallen w ­ omen and of St. Petersburg space, which objectifies, commodifies, and alienates p­ eople from themselves and one another. Dostoevsky’s Notes from Under­ground features two scenes between the under­ ground man and the brothel worker Liza. In the first, the under­g round man arrives at a brothel ­after humiliating himself at dinner with his male companions. In response to being laughed at and mocked by his peers, the man aims to reassert his dominance by humiliating Liza. As Eliot Borenstein puts it, “sex with [Liza] becomes a consolation prize for [the under­ground man’s] inability to become part of the male group.”47 ­After he sleeps with her, the under­ground man proceeds to narrate in acute detail how Liza ­will undoubtedly spiral into poverty, move from one flop­house to the next, fall ill, and eventually die. While initially she ignores his diatribe, even calling it something “out of a book,” she eventually succumbs to his barbs and begins weeping. With his goal accomplished, the under­ground man cannot resist the opportunity to act out the fantasy of being Liza’s redeemer and gives her his address, encouraging her to visit him.48 The under­ground man’s victory quickly shifts to panic at the thought that Liza might actually visit and see his degraded lodgings, for this would bring a death blow to his fragile ego. When she appears at his apartment, he a­ ntagonizes

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and berates her before he himself breaks into hysterics; to the under­ ground man’s dismay, rather than disgust, Liza shows him compassion. Humiliated by his emotional outburst and ashamed to look Liza in the eye, he is taken over “by the feeling of domination and possession” and has sex with Liza. While Liza initially embraces him “enthusiastically and fervently,” her subsequent dejection indicates that the encounter was meant to debase her. As the under­ground man confesses, “[Liza] surmised that my fit of passion was precisely revenge, a new humiliation for her, and that in addition to my prior, almost pointless hatred ­there had now been added a personal, envious hatred of her.”49 To compound her humiliation, the under­ground man attempts to justify his actions by making it into a commercial transaction and shoves a five-­ ruble note in her hand. Dostoevsky gives the final word to Liza, who leaves the money on the t­ able as she runs out of his apartment. Focusing on the under­g round man’s desire for revenge allows Dostoevsky to explore the contours of objectification. A number of studies have addressed this issue by articulating the inner contradictions in the under­g round man’s psyche and his inability to perceive the world beyond a master/slave logic.50 Less understood and critical to the discussion on fallen w ­ omen is how Dostoevsky utilizes space as part of the symbolic language in the novel. Through the under­ground man’s narration, Dostoevsky conveys that even when w ­ omen leave the confines of the brothel, men cannot help but see them as commodity goods that circulate on the St. Petersburg market. Rather than eroticize the public h ­ ouse, Dostoevsky demystifies and deromanticizes the brothel. The room where Liza sees clients, for example, doubles as a storage closet: “The narrow, cramped and low-­ceilinged room, filled with a huge dresser and cluttered up with boxes, clothing, and all sorts of rags” functions both as Liza’s boudoir and the setting for her encounter with the under­g round man.51 The cramped space also possesses an allegorical meaning in that it suggests the enclosure and confinement of the sex worker’s physical body. As Alain Corbin argues in his study of commercial sex in France, the brothel, along with regulation, placed ­women ­under the regulatory surveillance of the state, thereby theoretically preventing the possibility that they could reenter society. In his explication of the writings of French moral hygienist Alexandre Parent-­Duchâtelet, Corbin links the regulation of commercial sex to a broader panic that sex workers could escape the public h ­ ouse and infiltrate the sacred, domestic space. “They surround us . . . ​they gain access to our homes,” writes Parent-­Duchâtelet in 1836.52 As in France, Rus­sia’s policy of regulation aimed to enclose sex workers in brothels to keep a solid divide between “honest w ­ omen” and “whores.” Dostoevsky challenges this

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demarcation by exposing the exploitative under­pinnings of the brothel, where men participate in the commodification of w ­ omen through transactional sex. Dostoevsky uses the under­g round man’s fantasies about saving Liza as a way to critique the social and religious hy­poc­risy b­ ehind redemption narratives. The under­g round man admits to “indulging in sweet daydreams” about how Liza ­will undergo a complete reformation ­under his tutelage. He describes his fantasies to the reader: I’m saving Liza just b­ ecause she’s coming regularly to see me and I’m talking to her. . . . ​I develop her, educate her. Eventually I realize she’s in love with me, passionately in love. I pretend as though I d­ on’t understand. . . . ​In the end, all embarrassed, beautiful, trembling and weeping she throws herself at my feet and says that I am her savior and that she loves me more than anything on earth. . . . (In short, I start indulging in some unfathomable noble subtleties of the Eu­ro­pean, George-­Sandian variety . . .) But now, now—­you are mine, you are my creation, you are pure and beautiful, you are my beautiful wife!53 Dostoevsky indicts the under­g round man’s self-­aggrandizement through cruel irony, given that in the next breath he refers to Liza as a slut (merzavka). Like the epigraph in part 2, which is taken from Nekrasov’s “When from the darkness . . . ,” the daydream mocks the conventions of the redemption narrative, showing them to be clichéd and patronizing. By the same token, Dostoevsky parodies the reformation-­through-­education paradigms practiced among socialist utopians in Chernyshevsky’s coterie and presented in What Is to Be Done? Dostoevsky asks readers to consider what, exactly, it is that gives a man the right to “create” a ­woman as his “beautiful wife” when in actuality he thinks of her as his social inferior. It is not enough, however, to reveal the inherent exploitative under­pinnings of the salvation narrative. Dostoevsky completes his critique by focusing on the under­g round man’s response when Liza visits his apartment—­which, like the brothel, comes to symbolize enclosure and entrapment. The under­g round man’s apartment functions as source of shame, as a vis­ i­ble expression of his under­lying agony. When Liza arrives and sees his shabby apartment, the power dynamics are reversed: whereas he held command in the brothel, she now witnesses his humiliation and embarrassment. While he describes his apartment as “my mansion, my shell, my case, in which I hid from all mankind,” when he sees Liza, he realizes that from her perspective the space is filthy, and he is overwhelmed with self-­disgust.54 Compounding his abasement is the presence of his servant, Apollon, who reminds the under­g round

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man of his inability to hold authority over ­others—­even ­those supposedly subservient to him. Sex with Liza allows him to avenge his decimated pride while si­mul­ta­neously reasserting his lost dominance over Liza and Apollon. The circulation of money in Notes from Under­ground emphasizes the venality of St. Petersburg, where a market economy allows its citizens to justify sexual commerce through the logic of commodity exchange. The brothel setting most clearly underscores the theme of commodification, given that physical intimacy is exchanged for money. But similar moments of commodification, and of transactional exchanges that are dehumanizing, appear in connection to the under­g round man’s strug­gle for meaning and power. A ­ fter alienating himself from the group of men attending the dinner at H ­ otel de Paris, he pleads with his acquaintance, Simonov, to lend him money so he can join them at the brothel. “Take it,” exclaims Simonov, “if y­ ou’re so utterly without shame!”55 Simonov’s gesture, akin to paying a sex worker, places the under­g round man in a position of debt; unable to transcend his own commodification, he “pays back” this debt by forcing Liza to see herself as a sold ­woman. But instead of acquiescing to this closed system of exchange between men, Dostoevsky shows Liza moving beyond it through her compassion for the under­g round man’s suffering. As in his subsequent depiction of Sonia Marmeladova in Crime and Punishment, Dostoevsky’s fallen ­women understand the power of empathy as a means to circumvent the cold capitalism of St. Petersburg. While Liza manages to transcend the system of commodification, the under­g round man remains firmly entrenched in the system of commodity exchange. Although Dostoevsky trou­bles the salvation paradigm in his works, the cultural belief that fallen w ­ omen needed saving, and that male clients can bring about their redemption, remained a dominant theme in literary works of the period. Visual culture offers a complementary assessment of the theme of redemption and salvation of fallen ­women in the context of the brothel. While far less represented in visual culture than in prose of the period, works like Vladimir Makovsky’s Osviashchenie publichnogo doma (The Blessing of the Public House, 1900) imagine the brothel worker as tortured by her own conscience (see figure 1.3). The image is a rare example of a Rus­sian artist depicting the brothel. Makovsky’s watercolor painting was likely intended for personal study; ­there exists no rec­ord of its display in Rus­sia, and l­ittle is known about the work.56 In part, the relative silence concerning the painting can be attributed both to harsh restrictions by the censors and the fact that the nineteenth-­century Rus­sian art establishment—­which Makovsky, as a teacher at the Imperial Acad­emy of Art in St. Petersburg, belonged and helped codify—­stressed the

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Figure 1.3. ​Vladimir Makovsky, Osviashchenie publichnogo doma (The Blessing of the Public House), 1900. Sketch, 44 × 33 cm. State Museum of the History of Religion, St. Petersburg.

importance of art that, in the assessment of Molly Brunson, promoted “clear signification and a serious message.”57 In other words, Rus­sia did not possess a tradition that produced a Henri de Toulouse-­Lautrec or Edgar Degas, with their eroticized visions of brothel workers. Such images of sex workers, as art historian Linda Nochlin poetically summarizes, are themselves indicative of an artistic culture that privileges objectification as a source of enlightenment. “The erotic undertow,” writes Nochlin, “pulls Lautrec’s female bodies down into the bottomless sea of naturalized abjection.”58 Charles Bernheimer offers a similar assessment in his study of prostitution in nineteenth-­ century France, proposing that images of the brothel offer a “rhetorization of female difference” that “may be the most sophisticated of misogynistic strategies, conflating the contradictions of voyeurism and fetishism.”59 Makovsky’s Osviashchenie publichnogo doma aligns with Nochlin’s and Bernheimer’s power­ful analyses of the voy­eur­is­tic under­pinnings of brothel paintings while also recalling Brunson’s formulations of nineteenth-­century Rus­sian realism. Makovsky is tempted to eroticize the brothel—as his French counter­parts did—­but is also wedded to a tradition that aimed to expose social injustice through “serious” painting.

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Makovsky blends didacticism with a touch of titillation in his depiction of the brothel workers. The front plane features a sex worker who leans against the wall to overhear the priest’s blessings. The viewer’s eye is drawn to the interior room, where the priest and the com­pany of w ­ omen circle the blessed icon. The double framing is Makovsky’s gesture t­oward “pulling back the veil” on the spiritual agony of the brothel workers who, confronted with the icon of the Holy Virgin, are overcome with emotion. Makovsky uses light to suggest spiritual awakening; the darkness of the exterior room where the ­woman stands alone contains the remnants of the night’s revelries, with the overturned furniture, empty champagne ­bottles, and general disarray. By contrast, the interior room brightens around the icon, suggesting a religious experience. Depicting visual anguish allows Makovsky an ele­ment of titillation (the ­woman’s chemise hangs suggestively off her shoulder) while fulfilling a social indictment of the church and state, given that both institutions stand privy to the venal economy. As in Dostoevsky’s Notes from Under­ground, Makovsky’s painting shows the brothel as a space of enclosure and confinement. ­Whether through regulation, which literally kept ­women confined in h ­ ouses of tolerance, or through the figurative suffocating moralism of redemption narratives, the brothel symbolically linked the sex worker’s story to a traditional vision of entrapment.

Public Spaces for Public ­Women Unlike the brothel, which appears as a signifier of ­women’s economic and social oppression, urban spaces like taverns and cafés provided alluring settings to explore the possibilities of extramarital love without overt moralization. As Mark Steinberg has shown in his study of fin de siècle St. Petersburg, the “urban landscape offered all the enticements of any g­ reat city, not only opportunities for work . . . ​but a vast array of stimulations and encounters.”60 While Steinberg’s study largely addresses the literary culture and social history of the early twentieth c­ entury, his assessment of St. Petersburg’s public space holds true for previous de­cades as well. Christopher Ely, for example, examines the cultural atmosphere of the 1860s, in which “new alcohol-­f ueled public spaces including cabarets (kafeshantany) and popu­ lar ‘dance class’ establishments, facilitated the emergence of a ‘tavern public’ (kabatskaia publika).”61 Commercial sex undoubtedly played an integral role in the formulation of ­these spaces and their importance both to the “tavern public” and the St. Petersburg intelligent­sia. At times such urban locales appear in literary and visual texts as sites of erotic ambiguity where pleas­ur­able pastimes

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and joy-­seeking activities suggest a vibrant sexualized urban center. But cultural commentators also stressed the threat of public venues like cafés and taverns on the moral hygiene of the nation. Such spaces blurred the bound­ aries of traditional gender identities as ­women sought out alcohol, dancing, and other activities typically kept within the confines of the brothel. Images of ­women enjoying cigarettes, for instance, could convey at once social transgression and sexual innuendo, as “smoking by ­women expressed their in­de­pen­ dence from the expectation that they perform the traditional roles of wives and ­mothers.”62 Cultural production in the second half of the nineteenth c­ entury interplays social anxiety and sensual plea­sure in ways that show a fraught tension over the city’s topography and ­women’s place within it. Not unlike in Berlin or Paris, St. Petersburg’s cafés operated as social venues for dif­fer­ent classes to mingle in. In ways similar to what art historian T. J. Clark describes in his study on modernism, Rus­sians examined the pleasures and excitement provided by outdoor theaters and cafés, taking note of a new mode of urban existence predicated on movement and consumption.63 The illustration Uveselitel’nye zavedeniia v S.-­Peterburge i okrestnostiakh (Amusement venues in St. Petersburg and its suburbs, 1879) showcases the venues available to men and ­women for intermingling in the northern capital (see figures 1.4 and 1.5). As the illustrations show, w ­ omen entered t­hese spaces and asserted their right to influence the shaping of Rus­sian nightlife. This new vision of womanhood appears most vividly in the central illustration of the Summer Garden (figure 1.5), where men and w ­ omen sit, converse, and smoke in the relaxed café setting. The artist hints at quid pro quo arrangements but refrains from making any outright proclamation that the ­couples engage in transactional sex. While it is tempting to assume that the ­women are sex workers, the depiction of femininity ­here blurs propriety with flirtation in ways that mask the real­ity of the situations portrayed. ­Women of high society and the nobility would not have ventured into cafés, but if they did, they might have looked very similar to the ­woman featured in the lower left corner, who hovers over two Asian men enjoying a glass of wine. The two ­women to her right, also finely dressed, sit and look nonchalantly as their male companion smokes with his back to the viewer. To the far left, a faceless crowd streams past the patrons, confirming Allison Leigh’s description of the café as “an ele­ment quin­tes­sen­tial to modernity” where “dif­fer­ent levels of society muddled and confused, impossible to delineate . . . ​rubbed elbows in compressed space.”64 The mixture of ethnicities and social classes is also affirmed by the man featured in the lower right corner. Heavyset, with a thick beard, he might be a tradesman or member of the merchant class; the w ­ oman accompanying him sits with her back facing the viewer, hiding the nature of their exchange and their relationship to each

Figure 1.4. ​ Uveselitel’nye zavedeniia v S.-­Peterburge i okrestnostiakh (Amusement Venues in St. Petersburg and Its Suburbs), illustration from Vsemirnaia illiustratsiia (World Illustrated), 1879. Print, 39.5 × 59. State Museum of the History of St. Petersburg.

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Figure 1.5. ​ Uveselitel’nye zavedeniia v S.-­Peterburge i okrestnostiakh (Amusement Venues in St. Petersburg and Its Suburbs), detail.

other. The unifying quality of ­these vari­ous encounters—­whether it be a man and w ­ oman walking arm in arm or a c­ ouple sitting together enjoying champagne—is ambiguity. Suggesting that St. Petersburg operates as a space of sexual and social adventure, as the illustration does, highlights how Rus­ sians coming of age in the late imperial period negotiated gender relations in ways that could be exciting and liberating for both sexes. Another prominent space that created excitement about the possibility of venal relations was the glass-­enclosed Passazh located on Nevsky Prospect in central St. Petersburg. It was built in 1848 and modeled a­ fter Eu­ro­pean arcades. The luxury goods and expensive wares sold in the Passazh enabled Rus­sia’s “urban elite to demarcate itself from the lower estate and establish its identity based upon consumption.” In her study of the Passazh, Abby Schrader points out how the building, with its upscale shopping stalls, not only stimulated desire for high-­end goods but created an atmosphere predicated on transaction where consumer desire activated all the senses. Confirming Walter Benjamin’s assessment of arcades as “centers of commerce in luxury items,” the Passazh amplified the marketization of desire and the commodification of leisure culture.65 Mercenary sex and quid pro quo exchanges helped solidify the space as “the epicenter of Petersburg’s commercial sex trade.”66 By the 1860s, the boulevard presses focused on the Passazh to convey a deeper concern about the blurring of traditional categories of w ­ omen, for, as Schrader notes, “­there was a g­ reat deal of fluidity between categories—­a seamstress

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could make ends meet by selling her own body if needed or a female shopper could provide sexual f­ avors to a gentleman suitor in exchange for a costly bauble that she had seen on display ­earlier.”67 Transactional relations of this sort ­were buttressed by the unique space of the Passazh, which, as Katia Dianina has shown, functioned as one of the few venues in St. Petersburg that allowed for the intermingling of p­ eople of dif­fer­ent ranks and genders.68 To be sure, the Passazh operated as a site not only for heterosexual relations but also same-­ sex liaisons. As early as the 1860s, writes Dan Healey, the Passazh “was already attracting blackmailers who preyed on the men picking up available [male] youths in its upper reaches.”69 Reflecting on the mixing of social classes, the journalist Vladimir Mikhnevich bemoaned of the Passazh’s cultural decline, writing in 1874 that it “had completely lost its former glory as a center of elegant trade and elegant promenades for an elegant public.”70 Some of the era’s cultural commentators, particularly Mikhnevich, interpreted the expansion of the city’s nightlife as a telling sign of rising immorality. Reflecting on the “hopelessness and chaos” growing in St. Petersburg, Mikhnevich paints a dire picture of its establishments: “everywhere you look, a kingdom of death is spreading decay and corruption.” Literary texts likewise focus on the urban landscape and stress how public spaces cultivate debauchery, crime, and vio­lence. Dostoevsky depicts the city’s taverns and “pleas­ur­able establishments” and shows how sexual commerce spreads from the taverns into the streets. In Crime and Punishment, which contains Dostoevsky’s most developed critique of state-­regulated prostitution, Raskolnikov is drawn to a tavern in the notorious Haymarket Square where w ­ omen openly solicit clients: “A big building h ­ oused several taverns and other eating and drinking establishments; t­ here was a constant stream of ­women rushing out of the building who ­were dressed simply, with their heads uncovered. They gathered in bunches of two or three, mostly near the basement entrances, where a few steps led to the vari­ous pleas­ur­able establishments.” A ­woman named Duklida steps forward from the crowd to ask Raskolnikov for money to buy a drink. A neighboring ­woman, described as “a pockmarked wench of about thirty, all covered with bruises, and with a swollen upper lip,” witnesses the exchange and chides Duklida for her brazenness.71 Raskolnikov quickly moves on, but the image of the abused, impoverished ­woman forced into sex work reverberates through the novel. While the streets of St. Petersburg could signify unparalleled excitement and sexual adventure for some citizens of the nineteenth c­ entury, for Dostoevsky the boulevard and city ave­nues are spaces of destitution and vio­lence. In part 1, chapter 4 of Crime and Punishment Raskolnikov walks along Konnogvardeisky Boulevard and notices an oddly dressed girl, about the age of

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fifteen, who stumbles, visibly drunk, through the street. When he spies a dandy hovering nearby, Raskolnikov assumes the worst. “Look over ­there,” he emphatically tells a policeman; “that overdressed dandy [frant] . . . ​he’s wanting to get hold of her . . . ​and take her off somewhere.” “Oh, what a shame,” bemoans the policeman, “she’s still but a child.” Raskolnikov, at first overtaken by a need to intervene, suddenly grows apathetic, shouting at the officer to forget it and “let the man have his fun.”72 Raskolnikov cynically reflects that the officer, rather than helping the girl, ­will simply take a bribe from the man and “that w ­ ill be the end of it.” The girl is no longer an individual victim; Raskolnikov envisions her as just another common occurrence of sexual exploitation in St. Petersburg. Raskolnikov reflects on her fate and concludes that, like so many ­others, she ­will be beaten and abused, forced to join a brothel, succumb to disease, and perish at the tender age of nineteen. Regardless of the intentions of the dandy eyeing the young w ­ oman, for Raskolnikov and the novel’s readers he represents a predatory masculinity that flourishes on the St. Petersburg streets and in its numerous taverns and cafés. Dostoevsky ­will contrast this image of male sexual licentiousness with the saintly female figure of Sonia Marmeladova, who manages through meekness and empathy to bring about a moral regeneration in Raskolnikov.73 As the ultimate signifier of St. Petersburg duality, Sonia poses a moral conundrum for Raskolnikov, who pointedly asks, “How can such shame and such disgrace live in you side by side with your other quite dif­fer­ent and holy feelings?”74 Looking at Sonia, Raskolnikov sees only the inherent binaries of the city; she is both saint and sinner, virgin and whore. He cannot fathom a world that allows for a third type of womanhood outside this traditional dichotomy. The city itself seems to hamper his consciousness, which is why only a­ fter leaving St. Petersburg can Raskolnikov begin a new life for himself with Sonia.75 As the images and texts examined in this chapter show, St. Petersburg performed vari­ous functions in the cultural imagination. Nascent forms of cap­it­ al­ist exchange influenced relations between men and women in ways that artists and writers depicted in nuanced, and often contradictory, terms. Was Nevsky Prospect a place of sexual deviance, of adventure—or neither, or both? Could ­women and men flirt openly and provocatively with one another in public without being considered sex workers and clients? Moreover, why did the city’s inhabitants find extramarital sexual freedom in the spaces of the outdoor café or boulevard, and not where the Ministry of the Interior intended, the brothel? The cultural elite asked ­these questions, providing their own answers and interpretation of the city and its destiny. For Dostoevsky, St. Petersburg and its citizens hover between damnation and salvation; its dirty slums, stinking canals,

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and oppressively cramped streets neither inspire the ­human psyche nor elevate the individual. For e­ very Sonia, t­ here is an e­ ager predator—­dressed like a French dandy—­ready to abuse and molest the innocent. What, Raskolnikov asks, is the point in intervening when every­one lives according to the rules of scientific utilitarianism, when every­thing is guided by self-interest? Dostoevsky expressed a power­ful vision of St. Petersburg, but his was not the only conceptualization of venal sex. Illustrations in Strekoza and the day’s popu­lar journals show how St. Petersburg spaces like Nevsky Prospect and the Summer Garden offered room for playful flirtation without overt moralization. ­Toward the end of the c­ entury, visuals of ­women propositioning men took on par­tic­u­lar resonance as the city expanded to make room for the influx of mi­grants, many of whom turned to sex work, w ­ hether as an occasional supplement to their income or a long-­term profession. While not matching the quantity or quality of their Eu­ro­pean counter­parts, Rus­sian artists nevertheless depicted moments of innuendo, proposition, and quid pro quo agreements. A drawing by Aleksander Vakhrameev portrays a c­ ouple on the bank of the Moika River (see figure 1.6). The ­woman, with her worn, shabby black coat and wide-­brimmed hat, smiles coyly at the gentleman. It is hard to say who propositions whom in this image, ­because Vakrameev does not suggest that one of the individuals is prey, the other predator. Such ambiguity indicates how ­people of both genders navigated sexual desires in late imperial St. Petersburg as they frequented the city’s cafés, taverns, and brothels or strolled along Nevsky Prospect.

Figure 1.6. ​Aleksandr Vakhrameev, Parochka na beregu Moiki (A ­Couple on the Banks of the Moika), 1906. Watercolor on paper, 33.2 × 22.2 cm. State Museum of the History of St. Petersburg.

Ch a p ter 2

“Safety Valves of Social Passions” Regulating Commercial Sex

The ­Great Reforms, initiated by Tsar Alexander II in the aftermath of Rus­sia’s crushing defeat in the Crimean War (1853–56), brought significant changes to the country’s social and ­legal institutions in the quest for modernization.1 The emancipation of the serfs in 1861 and the expansive reconstitution of Rus­sian society facilitated a productive reassessment both of the country’s institutions and w ­ omen’s oppression within them.2 The ­Great Reforms “unleashed new challenges to the traditional gender and f­ amily order,” explains Barbara Alpern Engel, as social activists called for ­women’s access to education and their economic in­de­pen­dence.3 As commentators turned a critical eye to the patriarchal structures upholding both ­family and society, they found their attention increasingly drawn to the most destitute of ­women, the urban prostitute. Unlike her counter­parts in the ­middle ranks who might benefit, albeit meagerly, from opportunities recently made available to ­women, reformers stressed that the registered prostitute remained solidly bound within the administrative system (nadzor).4 Writers ­imagined such ­women as paramount victims of a sexual double standard that relegated impoverished ­women to a life of destitution and sexual degradation. How best to prevent w ­ omen from entering the commercial sex trade became part of public discourse and ensuing debates on the “­woman question.” Originally devoted to countering the lack of education for upper-­class ladies, the ­woman question expanded to encompass the pitfalls of domestic and so48



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cial in­equality. As a distinct social issue condoned by Rus­sian law and regulated by the medical police, commercial sex became part of the discourse on the w ­ oman question while operating si­mul­ta­neously within the realm of public health. As writers led the condemnation of prostitution through works of prose fiction, they actively responded to con­temporary medical and so­cio­ log­i­cal discourse, which presented sex workers as deviants inclined ­toward pathological be­hav­iors. While their sympathies rested with impoverished ­women, authors could not ignore social biases against sex workers and the reigning view that fallen w ­ omen ­were atavistic, morally depraved, and diseased. In order to showcase the competing discourses on the regulation of prostitution, authors turned to the theatricality of the courtroom to illustrate the injustices waged against public w ­ omen. The writer Vsevolod Garshin, for example, offers a power­ful image of a St. Petersburg sex worker in his 1878 story “An Incident” (“Proisshestvie”) by showing the heroine, Nadezhda Nikolaevna, unjustly condemned by judge and jury as she ­faces charges for disturbing the peace. “Why does the entire public look so scornfully at me?” she angrily reflects, “Yes, I have a dirty and detestable duty, mine is the most despicable job. But it’s a job just the same!”5 Through Nadezhda’s poignant reflection, Garshin manages to show the hy­poc­risy of the authorities who sanction her sexual ­labor while actively harassing and berating her. Equally vulnerable to vio­lence by the state and her clientele, the prostitute came to symbolize the epitome of patriarchal overreach and the marginalization of Rus­sia’s impoverished ­women. Male authors took up the issue of venal love not only out of empathy for registered prostitutes but ­because the sold ­woman’s body intrigued them. They characterized such ­women as both titillating and horrifying, making them the arch-­symbolic figure associated with urban living and the anx­i­eties of modernity. “The street-­walker is like stinking ­water,” reflects Dmitry Nekhliudov in Leo Tolstoy’s final novel, Resurrection (Voskresenie, 1899); she offers her body “to anybody with a thirst stronger than his revulsion.”6 The streetwalker disgusts Nekhliudov—­and by extension the men of his generation—­because although she has sex with multiple partners, he cannot help but find her appealing. Hoping to make their fiction as close to the lived experience of prostitutes as pos­si­ble, novelists drew from the daily press (and in some cases, their own firsthand knowledge) to showcase tales of vio­lence against ­women who fell victim to homicidal clients. Late imperial writers who fixated on the sex worker’s body mobilized the themes of vio­lence and sexual abuse more than their pre­de­ces­sors had. As I argue, the shift to more gory descriptions and sensational endings is a response to enlivened public discourse on both the emancipation of ­women and the

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supposed deviance of ­women engaging in sexual commerce. On the cusp of the twentieth ­century, sexually liberated ­women (including sex workers) threatened to destabilize the ­family unit. Gruesome murder scenes, bloody suicides, syphilitic rantings of brothel clientele, exile to Siberia: t­ hese are the culminations of fin de siècle tales on commercial sex. Prose fiction telling of murdered sex workers offered an ave­nue to silence the most disruptive female sexuality and contain such w ­ omen’s stories through plots ending in their death. Such fiction also blamed w ­ omen’s emancipation as a primary cause for transgressive female be­hav­ior. ­Women who sought more financial, sexual, and personal autonomy no longer abided by patriarchal norms. That they might engage in occasional nonreproductive sex likened them to prostitutes in the public’s imagination. Thus, lit­er­a­ture served as a repository to showcase both the possibilities of emancipation and the ­g reat anx­i­eties associated with more sexual freedom for w ­ omen. This chapter analyzes four texts debated in leading journals, lecture halls, and salons throughout Rus­sia. Each work represents a shift in the national narrative on femininity, the commodification of sex, and the discussion of ­women’s rights. Four writers—­Vsevolod Krestovsky, Vsevolod Garshin, Leo Tolstoy, and Leonid Andreev—­weighed in on the hy­poc­risy of state-­sanctioned prostitution in ways that left readers angered and horrified that the state profited from the selling of sex. Yet, like other members of the intelligent­sia, ­these writers could not decide whether the prostitute was prey or predator. Was she the victim of upper-­class male exploitation, as outlined in Krestovsky’s The Slums of Petersburg (Peterburgskie trushchoby, 1864–66) and Tolstoy’s Resurrection? Or, was she a drunken outcast, like Manechka from Andreev’s “In the Fog” (“V tumane,” 1902)? ­These authors vacillated between vilifying sex workers and defending them, in part b­ ecause the sex trade posed an unsolvable prob­lem for Rus­sians of all classes. At stake was the health of the nation, which panicked medical authorities claimed was u ­ nder threat by the bodies of diseased ­women who ­were infecting scores of men with syphilis and other venereal diseases. The four texts examined in this chapter engage with con­temporary debates made by sociologists, medical professionals, and criminal anthropologists on prostitution and public health. Writings by Garshin, for example, openly polemicized with the theories of early sociologist Nikolai Mikhailovsky, who defended the government’s role in regulating the sex trade as necessary to curtail the spread of syphilis. “Prostitution has an im­mense benefit,” explained Mikahilovsky in 1869, for “it functions as a safety valve of social passions.”7 The meta­phor of the “safety valve” reappears in literary works to critique the notion, propagated by authorities, that prostitution acts as a repository for excess male sexual desire. In the final de­cades leading up to the twentieth



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c­ entury, language evocative of cesspits, putrid ­water, stench, and decay increasingly appears in fiction to define the sex worker’s body and her trade. Like their counter­parts in France, Rus­sian writers drew from the imagery of public hygienists who connected the public ­woman to the functionality of the city’s sewer system and its use in channeling waste, bodily fluids, and filth.8 Discourse on prostitution intensified over the 1880s as reports emerged outlining the high rate of syphilis among registered sex workers.9 The advent of criminal anthropology and Darwinian evolutionary thought likewise fomented anxiety about the prostitute as a particularly dangerous ele­ment within Rus­ sian society who knowingly threatened public health. As Laura Engelstein explains, “­because it was linked to the spread of disease, prostitution came to embody a diseased condition in its own right.”10 Guided by the theories of the Italian criminal anthropologist Cesare Lomboso and the belief in “born criminals,” Rus­sia’s moral hygienists, including the venereologist Veniamin Tarnovsky, argued that prostitutes had a propensity for social deviance and criminal activity that could be traced to biological characteristics. In Prostitution and Abolitionism (Prostitutsiia i abolitsionizm, 1888) Tarnovsky argued that his documentation of physical abnormalities among prostitutes proved to be an outward sign of their moral depravity.11 Only through regulation and careful “scientific” study could authorities curtail the spread of venereal disease and counteract the public ­woman’s negative influence on society. The research of Tarnovsky’s wife, the trained physician Praskovia Tarnovskaia, helped buttress the school of criminal anthropology at home and abroad, as she contributed data on female Rus­sian murderers to Cesare Lombroso’s The Criminal ­Woman (La donna delinquente, 1893).12 Lombroso concluded that w ­ omen’s inherent “primitiveness” made them more susceptible to criminal tendencies than men. The body, argued Lombroso, conveyed proof of the “degenerative characteristics” of female criminals, with prostitutes exhibiting the most frequent physical anomalies, including head size, jaw weight, and teeth structure.13 Translated into Rus­sian in 1897, Lombroso’s The Criminal W ­ oman proved im­mensely influential, and while some members of the Rus­sian so­cio­ log­i­cal school resisted his conclusion of biological determinism, they nevertheless echoed their Italian colleague when pathologizing prostitutes and ­women more generally as biologically inferior and less evolved than men.14 Critique of Lombroso’s theories played a vital role in prose fiction as writers like Leo Tolstoy countered beliefs on such w ­ omen’s supposed propensity for crime. The question of how to interpret the sex worker’s fate within the context of writings by sociologists and medical prac­ti­tion­ers produced a rich, contradictory polemic in late imperial prose. Adding to the urgency w ­ ere writings

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by the country’s leading experts, particularly Tarnovsky, who argued that brothel workers and street­walkers intentionally infected clients and knowingly spread disease. “They love their station in life,” explained Tarnovsky, ­because “they live in constant dishonesty, in offense to h ­ uman decency, and in the most severe debasement of the ­human condition.”15 The prose writers discussed in this chapter engaged with such misogynistic and ste­reo­typical beliefs concerning Rus­sia’s public ­women. But, as careful analy­sis of their texts shows, the sex worker’s erotic body troubled male authors ­because of its sexual potency. Krestovsky, Garshin, Tolstoy, and Andreev used their prose as a springboard for debate and eagerly defended the humanity of sex workers while si­mul­ta­ neously underscoring the public ­woman’s sexual difference as a threat to the social order, traditional gender identity, and the ­family unit.

“Prostitution is a Gangrene”: Vsevolod Krestovsky’s The Slums of Petersburg “We have to remember one ­thing—[prostitution] is a gangrene plaguing Rus­sian society; gangrenous sores cannot be attractive and aesthetic.” —­Vsevolod Krestovsky, The Slums of Petersburg

Krestovsky’s best seller The Slums of Petersburg, published serially between 1864 and 1866 in the journal Notes of the Fatherland (Otechestvennye zapiski), depicts the horrors of urban living, including the misdeeds of murderous philanderers and ­children trafficked into the sex trade. Inspired by Eugene Sue’s The Mysteries of Paris (Les Mystères de Paris, 1842–43), Krestovsky researched the underbelly of St. Petersburg for his monumental novel, outlining the most sensational ele­ments for a curious public.16 The plot contains many twists and turns, but the central focus is on the manipulations of the Shadursky ­family and the fates of their illegitimate ­children, including the young and destitute Masha, who eventually turns to sex work as her only means to survive in the northern capital. The precision with which Krestovsky portrayed the brothels and prisons of St. Petersburg caught the eye of the Tret’e otdelenie, the Third Section of the tsar’s chancellery, which included the secret police. At the behest of the Third Section, the censor demanded that editors remove the novel’s first installment from the presses. One member of the Third Section recommended arresting Krestovsky for the inclusion of a particularly horrific incident, which was “so obscene” that it “offended all feelings of morality.”17 The censor objected to Krestovsky’s inclusion of a sadistic lottery in which the winner re-



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ceives the right to have first “dibs” on Luiza, a virgin recently recruited to the brothel. Krestovsky compounds the debauchery by having the girl’s f­ather, who is employed as the brothel’s piano player, provide musical accompaniment to what he realizes—­only too late—is his d­ aughter’s initiation into brothel life. Hoodwinked by the establishment’s malicious and conniving madam, Aleksandra Pakhomovna, Luiza agrees to join the brothel. Forced to pick the “winning” ticket herself, Luiza selects number 48 and hears the answer “Mine!” from a man with a “beastly voracious” voice. He subsequently drags her off to the applause and cheering of all in attendance.18 Krestovsky’s lurid description demonstrated for readers the depravity of the aristocracy, which infected all segments of society with its insatiable sexual lust. The novel depicts how the Shadursky ­family combines seduction and treachery with outright exploitation of the weak and defenseless. Central to the spread of evil in St. Petersburg is the scourge of commercial sex, the “gangrene in Rus­sian society,” as Krestovsky terms it. Taking it upon himself to explain to readers what they themselves “have never seen,” Krestovsky describes the root of “the worst, most ruthless, debauched slavery, that leads to the complete annihilation of a ­woman’s individuality along with all her rights” and lowers her “to the level of barbarity that borders on complete idiotism.” Brought to the very depths of ­human suffering, t­ hese w ­ omen eagerly welcome death. Such is the case for Masha, who, upon coughing up blood, realizes that her death is imminent, and joyfully exclaims, “Tuberculosis! At last! Thank God!”19 Warning his reader not to take offense at the subsequent description of brothel life, Krestovsky describes the position of brothel workers vis-­à-­vis the judicial system. “In relation to fallen ­women the law is placed in a precarious position,” ­because, he explains, “[the law] cannot sanction depravity, but allows it, endures it as an inevitable evil, yielding a huge mass of the population for this cause.” The subsequent chapters vividly demonstrate to readers how ­women enter brothels out of desperation, immediately become indebted to their madams, and find themselves servicing clients six days a week. Some ­women manage to “cultivate their inner morality and femininity” by erecting a barrier between their true spiritual selves and their “immoral” brothel work. Such division produces “a strange duality”: “In one and the same creature is combined w ­ oman—in the best meaning of the word—­and a harlot [publichnaia razvratnitsa].”20 Krestovsky describes this state of being as inherently contradictory: how can a ­woman be both virtuous and vile? In the traditional understanding, a woman could be e­ ither sinful or saintly, m ­ other or whore. That the St. Petersburg sex worker manages to combine both poles of femininity (the moral and the depraved) pre­sents a prob­lem for Krestovsky.

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While Krestovsky envisions this duality as paradoxical, it is commonly found in Rus­sian depictions of w ­ omen employed in commercial sex. The Madonna/ whore binary appears in Nikolai Gogol’s depiction of the neznakomka (unknown w ­ oman) in “Nevsky Prospect,” in the character Sonia in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, and ­will haunt subsequent iterations of the fallen w ­ oman’s plot in works by Vsevolod Garshin, Leo Tolstoy, and Leonid Andreev. From a psychological perspective, ­these male authors express ­g reat anxiety over the sold w ­ oman’s sexual difference; she is both enticing and threatening in her sexual awareness. As Charles Bernheimer puts it, the “prostitute is i­magined as animalistic, intense, a sensual feast for the blasé upper-­ class male. But almost immediately her sexuality becomes threatening.”21 The eroticism of sex workers challenged the conventional understanding that ­women lacked libido; a w ­ oman’s engagement in sexual activity was purely for reproductive purposes, not for her own physical gratification. What irks Krestovsky and his contemporaries tells us something crucial about the conceptualization of female sexuality in the 1860s. For male writers, the fact that a ­woman could be sexually active outside marriage while preserving her morality brought the entire social contract into question. The two components constructing femininity—­marriage and motherhood—­contributed to ­woman’s status as morally superior to men. But if a ­woman could cultivate her “inner life and morality,” as Krestovsky puts it, while engaging in sex with multiple partners and avoiding child-­rearing, then what exactly was the difference between honest w ­ omen and harlots? The blurring of t­ hese categories produced anx­ie­ ties that threatened to unravel not only the differences between categories of ­women but the construction of the ­family unit. As a means to sublimate ­these fears, authors relied on sensational plots that culminated in the sex worker’s untimely death. By expelling her body from the narrative, writers could reestablish the social structure and w ­ omen’s place in the traditional patriarchal order. Writers thus employed strategies to encapsulate the eroticized female body in narratives that contain hypersexuality. Krestovsky’s The Slums of Petersburg won immediate commercial success, with avid readers complaining about the difficulty in obtaining their own copies. But while the public eagerly consumed Krestovsky’s story of moral depravity, the reception among the literati was far from positive. The editorial staff of the popu­lar weekly journal The Spark (Iskra) devoted an entire column, featured over several issues, that poked fun at the melodramatic content in The Slums of Petersburg (see figure 2.1). With ample caricatures and humorous commentary, satirists pointed out the absurdity of the plot and the unbelievability of characters like Masha. The Slums of Petersburg morphed into a “novella about a coffee



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Figure 2.1. ​Illustration from Iskra (The Spark), 1867. Slavic, East Eu­ro­pean, and Eurasian Collection, University of Illinois Urbana-­Champaign.

cup, a fork, and a silver ruble,” with a caricature featuring a hysterical w ­ oman catching fire from a cup of hot coffee. Plot points are exaggerated and reformulated to pre­sent the novel as a mishmash of crimes and intrigue. Heart-­wrenching death scenes, including Masha’s, devolve into melodramatic spectacle. Although the editors at The Spark mocked Krestovsky for his convoluted plot and exaggerated depictions, his tale of St. Petersburg debauchery made a lasting impact on the book market. If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, Krestovsky had a cabal of writers following in his footsteps. Texts modeling

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themselves on his best seller appeared on the market in an attempt to repeat the original’s fame.22 Following Krestovsky’s lead, writers set their stories and novels within the urban decay of St. Petersburg; in ­these narratives, a naive young ­woman who has recently arrived to the capital cannot survive on the meager wages offered for her work and thus inevitably turns to sex work. Even as late as 1910, works like The New Petersburg Slums: Sketches of Life in the Capital (Novye peterburgskie trushchoby: ocherki stolichnoi zhizni) appeared in bookstores, thus proving that the tales of criminal m ­ others, duped w ­ idows, and girls sold into the “white slave trade” remained popu­lar with readers. Paradoxically, even as The Slums of Petersburg made Krestovsky famous, it tarnished his status as a writer. His popularity slowly waned ­toward the end of the 1860s, in part ­because established writers dismissed the novel as charlatanism.23 Ivan Turgenev reportedly condemned The Slums of Petersburg as “pure nonsense,” whereas o ­ thers, including the influential publisher Aleksei Suvorin, thought it l­ittle more than direct transcription of daily life. Although Dostoevsky initially regretted missing the opportunity to publish Krestovsky’s series in his own journal, nearing the 1870s his attitude t­oward the younger writer soured.24 And in general, Krestovsky’s subsequent conservativism alienated him from his former coterie of influential pochvenniki. Coming from pochva, the Rus­sian word for “soil,” the pochvenniki (literally “men of the soil”) w ­ ere a group of like-­minded intellectuals closely associated with Dostoevsky’s journal Time (Vremia). Advocating for a “return to the soil,” the pochvenniki stressed the need for the educated classes to engage more comprehensively with the masses.25 The position of impoverished w ­ omen remained central to discussions among Rus­sian writers, but it was clear that Krestovsky’s appeal to the masses angered the literary elite. In their view, what had traditionally been the topic of liberal-­minded poetry by Nikolai Nekrasov and psychological prose in Dostoevsky’s novels was trivialized in boulevard lit­er­a­ture. From the point of view of writers like Dostoevsky and Turgenev, ­these dime novels sensationalized the serious threat commercial sex posed to ­women and the f­ amily, which is why the next generation of writers coming of age in the 1870s and 1880s sought to distance themselves from boulevard prose as they took up the question of venal love in their fiction. For the author Vsevolod Garshin, the topic of commercial sex took on a personal importance. Believing himself the next ­g reat word in Rus­sian lit­er­a­ture, he used his prose to polemicize with medical “truths” about public ­women. Invigorated by debates on the nature of fallen w ­ omen, Garshin authored two stories that openly polemicized with the state’s role in selling sex.



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Garshin’s Depiction of Commercial Sex Like other writers of the age, Garshin’s interest in fallen ­women developed from both private interactions with sex workers and public debate on the regulation of commercial sex.26 His own trips to the brothel to conduct research for his writing likely informed the characterization of his heroine Nadezhda Nikolaevna.27 Moreover, the experience of Garshin’s b­ rother—­who committed suicide in 1873 ­after a failed love affair with a sex worker—is strikingly similar to the plot of Garshin’s story “An Occurrence” (“Proisshestvie”).28 Accounts by friends and ­family illustrate that Garshin was deeply sympathetic to the injustices of his day, and he used his writing as a means to polemicize with commonly held beliefs on the supposed deviance of sex workers.29 Through two power­f ul stories that conveyed the complex psy­chol­ ogy of w ­ omen in the sex trade, Garshin countered the bombastic moralism that justified regulation. In the context of the debate between reformers and abolitionists, Garshin’s stories “An Occurrence” (1878) and “Nadezhda Nikolaevna” (1885) read as an answer not only to the Rus­sian tradition of tales of a wayward w ­ oman’s redemption but also as a stark polemic with the leading advocates for Rus­sia’s system of regulation. Through the first-­person account of Nadezhda Nikolaevna, Garshin defamiliarizes what had become a predictable story for nineteenth-­century Rus­sian readers. Garshin upends the traditional male-­centered redemption plot in “An Occurrence,” which is set in St. Petersburg, by having a sex worker tell her own story through first-­person narration. The reader hears directly from Nadezhda how she turned to sex work a­ fter being seduced by a male acquaintance. She confides openly in her reader and frankly discusses her indignation at the men who sleep with her and then berate her with such patronizing questions as “­Couldn’t you do something e­ lse to survive?” Garshin investigates Nadezhda’s ­mental and spiritual agony as she is told by one of her clients that, according to a “con­temporary phi­los­o­pher,” w ­ omen like her are the “safety valves of social passions,” and that this thought should comfort her. Nadezhda is disgusted by her client’s sanctimonious diatribe and the hypocritical tone of the “con­ temporary phi­los­o­pher.” On the one hand, Garshin’s ingenuity in the story is his ability to speak from the position of the female sex worker, who hears the demeaning justifications for regulation and voices disbelief to the reader. On the other, Garshin’s text demonstrates a scathing critique of the day’s leading theories on the sex trade. The “con­temporary phi­los­o­pher” Garshin quotes is none other than the critic, publicist, and sociologist Nikolai Mikhailovsky. Such a feat deserves explication given that Garshin published his story, including its criticism of Mikhailovsky’s theories, in the journal edited by none other than

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Mikhailovsky himself. Garshin felt warranted to make the case for more humane treatment of sex workers, whom professionals regularly discussed as such “safety valves.” This phrase entered the Rus­sian presses in 1869 through the anonymous article “O merakh k protivodeistviiu prostitutsii” (“On mea­ sures against prostitution”), based on Pierre Dufour’s Histoire de la prostitution; contemporaries likely knew that the article was authored by Mikhailovsky, given that the piece was subsequently included in his collected volume of works. In the article, Mikhailovsky argues that all ­women in the sex trade must be registered and ­under police supervision to keep the public healthy from disease: “In some circumstances prostitution has the utmost benefit, for in ­those situations it functions as a safety-­valve, the function of an ‘immoral guardian of social morals’ as Dufour puts it. In other circumstances . . . ​prostitution emerges as a gangrenous ulcer, threatening to overtake the entire social body.”30 The notion that she is a “safety-valve” pushes Nadezhda to a moral precipice as she contemplates suicide as the only means of escape.31 To contrast the notion that sex workers ­were cesspits that collected the excess flow of the city’s seminal fluids, Garshin focuses on Nadezhda’s thoughts and her understanding of how ­others view her. Nadezhda confides in her first-­person testimony that having been brought before the magistrate for disorderly conduct, she is chastised, berated, and fined fifteen rubles. To add insult to injury, Nadezhda must listen to the patronizing banter of clients, the condescending verdict of the court, and the abuse of police officers who shout and threaten her. Nadezhda’s perspective contradicts the statements of Mikhailovsky on the prophylactic purposes of regulation and offers a power­ ful vindication of the female sex worker. As in other tales of commercial sex in St. Petersburg, in “An Occurrence” a male admirer falls in love with the fallen w ­ oman and tries to save her by offering his hand in marriage. But Garshin undoes the established redemption narrative by having Nadezhda equate marriage to her suitor, Ivan Nikitin, as just another form of sexual transaction: “­Wouldn’t that be just another sale? Lord, no, it would be worse!” Nadezhda concludes that Nikitin is no dif­fer­ent from other would-be saviors: “Now he is ready to lick my hand, but ­later . . . ​­later he ­will kick me down . . . ​and say, ‘you contemptible creature’!” But as Nikitin’s own diary entries reveal, he is, in fact, genuinely convinced that his life is meaningless without Nadezhda; when she rejects his offer of marriage, he commits suicide. That Nadezhda could have saved him (she realizes only too late that Nikitin is on the verge of ending his life) remains a source of inner torment and regret for Garshin’s heroine. Visual repre­sen­ta­tions of fallen w ­ omen play an impor­tant role in Garshin’s conceptualization of Nadezhda. She mentions how one client loves to bring



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Figure 2.2. ​Viktor Shpak, Dve dorogi (Two Roads), illustration from Strekoza (The Dragonfly), 1878. Slavic, East Eu­ro­pean, and Eurasian Collection, University of Illinois Urbana-­Champaign.

her “provocative” stories and images from the journal Strekoza (The Dragonfly).32 She relates how one caricature (see figure 2.2) in par­tic­ul­ ar irks her: “the picture showed a young girl with a doll and next to her two rows of figures. In the upper row the young girl matures and becomes a schoolgirl, then a modest young lady, a m ­ other, and fi­nally a respectable older w ­ oman.” The bottom row of figures shows Nadezhda’s path: “This is me now, and the second—­the ­woman sweeping the street, and the last is a disgusting old hag.” The image’s

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illustrator, V. S. Shpak, depicts what Nadezhda already believes her fate to be. As she accepts clients night a­ fter night, her worldview becomes increasingly pessimistic. She understands her life within the context of the caricature; it is just a ­matter of time before she ­will share the fate of the “disgusting old hag.” Therefore, when Nikitin bares his soul and declares undying love, Nadezhda can only interpret such utterances as false. She becomes enraged at his proposal: “What interest could you have in me. . . . ​You thought it up to save me? Get away from me! I ­don’t need anything! Better to die alone.”33 The caricature visually marks Nadezhda’s path for her. The image from Strekoza critiques the stratification of society and the only “two roads” available to ­women. It also demonstrates—­contrary to the writings of subsequent criminal anthropologists—­that prostitutes w ­ ere victims of social in­equality and not born criminals.34 Examining the figures in the top and bottom rows reveals how the illustrator imagines the stratification through body language and attire. Whereas the w ­ oman in the upper series progresses from smartly dressed pupil to meek and modest young lady, the young girl in the bottom row matures from selling products (likely flowers) to selling herself. With her head held high and bust leading forward, the figure contrasts starkly with the complementary image of the top row. Both figures embody feminine beauty, but whereas the upper-­class w ­ oman in the top row looks down at the pavement as if ashamed of her sex appeal, her ­sister in the lower ranks is proud and uninhibited. The final images in the bottom row demonstrate clearly how a life of sex work and physical ­labor cripples the ­woman in her old age. Faced with such a bleak picture, Nadezhda declares, “I ­won’t allow myself to reach that point. If I can stomach this life I w ­ ill give it another two or three years. ­After that, it’s off to Ekaterinovka.”35 Garshin takes care to show what a sex worker like Nadezhda might feel when confronted with a caricature of her past, pre­sent, and ­f uture. Through Nadezhda’s response, he reveals that the image alienates the very person most in need of compassion. Garshin thus demonstrates the forces of dehumanization at work in “combating” the evils of gender and social in­equality. Ele­ments of sensationalism reappear in the story’s sequel, “Nadezhda Nikolaevna,” which is set three years a­ fter “An Occurrence.” Nadezhda’s station in life has improved, yet she remains beholden to the whims of her former benefactor, Bessonov. When Lopatin, a sensitive artist, approaches Nadezhda and asks her to sit as his model for a painting of Charlotte Corday, she reluctantly agrees. Over the course of the sitting they fall in love, and Nadezhda sees a ­future outside of sex work. Bessonov, indignant that Nadezhda prefers another man to him, storms into Lopatin’s apartment, wounds Lopatin, and kills Nadezhda in a jealous rage. Lopatin manages to strike Bessonov and kill him, but



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not before the latter critically wounds Lopatin. The reader knows that Lopatin, who is nursed by his former fiancée, Sonia, is not long for this world and that he w ­ ill soon be re­united with Nadezhda beyond the grave. “An Occurrence” and “Nadezhda Nikolaevna” question both the normalization of commercial sex in the sociomedical writings of the leading theorists of the day and public condemnation of registered prostitutes as “safety-valves”. From the self-­important men who visit Nadezhda for sex and then lecture her on the ills of her profession, to police officers who call her trash, Garshin makes sure to convey to readers that his fallen w ­ oman is subject to vio­lence, abuse, and an infuriating sense of privilege from clients. In this sense, the tales add to the tradition of humanizing prostitutes in Rus­sian belles lettres and critique the system of regulation through Nadezhda’s ironic comments on the social justifications for the sex trade.36 At the same time, the stories contribute to what Michel Foucault describes as the proliferation of discourses concerning deviant bodies and illegitimate sexualities.37 ­Whether in lit­er­a­ture or life, the impetus to track and regulate venal ­women reflects, according to Alain Corbin, a need “to enclose in order to observe, to observe in order to know, to know in order to supervise and control.”38 In other words, even though Garshin questions the condemnation of prostitutes, his stories contribute to a discourse that sees the fallen ­woman as highly narratable. Garshin’s descriptions of Bessonov, Lopatin, and Nikitin, eyeing Nadezhda from dif­fer­ent vantage points—­sometimes with her knowledge, sometimes without—­exemplify a controlling one-­sided gaze that periodically silences the female voice by making Nadezhda an object of study rather than an autonomous agent in the story. A similarly complex alterity informs Tolstoy’s portrayal of commercial sex in his final novel. Like Garshin’s heroine, Maslova—­a registered sex worker—faces a public trial that exposes her to the injustices of the Rus­sian criminal system.

“Maslova’s Life Was a Common One”: Tolstoy on Commercial Sex While he had discussed the topic of commercial sex ­earlier in his fiction and essays, Tolstoy saved his most detailed assessment of the regulation of commercial sex for his final novel, Resurrection (Voskresenie, 1899). Tolstoy based his narrative on a story he heard from the prominent prosecutor Anatoly Koni, who described a case against a sex worker named Rozaliia Oni.39 ­After Oni was found guilty of petty theft, Koni was approached by one of the jurors, who eagerly intervened on her behalf. Curious as to the man’s interest in the case, Koni

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found out that Oni had survived the man’s sexual advances some years ­earlier. Tolstoy used the story as a springboard to expose the injustices of the Rus­sian penal code and the vast system of corruption plaguing Rus­sian society. Like writers of his generation, Tolstoy harnessed the dramatic confrontation of the accused within the “theatricality of the adversarial courtroom” to reinforce the public’s general distrust of the Rus­sian ­legal system.40 The novel examines the unjust sentencing of Katiusha Maslova, who is exiled to Siberia for murder, a crime she did not commit. Among the jury members is none other than Count Dmitry Nekhliudov, the very nobleman responsible for Katiusha’s downward spiral. As he sits on the jury, Nekhliudov feels it is he who is standing trial, not Maslova; he recalls their tender romance in early youth, when he first visited his aunts’ estate and fell ­wholeheartedly in love with Maslova. ­After a few years and a bout of ser­vice in the army, he returns to the estate full of lust for Maslova, cannot help but give into his “animal desires,” and has sex with her. Tolstoy drives home the extent of Nekhliudov’s “fall” from grace by placing the sexual encounter directly following their attendance at an Easter ser­ vice. Nekhliudov makes his way to Maslova’s dwelling, throws her over his shoulder, and takes her to his room; the next day, before leaving, he gives her one hundred rubles, consoling himself with the thought, “That’s how t­ hings are. That’s how it was with Schenbock and that governess he was telling me about, that’s how it was with ­Uncle Grisha, and ­Father when he lived in the country and had a bastard son by that peasant girl—­Mitya, he’s still alive. If every­body does it, that’s how ­things must be.”41 Maslova, for her own part, believes that Nekhliudov ­will come to her aid; yet when she realizes he has abandoned her despite her pregnancy, she gives up hope. Her worst assumptions are proven true, for when Nekhliudov’s aunts realize that she is pregnant, they promptly fire her. The baby dies shortly ­after childbirth and she nearly perishes as well. With l­ ittle opportunity to find work elsewhere, Maslova takes up first with a writer, then another man, before fi­nally ending up as a brothel worker. One injustice against Maslova follows another in Resurrection. Her trial is badly mishandled: while the members of the jury agree she is innocent of the murder charges against her, they botch her sentencing and she is exiled to Siberia with four years’ hard l­abor. Nekhliudov embarks on the herculean task of getting her sentence overturned, meeting and petitioning a variety of disinterested bureaucrats. Like many an ambitious male protagonist before him, Nekhliudov decides that only through marrying Maslova can he atone for his sins. While marriage to a fallen ­woman is a recurring motif in Rus­sian lit­er­a­ture, and reminiscent of Piskarev’s proposal to the neznakomka in Gogol’s



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“Nevsky Prospect,” Tolstoy reformulates the equation by drawing out the narrative for more than three hundred pages as Nekhliudov tries to si­mul­ta­ neously win Maslova’s court case and her heart. Whereas Gogol’s sensitive artist commits suicide upon the neznakomka’s rejection, Nekhliudov refuses to accept Maslova’s indifference. Despite his promises, Maslova believes that Nekhliudov plans “to use her spiritually as he had once used her physically,” and thus she refuses his offer of marriage.42 The novel’s final chapters focus on the gross mistreatment of prisoners as Maslova and her fellow convicts travel to Siberia. The farther the characters travel from St. Petersburg—­the epicenter of greed and hy­poc­risy—­the closer they come to spiritual enlightenment. Maslova undergoes a kind of emotional rebirth through her friendship with po­liti­cal prisoners who teach her the true value of comradery. When Nekhliudov fi­nally succeeds in his appeals and her sentence is overturned, Maslova nevertheless decides to remain in Siberia with the man she truly loves, Simonson, a socialist revolutionary exiled for his po­ liti­cal activities who loves Maslova in a platonic, brotherly way. As he explains to Nekhliudov, he plans to marry Maslova “to lighten her burden” and “make life a ­little easier for her.”43 Nekhliudov, who is left without purpose once his burden has been lifted, turns to the Gospels for guidance; reading the Bible fills his heart with rapture, and he concludes that life must be lived by the Ten Commandments. The strong moral didacticism of Tolstoy’s final novel left early critics puzzled, if not downright perturbed; although Anton Chekhov thought the book good, he objected to the ending: “To write so much and then suddenly make a Gospel text responsible for it all smacks a bit too much of the seminary.”44 Dmitry Mirsky was significantly harsher, calling it “Tolstoy at his worst.” Hugh McLean finds more rhetorical value in Resurrection, and in tracing the text’s origins he places the narrative within broader trends in Tolstoy’s oeuvre. Ani Kokobobo reads Resurrection within the context of the grotesque, arguing that Tolstoy’s final novel relies on defamiliarization to create a “grotesque aesthetic both in small-­scale form through depictions of the body, as well as in large-­ scale depictions of social institutions.”45 ­Others scholars, including Edwina Cruise and Donna Orwin, have studied the question of sexuality in Resurrection to illustrate Tolstoy’s thought on the ideal w ­ oman. Daniel Rancour-­Laferriere provides a psychoanalytical reading of Tolstoy’s masochism, linking it to material from his extensive diaries.46 While ­these insights are fruitful, they do not focus on Tolstoy’s response in Resurrection to the leading theories of the day on sex work—­which, I argue, is crucial to understanding how the Rus­sian writer sets out to problematize con­temporary beliefs about public w ­ omen. Taking into account the image of prostitution in Resurrection alongside the

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deeply misogynistic paradigms espoused in Tolstoy’s most provocative work, The Kreutzer Sonata (Kreitserova sonata, 1889) elucidates how the author imbues questions of sexual difference with profound anx­i­eties regarding ­women’s sensuality. Tolstoy aims to debunk positivist criminology and the prominent belief that sex workers ­were born with a predisposition ­toward deviant be­hav­ior. The clearest critique of popu­lar forensic pathology appears in the prosecutor’s long-­ winded speech on the nature of Maslova’s crimes. “His speech contained all the latest ­things,” reflects the narrator; “it was all ­there: heredity, congenital criminality, Lombroso and Tarde, evolution, the survival of the fittest, hypnotism, Charcot, and de­cadence.” The prosecutor goes further in his condemnation of Maslova, commenting, “An orphan child, likely to have been carry­ing within her the germs of criminality, she was brought up in a cultivated ­family and could have earned a living by honest means, but no, she abandons her benefactors, surrenders to her passions and satisfies them by entering a h ­ ouse of ill fame.” Maslova not only bears the mark of “criminality” but eagerly employs “hypnotic suggestion” to control her clientele.47 The prosecutor evokes both Lombroso’s and Tarnovsky’s writings on the criminal ­woman to support the condemnation of Maslova as a degenerate. According to ­these theorists, meticulous observation and documentation of the facial features of prostitutes proved such ­women anatomically dif­fer­ent from their “normal” peers. Only through tracking and surveillance could the public ­woman’s body be contained and controlled.48 The system of regulation, which included mandatory weekly medical examination, provided the sole means to curtail the spread of disease and keep Rus­sia’s healthy population safe from the scourge of syphilis. Tolstoy exposes ­these theories as completely absurd by placing them in the mouth of the hypocritical prosecutor.49 Maslova, of course, is no hardened criminal, nor does she use hypnosis to woo men to submission. While Tolstoy convincingly debunks criminal anthropology and appears a sensitive defender of prostitutes’ rights, ­there is an under­lying misogyny in his depiction of Maslova that complicates feminist readings of the novel. Tolstoy hints that Maslova is to blame for her descent into sexual commerce ­because she despises hard ­labor. While living with Nekhliudov’s aunts, “she had been spoilt by the comforts of the manor-­house” and thus refuses to support herself through manual work as a laundress. She received a number of proposals but “­didn’t want to get married, sensing that life with the working men . . . ​ would be too hard.” Maslova is not only spoiled but also vain; she makes up her mind to join the brothel when “the procuress tells her she [can] order any dress she wants.” In prison, Maslova confides in a fellow inmate that her “fate



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should have been dif­fer­ent,” ­because she “is used to living a nice life.” ­These descriptions of Maslova point to an inherent character flaw: accustomed to the finer t­ hings in life, she willingly chooses life in the brothel as an easy way to keep a luxurious and relaxed lifestyle. That Tolstoy weaves t­ hese points in through the narrator’s observations encourages a moral condemnation of Maslova based on traditional female vices: she is morally weak, vain, spoiled, and easily manipulated. Closer examination of the sexual encounter with Nekhliudov shows the extent of veiled misogyny at work in the text. It is Maslova who unlocks the door and allows Nekhliudov to ender her room on the fateful night. And, most condemning, while Maslova seems to reject Nekhliudov’s sexual advances, in real­ity, the narrator tells us her entire being was saying “I’m yours.”50 Keeping ­these points in mind, Tolstoy’s description of the sexual encounter justifies Nekhliudov’s advances. Tolstoy describes both pre-­and postcoital events strictly through Nekhliudov’s reflections. It is his vision of the events, which are relayed through the male omniscient eye, that colors their sexual encounter. Another undercurrent supporting a critical reading of Tolstoy’s depiction is his focus on Nekhliudov’s psy­chol­ogy rather than on Maslova’s perception of self. Curiously, Maslova’s primary trauma—­the loss of her child—­remains hidden from view. Confronted with her past when Nekhliudov visits her in prison and asks about their child, Maslova is unable to think critically about her past: “She was incapable of sorting it all out” and therefore “she dealt with it as she always did, by distancing ­these memories and clouding them over with the mists of the promiscuous life she knew so well.”51 In a circuitous way, Tolstoy’s suggestion that Maslova lacks the emotional and intellectual depth to mourn her own child, and that she turns, instead, to intercourse, aligns her be­hav­ior with the theories of criminal anthropologists and medical authorities who argued prostitutes ­were biologically predisposed to be hypersexual.52 Nekhliudov’s intervention, however, ­will reawaken Maslova’s dormant conscience and prompt her redemption: “He sensed that he was ­going to have to reawaken her spirit, and this would be terribly difficult, but he was attracted by the sheer difficulty of it.”53 So begins Nekhliudov’s reeducation of Maslova. The more righ­teous she becomes, the less physicality she has in the text; while not erasing her body entirely, Tolstoy manages to rework Maslova into an obedient, meek, complacent convict by the end of her journey to Siberia. Of course, Tolstoy is not without criticism of Nekhliudov, whom he condemns for his philandering. Prior to intervening in Maslova’s fate, Nekhliudov sees ­women only for sexual plea­sure. For him, “­woman was one of the finest instruments for the provision of enjoyment,” and l­ittle e­ lse.54 But once he takes

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on Maslova’s case he embarks on a path of spiritual cleansing; while t­ here are moments of doubt and failure, ultimately the sheer fact that he takes on a fallen ­woman’s burden redeems him in the text. Sensing the one-­sidedness of the narrative, Mikhail Bakhtin observed that the “orga­nizational center of the novel had to be Nekhliudov; the repre­sen­ta­tion of [Maslova] is sparing [skupo] and dry and is built entirely on Nekhliudov’s pursuit.”55 Bakhtin’s reading may be extended to the metaliterary level of the text, for the driving princi­ple of Resurrection is not just Nekhliudov’s rocky path ­toward salvation but Maslova’s erasure. Taken in this context, Tolstoy’s appropriation of the real-­life story of Rozaliia Oni to convey the difficulty of an upper-­class man to find spiritual enlightenment is another act of exploitation, one that is mirrored in Nekhliudov’s relations with Maslova in the text. As Maslova recedes from narrative view, Tolstoy focuses on Nekhliudov’s moral redemption. To emphasize his hero’s growth, Tolstoy returns Nekhliudov for a brief sojourn to St. Petersburg, where he works on Maslova’s appeal. While in attendance at a per­for­mance of Alexandre Dumas fils’ The Lady With the Camellias (La dame aux camélias) at the Imperial Theatre, Nekhliudov is invited to visit the box of Mariette, a ­woman ­eager to become his mistress; her bare shoulders leave him feeling “delighted and disgusted,” and he is both “attracted and repelled” by Mariette’s flirtation. The narrative likewise construes the view of a w ­ oman’s sexualized body as abhorrent and attractive. This contradictory impulse to be both attracted to and horrified by the female body culminates in Nekhliudov’s reflections on the similarities between dif­fer­ent types of ­women as he encounters a female streetwalker ­after leaving the theater: Walking home down the Nevsky Prospekt he ­couldn’t help noticing ahead of him a fine figure of a w ­ oman . . . ​And, strangely enough, Nekhliudov’s thoughts went straight back to Mariette, ­because he was struck by the same feeling of attraction and revulsion he had experienced in the theatre. . . . ​‘That’s the same smile the other one in the theatre smiled at me when I went into her box,’ he thought, ‘and both smiles meant the same t­hing. . . . ​At least this one is telling the truth; the other one’s lying. Besides, this ­woman ­here has been forced into it, while the other one is enjoying herself, fooling around with that enchanting, disgusting and dreadful passion. This streetwalker is like foul stinking ­water on offer to anybody with a thirst stronger than his revulsion, but that ­woman in the theatre is like a toxin secretly poisoning every­thing it comes into contact with.”56 At the heart of Tolstoy’s depiction of both the streetwalker and Mariette is an aversion to female sexuality, which is portrayed as a harbinger of disease and



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death. The streetwalker is “foul stinking w ­ ater,” an image that connects the public ­woman’s body, particularly her genitals, to a cesspit. She evokes Nekhliudov’s disgust b­ ecause he considers her sexual organs as tainted, diseased, and noxious from her contact with many men. His assessment of Mariette likewise fixates on her body as a toxic force that “infects” without detection. Through Nekhliudov’s narration, Tolstoy manages to convey a broader anxiety about the blurring of social bound­aries between “honest” w ­ omen and street­walkers. In contrast to commentators like Mikhailovsky, who advocated for regulating commercial sex as an urban prophylaxis to keep ­women of marriageable age “pure” before marriage, Tolstoy shows that no amount of demarcating, controlling, or policing commercial sex can prevent w ­ omen’s sexual pollution from tainting the public sphere. That Nekhliudov’s revelations take place in the context of a per­for­mance of La Dame aux camélias, a tale that hinges on the sentimental portrait of a self-­sacrificing courtesan, also calls into question the aestheticization of venal w ­ omen in high art and the impulse among high society to replicate similar patterns of be­hav­ior in their own lives.57 Nekhliudov feels both “delight and disgust” upon seeing Mariette’s bare, marble-­like shoulders; passion is “disgusting and dreadful” for him. A psychoanalytical reading of Nekhliudov’s responses uncovers a major source of his antipathy t­oward w ­ omen. To paraphrase Laura Mulvey, ­woman, viewed by man, “connotates something that the look continually circles around but disavows: her lack of penis, implying a threat of castration and hence unplea­ sure.”58 The destabilizing force of the streetwalker, who, Nekhliudov states, is “aware of the despicable power she wields,” conjures the fear of w ­ oman as seducer, ­woman as other who distorts the patriarchal power dynamic by asserting her sexual dominance. To be sure, Nekhliudov’s misogyny appears ­earlier in the narrative in the form of fearing ­women as a dangerous “other.” When he debates, for example, ­whether or not to get married, what stops him from proposing to Missie—­a good match in terms of status and wealth—is first “the fear of losing his freedom, and, second, the subconscious dread of the mysterious creature that is ­woman.”59 This authorial aside on Nekhliudov’s psyche is critical to understanding how Tolstoy solves the prob­lem of sensual desire through negating the sexualized female body. Reading Resurrection in concert with the era’s discourse on the regulation of prostitution still leaves ave­nues of the text’s complicity unsolved. Turning to Tolstoy’s other works on sexuality and abstinence can help explain the author’s differing perception of female versus male paths to redemption. The Kreutzer Sonata synthesizes ­these themes through the story of Pozdnyshev, who relays how, a­ fter years of tumultuous marital conflict, he murders his wife in a jealous rage. As the narrator sits with him in their shared railway car,

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Pozdnyshev expounds upon his sordid youth prior to marriage and then compares it to his life as a husband and ­father. In his long-­winded confession, Pozdnyshev concludes that ­whether in the cold transactional sex with a brothel worker, the coquettish flirtation preceding matrimony, or intercourse with one’s wife or mistress, sexual desire polluted e­ very aspect of his life, as it has society more generally. From the vantage point of his current state, Pozdnyshev recalls with disgust and horror the act of sexual intercourse and the feelings of repulsion it evokes in him. “Carnal love has become a safety valve,” concludes Pozdnyshev, “a license for debauchery.”60 Using Pozdnyshev as his mouthpiece, Tolstoy evokes the theories of Mikhailovsky and like-­minded individuals who justified commercial sex as a necessary outlet for male sexual desire. But the critical difference outlined in The Kreutzer Sonata is that all sexual intercourse—­whether in the marital bed or brothel confines—is inherently exploitative. The reassessment of sex in the novel stands as a radical indictment of intercourse itself. As Olga Matich notes, while “intended by Tolstoy as a moral sermon, Pozdnyshev’s confession instead resembles a psychopathological case history from Psychopathia Sexualis” by equating the sex act with murder.61 While a number of scholars have addressed the themes of ­music, art, and narrative desire in The Kreutzer Sonata, Andrea Dworkin’s reading of the text remains to date unparalleled in its exegesis of the overt misogyny in Tolstoy’s novella.62 Tolstoy “locates his repulsion,” argues Dworkin, “not in the ­woman’s body” but rather “in sexual intercourse . . . ​what it means; the in­equality of it.” But, Tolstoy’s repugnance at intercourse is also “rooted in ongoing desire . . . ​in satiation,” and passionately conveyed in The Kreutzer Sonata through a “full-­blooded misogyny” that is “stilled in sorrow.” Dworkin perceptively articulates the connection between repulsion, owner­ship, and objectification that is outlined in Pozdnyshev’s relations with w ­ omen. As an example, she notes how Pozdnyshev fretted obsessively when he failed to pay a w ­ oman ­after sex and only felt at ease a­ fter sending her money. “The money repudiated the possibility of any h ­ uman sameness between him and her,” Dworkin explains; “it put her in her place as inferior . . . ​this contemptuous but absolutely normal and unremarkable arrogance, that he now sees as the essence of sexual depravity” is “a first step ­toward killing his wife.”63 Paying the sex worker for intercourse becomes not just a symptom of sexual depravity but the foundation of Pozdnyshev’s misogyny that ­will prompt him eventually to murder his wife. What Dworkin suggests in her assessment of the transactional relations in The Kreutzer Sonata deserves more unpacking, for it rests at the heart of Tolstoy’s condemnation of sex. Tolstoy collapses traditional categories of wom-



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anhood, finding no difference between the paid w ­ oman, the mistress, or the spouse. As the hierarchy of female gender identity crumbles, all sex comes to mean violation and loss; all intercourse robs men and ­women of their innocence, equality, and humanity. Using the meta­phor of the brothel helps Tolstoy convey the urgency of the prob­lem. “This squalor that’s become second nature to us,” explains Pozdnyshev, “in all its shamelessness,” shows that “we live in a sort of licensed brothel.”64 For Pozdnyshev, the proof of social hy­ poc­risy rests clearly in the fact that while sex workers are held in contempt, their promiscuous female counter­parts among the elite enjoy re­spect. The bordello mentality, in essence, has infected all segments of sexual and social life to such a degree that only abstinence can undo the moral and psychological damage. Reading The Kreutzer Sonata alongside Resurrection shows how Tolstoy uses the image of the sex worker to make his case for celibacy. As he quite succinctly puts it in the afterword to The Kreutzer Sonata, the energies of men and w ­ omen are wasted fruitlessly on coy flirtation, courtship, and the drive for sexual conquest. The achievement of sexual ­union is “the cause of the idleness in our men and the shamelessness of our w ­ omen”—­who, he insists, “think nothing of parading, in fashions borrowed from prostitutes, t­ hose parts of their bodies that excite men’s lust.” While arguing for chastity, Tolstoy cannot help but stress men’s sexual attraction to ­women’s genitals, breasts, and mouths—­all of which they purposefully put on display to excite men’s desire. As he insists, ­there is nothing poetic in this condition, for it mirrors the relationship between sex worker and client. Moreover, it constantly reinforces a pro­cess of sexual objectification for both men and ­women. The w ­ oman’s body—­the site of man’s sexual need but also of his shame—­must be negated, erased, and its sensual potency removed in order to achieve a state of grace. Bringing together Tolstoy’s thinking on celibacy with the conclusion of Resurrection helps shed light on why Maslova and Nekhliudov follow dif­fer­ent paths t­oward redemption. The image of womanhood in Resurrection is connected with manipulation, and particularly ­women’s proclivity to seduce and coerce men. Nekhliudov reflects on this aspect of female sexuality, but it appears most succinctly in Pozdnyshev’s diatribe in The Kreutzer Sonata. ­Because they have been denied the rights of men, ­women “are like empresses, keeping nine-­tenths of the ­human race in servitude, ­doing hard ­labor.” Therefore, Pozdnyshev argues, w ­ omen “take their revenge by acting on [men’s] sensuality and ensnaring [men] in their nets.”65 But their connection to the natu­ral world, their heightened feelings of compassion and emotion, make ­women’s path t­ oward salvation easier than that of their male counter­parts. For this reason, Maslova’s atonement and purification comes through the erasure of her

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sensuality. Whereas in the beginning of the novel she sticks out her chest with pride and smiles at the prisoners, by the end she is meek, submissive, and dressed in baggy, plain prison clothes. Maslova’s projected marriage to Simonson is not an affirmation of her sexual self but rather a turn ­toward the platonic. The erasure of the physical solidifies Maslova rebirth into spiritual enlightenment with Simonson by her side. By way of contrast, Nekhliudov’s search for spiritual meaning takes far longer, is more complex, and requires constant intellectual and moral questioning on the nature of h ­ uman relations. Through Nekhliudov’s growing disgust ­toward sexual passion and the desexualization of Maslova, Tolstoy removes any libidinal desire in the text. As Nekhliudov and Maslova journey on their respective paths to resurrection, they become further removed from their sexual selves. In realizing, as Nekhliudov does at the novel’s end, that the entire penal system perpetuates the same forms of evil it proclaims to punish, he comes to an epiphany about the source of evil and its continuous cyclical nature: ­people, in trying to achieve justice and punishing criminals, fail in their attempts b­ ecause they, too, are sinful. The only means to salvation, Nekhliudov concludes, is “to forgive every­one an infinite number of times.” Locating affirmation in both the Gospels and the Ten Commandments, Nekhliudov is f­ree to begin a new life, one in which he rejects sensual pleasures and embraces, in its place, a quest for righ­teousness.

Erotomania and Sexual Contagion in Leonid Andreev’s “In the Fog” In contrast to Tolstoy’s Resurrection, which envisions the sex worker’s moral reformation, Andreev’s “In the Fog” (“V tumane,” 1902) subsumes anx­i­eties around the public w ­ oman’s body through her violent death at the hands of a client. An instant sensation for its blunt discussion of venereal disease, “In the Fog” raised, to quote Laura Engelstein, “the personal dilemma of [Andreev’s] protagonist to the level of social analy­sis.” In ­doing so, the story “exposed the negative consequences not of individual indulgence but of society’s under­lying values.”66 In part, Andreev’s story drew the public’s attention to the “sexual question” besieging the nation by amplifying the worries codified in Tolstoy’s The Kreutzer Sonata and Resurrection.67 Polemicizing with Tolstoy made Andreev a lightning rod for criticism from high-­profile figures, including Tolstoy’s wife, Sofia Tolstaya, who published a fiery letter in the journal Novoe vremia (The New Time) blasting the tale and Andreev personally for “loving to take plea­sure in the filthiest parts of depraved ­human be­hav­ior.”68



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Countess Tolstaya’s condemnation inspired a rather heated polemic as numerous university students rushed to defend Andreev, praising him for his bold depiction of ­mental illness and venereal disease.69 The story describes the ­mental anguish of a St. Petersburg university student, Pavel Rybakov, who contracts syphilis a­ fter visiting a brothel; ashamed of his disease, he isolates himself from both friends and f­ amily. A ­ fter an argument with his f­ ather, Pavel walks along the St. Petersburg streets and encounters an intoxicated streetwalker named Manechka. When they arrive at her apartment, he proceeds to berate Manechka by calling her Katya (the name of his true love) and referring to her as “trash.” Manechka slaps Pavel, and they begin a vicious strug­gle that culminates in Pavel grabbing a knife, plunging it into her chest, and stabbing himself. Pavel is not a criminal mastermind, nor does he seem inclined to murderous rage at the story’s onset, but his obsession with w ­ omen reaches the heights of gynophobia. He watches w ­ omen from his win­dow, through binoculars in the forest, b­ ehind doors, from the city streets. This obsession with w ­ omen drives his e­ very interaction and conversation, and he is horrified by the female body: He saw the image of a stony city, and the gaze of apathetic, exhausted ­women, who looked at him with impudent and cold eyes . . . ​­these memories pierced his soul like a sharp knife into living flesh. The ­women, with their soulless bodies, w ­ ere as revolting as sticky, courtyard muck, yet strangely alluring in their unabashed filth and availability. And they ­were everywhere. They w ­ ere in the cynical, caustic vitriol of the meaningless jokes he heard and repeated so masterfully to ­others; they ­were in the drawings he made and showed laughingly to his friends; they ­were in his lonely thoughts and dreams.70 Like Tolstoy’s Nekhliudov, who is paradoxically attracted to yet revolted by female sexuality, Pavel cannot escape his fascination with ­women. It is the image of sexual intercourse—­the drawings mentioned in the quoted passage—­that actually prompts Pavel’s ultimate decline. Pavel’s f­ ather, Sergei Andreevich, is a learned man, even a liberal-­minded fellow; but when he finds a lewd sexual drawing in Pavel’s possession, he won­ders whether his seventeen-­ year-­old son could be capable of such vile and dirty thoughts. Sergei Andreevich musters up the courage to ask Pavel whether he penned the drawing, but rather than ask directly, he engages in circumlocution, with a long lecture on the threat of sexual depravity: “Pavel, ­there is a certain something worse than alcoholism, more horrifying than murderous wars, the plague, and cholera . . . ​it is debauchery!”71

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Unaware that his son suffers from syphilis, Sergei Andreevich drones on about the latest scientific data on venereal disease, quoting a certain “Professor Berg” who writes that debauchery “is threatening entire generations, even entire countries.” Pavel can do nothing but sit silently through the excruciating lecture. “One of my friends from university,” explains Sergei Andreevich, “contracted the disease and . . . ​fearing the worst, he set himself on fire . . .” The litany continues; Sergei Andreevich mentions “seventy-­two p­ ercent”—of what, Andreev leaves unsaid—­but the reader can assume it refers to the number of infected brothel workers and, by extension, their clients. Pavel listens on as his f­ather quotes “some big, smart, omniscient man” who speaks disinterestedly about disease and death. “In the calm pragmatism of his words,” reflects Pavel, “­there was something so fatal that it left no hope whatsoever.” When Sergei Andreevich fi­nally brings up the drawing, Pavel answers spitefully, and proudly, that he drew it. Acknowledging his authorship of the sketch certifies his pending doom. He now sees himself as a statistic, and thus when he meets Manechka he introduces himself as “the percentage [protsentik].” “­There’s no such name,” Manechka replies. “It’s true!” shouts Pavel, “even my f­ ather calls me ‘the ­little percentage.’ ”72 Andreev portrays Pavel’s illness and his violent be­hav­ior as part of the immorality infecting all of St. Petersburg society. From the misogynistic banter among his male classmates, who frequent brothels—­Pavel’s acquaintance comments, “I never allow myself to kiss a prostitute. You should only kiss someone you love and re­spect, not that trash”—to his ­father, who lectures him on the deadly effects of venereal disease, the city and its inhabitants remain u ­ nder the spell of libidinal desire. Even pure young ladies, Pavel concludes, give in to their sexual urges and “run to a midnight rendezvous with one of the servant boys.”73 He surmises that all young men and w ­ omen remain “dirty” in their hunt for sexual gratification. The omnipresent “yellow and disgusting” fog hangs drearily over the city throughout the story, reminding the reader that St. Petersburg suffers from a syphilitic haze that covers the city streets and buildings. Evocative of the yellow ticket (the official registration card required for sex workers), the fog represents the suffocating haze that smothers the city’s public ­women. The murder-­suicide in Andreev’s story read as erotomania to some of his contemporaries, but the author defended his portrayal even as he acknowledged its aesthetic weaknesses. “I ­don’t like the story as an artistic work,” Andreev confessed to the literary critic A. A. Izmailov; “it’s long, the beginning is dry and contrived . . . ​the story’s main idea is expressed weakly.” But Andreev fervently disagreed with Izmailov that his description of Manechka lacked feeling: “­There’s more re­spect and compassion [in my depiction] than



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if I had lied and made her into an angelic figure. Is she ­really that wicked? She is completely filled with self-­respect. . . . ​The slap she gives Pavel is meant for all of us.”74 Indeed, Andreev paints Manechka in realistic terms: she’s poor, yet unapologetically so; she becomes angry when Pavel continuously calls her Katechka, the pet name of his beloved, yelling at him “I’m not your ‘Katechka’!” and insisting, “I was baptized Manechka . . . ​you give a ­woman a ruble and you think you own her.” ­Later, when he calls her “trash” (drian’)—­a reference to how his classmates term sex workers—­she slaps him. Their ensuing strug­gle is meta­phor­ically conveyed as the ­battle between the sexes: “They rolled on the floor, hitting chairs and dragging the bedding about them. It seemed they had merged into some strange creature with four arms and four legs, frenziedly scratching and choking one another.”75 Pavel’s only affirmation of self comes through his relations with sex workers, with whom he can assert his authority and masculinity. For instance, when Manechka approaches him and invites him back to her apartment, Pavel responds with a bombastic, “Divine one [bozhestvennaia]! You ­really want my passionate caresses?” Manechka, clearly annoyed with Pavel’s tone, turns away from him in disgust. The clear refusal to be turned on by Pavel’s banter indicates that Manechka is not willing to play along for the sake of assuaging his male ego. “In the Fog” culminates when Pavel ultimately silences the ­woman who challenges his superiority. Grabbing a knife from the nearby t­ able, he repeatedly stabs Manechka while yelling, “Be quiet!” Although it is a dif­fer­ent sex worker who gave Pavel syphilis, to him, all the ­women in St. Petersburg merge into one monstrous image of infectious muck. Prior to stabbing Manechka, Pavel “saw only a body; it was frightening and incomprehensible in its power, the body of a ­woman. He had seen it in his fiery dreams, and it was disgusting to the point of revulsion, but also as appealing as a puddle of ­water for a man ­dying of thirst.”76 Andreev’s description inverts Nekhliudov’s reflection from Resurrection about the “foul stinking w ­ ater” that allegorically represents the sex worker’s body. Both Pavel and Nekhliudov feel as though they are ­dying of thirst, but whereas Tolstoy’s narrative replaces sexual longing with spiritual enlightenment, ­there is no such possibility in Andreev’s narrative. The violent means of killing Manechka is a refracted version of Pozdnyshev’s stabbing of his wife in The Kreutzer Sonata. In both instances the murder has a sexual overtone as the descriptions focus on penetration, laceration, and gushing blood. Tolstoy’s Pozdnyshev recalls stabbing “into something soft,” and Andreev’s narrator describes Pavel thrusting the knife numerous times into Manechka’s torso. While the subsequent perspective of the characters differs, both Pozdnyshev and Pavel appear deeply motivated by a misogyny

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that needs to silence ­women. A critical difference appears in Andreev’s text, though, ­because although Pavel shouts “Be quiet!” as he stabs Manechka, he subsequently plunges the knife into his own chest. While certainly not vindicating Pavel by ending the story with his suicide, Andreev conveys a cycle of death in which men abuse, berate, and even kill ­women, only to turn the murder weapon on themselves. In this regard, the theme of silence in “In the Fog” connects to Andreev’s own grappling with the many barriers imposed on w ­ omen’s sexual and economic emancipation. Andreev, writes Eva Buchwald, “is sensitive to the sheer force of a male conspiracy which annihilates ­women’s presence by refusing to acknowledge her version of life’s experience.”77 The gruesome murder scene from “In the Fog” thus points to a broader critique of sexual relations between men and ­women. Unable to see ­women as anything but syphilis-­infected temptresses, Pavel finds death the only means to quiet ­women and his own murderous rage. The story crystallizes the palpable fear, voiced by a number of fin de siècle commentators, that Rus­sian culture was ­under attack by sexual licentiousness and wide-­scale debauchery. Read in this context, Manechka’s violent death points to the sublimation not only of sex workers but of all transgressive ­women who pre­sent a threat to the social order. The story’s bloody conclusion suggests as much about venereal disease haunting the St. Petersburg population as it does the violent response to ­women’s shifting role in society. Pavel, as a kind of symbolic figure for his generation, cannot help but see all ­women as depraved and sexually aggressive. Pavel’s murder-­suicide encapsulates a broader social vio­lence that responded to the demands of w ­ omen for sexual, financial, and po­liti­cal autonomy.

Love is like a glass of w ­ ater, given to anyone who asks for it. —­George Sand to Frédéric Chopin

Krestovsky, Garshin, Tolstoy, and Andreev weighed in on the question of venal love, crafting for readers the image of the urban sex worker. Despite clear differences in tone, the works nevertheless align in their focus on the venal ­woman’s body as attractive and repulsive. T ­ hese prose writers strug­gled, as their readers did, between vindicating the public w ­ oman and denouncing her. This tension steadily increased as ­women of all social categories demanded more rights in both private and public domains. Krestovsky’s depiction of brothel destitution, Garshin’s sensitive portrayal of a sex worker moved by the



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intervention of a male client, Tolstoy’s didactic novel, and Andreev’s story of a syphilis-­infected student reveal how the era’s leading thinkers formulated the question of commercial sex for the public. Prose fiction of the period incorporated the writings of medical prac­ti­tion­ ers and sociologists in complex, contradictory ways. On the one hand, late imperial writers like Tolstoy and Andreev polemicized with theorists of degeneration, particularly their atavistic claims that sex workers w ­ ere morally obtuse and biologically less evolved. Yet as they aimed to humanize the sex worker, ­these writers also fell into traps of essentializing ­those ­women classified as transgressive or nonnormative. Thus, when Tolstoy suggests that Maslova was too lazy to take on “honest” ­labor, his authorial characterization bears a striking resemblance to the statements of prominent theorists like Tarnovsky. Writing in scathing terms that the nation’s sex workers w ­ ere egotistical, lazy, and depraved, Tarnovsky urged his readers to recognize “that any prostitute, no ­matter how much she owes her madam, can without documentation or formality leave the establishment” and take refuge “in the asylums for Mary Magdalenes.” But according to Tarnovsky, instead of choosing “legitimate” work, ­women in the sex trade inevitably succumb to their latent immorality and abnormal sexual urges. Maybe “one in a thousand” is capable of reforming, but even she “­will soon return to her former life.”78 By demonizing sex workers and categorizing them as monstrous, Tarnovsky robs them of dignity while solidifying the case for their policing. While the writers of late imperial Rus­sia problematized the findings of criminologists, they could not help but adopt some of their rhetorical biases against transgressive w ­ omen. Most threatening for writers and Rus­sia’s educated classes was the transfer of be­hav­iors between sex workers and their female counter­parts among the elite. Traditional gender identities seemed on the verge of collapse as w ­ omen normally indifferent to sensual desire turned, at least in the minds of commentators, sexually aggressive. W ­ omen’s newfound sexual freedom, as Pozdnyshev so bitterly notes in The Kreutzer Sonata, was aided thanks to methods of contraception that allowed w ­ omen sexual intercourse without the worry of pregnancy. W ­ hether as represented in Pavel’s fantasies from Andreev’s “In the Fog” or Nekhliudov’s reflections on womanhood in Tolstoy’s Resurrection, the male characters look with increasing worry as they witness “respectable” w ­ omen seeking sexual gratification. As it had for Krestovsky and Garshin, the sex trade symbolized for Tolstoy and Andreev both the dire consequences of the sexual double standard and a frightening shift in the national conversation on femininity. A host of issues surfaced related to w ­ omen’s sexual lives. Could sex take place outside of marriage, could it

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be for plea­sure rather than procreation, could it be separated from eros? All of ­these points remained po­liti­cal as well as aesthetic issues for authors and their public. At the same time, proponents of ­women’s equality eagerly pushed for reconsideration of the traditional understandings of relations between men and ­women. The leading emancipationist for freedom of the heart, George Sand, reportedly once proposed, “Love is like a glass of w ­ ater, given to anyone who 79 asks for it.” But the nature of a ­woman’s sexual past—­namely, her proclivities and liaisons with men—­made her a “foul and dirty” source of ­water. How, given the emancipation of w ­ omen’s sexual selves, could men quench their thirst? The imagery of stagnant w ­ ater, of putrid puddles, b­ ubbles up from the Rus­sian works on the sex trade. How to contain the sex worker’s physical body and the threat of pollution she poses continues to occupy a prominent place in social discourse well into the twentieth ­century, culminating in the writings of the Marxist revolutionary and early Bolshevik leader Aleksandra Kollontai.80 Locating the source of venal sex in the structure of capitalism, Kollontai argued that commercial sex was the complement of bourgeois marriage (to paraphrase Karl Marx) and that the fight to end commercial sex rested in equal ­labor conditions for w ­ omen.81 Comparing ­these nineteenth-­century writers’ conceptualizations of the sex trade demonstrates the major stumbling blocks facing Rus­sian intellectuals of the period. Unable to see commercial sex as a ­viable option for working-­class ­women, writers remained beholden to the belief that sex workers w ­ ere victims of male exploitation and in need of redemption. Striving to reinvent the well-­worn tale of the “fallen w ­ oman,” Krestovsky, Garshin, Tolstoy, and Andreev reworked the narrative structure. First, they based their stories on ­actual cases of vio­lence against sex workers. Second, they incorporated anx­i­eties par­ tic­ul­ar to the period: the increased medicalization of sex, the reliance on criminal anthropology to excuse or even buttress the policy of regulation, and the rise in venereal disease among Rus­sian youth. Most importantly, though, they gave literary life to the sexualized ­woman. While Tolstoy and Andreev construct their depictions through dif­fer­ent generic conceits (Tolstoy through the lens of realism, Andreev via apocalyptic symbolism), they nevertheless pre­sent a unified narrative that silences the sex worker through the erasure of her physical presence: Maslova fades from the text, Manechka is violently murdered. A vibrant discourse—­represented in the works of Krestovsky, Garshin, Tolstoy, and Andreev—­emerged over the period to determine w ­ hether the Rus­sian state could, or should, police sexual urges. But the conclusions ­these writers proposed in their fiction eclipsed any possibility for ­women’s sexual autonomy. The threat ­women’s sexual emanci-



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pation posed to the f­ amily outweighed any pos­si­ble benefits it might offer Rus­ sian society. As a harbinger of modernity, the sex worker’s status as envisioned by male intermediaries came to signify the impending doom threatening Rus­ sia’s ­future. How visual culture and prose fiction amplified ­these anx­i­eties through the image of the elite sex worker—­the demimondaine—is the subject of chapter 3.

Ch a p ter 3

Tricks of the Trade Elite Prostitution and the Art of Seduction

A lady “between worlds,” the dama polusveta, or demimondaine, occupied a precarious position in imperial Rus­sia.1 More selective than a brothel worker and unlike the kept w ­ oman who settled with one lover, the demimondaine confused sexual and social bound­aries by appropriating the be­hav­iors, pastimes, and clothing of the elite. While she typically hailed from modest origins, the demimondaine harnessed her sex appeal as a tool for upward mobility, and she blended in with w ­ omen of the gentry in troubling ways. Rus­sians of the nineteenth c­ entury saw that as the demimondaine r­ ose in stature, she started to develop a taste for the finer ­things in life, including good wine, expensive lodgings, and fash­ion­able attire. Cultural figures of the imperial period would point to the demimondaine’s supposed insatiable love of luxury as confirmation that all ­women w ­ ere vulnerable to the 2 allure of haute couture. It became increasingly impor­tant for Rus­sia’s civic-­ minded authors to satirize the demimondaine’s vanity in the hope of preventing other w ­ omen from following in her footsteps. Rus­sian writers and artists of the mid-­nineteenth ­century introduce the demimonde to the public by describing it as a French-­inspired sexual subculture taking root in the fertile soil of St. Petersburg. “We are starting our own Pa­ri­sian demimonde in St. Petersburg,” cautions the narrator in a story from 1855 by the writer and editor Ivan Panaev. “It’s impossible not to take notice of t­ hese w ­ omen” ­because, he explains, “their numbers are increasing by the 78

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day.” Excited by the sex appeal of such ­women but also shocked by their ability to bankrupt men, Panaev’s narrator warns his readers that t­ hese coquettes “are moving beyond their usual sphere of influence and gaining strength . . . ​ they have no qualms flaunting their luxuriance beyond all decency.”3 Panaev encapsulated for readers what they saw regularly on the streets of Rus­sia’s northern capital: ­women dressed to the nines who outearned and outspent some of the country’s richest nobility. That ­women could weaponize sex to gain fortunes deeply troubled the Rus­sian intelligent­sia, who sensed that mobilizing transactional relations, as the demimondaine did, provided a dangerous model that any female citizen might choose over domestic servitude. Panaev and his contemporaries studied demimondaines, often referring to such ­women as “camellias” (kamelii), in reference to the selfless courtesan Marguerite Gautier from Alexandre Dumas fils’ The Lady with the Camellias (La dame aux camélias, 1848).4 But Panaev’s depictions of kamelii stop short of the redemptive portrait Dumas fils offers readers. Instead of sacrificing happiness for the well-­being of her lover, as Gautier eventually does, typical Rus­sian kamelii are at once more vindictive and cutthroat than their Pa­ri­sian counter­ parts. Pictured in cultural production as surrounded by admirers and draped in furs, Rus­sia’s ­women of the demimonde signal the power of female consumption in a nascent cap­it­ al­ist market. But as with other categories of transgressive ­women, the demimondaine also proved alluring to ­those who transposed her image to page or canvas. She might emasculate her keeper, as cultural producers keenly noted, but she also facilitated a burgeoning leisure culture founded on the princi­ples of plea­sure and enjoyment. This chapter addresses depictions of the demimondaine in Rus­sian lit­er­a­ ture and visual culture and focuses predominantly on the period from the 1850s through the 1880s. Much of the commentary on demimondaines emerges in ­these de­cades in response to a sexual subculture that disregarded traditional mores and turned instead to the glorification of consumption and the cele­ bration of coy flirtation and sexual innuendo. I trace the origins of literary and pictorial depictions of this type of female figure to a rarely studied text from the late eigh­teenth ­century, Mikhail Chulkov’s Prigozhaia povarikha, ili pokhozhdenie razvratnoi zhenshchiny (The Comely Cook, or The Adventures of a Debauched ­Woman, 1770). While typically overlooked in discussions of commercial sex, The Comely Cook predicts the concerns that come to the fore in writings of the mid-­nineteenth ­century. Chulkov’s bawdy heroine, Martona, uses men’s affections to gain the necessary trappings and financial security to copy the lifestyle of her upper-­class peers. Like her successors of the nineteenth ­century, Martona embodies liminality b­ ecause she fluctuates between worlds in ways that reveal a breakdown of social hierarchies and sexual categories.

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The notion of liminality, described by anthropologist Victor Turner in his studies on ritual pro­cesses, proves useful in analyzing Rus­sian depictions of wanton ­women.5 On the one hand, operating “between worlds,” the demimondaine, by virtue of her position as social outsider, provided a generative vantage point from which writers and artists could interrogate the destabilization of gender identity. On the other hand, w ­ omen who mirrored both in dress and be­hav­ior their counter­parts from the elite while offering sensual plea­sure associated with the public w ­ oman’s profession functioned as “betwixt and between” in their threshold social state. As the texts and images in this chapter suggest, the demimondaine’s liminality extends beyond her status between worlds to that of her gender. As exemplified in descriptions by Panaev and images from the popu­lar press, portrayals of demimondaines underscore that such ­women possess traits normally associated with their male suitors: they are aggressive, sexually aware, socially astute, and increasingly better off financially than their would-be lovers. Prose fiction calls attention to the troubling fact that ­these w ­ omen function completely outside the jurisdiction of brothels and make the city of St. Petersburg their social playground, as they frequent the theater, opera, and travel the streets in extravagant carriages and expensive finery. That the majority of texts examined in this chapter take up the demimondaine in the context of St. Petersburg indicates how this w ­ oman between worlds also comes to signify the liminality of the northern capital. In ways similar to her impoverished counterpart walking the streets or working in the brothel, the demimondaine embodies St.  Petersburg’s mercenary under­ pinnings, where ­women circulate as commodities. Yet b­ ecause the demimondaine has spending power of her own, she can dictate her engagement with the market. Prose fiction characterizes this economic autonomy as both liberating and oppressive, as writers stress that such ­women are tied to their sexual worth and decrease in value with age. Mobilizing her autonomy for as long as pos­si­ble, the demimondaine appears in cultural production as actively transgressive in that she fluctuates between realms, reverses hierarchies, and embodies ambiguity. Writers and artists locate the demimondaine within the setting of St. Petersburg and stress that like the northern capital, the city’s numerous kamelii and w ­ omen of ill repute embody duplicity. Just as St. Petersburg evokes a sense of won­der, with its magnificent facades and breathtaking vistas, so too does the demimondaine’s external beauty prove captivating to onlookers. Yet writers stress that closer examination reveals both the city’s facades and the demimondaine’s outward appearance as nothing but a veneer of beauty. Under­neath the splendid, attractive exterior rests emptiness, falsity, or decay. Prominent social figures would point to the popularity of demimondaines as a sign of a

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broader cultural decline; arguing that the public inability to condemn such ­women was indicative of growing immorality, commentators bemoaned the spread of sexual licentiousness. In a manner typical for the period, the historian and ethnographer Serafim Shashkov would complain about the “empty-­ headedness” of popu­lar kamelii and attribute their success to “the debauchery of a parasitic society” that foolishly worships them.6 To highlight the insincerity of the demimondaine’s be­hav­ior, commentators borrow the meta­phor of the stage to call into question her motivations. Comparing her to an actress who performs well-­rehearsed roles, authors demonize the demimondaine by showing her as a calculating gold-­digger who promises naive men her love but is ­really ­after their fortune. By evoking the supposed theatricality of the demimondaine, writers emphasize that such a ­woman is inherently untrustworthy. Like an actress who learns a part and manipulates the emotions of her audience, the demimondaine toys with the affections of her keeper through a well-­rehearsed seduction technique. “She can take on any role,” frets one of Panaev’s male characters, who is beguiled by Armans, a famous St. Petersburg demimondaine. One moment she “behave[s] like an unobtainable w ­ oman,” only to “suddenly switch and become the most dissolute and audacious lorette.”7 Equal parts playful and vindictive, the demimondaine appears as a highly adaptable, socially nimble figure whose intentions cultural commentators attempt to unmask and expose to the public. Connected to the imagery of the demimondaine as performer are the real-­ life examples of female actresses, singers, and dancers who gained fame for their liaisons with upper-­class men and members of the nobility.8 While such ­women might have circulated among the elite, and on rare occasion even married their influential lovers, their ability to obtain social legitimacy was an exception rather than the norm. Rus­sia’s female performers not only faced social stigma in that their profession was considered a dishonorable one; the vast majority of ­women employed in the theatrical arts also grappled with sexual extortion. In the assessment of Catherine Schuler, actresses in Rus­sia, as elsewhere in Eu­rope, ­were “at the mercy not only of unscrupulous entrepreneurs and directors, but also of their ‘admirers.’ ”9 It was commonly assumed that actresses and other female performers w ­ ere “loose” ­women who supplemented their income with sexual patronage. As Julie Cassiday puts it, by the nineteenth ­century, “the professional Rus­sian theatre had become a thinly veiled but socially acceptable brothel, in which actresses’ dramatic per­ for­mance in public implied a sexual per­for­mance in private with male spectators and superiors in the theatre administration.”10 The realm of prose fiction reflects both the financial pressures facing actresses and the stigma associated with their profession. When, for instance,

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Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s heroine from What Is to Be Done? (Chto delat’? 1863) tries to escape her ­family’s despotism, she hopes the theater might offer a path to in­de­pen­dence. But when her confidant, Lopukhov, conducts a cursory investigation into the common working conditions of actresses, he urges Vera Pavlovna to abandon the idea, given that even the most chaste of ­women cannot avoid the “unpleasant dangers en route to a ­career on the stage.”11 Even more explicit a condemnation of the conditions facing actresses appears in Mikhail Saltykov-­Shchedrin’s The Golovlyov F­ amily (Gospoda Golovlevy, 1880), which foregrounds the tragic fate of the twin s­ isters, Anninka and Liubinka, who embark on a stage ­career in the provinces. While they initially enjoy a ­limited success, the system of patronage leaves them no choice but to acquiesce to the sexual demands of dodgy male figures who implicate them in their own cases of fraud and embezzlement. Humiliated and scorned by the public and unable to find permanent “protectors,” both ­sisters spiral downward into a hopeless pit of despair that culminates in Liubinka’s suicide.12 The case of Saltykov-­Shchedrin’s actresses proves instructive in that it foregrounds the dif­fer­ent, albeit interrelated, concepts of theatricality and performativity. Taking into account t­ hese varied images and types of “per­for­mance,” the following analy­sis differentiates between theater and theatricality, and per­ for­mance and performativity, to tease out how and for whom the demimondaine performs. Certainly the demimondaine registers in textual repre­sen­ta­tion as a “theatrical” being, meaning that cultural producers use the meta­phor of the stage to call into question the veracity of her be­hav­ior, which they describe as scripted, overly dramatic, and duplicitous.13 By the same token, the body of works examined in this chapter also produce a per­for­mance of their own, wherein the demimondaine serves as a platform to interrogate new gender identities. Examining her from this perspective allows for a fuller engagement with both the reductive aspects and the emancipatory possibilities located in the visual and written texts of the period. By reading with an eye to the performative, the pre­sent chapter uncovers how images of the demimondaine transgress and destabilize traditional thoughts and beliefs regarding femininity. Visual culture of the imperial period offers a nuanced interpretation of the demimondaine’s role in fostering leisure culture. Unlike literary works that stress her “fallenness” as a moral dilemma, illustrations offer ways of seeing nonreproductive sex as a pleasant alternative to the demands of marriage and ­family life. Images, particularly t­hose from the ­album Fallen but Charming Creatures (Pogibshie, no milye sozdaniia, 1862–63), imagine demimondaines as gregarious socialites who balance flirtation with innuendo in alluring ways. As active brokers in Rus­sia’s sexual subculture, demimondaines emerge in lithography and fine art as a new category of sexually liberated w ­ omen.

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Fallen but Charming Creatures does not contain sexuality, but rather sells it—­ along with the accompanying lifestyle—as an enviable, reproducible, and pur­chas­able phenomenon. By eroticizing the demimondaine in this way, visual culture aligns with what art historian Abigail Solomon-­Godeau describes as the mechanisms of commodity culture through which “desire is provoked not merely or only for the commodity but for the ambiance or lifestyle that the commodity represents.”14 Taken in their entirety, both prose fiction and visual culture use the demimondaine as a way to discuss ­women’s increasing importance in the public domain as consumers.

The Comely Cook: Origins of the Elite Prostitute in Rus­sian Lit­er­a­ture Martona, the heroine of Mikhail Chulkov’s The Comely Cook, or The Adventures of a Debauched W ­ oman, begins her first-­person confession not with repentance, but by justifying her debauchery. “Our ­sisters ­will accuse me of immodesty,” she begins, “but since this vice is natu­ral for ­women . . . ​I ­shall indulge it willingly.”15 In what follows, Martona narrates an exciting array of indulgences, both sexual and financial, as she moves from one lover to the next. An adventuress armed with witty Rus­sian proverbs to explain her transgressions, Martona describes her many romantic trysts as inevitable, given the weaknesses of her sex. As a heroine who seeks transactional relationships while escaping any pangs of moral guilt, she predicts literary and visual depictions of the 1850s that satirize the wanton w ­ oman for her supposed vanity and lack of moral compass. In this sense, Martona functions as a pre­de­ces­sor to l­ater depictions of Rus­sian demimondaines who willingly use their status as commodities to ascend the social ladder. Noting both Martona’s h ­ umble origins and the numerous adventures that bring her into contact with varying segments of society, commentators on The Comely Cook have studied the novel in terms of the picaresque mode. Originating in Spain in the sixteenth ­century, the picaresque follows a rogu­ish protagonist who is “caught up in a chaotic world worse than ours, in which [he or she] is on an eternal journey of encounters that allow [him or her] to be alternately both victim of that world and its exploiter.”16 In the British and Rus­ sian contexts, the birth of the novel is connected with the harlot’s tale told in picaresque form. Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders (1722), one of the first novels in En­glish lit­er­at­ure, details the exploits of a wayward ­woman. Chulkov’s The Comely Cook is often termed “the Rus­sian Moll Flanders” for its similarities to Defoe’s text. Conveyed through Moll’s first-­person confession, the novel follows

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her vari­ous transgressions, beginning with her pressing need to find a wealthy husband to replace her recently departed one. As a heroine, Moll is “no mere ‘average’; she is superior in kind and larger than life—­the most attractive of mistresses, the best of wives, the deftest of thieves.”17 Moll embarks on a series of misadventures that include bankruptcy, adultery, thievery, and marriage to a man who turns out to be her half ­brother. Punished for her crimes, Moll manages to avoid hanging by pleading for transport to the colonies for herself and her Lancashire husband. She ultimately repents her misdeeds and is allowed to return to ­England, thus solidifying the novel’s status as part picaresque, part parable on the reformed prodigal ­woman. While it is unlikely that Chulkov read Defoe’s novel, the similarities in the narrative depictions of the female rogue (pícaro) indicate a shared interest in the wanton w ­ oman’s ability to broker her own transactions with the world she inhabits.18 At first Martona becomes the mistress of a young butler who uses his master’s money to outfit her with “all sorts of knickknacks” and buys her anything “as testimony of his love . . . ​and a kind of perpetual guarantee.”19 But Martona’s beauty and grace catch the eye of her lover’s boss, and before long she exchanges servant for master. For ­every piece of good tiding, however, Martona feels the brunt of scorned fortune; one minute a nobleman’s mistress, the next thrown out and penniless, she never manages to stay long with one lover. Martona’s social identity plays an impor­tant part in Chulkov’s framing of the profligate heroine. As a sergeant’s ­widow, Martona finds her poverty unbearable but is unable to find legitimate employment. Not unlike other soldiers’ wives (soldatki) in imperial Rus­sia, ­women like Martona would have faced considerable economic hardship during their husbands’ lives, but doubly so ­after their death. In the assessment of Elise Kimerling Wirtschafter, very few, if any, mea­sures existed in imperial Rus­sia to assist soldiers’ wives, “as both the army and civilian society successfully avoided responsibility” for the fate of such ­women. Moreover, as Martona herself complains, neighbors in Kiev gossip constantly about her ­after her husband’s death, blaming her for supposed promiscuity despite lack of cause. The historical analy­sis offered by Wirtschafter helps elucidate why w ­ omen of Martona’s status might garner such scorn from their community even without evidence of sexual transgression. Often perceived as promiscuous, soldiers’ wives “maintained vis­i­ble presence in towns where they became involved in petty trade, prostitution, and the trafficking of unwanted ­children between foundling homes and the countryside.”20 Thus, by choosing a heroine from a category of female citizens already considered “morally loose,” Chulkov’s text emphasizes how w ­ omen on

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the margins might turn to commercial sex not only out of economic need, but ­because of their weakness of character as perceived by their communities.21 Chulkov plays with typical assumptions regarding w ­ omen of Martona’s social estate by highlighting how she views her promiscuity as only natu­ral for members of her sex. From her point of view, resisting plea­sure serves no purpose, especially when one considers how minor sexual transgressions are when compared to the evils of the world. “My conscience did not bother me,” reflects Martona, “­because I thought that ­there are ­people in this world who are much bolder than I. . . . ​All one has to do is to let oneself be ruled by vices, and they w ­ ill seem much more pleasant than virtue.”22 In this regard, the blatant didacticism and moralism of Defoe’s text finds no counterpart in Chulkov’s tale. In the assessment of David Gasperetti, “in Chulkov’s version of the ‘fallen ­woman’ motif an earthy humor and nonjudgmental view of the world displace the conventional conceptualizations of authority and morality that lie at the heart of Moll Flanders.”23 As one of Rus­sia’s first novels, The Comely Cook shows at once a fascination with Western models and a displacement and reworking of them. Chulkov not only allows Martona to participate in her own commodification but he portrays her journey as one of self-­f ulfillment. Part of this libertine attitude ­toward the libidinal economy in The Comely Cook has to do with the relative infancy of both the novel and of cap­i­tal­ist enterprise at the time of Chulkov’s writing. Michel Foucault’s assertion that prior to the Victorian era “sexual practices had l­ittle need of secrecy” holds true in eighteenth-­ century Rus­sia, when notions of sexual propriety could be treated with relative humor and frankness.24 And unlike Defoe, who emphasizes Moll’s feeling of guilt and stresses her ultimate conversion, Chulkov’s heroine never thinks twice about her mercenary pursuits in ­matters of the heart. The lack of critical perspective is confirmed by the economic banter in Martona’s descriptions of her affairs. She sees herself as a business owner would her trade, which is why she describes her lovers as clientele who bargain for her affections: “Our first meeting was an auction; we did not discuss anything e­ lse ­until we closed our deal. He was bidding for my charms, and I was yielding them for a good sum of money. Afterward, we gave our mutual pledges with love as mediator and my landlady as witness.”25 The theme of commerce in The Comely Cook parallels the commodification of the novel within the Rus­sian literary market of the second half of the eigh­ teenth c­ entury. Much to the chagrin of intellectuals and the presses of the Acad­emy of Sciences, by and large the most popu­lar tales of the period w ­ ere adventures and romances.26 The relative infancy of the publishing industry in

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Rus­sia meant that market entrepreneurs who fulfilled the desires of the reading public often did better than their intellectual counter­parts who pushed translations of Enlightenment lit­er­a­ture. The popularity of The Comely Cook aligned with the overall success of the novel in Rus­sia, in which “the mixing of high and low, of the crude caricatures of lubok prints and the facile ste­reo­types of civic virtue, of carnivalesque buffoonery and sentimentalist didacticism informed the heteroglossia of the genre.”27 Lubochnaia literatura, a popu­lar genre in the eigh­teenth ­century comprising printed woodcuts with accompanying narratives—­often depicted bawdy themes through whimsical satire and farce. The novel’s hybrid composition explains both its structural components and the relative lack of closure at the story’s end. Whereas Defoe concludes Moll’s journey through the redeeming institutions of marriage and motherhood, Martona makes no such gestures t­ oward penitential reformation. Rather, the ending culminates in melodramatic fashion with a touch of poison and a deathbed confession.28 Put succinctly, Martona receives a letter from a former lover, Akhal, who has taken poison b­ ecause he can no longer live with the guilt of having killed their common friend, Svidal, in a duel. The fate of Akhal is a cruel one, for Svidal escaped the duel unharmed: he merely faked his death in order to flee with Martona. The novel’s final scene reaches a crescendo when Svidal arrives to ask for his ­dying friend’s forgiveness. Akhal, no longer in charge of his senses, believes Svidal to be an apparition sent to pull him straight into the torments of hell. Scholars of Chulkov’s text have disagreed on how best to interpret the novel’s ending, in which Martona is cleared of wrong-­doing and is well on her path to inherit a fortune from Akhal. Some critics, including Dmitry Blagoi, argue that the suddenness of the conclusion signals not a finale but rather the first part of a longer novel that Chulkov composed.29 ­Others reject this hypothesis in f­ avor of reading the ending as a sign of Chulkov’s own artistic limitations.30 The novel’s conclusion has also prompted persuasive interpretations on the nature of open-­endedness and Chulkov’s “parody of picaresque nonclosure.”31 For David Gasperetti, the ending works within “the perspective of the carnivalesque” in which the finale “parodies the attempt to neatly tie up something as complex as a novel.”32 Writing in a similar vein, Iurii Striedter proposes that Chulkov ends the novel where the story logically concludes, not where a Western model of narrative design would dictate.33 Despite the respective strengths of t­ hese interpretations of The Comely Cook, they overlook how consumption informs both Martona’s transformation and the subsequent open-­endedness of the novel. Martona assumes the part of an upper-­class ­woman by essentially dressing the part and purchasing the required

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trappings of the elite. After she cites the proverb “Wealth breeds respectability,” her first act upon taking up with the butler is to “spend his money freely” so that within a short time “all the shops discovered” how she “bought what­ ever [she] needed and all sorts of knickknacks” to the point that her home “constantly grew in possessions and increased in wealth.” Accumulation of finery equals status in Martona’s world. But as she herself notes, ­women’s lust for consumption can send them into a frenzy. “The more clothes a w ­ oman has,” she explains, “the more she has a desire to walk about the city,” which in turn threatens “to spoil our s­ isters and get us into trou­ble.” But Martona lovingly accepts the gifts and patronage that come her way; in the venal economy it seems only fair—­indeed, justly so—­that she should be rewarded for her beauty and com­pany with appropriate compensation.34 Although The Comely Cook gestures to Martona’s vanity, the novel does not morally condemn or punish her for her materialism. Nor does Martona’s hunger for wealth threaten to undo the men in her orbit, for she is as likely to give money and plea­sure as she is to receive it. In fact, her financial ­doings are part of what Emma Lieber describes as “Chulkov’s chaotic marketplace,” where “property changes hands freely and wealth is a temporary state.” Noting one of Martona’s favorite words, razdavat’ (to distribute, to spread around, to give to many), Lieber makes an apt comparison between Chulkov’s and Defoe’s heroines to contrast the fluctuation of wealth and capital in both works: “Where Moll is born into a system of symmetrical repayment and debt, Martona’s environment is a space of bounty, excess, and gift.”35 Considering Martona’s bountifulness and her potential for narrative helps explain the relative lack of closure in Chulkov’s novel. In heightening the emotional register to the pitch of tragedy, Chulkov stops short of catharsis or moral retribution. Instead Martona’s propensity for consumption and adventure continues outward beyond the novel’s finale. Rather than dilute the ending with didactic moralism, Chulkov leaves Martona’s story unfinished. If one reads with an eye to the conflation of venal w ­ omen with con­spic­u­ous consumption, Martona’s story cannot end. Her potential for consumption is as boundless as her love of adventure. She has many more gifts, lovers, and trophies to win before her narrative concludes. The Comely Cook pre­sents a portrait of a female rogue who eagerly mobilizes her sexual difference for financial and social gain. Martona’s adventures in the marketplace signal the importance of consumption to a fallen ­woman’s transformation from servant to mistress. She believes, as t­hose around her do, that donning the necessary clothing and mimicking the proper mannerisms provide entry into the upper class. The many mis­haps and misfortunes that punctuate her journey indicate that while

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hers is a bumpy road, she nevertheless ends with the fortune needed to gain respectability. While The Comely Cook precedes the advent of the demimonde as a cultural phenomenon by many decades, it shares a number of the formal qualities associated with images of Rus­sia’s nineteenth-­century sexual subculture. In par­tic­u­lar, Chulkov reveals Martona’s sexuality in her act of consumption in ways similar to l­ater generations of writers and artists e­ ager to portray the fallen w ­ oman’s propensity for luxury and fine goods. In one such indicative moment, Martona’s “excessive joy” at receiving a (used) snuff box from a lover stands in for coital plea­sure. Her brain, “inflamed by the gift,” ­causes her to go into “wild gesticulation,” ­after which she collapses, exhausted, in bed.36 Suggestive of orgasm and carnal plea­sure, Martona’s lust for goods is a meta­ phor for her sexual desire. In this sense, by stressing her predilection for consumption Chulkov predicts what nineteenth-­century writers would see as the “voracious ­woman consumer, whose ‘lust’ for objects ‘depleted’ the resources—­both financial and sexual—of her husband, thereby disrupting the economic and sexual hierarchy between the sexes.”37 The image of the female rake in The Comely Cook finds no comparison among Rus­sian works of the late eigh­teenth ­century—or even the early nineteenth, for that ­matter. It would be several decades ­after Chulkov’s publication before an elite sexual subculture would reappear as a theme in published Rus­sian works. A number of historical and cultural ­factors help explain why neither the writers associated with Sentimentalism nor t­ hose who would l­ater be categorized as Romantics directly addressed the theme of venal sex among the upper-­ classes. Rather than focus on the histrionic gestures and picaresque adventures of a ­woman like Martona, writers of the early nineteenth ­century built an idealized image of the female sex.38 When heroines transgress sexual norms, it no longer contains the flippant and carefree qualities exhibited in The Comely Cook. Instead, the kind of ambiguity exemplified in Martona’s sexual escapades gives way to didactic moralism that vindicates fallen ­women as victims. Thus, Nikolai Karamzin’s “Poor Liza” (“Bednaia Liza,” 1792) paints an image of an impoverished ­woman betrayed by her upper-­class seducer in order to justify her transgression in the eyes of readers and si­mul­ta­neously uphold her moral superiority. Examples of heroines with complex inner lives can be found in poetry and prose written between the late eigh­teenth ­century and the 1830s, but by and large the image of heroines openly violating gender norms in ways similar to Martona’s recedes from view. Only with the advent of the Natural School in the 1840s would Rus­sian literati and their compatriots working in the visual arts address the theme of commercial love. While strictly prohibited from any direct repre­ sen­ta­tions of prostitution, works of the mid-­nineteenth ­century convey the

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par­ameters of Rus­sia’s sexual subculture through innuendo and veiled discussion on sexually promiscuous ­women.

Picturing Rus­sian Morals: Masquerades of Affection Emboldened by both the advent of new printing technologies and a brief loosening of the censor’s regulations, Rus­sia’s graphic artists began in the 1840s to document St. Petersburg’s changing urban landscape with hints of social satire and parody. Inspired by French journals like The French Painted by Themselves (Les Francais peints par eux-­mêmes, 1840–42), new broadsheet publications like Our Folk Drawn from Nature by Russians (Nashi, spisannye s natury russkimi, 1841) and The Physiology of Petersburg (Fiziologiia Peterburga, 1844–45) “gripped the public’s imagination” with witty caricatures that accompanied brief vignettes.39 Pairing short texts with small-­scale graphic images, ­these works responded “to the demographic and institutional changes in Rus­sian society” and acquainted audiences with the distinctness of the country’s social classes.40 This brief flowering of critical commentary would cease in the final years of Tsar Nicholas I’s rule, when in response to revolutionary fervor abroad, the monarch enacted stringent censorship rules that stifled creative output among graphic artists.41 But works by caricaturists and illustrators made a fantastic comeback in the era leading up to and directly following the G ­ reat Reforms as increased rates of literacy combined with an ease in censorship allowed editors to publish more satirical content.42 Illustrations of this period profile a number of urban locales, including street scenes, apartment interiors, and other St. Petersburg “corners” in an attempt to document ­these spaces for a public interested in seeing and learning about its fellow citizens. Reflecting this newfound interest in the city’s milieu, artists pay par­tic­u­lar attention to two erotically charged spaces: the masquerade ball and the loge, or theater box. Both settings offer the opportunity for the caricaturist to imagine popu­lar pastimes where playful flirtation and sexual intrigue take center stage. T ­ hese venues, while dominated by the cultural elite, come to signify dangerous erotic zones where ­women of ill repute might mix with men of the upper classes. Examining the pictorial repre­sen­ta­tion of ­these liminal spaces shows how Rus­sia’s graphic artists both responded to and helped shape perceptions of sexually promiscuous ­women as moving from the margins to the center of Rus­sia’s cultural landscape. Originating in western Eu­rope and made popu­lar in the court of Peter the ­Great, by the nineteenth ­century masquerade balls had transitioned from lush

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affairs reserved solely for the aristocracy to soirees with participants hailing from the ­middle and upper estates. As reflected in both literary and visual culture of the mid-­nineteenth ­century, the setting of the masquerade offered anonymity and a sanctioned venue to explore the possibilities of extramarital love. “­Because it was unlikely that participants would encounter and recognize each other at f­ uture events,” explains Colleen McQuillen, “masquerades offered the possibility of immediate sensual gratification without consequences.”43 Whereas the masquerade cloaked identity through costume, in the theater one’s public persona was put on display as men and ­women might gaze at one another from the vantage points of their seats in private boxes. While ­women w ­ ere allowed to attend the theater and masquerades without damage to their reputations, ­these spaces began to take on a subversive quality as the attendees expanded to include demimondaines. Pictorial repre­sen­ta­tions document how the masquerade serves as a locus for social and sexual transgression. Images from humorous publications like the caricature ­album Hodgepodge (Eralash, 1846–49) pre­sent female masquerade-­ goers as flirtatious and coy with male attendees.44 While they are not identified as prostitutes per se, their forwardness suggests a sexual openness attributed to ­women of ill repute. More impor­tant, donning a mask could give any w ­ oman the courage to break with decorum and act out desires normally forbidden. Satirists of the 1840s poke fun at how such freedom turns ­women into over-­ sexed huntresses looking for prey, as one of the ­album’s illustrations suggests (see figure 3.1). The scarcity of eligible bachelors initiates a Dionysian free-­for-­all as the w ­ omen, overwhelmed with enthusiastic fervor, tug and pull at the man’s limbs. Such interpretations align with other visuals from the period that compare female masquerade-­goers to leeches, parasites, or mythical beings that “suck” their male companions dry. While certainly comedic in intent, the message such images convey is far from simplistic. When caricature makes fun of hypersexualized w ­ omen, as the image from Hodgepodge does, it offers vital commentary on the perception of appropriate be­hav­iors for both genders. As art historian Cindy McCreery has shown, satirical images of w ­ omen behaving aggressively provide valuable insight into debates on femininity and changing notions of propriety.45 Keeping in mind the social message of graphic satire, the masquerade-­goers pictured in the a­ lbum point to a distinct worry that wives or ladies of marriageable age might adopt the sexual licentiousness normally associated with ­women of ill repute. By the 1860s artists could imagine the masquerade ball in ways more sexually suggestive than had their pre­de­ces­sors, as exemplified in the illustrated ­album ­You’re Beautiful in any Clothing, Darling (Vo vsekh ty dushen’ka nariadakh khorosha, 1861). The work of popu­lar graphic artist Aleksandr Lebedev, the

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Figure 3.1. ​Mikhail Nevakhovich, illustration from Eralash (Hodgepodge), 1847. National Library of Rus­sia, St. Petersburg.

images feature some rather risqué content, including a lithograph of a w ­ oman, clearly aroused, undressing a­ fter a ball, and a scene where a man gropes a peasant w ­ oman as she bathes in a stream. Coquettish be­hav­ior appears in a number of prints, especially in At the masquerade (V maskarade), which depicts an amorous rendezvous between a seductively dressed w ­ oman and her male ad46 mirer (see figure 3.2). The print is evocative of a striptease as the man unties the w ­ oman’s shoe while she provocatively lifts her skirt in a gesture that beckons to both the man and the image’s viewer to take a peek. The viewer “sees” the image from left to right (mimicking the pro­cess of reading); our attention is brought to the ­woman’s naked leg, then her hand, her waist, and ultimately her masked face. Only then does the viewer return, along the line of the ­woman’s body, to the knee itself, the centerpiece of the image. The fact that the man’s face is hidden allows the viewer to stand in his or her place and enjoy the sensual plea­sure offered by the image itself. Although we cannot know for certain whether the female figure is a demimondaine, the strong sexual connotation, which is pre­sent throughout Lebedev’s series, connects her

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Figure 3.2. ​Aleksandr Lebedev, V maskarade (At the Masquerade), print from the series Vo vsekh ty dushen’ka nariadakh khorosha (­You’re Beautiful in Any Clothing, Darling), 1861. National Library of Rus­sia, St. Petersburg.

to the new category of w ­ omen known as kamelii, who exchange companionship for financial support. The image also points out that, thanks to the anonymity provided by a mask, any ­woman—­whether she be a member of the demimonde or the wife of a nobleman—­could embark on a sexual liaison if she so desires. Not unlike the masquerade ball, images of the theater reflect profound anx­ i­eties about the mixing of dif­fer­ent categories of w ­ omen in the public sphere. Such is the case in an illustration from Faddei Bulgarin’s Pictures of Rus­sian Mores (Kartinki russkikh nravov, 1842–43) that accompanies a didactic moral about the pitfalls of falling in love with St. Petersburg’s manipulative coquettes. Bulgarin’s conservative text addresses the wayward w ­ oman as part of a general expose on the supposed laziness and greed of the capital’s social misfits. Far

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from the destitute victims they pretend to be, the city’s many beggars, the text insists, are charlatans of the worst order, hoodwinking susceptible citizens into giving alms and charity. With accompanying images by the popu­lar illustrator Vasily Timm,47 Pictures of Rus­sian Mores takes par­tic­u­lar umbrage at el­derly ­widows who exploit the sympathies of gullible men. As proof of such w ­ omen’s duplicity, Bulgarin and Timm depict a former St. Petersburg socialite who now survives by abusing the charity of o ­ thers. Together with its accompanying illustrations, the vignette performs a kind of revelatory study of the psyche and the motivations of demimondaines. Beginning with a description of the ­woman in her old age, the narrative details how she conspires with other starukhi (old women) to swindle men with tales of hungry ­children and sick relatives, when in real­ity they pocket the money for trips to the local tavern. As the illustration suggests, her pockmarked face and darkened nose convey ill health and a penchant for drink (see figure 3.3). When she knocks on the narrator’s door asking for money to save her d­ ying d­ aughter, his friend recognizes her as a popu­lar lady of ill repute from his youth. According to the acquaintance, thirty-­five years ago this very ­woman “dressed like a doll” and “owned diamonds and shawls” (see figure 3.4). She regularly attended the theater, where she always “sat in the first balcony,” and ­after enjoying a production would return home, where she “lived in elaborately decorated rooms.”48 One honest merchant abandoned his ­family ­after falling in love with the ­woman. Upon realizing she had stolen his entire fortune, he committed suicide, thus leaving his wife and child ­behind to fend for themselves. “Such is the result,” explains the narrator, “of wickedness and debauchery.”49 The narrative affirms the ­woman’s proclivity for vice by locating her haughty distain for social decorum in the days of turbulent living as a popu­lar coquette. Working in tandem with the textual description, the illustration shows the ­woman in her former glory as she reclines and fiddles nonchalantly with the tassels of her dress. The expensive bracelet on her wrist and the luxurious fur coat signal to the viewer that the ­woman’s wealth rivals that of the richest ladies in attendance. Framed within the loge, the w ­ oman glares suggestively at the viewer in an act of defiance as if to say that she, rather than the action on stage, is the true focus of the audience’s attention. The setting of the theater places her within the realm of theatrical fantasy and thus buttresses the narrator’s assertion that she “acts” her role, w ­ hether as vixen in youth or beggar in old age. Predicative in this regard of l­ater assessments in literary culture that reject the theatricality of the demimondaine, the female figure signifies the link between promiscuity and duplicity so often encountered in texts on fallen ­women. But the image also operates on the level of authorial per­for­mance, given that Bulgarin and Timm can secure their moral

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Figure 3.3. ​Vasily Timm, illustration from Kartinki russkikh nravov (Pictures of Rus­sian Mores), 1842–43.

rectitude by exposing the fraudulence of the fallen ­woman. Didactic in intention, the image codes the feminine in terms of spectacle by placing her in the cultural space of the loge, where the w ­ oman presumably upstages the action taking place on stage. As a reference to and a commentary on the exhibition of ­women attending the theater, the illustration from Pictures of Rus­sian Mores deserves a bit

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Figure 3.4. ​Vasily Timm, illustration from Kartinki russkikh nravov (Pictures of Rus­sian Mores), 1842–43.

more historical contextualization, as it reflects shared tropes and narrative techniques with other works of the period. Bulgarin and Timm’s collaborative proj­ect belongs to an impor­tant literary genre known as the physiological sketch (fiziologicheskii ocherk), which emerged in the 1840s as a medium to explore the country’s changing demographics and document new categories of urban dwellers, including wayward ­women. Building on the French tradition from which it originated, Rus­sian writers a­ dopted the physiological sketch to convey the particularities of specific social estates and their prospective milieus. It became a favorite genre of the Natural School (Natu­ral’naia shkola), the term used to describe a loosely aligned group of individuals working in the visual and verbal arts who shared a common interest in portraying social realities without overt idealization.50 Combining the brevity of a feuilleton with the specificity of a so­cio­log­i­cal study, the physiological sketch represented “what could be seen, heard, even smelled and touched, in an effort to abstract from ­these perceptions more general conclusions about the modern city, its inhabitants and their mores.”51 Given that the physiological sketch aims to

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relay the “representativeness” (tipichnost’) of a par­tic­u­lar hero or heroine, Pictures of Rus­sian Morals categorizes an entire subset of ­women who use liaisons to achieve financial gain. While the social implication of the ­woman’s moral comeuppance condemns her promiscuity, the image of her at the theater promotes her status as cultural commodity. Images of coquettes and socialites attending per­for­mances bring to light impor­tant issues regarding the charged geography of the imperial theater’s interior and its seating structure. As historians of the imperial period have shown, bringing together a diverse audience u ­ nder one roof might work, but only if the attendees followed a hierarchical seating arrangement that could protect class barriers. Attending the theater became at once more accessible and vital for members of Rus­sia’s ­middle estates, who purchased tickets and constituted the majority of attendees in the upper gallery and the standing sections.52 The choicest seats remained squarely for the elite, with the bel-­étage reserved for the wealthiest ticket holders.53 ­These loges typically appealed to well-­off families, who might pre­sent marriageable d­ aughters to an ­eager male public more interested in the female attendees than the action on stage. “Loges ­housed the prime target of masculine gaze,” explains Richard Stites, with flirtation “discreet and clandestine for some, bold and direct through a well-­aimed rolled-up program or an opera glass for o ­ thers.”54 Yet visual culture increasingly reflects the importance of the theater box not as a venue for respectable ­fathers to show off their eligible ­daughters but as a space for demimondaines to put themselves on public display. Visual cultural shows both a deep fascination and an encroaching fear that Rus­sia’s kamelii use their vantage point from the theater box to perform a carefully choreographed game of seduction. Images from the ­album Fallen but Charming Creatures imagine such moments of cultural intersection when prominent kamelii sardonically comment on their vari­ous romantic and financial successes among the male audience members. Two demimondaines share an intimate tête-­à-­tête as one of the w ­ omen points out a man she cleverly schooled in the ways of love (see figure 3.5). With their delicate features, marble-­like skin, and extravagant attire, the ­women share similar features and be­hav­iors with their counter­parts among the elite, but the camellia flowers eloquently placed in their hair signal their status as kamelii. While the w ­ omen are visually coded as hyperfeminine, with their string of pearls and low necklines, the textual commentary conveys a sexual awareness and financial acumen typically associated with the men who pursue them. The w ­ omen’s pointed gaze, which focuses outward to the unnamed benefactor, also implicates the viewer in a game of erotic innuendo. The image thus flips the traditional assessment of the period, that ­women attending the the-

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Figure 3.5. ​Aleksandr Lebedev, illustration from Pogibshie, no milye sozdaniia (Fallen but Charming Creatures), 1862–63. National Library of Rus­sia, St. Petersburg. ­There’s the man I taught the ways of the world! . . . ​I’m positive that no w ­ oman could bankrupt him, even if I had left him with a single farthing!

ater passively received the gaze of male onlookers. Instead the w ­ omen become subjects in their own right as they look from the height of the loge and survey the lay of the land and their exploits within it. Lebedev’s images of kamelii at the theater thus convey an impor­tant paradox that is echoed in subsequent repre­sen­ta­tions of demimondaines. Externally such w ­ omen appear as ultrafeminine, with milky-­white skin and delicate features that not only align them with the “weaker sex” but also suggest that they epitomize its most endearing qualities. In terms of their inner life, however, kamelii appear as hyperaware of their own status as sexual objects. Weaponizing this knowledge makes this category of ­women doubly subversive to the social order in that they can harness the desires of men for their own purposes and acquire sexual and

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economic autonomy as they do so. While visual culture allows for ambiguity in the portrayal of temptation and seduction, writers like Ivan Panaev offer far more essentializing critiques of kamelii. In his portrayals of the St. Petersburg demimonde, the kameliia appears as a cutthroat entrepreneur who is willing and able to betray her lovers in the pursuit of wealth and notoriety.

Ivan Panaev’s Vision of the St. Petersburg Demimonde For nineteenth-­century Rus­sians like Panaev, elite prostitution posed a conundrum. Demimondaines modeled for other w ­ omen the benefit of abandoning ­family and tradition for the comforts of wealth and leisure. Found strolling on Nevsky Prospect or attending the theater, demimondaines not only wanted to inhabit the public sphere but seemed e­ ager to own it. Even worse, while kamelii ­were once solely a Eu­ro­pean phenomenon, now Rus­sian ­women began mirroring the be­hav­iors of the French and German ­women who had recently arrived in the northern capital and taken up with men of the elite. Ivan Panaev addressed this cultural phenomenon through a series of stories included in his popu­lar Sketches of Petersburg Life (Ocherki iz peterburgskoi zhizni). Published between 1855 and 1860, Panaev’s column comprised five stories specifically on ­women of ill repute: “Lady from the St. Petersburg Demimonde” (“Dama iz peterburgskogo polusveta”), “Camellias” (“Kamelii”), “My Friend from out of Town” (“Moi inogorodnyi drug”), “The St. Petersburg Monte Cristo” (“Peterburgskii Monte-­Kristo”) and “Sharlota Fedorovna” (“Sharlota Fedorovna”). As with many second-­tier writers of the period, neither Panaev’s reputation nor his works have survived the test of time. But as an influential publisher and long-­term collaborator with both his wife, Avdotia Panaeva, and the luminary Nikolai Nekrasov, Panaev’s physiological sketches deserve a second look. His literary descriptions are the first to codify the demimonde for readers in pithy, accessible terms, and his stories offer valuable insight into mid-­ nineteenth-­century perceptions of gender and class. Panaev’s tales on kamelii confirm a similar infatuation and fear of demimondaines found in visuals of the period, but his fiction is far more condemnatory of such w ­ omen. He envisions demimondaines as vain beyond mea­sure and ruthless in their relations with patrons. In Panaev’s assessment, two forces drive the propagation of demimondaines: fashion and French lit­er­a­ture. One of the protagonists from his stories, Aleksandra Nikolaevna, is an upstanding Rus­sian wife who dutifully serves her husband. The ­woman’s moral demise is facilitated by the detrimental

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influence of French lit­er­a­ture, which models a life of libertine values that warps the mind of Rus­sia’s female readers. Her marriage collapses when Aleksandra Nikolaevna picks up a French novel and becomes emboldened to seek out true love. Initially she lives on her own, but she finds it impossible to survive without the luxuries to which she’s become accustomed via her marriage to a wealthy husband. Luckily, a new beau appears who can support her financially. Accepting a handsome salary seems only natu­ral, for, as she explains, “Balzac was right”: ­whether living in Paris or Petersburg, “it is impossible to love someone if you are living in an attic or hut.” When a benefactor scoffs at her love of Dumas, or tries to curtail her spending, she cuts him loose, explaining, “we w ­ omen cannot stand being with men like that for long.”55 ­After growing wise in the ways of the demimonde, Aleksandra Nikolaevna adroitly plays her male suitors off one another to obtain money, jewelry, and what­ever her heart desires. According to Panaev’s narrator, to the unobservant eye a w ­ oman like Aleksandra Nikolaevna might seem the hapless victim of a loveless marriage. On the surface, her need to find a male benefactor appears to be a strategy for survival. In real­ity, however, like the numerous other demimondaines found in St. Petersburg, Aleksandra Nikolaevna is driven by money alone. As proof of his accusation, the narrator details how ­after falling madly in love with Aleksandra Nikolaevna, an acquaintance spends a shocking twenty thousand rubles to appease the ­woman’s slightest whims of fancy.56 When the narrator confronts Aleksandra Nikolaevna for bankrupting his friend, she shows no remorse—­for what, if anything, can she do to help a man in the throes of love? The narrator gives up on his appeal, returns to his friend, and confides that Aleksandra Nikolaevna fails to see the error of her ways. Aleksandra Nikolaevna has the last word, ­because although estranged from her benefactor, she still manages to manipulate the situation to her advantage. She sends a promissory note with an assurance that she ­will pay back the twenty thousand in full. Appealing to his feelings of chivalry, Aleksandra Nikolaevna achieves her goal and the man tears up the notes and refuses to speak ill of her. At first surprised by her gesture, the narrator quickly realizes that it is “all for show” and that Aleksandra Nikolaevna simply “wanted to prove that she has nothing in common with the Luizas and Bertas,” the other prominent kamelii in St.  Petersburg society.57 Adroit in capitalizing on the weaknesses of men, Aleksandra Nikolaevna succeeds in supporting her luxurious lifestyle by appearing morally righ­teous and the social better of her competitors. The didactic warning the story sends to naive young men traveling to Petersburg is clear: taking up with a demimondaine leads to moral and financial bankruptcy.

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Panaev’s stories implicate demimondaines not only in duplicitous be­hav­ior but in an obsessive compulsion to spend exorbitant sums on the latest fashions. Typical in this regard is the French demimondaine, Armans, who never appears more than twice in the same dress. As described in the story “The St. Petersburg Monte Cristo,” her benefactor spends exorbitant sums of money to fulfill Armans’s ­every whim, even ­going so far as to purchase bed linen costing over fifteen thousand rubles simply ­because it appeals to her.58 Panaev imagines the demimondaines’ penchant for shopping as indicative of ­women’s predilection for consumption. In this regard, the image of kamelii found in his stories aligns with more general concerns regarding ­women’s entry into the marketplace and their new role as consumers. As Christine Ruane notes in her study of clothes shopping in imperial Rus­sia, from the 1850s onward the act of consumption is gendered as female. Discourse on shopping increasingly portrays exclusive boutiques as a site of dangerous transaction, where all w ­ omen—­from the shop girls peddling wares to chaste young ­women, from well-­bred young ladies to the most audacious coquettes—­fall prey to the allure of fashion. Moreover, such spaces become contested in the cultural sphere as commentators express worry that upper-­class wives might encounter ­women of the demimonde while on a trip to the Passazh shopping arcade. “­There was ­great concern,” writes Ruane, “that respectable w ­ omen by making the acquaintance of the demimondaines in the shops might become influenced by their example and lifestyle in rebelling against conventional morality.”59 Taking a closer look at images from the popu­ lar press in reform-­era Rus­sia helps elucidate the ways in which the demimondaine becomes tied to a gendered understanding of consumer culture.

The Camellia, An Indecent Flower In caricature and illustration in the second half of the nineteenth ­century, the demimondaine signifies an inevitable consequence of what happens when members of the female sex escape the watchful eye of parents and relatives. In this line of thinking, the elite prostitute embodies female weaknesses at their most extreme: she prefers leisure over l­ abor, consumes life instead of produces it, and dupes benefactors rather than supports a husband’s endeavors. While obviously critical in their indictment of gold-­diggers who play the sex market to their financial advantage, images from the popu­lar press walk a delicate line between condemnation and titillation. At times pictorial repre­sen­ta­tions play with the connotations of unattached w ­ omen who venture into the marketplace by eroticizing the employees of fash­ion­able stores or the female custom-

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ers who frequent them. Often associated with St. Petersburg’s bustling sexual subculture, elite prostitution features in images of the city’s major shopping arcades and downtown promenades. Images of quid pro quo agreements resonate as cultural responses to w ­ omen’s increased role in the public sphere as consumers. What begins, however, in popu­lar satirical publications like Budil’nik (The Alarm Clock) and Iskra (The Spark) as acerbic tongue-­and-­cheek portrayals of mercenary young ­women starts to acquire more artistic legitimacy in works by Rus­sia’s most distinguished paint­ers. Mirroring the path of the real-­life demimondaine, who moves from the social margins to the center of leisure culture, images of kamelii shift from the periphery of social satire in the 1860s to become a focal point in the art of the 1880s. The repre­sen­ta­tion of elite prostitution evolves over ­these de­cades ­toward a more overt aestheticization of the demimondaine that propagates a new vision of womanhood founded on consumption. Visual culture of the 1860s casts the kameliia as a wanton w ­ oman driven by a ravenous appetite for finery. Caricatures in Budil’nik and Iskra represent kamelii as social climbers who set their sights on feeble dotards willing to spend their savings to keep fine ladies in their com­pany.60 One such image from an 1859 issue of Iskra titled A Meeting Between a Camellia and a Simple Flower (Vstrecha kamelii s prostym tsvetkom) shows an exchange between two ­women of the demimonde (see figure 3.6). Amalia explains that her recent change in fortune is thanks to the “many dumb old men” who have helped make her rich. Her unfortunate friend has chosen a less beneficial partnership, which proves that her “simplicity” refers not only to her lack of status but to an inability to strategize as regards sexual companions. Using venal sex to acquire desirable goods becomes a socially constructed mode of interaction attributed to the demimondaine; increasingly, however, images convey the fear of social infection, that the be­hav­iors of the demimonde are spreading to other segments of female society. Pictorial repre­sen­ta­tion stresses that any respectable w ­ oman might learn from her social lessers and mobilize their tactics if given the opportunity. For instance, an illustration from Iskra shows how an eloquently dressed ­woman uses her sex appeal in exchange for material reward (see figure 3.7).61 The print features a young ­woman tickling the beard of a salesclerk and asking him whether he ­will deliver in person the hat she recently purchased. Titled Commerce (Kommertsiia) with the subtitle Gostinyi dvor, fashion shop (Gostinyi dvor, lavka mod) the image connects the ­woman, depicted with a large bustle and thin waist, to a sexualized commercial culture. More worrisome than the lady’s sexual forwardness is the ambiguity of her class. She could just as easily hail from a well-­to-do ­family as be a member

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Figure 3.6. ​N. Stepanov, Vstrecha kamelii s prostym tsvetkom (A Meeting Between a Camellia and a ­Simple Flower), illustration from Iskra (The Spark), 1859. Slavic, East Eu­ro­pean, and Eurasian Collection, University of Illinois Urbana-­Champaign. First: Amalia, ­you’ve grown rich! Second: ­There’re so many dumb old men, my dear. I get rich and they go broke. Are you seeing anyone? First: Just one young guy, and he’s fleecing me.

of the demimonde. In this sense, the illustration reveals how dress shops and boutiques function as contested sites where new modes of sexual and commercial exchange challenge traditional assumptions about ­women’s chastity. Not only rich demimondaines but impoverished female shop clerks w ­ ere implicated in the commercial sex trade. As historians have shown, most

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Figure 3.7. ​ Kommertsiia (Commerce), illustration from Iskra (The Spark), 1860. Slavic, East Eu­ro­pean, and Eurasian Collection, University of Illinois Urbana-­Champaign. The Gostinyi dvor—­Fashion Department She: ­Will you come over and deliver the hat I purchased? He: I ­will. She: What a dear! He: We know how to make good se­lections at the shop. I make sure to fulfill the wishes of our young lady shoppers.

nineteenth-­century Rus­sians assumed that saleswomen supplemented their income with occasional prostitution.62 That ­women employed in boutiques and dress shops might engage in mercenary sex made them doubly troublesome to the social order. On the one hand, ­because such ­women ­were unregistered with the medical police, they evaded the cautionary eye of the authorities. On the other hand, the supposed sexual licentiousness of saleswomen made coming to a fashion shop potentially dangerous for innocent w ­ omen who might take on

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their be­hav­iors. The social ambiguity made pos­si­ble by the egalitarian space of the boutique was, as Abby Schrader notes, “problematic in imperial Rus­sia, where authorities strove to ascribe a fixed identity to each of the empire’s subjects.” The “­great deal of fluidity between categories,” wherein ­women might fluctuate between the realm of buyer and bought, made the fashion boutique a site of contested possibilities, promises, and social anxiety.63 Coy and flirtatious, the w ­ oman represented in the illustration Commerce appears as a new class of urban female dwellers that drives consumption by frequenting such fashion shops. The location of Gostinnyi dvor, the shopping center located in downtown St. Petersburg on Nevsky Prospect, operates as a site of transaction where ­women might give into the allure of the latest fashions. The northern capital, with its status as center of trade and commerce with the West, combines both commercial and sexual transaction in the act of shopping. As Mary Louise Roberts asserts, new cosmopolitan arenas “specularize urban culture of arcades, boulevards, and department stores” where “­woman is inscribed as both consumer and commodity, purchaser and purchased, buyer and bought.”64 Even though the female shopper is not identified as a kameliia, her be­hav­ior recalls modes of coquettish flirtation associated with one. Linking sex and commerce through performative be­hav­iors, as this image does, points to a deeper concern with ­women’s role in commercial life in imperial Rus­sia. In the market economy, any ­woman tempted by luxury could become a kameliia and find her transformation financially bankrolled by a gullible man ­eager for her companionship. Visuals like the ones from Iskra highlight the ways in which men eagerly seek out the com­pany of demimondaines. The images show that what separates the average fellow from the affluent upper-­class gentleman is not just professional rank and social status but the number of kamelii he supports. A sketch by N. Stepanov in an 1864 edition of Iskra shows two subordinates discussing the notion that “hooking” a kameliia is an activity for ­those above them on the social ladder (see figure 3.8). One of the men jealously observes a superior walking arm in arm with a demimondaine. The second man concludes that his boss—­who is a true virtuoso—­would have not one, but two such ­women in his com­pany. Such liaisons equate a man’s virility with the size of his wealth. Sketches like Stepanov’s pre­sent w ­ omen as valued commodities that are circulated among men. Buying a ­woman’s companionship affirms power and prestige; providing not only for her lifestyle, but presumably for a wife and ­children as well, signals to onlookers a man’s wealth and status. Visuals from the 1860s portray the demimondaine as an active consumer who attaches g­ reat significance to the accumulation of fine clothes and wealth. Nowhere is this more clearly outlined than in the a­ lbum Fallen but Charming

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Figure 3.8. ​Illustration by N. Stepanov, from Iskra (The Spark), 1864. Slavic, East Eu­ro­pean, and Eurasian Collection, University of Illinois Urbana-­Champaign. First: Take a look at that; your boss hooked a camellia. Second: No, that’s your boss; mine would have hooked two.

Creatures. A joint venture between the artist Aleksandr Lebedev and the popu­ lar writer Vsevolod Krestovsky, the ­album contains approximately sixty images that pre­sent to readers the dramatic and exciting world of kamelii.65 Distributed to all bookstores in St.  Petersburg, Fallen but Charming Creatures offered purchasers the chance to enjoy the images of kamelii in the privacy of their homes.66 Taken in their entirety, the prints imagine demimondaines as the key commodity in Rus­sia’s emerging leisure culture. Demimondaines engage in activities that are intentionally nonreproductive—­the ­women smoke, sip champagne,

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stroll along St. Petersburg boulevards, attend the theater, and lounge with lovers in plush apartments. T ­ hese activities, which are coded as masculine, subsume any potential maternal instinct the ­women might have. Any inclination for productive ­labor has been replaced with the urge to acquire more finery, better accommodations, and wealthier benefactors. The images of demimondaines as both consumers and objects of consumption show the ways in which commerce influenced the construction of femininity in imperial Rus­sia. For example, images connect elite prostitutes with subterfuge and trickery in their insatiable hunger for better clothing (see figure 3.9). The kameliia combines an

Figure 3.9. ​Aleksandr Lebedev, illustration from Pogibshie, no milye sozdaniia (Fallen but Charming Creatures), 1862–63. National Library of Rus­sia, St. Petersburg. This is how you bamboozle them! Yesterday, the prince gave me this dressing gown, which cost 150 rubles. I then told Robert that ­they’re selling it for a mere 60 and he covered the cost. How unfortunate that I pitied him and asked for so l­ ittle.

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appealing devil-­may-­care attitude with a calculated goal-­oriented approach that makes her virtually unstoppable as she outmaneuvers benefactors in the acquisition of cutting-­edge fashion. The ­woman’s sumptuous dress, with an ample bustle, contrasts nicely with her delicate neckline and pe­tite wrist. The pearl bracelet accentuates the ­woman’s elegant hand as she admirers herself in the mirror. The print completes a balanced composition between mirror, face, wrist, and fi­nally, graceful slipper, which modestly pokes out from under­neath the layers of lace. The entire setting, complete with a relaxed confidante lazily sharing in the tête-­à-­tête, elevates the kameliia to the position of fashionista.67 Nearly fifteen years ­after Lebedev’s ­album of prints appeared in Rus­sia, Ilia Repin, one of Rus­sia’s most prominent portrait and genre paint­ers of the period, ­imagined a similar dynamism in his painting of Pa­ri­sian café culture. Initially titled Un café du boulevard, but now commonly referred to as A Pa­ri­ sian Café, the 1875 painting depicts a modern café in the heart of Paris with a luxuriously dressed demimondaine its cental focus (see figure 3.10). In her study of Repin’s painting, Allison Leigh interprets the work as a “singular instance of transcultural connection” that allows us a gateway into sensing moments of “modernity that made life so exciting (and terrifying).”68 Repin underscores the ­woman’s charisma as she has a near magnetic hold on the men and w ­ omen featured in the painting. As David Jackson notes, far from receiving acclaim for the painting, Repin garnered censure for veering into territory clearly aligned with French artistic trends as exemplified in works like Édouard Manet’s Olympia.69 That a Rus­sian artist would depict a French coquette and the flaneurs bewitched by her sensuality struck Repin’s friend and fellow artist Ivan Kramskoi as inappropriate, “an impudent gesture.”70 What Kramskoi and ­others failed to see was that coquetry and sexually suggestive images of w ­ omen had already circulated in the satirical journals and in ­albums like Lebedev’s. What made Repin’s painting far more dangerous than the images of the previous de­cade was the seriousness with which the artist approached the topic and his reputation as a leading painter. The Pa­ri­sian demimondaine and the café milieu ­were no longer the stuff of satire, and Repin aestheticized them in ways that suggested a modern form of urban living in which elite prostitutes circulated freely among the public. Despite Kramskoi’s initial antagonism ­toward Repin’s painting, he, too, addressed the question of the demimondaine in artistic repre­sen­ta­tion. His 1883 painting Portrait of an Unknown W ­ oman (Neizvestnaia) caused a sensation at its unveiling at the eleventh exhibition of the Peredvizhniki (Wanderers; see figure 3.11). Seated in a plush carriage and looking out at the viewer with an ambiguous gaze, the w ­ oman neither seeks nor desires the approval of passersby. The fur-­lined coat accentuates the w ­ oman’s supple figure and draws

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Figure 3.10. ​Ilia Repin, A Pa­ri­sian Café, 1875. Oil on canvas, 120.6 × 191.8 cm, private collection. Photo courtesy of Christie’s / Bridgeman Images.

the viewer’s eye to the satin bow below her soft jawline and plump, moist lips poised between a pucker and a smile. Careful examination of the painting reveals how the ­woman’s dress conveys her wealth; ­there is the lush, velvet attire, but also a golden bracelet vis­ib­ le on her wrist and a pearl nestled snuggly in the ostrich feather adorning her cap. Such details, combined with her look of confidence, conveyed to attendees at the 1883 exhibition that the w ­ oman looking out at them belonged to the demimonde. One commentator reflected that “judging by the scenery, worn carriage, necessary loneliness and defiant look, as well as the painting’s title—­Unknown ­Woman,” it seems that “­here is a portrait of an expensive [lady of the] Camellias.”71 In his study of Kramskoi’s painting, Trenton Olson argues for an assessment of the female figure as a reflection of modernity in Rus­sia, and he interprets the w ­ oman’s sartorial choices as “an indicator of ideological persuasion and a declaration of national identity.”72 Most recently, Allison Leigh has studied Unknown ­Woman within the context of Kramskoi’s evolution as an artist. As Leigh astutely notes, Kramskoi “identified with his heroine,” for, like the ­woman ­imagined on canvas, he, too, offered himself up to the public using “the language of commodity domain” to sell his works to the art collector Sergei Tretiakov. Combining a careful analy­sis of the painting together with the artist’s letters on the image, Leigh eloquently argues that Kramskoi depicts the fallen

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Figure 3.11. ​Ivan Kramskoi, Neizvestnaia (Portrait of an Unknown ­Woman), 1883. Oil on canvas, 75.5 × 99 cm. State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

­ oman with “sympathetic understanding,” for he identified with his subject’s w commodification both personally and professionally.73 While nowhere near as detailed or evocative as the paintings by Repin or Kramskoi, images by fellow Rus­sian artists of the nineteenth c­ entury emphasize a likeness between St. Petersburg’s sexual subculture and its French equivalent. ­Whether in attendance at the theater, disguised at a masquerade ball, or shopping at department stores, illustrations of w ­ omen of ill repute reveal how aspects of sexual desire, to quote Judith Butler, are “manufactured and sustained through corporeal signs and discursive means,” thus making the kameliia an inherently performative figure.74 In this sense, the be­hav­iors and actions of kamelii take on paramount cultural importance as other ­women begin replicating them. As the illustration Commerce suggests, a w ­ oman wishing to acquire the latest fashion needs only to tickle the right beard to make her dream come true. As demimondaines increasingly become connected with commercial culture, their own value as commodities grows. To provide financially for such ­women, as Stepanov’s image demonstrates, raises a man’s social status among his peers. The sexually charged world of kamelii in Lebedev’s lithographs canonize demimondaines as producers and consumers of leisure culture. ­These

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illustrations codify the demimonde as an elite cultural sphere where venality and frivolity go hand in hand to maximize viewer enjoyment. Like their counter­parts in Western Eu­rope, Rus­sia’s w ­ omen of the demimonde created “the twin realms of plea­sure and leisure, at once symbolizing a certain de­cadence and providing a crucial outlet for it.”75 While visual repre­sen­ ta­tions focus on the demimondaine’s vanity, they also underscore the potentially liberating aspects of such be­hav­ior. Moving beyond the clear social critiques, images from the daily press emphasize how ­women of ill repute offer something altogether revolutionary for their time: intellectual and sexual stimulation that has no reproductive purpose. As a cultural phenomenon, the demimondaine’s sexual proclivity and the pos­si­ble plea­sure she could glean from partners trou­bles the sexual double standard. Associated with sexual transgression, elite prostitutes first entered the Rus­ sian cultural imagination through picaresque works of the late eigh­teenth ­century. At the time when Chulkov composed The Comely Cook, Rus­sia’s cap­ i­tal­ist marketplace was in its early infancy; a w ­ oman bent on adventure and fiscal success provided an excellent ave­nue in which to discuss the mechanisms of monetary exchange in a lighthearted and comedic register. Yet beginning in the nineteenth ­century, the ubiquity of ­women in the commercial sphere threatened to destabilize relations between the genders. Writers pointed to the demimondaine’s extravagant wealth as a sign of moral degeneration brought on by contact with western libertine values. Such ­women appear as thoroughly corrupted by the luxuries of modern life. Quite typical in this regard is the explanation offered by the French courtesan Julie in Chernyshevsky’s What Is to Be Done? As she explains to Vera Pavlovna, her true crime is not living as a fallen ­woman or suffering the “desecration” of her body, but that she “was corrupted” by “idleness and luxury.” “I’m a vile ­woman” she tells Vera Pavlovna; “where t­ here’s idleness, ­there’s vileness.”76 Visual conceptualizations of venal w ­ omen add to this perception, but in ways that prove provocative and titillating for viewers. In the wake of Rus­sia’s ­Great Reforms, writers shift the conversation to look at the plight of impoverished ­women who have no choice but to sell themselves on the bridal market. In lieu of demimondaines who climb their way into the ranks of the elite, the prose writers of the nineteenth c­ entury look to the dowerless bride to critique the commodification of marriage, and by extension, Rus­sian society.

Ch a p ter 4

The Dowerless Bride on Rus­sia’s Marriage Market

Marriage constituted one of the most impor­tant milestones in the lives of nineteenth-­century w ­ omen. An advantageous match was a Rus­sian ­woman’s sole means for upward mobility, w ­ hether she hailed from the lower classes or the nobility.1 A substantial dowry improved a young ­woman’s chances in finding a suitable match, as did a good f­ amily name and wealthy relatives. The compilation of a ­woman’s dowry (pridanoe), which might include material possessions, money, or, in the case of noblewomen, property, was considered a bride’s contribution to ­family wealth. Rus­sia’s noblewomen, who had the right to possess and sell their property during marriage, could leverage their dowry a­ fter their wedding to maintain a sense of autonomy.2 Far worse off in the minds of cultural commentators w ­ ere ­women of the lower classes for whom the lack of a dowry translated into poor chances of finding a reputable husband. The dowerless bride appears in literary works as vulnerable to the pernicious attentions of an older man who seeks out marriage to a young, impressionable maiden whom he hopes to dominate and control. Typical in this regard is the plight of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s impoverished heroine from his short story “A Gentle Creature” (“Krotkaia,” 1876) whose aunts hope to sell their sixteen-­year-­old niece in marriage to a repulsive neighbor, a fifty-­year-­old storekeeper whose abuse has already pushed two wives into an early grave. When an unattached pawnbroker (the story’s narrator) begins to court the gentle creature, she hesitatingly agrees to his offer 111

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of marriage. Dostoevsky makes clear that her lack of a dowry pushes the gentle creature into an impossible position in which she must agree to be the child bride of the pawnbroker, a man twenty-­five years her se­nior.3 Historians of late imperial Rus­sia have studied the emerging discourse on marital choice among the country’s estates, noting how prose fiction both reflected and helped inform beliefs about the importance of love and personal autonomy in guiding nuptial ­unions. Barbara Alpern Engel, in her study of marriage breakdown in imperial Rus­sia, details the rise in petitions by w ­ omen to demand l­egal separations from abusive husbands and discusses the special imperial chancellery that handled ­these cases. Engel likewise references novels, images from the popu­lar press, and works by the prominent playwright Alexander Ostrovsky to elucidate the cultural context for her historicization of the “marriage crisis” plaguing families and society more broadly.4 While marriages in Rus­sia had always involved property transfers and contractual agreements, increasingly works of fiction and visual culture call into question the venality of marital u ­ nions where the absence of a dowry pushes a young ­woman into an unequal marriage, thus destroying her chance at happiness. Images of young, impoverished w ­ omen, like Dostoevsky’s “gentle creature,” who have no dowry and thus must “sell” their hand in marriage to opportunistic, much older fiancés proliferate in lit­er­a­ture and fine art between the 1840s and the 1880s. In the cultural imaginary the dowerless bride comes to signify the corrupting influence of money in dictating marriage u ­ nions. Borrowing the meta­phor of prostitution, writers and artists liken the dowerless bride to a sold ­woman whose groom “buys” her hand in marriage, as the pawnbroker does in “A Gentle Creature.” Fiction, drama, and fine art center on the experience of the poor bride ­because her perspective offers a unique vantage point from which to comment on the demands for w ­ omen’s emancipation and the forces impeding it. Beginning in the 1840s and accelerated in the following de­cades, the bespridannitsa (dowerless bride) appears as an emblem of Rus­sia’s backwardness and the authoritarian, paternalistic structures that commodify w ­ omen on the marriage market. “Any ugly creep who crosses my path thinks he has the right to court me,” reflects the heroine Maria Nezabudkina from Ostrovsky’s play The Poor Bride (Bednaia nevesta, 1852). “­Others ­will simply bargain for me,” concludes Nezabudkina, “as if I’m something for sale.”5 As Ostrovsky and his contemporaries working in prose fiction and the visual arts amplify fears about poor brides like Nezabudkina being sold to the highest bidder, they manage to confirm the primacy of love, rather than monetary gain, in the marriage ­union. Sympathetic portrayals of impoverished w ­ omen who must barter themselves

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on the marriage market thus work to justify marital choice and the importance of f­ ree ­will in dictating ­matters of the heart. The number of images, both textual and visual, condemning the fate of poor brides illustrates how artists used their platform to advocate for ­women’s autonomy in marital choice. Indicative in this re­spect are the works of Avdotia Panaeva, who like many female writers of the period used her fiction to expose the forces hampering ­women’s emancipation. Panaeva’s novels profile scheming relatives e­ ager to crush the w ­ ill of naive young girls by hoodwinking them into marrying profligate men who initially appear as progressives but are just as tyrannical as other men. A similar paradigm emerges in Dostoevsky’s psychological prose where he explores the motivations of sleazy, older bachelors who pursue young brides in an attempt to secure a submissive wife they can easily dominate. Both Panaeva’s A ­Woman’s Lot (Zhenskaia dolia, 1862) and Dostoevsky’s “A Gentle Creature” imagine the fate of a brokered bride who is crushed by the machinations of a disreputable husband and calculating relatives. The heroines from t­ hese two works find marriage a worse form of slavery than the subjugation they endured as dependents. To be sure, repre­sen­ta­tions of marriage in nineteenth-­century Rus­sia could easily depart from the sentimental or compassionate to stress other anx­i­eties about the impact of ­women’s roles in marital choice. Images of fussy, spoiled brides who might throw a tantrum rather than receive an unwanted suitor appear in lit­er­a­ture and fine art as a reminder of ­women’s inability to control their emotions. Somewhat paradoxically, even as they argue that marriage should not mirror the relationship between prostitute and client, whereby men “purchase” their wives in matrimony, cultural producers call into question ­whether ­women have the intellectual and moral capacity to dictate their lives, let alone whom they marry. In large part, humorous images in text and pictorial repre­sen­ta­tion underscore the venality of any bride, w ­ hether she hails from the ranks of the elite or the poor. Having internalized their primary role as consumers in Rus­sia’s commercial culture, marriageable w ­ omen relate solely to the world through the language of transactional exchange. Such paradigms appear most distinctly in Pavel Fedotov’s genre paintings that immortalize the finicky debutante whose superficiality is meant to reflect her lack of cultural refinement. Complimenting Fedotov’s portraits are the scrupulous brides in Ostrovsky’s comedies, many of whom pick money over love in their relations with suitors. Understanding from an early age their value as their parent’s property, Ostrovsky’s shallow brides and calculating wives find spending money the primary means for self-­actualization. Cloaked in humor and parody, such portrayals of

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womanhood strike a dif­fer­ent tone than that found in Ostrovsky’s tragedies. Examining the portrayal of marital choice featured in ­these dramas elucidates the rich tension (often within the same work) between the call to agitate for ­women’s rights and the insistence that ­women uphold their traditional role in the gender hierarchy and to obey the wishes of parents and husbands alike. What unites the textual and visual repre­sen­ta­tions examined in this chapter is their common use of the language of monetary transaction to describe matrimony. What begins as a general portrayal of the marriage market in works like Alexander Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin (published in full in 1833), develops into a full-­scale reassessment of the forces pushing ­women into loveless marriages. Writers quickly turn their attention away from the world of the elite to the plight of impoverished ­women who appear as commodities sold and exchanged in marriage. On the one hand, critiquing the transactional nature of marriage allows writers like Panaeva and Dostoevsky to explore how the phenomenon of prostitution extended beyond the realm of the brothel into ­family relations. That a groom might “purchase” a poor w ­ oman’s hand in marriage taints the nuptial ­union with a venality likened to commercial sex. On the other hand, probing the psyche of w ­ oman as consumer and w ­ oman as commodity prompts writers like Ostrovsky to see the monetization of marriage as part of Rus­sia’s expanding consumer culture, especially among the merchantry. Both in literary and visual depictions of brides, “the exchange in ­women,” to borrow Gayle Rubin’s formulation, illustrates a “profound perception of a system in which ­women do not have full rights to themselves.”6 Locating bridal wealth as a signifier of ­women’s commodification, the country’s cultural producers dramatize the quandary facing impoverished girls who must marry to survive but whose choice often appears to be a fate worse than death.

­Women for Sale: Origins of Rus­sia’s Bridal Market “Why, my dear lady, what’s the bother? To Moscow and the marriage mart! ­They’ve vacancies galore . . . ​take heart!” —­Alexander Pushkin, Eugene Onegin Prior to the 1800s, writers rarely considered the potential threat monetary self-­ interest posed to matrimony. Yet by the time Pushkin created Tatiana Larina,7 the heroine of his masterpiece Eugene Onegin, the issue of marital choice had taken on new meaning for the Rus­sian literary elite as a way to explore the

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conflict between a w ­ oman’s personal life and duty to her ­family. Even as writers of the early nineteenth c­ entury remained heavi­ly influenced by “sentimentalist definitions of gender,” which held that ­women ­were primarily “ornaments of men’s existence, and instruments to men’s well-­being,” depictions of courtship and nuptial arrangements began exploring the external pressures guiding marriage alliances.8 Thus, when Tatiana appears at a ball at the G ­ rand Assembly, the club for Rus­sian nobility, Pushkin underscores how t­ hose in attendance eagerly eye her from head to toe, surmising her value as a potential bride. Pushkin paints the world of courtship at vari­ous points in Eugene Onegin, but chapter 7, which is devoted to Tatiana’s sojourn in Moscow, offers a condensed critique of the bridal market by focusing on the superficiality of ball culture.9 As the attendees gossip about Tatiana’s marriageability, the men eagerly assess her beauty and rank. From the old man who “straightened his wig” and “asked around / about this unknown belle he found” to the “melancholy joker” who hovers close to Tatiana, Pushkin’s description recalls a bustling atmosphere where ­women’s beauty and wealth are put on display for men to assess and evaluate.10 Tatiana finds herself in a “swarming gallery” that “assaults the senses” as e­ ager bachelors and hopeful maidens engage in marriage hunts.11 The chapter’s ending hints that Tatiana’s fate has already been de­cided, as an affluent and well-­known general looks longingly at Pushkin’s heroine from across the room. While in Eugene Onegin Pushkin hints at the pressures guiding Tatiana t­ oward marriage, the text does not critique the heroine’s marriage nor show it as an unhappy ­union. The finale, in which Tatiana rebuffs Onegin’s belated confession of love, affirms the primacy of fidelity and the heroine’s moral superiority. The problematization of marital choice as it impacts ­women’s lives emerges in the fiction of the 1830s and 1840s, in large part due to the attention this topic garnered among Rus­sia’s first generation of female writers through the society tale. A small number of ­women intellectuals gained notoriety in this period both as hosts of prominent salons (where they wielded considerable power as arbiters of good taste) and writers of prose fiction.12 As historians of ­women’s lit­er­at­ure in Rus­sia have shown, the space of the salon offered female writers a means to discuss questions of aesthetics and literary trends while promoting their own work.13 Transitioning to more public-­facing ­careers could evoke the ire and criticisms of their male interlocutors, a real­ity both Evdokiia Rostopchina and Karolina Pavlova experienced firsthand.14 While Rostophcina and Pavlova enjoyed success and fame, they also felt the scorn of male intellectuals who distrusted their interpretations of w ­ omen’s social position. Although they differed in terms of their public personae—­a fact that led to some considerable tension between the two authors—Rostopchina

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and Pavlova shared an interest in the pressures forcing ­women into loveless marriages.15 In this sense, their texts align with what Jehanne Gheith’s assesses as a common interest among w ­ omen writers of the period to diagnose society’s ills “by protesting the position of w ­ omen in Rus­sian society, often through the critique of arranged marriages.”16 For both writers, the figure of the young ingenue on the cusp of marriage sparks a critical assessment of w ­ omen’s lack of autonomy. Rostopchina’s Rank and Money (Chiny i den’gi, 1838) and Pavlova’s A Double Life (Dvoinaia zhizn’, 1848) provide rich contextualization for the social and cultural forces that push w ­ omen into loveless marriages, or even worse, spinsterhood. Both works highlight the commodification of marriage by imagining the bride as a pawn in schemes concocted by relatives. Published in one of the day’s leading journals, Son of the Fatherland (Syn otechestva), Rank and Money condemns the superficial world of the elite and points directly to financial motivations in marriage as a primary source of ­woman’s oppression. Written in the form of an epistolary novel with excerpts from the main protagonist’s diary, Rank and Money describes the failed courtship of Vadim Svirsky, a man lacking both money and connections, to a Petersburg socialite, Vera Klirmova. Vera’s parents forbid her marriage to Vadim, admitting they “would rather see Vera under­g round than give [her] to a beggar, to trash, to an unsuitable urchin.”17 Utterly destroyed by the rejection, Vadim commits suicide. While Rostopchina points out that the monetization of marriage negatively affects all young ­people—­Vera must marry someone she does not love, Vadim chooses death—­the most unenviable position in the social order belongs to the dowerless ­woman. The story’s ending leaves the reader not with the image of Vadim or Vera but with Katerina, Vadim’s impoverished ­sister. ­Because Katerina “is unattractive, has no dowry, no distinguished connections,” her fate is sealed; she w ­ ill live in poverty and never marry.18 Rostopchina introduces the figure of the dowerless w ­ oman not necessarily to develop her character but to offer a concise image of the defeated w ­ oman whose meekness and utter lack of beauty is a sign of moral virtue. As the narrator describes Katerina at Vadim’s funeral, it is the s­ ister in mourning, not her deceased b­ rother, who deserves the reader’s pity for her disheveled appearance and unfashionable attire prompt onlookers to see her as uncouth, even pathetic. Described as “totally unremarkable” except the expression of “quiet sorrow and angelic meekness,” Katerina appears broken by her own homeliness. Yet as the narrator explains, although Katerina has given up “the most precious rights of womanhood, the right to please and the right to be liked,” she understands that her suffering ­will be rewarded in heaven through eternal

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life. Rostopchina compounds this social satire by focusing on Vera’s response at the funeral. She also suffers ­after Vadim’s death, but unlike Katerina, who feels at peace, Vera’s grief is full “of languor and bitterness,” driven more by “earthly sorrow” that ultimately pushes her to an early grave, as she dies shortly a­ fter Vadim’s funeral. Katerina, while not literally ­dying, suffers a kind of extreme seclusion that Rostopchina meta­phor­ically likens to death. The text’s finale, which romanticizes Katerina as having “the soul of an angel and a loving heart,” enforces Rostopchina’s critique of marriage politics and society’s superficial understanding of ­women’s worth. The ideological message of Rank and Money rests in its clear vindication of ­women like Katerina, whom society scorns for their lack of wealth and beauty. In this regard, the text fully aligns with the generic conventions of the society tale, a popu­lar genre of the 1830s that exposed society’s foibles from within, in large part by criticizing the attitudes and assumptions of the elite.19 A number of ­women writers, Rostopchina included, found the society tale a means to probe the psy­chol­ogy of ­women who suffer the machinations of fate, on the one hand, and the perditions of relatives and friends, on the other. The question of marital choice continues as a major theme in ­women’s fiction of the 1840s but expands to show how m ­ others, rather than promoting their ­daughters’ educational development and artistic talents, push them into marriages of con­ve­nience. Characteristic in this regard is the depiction of the young, aristocratic heroine Cecily in Pavlova’s novel A Double Life (Dvoinaia zhizn’, 1848) whose ­mother works painstakingly to close her ­daughter’s mind to creative thought. “My efforts have not failed,” boasts Vera Vladimirovna, Cecily’s ­mother; “she is exactly what I wanted to make of her. E ­ very kind of daydreaming is foreign to her.”20 Despite her ­mother’s intentions, Cecily has a vibrant imagination, which surfaces when she sleeps and is conveyed through poetry (rather than prose). As Diana Greene has shown, the hybrid form of A Double Life, which alternates between excerpts of prose and poetry, uses the generic conceits of both forms to express the conflict weighing heavi­ly on Cecily’s psyche. The banality of everyday life and the courtship rituals they contain is expressed in prose; by way of contrast, the romantic ideals and hopes of true love are voiced in poetry that take place when Cecily dreams.21 A Double Life, like Rank and Money, centers on a young girl’s path ­toward marriage to expose the forces that guide nuptial alliances as inherently mercenary and detrimental to w ­ omen’s advancement. Through a game of calculated intrigue, her friend’s ­mother manages to secure Cecily’s engagement to Dmitry Ivanchinsky, a man who lives beyond his means. He originally finds marriage to Cecily out of the question, b­ ecause he senses that her f­ amily’s

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wealth w ­ ill not pass to her but to her ­brother. Assuming “her to be dowerless,” Dmitry “calculated very sensibly and correctly that if he could only scrape by . . . ​on fifteen thousand a year as a bachelor, then as a married man, ­things would be bad for him.” Her beauty and charm eventually win him over and he begins to actively court her hand in marriage. Although he eagerly pursues Cecily, the narrator’s ironic tone when describing Dmitry suggests that he ­will prove to be a disloyal, untrustworthy husband. On the night before their wedding, while Cecily and her friends praise her groom’s “unbelievable meekness and timidity,” Dmitry and his friends engage in drunken revelry and proclaim that no man should take the vows of matrimony so seriously as to deny himself the carefree, joy-­seeking pastimes cultivated during bachelorhood. The scene culminates when one of Dmitry’s friends declares they should take a bet on his f­uture fidelity. Against the claim that he w ­ ill ­settle down and become a f­ amily man, Dmitry bets that in a week’s time, he ­will invite them “to a drinking bout at the gypsies,” a nineteenth-­century euphemism for promiscuous be­hav­ior in the com­pany of friends.22 In Pavlova’s A Double Life, Dmitry’s bet signifies more than just banter between groomsmen; it suggests that men g­ amble their relations with wives as a means to assert their masculinity. Rostopchina and Pavlova both see marriages of con­ve­nience as part of ­women’s broader oppression. At fault are the m ­ others who push their ­daughters to marry inconstant men, the suitors who are ­after large dowries, and the female confidantes who confirm matrimony as the culmination of a ­woman’s existence. Most worrisome, as Pavlova takes care to note, is how ­women themselves remain subdued in the social and cultural system that breeds them to be complacent and obedient. As the narrator in A Double Life puts it, Cecily is “so used to wearing her mind in a corset” that she never commits a fault, never speaks out of turn, and always remembers to behave appropriately with men.23 In this sense, the call for social change clearly voiced in A Double Life aligns with Greene’s assessment that Pavlova “challenged male critics and readers to give the same sympathy and attention to the gilded slavery of upper-­class w ­ omen that they gave to the exploitation of poor urban and 24 peasant men.” A similar statement can be made about the moral message Rostopchina conveys in Rank and Money, which compares the fate of a high society ­woman (Vera) to her counterpart among the impoverished gentry (Katerina) in order to illustrate that regardless of class and economic standing, all ­women suffer from the oppressive patriarchal ­family structure. Subsequent writers publishing in the wake of the ­Great Reforms would make bolder claims about the contours of ­women’s subjugation, locating it not only in the domestic realm but in the institution of marriage itself.

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The Impact of the ­Woman Question on Marital Choice Two interconnected phenomena emerging in the second half of the nineteenth c­ entury influenced textual and visual repre­sen­ta­tions of all w ­ omen, but impoverished brides in par­tic­u­lar. On the one hand, the advent of “the ­woman question” moved from its initial focus on improvements in ­women’s education to a broader reassessment of the social structures oppressing ­daughters, ­mothers, and wives throughout the nation. Subsequent debates in the salons and journals would agitate for ­women’s rights by focusing predominantly on issues of domestic in­equality. Radical critics like Nikolai Dobroliubov used the stark images of ­family oppression from Ostrovsky’s merchant milieu to make broad critiques on the unfortunate lot of Rus­sia’s ­women. In Dobroliubov’s iconic formulation, the ­family was a “Realm of Darkness” where tyranny ruled supreme, brutish egoism dictated everyday real­ity, and despotic husbands and ­fathers held complete control over their female relatives. Rus­sia’s impoverished brides, like Ostrovsky’s Nezabudkina, suffer cruel and unenviable fates, for their f­ utures rested in the hands of petty tyrants who lacked even a modicum of compassion and viewed their wives as ­little more than property. On the other hand, the plight of a poor ­woman forced into a loveless marriage appealed to Rus­sian writers ­because her strug­gle for romantic fulfillment aligned with the tenants of utopian socialism espoused in George Sand’s novels. Sand, who gained im­mense popularity among Rus­sian readers, advocated ­women’s emotional rights and preached the “emancipation of the heart” by insisting that love, not calculation or tradition, should dictate relations between the sexes.25 Her fiction provided Rus­sians a flashpoint to critique the artifice of marriage, for she highlighted the ways in which husbands and wives remained shackled to each other by the laws of church and state even when both parties had long ceased loving one another. Although Rus­sia’s writers, both male and female, remained heavi­ly ­under the influence of Sand’s fiction, they interpreted ­women’s emancipation and the forces hindering it somewhat differently than their French counterpart. “Rus­sian authors rejected the depiction of ‘fatal’ passions,” found in Sand’s oeuvre, and turned instead to the exploration of “real-­life situations, the ‘quiet terror of everyday,” that characterized ­women’s lives.26 A ­woman’s lack of marital choice constituted one such “quiet terror” that marked female oppression in the eyes of Rus­sia’s civic-­minded writers. Adopting leitmotifs from Sand’s narratives, authors showed how w ­ omen, particularly of the petty gentry, appeared as unwilling partners in the schemes of marriage

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alliances. Notable in this regard is the iconoclastic Lelenka from Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaia’s Boarding School Girl (Pansionerka, 1861), whose parents hope to marry her to a deplorable suitor. When Lelenka’s neighbor, Veretitsyn, belittles her attempts for self-­advancement, he does so by underscoring their futility in light of the fact that her parents dictate her fate. “­You’re their property” he tells Lelenka, “You have no right to determine how you wish to live.”27 Rather than submit to a life of dreary subservience, Lelenka escapes to St. Petersburg, where she earns her keep by painting copies of famous works on display at the Hermitage.28 Resisting both the cynical views of Veretitsyn and the suffocating oppression of her parents, Lelenka fights ardently for her autonomy. “I ­will never again allow someone to have power over me,” she reflects. “Live alone—­this is what life is about: work, knowledge, freedom.”29 Whereas Khvoshchinskaia suggests that a w ­ oman’s economic self-­sufficiency and intellectual fulfillment might not require marriage, ­others found the nuptial bond, if in name only, a useful means to secure female liberation. At once acknowledging the falsity of traditional marriages while harnessing the legitimacy it could afford w ­ omen, real-­life instances of “fictitious marriages” of the sort portrayed in Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s What Is to Be Done?, offered ­women the chance to pursue their own goals.30 The actions of both Khvoshchinskaia’s Lelenka and Chernyshevsky’s Vera Pavlovna represent the more radical responses a ­woman might make to avoid pressures by f­ amily members to marry. Refusing to be the “property” of their parents or husbands, t­hese female protagonists sought personal fulfillment through intellectual pursuits and their own l­abor. Sand captured the reading public’s imagination ­because she gave voice to the strug­gles of individual w ­ omen who fought against ill-­fated matches and loveless u ­ nions in their search for happiness. Both Vissarion Belinsky and Alexander Herzen, the leading Westernizers in Rus­sia, looked to Sand’s writings as formative in their discussions of marriage. Herzen’s novel Who Is to Blame? (Kto vinovat?, 1846) ­adopted a Sand-­inspired narrative and Russified it to convey to readers the abysmal state of marriage in the country. Sand had an impact not only on writers, but readers as well; commentators noted that w ­ omen of the aristocracy began adopting the be­hav­iors of the author’s heroines and flaunting their sexual freedom in ways that shocked moral decorum. Conservatives pointed to the spread of zhorzhzandshchina (be­hav­ior likened e­ ither to George Sand or to her heroines) as a dangerous phenomenon that led ­women into debauchery and threatened the sanctity of marriage. But while some warned of the potential menace of Sand’s novels, the early Rus­sian intelligent­sia, particularly the radical critics working at the journal The Con­temporary (Sovremennik),

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found her ideology on sexual freedom informative for their own conceptualizations of gender relations. The period’s leading writers—­Chernyshevsky, Dostoevsky, Herzen, and Ivan Turgenev—­adopted Sand’s formulations as a starting point for their perception of w ­ omen.31 Dostoevsky looked to Sand’s captivating, trail-­blazing heroines in his own quest for meaningful storytelling.32 The love triangle novel, so quin­tes­sen­tial to Sand’s artistry, offered Dostoevsky a framework for his own studies of destitute urban dwellers caught among passion, narcissism, and material pursuit. Debates relating to the w ­ oman question that emerged in the 1850s and 1860s ­were dominated by male voices centered around Sovremennik. Despite a significant number of female authors who actively published on the topic, it was the radical critics at Sovremennik who determined the appropriate way to pre­sent the w ­ oman question in prose fiction.33 Works by once prominent female writers, like Pavlova and Rostopchina, ­were dismissed by Chernyshevsky and Dobroloiubov as retrograde and out of sync with the call for rationalist fiction. Even ­women writers who focused less on issues of the elite and turned their attention to the urban poor found their works of fiction held to higher standards or outright ignored. Thus, the journalist and literary critic Nikolai Shelgunov could boldly ask, “Which of our w ­ omen writers—­and we have a fair number of them—­has studied the ­woman question and written about it? Not one. Is this not grim evidence of ­women’s lack of resolve, of ­women’s hereditary passivity?”34 As Arja Rosenholm has shown, Shelgunov’s comments are evidence of a fervent power strug­gle between the men who attempted to define the w ­ oman question and the female intellectuals who distrusted their promises of gender egalitarianism. Lest we think of the radical critics as immune to misogyny, it is helpful to remember that just b­ ecause they might have celebrated the possibilities of ­women’s equality or written about the ­woman question, that did not prevent them from a reliance on the traditional gender binary to push their own conceptualizations of womanhood. As male critics formulated a vision of the “emancipated ­woman” (emansipirovannaia zhenshchina) they did so by relying on their own perceptions of a gender system that articulated w ­ omen’s autonomy through male-­guided discourse. Retribution for w ­ omen who challenged the paradigms outlined by male intellectuals could be swift and harsh. Examining the reception of Avdotia Panaeva’s fiction, particularly her two final novels, helps elucidate the ways in which w ­ omen’s writing on emancipation in the context of marital choice became highly contested terrain in the 1860s. Garnering both fame and ridicule for her work at Sovremennik, Panaeva pushed her male colleagues to reconsider their ingrained beliefs about w ­ omen’s inferiority.

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Avdotia Panaeva and the Failed Promises of ­Women’s Emancipation As an editor and regular contributor to Sovremennik, Avdotia Panaeva (who published ­under the male pseudonym N. Stanitsky) played a significant role not only in the development of Rus­sian realism but also in the evolution of feminist thought.35 While the generation of young radicals working at Sovremennik spilled ink on how to emancipate ­women, Panaeva put ­these ideas into practice by embarking on a literary ­career and publishing seven novels (two coauthored with Nikolai Nekrasov), numerous short stories, and an engaging memoir.36 Despite initial praise from her friend, the prominent critic Vissarion Belinsky, Panaeva’s steadfast questioning of the promises offered u ­ nder the auspices of “­free love” and ­women’s emancipation made her subject to considerable ridicule and disdain. Although her ­later works w ­ ere mostly dismissed by contemporaries and subsequent scholars as overly melodramatic and heavi­ly didactic, they deserve reassessment, given their unique framing of the ­woman question. Whereas her contemporaries touted the utopian promises of egalitarian u ­ nions between men and w ­ omen, Panaeva’s fiction calls into question w ­ hether husbands, having been taught from youth w ­ omen’s value as commodities, are capable of treating their wives with even a modicum of re­spect. Panaeva strug­gled to gain legitimacy in the literary world, in part b­ ecause of her damning critiques of the ­women’s emancipation movement. In addition to her ideological stance, which at times ran contrary to the radical male intelligent­sia, her personal love life was the subject of much gossip among the cultural elite. Together with her husband, the publicist and writer Ivan Panaev, the c­ ouple moved in with Nekrasov, their literary partner at Sovremennik. When Panaeva eventually abandoned her philandering husband for Nekrasov (seemingly with Panaev’s approval), she transgressed a moral code and suffered dearly for it. To be a w ­ oman writer in the nineteenth c­ entury constituted its own violation of gender norms, but doubly so in Panaeva’s case, as she lived openly with both lover and husband. ­Because she embraced, in a sense, Sand’s credo of the “emancipation of the heart,” her contemporaries conflated her professional persona as la femme émancipée with that of the morally loose ­woman. As early as 1835, Belinsky’s famous phrase that a w ­ oman writer is la femme émancipée would mark the gender transgression in a ­woman’s act of writing for subsequent generations.37 While Belinsky ultimately championed the entry of ­women (including Panaeva) into literary culture, the entrenched biases against female authors held strongly throughout the era.

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Using her fiction as a means to scrutinize male bravado, Panaeva revealed that trusting men with w ­ omen’s emancipation was a doomed endeavor. Panaeva probed “the practical consequences of l­egal emancipation for ­women in a country not known for its adherence to the rule of law,” asking, as Gheith articulates it, “What would happen to ­women if men turned out to be less honorable than the radical critics assumed?”38 One can extend Gheith’s assessment and argue that Panaeva answers this question with acerbic critiques of men who acquire w ­ omen in marriage and then torture them to no end. Unlike her contemporaries, Panaeva found no exit strategy available to w ­ omen who were forced to marry. No sojourns to St. Petersburg to work in the Hermitage, as in Khvoshchinskaia’s Boarding School Girl, and no fictitious marriages of the sort profiled in What Is To Be Done? are ­viable options for Panaeva’s heroines. In Panaeva’s Romance in the St. Petersburg Demimonde (Roman v peterburgsom polusvete, 1860) and A ­Woman’s Lot (Zhenskaia dolia, 1862) marriage is an inescapable real­ity for ­women who exist at the complete mercy of their husbands and relatives. Both works suggest that the ideology of “­free love” makes all ­women objects of sexual gratification; having lost the need to adhere to any moral code, husbands have no qualms about belittling or abusing their wives as they would a mistress or prostitute. Virtually forgotten ­today, Romance in the St. Petersburg Demimonde stands as a stark testament to the way society condones the abuse of w ­ omen by husbands and vile relatives. The novel focuses on the unfortunate fate of a young ­woman from the provinces named Anna. Like other Panaeva heroines, she is raised sheltered from the realities of life, particularly the favorite pastimes of male society (smoking, drinking, gambling, and whoring) that inevitably lead to unhappy marriages. Anna’s ignorance makes her vulnerable to the schemes of self-­serving ­family members, and particularly her manipulative aunt, Lizaveta Ignatevna Abriutina. When Anna’s ­mother dies, Abriutina decides to pay a visit to her mourning niece at the country estate. Abriutina’s intention is not to grieve over her recently departed ­sister but to take Anna to St.  Petersburg, where she plans to barter the young ingenue on the bridal market. The theme of transactional relations emerges in full force when Abriutina blatantly pays Anna’s ­father a large sum of money to look the other way and allow her to do as she pleases with Anna. Abriutina succeeds in her designs and marries Anna to a controlling husband, Skobinsky. In the final chapter of the novel, Anna nearly escapes this loveless bond with the help of her childhood companion, Dmitry Karsanov. ­Under cloak of darkness, the two idealists hire a carriage to take them from St. Petersburg to Prus­sia, where they hope to live happily in Eu­rope. As their driver approaches the Prus­sian border,

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and with their freedom in sight, the authorities catch them and take Dmitry and Anna back to St. Petersburg. Even the best laid plans are no match for Skobinsky and Abriutina, who pull the two dreamers back into their snares. The novel portrays St. Petersburg high society as completely rotten, with ­women like Abriutina bartering their female wards first in marriage, and then ­later as mistresses to prominent men. All ­women, but particularly ­those like Anna, who marry without financial recourse of their own, are at the mercy of treacherous relatives and calculating husbands. When, for example, two ­women discuss Anna’s appearance at the theater, they describe her as raw material for Abriutina to circulate on St.  Petersburg’s sexual market. In the words of one of the ­women: “Yesterday, like some rare plant, they took her out to be shown, dressed her like a real member of the bourgeoisie: fine threads worth ten thousand; earrings costing three thousand. The only t­hings missing ­were the bracelet and locket; other­wise she would have been like a young bachelorette from the Summer Garden.”39 Their reference to the Summer Garden links Anna to a site of notorious activity for elite prostitution among the upper classes. In fact, the ­women know that Abriutina plans to use marriage as a cover for Anna to serve as a mistress to well-­placed aristocrats. “The sooner they marry her off, the better,” comment the ­women, “­because a married ­woman can do a lot more with men than can a girl. And Abriutina’s plan is to use her niece to acquire connections with impor­tant ­people in St. Petersburg, and through them s­ he’ll orchestrate her black-­market dealings.”40 Marriage to a libertine husband who w ­ ill willingly look the other way as his young wife does the bidding of her aunt is the true secret to Abriutina’s financial successes as she wheels and deals in the northern capital. If Abriutina’s schemes represent the unscrupulous under­pinnings of St. Petersburg’s sexual subculture, the marriage between Anna and Skobinsky appears as its complement among polite, high society. Skobinsky pre­sents himself as a well-­read, self-­made man who thinks critically about the day’s major economic and social questions. In his relations with his wife, however, he is a complete tyrant and works to crush any sense of in­de­pen­dence Anna might cultivate for herself. When Anna begs for her freedom and an end to their marriage, he demands she obey outward decorum and pretend, at least in public, that she is a dutiful and loving wife. When she attempts to resist, he threatens to follow the example of one recent husband and forcibly put his wife in a psychiatric hospital. As she reflects on her husband’s cruelty, Anna remembers the tragic fate of her other aunt, Masha, who was similarly crushed by f­ amily despotism. Realizing that society has not progressed in its abuse of w ­ omen, Anna concludes that the mechanisms of oppression “have simply taken a dif­ fer­ent, more refined approach, at once stronger and more constricting.”41

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The threat of forced psychiatric treatment for ­women who disobey their husband’s wishes likewise appears as a theme in Panaeva’s final novel, A ­Woman’s Lot. When the heroine’s ­mother attempts to prevent her ­daughter’s marriage to a cretin of the worst order, her husband intervenes and makes it clear that if she goes against his wishes, he ­will put her in an asylum. Published in 1862 in Sovremennik, A ­Woman’s Lot is a biting critique of marriage and, in the assessment of Susan Conner Olson, “reflects [Panaeva’s] state of absolute disillusionment with husbands, lovers, ­fathers, and society in general.” Unlike previous works, the novel “argues that men are the base cause of all female suffering.”42 A ­Woman’s Lot depicts in detail the horrifying fate of a young bride, Sonia, who is swindled by her own ­father into marrying a womanizer. ­After their wedding vows are complete, Sonia’s new husband, Petr, whisks her away to his grand­father’s country estate, where debauchery subsequently ensues. Beyond having to defend herself from the lecherous patriarch, she also learns that her husband has not one, but three mistresses, all living on the estate. The grand­father pits the ­women against one another in the hopes of causing a disastrous scandal. His calculations fail, however, when Sonia manages to cultivate a sense of comradery among her husband’s kept ­women. A ­Woman’s Lot diagnoses the country’s marital crisis by placing blame firmly in the hands of men who have abused the ideal of “emancipation of the heart” to have their way with w ­ omen and abandon them. W ­ omen’s emancipation, rather than solidifying husbands’ re­spect for their wives, has given men full recourse to engage in licentious be­hav­ior ­under the auspices of “­free love.” In one of the opening scenes of the novel, Sonia’s ­mother complains to a female confidante about the failed state of marriage, at once foreshadowing her ­daughter’s ­f uture conundrum while also providing a broader assessment on the rampant infidelity among the country’s male citizens. “Every­thing in our society is built to ease a man’s debauchery,” for a husband’s sensuality w ­ ill lead him to throw off his wife, thus “mangling her life to the point of disgrace before abandoning her for some sold w ­ oman!”43 The novel’s didactic tone, conveyed most succinctly through the narrator’s direct addresses to female readers, pushes A ­Woman’s Lot to the realm of diagnostic fiction in ways that blur the objective and subjective, the narrative and social critique. A ­Woman’s Lot struck a nerve with male intellectuals of the 1860s, who found the author’s critique of emancipation a betrayal of the radical’s agenda. In a long-­winded review of the novel, Dmitry Pisarev called the work “putrid trash” and “noxious crap.”44 ­Because Panaeva did not create positive heroines like Chernyshevsky’s Vera Pavlovna, who escape the bonds of social and familial constraints, male critics questioned her intellect, talents, and belief in the cause. To be sure, Panaeva felt ­women’s fate deeply and personally, but she did not

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paint liberation as a natu­ral outcome of egalitarian relations between the sexes, as the men of Chernyshevsky’s coterie did.45 That she amassed criticism ­because of her distrust of self-­fashioned male liberators reminds modern readers of an everlasting tension over who owns the discourse on self-­determination. Her writing shows the depths to which w ­ omen authors would go to dictate for themselves and their readers how to envision a more equal ­future between men and w ­ omen.

Unequal Marriages, Wedding Agreements, and Fussy Brides The world of fine art a­ dopted the criticisms of literary progressives as artists turned their canvases into displays of moral corruption and social hy­poc­risy. As Elizabeth Valkenier argues, the work of realist paint­ers, “like the lit­er­a­ture of the day, recorded and commented on the vast changes that Rus­sian society experienced during the second half of the nineteenth c­ entury.”46 Genre paint­ ers, particularly Pavel Fedotov, Vasily Pukirev, and Nikolai Shilder, addressed the era’s “accursed questions” and used their canvases to reveal the realities of Rus­sia’s lower and ­middle classes.47 Practice of courtship in Rus­sia pointed both to financial in­equality and gender disparity as primary obstacles in reforming marriage. Shilder visualizes such tensions between f­amily necessity and marital choice in his painting Wedding Collusion (Sgovor nevesty, 1859), which depicts the betrothing of a young w ­ oman to a man nearly twice her age (see figure 4.1). The bride-­to-be extends her arm as the older man, soon to be her husband, eagerly kisses her hand. While her face shows apprehension, if not downright disgust, she is reminded by the w ­ oman hovering over her shoulder (­either her ­mother or a matchmaker) that the choice is not hers alone. As she points to the ­family patriarch, who appears to be suffering from the dual plights of poverty and illness, her look signals that any refusal would send the ­family, including her younger ­sister, to the poor ­house. Shilder crafts the painting’s composition to underscore the ­family’s dependence on the bride. She remains the central focus, amplified by the two figures in opposite corners who stand as signifiers for social and religious categories encouraging such a u ­ nion rather than preventing it. In the upper right-­hand corner, the el­derly ­woman, likely the ­family matriarch, points to an icon in a gesture that affirms the marriage ­union as sanctified by the holy image. The ineptitude of religious justification of such an unequal marriage is echoed by the presence of the male figure in

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Figure 4.1. ​Nikolai Shilder, Sgovor nevesty (Wedding Collusion), 1859. Oil on canvas, 27 × 35 cm. Image in the public domain.

the opposite corner. Possibly the ­woman’s ­brother (or even her failed suitor), he is shrouded in near darkness—­suggesting that although men of his generation aspire to enlightenment, they cannot prevent the sale of their s­ isters or female acquaintances into matrimony. Like Shilder, who frames the nuptial agreement as a transaction, Vasily Pukirev’s Unequal Marriage (Neravnyi brak) evokes a sense of bridal commodification. Pukirev’s painting caused a sensation upon its unveiling in 1862, for it dramatized, in near hyperbolic terms, the fate of young brides forced to marry men old enough to be their grand­fathers (see figure 4.2).48 Pukirev, by visualizing the shocking age gap between the groom and his teary-­eyed bride, manages to evoke in the viewer feelings of intense sympathy for the girl and an equal amount of disgust at the septuagenarian groom who gazes, somewhat inquisitively, at his bride-­to-be. The general in Pukirev’s painting, clearly a privileged member of high society, with his Order of Saint Vladimir medal resting prominently on his chest, exudes a cruel solemnity. Pukirev’s painting demands that the audience engage with the social commentary dramatized on canvas. This tendency to locate the transformative potential of art is something that Molly Brunson in her study of Rus­sian realism has described as “the affect of realism” that allowed the ­sister arts to push Rus­sian audiences to the visceral,

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Figure 4.2. ​Vasily Pukirev, Neravnyi brak (Unequal Marriage), 1862. Oil on canvas, 174 × 137 cm. State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

the emotional, in order to accomplish social and ethical change.49 Indeed, some viewers, like the prominent Rus­sian historian Nikolai Kostomarov, took Pukirev’s message to heart and called off their engagements to young brides.50 Of course, not all courtship rituals appeared in visual repre­sen­ta­tion as tragic misalliances; several of the most famous works from the period poked fun at the mercenary interests and delusional grandeur of socialites. The works of Fedotov, for example, ­were some of the first “to foreground the importance

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of social status and the role of money in marital ­unions” in ways that profiled the “mercantile notion of marriage as a business deal.”51 Hailed as the “Rus­ sian Hogarth” for his ability to capture vice and make light of it through telling portraiture, Fedotov immortalized the figure of the persnickety bride in works like The Discriminating Bride (Razborchivaia nevesta, 1847) and The Major’s Courtship (Svatovstvo maiora, 1848). Visual depictions functioned alongside literary portrayals to synthesize for Rus­sian audiences the threat financial interest posed to the institution of marriage. While satirical genre paintings could poke fun at the issue, the broader goal was to use laughter so that viewers might question their own beliefs on marital choice. As Fedotov codified the mercenary forces driving the ­middle estates’ marriage choices, his paintings looked both to the experience of the merchantry and impoverished gentry to advocate for a critical reevaluation of the f­amily order. ­These ideas would take full form in the writings of Dostoevsky, who presented the power dynamics in unequal marriages as a kind of neurosis plaguing male society. The psychological drama between such a ­couple emerges most succinctly in “A Gentle Creature.”

A Rebellious Spirit: Dostoevsky’s “A Gentle Creature” ­ hether in the confines of the brothel or in the context of the marriage marW ket, the commodification of ­women offered Dostoevsky a starting point to explore how capitalism s­ haped female psy­chol­ogy. From his “fallen w ­ omen” characters—­Sonia Marmeladova in Crime and Punishment, Nastasia Filippovna in The Idiot, Grushenka in The B ­ rothers Karamazov—to impoverished urban dwellers like Varvara in Poor Folk, Dostoevsky’s heroines strug­gle to define their autonomy within a social economy founded largely on their commodification. In Dostoevsky’s artistic vision, monetary self-­interest serves as a root cause for the disintegration of male-­female relations. As the literary scholar Jacques Catteau succinctly puts it, “In Dostoyevsky, love between man and ­woman is always affected by money, if not caused, destroyed or defiled by it.”52 This is particularly the case in Dostoevsky’s depictions of unequal marriages between older men and young, impoverished brides. In “A Gentle Creature” Dostoevsky ­adopted the topic of an unequal marriage to probe the psyche of an exploitative husband who congratulates himself on saving an impoverished girl twenty-­five years his ju­nior by marrying her. “Oh what filth I dragged her out of!” reflects the narrator, admitting that the “feeling of in­equality” was “delightful, very delightful!”53 While he subjects his sixteen-­year-­old wife to

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psychological torture, she refuses to embrace his view of the world, which is founded on monetary exchange and cost-­benefit analy­sis. “A Gentle Creature” begins, tellingly, with the narrator staring at the body of his dead wife. In the story’s preface Dostoevsky explains that the ­woman committed suicide and now her husband is left trying to explain her motivations.54 “A series of memories which he recalls lead him ultimately to the truth,” writes Dostoevsky, and this “truth elevates his mind and heart.”55 This power­ ful opening draws from Dostoevsky’s embellishment of an ­actual news story he read in the presses about a w ­ oman who jumped to her death while holding an icon of the Virgin Mary and the Christ Child.56 “The girl with the icon,” as Dostoevsky referred to her in his notes, inspired the depiction of the gentle creature, who goes unnamed throughout the story. Written in the form of a monologue, “A Gentle Creature” blends stream of consciousness with thoughtful reflection as the mourning husband comes to terms with his wife’s suicide. “A Gentle Creature” codes monetary exchange as the foundation of men’s exploitation of w ­ omen. The narrator, who runs a small pawnbroking business, meets his f­uture wife when she stops in to pawn some of her prized, albeit inexpensive, possessions, including a pair of silver earrings, a medallion, and eventually an icon. She has de­cided to sell t­ hese items—­the last remaining heirlooms from her deceased parents—in order to pay for an advertisement in the newspaper The Voice (Golos) to publicize her ser­vices as a governess to wouldbe employers. Pawning her own inheritance (the remnants of a dowry) in order to purchase advertisement space is the first of many instances in which Dostoevsky underscores the gentle creature’s transformation into commodity. She initially composes a specific entry, advertising that she is ready to work as “A governess, ready to move to the country,” but eventually, as the days go by without any response, she becomes desperate, adjusting the wording to sound more accommodating: “Willing to accept anything, to teach, to serve as a companion, to look ­after the ­house­hold, to take care of the sick, able to sew.” Seeing her despair activates the pawnbroker’s hopes of dominance; he decides “to test” her, pointing to a dif­fer­ent advertisement in Golos that would certainly guarantee ­future employment: “A young lady, orphan, looking for work as governess to young ­children, ideally with an el­derly widower. Able to assist with h ­ ouse­hold duties.”57 Of course, the advertisement serves as a veiled cover for an illicit quid pro quo arrangement by which a governess could serve a widower both by teaching his ­children and becoming his mistress. Considering the gentle creature’s subsequent muteness in the text—­she rarely speaks, and her death pervades as an ultimate silence that w ­ ill haunt the pawnbroker—­the newspaper’s title, Golos (voice), underscores a disparity between ideal and real­ity presented in the text. Dostoevsky shows what mar-

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keting does to the psyche: rather than pre­sent the ­wholeness of a person, it simplifies the individual into a few ele­ments that appeal to potential buyers. This type of commodification, whereby ­people become no more and no less than their market value, works its way through Dostoevsky’s many depictions of fallen w ­ omen. In this sense, he foresaw what Walter Benjamin would subsequently formulate in The Arcades Proj­ect—­namely, that “the modern advertisement demonstrates . . . ​how much the attraction of w ­ oman and commodity 58 can be merged.” The role of the advertisement formulates for the gentle creature the limitations of her own autonomy, for she is both selling her heirlooms in the pawnshop and selling herself in Golos. As the world of advertising commodifies the gentle creature, so, too, does her ­family. A ­ fter the death of her parents, she is left in the care of two disreputable aunts who utterly abuse her. “She taught her aunt’s ­children, sewed their clothes,” and, as the pawnbroker explains, “scrubbed their floors . . . ​they even beat her, reproached her for e­ very morsel she ate.” Although he leaves out “the sordid details,” the pawnbroker explains that the aunts “aimed to sell her” to a fat storekeeper who lived next door and fancied the young girl.59 Faced with the prospect of marrying this storekeeper, who had driven two wives to an early grave, versus the pawnbroker, the gentle creature chooses the latter. While he asserts that she “­ought to have thanked him” for digging her out of that “filth,” Dostoevsky makes clear that the pawnbroker is motivated by sadistic plea­sure and the power he ­will have over a child bride. While the pawnbroker admits that his young bride initially shows signs of affection, he refuses to act tenderly t­ oward her as part of a plan to bend her to his ­will. But his intentions backfire, for although his silence ­toward her is meant as a form of torture, she rebels and begins taking on the workings of the shop and issuing loans herself. When he chastises her, saying that the money is his and his alone, she becomes “a wild beast,” “stamps her foot,” and “laugh[s] in [his] face.”60 Her decision to take control over the financial side of the business humiliates the pawnbroker; his comeuppance continues when the gentle creature confronts him about a shameful incident from his army days when, out of cowardice, he refused to fight a duel. Instead of embracing him as her savior, as he e­ arlier hoped, she rebels and seeks out the very army officer who holds the key to the pawnbroker’s humiliating past. Learning of the rendezvous, the pawnbroker eavesdrops on their conversation, only to find that his wife laughs sarcastically at the officer’s romantic declarations of love. Convinced that she is guiltless, the pawnbroker enters the room to the surprise of both his wife and his former foe. The tension builds, rather than eases, a­ fter the melodramatic exposé: that eve­ning the pawnbroker awakens to his wife holding a gun to his ­temple. He

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pretends to be asleep, but they both know “he had seen every­thing,” that he “was waiting for death” and the sound of a pistol shot. From that moment onward the two become estranged and no longer share the same bed. Over the winter she falls ill; a­ fter recovering, she secludes herself, never looks at him, and suddenly, to his dismay, begins softly singing. “­Until then I had hardly ever heard her sing” remembers the pawnbroker; “the song sounded so weak . . . ​ as if her voice was trembling, broken, as though her l­ ittle voice could not manage it—as if the song itself was sick.” To his dismay, he won­ders, “She’s singing with me h ­ ere. Could it be that she had forgotten about me?” This realization confounds him; instead of her begging his forgiveness, she has successfully removed him from her conscious thoughts. He breaks down, throws himself on the ground before her and begins kissing her feet and asking for her forgiveness. The gentle creature’s response to the burst of emotion holds the key to unlocking the mystery of her suicide. She succumbs to a “terrible fit of hysterics” and suddenly says to the pawnbroker, “And I thought you’d leave me alone [Ia dumala, chto vy menia ostavite tak].” Realizing the magnitude of her statement, the pawnbroker reflects, “that was the most impor­tant ­thing she said that eve­ning . . . ​it was like a knife being stabbed in my heart.”61 Five days ­later she jumps to her death, holding the same icon of the Virgin Mary and the Christ Child that she initially brought for sale to the pawnbroker. What motivated the gentle creature to commit suicide tortures the pawnbroker, and although Dostoevsky does not offer any definitive answer as to why she de­cided to end her life, an analy­sis of her final statement sheds light both on her rationale and on the ultimate meaning of the story’s finale. While Joseph Frank argues that the gentle creature “has been irremediably estranged” and that she jumps ­because she is “consumed by guilt at her own incapacity to respond, except with profound pity, to his entreaties to begin a new life,” ­there is more to the decisive denouement than a sick ­woman’s tortured conscience.62 On the one hand, her suicide can be read as a response to a dif­fer­ent failure: her inability to shoot the gun and end the pawnbroker’s life. Maybe she sees herself as a coward in this regard, no better than the pawnbroker who had refused to fight in a duel. On the other hand, one could read the gentle creature’s death within the paradigm outlined in Irina Paperno’s study of suicide in imperial Rus­sia. “Dif­fer­ent themes converged in the image of suicide” explains Paperno; “the suicide’s body, presented in graphic images of corporeal disorder, became an emblem of the disintegrating social body.”63 Taking into account the broader social panic concerning suicide, the pawnbroker’s attempts to fathom his wife’s death symbolically convey the strug­gle of any person to fathom the incomprehensibility of death.

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Looking at the gentle creature’s final statement illuminates a dif­fer­ent interpretation: she jumps to escape the bonds of marriage, in par­tic­u­lar the physical and sexual relations that would now presumably resume between them. That she resumes singing a­ fter he purchases a separate bed for her signifies that she has found happiness not despite the pawnbroker’s lack of physical contact, but ­because of it. She has been freed of any expectation to participate in a sexual relationship with a man twenty-­five years her se­nior, and now, with his emotional outburst of love, this duty would return. The pawnbroker’s reflection ­toward the story’s conclusion hints that he, too, understands that the prospect of physical contact urged her to suicide: “You w ­ ouldn’t have loved me, but what of it? . . . ​Every­thing could have remained as it was [vse by i ostavalos’ tak]. You would have talked to me only as a friend, and we would have laughed and been happy together.”64 The Rus­sian text, which more clearly conveys the pawnbroker’s echoing of the gentle creature’s statement (Ia dumala, chto vy menia ostavite tak), illustrates that he understands his wife’s desire not to renew sexual relations. “She had started believing that I would leave her alone,” reflects the pawnbroker e­ arlier in the text, adding, “Oh, like the thought of a ten-­year-­old girl! And she believed, truly believed that every­thing would remain as it was: she ­behind her ­table, me ­behind mine, and so we would have lived well into our sixties.” But his sudden burst of devotion signals to the gentle creature that, as the pawnbroker puts it, “a husband needs love!”65 Keeping in mind her desire to escape the conjugal bed, her suicide conveys a far deeper rebellion than traditionally considered. Moreover, her death brings together the gentle creature’s rebellious spirit within Dostoevsky’s broader aim to reject the commodification of the individual. Returning to the theme of Golos—­namely, the gentle creature’s advertisement—­her suicide demands that she be seen as a body rather than a commodity. An analy­sis of how Dostoevsky conceptualizes frames in the story elucidates this point. The gentle creature pledges the icon with the Virgin Mary and the Christ Child, with “embossed metal of silver gilt”; rather than remove the icon from the frame, as the pawnbroker initially suggests, he decides to keep it in the casing and place it with the other icons, and he gives her five rubles. Pawning the icon is marked as semisacrilegious in the text and shows the gentle creature’s dire financial need. The notion that in selling this item she is figuratively pawning her own soul is confirmed by the narrator’s reference to Mephistopheles ­later in their exchange.66 “Half jokingly, half mysteriously,” the pawnbroker tells her, “I am part of that Power which still doeth good, though scheming ill.” Taken in this context, the gentle creature’s leap from the win­dow while holding the sacred icon can be read as her rejection of the pawnbroker’s bargain.

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He may have successfully brokered her hand in marriage, but she takes the icon with the Virgin Mary and the Christ Child—­a Christian symbol of sacred virginity and motherhood—­with her to the grave as a reaffirmation of her own virginity.67 Through suicide she demands the acknowl­edgment of both her body and soul. Her escape from the pawnbroker is predicated on her leaving, both physically and spiritually, the space of the apartment. In this sense, by moving from the frame of the win­dow into the air she reenters the world anew.68 Her departure liberates her not only from the physical world associated with the pawnbroker but from the realm of commodity exchange and the purchased advertisement that she places in Golos before their marriage. “A Gentle Creature” offers a distillation of Dostoevsky’s thinking about unequal marriage and it shows his mastery and probing the ­human psyche. It is a power­f ul testament to what goes unsaid between married ­couples, and it looks, from the outside in, on how grief alters consciousness. Poverty and social in­equality produce disastrous ­unions for Dostoevsky’s characters, but psychological warfare plays an equal part in the downward spiral of ­human relations. Interested as Dostoevsky was in the “accidental ­family,” he put his artistic talent to uncovering how pressures of industrialization, urbanization, and Westernization affected ­women of lower social standing. ­These themes ­were taken up in dramatic writing of the period as well, as evidenced in the subsequent analy­sis of plays by Alexander Ostrovsky.

Alexander Ostrovsky and the Dramatization of Marital Choice “It’s horrifying to imagine yourself married to a man for whom you feel nothing but repulsion. . . . ​Any ugly creep thinks he has the right to court me. He even believes he’s ­doing some kind of ­favor, ­because—­from his point of view—­I’m a poor bride. Another w ­ ill simply bargain for me, as if I’m something for sale. ‘I have the capital’ he’d say, ‘you have nothing.’ ” —­Alexander Ostrovsky, The Poor Bride

The plays of Alexander Ostrovsky offer an incredible assortment of characters, from petty clerks to daring business entrepreneurs, from young ingenues to miserly spinsters. Richly diverse in their repre­sen­ta­tion of Rus­sia’s vari­ous social classes, Ostrovsky’s dramas provide valuable insight into the cultural anx­ i­eties of the late imperial period while also profiling the hopes of reformers who advocated for change. While Ostrovsky’s legacy has largely been confined to the study of his portrayal of the Moscow merchantry, the playwright pop-

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ulated his works with members of the vari­ous social estates including ­those from the lower classes and the intelligent­sia. Uniting many in this disparate group of dramatis personae is a common interest in the politics b­ ehind marriage arrangements. From the matchmakers who encourage profitable u ­ nions to the conniving parents who barter their d­ aughters in matrimony, Ostrovsky’s works draw upon the dramatic conflict of nuptial contracts to show the generative tension between commercial self-­interest and a w ­ oman’s autonomy. That marital arrangement and personal choice remain in opposition to one another illustrates Ostrovsky’s poignant grasp of the economic foundation of the marriage u ­ nion. As Maria Nezabudkina’s speech from Ostrovsky’s play The Poor Bride quoted above demonstrates, any “ugly creep” (urod) can “bargain” for her, as if she “is something for sale.”69 Maria’s plight stands in for that of an entire category of w ­ omen who found themselves at the mercy of the marriage market. Bridging the era leading up to the ­Great Reforms and the subsequent de­ cades following their implementation, Ostrovsky produced an entire repertoire for the Rus­sian theater (forty-­seven original plays in total). His work in the theater extended beyond playwriting to directing, management, and advocacy work on the behalf of his actors. As a writer whose plays w ­ ere disseminated both in journals and on the stage, he knew the pressures of censorship firsthand.70 His plays offered his contemporaries and subsequent generations an access point from which to explore the conflicting discourses on the ­woman question in the imperial period. While his works are relatively unknown in the West, his dramas continue to be staged in theaters throughout Rus­sia and have been adapted for opera, ballet, and cinema. Ostrovsky’s plays, which first gained fame as staged per­for­mances, built upon well-­established plots of mésalliance developed in Eu­ro­pean theater. Influenced by the French playwright Eugène Scribe and his “well-­made plays,” Ostrovsky followed a four-­or five-­ act structure that culminated in a final resolution. As Louise McReynolds notes, unlike his Eu­ro­pean contemporaries—­Victorien Sardou and Eugène Scribe, whose reputations quickly faded—­Ostrovsky’s popularity continued ­after his death ­because the changes he depicted “passed the test of po­liti­cal correctness Soviet-­style.”71 Ostrovsky adroitly conveys how the commodification of the individual impacts w ­ omen and their perception of themselves. From his first play to his last, he locates w ­ omen’s emancipation as tied to the question of economic transaction. This is not to say that the playwright’s perception is myopic and that he focuses solely on womanhood to the point of ignoring masculinity; quite the contrary. But in Ostrovsky’s dramas, w ­ hether they be tragedies or comedies, the world of consumption is coded as female. W ­ omen are exchanged

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between men, gifted from one male to another, bartered and brokered in ways that convey the economic transaction not only of sex but also of marriage. By the same mea­sure, w ­ omen actively participate in the pro­cesses of cost-­ benefit analy­sis, brokering ­daughters, selling themselves, or undercutting acquaintances to make a profit. His plays thus showcase the possibilities of commercial culture to upend tradition, while si­mul­ta­neously revealing the practices of exploitation that remain concurrent even in times of change. Ostrovsky is best known for his drama The Storm (Groza, 1860), which depicts the fate of an unhappily married w ­ oman, Katerina, who, a­ fter committing adultery, confesses publicly to her crime of passion; unwilling to face the tyranny and scrutiny of her husband, mother-­in-­law, and the town, she throws herself into the Volga River. This drama, along with other forays into the oppressive atmosphere of the merchantry, inspired Nikolai Dobroliubov, one of the day’s leading radical critics, to characterize the world of Ostrovsky’s plays as a “dark kingdom” (temnoe tsarstvo) where domestic tyranny (samodurstvo) rules supreme. Katerina, in Dobroliubov’s famous formulation, appears as a “light in the kingdom of darkness” b­ ecause she manages to hold onto her dignity despite the attacks of her mother-­in-­law and husband.72 The Storm helped codified the image of the Rus­sian merchantry among the intelligent­sia as a prohibitively conservative estate that was resistant to change.73 Ostrovsky placed marital choice at the center of his plays ­because it brought together conflicting beliefs about social mobility and emancipation. By focusing on the tensions produced by interclass marriages he could profile idealistic, principled heroines and contrast them with greedy hedonists who honored profit above all ­else. Typical in this regard is the fate of Larisa in his The Dowerless Bride (Bespridannitsa, 1879). In Ostrovsky’s formulation, Larisa begins as a prized possession sought ­after by the vari­ous male miscreants featured in the play; while she agrees to marry a social inferior, Karandyshev, it is clear that he, too, sees her as an object to own and parade in front of fellow men. A biting condemnation of the monetization of marriage and the commodification of w ­ omen, The Dowerless Bride shows the intrusion of predatory capitalism in gender relations. The businessmen in the play—­Vozhevatov and the more affluent Knurov—­transfer market princi­ples into their dealings with ­women. As Karandyshev explains to Larisa, they flipped a coin to see which of them would have the chance to take her as a mistress: “They think of you not as a ­woman, not as an individual—an individual decides his fate; they think of you as a t­ hing.” Larisa tellingly responds, “A t­ hing, yes a t­ hing! At last the right word for me.” Karandyshev has also internalized the sensibility of business logic by concluding that he alone owns her. It is no won­der, then, that

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Larisa eagerly welcomes death and thanks her fiancé for killing her, exclaiming in her last d­ ying breath, “What a blessing [kakoe blagodeianie]!”74 Not unlike Dostoevsky’s gentle creature, Ostrovsky’s Larisa confronts her own status as commodity and chooses death over a life of domestic tyranny with the dim-­witted Karandyshev. The play underscores that Larisa lacks any other ­viable options, for the laws of business now rule supreme; she is reminded that every­thing and every­one has its price, and she most of all. Market capitalism and the commodification of w ­ omen converge through the sale of Paratov’s boat, The Swallow. When Paratov returns to Larisa’s town she wrongly believes that he has come to pledge his hand in marriage. Instead he aims to have one last bout of passion before wedding an heiress.75 The sale of The Swallow to Vozhevatov ­will provide Paratov with much-­needed capital to accomplish his aim. But the sale is meant as an allegory for the men’s relationship with Larisa. Paratov rids himself of the boat by selling it to Vozhevatov, an exchange that is mirrored in Paratov’s abandonment of Larisa. Both men ­will use the sale of the boat to fund debauchery: Paratov w ­ ill use the much-­ needed earnings from the sale to continue his hedonism before marrying a wealthy heiress; Vozhevatov plans to resell the boat and use the earnings to fund a trip to Paris with Larisa by his side. As Marjorie Hoover eloquently surmises, when Vozhevatov purchases the boat he sees in it a price for Larisa, evidenced in his comment that “­every piece of merchandise has its price.”76 Commodity fetishism motivates this new generation of entrepreneurs who relate to the world through consumption. As they lust a­ fter Larisa, her value as a commodity fluctuates; rather than acquiesce to the marketization of her body, Larisa chooses death. In both The Dowerless Bride and The Storm, the heroine’s death vindicates the primacy of love over financial interest in ­matters of the heart. While his dramas canonize the impoverished ­woman as a martyr in the fight for marital choice, Ostrovsky’s numerous comedies paint a dif­fer­ent picture of the relations between the sexes. Whereas both Katerina and Larisa fight their status as “­things” to be brokered between men, the heroines of his comedies embrace their role as commodities. Having internalized their role in the cap­i­tal­ ist marketplace, they voraciously consume. As Lidiia, the heroine from Easy Money (Beshenye den’gi, 1870) aptly puts it, “Who cares about economic laws? We have no time to think of any laws, all we have time for is to go shopping and buy.”77 To a certain degree, genre determined for Ostrovsky ­whether a ­woman rebelled against her status as commodity or relished it. A heroine that dies at the hands of a fiancé belongs to the world of tragedy. Her martyrdom produces

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a cathartic response that exposes injustice and hy­poc­risy in the effort to promote broader social change. By way of contrast, comedies like The Poor Bride and Easy Money look at consumption to question the traditional order while ultimately advocating for its validity. To put it another way, Ostrovsky made fun of consumption in order to reveal how it could destabilize the f­ amily unit. While characters like Katerina and Larisa rebelled against commodification, ­women who embraced the power of consumption proved far more threatening to the social order. They ­were the ultimate extension of the commodification of Rus­sian culture hinted at in the tragedies; and worse than ­these heroines, the comedic ones continued living in order to continue spending. Such w ­ omen used sex as a power­f ul tool, offering or withholding it in ways that mirrored the relationships between elite prostitutes and clients. In this way Ostrovsky showed that the be­hav­iors of the demimonde percolated upward ­toward the m ­ iddle estates as wives threatened to withhold sexual relations lest their husbands refuse to purchase the embroidered drapes they desperately wanted. Making light of ­women’s insatiable hunger for fancy dresses and new hats tapped into anx­i­eties about ­women’s troubling hold over their husband’s pocket­books. Ostrovsky’s depiction of wives captivated by luxury items pointed to a real issue facing middle-­class homes; a w ­ oman’s “ ‘lust’ for objects,” to paraphrase Venita Datta, could threaten to drain a husband’s resources and destabilize the traditional gender hierarchy.78 A chief example is the comedy Easy Money. In this play, a Rus­sian rendition of William Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, the hero Savva Vasilkov makes his wife, a profligate socialite, curb her spending and live according to what she despises most: a bud­get. Her transformation from squandering shopper to thrifty companion takes a full five acts to accomplish, for the heroine, Lidiia Cheboksarova, spends so drastically that her f­amily estate is now in foreclosure. When Vasilkov refuses to subsidize her lifestyle, she runs to another man; when it is revealed that he, too, is in fact penniless, Lidiia has no choice but to return to Vasilkov. Easy Money depicts female consumption in its most condensed form and contrasts it with the frugal businessman of Vasilkov, a gentleman from the provinces who made his fortune abroad and has returned to Rus­sia to invest his capital. Juxtaposing Vasilkov with Lidiia provides rich dramatic tension in the play, in part ­because the characters represent dif­fer­ent sides of financial speculation. Lidiia, for instance, knows her value as a shopper: “I’ve never known what it means to go wanting and I ­don’t care to. All I know is that I like shopping, for underwear, silks, carpets, furs, furniture. I know that when I want something I

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go to the best shop in town, get it and pay for it.” Vasilkov, by way of contrast, lives according to a frugal bud­get and through hard work has acquired a fortune. When he agrees to take Lidiia back, he does so ­under the condition that she “unlearn certain habits” acquired during her upbringing.79 The final act emphasizes that while ­women might demand emancipation, their natu­ral inclination t­oward consumption prevents them from meaningful participation in society. Only the tempered hand of a husband can guide a wife to enlightenment. This is why Vasilkov preaches to Lidiia that her fears of the Moscow debtor’s prison are the least of her worries. “­You’re afraid of the [debtor’s] pit,” he tells her, “but y­ ou’re not afraid of that bottomless pit from which ­there is no return.” It is the “bottomless pit which is called debauchery and in which the good name, honor, and decency of a w ­ oman perishes” that she should r­ eally fear. He agrees to “save Lidiia” and take her back, but only u ­ nder the condition that she move to his country estate, take the job of his “house­keeper,” and live u ­ nder the careful eye of his m ­ other. If a­ fter many years of good be­hav­ior she proves herself worthy, he w ­ ill consider taking her to an opera in St. Petersburg. With the bailiffs knocking on the door to repossess her furniture, Lidiia begrudgingly agrees, capitulating, “My goddess of carefree happiness has been removed from her pedestal to be replaced by the coarse idol of work and production whose name is bud­get.”80 By the time Ostrovsky published Easy Money in 1870, he had distilled the conflict of marital choice to a refined art. Lidiia—­who synthesizes the traits found in previous female consumers—­can do nothing but acknowledge her place at the hearth as Vasilkov forces her to live on a bud­get. Easy Money, more than any of Ostrovsky’s plays, reaffirms the patriarchal ­family unit by solidifying female domesticity and w ­ omen’s subservience to their husbands. Connecting femininity with consumption conveyed that the social hierarchy relegated ­women to the role of mindless consumers. By the same mea­ sure, stressing ­women’s inability to curb their lust for finery, fancy hats, and luxurious materials buttressed the traditional view that all ­women suffered from latent vanity. As Easy Money outlines, while greed is not gender-­specific in Ostrovsky’s world, the need to define oneself through consumption is par­ tic­ul­ar to the female sex. Having internalized their place in the social order as buyers and objects to be bought, Ostrovsky’s manipulative debutantes and superficial wives gender the act of consumption as female. Poking fun at ­women’s latent consumerism helped maintain the social order that placed men at the head of the h ­ ouse­hold. Through the nexus of marriage Ostrovsky brought to light a common strug­gle among the social estates to control their female wards. W ­ hether a

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f­ ather hailed from the nobility or the merchantry, he faced the same b­ attle against ­daughters who insisted on the right to marry for love over financial interest. For example, the merchant f­ather in Ostrovsky’s It’s a ­Family Affair, ­We’ll ­Settle It Ourselves (Svoi liudi-­sochtemsia, 1850) shouts that his d­ aughter, Lipochka, ­will “go to the man I tell her,” claiming paternal sovereignty as an ultimate right: “It’s my kid. If I like, I’ll eat her with my cereal, or churn her up into butter.”81 As Ostrovsky’s first major play, It’s a ­Family Affair, ­We’ll ­Settle It Ourselves established the marriage crisis as a favorite theme for the author. The play suggests that an inevitable catastrophe awaits parents across Rus­sia as the results of patriarchal overreach come into full affect. When push comes to shove, Lipochka acquiesces and marries her ­father’s protégé, the young upstart Podkhaliuzin. But victory is short-­lived; when the debt collectors come calling, Lipochka and Podkhaliuzin betray the ­family patriarch and turn their backs on his pleas to save him from exile to Siberia. At once crueler and more superficial than their elders, this new generation pledges allegiance to profit, not tradition. For her own part, Lipochka learns first as ­daughter, then as wife, that she operates as a signifier of male status. Podkhaliuzin “buys” her hand in marriage by offering her silk clothes, fine dining, and a luxurious apartment. Combined with her new husband’s crooked business dealings, the nuptial ­union and betrayal of ­family values convey the play’s original title—­The Bankrupt (Bankrot)—­not as a financial prob­lem but as a moral one. From his first play to his last, Ostrovsky captured the possibility of capital enterprise to better the lives of average Rus­sians while revealing the darker side of a market economy as it commodified individuals and bankrupted families. For this reason his plays continue to resonate among Rus­sian audiences grappling with the same conflicting impulse to embrace the power of money and also abhor the in­equality and greed it produces. In many re­spects, Ostrovsky succeeded in encapsulating ­these competing desires by focusing on the plight of w ­ omen who w ­ ere doubly commodified u ­ nder capitalism—­first as sexual objects, and second as wives bartered in marriage. Katerina from The Storm, Larisa from The Dowerless Bride, and Lidiia from Easy Money push back against the patriarchal structures that ensnare them in tradition. While the male characters in ­these plays also make sense of their roles in the new market economy, they do so by reaffirming their right to own the ­women they supposedly love. In this way Ostrovsky showed how capital enterprise could further push ­women into positions of subjugation. As members of all social estates strug­gled with the commercialization of Rus­sian culture, they found the spoils increasingly sparse and far from meeting their needs.82 Ostrovsky’s dramas thus bridged the social divide by showcasing the common dilemma

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among Rus­sians who felt the patriarchal structure threatened by ­women who increasingly demanded more personal and financial autonomy. The theme of bridal commodification entered Rus­sian lit­er­a­ture with Pushkin’s portrait in Eugene Onegin of Tatiana circulating on the marriage market in Moscow. Subsequent iterations turn to orchestrated matchmaking and stress the damning influence of capitalism in marital choice for impoverished brides. Focusing on the scant options for lower-­class ­women, as Dostoevsky did, conveyed to the public that dowerless brides functioned as commodities to be bought and sold on the marriage market. What they lacked in dowry they made up for in youth, beauty, and virginity. As the works of female writers—­ including pieces by Rostopchina and Panaeva—­demonstrate, opportunism fueled the bartering of young brides who found marriage not a means of liberation but just another form of exploitation. With impoverished ­women forced into loveless marriages, opportunistic young men proposing to merchants’ d­ aughters, and matchmakers brokering deals between families, ­these plots emphasized that w ­ omen ­were objects of transaction. In Ostrovsky’s numerous plays, the commercialization of Rus­sian culture pointed to a new kind of dynamism that placed profit above morality. As the cynical conniver Glumov from Ostrovsky’s Easy Money explains, “Beauty is not dead capital,” but must be circulated “to yield interest” on a man’s investment. Thus, any gentleman who marries the play’s heroine Lidiia should do so with the clear intention of capitalizing on her beauty. “The man who wants to get ahead,” expounds Glumov, “could use her as a lure for his boss and as a means to quick promotion.”83 Harnessing the capital of a beautiful wife to serve one’s best interests likened husbands to pimps and go-­betweens who profited from the sale of w ­ omen’s sexual ser­vices. When the radical critic Nikolai Dobroliubov codified the par­tic­u­lar ethos of Ostrovsky’s merchantry as a “kingdom of darkness,” he found patriarchal excess most succinctly embodied in the rite of marriage. The plight of impoverished brides struck Dobroliubov and members of the intelligent­sia as a key point in ­women’s oppression. Commenting on Ostrovsky’s drama Poor Bride, Dobroliubov asks his reader to consider what oppresses ­women like the play’s heroine, Maria Nezabudkina. To his question “Who holds her in this whirl­ pool?” Dobroliubov concludes that class and economics are to blame: “It’s certain that she is a poor bride; she has nowhere to go, nothing to do, except wait or look for a lucrative bridegroom.”84 Dobroliubov managed to heighten Nezabudkina’s woe to the level of national concern; solving the marriage crisis and liberating impoverished ­women became linked to the country’s ­f uture.

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Drama, prose fiction, and fine art stressed that the cause of unhappiness for impoverished, unattached girls was not only the men who eagerly paid for their affections but also the w ­ omen who promoted such unequal ­unions. In instances of the dowerless bride, it is often the maternal figure—or her surrogate—­who facilitates transactional relations with suitors. In Dostoevsky’s “A Gentle Creature,” once the heroine’s aunts learn that the pawnbroker intends on offering them financial compensation, they stand aside to let their niece marry him. Panaeva likewise focuses on the predatory aunt in Romance in the St. Petersburg Demimonde who intends to sell her niece’s hand in marriage and then subsequently circulate her among the affluent male citizens of the northern capital. The culmination of such unscrupulous figures appears in Ostrovsky’s The Dowerless Bride, for the heroine’s own m ­ other, Kharita Ogudalova, brokers her ­daughter’s affections to the town’s men. ­Mothers like Ogudalova represent the ultimate extension of cap­i­tal­ist exchange within the ­family unit as they reflect the notion that anything, including one’s own ­daughter, might be bartered like a commodity. Having a­ dopted the be­hav­iors of procuresses and madams, such ­mothers appear even worse than their counter­parts in the sex trade for they go against the bonds of ­family to turn profit. Images of w ­ omen brokering their female wards into transactional sex extended outward beyond ­mothers and aunts to the realm of the brothel. Lest society forget that the true profiteers w ­ ere the w ­ omen who brokered such unequal alliances, cultural figures saved their vitriol for madams and procuresses who capitalized on the exchange of sex. By pointing the fin­ger at madams rather than at clientele, commentators shifted the blame for prostitution away from male clients ­toward the ­women who facilitated venal sex. ­Imagined as a social parasite who capitalizes on untoward, immoral be­hav­ior, the female go-­ between appears almost universally in nineteenth-­century cultural production as a figure worthy of distain. As chapter 5 ­will explore, the procuress becomes a repository for male frustration at older ­women who manage, despite their reproductive irrelevance, to gain cultural significance in their role as go-­betweens.

Ch a p ter 5

“Hyenas in Bonnets” The Madam and Her Milieu

“Social parasites,” “hyenas in bonnets,” “female pariahs”: ­these are some of the epithets accompanying nineteenth-­century Rus­sian descriptions of the madam. She was ­imagined to be a ­woman more dangerous than the demimondaine, a force harder to contain than the brothel worker, and a villain fiercer than the gold-­digging coquette. “In the interest of profit, t­ hey’ll spare neither youth, nor inexperience, neither their d­ aughters nor their s­ isters,” explains one author of a popu­lar 1866 pamphlet. “They hold absolutely nothing sacred” ­because ­these “hyenas in bonnets . . . ​see ­women only as commodities that can bring in money.”1 Portrayed as far more heinous than the men who frequented brothels, the madam loomed in lit­er­a­ture and fine art as a trafficker in ­human flesh, a depraved ­woman who went against God and nature in the pursuit of money. Repre­sen­ta­tions of ­women who broker commercial sex tell us something vital about the perception of prostitution in imperial Rus­sia. While writers offer empathetic, at times romanticized portrayals of brothel workers and street walkers, the image of the madam (soderzhatel’nitsa doma terpimosti, also referred to colloquially as ba[e]ndersha, madam, or maman) garners near universal hatred among nineteenth-­century commentators. Despite the legality of her profession, she garnered distain for her work as a go-­between. As a third party in the arrangement of transactional sex, she was touched by prostitution but physically removed from intercourse. That a madam could legally 143

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harness the power of cap­i­tal­ist enterprise to profit from men’s libidinal desires struck nineteenth-­century commentators as a troubling sign of Rus­sia’s moral decline. No less worrisome ­were the machinations of the procuress (svodnia) who facilitated prostitution outside the state system of administrative supervision (nadzor) and was thus considered a criminal u ­ nder imperial law. Procuresses, like madams, appear in prose and fine art as touched by debauchery and guided solely by profit. The procuress evoked a distinct set of worries among commentators who feared that such ­women evaded the watchful eye of the police and plied their trade through trickery and coercion. In this line of thinking, the procuress orchestrated a ­woman’s “fall” into sexual servitude and acted as the dev­il’s handmaiden by tempting an unassuming, impoverished girl into prostitution. Pavel Fedotov codified the image of an el­derly ­woman ready to capitalize on the poverty of a young, attractive girl in A Poor Girl’s Beauty is a Fatal ­Thing, The Mousetrap (Bednoi devushke krasa—­smertnaia kosa, Myshelovka, 1846).2 Fedotov’s famous sepia drawing shows an impoverished seamstress whose bedridden ­mother can do nothing as a procuress suggestively points to the male figure anxiously waiting in the hallway. The work makes clear that the m ­ other’s inevitable death opens up the possibility for a second, predatory maternal figure to take her place. In ways similar to what Jenny Kaminer describes in her study of the image of the “bad m ­ other” in Rus­sian lit­er­a­ture, both the madam and procuress signify a violation of the code of moral and social ethics b­ ecause such ­women place their self-­interest above the needs of their female wards.3 Like other maternal figures who violate the sanctity of the f­ amily unit, w ­ omen who broker sex threaten the moral fabric of society and disrupt the image of the eternal, loving, self-­sacrificing ­mother upheld both in religious and secular culture. Authorities confirmed the suspect nature of the madam’s profession by precluding such w ­ omen from raising a ­family inside the whore­house. The antagonism ­toward madams and procuresses was far stronger than that ­toward other w ­ omen who defied traditional norms of motherhood. Studies of prostitution, ­whether they ­were conducted by early sociologists or established fiction writers, assumed that such ­women abused their power over their wards, bending young ladies to comply to their w ­ ill. Thus, Mikhail Kuznetsov, one of the first medical specialists to write on prostitution in Rus­sia, could declare in 1870 that madams robbed vulnerable women of their innocence and turned them into slaves.4 Such fears culminated at the turn of the twentieth ­century in anti-­Semitic discourse that placed Jews at the center of a “white slave trade” panic.5 Believing that madams and procuresses used their connections to traffic ­women in and out of Rus­sia, commentators warned of a Jewish under­g round criminal network that stretched beyond the country’s



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borders. Typical in this regard is Alexander Kuprin’s depiction of Jewish brothel owner Anna Markovna Shoibes in his novel The Pit (Iama, 1909–15). Although slightly beyond the periodization of this study, it is worth including Kuprin’s depiction b­ ecause he adopts the language of Rus­sian realism to offer a hyperattentive depiction of brothel life, including the clandestine activities of Anna Markovna. Described as “very small in stature, but dumpy,” Anna Markovna bribes the local authorities, keeps her workers in check by beating them, and inspires general disgust even in ­those characters with ­little more than an ounce of conscience.6 Together with her second in command, Emma Edvardovna, Anna Markovna keeps the brothel workers ­under tight control by charging them exorbitant rates for lodging, clothing and food. The second part of Kuprin’s novel offers an even more condemnatory picture of a Jewish sex trafficker named Gorizont, who tricks naive girls into marrying him, only to sell them to brothel ­owners. Together with Kuprin’s depiction of Anna Markovna, The Pit demonizes individuals who profit from the sale of young, Rus­sian, Orthodox girls by drawing upon established ste­reo­types of Jews as physically repulsive and morally depraved.7 As Kuprin’s portrait demonstrates, t­here was more to the repre­sen­ta­tion of madams and procuresses than indignation at a w ­ oman’s profiting from commercial sex. Driving condemnations of Rus­sia’s “hyenas in bonnets” was a general distrust of ­women who acquired social and financial capital by facilitating nonreproductive sexual exchanges. Close examination of literary works, including ­those by Fyodor Dostoevsky and his contemporaries, reveals that prose fiction offered a fertile space to voice society’s bias against ­women who brokered transactional relations. Similarly, visual culture codified the image of the procuress as a social parasite who preyed on vulnerable ­women. Prose writers focus on the image of the predatory w ­ oman, typically beyond first youth, who dupes w ­ omen into the sex trade. By pointing to mercenary w ­ omen who broker transactional sex, literary and visual culture could shift blame, at least in part, away from male pimps and brothel clients t­oward the w ­ omen who profit from prostitution. Such depictions affirm that ­women turn to prostitution not out of their own volition but b­ ecause madams and procuresses hoodwink them into joining the sex trade. Despite the majority of portrayals demonizing madams and procuresses, ­there are a few instances of dynamic, surprisingly empathetic images in works from the period. Even Leo Tolstoy, who emphatically condemns the commercial sex trade in Resurrection (Voskresenie, 1899) offers a somewhat sympathetic depiction in Maslova’s brothel madam Karolina Albertovna Kitaeva. Called to testify at Maslova’s trial, Kitaeva speaks well of her brothel employee, praising her for a strong background in French and a solid education received in

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her youth. Like other depictions of go-­betweens in the period, Kitaeva is a Russified German; whereas Dostoevsky makes such figures into manipulative crones, Tolstoy shows that the madam is not without compassion for her ward. She not only comes to Maslova’s defense but sends money to her a­ fter the trial’s sentencing. While Tolstoy shows only a glimpse of Kitaeva in Resurrection, it proves an in­ter­est­ing case in which an author shows a less caricatured depiction of the brothel madam. The most nuanced depiction of a go-­between appears in Nikolai Leskov’s novella The Battle-­Axe (Voitel’nitsa, 1866), which offers a compelling portrait of Domna Platonovna, a w ­ idow from the provinces who moves to St. Petersburg and starts a bustling “matchmaking” enterprise for the city’s men and ­women. While she pre­sents herself as a disinterested party who is simply helping at-­risk ­women find male protectors, her dealings with friends bend t­ oward the criminal as she facilitates quid pro quo sexual agreements, sometimes with their consent and sometimes without it. Comparing Leskov’s nuanced portrayal of Domna Platonovna with images of madams and procuresses found in works of his contemporaries shows that depictions of such ­women are far from homogeneous. In ways similar to the “speciation” of sex workers found in lit­er­a­ture and art of the nineteenth ­century, the figure of the female go-­ between offered Rus­sia’s writers and artists a means to portray both the forces guiding prostitution and the w ­ omen who profited from it. The spectrum of female personae includes a range of images, from the mercenary madams who operate brothels, to the manipulative and conniving procuresses who hoodwink girls, to the matchmakers who dabble in the sex trade. United in their distrust of the commodification of ­women ­under cap­i­tal­ist exchange, the images examined in this chapter attest to an increasing awareness of ­women’s ability to use men’s libidinal desires for their financial advantage.

The Madam’s Profession in Rus­sia In ways similar to the figure of the prostitute, the female go-­between and her coterie have inspired artistic production from antiquity onward. Following western Eu­rope, Rus­sians ­imagined the procuress almost always as a w ­ oman, with very few instances of men brokering sexual exchange. One pos­si­ble explanation for the female specificity of this character is offered by Julie Cassiday and Leyla Rouhi in their study of the Rus­sian procuress. Tracing the genealogy of this figure to her origin in western Eu­ro­pean culture, Cassiday and Rouhi surmise that the scarcity of male go-­betweens is a product of sexual anxiety. Although both men and w ­ omen facilitated prostitution, Rus­sian



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artists focused on the female go-­between ­because she posed no sexual threat to prostitute-­client relations.8 Moving to nineteenth-­century depictions of the madam, one can add that b­ ecause regulation excluded men from participating in brothel owner­ship, w ­ omen came to dominate the profession both in real­ity and in artistic repre­sen­ta­tions.9 Although go-­betweens existed in the pre-­Petrine era, information on them is extremely scarce. Historians have cobbled together the few medieval sources on the topic to show that premodern Rus­sia lumped together all forms of female sexual transgression; w ­ hether a w ­ oman worked as a go-­between or engaged in adultery or prostitution, she was labeled bludnitsa (whore) both in the l­egal codex and the ecclesiastical lit­er­a­ture.10 Prior to regulation, one of the only documented cases concerning sexual indecency outlines the fate of a foreigner known as the Dresdener (Drezdensha) who ran a series of upscale vecherinki (parties) in mid-­eighteenth-­century St. Petersburg.11 ­These soirées, according to Igor Fedyukin, “had an impor­tant social and cultural meaning,” ­because they served “among the earliest sites of truly autonomous and emancipated elite sociability in the empire.”12 Privately owned and operated, the parties caught the eye of Empress Elizabeth, who promptly ordered the Dresdener and her accomplices arrested. Many of the ­women detained, including the Dresdener herself, suffered bitterly for their roles in managing St. Petersburg’s sexual subculture. With the onset of regulation in 1843, the madam took on a more legitimate social role with the legalization of her profession. Both state authorities and the medical police begrudgingly acknowledged the madam’s crucial role in keeping the system of regulation afloat. As the first line of defense against the transmission of venereal disease, the madam provided a necessary ser­vice to public health. But ­because she profited from the trade of sex, she was associated with immorality and criminal be­hav­ior. Compounding t­ hese attacks ­were ste­reo­types upheld by writers, journalists, and medical professionals, all of whom pointed to madams as the premier traffickers in h ­ uman flesh. So­ cio­log­i­cal studies on prostitution, such as that of Serafim Shashkov, use the traditional gender binary to affirm the madam’s monstrosity, for she goes against her “natu­ral” maternal instincts. The madam “acquires virgins and sells them, she buys up female bodies at prostitution markets in Hamburg and Riga ­wholesale and for cheap in Rus­sia.” “Together with the executioner and the spy,” concludes Shashkov, the madam “makes up society’s most repulsive triad.”13 ­Were madams the traffickers in ­human flesh and the abusive overlords that writers and medical authorities made them out to be? T ­ here is evidence to suggest that while many abused their power, madams also protected the ­women

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in their care from police overreach and exploitation by clients. In her study of imperial prostitution in Rus­sia, Laurie Bern­stein summarizes several cases from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in which madams physically abused and emotionally blackmailed their female employees. From forcing ­women to ser­vice fifteen to twenty men a night, to tricking them into believing they w ­ ere not allowed outside the brothel, madams could—­and did—­ terrorize their employees. But as Bern­stein takes care to note, prostitutes identified more with their madams than the male authorities who intervened in their work. In Bern­stein’s assessment, “Prostitutes might suffer economic and even physical abuse at the hands of their madams, but this treatment differed fundamentally from what they encountered at the hands of men from government agencies. Brothelkeepers could be cruel, but many had risen from the ranks and all remained social outcasts along with the prostitutes themselves. Consequently, brothelkeepers could not dehumanize the w ­ omen in their ­houses quite in the way that even well-­meaning, paternalistic bureaucrats could.”14 By placing blame solely on the madam, the medical police and the authorities could ­free themselves from their own culpability in the sex trade. Moreover, such depictions removed any possibility that a ­woman might willingly enter into sex work. In real­ity, the relationship between the brothel worker and her madam was more complicated than the essentialist arguments that w ­ ere propagated in prose fiction and medical lit­er­a­ture of the period. Considering the dif­fer­ent spheres in which she circulated, the madam’s job combined the skills of an entrepreneur with the savvy of a public relations specialist. Indeed, her success depended on managing the competing needs from the many communities she ser­viced. In essence, the madam served as the glue holding together Rus­sia’s sexual subculture, but she garnered disdain as a cap­i­tal­ist making profit out of vice. Her very existence proved that the authorities ­were implicated in the sale of sex. To compensate for their own culpability, the authorities placed a litany of rules and regulations on the madam’s trade. As Bern­stein describes it, a madam “had to be more than a mere landlady; she had to ‘restrain’ the ­women in her charge from abusing alcohol, to ‘demand’ that they remain ‘tidy’ and ‘observe’ that they followed the regulations about modestly applied makeup and personal hygiene.” But her duties extended beyond monitoring prostitutes’ be­hav­ior; the procuress was to take full responsibility of her wards, checking their bodies weekly for signs of venereal disease. The repercussions for breaking t­ hese laws w ­ ere swift and harsh, from a madam losing her business to pos­si­ble imprisonment. When the authorities doubled the number of regulations in 1861, they claimed that t­ hese new policies ­were needed to curtail the abuses of madams t­ oward their employees. Yet the requirements did l­ ittle to better the lives of Rus­sia’s sex work-



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ers. Rather, ­these excessively bureaucratic mea­sures ­were solely aimed at controlling prostitutes and the madam’s trade. Moreover, the new l­egal code ­limited the age category for madams to operate brothels; whereas the original code allowed for ­women ages thirty to sixty to run establishments, the 1861 reformation raised the age to thirty-­five and lowered the maximum age to fifty-­ five.15 Although ­women as young as thirty-­five could operate brothels, the majority of literary and artistic repre­sen­ta­tions imagine them as old, gluttonous, unattractive crones. By portraying madams in this way, Rus­sia’s cultural producers could confirm that w ­ omen who entered the commercial sex trade did so not of their own volition but through the intervention of “hyenas in bonnets” who tricked poor girls into a life of prostitution.

Bargaining on Behalf of the Dev­il: “Aunty-­Despots” as Agents of Sin Both the madam and her counterpart in the criminal world, the procuress, are ­imagined as shrewd predators. Such ­women seek out the most vulnerable victims, including the urban poor, recent ­widows, and motherless d­ aughters. While the madam remains in the confines of the brothel, supposedly “luring” ­women into depravity, the procuress appears as a figure on the prowl as she seeks fresh recruits to join in under­ground sexual l­abor. ­Whether operating in ­legal or illegal spheres, go-­betweens appear keenly aware of the vulnerabilities of other ­women who lack a maternal figure or male protector; conventional thought holds that without a husband or female guardian to protect them, w ­ omen are more easily swayed by the temptation of sin. Nikolai Shilder codifies this paradigm in his 1857 painting The Temptation (Iskushenie, see figure 5.1). Like Fedotov had before him, Shilder underscores the depravity of the procuress by contrasting her to the sickly m ­ other lying ill in the corner. The d­ aughter must choose w ­ hether to accept the madam’s offer of a gold bracelet, given on behalf of a potential lover, or remain penniless, hunched over mounds of embroidery that ­will never garner an appropriate salary to sustain herself and her sick ­mother. The procuress points suggestively to the corridor, where a barely vis­i­ble male figure eagerly awaits the girl’s decision. To heighten the painting’s moral imperative, Shilder contrasts the central figure, with her look of shock and dismay, to the go-­between’s predatory gaze. Building on the dichotomies of youth and old age, health and illness, purity and vice, the painting squeezes the three female figures into the space of a tiny apartment to underscore the suffocating pressure weighing on the young ­woman’s soul. The color scheme likewise conveys a deeper meaning to the

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Figure 5.1. ​Nikolai Shilder, Iskushenie (The Temptation), 1856. Oil on canvas, 54 × 67 cm. State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

displayed figures. Both the ­woman and her ­mother appear in white to symbolize their inner purity. By way of contrast, the go-­between appears in darker attire, wrapped in black, brown, and dark gray. The bonnet, with its delicate white lace and burst of pink lining and bow, contrasts sharply with the masculine features of her face. The incongruity of the matronly cap and the go-­ between’s waxen features, small lips, and long nose is meant to convey her disharmonious character and physical resemblance to a witch. Shilder takes care to show that the viewer alone is privy to the young w ­ oman’s plight. Neither her sick ­mother, whose face is turned away from the encounter, nor the holy icon, which is partially hidden from view, offer her protection from the go-­between. Shilder heightens the dramatic effect by making the procuress’s “temptation” a paramount decision in the young w ­ oman’s life. In this context, the golden bracelet the procuress extends symbolizes more than payment: it functions as a meta­phor for the impending shackles of brothel life. If the ­woman accepts the gift, she ­will be beholden not only to the man but to the go-­between, who ­will have power to barter and exchange the ­woman’s ­favors as she wishes. Shilder’s painting thus taps into a latent distrust of procuresses by showcasing



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them as integral in the demise of chaste w ­ omen. As the painting suggests, the go-­between functions in nineteenth-­century art and lit­er­a­ture as an agent of vice. From writings by medical professionals to prose by leading authors, such ­women appear as cultivators of sin who come to their trade a­ fter a checkered past. It is assumed that madams are themselves former prostitutes who have taken on the role of man­ag­er ­after aging out of the profession. Having passed their prime, so to speak, they now “pay back” the debt they owe by bringing more w ­ omen into prostitution. Binding this cyclic economy together was a w ­ oman’s loss of chastity, on the one hand, and contractual law, on the other. The madam was i­ magined as the central figure in the system of regulation ­because it was believed that she hoodwinked ­women into signing the necessary l­ egal documentation to obtain the infamous “yellow ticket.” Rus­sian writers agreed with their contemporaries from the medical profession and offered equally damning portrayals of madams in their prose. Vsevolod Krestovsky, for example, condemned madams for their role in seducing vulnerable young ­women and then bonding them to brothel servitude. His portrayal of prostitution in The Slums of Petersburg (Peterburgskie trushchoby, 1866) amplifies charges waged against madams by focusing on their predatory lending practices. It was common practice in the nineteenth ­century for recent arrivals to the brothel to take out loans from their madams to pay for the dresses, jewelry, and other finery required to attract customers. Krestovsky’s text reflects this phenomenon by explaining that a madam, upon taking in a new charge, requires that she sign a promissory note for money exchanged to purchase ­these items. According to Krestovsky, “If the girl refuses to sign the agreement, the shark-­auntie [akula-­tetenka] attempts to trick her through vari­ ous terms of endearment and sickly sweet promises, assuring her that every­ one does it this way. That she should not be worse off than the o ­ thers and that the loan means nothing, ­because she can pay it back in increments, over the course of several years.”16 By Krestovsky’s calculation, however, a brothel worker never manages to pay back her original debt, as the madam takes three quarters of the wages for overhead (housing and food) and the remaining quarter of the prostitute’s salary is used to pay interest on the loan. Madams compound financial exploitation with physical and emotional abuses. T ­ hese “despot-­aunties,” explains Krestovsky, are “always in their right to punish an unfavorable girl with a slap or punch.”17 Both in prose fiction and the writings of early medical professionals, madams appear as manipulative figures who deceive w ­ omen into joining the brothel. Depictions emphasize that fashion and luxury serve as two modes of coercion the madam uses to trap ­women into a life of prostitution. Krestovsky’s

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brothel madam offers a young recruit “gold earrings, an expensive dress and burnoose made of silk and velvet” as pretext to get her to sign the necessary paperwork to register for the yellow ticket.18 Maslova in Tolstoy’s Resurrection makes the decision to join the brothel when a w ­ oman working for Kitaeva promises her that “she can order any dresses she want[s]—­velvet, satin, silk, ball-­gowns exposing her shoulders and arms.”19 Picturing herself in such finery, Maslova surrenders her passport and is taken to Kitaeva’s brothel. In his 1871 study of prostitution, Kuznetsov describes the hold of fashion on the minds of girls and ­women who turn to prostitution, at times unaware of the consequences. He cites a case in which a sixteen-­year-­old girl arrived in St. Petersburg from Finland in hope of finding work as a maid, but out of sheer ignorance took refuge in a brothel where “tempted by idleness and the fancy dresses” she lived completely ignorant of the true nature of the organ­ization.20 According to Kuznetsov, such instances ­were rare, but they reminded the public of the sheer vulnerability of young girls to fall into brothel life b­ ecause of the promises madams made to offer them haute couture. Works of prose fiction, like Petr Boborykin’s novel Eve­ning Sacrifice (Zhertva vecherniaia, 1868), portray the madam as a conniving businesswoman who uses the nadzor system to justify the legality of her work. When the story’s narrator, Maria Mikhailovna, and her confidante, Lizaveta Petrovna, survey brothels in St. Petersburg to try and reform wayward ­women, they come into contact with a madam who owns a high-­end public ­house. “If you heard stories about how madams steal from their girls, push them into debt, and hold them against their ­will—­that’s all a lie, a sheer lie,” the madam tells them. In fact, she relays to the w ­ omen, thanks to her intervention, she has prevented her brothel employees from ­going into unnecessary debt: “Every­one in St. Petersburg loves glamour. Often I myself hold back my girls and refuse to allow them to spend frivolously on dresses. Besides me, no one e­ lse ­will look ­after them.”21 Both Maria Mikhailovna and Lizaveta Petrovna find the madam’s statements cynical justifications for the trade in sex. Boborykin codes the madam’s French origins as another sign of her latent debauchery. While the majority of depictions focused on the brothel as the central locus for the cultivation of vice, commentators among the medical community also warned of the widespread practice of “­family prostitution” (semeinaia prostitutsiia), in which husbands prostituted their wives and ­daughters. In his study of prostitution in Rus­sia, Shashkov cites instances across the country of ­fathers “offering” their ­daughters’ sexual ser­vices to guests and travelers. Clandestine prostitution in which girls turn tricks on the behalf of their ­fathers or husbands is, according to Shashkov, proof of w ­ omen’s subservient social position. “Many f­ athers, but even more husbands, barter their wives in order to



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obtain money and tribute” and benefit both financially and professionally from such “dark dealings.” That husbands sell their own wives in this way “offends not only one’s sense of morality,” concludes Shashkov, “but the feeling of civic duty in each honest person.”22 Although Shashkov and fellow medics discussed the role of f­athers and other male go-­betweens in the propagation of commercial sex, rarely do such figures appear in lit­er­at­ ure of visual culture of the nineteenth ­century. Historians of the period confirm the impor­tant role of men in facilitating prostitution, yet scant references exist in nineteenth-­century poetry and prose.23 One of the sole exceptions prior to Kuprin’s depiction of the male trafficker in The Pit is a satirical poem by Nikolai Nekrasov that portrays an aging dandy who sells his own d­ aughter to pay for his lifestyle. “­Daddy” (“Papasha,” 1860) depicts a St. Petersburg fop who has used sexual liaisons with ­women to acquire the finer t­ hings in life. A ­ fter his youth fades, he finds prostituting his ­daughter to be the easiest way to make ends meet. The poem’s narrator emphatically condemns the man’s be­hav­ior and points to society’s ability to turn a blind eye to such dealings as evidence of the pervasive immorality plaguing the northern capital. One reason the majority of depictions focus on female (rather than male) go-­betweens is that such ­women serve as easy scapegoats for the continuation of prostitution. A number of repre­sen­ta­tions buttress the condemnation of female go-­betweens by drawing upon established ste­reo­types linking older ­women to mischievous be­hav­ior, duplicity, and witchcraft. As both Shilder’s painting and Krestovsky’s novel show, the procuress and madam behave in ways similar to a witch by using trickery and deception to coax beautiful young ­women into d­ oing their bidding. Like Baba Yaga, the witch of Slavic folklore who holds maidens hostage in her hut ­until they perform designated chores, the go-­between keeps her female companion captive, forces her to do her w ­ ill, and abuses her for as long as she wishes.24 ­Whether in fiction or visual culture, such figures are ­imagined as barren older ­women who compensate for their lack of ­children by adopting surrogate ­daughters and forcing them to ser­ vice the city’s multitude of men. Extending the analogy further, one could interpret a man’s visit to the brothel—­a sexual rite of passage for many—as mirroring the folklore hero’s journey to Baba Yaga’s hut, which serves a similar purpose in the hero’s transformation. Both in the folkloric tradition and lived experience, the journey symbolizes male sexual maturation. Moreover, connecting older w ­ omen’s femininity with the demonic registers with what Christine Worobec outlines in her expansive study of witchcraft and possession in late imperial Rus­sia. In Worobec’s analy­sis, the “emphasis on the demonic in Rus­sian peasant culture fit nicely with popu­lar misogynistic beliefs that identified witches as misfits, sexual deviants, and, at times, the products

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of illicit love affairs.”25 Madams and procuresses fit many of t­ hese descriptors as they facilitated clandestine sex and ­were viewed as social deviants. Just as the evil witch of folklore acts as a foil to the good m ­ other, so, too, does the go-­between appear as the inversion of the ideal maternal figure in cultural production. Not only was it assumed that she pushed w ­ omen into a life of sexual transgression; she was also believed to help her female employees prevent pregnancy through contraception or abortion.26 That ­these means of terminating pregnancy ­were also associated with magic and witchcraft only further buttressed the connection between the go-­between and witches. Moreover, the number of images stressing the go-­between’s old age underscore her lack of fertility. Writers and artists imagine that she makes up for ­these deficiencies in youth and beauty by working the w ­ omen in her charge to a point of near death. Thus, not unlike works produced in western Eu­rope, Rus­ sian depictions of older w ­ omen could evoke lack of fertility as a key f­ actor in driving go-­betweens to deviant be­hav­ior.27 As the subsequent analy­sis of literary and artistic works shows, Rus­sians blended the image of the madam and procuress with that of the evil ­mother in ways that could resonate with broader anx­i­eties about older w ­ omen’s roles in prostitution.

Dangerous Intentions: The Go-­Between in Dostoevsky’s Fiction As any reader of Dostoevsky’s fiction can attest, his novels offer a cornucopia of male villainy—­from sexual predators like Svidrigailov and Stavrogin to the patricidal Smerdiakov. But one would be hard-­pressed to locate a predatory female character of equal complexity within the pantheon of male rapists, murderers, and pedophiles depicted in his fiction. In Dostoevsky’s artistic vision, w ­ omen are far likelier to be the victims of abuse than the perpetrators of it. His focus on female vulnerability is, in the assessment of Nina Pelikan Straus, a key f­ actor in his depiction of “male sensitization.” W ­ hether it be Raskolnikov’s murder of the pawnbroker and Lizaveta in Crime and Punishment (Prestuplenie i nakazanie, 1866) or Stavrogin’s rape of the prepubescent girl Matresha in “At Tikhon’s” (“U Tikhona”), the omitted chapter in Demons (Besy, 1872), some of Dostoevsky’s male characters actualize their ideas through vio­lence against ­women.28 While Straus’s analy­sis of Dostoevsky’s contentious relationship with “the ­woman question” is persuasive, the theme of exploitation can be broadened beyond male-­female relations. Dostoevsky offers biting critique of ­women who profit from the sale of female relatives and acquaintances. Both in Humiliated and Insulted (Unizhennye i oskorblennye, 1861) and



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Crime and Punishment the go-­between embodies predatory characteristics similar to t­ hose found in Dostoevsky’s male villains. While ­these female characters play small roles in the narrative, they nevertheless operate as central conduits for the spread of prostitution and are thus linked to a broader condemnation of vice and exploitation. When the go-­between appears in Dostoevsky’s novels, she typically orchestrates the sexual abuse of a female child or an impoverished young w ­ oman. It is worth noting how the topic of pedophilia evolves in Dostoevsky’s fiction before addressing the role of the go-­between. The reoccurrence of the leitmotif of the victimized female child in Dostoevsky’s fiction—­four novels written between 1861 and 1872 discuss the theme openly—­helped fuel a rumor that he himself was a child molester and that his predatory male characters ­were merely voicing the author’s own crimes.29 A number of scholars, including Susanne Fusso, have examined t­ hese accusations, and it seems unlikely that Dostoevsky was guilty of the charge. But in investigating the tendencies of pedophiles, Dostoevsky tapped into his own “literary obsession,” to quote Fusso. In her analy­sis of the dif­fer­ent points of view in each of four works—­ Humiliated and Insulted, Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, and Demons—­Fusso discusses how the theme of male sexual abuse of young girls evolved over Dostoevsky’s ­career. The subconscious feelings of desire the narrator in Humiliated and Insulted feels for the young girl Nelli move to the surface in Dostoevsky’s next novel Crime and Punishment, where the theme of sexual abuse is explic­ itly discussed through Svidrigailov’s alleged rape of a deaf-­mute fifteen-­year-­ old girl. In Fusso’s assessment, whereas Crime and Punishment pre­sents a “move ­toward greater explicitness about pedophilia and a greater sense of responsibility on the part of the man with pedophilic tendencies,” The Idiot is an unfortunate regression as Totsky never comes to terms with his crimes against Nastasia Filippovna. Fusso concludes her discussion with an analy­sis of the excised chapter “At Tikhon’s” from Demons, surmising that Stavrogin’s confession to the rape of Matresha offers a power­f ul testament to “the theme of the man taking responsibility for an improper sexual relationship with a female child.”30 Fusso provides a compelling analy­sis of the depiction of male sexual abuse of minors in Dostoevsky’s fiction. ­There is one component, however, that could be added to fully elucidate the “literary obsession” that troubled Dostoevsky for over a decade—­namely, the female go-­between plays an impor­tant role in how male characters navigate their relations with young girls. As the following analy­sis shows, Ivan Petrovich, the male protagonist and narrator of Humiliated and Insulted is able to sublimate any inappropriate feelings he might have for the young orphan Nelli by focusing on the evil debauchery

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perpetrated by the procuress, Anna Trifonovna Bubnova. By intervening on Nelli’s behalf, Ivan can channel any desire into a need to protect the young girl. As a barrier between the adult male and prepubescent girl, the go-­between ignites the protagonist’s sense of decency; when she is absent, as in the latter two novels The Idiot and The Demons, men no longer stop themselves from acting on their predatory urges. The figure of the go-­between is introduced in Humiliated and Insulted in the repugnant image of Anna Trifonovna Bubnova. B ­ ecause of the novel’s aesthetic stumbling blocks, it has been relegated to the margins of Dostoevsky scholarship, but it is in­ter­est­ing for a variety of reasons, not least of all being that it introduces the major themes Dostoevsky subsequently developed in his ­later works.31 The abuse of young girls by adult men makes its first appearance h ­ ere, but t­ here are other Dostoevskian favorites as well: a compromised heroine (Natasha) who must pick between love and ­family duty; the connection between illness (tuberculosis, epilepsy, hysterics) and psy­chol­ogy; the image of St. Petersburg as a haven for depravity; and the female intermediary who brokers innocent girls into prostitution. What the narrative lacks in realism it makes up for in melodramatic coups de théâtre, sudden revelations of unexpected parentage, and shocking confessions of the most unbridled sadism. Bubnova strikes quite the figure among the novel’s menagerie of hedonists. Involved in vari­ous “sordid business affairs,” she rents a room to young Elena, who also goes by Nelli, and her ­mother.32 At the tender age of thirteen, Nelli loses her m ­ other to tuberculosis; left penniless, she turns to begging on the street. Bubnova—­ready to take advantage of the girl’s innocence—­adopts Nelli with the aim of prostituting her to the pedophile Arkhipov. That Bubnova would have succeeded without the intervention of the story’s narrator, Ivan Petrovich, is certain. Ivan’s first impression of Bubnova is one of absolute disgust, foreshadowing subsequent revelations of her evil intentions: “A fat wench [baba] was standing on the wooden porch, dressed like a petit bourgeoisie [meshchanka] with a bonnet and green shawl. Her face was a disgusting scarlet color, with small, puffy eyes filled with blood and blazing in anger. It was clear that she was drunk despite the early hour. She was screaming at poor [Nelli].”33 When Bubnova begins beating Nelli, Ivan attempts to stop the abuse, but she succumbs to an epileptic fit and Ivan is forced to leave. Ivan eventually manages to extricate Nelli from Bubnova’s clutches with the help of his friend, the part-­time detective Masloboev. Together the two men set out to the infamous apartment where Bubnova resides and an attempted rape of Nelli is about to take place. They arrive in time to prevent her sexual assault, but when she runs out of the room where Arkhipov held her, the look



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of shock on her face and disheveled appearance convey that she did not escape unscathed. “Visibly pale with tearful eyes,” she emerges “in a white muslin dress that was completely wrinkled and torn” and “her hair, which had been done up nicely, was disheveled from a fight.” She rushes to embrace Ivan and he takes her to his home, where he unfastens her dress and puts her to bed. As Ivan gazes at “her pale ­little face” he takes notice of “her ­whole attire, at t­ hose pink ribbons that managed to remain on the dress,” concluding that he fathoms “the ­whole disgusting story.”34 Examining this par­tic­u­lar encounter, Fusso argues that while “Ivan fully understands the story of Arkhipov’s designs on Nelli,” he does not fathom “his own attraction to her.”35 One could read Ivan’s encounters with Nelli, as Fusso does, as blurring the paternalistic with the pedophilic; analyzing Nelli’s passionate embraces of Ivan and the instance where she sits on his lap can seem tinged with a touch of the erotic to modern readers. ­There is, however, another ele­ment at play that helps elucidate the interpersonal relations outlined in the narrative. By identifying Bubnova as the true threat to Nelli’s maidenhood, Ivan is able to transfer any inappropriate desire into feelings of paternal protection. Bubnova, who functions as the evil replacement for Nelli’s deceased ­mother, disgusts Ivan, prompting him to act the role of a righ­teous surrogate ­father. The exchanges described above, whereby Ivan intercedes on Nelli’s behalf, show how Dostoevsky emphasizes the heroic to downplay any potential sensual attraction. When Ivan sees Bubnova beating Nelli, he physically and verbally intervenes, shouting, “What do you think ­you’re ­doing? How dare you treat a poor orphan this way? You are ruthless! How can you tyrannize a young child?”36 By coming to the aid of the defenseless girl Ivan solidifies his role as protector of Nelli. Additionally, when he is alone with Nelli a­ fter the attempted rape, he sees the pink ribbons and white dress. T ­ hese ele­ments, symbolic of her threatened virginity, remind Ivan of the heinous intentions of Arkhipov and Bubnova. Reflecting on the inappropriate desires of fellow male characters gives Ivan a moral clarity to act in Nelli’s defense. Comparing Ivan to other male characters in Dostoevsky’s fiction shows how Humiliated and Insulted replaces male sexual desire for prepubescent girls with the need to protect them from other men. Without the intermediary, Dostoevsky’s pedophilic characters—­like Totsky in The Idiot and Stavrogin in Demons—­are freed, in a sense, to do as they wish. In both novels, the female victims are left vulnerable by their lack of parental protection and t­ here is no female intermediary to cause male predators to rethink their actions. Totsky easily stashes Nastasia Filippovna away in a cottage to defile her as he wishes ­because both her ­mother and ­father are dead. By the same token, in Demons,

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Matresha’s m ­ other is herself abusive, beating the child for her supposed misplacement of Stavrogin’s penknife. Men’s response to vio­lence, a theme begun in Humiliated and Insulted, is reversed in Demons. Whereas Bubnova’s attack of Nelli prompts Ivan to intervene, Stavrogin’s voy­eur­is­tic witnessing of Matresha’s beating sexually excites him. Of course, Stavrogin is a very dif­fer­ent character from the well-­intentioned Ivan, who has no outward intention to harm Nelli. In Dostoevsky’s portrait of male villainy, Stavrogin appears as the ultimate criminal b­ ecause his crime is his alone; he is not aided by a procuress or tempted by a w ­ oman like Bubnova to prey on Matresha. Dostoevsky perfects his indictment of the female go-­between in Crime and Punishment, which features three w ­ omen of German origin all e­ ager to abuse at-­risk girls. The first is Amaliia Ivanovna (also called Fedorovna or Liudvigovna) Lippevekhzel, who combines both the predatory characteristics of a conniving landlady and the exploitative be­hav­ior of a procuress. As the proprietress of the apartment where the Marmeladov f­amily resides, Amaliia Ivanovna witnesses the decline of the f­ amily patriarch—­the alcoholic Marmeladov—­and the ensuing destitution that befalls the f­ amily. She figures in the text as a willing participant in Sonia’s turn to prostitution, even attempting to facilitate an arrangement with one of the city’s procuresses, Daria Frantsevna. Described by the narrator as a “­woman with the most malicious intentions” who is “well-­known to the authorities,” Daria Frantsevna is e­ ager to take Sonia u ­ nder her wing. Although it is not Amaliia Ivanovna who brokers Sonia’s work as a prostitute, she facilitates it not only by bringing her to the attention of Daria Frantsevna but by threatening Katerina Ivanovna, Sonia’s stepmother, with eviction if they fail to pay for the ­family’s apartment. With no other means at their disposal, Katerina Ivanovna berates Sonia to abandon her sense of pride and take to the streets. Marmeladov confides to Raskolnikov that it is Katerina Ivanovna who pushed Sonia to prostitution. “What is t­here to preserve?” she mockingly asks Sonia. “What a trea­sure!”37 When Sonia returns ­later that eve­ning with thirty silver rubles, Katerina Ivanovna, visibly moved by her stepdaughter’s sacrifice, kneels at Sonia’s bedside and kisses her feet. In contrast to Katerina Ivanovna, who feels sincere guilt at Sonia’s descent into prostitution, Amaliia Ivanovna takes advantage of the occasion to shame the ­family and force Sonia to register for a yellow ticket. For her own part, Amaliia Ivanovna embodies a kind of banal evil that not only condones debauchery but helps facilitate it among her lodgers. Raskolnikov—­himself no stranger to poverty and vice—­enters Amaliia Ivanovna’s lodgings and is struck both by the apartment’s grimy furniture and the “most indecorous words” coming from lodgers in the other rooms. Marmeladov describes the apartment as a “regular Sodom,” with Amaliia Ivanovna renting apartments to the riff-



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raff of St. Petersburg. Her appearance in the text is marked both by an “ominous piercing yell” threatening Katerina Ivanovna “by ordering her for the hundredth time . . . ​to quit the flat.” L ­ ater, as Marmeladov lays ­dying with precious ­little time left to make peace with his f­ amily, Amaliia Ivanovna berates Katerina Ivanovna in broken Rus­sian, “Your drunk husband has a ­horse trampled. He should in the hospital!” (Vash muzh p’ian loshad’ iztoptal’. V bol’nits ego!) Such ineptitude and busy-­bodied interference in ­others’ affairs prompts the narrator to describe Amaliia Ivanovna as “a most quarrelsome and disorderly German ­woman.”38 Although certainly a predatory figure, Amaliia Ivanovna—­with her mangled Rus­sian and frenetic energy—­ultimately represents a rather ridicu­lous character. A more shadowy and nefarious procuress is Svidrigailov’s landlady, Gertruda Karlovna Resslich. Like Amaliia Ivanovna, Madam Resslich is of German birth. While the information on her is relayed through the unreliable Luzhin, Madam Resslich is believed to have prostituted her fifteen-­year-­old deaf-­mute niece to Svidrigailov. The portrayal of Madam Resslich underscores her brutality and links her moral licentiousness to her profession (moneylending) and her relations with kin (she “hated the girl, reproached her with e­ very morsel she ate, and beat her unmercifully”).39 The cruelty and sexual abuse Resslich’s niece experiences pushes her to commit suicide. The go-­betweens in Crime and Punishment offer male characters a scapegoat for their own crimes. Thus, the profligate Svidrigailov voices abhorrence at Madam Resslich and claims he was a passive participant in her evil intentions: “Madam Resslich was the one who cooked it all up for me; ­you’re bored, she said, you must find some way to amuse yourself.” Svidrigailov insinuates that he is the innocent one: “I d­ on’t do any harm, but I sit in a corner, and sometimes I ­haven’t a word to say for three days on end.” He goes on to describe her to Raskolnikov as a “tricky piece of work [shel’ma],” with her own ulterior motives. It is Madam Resslich who brokers Svidrigailov’s courtship to a child bride of sixteen. “This is what she has in mind,” explains Svidrigailov, “I ­shall get tired of my wife and leave her, and my wife ­will fall into her hands, and be put into circulation by her, among our own class, that is, and higher ones.”40 Motivated solely by greed, Madam Resslich operates as the antithesis of the ideal maternal figure. While minor characters in Dostoevsky’s fiction, procuresses nevertheless appear as critical linchpins in the cultivation of vice. Anna Trifonovna Bubnova, Amaliia Ivanovna, Daria Frantsevna, and Madam Resslich evoke moral disgust b­ ecause they prey on defenseless ­women. Instead of protecting the girls in their care, they push them into the hands of pedophiles. By having a female intermediary facilitate sexual debauchery, Dostoevsky’s male characters could

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deflect blame away from their own sexual improprieties (real or i­magined) and onto the ­women who facilitate child prostitution. Without the go-­between, as in The Idiot and Demons, a man’s sexual abuse of a child or young ­woman becomes entirely his own crime.

“The Petersburg Circumstances”: Nikolai Leskov’s The Battle-­Axe By the 1860s the court of public opinion had declared the madam guilty of the most heinous crimes imaginable. She lured, trapped, and prostituted young girls; she profited from men’s sexual weaknesses; and she was old, unattractive, and gluttonous. Given this overwhelmingly negative perception of the procuress and her trade, it is perplexing that Nikolai Leskov would turn his authorial talents to producing a compelling image of a go-­between in the heroine Domna Platonovna from The Battle-­Axe. The plot thickens when one considers Leskov’s close friendship with Vsevolod Krestovsky,41 whose The Slums of Petersburg Leskov knew and valued. But in contrast to Krestovsky, who depicted madams as greedy crones with no moral scruples, Leskov created a compelling portrait of a ­woman who manages St. Petersburg’s under­g round love affairs. Ultrapragmatic in ­matters of the heart, Domna Platonovna knows nearly every­one in St. Petersburg b­ ecause she has matched, married, or brokered relations for the majority of them. She serves all sectors of society, from rich to poor, with equal rapidity and efficiency. From the narrative’s outset, Leskov endears his heroine to the reader through her inventive use of language and sharp sense of humor. A meshchanka (pe­tite bourgeoisie) from the town of Mtsensk, Domna Platonovna is about forty-­five years of age, “broad about the waist” and with “an enormous bosom hardly imaginable.”42 Written shortly ­after Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District (Ledi Makbet Mtsenskogo uezda, 1865), this second story was to be part of a broader cycle that Leskov never completed.43 But Domna Platonovna has none of the murderous passion that besieges Katerina Lvovna, Leskov’s “Lady Macbeth.” An endless charmer with a sweetly delicate face, Domna Platonovna immediately befriends the story’s narrator, a fellow native of Mtsensk. While officially she barters lace, in real­ity her work extends to the bartering of sex. As the narrator recounts, Domna Platonovna “found husbands for w ­ omen, brides for men; arranged buyers for furniture and w ­ omen’s clothing; raised loans with capital and without; ran a kind of domestic agency and found jobs for governesses, caretakers and servants; she took confidential messages to the most famous salons and boudoirs, to t­ hose places the post w ­ ouldn’t even dream



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of ­going.”44 She tries to mask her provincial origins by adopting the language of the capital’s upper classes. The end result is a rich tapestry of personalized jargon and ­g rand circumlocutions appropriate to Domna Platonovna’s adventurous spirit. Leskov shows his mastery of skaz (the technique of relaying individualized speech patterns in narrative) through the heroine’s witticisms.45 “Domna Platonovna had a very polite way of speaking,” recounts the narrator; she would never “come out and say a ­woman is pregnant, but rather, ‘She is in a maritally in­ter­est­ing condition [ona v svoem mar’iazhnom interese].’ ”46 The aesthetic value of her speech is part of her overall artistry; w ­ hether peddling lace or providing a merchant with a mistress, Domna Platonovna takes ­g reat pride in the virtuosity of her work. By focusing on the go-­between as a connoisseur—­both of language and of love—­Leskov offers a compelling portrait of the indomitable Domna Platonovna. The first half of Leskov’s novella focuses on Domna Platonovna’s dealings with a w ­ oman of Polish descent named Lekanida, who turns to her for help ­after a failed love affair with an actor leaves her penniless and stranded in St. Petersburg. Unable to pay for a ticket back to her husband in the provinces, but morally indignant at Domna Platonovna’s proposal that she barter her sexual ­favors to pay the fare home, Lekanida is stuck between a rock and a hard place. Born and bred on bucolic ideals about love, she finds such quid pro quo arrangements contrary to her moral code. Her consternation strikes Domna Platonovna as silly: “You ­didn’t mind living in sin for months on end, but when it concerns business, when your own peace of mind is at stake, when the only chance of turning your life around is on the line, you w ­ on’t take the one step necessary to make it happen.”47 Sobbing, hand-­wringing, and prayerful entreaties that her dead ­mother intercede on her behalf do not ingratiate Lekanida to Domna Platonovna, who clothes, lodges, and feeds the Polish ­woman when she has nowhere ­else to go. When Lekanida eventually consents to allowing a one-­time tryst, Domna Platonovna is relieved. But when she learns that Lekanida has refused to open the door to the general who comes knocking, her patience is at an end. She locks Lekanida in the apartment, gives the general the key, and considers the job well done. When Domna Platonovna returns, she finds Lekanida brooding angrily. Lekanida wants nothing more to do with Domna Platonovna and departs to live as the general’s mistress. Any impulse to make Lekanida into a hapless victim, however, is checked by the w ­ oman’s selective sense of right and wrong. She admits to Domna Platonovna to acquiring ten rubles from an el­derly Greek man who knows no better than to dish out money to pretty ladies who come calling. Domna Platonovna views such be­hav­ior as immoral; hoodwinking a defenseless old

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man goes against her morality, and taking money without providing ser­vices offends her business ethics. ­There are other examples of Lekanida’s be­hav­ior that Domna Platonovna interprets as duplicitous. Upon ingratiating herself to the general’s daughter-­in-­law, Lekanida begins an affair with the w ­ oman’s husband. ­After inviting Domna Platonovna for a visit, Lekanida proceeds to snub her by suggesting she take coffee with the servants in the kitchen. “I  was an honest w ­ oman,” Lekanida shouts at Domna Platonovna, “now I am rubbish and I owe it all to you and your generosity Domna Platonovna.” Domna Platonovna sets her straight: “I may be repulsive, but I d­ on’t have affairs with other ­women’s husbands. However bad I may be, what­ever evils I’ve done, I’ve never tried to seduce both a f­ ather and his son.”48 ­After such a scandalous revelation, both the old gentleman and his son kick Lekanida out of the h ­ ouse. The second half of the novella consists of a series of anecdotes about the strange, even fantastic, misadventures that befall Domna Platonovna in St. Petersburg. K.  A. Lantz rightly surmises that ­these tales convey Domna Platonovna’s forthright nature, for “she sees what r­ eally motivates the be­hav­ior of Petersburgers—­selfishness, lust, and greed.”49 The anecdotes abruptly segue into the heroine’s demise, for when the narrator finds her some years l­ater, she has lost her former vivaciousness and visibly aged. Despite proclaiming herself above ­matters of the heart, at the end of The Battle-­Axe Domna Platonovna—­now in her late forties—­makes an about-­face and falls madly in love with a man half her age. He takes her for all she’s worth, leaving Domna Platonovna to perish in utter poverty. But she loves her rapscallion ­until the very end; her last request is that the narrator send her remaining possessions—­a trunk, a pillow, and a jar of preserves—to help her imprisoned beau. This “neat and affecting” ending, whereby Domna Platonovna is crushed by her unrequited love for a man twenty-­five years her ju­nior, reads to Hugh McLean as cliché and “dictated more by the laws of conventional morality than by t­ hose of psy­chol­ogy or art.”50 While McLean is justified in his critique that the second half of Leskov’s tale pales in comparison to the first, ­there is more to The Battle-­Axe’s denouement than meets the eye. By dismissing the second half of the novella, scholars have overlooked Leskov’s impor­tant contribution to the conceptualization of commercial sex in the northern capital. Examining t­ hese tales shows Leskov’s playful reworking of the phantasmagorical space of St. Petersburg—­a theme that links The Battle-­ Axe to Nikolai Gogol’s Petersburg tales. The anecdotes should not be dismissed, for they all point to a common theme of male knavery. Leskov, in placing Domna Platonovna at the center of each hoax, is confiding in his reader the same message conveyed in Gogol’s “Nevsky Prospect” (1835). As Gogol’s



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narrator warns, in the city of St. Petersburg, “every­thing is deception, every­ thing is a dream, every­thing is not what is seems to be!” This is especially so at dusk, when “the devil himself lights the lamps only so as to show every­ thing not as it r­ eally looks.”51 Domna Platonovna, who frequently refers to “the Petersburg circumstances” that push and pull on her profession, is equally caught in the web of deception that befalls Gogol’s characters. By placing her in the center of St. Petersburg’s mischief, Leskov humanizes Domna Platonovna’s follies; he is careful, however, to also show her contradictory nature, for she is both cruel and kind, ruthless and compassionate. She might feel moments of pity, even shame, but her pragmatism prevails over any urge to feel guilt over her actions. Careful analy­sis of t­ hese anecdotes helps elucidate Leskov’s dialogue with Gogol. Domna Platonovna is prompted to share the series of odd encounters ­because an embarrassing mishap has befallen her: a gentleman stops to ask her for directions, and while she is distracted, he steels her belongings. But in fact, as Domna Platonovna recounts, this is just one in a long line of St. Petersburg men who have pulled the wool over her eyes; she reminisces about how a driver chucked her out of a carriage a­ fter taking a sharp turn. A man dressed as an officer comes to help Domna Platonovna, and she is horrified to ­later discover that he has stolen her bundle and replaced it with his dirty underwear. Another story quickly follows: a beautiful chemise she bought on the street is revealed to be a rag upon second glance. To prove how rotten ­these “Petersburg circumstances” are, she relays a disturbing occurrence of subterfuge; while securing a good match for a merchant, the deal falls apart when it is revealed he already has a wife and three ­children. Confiding in the narrator, Domna Platonovna surmises that in St. Petersburg every­one is doomed, and she issues a frightening prophesy: “Every­body is trying to trick and deceive every­body ­else, and before long ­they’ll get the ­whole state ensnared in their trickeries!”52 Domna Platonovna sees herself as the premier victim of Satan’s trickery, and she has evidence to prove it. While on a journey with a group of tradesmen, she falls into a deep slumber and has a vision of a l­ittle man “not bigger than a rooster” who proposes to make love to her. He lets out a loud “cock-­a-­ doodle-­doo,” and Domna Platonovna subsequently turns into a drum being “scraped away” and played on by the forest animals for the entire night. She wakes up alone in the forest and realizes the men “played all night” on her. While Domna Platonovna goes on to say that she “prevailed with the devil” by keeping her nakedness hidden from the men, it is possible that she was assaulted by the tradesmen, who had been drinking heavi­ly along the journey and berating her the entire trip.53

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What to make of ­these odd tales and how to incorporate them into a holistic analy­sis with the first half of the novella has eluded scholars. The incongruity of the text is no less baffling than Domna Platonovna’s sudden passion for a twenty-­one-­year-­old. But the answer to unlocking the mystery of Voitel’nitsa is found in the dichotomized vision of St. Petersburg presented in the text. From the tale’s beginning, we are reminded that t­here are two St. Petersburgs—­the one functioning in accordance with proper morals, and the other, the “true” St. Petersburg, where Domna Platonovna works her magic by brokering clandestine affairs. As early as the first page, she warns the narrator to heed her advice; while he is blind to “the Petersburg circumstances,” she knows them intimately. But by the tale’s end, it is the narrator who knows the duality of Petersburg and Domna Platonovna who has been hoodwinked. The formidable heroine at the story’s opening falls victim to the same lovesickness she cynically dismisses in Lekanida. The t­ables have been turned: Domna Platonovna takes on the qualities of her archenemy. While this proves Leskov a master in romantic irony, t­ here is more to the cosmic retribution dealt to Domna Platonovna. One can attribute Domna Platonovna’s spiral into lovesickness as karmic retribution for a sin she committed in her youth. As she confesses to the narrator, many years e­ arlier, while at a friend’s birthday cele­bration, Domna Platonovna drank too much, passed out, and awoke in bed with her friend’s husband. “I thought it was my husband,” she confides to the narrator, “and yet it ­didn’t seem to be him, for he seemed otherworldly.”54 To her friend’s horror, she wakes up in bed with Domna Platonovna’s husband, confirming the two wives have completed a spouse swap without realizing it. The vari­ ous pitfalls and trickery that besieges Domna Platonovna come as a consequence of her unintentional adultery. Ultimately, Domna Platonovna fails to realize that like Lekanida, she, too, has slept with another ­woman’s husband. By the tale’s finale, the wheel of fortune has come full circle, for just like Lekhanida, Domna Platonovna has fallen in love with completely the wrong man. ­Whether mistaking a miscreant for an officer, a chemise for a rag, or a bachelor for a husband, Domna Platonovna seems locked in a cycle of mistaken identity. No longer the matchmaker, she is now the victim of St. Petersburg’s cruelest turn of fate: unrequited love. The depictions of madams and procuresses in nineteenth-­century fiction and art attest to a thorough distrust of ­women who broker sex. With the exception of Leskov’s portrait of Domna Platonovna, the vast majority of repre­ sen­ta­tions of madams and go-­betweens link such ­women’s presence to a broader threat besieging the urban centers of Rus­sian cities. As the demand



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for commercial sex increased with the growth of metropolises, the madam’s profession became increasingly impor­tant to sustaining the brothel trade and the ser­vices sex workers provided. Looking at the issue from an economic perspective, the repre­sen­ta­tion of madams speaks to a frustration with older ­women who managed, despite their reproductive irrelevance, to gain cultural importance in their roles as go-­betweens. Artistic and literary depictions place the go-­between at the center of the debate on prostitution. Subverting the traditional maternal ideal, the intermediary appears in the cultural imagination as evocative of the hag of folklore or her double, the evil stepmother. In ways similar to t­ hese archetypes, the go-­between figures as a conniving older ­woman who tricks helpless young maidens and meta­phor­ically feeds on the flesh of ­others. In the cultural sphere, madams garnered suspicion ­because they subverted the traditional assumptions of womanhood. The types of be­hav­iors the madam deployed—­bargaining exchange rates, negotiating contracts, allocating profits, issuing bribes, and navigating regulation—­required a cutthroat business acumen typically associated with male industrialists. Buttressing the antagonism t­ oward madams was a latent fear that ­mothers (or surrogate maternal figures) would sell their ­daughters or female wards into the sex trade. Typical in this regard is a cover image from an 1880 issue of the satirical journal Budil’nik (The Alarm Clock; see figure 5.2). The image features two older ­women seated at a ­table who are meant to symbolize an entire cast of ­mothers (and families) that survive thanks to the wages their d­ aughters earn through sexual liaisons with men. As a young w ­ oman smokes and looks nonchalantly out the win­dow, the contrast between the two generations suggests a complete shift in traditional maternal values. The raggedly dressed w ­ oman, seated with legs akimbo, neither acts nor looks the part of a devoted ­mother. While she gazes fondly at her d­ aughter, the viewer is left to won­der if it is the economic security of having such a wage earner that warms her heart, or a sense of motherly devotion. Images like this one synthesize many of the anx­i­eties pre­sent in the late imperial period concerning new modes of financial and sexual commerce founded on w ­ omen’s use of transactional sex for upward mobility. That ­mothers might willingly profit from their ­daughters’ profits in the sex trade heightened fears that the traditional f­ amily unit was u ­ nder threat from the economic potential of ­women’s sexual ­labor.

Figure 5.2.  These Women Don’t Despair, illustration from Budil’nik (The Alarm Clock), 1880. Slavic, East Eu­ro­pean, and Eurasian Collection, University of Illinois Urbana-­Champaign. God help us, how hard it is to live ­these days . . . ­We’re making do. My ­daughter is my only hope . . . ​She has grown up, thank God, and done well. Thanks to her we ­will be all right!

Ch a p ter 6

Commodifying Domestic Bliss The Kept ­Woman in Rus­sian Fiction

More than a mistress, but less than a wife, the kept ­woman (soderzhanka) operated on the margins of Rus­sian society. In theory, she offered a man a second home—­one that was preferable to the demands of his official duties, including the needs of a wife and c­ hildren, assuming he had them. Yet the pressure to provide financially for an additional w ­ oman’s needs could deprive a man’s l­egal progeny of their rightful inheritance. As the Rus­sian etymology of soderzhanka suggests, a kept ­woman required money. Evolving from the phrase nakhodit’sia na soderzhanii—­literally, to live on another’s support—­the term soderzhanka also connotes “to hold” (derzhat’) and “to keep in place.”1 Commentators of the period built on t­ hese associations by stressing that kept w ­ omen ­were tethered to a f­amily structure that paralleled the monogamous relationship of marriage but lacked the ­legal status of matrimony. For this reason, Mikhail Kuznetsov eagerly defended the morality of kept ­women, writing in his study of prostitution in Rus­sia that soderzhanki “appear as wonderful, capable helpers of men,” who despite society’s distain of them, “are not devoid of feelings of maternal devotion.”2 By stressing the kept ­woman’s adherence to traditional codes of femininity, Kuznetsov argued that such figures deserve compassion based on the sacrifices they make for ­children and lovers. ­Because Rus­sia’s kept w ­ omen fell neither u ­ nder the responsibility of the state (as registered prostitutes did), nor ­under paternal patronage (as most 167

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unmarried w ­ omen did), they could acquire more autonomy to navigate relations with lovers. A kept ­woman, for instance, could achieve a certain amount of sexual and moral legitimacy by remaining the longtime lover of one man. She therefore confused bound­aries, as she could be mistaken just as easily for a wife as a man’s mistress. Literary works, like Alexander Pushkin’s “The Station Master” (“Stantsionnyi smotritel’,” 1831) explore the duality of such female figures, whose social status defy easy categorization. Pushkin’s heroine Dunia arrives at her f­ather’s gravesite with her ­children in tow; but the reader never knows if she is the lawful wife of the man who swept her away from the countryside to the capital of St. Petersburg, or if she remains his soderzhanka. As Pushkin’s depiction implies, the figure of the kept ­woman appealed to Rus­sian writers ­because she embodied ambiguity. Literary depictions showed that she just as easily moved up the social ladder as she descended it. What changed the equation for any kept ­woman, as authors keenly noted, was pregnancy. Unlike the demimondaine and the “camellia” (kameliia), who functioned primarily outside the patrilineal contours of reproduction, the kept w ­ oman operated within them. Writers, particularly Leo Tolstoy, found that a kept ­woman’s drive for sexual fulfillment could conflict, if not subsume, her maternal instincts. In Anna Karenina, the titular heroine’s passion for her lover Vronsky mutates the bonds between herself and her c­ hildren. But whereas Tolstoy saw “keptness” as a force that destroyed families, other writers challenged this view by offering glimpses of love affairs in which the relationship between partners was healthier than in most marriages. Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaia, arguably the most impor­tant ­woman writer of her generation, explored how kept w ­ omen from the lower classes navigated their ascendance from the peasant hut to the gentry manor while keeping room in their hearts for both lover and child. For Tolstoy, Khvoshchinskaia, and numerous other writers, the fluidity of the kept w ­ oman’s status offered a gateway to discuss broader issues of social concern. In addition to questions of inheritance and legitimacy, the kept ­woman evoked anx­ie­ ties about the f­ uture of marriage and the Rus­sian ­family. Members of the nobility, landowners, and merchants all had long affairs with soderzhanki that threatened e­ ither to prevent a man’s chances at securing a good spouse or, if he was already married, promised to unravel a nuptial ­union. The conundrum was no less dire when it came to young ­women, whose chastity became increasingly difficult to protect as the relations between men and women changed with the times and allowed for more open explorations of extramarital love. While social commentators found an easy culprit in the West to blame for the proliferation of sexually emancipated kameliia and demimondaines, soder-

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zhanki ­were a homegrown phenomenon. Fiction amplified t­ hese fears by asking readers to consider the state of marriage in con­temporary Rus­sia. Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s What Is to Be Done? proposed a new model of marriage to replace the archaic traditions of domination and submission that allowed—­ and even encouraged—­adultery. As a manifesto dedicated to exploring how to destabilize the sexual and social hierarchy, Chernyshevsky’s novel galvanized radicals to model their relations ­after the egalitarian ideals of his characters. But the real­ity for average Rus­sians was far removed from Vera Pavlovna’s utopian sewing collective. Given that divorce was nearly impossible to obtain ­because of prohibitions enacted by both church and state, unhappily married ­couples had few options but to remain lawfully wed while pursuing extramarital love.3 Lit­er­a­ture prompted the public to consider if the institution of marriage could survive in its current state. Radicals put the issue more bluntly, asking if marriage was necessary at all. ­These burning questions excited Rus­sian writers to take the kept w ­ oman’s marginal status as a central point of discussion in their fiction. She exposed society’s double standards ­because her male counterpart bore l­ittle, if any, of the stigma associated with an extramarital affair. This inequity likened her to other marginal ­women, like the prostitute, the dowerless bride, and the demimondaine. But unlike other “fallen ­women,” the soderzhanka came closest to the duties of wife and ­mother. Her devotion to and intimacy with one man could prove that while marriage was the ideal, in light of obstacles to marrying between classes or obtaining divorce, true love could exist outside the sacrament of matrimony. By the same token, however, the leverage a kept ­woman had over her lover posed a formidable threat to the social and familial hierarchy. Visual culture responded to the anx­i­eties produced in extramarital relations by highlighting the mercenary interests of calculating mistresses. Portrayed as gold-­ digging wenches with an eye only for fashion and luxury, ­these kept ­women extracted money from their love-­struck paramours without so much as batting an eye. Aleksander Lebedev played with t­hese connotations in his a­ lbum Fallen but Charming Creatures (Pogibshie, no milye sozdaniia, 1862–63 ) by showing how men could spend fortunes on a kept ­woman (see figure 6.1). As the image suggests, a soderzhanka understands hierarchies of power ­because she can as easily benefit as suffer from them. By evoking a competition with the man’s l­egal spouse, the young mistress manages to weasel more cash from her benefactor. Femmes fatales, gold-­digging mistresses, double-­crossing adulteresses appeared with increasing frequency in caricature printed in the day’s leading satirical journals. But the satirist’s pen could cut both ways, as the front-­page image of an 1878 issue of the journal Strekoza (The Dragonfly) demonstrates (see figure 6.2).

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Figure 6.1. ​Aleksandr Lebedev, illustration from Pogibshie, no milye sozdaniia (Fallen but Charming Creatures), 1862–63. National Library of Rus­sia, St. Petersburg. He: But my dear, it’s been less than a month since I bought you a carriage. She: But your wife has an open carriage. Do you r­ eally want me to feel ashamed when I see her?

While the ­woman suggests that marriage is the natu­ral conclusion of their affair, the man’s rejoinder suggests that delo liubvi (the business of love—­i.e., sexual gratification) and married life are antithetical to one another. For all the image’s humorous under­pinnings, it suggests a serious conflict raised in the post-­Emancipation period regarding the contours of extramarital love and the pursuit of plea­sure. Rus­sia’s leading writers, including Fyodor Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, would take up the prob­lem distilled in this image—­namely, how, when, and whom men and ­women should marry—by focusing on the kept ­woman’s status as both a victim and a transgressor of social norms.

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Figure 6.2. ​Illustration from Strekoza (The Dragonfly), 1878. Slavic, East Eu­ro­pean, and Eurasian Collection, University of Illinois Urbana-­Champaign. She: You say that you love me, but love should result in a wedding. Why d ­ on’t you talk about getting married? He: That’s exactly why I ­don’t want to get married, in order to continue the m ­ atters of love. And why would you want to love a married man anyway?

No single chapter could encompass the number of Rus­sian characters who fall ­under the fluid category of “kept w ­ oman.” They are found in works not only by the authors mentioned above but in numerous pieces of poetry and prose by writers of dif­fer­ent schools, generations, and traditions. Some kept ­women, like Bela from Mikhail Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time, (Geroi nashego

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vremeni, 1840), highlight the overlap between Rus­sia’s imperial expansion and the urge to “conquer” native w ­ omen as a crucial part of colonialization.4 By the 1860s, emboldened by social reform and calls for emancipation, writers would turn to kept ­women among the lower classes to expose the commonplace occurrence of landowners keeping longtime mistresses among their peasants. Ivan Turgenev, in ­Fathers and ­Children (Ottsy i deti, 1862), would show such a ­union between the baron Nikolai Kirsanov and Fenechka, the ­house­keeper’s ­daughter who bears his child. In novels like Turgenev’s, marriage is impeded by social in­equality, further indicating the need to reform marriage within late imperial society. Other Rus­sian writers addressed the topic of kept w ­ omen to play with the categorizations of who or what could be exchanged in the pursuit of sexual gratification both within and outside the confines of marriage. In Anton Chekhov’s “Living Chattel” (“Zhivoi tovar,” 1882), an estranged husband becomes “kept” by his wife’s lover, who pays a fortune to keep him out of the picture. While t­ hese works deserve attention ­because they overlap with the cultural elite’s understanding of sexual mores, as fiction they provide snapshots of kept ­women. The issues touched upon in ­these works are more fully developed in the lit­er­at­ ure of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Khvoshchinskaia. The following analy­sis therefore focuses on t­ hese writers as exemplary for the imperial era. The kept ­woman’s narrative appealed to Rus­sian authors ­because through her plot they could explore questions of sexual desire and fidelity while reflecting on the status of female emancipation more broadly. Generally speaking, the kept ­woman’s story developed in one of two ways. In the first iteration, most definitively represented in the prose of Dostoevsky, the kept ­woman reflects back to her social milieu the impact of commodification on the h ­ uman psyche. ­Because Dostoevsky’s kept female characters are touched by the mark of commodification, they understand how to commodify o ­ thers; this self-­awareness allows his kept ­women to be just as capable of empathy as they are of cruelty. The second narrative arch, developed by Tolstoy and Khvoshchinskaia, describes a kept ­woman’s internal conflicts between her duties as lover and ­mother. Despite the dif­fer­ent approaches to the kept ­woman’s narrative, the examples herein are united by their focus on how such female figures test the social order by constituting a domestic sphere outside the ­legal bonds of marriage.

Kept ­Women in Dostoevsky’s Fiction The kept w ­ oman translated well into Dostoevsky’s artistic vision ­because her tenuous status and victimhood could be mobilized to test the moral and so-

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cial order in dramatic, provocative ways. Dostoevsky’s l­ater novels showcase his penchant for combining the sensational with the biblical, as demonstrated in his depiction of the kept ­women Nastasia Filippovna in The Idiot and Grushenka in The ­Brothers Karamazov. ­These two heroines emerged out of Dostoevsky’s attempts to move the kept ­woman’s plot beyond the realm of cliché. Much of his success in this regard can be attributed to the dynamism of Nastasia Filippovna and Grushenka, who push back against the gossipy and hypocritical socie­ties that label them “fallen” despite their victimization at the hands of pedophiles and predatory men. But what makes ­these heroines more complex than Dostoevsky’s e­ arlier depictions of prostitution is that both Nastasia Filippovna and Grushenka challenge the mercantile foundation driving relations between the genders. Aware of their status as commodities to be exchanged among men, both w ­ omen strug­gle between seeking revenge for past abuses and offering forgiveness to t­hose who commodified them. Ultimately Dostoevsky encapsulates this conflict in both heroines’ dialogue with the salvation economy outlined in the New Testament. Despite the iconoclastic moments punctuating both heroines’ narratives, Dostoevsky’s depictions bring up troubling questions regarding the fate of transgressive female characters in his fiction. Grushenka, while initially driven by revenge, ultimately succumbs to melodramatic swooning, telling Dmitry that she “­will be his slave.” Her subservience borders on the fanatical: “Beat me, punish me, do what you w ­ ill with me,” she tells Dmitry, continuing in the same vein at his trial, “I’m yours, I’ll follow you forever.”5 Nastasia Filippovna’s forcefulness wanes as her death drive takes over; by the end of the novel she is a corpse bride, surrounded by the favorite simulacra of fetishized femininity: diamonds, lace, flowers, and a wedding dress. While one can point to t­ hese texts and read Dostoevsky, as Barbara Heldt does, as the “inheritor of the melodramatic pornographic” tradition that “combined terror with infatuation,” to dismiss the novels outright robs us of the chance to explore their rich textual and symbolic coding.6 While certainly their depictions are graced with an amount of authorial misogyny, Nastasia Filippovna and Grushenka also call into question power structures as they attempt to dismantle them. Reading ­these two iterations of the kept w ­ oman shows how Dostoevsky recognized the economy of exchange inherent in the sold ­woman’s narrative. Astute readers of The Idiot have focused on Nastasia Filippovna to explicate Dostoevsky’s interpretation of the fallen w ­ oman motif. In her study of Nastasia Filippovna, Olga Matich persuasively outlines how Nastasia Filippovna is Dostoevsky’s reworking of the victimized female in its vari­ous forms—­ biblical parable (Mary Magdalene), Gothic novel (persecuted female victim), magical tale (rusalka), literary realism (Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary), and

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the socioeconomic literary manifesto of the 1860s (Chernyshevsky’s Chto delat’?).7 Other scholars, including Nina Pelikan Straus and Robin Feuer Miller, have read Nastasia Filippovna side by side with Prince Myshkin to explore Dostoevsky’s par­tic­u­lar vision of sainthood.8 The novel’s final tableau, in which Rogozhin and Myshkin embrace at the feet of Nastasia Filippovna’s dead body, places the novel’s moral imperative—­namely, the possibility of redemption—­ into question, for the prince fails in his attempts to save the fallen w ­ oman. Murdered by Rogozhin, Nastasia Filippovna’s decaying body rests between the men, or rather brings the two together, in what Straus has described as a “pieta with the genders reversed.”9 ­Whether one reads Nastasia Filippovna’s displayed body as an inverted icon, like Tatiana Kasatkina does, or as a testament to the heroine’s “unfinalizability” (to use Mikhail Bakhtin’s term), as in Sarah Young’s interpretation, her death expels the vengeful femme fatale from the narrative.10 But her death does not regenerate the community, nor does it bring together rightful lovers; in fact, her murder sets into motion a series of similar, albeit meta­phorical, deaths. Prince Myshkin reverts back to his former illness, and Rogozhin is sentenced to penal servitude, but other characters fare poorly as well—­Aglaia elopes with a Pole who turns out to be a swindler, and Adelaida’s marriage to Prince Shch. seems chilly, at best. And according to the narrator, the motley crew that orbited Nastasia Filippovna—­Lebedev, Keller, Gania, and Petitsyn—­remain unchanged ­after her murder, which suggests a static, melancholic f­ uture for all four of them. Nastasia Filippovna’s death should give us pause not only ­because it silences Dostoevsky’s most-­enigmatic heroine but ­because her corpse symbolically links to Christ’s dead, decaying body as visualized in Hans Holbein’s The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb. The significance of this painting, which is discussed at vari­ous points in the text, has been studied in depth by scholars.11 Less understood, though, is how Nastasia Filippovna’s strug­gle for redemption meta­phor­ically links her to the same existential question posed in Holbein’s painting: When faced with Christ’s decaying body in the tomb, how can one believe in the Resurrection? Nastasia Filippovna’s reticence to accept Myshkin’s offer of marriage proves that she, too, distrusts the promise of redemption. A deeper examination of Nastasia Filippovna’s reticence to marry shows that her skepticism is not, as some have argued, a testament to her sadomasochism, but a sincere distrust of the mercantile language underpinning the Christian theology of redemption.12 Dostoevsky’s novels, as Susan McReynolds notes, are full of metaphysical questions regarding “the spiritual exchange logic” in Chris­tian­ity, whereby Christ’s Crucifixion saves, or “buys back,” humanity from eternal damnation. As McReynolds notes, the economic meta­phor in Dostoevsky’s fiction, particularly

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in The ­Brothers Karamazov, calls into question redemption as “an item for sale, the object of an exchange transacted between God and his adult customers.”13 Whereas The ­Brothers Karamazov iterates this strug­gle through redemption “paid for” by the suffering of innocent c­ hildren, in The Idiot the conflict hinges on a ­woman’s sins being exculpated through marriage. In The Idiot, the vari­ous male characters bid for Nastasia Filippovna; ­there are three types of transaction represented in the text through three male protagonists: Totsky, who wants to “buy off ” his former victim; Rogozhin, who hopes to possess her by outbidding other suitors; and Myshkin, who aims to redeem the fallen w ­ oman by “buying back” her sins through marriage. While Myshkin pre­sents Nastasia Filippovna with a Christian love modeled on pity and compassion, ­because she has been commodified from her youth she cannot separate the economic valence of redemption from its language of commodity exchange. In this sense she rejects marriage ­because she finds the spiritual exchange economy of Chris­tian­ity just another form of commercial transaction. Explicating the economic and religious connotations of redemption sheds light not only on Dostoevsky’s characterization of Nastasia Filippovna but that of Grushenka as well. The original Latin meaning of redemption, “to buy back,” is likewise pre­sent in the Rus­sian iskuplenie (redemption, atonement). To redeem, in this sense, meant to f­ ree someone from slavery, debt, or imprisonment. Christian theology melded the mercantile with the spiritual by codifying the Crucifixion as the ultimate sacrifice through which Christ paid for the sins of humanity.14 For the commodified ­woman, however, the economy of spiritual exchange echoes the relations between client and prostitute. The question thus becomes, what exactly is the difference between paying a w ­ oman for sex and paying for her salvation? Instead of escaping the bonds of sexual ser­vice, redemption as an economic transaction reinforces a w ­ oman’s commodity value. Dostoevsky illuminates this theme in The Idiot by contrasting Myshkin’s relations with the Swiss girl Marie, whom he is able to redeem, with ­those he has with Nastasia Filippovna, who ultimately rejects his offer of marriage. In his first visit to the Epanchin h ­ ouse­hold, Myshkin relays a story from his time in Switzerland when he befriended a peasant girl named Marie. ­After being seduced and abandoned by a traveling French salesman, Marie becomes a social outcast and is berated not only by the community but by the town’s ­children. Unlike the many who belittle and torture Marie, Myshkin shows her kindness, even selling the only t­ hing of value he possesses—­a diamond pin—­ and giving Marie the eight rubles. The monetary gift introduces the spiritual exchange economy into Myshkin’s relations with Marie and initiates her spiritual regeneration. More impor­tant, though, is that the community of ­children

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undergo a profound change ­after witnessing Myshkin’s kindness. Whereas before they would chase, throw mud, and berate Marie, through their discussions with Myshkin the ­children learn to treat her with compassion. They become her biggest supporters, lavishing her with treats and kindness. The overwhelming emotion conveyed in ­these exchanges with Marie is pity: out of pity Myshkin sells his diamond pin, and out of pity the ­children defend Marie. “Marie forgot her deep woe,” explains Myshkin, “­because she received [the ­children’s] forgiveness.”15 When he attempts to save Nastasia Filippovna, Myshkin wrongfully assumes that the same model of pity and forgiveness ­will regenerate her and the community. But the men and w ­ omen in St.  Petersburg are not Swiss ­children; ­there is no spiritual giving economy as far as Nastasia Filippovna is concerned. While she initially entertains the idea of cultivating a f­ amily of her own, Dostoevsky’s heroine chooses vengeance as repayment for the wrongs done to her. While preventing Totsky’s successful remarriage is her crowning achievement, no less impressive are her retributions against t­ hose who offend or debase her. She unmasks Gania’s mercenary intentions, exposes General Epachin’s lustful intentions, whips an officer across the face when he insults her, and undermines Aglaia’s engagement to the prince. Despite Nastasia Filippovna’s effort to balance past retributions with ample reprisals, the theological under­pinnings of the novel suggest that a drive for repayment outside of God’s mercantile model of redemption ultimately leads to Nastasia Filippovna’s death, not her reconciliation with o ­ thers. Whereas Nastasia Filippovna rejects the economy of spiritual exchange, Grushenka embraces it. Like Nastasia Filippovna, Grushenka has weathered men’s sexual abuses and seeks revenge for the crimes committed against her. But ­because Grushenka’s relationship to money is more pragmatic than Nastasia Filippovna’s, she finds no prob­lem in the mercantile language of redemption. In the four years since the merchant Samsonov took Grushenka as his kept ­woman, she learns the value of economic ingenuity by trading, saving, and eventually amassing a small fortune. With “a good head for business,” and “bold and determined,” Grushenka embarks on a venture investing in bad debts and then selling them for ten times the value. This “wench with brains [baba ne promakh],” as Samsonov calls her, acquires a reputation for successful speculation, so much so that the community thinks her “no better than a Jewess.”16 Grushenka’s financial acumen allows her to see spiritual redemption as an inherently transactional endeavor, as evidenced in her parable about the onion. When she realizes that her flirtatious baiting of Alesha comes directly a­ fter Zosima’s death, she jumps off his lap, horrified that she attempted to seduce

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the poor monk. While Alesha views Grushenka’s compassion as a mark of her inner goodness, she dodges his praise by likening herself to the sinful ­woman from a folktale she heard in her youth. To explain her point, she narrates the story of a miserly w ­ oman who upon death is sentenced to the fiery pits of hell. Her guardian angel takes pity and intercedes on her behalf; the w ­ oman deserves God’s pity, the angel argues, ­because she showed goodwill to a beggar ­woman by giving her an onion. God strikes a deal: the angel can lower an onion and pull the ­woman out of hell; if he succeeds, she can join them in paradise; if not, her fate is sealed. The angel begins his task, but as he lifts the ­woman, other sinners grasp onto her legs and try to escape as well. The ­woman’s true wickedness shines through and she begins kicking ­those who would escape with her. The onion breaks and the ­woman falls back into hell. “I am that wicked ­woman,” Grushenka tells Alesha, “I’ve done nothing but give one onion all my life.”17 The theological discourse in The ­Brothers Karamazov, especially as voiced through Zosima’s teachings, indicates that one act of kindness—­even Grushenka’s gift of an onion—is enough to forgive a sinner in the eyes of God. The irrational nature of the parable underscores a significant difference between economic transaction and salvation. The logic of salvation—­namely, that one minor good deed can save an evil sinner from the pits of hell—­does not align with the laws of market exchange and the exact quantification of financial transactions. By having Grushenka deliver the parable, Dostoevsky shows how she, more than any of the other characters in the novel, feels the distinct differences between the realm of commerce and that of salvation. Comparing Grushenka with Nastasia Filippovna illuminates how Dostoevsky envisioned two types of female responses to commodification. The origins of both ­women’s existential crises rests in their knowledge that they are circulated among men who buy and sell them. Both ­women likewise share a common understanding that not only redemption but vengeance operate on a mercantile logic: one must pay back her abusers to balance the score. Thus, Grushenka confides to Alesha that over the past five years she fantasized about getting even with the Pole who abandoned her, exclaiming several times that she “­will pay him back [ia emu otplachu].”18 Nastasia Filippovna exacts revenge not by taking money but by refusing it. While she dangles the possibility of calm retreat in front of Totsky and initially acquiesces to his offer of seventy-­ five thousand rubles as reparations for his crimes, by the end of her birthday cele­bration she makes it clear that she w ­ ill take no part in his bartering. While both heroines work ­toward reprisal, it is ultimately Nastasia Filippovna who finds the social system and religious dogma woefully unable to recompense her for the suffering she’s experienced. Unlike Marie, who can take Myshkin’s

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money as a gateway to redemption, Nastasia Filippovna sees monetary exchange as tied to men like Totsky, Gania, and Rogozhin. By way of contrast, Grushenka speaks the language of commerce and thus senses the inner logic of the spiritual exchange economy. Although the heroines share similar modi operandi, the difference in their social background plays an impor­tant role in how they ultimately respond to commodification. ­Because Nastasia Filippovna operates among high society she feels the sting of social degradation quite strongly; suffering from wounded pride, she rejects Myshkin’s interventions and cannot embrace the possibility of compassion to heal herself or o ­ thers. Grushenka is not the lover of an aristocrat but of the merchant Samsonov, who helps her acquire capital and better her social standing. While Grushenka might strug­gle at times to overcome her ego, she is ultimately capable of receiving and giving compassion to Alesha, Dmitry, and herself. By locating the question of redemption within the spiritual exchange logic, Dostoevsky uncovers the major strug­gle for commodified w ­ omen within Chris­tian­ity. Both heroines find a savior figure ready to be Christ to their Mary Magdalene. Nastasia Filippovna admits that she dreamed of someone like Myshkin: “I kept imagining someone like you, kind, honest, good, and silly as you are, who would suddenly come and say, ‘­You’re not guilty [Vy ne vinovaty].’ ”19 Grushenka admits something quite similar, exclaiming to Alesha that he “is the first, the only one who has pitied” her. She falls on her knees, declaring, “I’ve been waiting all my life for someone like you, I knew that someone like you would come and forgive me [znala, chto kto-to takoi pridet i menia prostit].”20 The parallel between the two heroines is key ­because it suggests a difference in how they view redemption: Grushenka seeks forgiveness, and Nastasia Filippovna an acquittal, a verdict that she is not to blame. The Christian doctrine informing Dostoevsky’s fiction underscores that we are all guilty before one another; recognizing original sin is the first step in moral salvation. In this context, Dostoevsky’s portrayal of Nastasia Filippovna suggests that when an abused ­woman seeks vengeance rather than redemption, she falls ­under the pressures of unrequited suffering rather than finding alleviation in the moral economy. Grushenka, by contrast, finds a means to escape the cycle of abuse and oppression by offering Dmitry a selfless love. This willingness to sacrifice her own fate for Dmitry opens her up to the Christian princi­ple of exchange, whereby her sins are redeemed. This kind of “redemptive currency,” to use McReynolds’s phrase, is most clearly articulated in Zosima’s teachings and f­ rees Grushenka of her desire for vengeance. As Zosima explains to a peasant ­woman who visits him, “with love every­thing is bought, every­thing is saved [liubov’iu vse pokupaetsia, vse spasaetsia].”21 Accept-

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ing the mercantile foundation of Christ’s redemption allows Grushenka to see herself as an equal participant in the salvation economy. Dostoevsky introduced the psychological complexity of the kept ­woman’s narrative into Rus­sian lit­er­a­ture by focusing on how she strug­gled to reclaim her sense of humanity. While he revealed the conflicting motivations of both Nastasia Filippovna and Grushenka, Dostoevsky avoided the greatest paradox of all: how the kept w ­ oman could si­mul­ta­neously embody the role of mistress and m ­ other. This choice is not coincidental; Dostoevsky located the victimized female in the strug­gle between the urge for revenge and the possibility of forgiveness and redemption. He nullified the question of maternity, focusing instead on the kept w ­ oman’s paradoxical position within the social order. Other writers, however, encapsulated the kept w ­ oman’s strug­gle as inherently linked to her role as a ­mother. In Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, the kept ­woman’s narrative leads to disastrous calamity when a ­mother must choose between child and lover.

Questioning a ­Mother’s Devotion: Tolstoy and the Maternal Myth in Rus­sian Culture In Anna Karenina, Tolstoy directly addresses the “marriage crisis” plaguing late imperial Rus­sian society.22 In the author’s telling, Anna’s decision to pursue her own self-­fulfillment with Vronsky puts her at odds with the duties of motherhood; the inability to find meaning in her life as Vronsky’s kept w ­ oman pushes her into a solipsistic stupor that crescendos with her suicide. While she begins the novel as a dutiful m ­ other who cherishes her son Serezha, over the course of the narrative she pulls away not only from him but from her ­daughter, Annie. When considering Anna’s maternal dilemma in the context of late-­ nineteenth-­century discourse on the ­family, her decline and suicide signify a broader moral degradation among Rus­sia’s cultural elite. Anna not only represents the antithesis of the ideal ­mother who puts herself before her ­children; she also appears as an omen of looming disaster when a w ­ oman misplaces her maternal drive with sexual fulfillment. A brief explication of the maternal my­thol­ogy in Rus­sian culture helps situate Tolstoy’s depiction of motherhood and the magnitude of Anna’s transgression. The maternal figure has occupied a place of prominence, even reverence, in Rus­sian culture from the ­Middle Ages to the pre­sent.23 Traditionally viewed as a simulacrum for Mary, the ­Mother of God (Bogoroditsa), the maternal figure offered unconditional love for her ­family; through meekness,

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kindness, and self-­abnegation, she modeled the be­hav­ior and attitude expected of all ­women. While a wife could hold some authority over domestic ­matters, particularly the upbringing of c­ hildren, a married w ­ oman remained subordinate to her husband ­under the law, which played, in the assessment of Barbara Alpern Engel, “a key role in maintaining social and po­liti­cal order, ­because the f­ amily stability so essential to that order depended on husbands’ authority over their wives.”24 Literary works played an impor­tant role in codifying the image of the ideal ­mother. In Andrew Wachtel’s assessment, the ­mother depicted in Tolstoy’s Childhood (Detstvo, 1852) functioned as the model for subsequent depictions of the selfless, placating, and devout maternal figure in depictions of gentry life.25 Child-­rearing manuals played no less impor­ tant a role in educating m ­ others to adhere to a model of maternity founded predominantly on sacrifice.26 This “cult of the perfect ­mother,” explains Jenny Kaminer, “flourished among the gentry” and “encouraged w ­ omen to adhere to the saintly, self-­denying ideal pop­u­lar­ized by autobiographical and literary works.”27 While activists of the 1860s initially championed ­women’s role in the domestic sphere as integral to the new civic order, discussions of the f­ amily structure became progressively more radical ­toward the end of the ­century. The intelligent­sia weathered the changes to ­women’s lives as best it could, acquiescing to some demands while holding strongly to the model of womanhood founded on maternal devotion. But the more w ­ omen questioned the gender hierarchy that kept them wedded to husbands they no longer loved, beholden to endless years of child-­rearing and caregiving, and forbidden to move freely without a male guardian’s approval, the less ­viable the model of maternal devotion seemed. Social commentators pondered if the f­amily unit could survive when ­mothers placed themselves before their c­ hildren. Fiction explored this question specifically by highlighting the disastrous repercussions when a ­woman abandoned her role as m ­ other to pursue her own self-­fulfillment in extramarital love. No longer willing to put her offspring before herself, the derelict ­mother flirted with sexual and financial liberation in ways that threatened to undo the f­amily and bring insurmountable damage to the nation. In Anna Karenina, Tolstoy encapsulated the crisis facing Rus­sian families by highlighting the incompatibility of a ­woman’s sexual drive with her role as m ­ other.

­ other or Mistress: Conflicting Desires M in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina Anna Karenina traditionally has been read as Tolstoy’s response to the challenges facing the Rus­sian f­ amily and to the image of the promiscuous ­woman

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depicted in Eu­ro­pean lit­er­a­ture, and particularly Gustave Flaubert’s Madam Bovary.28 In Anna Karenina Tolstoy pre­sents extramarital affairs as a mainstay of gentry life, as commonplace as marriage itself, if not an integral component in its constitution. But Anna’s relations with Vronsky are remarkably dif­ fer­ent from other illicit liaisons profiled in the novel. The most obvious contrast rests in Anna’s categorical refusal to play by the rules of innuendo and secrecy practiced by fellow members of the elite. Unlike her friend and confidant Princess Betsy Tverskaia whose long-­term affair with Tushkevich is an open secret, Anna demands that her love be made public—if not outwardly condoned, then at least tolerated. As Edwina Cruise puts it, what angers the “power­ful arbiters of respectability is not what Anna does, but how she does it.”29 That Anna demands that she be seen not as a kept w ­ oman but as Vronsky’s devoted partner upends the entire social order. Far from accepting such transgressive be­hav­ior as appropriate for the elite, Anna’s friends and foes work to expel her from the ranks of polite society as a wanton w ­ oman. Tolstoy thus highlights the rampant hy­poc­risy of the men and ­women who quickly turn against Anna once she moves from the realm of wife to mistress, from m ­ other to lover.30 But Tolstoy complicates Anna’s character by making her both a victim of unbridled passion and a violator of the sacred codex of motherhood. The following analy­sis of the novel expands on existing literary criticism of Anna Karenina to show how Tolstoy reinterprets the kept ­woman’s narrative by focusing on her strug­gle between sensual love and maternal devotion. On the one hand, Tolstoy displaces the traditional kept ­woman’s narrative in Rus­sian lit­er­a­ture by choosing a heroine from the aristocracy who begins the novel as a loving ­mother. Tolstoy’s heroine is at once a member of the elite and a burgeoning representative of the demimonde. She absorbs the be­hav­iors of both worlds—­obliterating the bound­aries between them—­and thus reads as the ultimate transgressive ­woman. In this regard, Tolstoy’s treatment of adultery aligns with other Eu­ro­pean novels centered on the theme of marital transgression. As Tony Tanner explains, the impetus of the “­great bourgeois novel” devoted to adultery was to reconcile the tension between “a strictness that works to maintain the law, and a sympathy and understanding with the adulterous violator that works to undermine it.”31 On the other hand, while Tolstoy addresses this conflict, he moves beyond it by focusing on Anna’s transition into the world of financial exchange. As Anna moves from the realm of wife to that of kept ­woman, she begins to see all facets of life—­including happiness, beauty, and even motherhood—as operating by the logic of market relations. Her subsequent downfall and suicide can be read as an enduring testament against the m ­ other who exchanges c­ hildren for the pleasures of

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erotic fulfillment. As Amy Mandelker puts it, “even if [Anna] is forgiven her sexual transgression, she is never excused for abandoning her son and ignoring her ­daughter.”32 In documenting Anna’s evolution, Tolstoy pre­sents two types of womanhood to readers, each of which circulates and competes in parallel economies. ­There is w ­ oman as ­mother (representative of a Christian logic of selfless devotion) represented through Dolly’s devotion to her ­children, and ­woman as mistress (the embodiment of commodification) explicated in Anna’s narrative. In contrast to Dolly’s boundless maternal devotion, which operates on unrequited love, Anna takes up proj­ects within the finite world of transactional exchange. ­Whether it be an obsession with her looks or the writing of c­ hildren’s lit­er­at­ure, Anna’s vari­ous endeavors are coded as “unnatural” replacements for her maternal drive. In ways similar to Dostoevsky’s kept ­women characters, Tolstoy’s heroine falls prey to a transactional logic whereby ­human relations operate on the princi­ples of capital exchange. The longer Anna lives with Vronsky, the sharper her sense of isolation becomes. This alienation plays a key role in how she begins to see the world as driven by transactional relations between ­people based solely on profit, rather than on goodwill. The first and most damaging isolation Anna experiences is from the maternal world.33 The opening chapters show Anna as a devoted ­mother, one who intuitively senses her son’s needs and misses him when they are apart. Yet as Jenny Kaminer demonstrates in her perceptive analy­sis of the novel, Anna’s increasing detachment from both Serezha and her ­daughter, Annie, ushers in the heroine’s isolation and despair, which “helps create the cynical and solipsistic frame of mind that propels her to suicide.”34 Anna justifies her decision to pick Vronsky over her ­children on the basis of economic exchange. In the carriage r­ ide before her suicide she suddenly reflects on her son: “I thought too, that I loved him, and used to be touched by my own tenderness. But I have lived without him, I gave him up [promeniala] for another love and did not regret the exchange [promen] as long as that other love satisfied me.”35 Reading this passage, Kaminer concludes that Anna’s sensitivity to the transactional relations b­ ehind e­ very ­human endeavor, “renders absurd the self-­ sacrificial ideal of motherhood.”36 Kaminer concludes her study of Anna Karenina on this note, but her analy­sis could be developed further to explicate the transactional models of love presented in the novel. On the one hand, Anna’s reflections represent the full extension of her drug-­ induced solipsistic logic, thus making the reader skeptical about their validity. On the other hand, the reliance on the language of transaction affirms her isolation from both Vronsky and her ­children. In this sense, Anna’s description

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of her relations with ­others shares a likeness with the fallen w ­ omen of Dostoevsky’s novels. Like Nastasia Filippovna and Grushenka, who talk about their relations with men in terms of economic exchange, so, too, does Anna consider her social status within the context of a market vocabulary that exchanges love to better one’s position or to worsen it. For example, when Anna reflects on her decision to tell Karenina about her affair, she describes her new position positively by comparing it to a financial reward. Now that she has told Karenin the truth, her suffering w ­ ill be “recompensed” (voznagrazhdena). But ­after she reads Karenin’s chilling letter, in which he threatens to take away her son, Anna reconsiders the consequences of her confession. Her position requires an “exchange” (promen) that w ­ ill guarantee her guilt before child and husband: “She felt that the position in the world that she enjoyed . . . ​was precious to her, that she would not have the strength to exchange [promeniat’] it for the shameful position of a ­woman who has abandoned husband and child to join her lover; that however much she might strug­gle, she could not be stronger than herself. She would never know freedom in love, but would remain forever a guilty wife, with the menace of detection hanging over her at ­every instant.” Notably, Anna w ­ ill become the “shameful w ­ oman” that she so abhors, and she completes the exchange outlined in her imagination. The “menace of detection” moves from external observers to internal self-­doubt as she becomes the “guilty wife” who abandons husband and child. Both Anna and Karenin discuss her infidelity through an economic discourse. When Karenin reflects on ­whether to issue Anna a divorce, he concludes by condemning such annulments using financial terminology; a husband who acquiesces to divorce “practically cede[s] or [sells] his unfaithful wife” to other men.37 While the references to economic transaction in Anna Karenina parallel Dostoevsky’s descriptions, the two authors diverge in their treatment of the kept ­woman’s inner strug­gle. Whereas Dostoevsky’s heroines ­battle between a desire for revenge versus a longing for redemption, Tolstoy’s depicts Anna torn between two visions of herself: one as ­mother, and the other as Vronsky’s lover. The inextricable nature of this choice pushes Anna into a psychological splitting, or a sense of doubling: She was not simply miserable, she began to feel alarm at the new emotional condition. . . . ​She felt as though every­thing was beginning to be doubled in her soul, just as objects sometimes appear doubled to overtired eyes. She hardly knew at times what it was she feared, and what she hoped for. . . . ​“Ah, what am I ­doing!” she said to herself, feeling a sudden thrill of pain in both sides of her head. When she came to herself,

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she saw that she was holding her hair in both hands, each side of her ­temples, and pulling it out.38 While Anna eventually chooses Vronsky over her son, she nevertheless remains a victim of a fractured psyche. Anna ­will attempt to bridge this divide by subsuming her maternal feelings and focusing solely on Vronsky’s love. As the novel progresses, however, it becomes painfully clear that their relationship ­will not satiate Anna’s hunger for fulfillment.39 She ­will thus turn to other forms of gratification—­all of which ­will prove unfruitful, unnatural, or perverse in the eyes of ­others. Moreover, the end result of this split identity ­will be a hyperawareness of the need to punish Vronsky for putting her in this untenable position. The psychological split is key to understanding how Tolstoy contrasts the two visions of womanhood, one as ­mother and the other as lover. In a sequence of decisions—­most notably, her choice not to have additional c­ hildren—­Anna upends the traditional model of womanhood founded on maternal identity. To her sister-­in-­law’s dismay, Anna admits that she w ­ ill “have no more c­ hildren,” confessing that she practices contraception. In Anna’s line of thinking, only by ceasing her reproductive role can she maintain her youthful countenance and keep Vronsky by her side. As Anna explains to Dolly, “I have a choice between two alternatives: ­either to be pregnant, that is, an invalid, or to be the friend and companion of my husband—­practically my husband.” Anna concludes by asking Dolly, “How am I to keep his love? Not like this?” and, as the narrator notes, “moves her white hands in a curve before her belly.”40 But in deciding to be Vronsky’s “companion” she sublimates any urge to be close to her ­daughter Annie. As Dolly quickly observes while visiting Anna, her sister-­in-­law knows virtually nothing about Annie’s health and upbringing. For example, Dolly is shocked by how l­ittle Anna knows of her d­ aughter’s physical health, like the number of teeth she has or how poorly the governess teaches her. By showing ­these serious flaws through Dolly’s eyes, the reader is meant to see Anna as a perversion of the ideal ­mother. While she abandons nearly all forms of maternal devotion to her ­actual ­children, Anna nevertheless invests a considerable amount of energy in rearing ­others. In part 6, chapter 25, the narrator describes the building of the hospital on Vronsky’s estate, in which Anna not only assists but takes a primary role in planning and organ­izing. Tolstoy colors this devotion as incongruous with Anna’s disassociation from her own ­daughter; instead of worrying about the health of Annie, she concerns herself with saving other ­people’s ­children. Even more condemnatory is Anna’s devotion to her En­glish protégée, Han-

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nah, which Vronsky describes as “unnatural” (nenatural’no). Reflecting on the hurt she feels at Vronsky’s comment, Anna decides that the “word stung her most of all” b­ ecause it meant she did not love her “own d­ aughter” but loved “another person’s child.” “What does [Vronsky] know of love for ­children,” thinks Anna, “of my love for Serezha, whom I sacrificed for him?” In challenging the nature of her relationship with Hannah, Vronsky inadvertently calls into question Anna’s paradigm of sacrifice. Instead of sacrificing her child for Vronsky, she now focuses on sacrificing herself. With a “trace of a smile of self-­pity,” Anna vividly pictures the way to assure both Vronsky’s punishment and his eternal devotion: “To die! And he ­will feel remorse; w ­ ill be sorry; w ­ ill 41 love me; he w ­ ill suffer on my account.” While the two make amends at the chapter’s end, Anna’s death drive is already set in motion. The “unnaturalness” of Anna’s attention to Hannah is mirrored in other passions, including her endeavors as a writer.42 On their way to visit Anna, Stiva describes to Levin how his ­sister is busy “writing a ­children’s book.” Having shared the manuscript with a publisher, Stiva confides that Anna’s manuscript is “a remarkable piece of work.” Lest Levin assume that Anna is a bookish, emancipated type of ­woman, he brushes off any association of the writing profession with his ­sister by saying that she is “a ­woman with a heart.”43 The lack of detail on the book’s subject ­matter should not deter us from concluding its content. Anna’s near ignorance of Annie’s upbringing should make the reader suspicious of any attempt to write for other ­people’s c­hildren. Combined with Anna’s affinity for En­glish novels (which is also coded negatively in the text), Tolstoy implies that instead of pursuing a relationship with her own d­ aughter, Anna devotes an “unnatural” amount of artistic energy to nonfamilial relations. In Anna Karenina Tolstoy pre­sents adultery and the kept w ­ oman’s position as anathema to the health of the Rus­sian ­family. While Stiva’s extramarital affairs certainly strain his relations with Dolly, they pale in comparison to Anna’s sexual transgression, which upends the natu­ral order of life. Instead of mothering her c­ hildren, she chooses a life with Vronsky; ultimately dissatisfied with the nonnormative relations that operate as replacements for her ­children, Anna signals that no ­woman who picks her lover over her child can live happily. In Tolstoy’s conception, the two stations of womanhood—as ­mother and as lover—­cannot coexist outside marriage without bringing about the disintegration of the ­family. Tolstoy’s con­temporary, Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaia, would take up similar questions within the kept w ­ oman’s narrative but reach strikingly dif­fer­ent conclusions.

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Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaia Reinterprets the Kept ­Woman’s Narrative Although Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaia (who wrote ­under the masculine pseudonym V. Krestovsky) focused on the tumultuous changes affecting w ­ omen’s lives in nineteenth-­century Rus­sia, she resisted the categorization of “­woman writer.”44 Khvoshchinskaia understood that such a label would not only pigeonhole her work but would also draw unwanted attention from gossipy neighbors in Ryazan, the provincial town approximately 120 miles from Moscow where she lived during the nearly five de­cades she actively published. Despite the fact that she mastered numerous genres, including poetry, prose, fine art (she was an accomplished painter), and journalism, Khvoshchinskaia remains, in the assessment of Hilde Hoogenboom, “the most impor­tant nineteenth-­century Rus­sian writer that Rus­sians have never heard of.”45 Khvoshchinskaia’s relative obscurity both in her native Rus­sia and abroad is unfortunate, most of all ­because her fiction offers nuanced interpretations of the era’s pressing social issues. Her assessment of the “­woman question” is a welcome relief from the moralizing tone found in works that enjoy more permanent status in the nineteenth-­century literary canon. For example, in The Boarding ­School Girl (Pansionerka, 1861) Khvoshchinskaia reimagines the emancipated w ­ oman and her broody male counterpart, the superfluous man.46 In contrast to her better-­known con­temporary, Ivan Turgenev, whose damning portrait of Avdotia Kukshina in Ottsy i deti became the prototype for subsequent depictions of the emancipated ­woman, Khvoshchinskaia largely avoided such essentializing by showing the inner life of intellectually curious heroines. While Khvoshchinskaia addressed many of the themes popu­lar among literati of the period, she avoided the didactic tone of her male contemporaries. When, for instance, she portrays prostitution, she does so with a keen awareness of the complex network of forces prompting w ­ omen to engage in transactional sex. Her short story “Ridneva” (1874) examines how a provincial actress navigates financial hardship and the social stigma associated with her profession. Rather than succumb to maudlin descriptions built on melodramatic intrigue, however, Khvoshchinskaia frames Ridneva’s narrative as a series of faulty choices prompted by her own pursuit of wealth and fame. Having learned from an early age to value wealth and luxury, Ridneva sees herself as an ­eager participant in commercial culture.47 When both her husband and ­daughter die, she embarks on a ­career in the theater, assured that it ­will guarantee her the financial and creative freedom to actualize her dreams of wealth. Instead of autonomous living, she spirals into a debt-­ridden existence; spurned by her former acquaintances and ­under constant pressure to acquiesce to the attentions of male devo-

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tees, Ridneva’s narrative ends at a crossroads. Faced with the option of suicide or life as a kept ­woman, Ridneva chooses the latter. As Jehanne Gheith puts it, Ridneva’s impasse “is a clear example of [Khvoshchinskaia’s] technique of presenting two options, both of which are undesirable . . . ​and thereby suggesting that the real prob­lem is systemic.”48 What is refreshing about the tale is not only its frank treatment of life in the provincial theater but also Khvoshchinskaia’s ability to distance herself from Ridneva to provide a holistic assessment of the heroine’s life. Rather than fall into traps of moralization or demonization, Khvoshchinskaia allows Ridneva—­and, by extension, her female readers—­the opportunity to question the limits of autonomy within a system that values ­women only in as much as they can be commodified. Khvoshchinskaia’s sensitivity to the ­woman question did not garner her, at least initially, the support of power­f ul male writers and publishers. When the literary critic Nikolai Shelgunov lambasted ­women writers for failing to address the seriousness of emancipation, he took Khvoshchinskaia’s prose as case in point. Referring to her by her pseudonym (Krestovsky), Shelgunov asked the public to consider what kind of ­woman writer would shirk the social and moral duty entrusted to her: “Surely a ­woman writer could provide immea­ sur­able aid to ­those who starve and wreck themselves in the fight to help the weaker sex? What contribution has the writer Krestovsky made? A ­woman in her ­later years, a married ­woman, a ­woman who knows other ­women like the back of her hand? Not a sound for or against. One cannot help but ask if such a writer is alive at all.”49 To readers familiar with Khvoshchinskaia’s prose, Shelgunov’s diatribe reads as pure nonsense. Khvoshchinskaia not only examined the issues facing Rus­sian ­women in the post-­Emancipation period but did so with gusto by exploring w ­ omen’s ­labor, education, migration, and the contours of female friendship in ways that defied the norm. But b­ ecause Khvoshchinskaia populated her works with complex heroes and heroines who neither fully denied nor completely accepted the promises of egalitarian reform, Shelgunov distrusted the message of her prose. Shelgunov faulted Khvoshchinskaia for failing to replicate the “positive heroine” of Chernyshevsky’s fiction; in real­ity, this criticism only attests to her literary acumen and the sensitivity with which she saw and documented the changes in ­women’s lives. As Jane Costlow rightly explains, w ­ omen writers like Khvoshchinskaia w ­ ere disinclined “to imagine utopian solutions to what w ­ ere, for them, intimate and intractable prob­lems.”50 Looking specifically at her treatment of kept w ­ omen helps elucidate Khvoshchinskaia’s contribution to the w ­ oman question and its contested legacy among dif­fer­ent generations. Khvoshchinskaia’s novella A Meeting (Svidanie, 1879) hinges on the themes of adultery, illegitimacy, and emancipation (both of w ­ omen and of serfs). That

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t­ hese same issues ­were raised by Tolstoy in Anna Karenina is no coincidence. Published a year ­after Anna Karenina, A Meeting responds to the issues raised in Tolstoy’s novel but is far more ambiguous about a kept ­woman’s fate. Unlike Tolstoy’s Anna, who is torn between her love for Vronsky and devotion to her son, the m ­ other in Khvoshchinskaia’s text—­fortuitously also named Anna—­loves her d­ aughter no less than her lover. A Meeting examines the fate of m ­ other and d­ aughter, both of whom become kept ­women. As is often the case in Khvoshchinskaia’s prose, A Meeting begins with a frame story that introduces the narrative’s major conflicts. Set on an estate in the Rus­sian provinces, it opens not unlike a Chekhovian drama or a novel by Turgenev, as two aristocrats wax poetic about their unrealized dreams. Khvoshchinskaia begins the narrative by highlighting the perspective of Aleksandra Tabaeva, an aging aristocrat of modest means. Jolted out of her provincial languor by a visit from her former love interest, Petr Altasov, Tabaeva awakens to the possibility that although she’s forty, her life may not be over. ­After a recent scandal at his publishers, Altasov fi­nally realizes that he w ­ ill never become a writer of notoriety, as he has hoped. Faced with a bruised ego and a meager salary, Altasov sets his sights on marrying a ­woman with capital, even if it means professing love to the graying Tabaeva. Altasov’s instinct for self-­ preservation sits nicely with Tabaeva, who takes the opportunity to expound on her estranged b­ rother. Herein begins the central narrative, told first through Tabaeva’s unreliable and biased vision. As Tabaeva relays to Altasov, her deceased ­brother ruined the ­family’s good name and left her to run the estate. Her b­ rother not only actively sympathized with the radicals of the 1860s but also put their egalitarian ideas into practice by taking his peasant mistress, Anna Vasilevna, as a common-­law spouse ­after she became pregnant with his child. Right before his death, sensing the need to act honorably, he married Anna so that she and their child, Sasha, might have an easier transition into the manor ­house­hold. The conversation between Tabaeva and Altasov is interrupted when Anna enters; her positivity and vivaciousness strike quite a contrast with the ennui emanating from the two has-­ beens. Anna’s cheerful demeanor quickly fades, however, when Altasov begins gossiping about a certain infamous kept ­woman in St. Petersburg known as Ma­de­moi­selle Ada Dunoyer. To the shock of every­one pre­sent, the popu­lar kept w ­ oman is revealed to be Anna’s d­ aughter, Sasha. The remainder of A Meeting focuses on Anna’s perspective and her resolve to travel to St. Petersburg to save Sasha from what she assumes w ­ ill be a disastrous end. Before she departs, Tabaeva lets her sister-­in-­law know that she should not bother returning to the estate. When Anna replies that she has no trade or skills to make her way in St. Petersburg, Tabaeva insinuates she w ­ ill rely on her old charms and be-

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come the mistress of some well-­off man: “I’m sure you’ll set yourself up well, in some rich ­house­hold. ­Don’t delude yourself, if not ­house­work you’ll manage to ingratiate yourself some other way.”51 Khvoshchinskaia invites her readers to consider the fate of ­mother and ­daughter, who represent two visions of emancipation. On the one hand is Anna, who represents the strengths and weaknesses of peasant culture: she is both inherently wise in the ways of the world, but also staunchly retrograde about w ­ omen’s chastity. Anna follows a path of self-­abasement; as penance for her crime of becoming a “fallen ­woman,” she refuses the money owed upon her husband’s death in the hopes of redeeming herself in the eyes of both God and the community. All she asks is that Tabaeva provide a small sum to pay for Sasha’s education and that she be allowed to hold on to a bond of four thousand rubles for her d­ aughter’s ­f uture. Tabaeva happily obliges and offers her sister-­in-­law to stay on as ­house­keeper, thus replicating the familiar peasant/ master dynamic from Anna’s childhood as a serf. On the other hand is Sasha, who signifies the failed dreams of the generation of the 1860s, for she wants nothing to do with the utopian visions practiced first by her ­father and ­later by her m ­ other, who runs the local school for peasant girls. When Sasha returns home a­ fter finishing her coursework in Moscow, she balks at her ­mother’s proposal that she stay ­behind and help run the school. “I’m eigh­teen,” Sasha says to her ­mother, “and my youth ­won’t last forever. I’ve had enough sitting in jail as it is.” When she learns her ­mother has signed away their rights to the estate, Sasha feels betrayed: “How could you have forgotten me? . . . ​Why should I be poor ­because of your good charity?”52 Sasha eagerly takes the bond for four thousand rubles—­the money Anna hoped to fund the school—­and departs for St. Petersburg without a moment to lose. One cannot fault Sasha too much for striking out to make her destiny in St. Petersburg. Given her m ­ other’s poverty and Tabaeva’s two-­faced be­hav­ior, what could provincial life possibly offer her? Neither, though, is Sasha applauded by Khvoshchinskaia as a paragon for emancipated ­women to replicate. By taking the money and departing for a life in the city, she signals that ­women of her generation ­won’t be repeating the ­mistakes of their foremothers. Capital ­will be put ­toward self-­advancement, not the development of peasant schools. W ­ omen ­will live for themselves, make love to millionaires, and be happy about it. In this regard, Khvoshchinskaia depicts the complexity of ­women’s lives and the difficult choices facing ­mothers and ­daughters in the post-­Emancipation period. While Sasha may represent the prototype of the new ­woman who puts her own sense of adventure before ­family duty, she has not completely abandoned her ancestral home. She makes sure that the peasant girls have a constant flow of cash by submitting o ­ rders for their lace and

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embroidery. This, combined with the narrator’s mention that Sasha sends money home to her m ­ other, suggests that patrilineal lines of inheritance can be replaced by ­women’s entrepreneurship. That ­these economies are funded through libidinal exchange shows the complexity of the new world order in late imperial Rus­sia. Much of the ambiguity in A Meeting emanates from the text’s complex treatment of the w ­ oman question. Written in 1879, “well beyond the first flush of discussions of the ­woman question,” Khvoshchinskaia’s novella, as Costlow puts it, “seems to adumbrate a wholly new way to imagine the resolutions and significances of w ­ omen’s lives.”53 In one sense, the text undermines the cornerstone of ­women’s emancipation—­the power of education to liberate ­women from patriarchal constraints. Education not only fails to achieve equality between men and women in A Meeting but reproduces the same unequal relations it proposes to dismantle. Education is what sparks the romance between Anna and Tabaev; they fall in love as he teaches her reading, writing, and arithmetic. While their love is idealized as a pastoral fable, Khvoshchinskaia suggests that Anna fails to learn the most impor­tant lesson of all, that of self-­preservation. In sacrificing her financial security by relinquishing rights to the estate, she has essentially made herself and her d­ aughter wards of her sister-­in-­law. Nor does education produce better ­women among the gentry; Tabaeva’s education does not prevent her from exploiting Anna, whom she seems ready to work to death as comeuppance for violating class norms. Most enigmatic is Sasha, whose coursework in Moscow has prepared her for l­ittle other than dancing, singing, and speaking French. All t­hese talents come in handy in St. Petersburg, where she pursues a scandalous life as the mistress of a millionaire, not the higher education courses she proposed to her m ­ other. While Khvoshchinskaia reflects on the same social issues as male novelists of her generation, she offers more ambiguous readings of gender relations than many of her contemporaries. Her female characters—­exemplified in Tabaeva, Anna, and Sasha—­resist strict and easy categorization b­ ecause they strug­gle to find their own sense of autonomy in a social milieu that is deeply antagonistic ­toward ­women who reject the status quo. Theirs is a highly complex, problematic world that Khvoshchinskaia knew well, and thus she paints her heroines with empathy while still not overlooking their faults. Tabaeva, an aging ­woman who has assumed her life is over, grasps onto Altasov, whom she assumes is her one last hope of happiness. That she crushes Anna along the way suggests the desperation ­women of her coterie felt at living as spinsters. Like many parents, Anna thinks she has paved a bright ­future for her ­daughter, only to realize their perceptions of happiness differ drastically. Sasha sees through Tabaeva’s miserliness, but she is more like her aunt than she

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might think. They both possess a keen awareness of the power of money and calculation to change a w ­ oman’s life for the better. Given the paths of ­these characters and their interdependence, Khvoshchinskaia challenges her readers to consider why female advancement seems dependent on ­women exploiting one another and if any other model of emancipation could escape the familiar traps of commodification and abuse. Rather than finalize a kept ­woman’s story, Khvoshchinskaia leaves her narrative open to interpretation. While Anna’s departure to St. Petersburg to rescue her ­daughter suggests a parallel to Pushkin’s “The Station Master,” Khvoshchinskaia offers l­ ittle in the way of closure. W ­ hether the d­ aughter ­will heed her ­mother’s advice, let alone what advice she might give, is left for the reader to imagine. No less intriguing is that the novella closes with an evocative image of a train leaving the station, presumably with Anna on board. Published on the heels of Anna Karenina, the readers of A Meeting could easily connect the fates of t­ hese two—­very dif­fer­ent—­Annas. The f­ uture of Tolstoy’s tragic heroine is sealed; unable to merge her duties as wife, lover, and ­mother, she commits suicide by throwing herself ­under a train. In contrast, Khvoshchinskaia’s Anna has an open destiny as the conclusion to her story awaits finalization. The train, which functions as an allegory for modernity and pro­gress, suggests in both Anna Karenina and A Meeting that as time moves forward, so does society’s view of womanhood. But rather than throw herself ­under the train, Khvoshchinskaia’s Anna gets on board. Again, however, the question becomes one of perspective. Tolstoy shows the train from Anna’s point of view, providing the reader the last glimpses of his heroine’s waking life. In contrast, Khvoshchinskaia shows the train from Tabaeva’s perspective. Looking from the veranda of her dilapidated estate onto the train passing by suggests that as Tabaeva and ­women of her ilk remain stuck in place, Anna and Sasha can adapt to the constraints of their time while embracing the liberations promised by life in St. Petersburg.

The Keys to Sexual Happiness In the final de­cades of tsarist rule in Rus­sia, lit­er­at­ ure and art challenged long-­ held beliefs about the sanctity of ­women’s chastity. Instead of heroines who perform femininity in codes of honor, duty, and self-­sacrifice, writers increasingly look to the sexually provocative female protagonist like Khvoshchinskaia’s Sasha. Subsequent generations of Rus­sian artists harnessed the kept ­woman’s status as social outsider to explore new repre­sen­ta­tions of femininity in fin de siècle Rus­sia. By the turn of the twentieth c­ entury, repre­sen­ta­tions

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of kept w ­ omen broadened thanks to the possibilities of new media, particularly cinema, to express the hopes associated with the New Woman, who embraced sexual and financial freedom. While Khvoshchinskaia makes Sasha out to be a questionable model for ­f uture generations of w ­ omen, subsequent writers and cinematographers had no qualms in celebrating similar forms of female rebellion. As Anastasiia Verbitskaya codified in her best-­selling novel Keys to Happiness (Kliuchi schast’ia, 1909–13), ­women could break the chains of self-­control to tap into their artistic talents, as the story’s heroine, Mania Eltsova, does. Although slightly beyond the scope of the pre­sent study’s purview, it is worth including Verbitskaya’s depictions of extramarital love ­because she draws directly upon the tradition of nineteenth-­century iconoclastic heroines. Not unlike Khvoshchinskaia’s Sasha, Mania locates her artistic talent in erotically charged dance. As a representative of the “new ­woman,” Mania beckoned to Rus­sians on the eve of World War I that radical politics could go hand in hand with sexual discovery. As Beth Holmgren and Helena Goscilo explain, “Sexual relations with multiple men are integral to [Mania’s] iconoclasm in Keys and [Verbitskaya’s] sociopo­ liti­cal agenda. . . . ​According to Yan, the novel’s ideological spokesman for the New ­Woman . . . ​separating physical intimacy from the ‘yoke of love’ provides the title’s keys to happiness, for it liberates w ­ omen from a coercive middle-­class morality that erroneously conflates the two. For [Verbitskaya], the talented individual’s personal autonomy and self-­realization are paramount.”54 The fin de siècle heroine of Verbitskaya’s novel signals a shift in multiple spheres: economic, social, sexual, biological, and even consumer taste. Mania’s story, read through the history of previous iterations on the theme of kept w ­ omen, shows that patterns of economic exchange could as easily liberate w ­ omen as entrap them in cycles of commodity fetishism. That Verbitskaya’s heroine chooses the romantic gesture of suicide suggests that while culturally significant, the novel remains firmly entrenched in the generic constraints of melodrama. The finale operates as remuneration for Mania’s numerous transgressions, including her sexual rebellion. Prior images of kept ­women likewise reveal the misogynistic, overtly paternalistic, and oppressive social and cultural constraints confining them to the roles of ­mother and wife. Like other categories of marginal ­women, the soderzhanka occupied an in-­between status in the social order; sustaining relations with one man for an extended period of time made her akin to the dutiful wife in the cultural imagination. Yet as literary and pictorial repre­sen­ta­tion increasingly noted, her relations outside the bonds of matrimony placed her outside the social order. Writers and artists explored such w ­ omen’s ambiguous cultural status to expose class biases, the sexual double standard, the im-

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possibility of obtaining a divorce, and questions of paternity. While images from the popu­lar press could poke fun at the supposed mercenary interests of the kept w ­ oman and compare her be­hav­ior to the demimondaine, in the realm of realist fiction her plight takes on paramount significance. As Dostoevsky’s codifies in his portraits of soderzhanki, such w ­ omen remain forever ensconced in a system of commodity exchange. ­Because men largely attempt to buy their affections, Dostoevsky’s kept ­women find it difficult to separate the language of transaction from the language of Christian salvation. By featuring their inner strug­gles to name their own experience, Dostoevsky managed to create compelling depictions of the socially ostracized soderzhanka. Unlike the demimondaine and kameliia, who functioned primarily outside the patrilineal contours of reproduction, the kept w ­ oman operated within them. Writers, particularly Tolstoy, found that a kept w ­ oman’s drive for sexual fulfillment could conflict, if not subsume, her maternal instincts. But new models of womanhood emerging at the end of the nineteenth c­ entury challenged the traditional role of ­mothers as the self-­sacrificing caregivers who silently bore their suffering for the benefit of their c­ hildren. Discussions of motherhood took on a po­liti­cal nature as leading proponents of female emancipation declared that the traditional ­family model, built on ­women’s oppression, was no longer ­viable for the country’s ­f uture. Literary works, like ­those by Khvoshchinskaia, reveal the generational gap between m ­ others, who seem beholden to conservative ideals about the ­family, versus the hopes of their ­daughters, who are ready to embrace sexual freedom and throw off the yoke of religious beliefs. In this context, the turn ­toward more secular understandings of the sexual and moral order provided writers a means to explore the psychological and social pressures facing ­women at the turn of the twentieth ­century.

 Conclusion Continuity through Change Sex Work from the Imperial Period to ­Today

The topic of prostitution remains just as contested in con­temporary Rus­sia as it did 150 years ago. While the po­liti­cal, social, and economic foundations of Rus­sian society have changed dramatically since the time of Fyodor Dostoevsky, con­temporary discourse draws from nineteenth-­century literary depictions of prostitution, including the writer’s image of the saintly Sonia Marmeladova in Crime and Punishment. For example, in 2017, when the Belorus­sian escort and international media star Nastia Rybka (real name Anastasiia Vashukevich) appeared on a popu­lar prime-­time TV show to describe her method of seducing oligarchs and absconding with their cash, she was accosted by a panel of medical professionals and media personalities who eagerly condemned her past and pre­sent affairs. “I’m so sorry for you,” commented one female psychologist to Nastia; “the only way you have to reach a millionaire is through the bedroom. . . . ​What you are d­ oing is just prostitution, plain and ­simple.” She continued, “At the very least, read Dostoevsky or some literary works on the topic.” Nastia responded with a quick giggle and shrug: “Oh wow, what a complicated last name, I d­ on’t even know what to say!”1 Clearly the psychologist wanted Nastya to exchange her methods of seduction for the code of self-­denial and Christian meekness performed by Sonia in Crime and Punishment. Nastia’s nonchalant response—­whether au­then­tic or contrived—­subverted the intention to moralize what she does. She also rejected the idea, proposed by another panelist, that she should “­settle down” 19 4

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and get married. In the clearest and most concise terms she conveyed why a billionaire might prefer her over a wife: “He needs me for emotional support, for sex, love, and euphoria. Somebody e­ lse can wash his socks for him.” The experiences of Nastia—­which include a global sex scandal, a stint in a Thai jail, and two best-­selling novels—is, of course, extraordinary and far removed from the experience of most sex workers. Nevertheless, the way she has framed her affairs with billionaires (including her relationship with the Rus­sian aluminum tycoon Oleg Deripaska) as eco­nom­ically and sexually emancipating recalls fin de siècle discourse on the New Woman. Rejecting traditional binaries of female identity (good girl versus bad girl, ­mother versus whore), ­today’s sex workers in Rus­sia and their advocates have argued for a more complex understanding of the mechanisms of power, economy, and intimacy that inform the practices of erotic ­labor.2 Not unlike the demimondaines and “camellias” (kamelii) explored in the chapters of this book, Nastia Rybka works the market, and her place in it, by finding the space for play and plea­sure within transactional sex. That commentators point her back to Dostoevsky shows the lasting power of imperial lit­er­a­ture in formulating perceptions of gender and sexuality in con­temporary Rus­sia. While sex workers and their allies in ­today’s Rus­sia have argued for the legalization of the venal economy on vari­ous judicial grounds, politicians remain deeply wedded to the belief that prostitution is a social vice and should be policed as such. Informing ­these retrograde discussions of sexual ­labor is a firm belief, made recalcitrant in the post-Soviet era, that prostitution represented the nation’s social and po­liti­cal decline. As Eliot Borenstein puts it, the figure of the prostitute “represents the anx­i­eties of a post-­Soviet masculinity in crisis, where the loss of empire, the onslaught of the market, and competition with a triumphant West are construed as a kind of male sexual humiliation.”3 In more recent debate, however, prominent leaders—­including Rus­sian president Vladimir Putin—­have turned an anxiety into a source of national pride. When, for example, Putin was questioned in 2017 about accusations contained in the Steele dossier that Donald Trump hired sex workers on a trip to Moscow in 2013, Putin candidly responded, “I have a very difficult time imagining that Trump rushed to a ­hotel to meet with our girls of lower social responsibility [vstrechat’sia s nashimi devushkami s ponizhennoi sotsial’noi otvetstvennost’iu]. Although they are, without a doubt, the very best in the world.”4 Televised and broadcasted worldwide, Putin’s comments capture the sexual essentialism that informs cultural perceptions of sex work not only in Rus­sia but in the vast majority of countries. Yet Putin’s description of sex workers, which is both infantilizing and fetishistic, seems particularly indebted to nineteenth-­century Rus­sian conceptualizations of prostitutes as “fallen but charming creatures.”

19 6  Conc lusion

As the previous chapters have shown, imperial era depictions of sex work attempted to undo, or at least challenge, the ste­reo­typical perception of prostitutes as e­ ither saints or sinners, victims or villains. For that ­matter, ­women writers turned their attention to the complex set of forces governing ­women’s lives to see where t­ here might be room for autonomy and agency. Both Avdotia Panaeva and Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaia challenged their readers to consider why the social and f­ amily order was founded on female self-­sacrifice. In the expanding market economy, w ­ omen writers, often writing u ­ nder male pseudonyms, understood the risk they undertook in questioning the bound­ aries of extramarital love and well-­entrenched moral codes. When Khvoshchinskaia’s heroine Sasha in A Meeting angrily chides her ­mother for giving away her inheritance, her question is both ethical and existential. “You d­ idn’t want the money? Well I do! Why should I be poor,” asks Sasha, “for your sense of charity?” In suggesting that self-­abnegation reproduces the same structures that ensnare w ­ omen in positions of inferiority, Sasha gestures to a new way of thinking about gender identity. But while writers, including Khvoshchinskaia, offered novel approaches to considering the par­ameters of extramarital love, the po­liti­cal discourse on prostitution remained deeply reliant on ste­reo­ types of deviance and exploitation. ­These assumptions about ­women’s sexuality remain pervasive and continue to inform discussions on prostitution well into the pre­sent moment. Within this rich tradition of literary and visual culture it may seem odd that Putin would return to the very paradigm nineteenth-­century artists tried to dismantle. But Putin’s comments, like t­ hose of the female psychologist berating Nastia Rybka, align with a general shift ­toward traditional Rus­sian Orthodox values and the disavowal of equal rights for marginalized communities, including sex workers and members of the LGBTQ+ community. Considering sex workers as ­people with “lower social responsibility” places into context a broader rolling back of w ­ omen’s rights in Rus­sia. Most notable in this re­spect was the passage in 2017 of a law that decriminalized domestic vio­lence. Referred to pejoratively as “the slapping law,” it all but exonerates men who batter w ­ omen by removing criminal prosecution for first-­time offenders when victims are not hospitalized.5 The reconstitution of erotic life in con­temporary Rus­sia mirrors imperial era panics about social degeneracy that connected prostitution with infection and disease. When the mixed martial arts fighter Viacheslav Datsik, better known as Red Tarzan, attacked St. Petersburg sex workers in 2016, he insisted he possessed a moral and ethical right to do so. The w ­ omen, he claimed, had arrived in Rus­sia to infect the country’s men with HIV. Dehumanization of erotic laborers in this fashion recalls nineteenth-­century claims that the pros-

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titute was a locus of disease and a transmitter of syphilis. Contextualizing the history of this moral panic, as the previous chapters have done, helps better situate con­temporary debates to their origin in the imperial period. As this book has shown, prostitution had a plurality of meanings for Rus­ sians coming of age in the late imperial period. Writers and artists presented this new urban milieu, and the role of the prostitute in its formation, with varying degrees of complexity. The registered sex worker exemplified the dual matrix of sexual exploitation and patriarchal excess for numerous Rus­sian authors, including Dostoevsky, Vsevolod Garshin, and Vsevolod Krestovsky. They used their prose as a vehicle to interrogate the policy of state-­regulated prostitution and they argued for the eradication of commercial love on the basis of Christian belief. Yet visual culture emerging in the l­ater years of the nineteenth c­ entury treated sexual commerce, especially in regard to w ­ omen’s autonomy, more ambivalently. Images of ­women dancing, smoking, and flirting with men suggest that the be­hav­iors typically associated with street­ walkers shifted and began informing the habits of w ­ omen more broadly. Illustrations in satirical journals like Budil’nik codified how traditional categories of w ­ omen—­mother, mistress, prostitute—­blurred beyond distinction. An image from an 1890 issue of the journal demonstrates how this fluctuation played out in the cultural sphere (see figure C.1). Titled Vsiacheskii sport (All Types of Sport), the illustration pre­sents five kinds of courtship activities, and while none of the ­women could be labeled as prostitutes, the two ladies featured in the lower left-­hand corner dress and behave provocatively. The accompanying caption hints that the gentleman accompanying them might very well be their benefactor, for he thoroughly enjoys the chance to treat the ladies to cigarettes and tasty liquor. Including this potential quid pro quo alongside other forms of courtship reveals a broadening conceptualization of normalized be­hav­iors for both genders. The topic of prostitution likewise offered Rus­sia’s cultural elite a means to discuss ­women’s sexual and economic emancipation. Arguing that economic in­equality was the root of all social evils, writers in the 1860s i­magined prostitution as a vexing prob­lem. That Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s Vera Pavlovna manages to liberate the ­women in her care by offering them work with needle and thread proved to his readers that any ­woman, when given the chance, would choose “honest” ­labor over prostitution. Whereas writers like Chernyshevsky ­imagined prostitutes as exploited ­women, they found demimondaines increasingly difficult to categorize and contain within traditional codes of morality. Such w ­ omen exchanged money for companionship and felt no qualms about sleeping with multiple men. The prob­lem, as Leo Tolstoy conceptualized it, was not so much the policy of state-­regulated prostitution (although that was

19 8  Conc lusion

Figure C.1. ​ Vsiacheskii sport (All Types of Sport  ), illustration from Budil’nik (The Alarm Clock), 1890. Slavic, East Eu­ro­pean, and Eurasian Collection at the University of Illinois Urbana-­Champaign.

certainly an abomination) but ­women’s pursuit of sexual plea­sure aided by the use of contraception. Linking the be­hav­iors of street prostitutes with flirtatious married w ­ omen of the upper classes, as Tolstoy did, buttressed fears of social contagion. When Nekhliudov in Resurrection feels a mixture of attraction and revulsion a­ fter a streetwalker smiles coyly at him, his thoughts immediately turn to similar encounters with ­women of the aristocracy. That

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­ omen could enjoy themselves through sexual innuendo and plea­sure seekw ing illustrated the toxicity of female sexuality. “That ­woman in the theatre,” reflects Nekhliudov, “is like a toxin secretly poisoning every­thing it comes into contact with.”6 Imagining female sexuality in terms of pollution illustrated that the country was experiencing a cultural decline and in the midst of a moral crisis. Despite the trend in literary works to rein in transgressive female sexuality via plots of containment, prose writers nevertheless presented new possibilities when considering extramarital love. In this sense, the topic of prostitution appealed to a diverse cadre of Rus­sian writers and thinkers coming of age in the post-­Emancipation period b­ ecause the vast majority of the country’s citizens personally experienced the commodification of love. As the im­mensely popu­lar plays of Alexander Ostrovsky show, Rus­sians found themselves enamored of the promises of a market economy while also deeply fearful of the changes it would bring. Ostrovsky’s female characters barter themselves and are bartered by o ­ thers, thus showing that the trafficking of w ­ omen can be driven, navigated, and subverted in unexpected ways. By the same token, he highlights how ­women can assert power over the men in their lives through consumption. Having learned that they are prized commodities, the female characters of his comedies toy with how best to unseat the ­family patriarch by taking control of his pocket­book. The topic of prostitution galvanized imperial Rus­sians to consider how love could circulate on the market like any other commodity. For some, like Dostoevsky, the registered prostitute represented the merging of social in­equality within the Westernized metropolis of St. Petersburg. Yet transactional sex could also prove ambiguous, allowing room for playful flirtation and adventure. Perplexed by t­ hese new modes of be­hav­ior between the sexes, Rus­sian writers and artists noted how prostitution moved beyond the realm of the street and into the homes of average citizens. W ­ hether romanticized or demonized, commercial sex appeared as a contested means for ­women’s emancipation. Exchanging companionship for monetary support remained an ever-­present option for ­women who found commodification a means not only for survival but for social and economic advancement.

N ote s

Introduction

1. Anastasiia Kuznetsova, “Datsik, goniavshii golykh prostitutok po ulitsam Peterburga, zaderzhan,” Life (Rus­sia), May 18, 2016, https://­life​.­ru​/­p​/­410034. 2. “Ryzhii Tarzan v sude,” NTV, January  1, 2018, https://­www​.­ntv​.­ru​/­novosti​ /­1970464​/­. 3. “Borets bez pravil,” Piatyi kanal, May  19, 2016, https://­www​.­5​-­tv​.­r u​/­news​ /­106996​/­. 4. N. B. Lebina and M. V. Shkarovskii, Prostitutsiia v Peterburge (Moscow: Progress-­ akademiia, 1994), 10–15. 5. Barbara Alpern Engel, “St.  Petersburg Prostitutes in the Late Nineteenth ­Century: A Personal and Social Profile,” Rus­sian Review 48, no. 1 (1989): 21–44; Richard Stites, “Prostitute and Society in Pre-­revolutionary Rus­sia,” Jahrbucher fur Geschichte Osteuropas 31, no. 3 (1983): 348–64. 6. Laurie Bern­stein, Sonia’s ­Daughters: Prostitutes and Their Regulation in Imperial Rus­sia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 28. 7. Mikhail Borovitinov, “Publichnye doma i razlichnye fazisy v istorii otnoshenii k nim zakonodatel’stva i meditsiny v Rossii,” in Trudy pervogo vserossiiskogo s”ezda po bor’be s torgom zhenshchinami i ego prichinami proiskhodivshego v S.-­Peterburge s 21 do 25 aprelia 1910 goda, vol. 2 (St. Petersburg: Tipogr. S-­Peterburgskoi Odinochnoi Tiur’my, 1912), 349–50. 8. Prostitution as demarcated in the l­egal codex allowed for female prostitution ­under the purview of the medical police. Male prostitution was strictly outlawed and sodomy statutes, while somewhat vague, defined sex between men as “unnatural shamelessness” (protivoestestvennoe stydodeianie). The subject of male prostitution falls outside the confines of this study given that the discourses on sexuality and criminality treat homo­sexuality differently from commercial sex. For discussion on male prostitution in imperial Rus­sia, see Dan Healey, Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Rus­sia: The Regulation of Sexual and Gender Dissent (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 33–40; and Dan Healey, “Masculine Purity and ‘Gentlemen’s Mischief ’: Sexual Exchange and Prostitution between Rus­sian Men, 1861–1941,” Slavic Review 60, no. 2 (2002): 233–65. 9. Jann Matlock, Scenes of Seduction: Prostitution, Hysteria, and Reading Difference in Nineteenth-­Century France (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 7. 10. Following Nicholas Mirzoeff, I use the term visual culture to mean that which “is concerned with visual events in which information, meaning, or plea­sure is sought

201

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by the consumer in an interface with visual technology.” Nicholas Mirzoeff, An Introduction to Visual Culture (London: Routledge, 1999), 3. 11. As Julie Cassiday and Leyla Rouhi demonstrate in their study of the madam in Rus­sian culture, the procuress appeared in literary works as a parasitic older w ­ oman who turned a profit from selling her female wards. See Julie Cassiday and Leyla Rouhi, “From Nevskii Prospekt to Zoia’s Apartment: ­Trials of the Rus­sian Procuress,” Rus­sian Review 58, no. 3 (1999): 413–31. 12. Jill McCracken, Street Sex Workers’ Discourse: Realizing Material Change Through Agential Choice (New York: Routledge, 2013), xx. 13. For a history on sex workers’ activism, see Melinda Chateauvert, Sex Workers Unite: A History of the Movement from Stonewall to Slut Walk (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2014). On critical approaches to terminology related to sex work, see Magaly Rodríguez García, Lex Heerma van Voss, Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk, “Introduction,” in Selling Sex in the City: A Global History of Prostitution, 1600s-2000s (Boston, MA: Brill, 2017), 1–21. 14. Walter Benjamin, “Paris: Capital of the Nineteenth C ­ entury,” in The Arcades Proj­ect, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 10. 15. Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), 180, emphasis in the original. 16. Gayle Rubin argues for a sex/gender system in her essay “The Traffic in ­Women,” in The Second Wave: A Reader in Feminist Theory, ed. Linda Nicholson (New York: Routledge, 1997), 27–62. 17. Nina Kushner, Erotic Exchanges: The World of Elite Prostitution in Eighteenth-­ Century Paris (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013), 5. 18. Alain Corbin, ­Women for Hire: Prostitution and Sexuality in France a­ fter 1850, trans. Alan Serbidan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 200–206. 19. On the practices of tsarist authorities to police sex workers from 1905 to 1917, see Siobhán Hearne, Policing Prostitution: Regulating the Lower Classes in Late Imperial Rus­sia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), especially chap. 1, “Selling Sex.” 20. Jill Smith, Berlin Coquette: Prostitution and the New German W ­ oman, 1890–1933 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013), 2, 18. 21. The Orpheum pictured is part of the illustrious St. Petersburg Club ­housed in a mansion owned in the 1860s by the prominent merchant K. Kulebiakin. See Lev Lur’e, Peterburg Dostoevskogo: Istoricheskii putevoditel’ (St. Petersburg: BKhV-­Peterburg, 2012), 296; and Vladimir Mikhnevich, Peterburg ves’ na ladoni (St.  Petersburg: Izdanie N.N. Plotnikova, 1874), 234. 22. Judith Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-­ Victorian London (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 10. 23. For a historical overview of “the w ­ oman question” in Rus­sia, see Barbara Evans Clements, A History of W ­ omen in Rus­sia: From Earliest Times to the Pre­sent (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012), 114–22; Linda Edmondson, Feminism in Rus­sia, 1900–1917 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1984), 114–20; Barbara Alpern Engel, ­Mothers and ­Daughters: ­Women of the Intelligent­sia in Nineteenth-­Century Rus­sia (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2000), 100–135; Catriona Kelly, A History of Rus­sian ­Women’s Writing 1820–1992 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994),

NOTES TO PAGES 1 2 – 2 0

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60–61; and Richard Stites, The ­Women’s Liberation Movement in Rus­sia: Feminism, Nihilism and Bolshevism, 1860–1930 (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1978), 29–154. 24. See David Ransel, ed., The F­ amily in Imperial Rus­sia (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978); Stites, The ­Women’s Liberation Movement; and Engel, ­Mothers and ­Daughters. 25. Laura Engelstein, Keys to Happiness: Sex and the Search for Modernity in Fin-­de-­ Siècle Rus­sia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), 4. 26. Siobhán Hearne, “To Denounce or Defend? Public Participation in the Policing of Prostitution in Late Imperial Rus­sia,” Kritika 19, no. 4 (2018): 723. 27. In Prostitutsiia i abolitsionizm (St. Petersburg, 1888) Tarnovsky argues that prostitutes have a natu­ral inclination ­toward vice and crime. 28. For a recent study examining Tarnovskaya’s research and its importance in Lombroso’s writings, see Frederick White, “Praskov’ia Tarnovskaia i russkie istochniki knigi Chezare Lombrozo ‘Zhenshchina-­prestupnitsa i prostitutka,’ ” Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie 56, no. 5 (2020). https://­www​.­nlobooks​.­ru​/­magazines​/­novoe​_­literaturnoe​ _­obozrenie​/­165​_­nlo​_­5​_­2020​/­article​/­22684/ 29. Engelstein, Keys to Happiness, 130–44. 30. Alexander Zholkovsky, “Topos prostitutsii v lit­er­a­ture,” in Бабель/Babel, ed. A. K. Zholkovsky and M. B. Iampol’sky (Moscow: Carte Blanche, 1994), 317–68. 31. Olga Matich, “A Typology of Fallen W ­ omen in Nineteenth-­Century Rus­sian Lit­er­a­ture,” in American Contributions to the Ninth International Congress of Slavists: Lit­ er­a­ture, Poetics, History, ed. Paul Debreczeny (Kiev: Slavica, 1983), 327. 32. Gayle S. Rubin, “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality,” in Deviations: A Gayle Rubin Reader (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 149, 138. 33. Rubin, “Thinking Sex,” 156. 34. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1990), 23. 1. Russia’s Babylon

1. S.  S. Shashkov, Ocherk istorii russkoi zhenshchiny (St.  Petersburg, 1872), 252, 275; figures on the number of registered prostitutes in St. Petersburg can be found on 257. 2. Other figures from the period who studied the state’s regulation of prostitution include Mikhail Kuznetsov and K. I. Babikov. See Mikhail Kuznetsov, Prostitutsiia i sifilis v Rossii (St. Petersburg, 1871); and K. I. Babikov, Prodazhnye zhenshchiny (prostitutsiia) (Moscow, 1870). 3. F. M. Dostoevskii, Prestuplenie i nakazanie, in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v tridsati tomakh, vol. 6 (Leningrad: Nauka, 1973), 43. 4. For an overview on the origins of the term “padshaia zhenshchina” (fallen ­woman), see N. Iu. Zimina, “ ‘Padshaia zhenshchina’ v epokhu F.M. Dostoevskogo,” Vestnik Pskovskogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta seriia: Sotsial’no-­gumanitarnye nauki 15 (2011): 37–42. 5. Bern­stein, Sonia’s ­Daughters, 18–20.

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6. Vladimir Toporov, the first scholar to outline the major princi­ples of the tradition in his Peterburgskii tekst russkoi literatury: Izbrannye trudy (St. Petersburg: Iskusstvo-­SPB, 2003), argues that literary works devoted to the theme of St. Petersburg are linked by common semantic and thematic motifs. The lit­er­a­ture on the Petersburg Text is massive, but for representative samples, see N. P. Antsiferov, Dusha Peterburga (St. Petersburg: Brokgauz-­Efron, 1922); Anna Lisa Crone and Jennifer Day, My Petersburg / Myself: ­Mental Architecture and Imaginative Space in Modern Rus­sian Letters (Bloomington, IN: Slavica, 2004); Ettore Lo Gatto, Il mito di San Pietroburgo (Milan: Feltrinelli Editori, 1960); Kathleen Scollins, Acts of Log­os in Pushkin and Gogol: Petersburg Texts and Subtexts (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2017); L. Moreva, ed., Metafizika Peterburga: Peterburgskie chteniia po teorii, istorii i filosofii kul’tury (St. Petersburg: Eidos, 1993); Iurii N. Bespiatykh, ed., Fenomen Peterburga (St.  Petersburg: BLIC, 2001); Vladimir Markovich and Wolf Schmid, eds., Sushchestvuet li peterburgskii tekst? (St. Petersburg: Izd-vo S.-­Peterburgskogo universiteta, 2005); and Helena Goscilo and Stephen Norris, eds., Preserving Petersburg: History, Memory, Nostalgia (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008). 7. Georg Simmel, The Metropolis and ­Mental Life, in The ­People, Place, and Space Reader, ed Jen Jack Gieseking et al. (New York: Routledge, 2014), 223. 8. Rita Felski, The Gender of Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 19. 9. Mark Steinberg, Petersburg Fin de Siècle (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011), 10–46. 10. Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight, 18. 11. N. V. Gogol’, “Nevskii prospekt,” in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v 23 tomakh, vol. 3 (Moscow: Nauka, 2009), 130, 131, 135. 12. For an explication of the genre’s major trends, see Anthony Glinoer, La littérature frénétique (Paris: Universitaires de France, 2009). 13. On the importance of Jules Janin’s prose to Gogol’s portrayal of the neznakomka see V. V. Vinogradov, “Romanticheskii naturalizm (Zhiul’ Zhanen i Gogol’),” in Poetika russkoi literatury: Izbrannye trudy (Moscow: Nauka, 1976), 76–100. 14. Jules Janin, The Dead Donkey and the Guillotined W ­ oman, trans. Terry Hale (Chislehurst, UK: Gothic Society at the Gargoyle’s Head Press, 1993). Enamored of Janin’s tale, Honoré de Balzac composed a grotesque epilogue to Henrietta’s story. Set in the morgue, a group of men perform an autopsy on Henrietta—­cutting out her organs and throwing her flesh to the floor—as an old ­woman watches on and calmly eats a ham sandwich. The finale includes one last detail to ensure reader revulsion: the narrator receives Henrietta’s tibia, which he makes into a penknife as a lasting memento of his affection. See Honoré de Balzac, “The Paper Knife,” in The Dead Donkey and the Guillotined ­Woman, 143-7. 15. Gogol’, “Nevskii prospekt,” in PSS, 3:133, 139, 140, 135. 16. Helena Goscilo, “Unsaintly St. Petersburg? Visions and Visuals,” in Goscilo and Norris, eds., Preserving Petersburg, 59. 17. For more on Gogol’s conceptualization of St. Petersburg, see Sergei Davydov, “Gogol’s Petersburg,” New ­England Review 27, no.  1 (1990): 122–27; and Danielle Jones, “Multifaceted Meta­phor: Gogol’s Portrayal of St. Petersburg in ‘Dead Souls,’ ” Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Lit­er­a­ture 56, no. 2 (2002): 7–24.

NOTES TO PAGES 2 3 – 3 2

205

18. Gogol’, “Nevskii prospekt,” in PSS, 3:136, 150. 19. See Smith, Berlin Coquette, 7–18. 20. Gogol’, “Nevskii prospekt,” in PSS, 3:126, 127, 145. 21. Abby Schrader, “Market Pleasures and Prostitution in St. Petersburg,” in Rus­ sian History through the Senses: From 1700 to the Pre­sent, ed. Matthew Romaniello and Tricia Starks (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 70. 22. Gogol’, “Nevskii prospekt,” in PSS, 3:144. 23. George Siegel, “The Fallen ­Woman in Rus­sian Lit­er­a­ture,” in Harvard Slavic Studies, vol. 5, ed. Horace G. Lunt (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970), 83. 24. N. A. Nekrasov, “Kogda iz mraka . . . ,” in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem v piatnadtsati tomakh, vol. 1 (Leningrad: Nauka, 1981), 34–35. 25. Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, 187. 26. Nekrasov, “Kogda iz mraka . . . ,” in PSS, 1:62–63. 27. Barbara Heldt, Terrible Perfection: ­Women and Rus­sian Lit­er­a­ture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 8. 28. See Andrew Drozd, Chernyshevskii’s What Is to Be Done?: A Reevaluation (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2001), 9–12. 29. Irina Paperno, Chernyshevsky and the Age of Realism: A Study in the Semiotics of Be­hav­ior (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988), 31. For Chernyshevsky’s lasting importance on Rus­sian lit­er­at­ ure, see Rufus W. Mathewson Jr., The Positive Hero in Rus­sian Lit­er­a­ture (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2000): 63–84. 30. For an explication on how the novel also responded to and helped transform the nihilist movement, see Christopher Ely, Under­ground Petersburg: Radical Pop­u­lism, Urban Space, and the Tactics of Subversion in Reform-­Era Rus­sia (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2016), 70–76. 31. Nikolai Chernyshevsky, What Is to Be Done?, trans. Michael Katz (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989), 76, 354. 32. Chernyshevsky, What Is to Be Done?, 230. 33. Chernyshevsky, What Is to Be Done?, 226. 34. Examples of male intellectuals trying to “liberate” w ­ omen from a life of sex work include the literary critic Vasily Botkin, whose marriage to a Pa­ri­sian grisette was short-­lived. According to Alexander Herzen, Botkin claimed he knew the marriage was a ­mistake when his new wife rejected his gift of George Sand’s Jacques, saying that the novel did not suit her. Possibly the longest, if not necessarily the most joyous, of such u ­ nions was between Apollon Grigorev and a former sex worker, Maria Fedorovna, who lived together from 1858 u ­ ntil Grigorev’s death in 1864. On Botkin’s marriage, see A.  I. Herzen, My Past and Thoughts: The Memoirs of Alexander Herzen, vol. 2, trans. Constance Garnett (New York: Chatto and Windus, 1968), 630– 38; and B. F. Egorov, “Ocherki po istorii russkoi kul’tury XIX veka,” in Iz istorii russkoi kul’tury, vol. 5 (Moscow: Iaziki russkoi kul’tury,1996), 262–3 35. For a discussion of Dobroliubov’s affair with Therese Grünwaldt, see Alexey Vdovin, “How to Write the Biography of a Prostitute from the M ­ iddle of the 19th ­Century? Therese Grünwaldt’s Letters to Nikolai Dobroliubov: The Biography of a Prostitute from the ­Middle of the 19th  ­Century as a Research Prob­lem,” Zeitschrift für Slawische Philologie 69, no. 2 (2012–13): 281–96; see also Aleksei Vdovin,

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Dobroliubov: Raznochinets mezhdu dukhom i plot’iu (Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia, 2017): 187–201. 36. Egorov, “Ocherki po istorii russkoi kul’tury XIX veka,” 260–62. 37. Paperno, Chernyshevsky and the Age of Realism, 80. 38. Chernyshevsky, What Is to Be Done?, 224. 39. Olga Matich, “28 Nevsky Prospect: The Sewing Machine, the Seamstress, and Narrative,” in Petersburg/Petersburg: Novel and City, 1900–1921, ed. Olga Matich (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2010), 249. 40. Chernyshevsky, What Is to Be Done?, 222. 41. Jo Anna Isaak, Feminism and Con­temporary Art: The Revolutionary Power of ­Women’s Laughter (New York: Routledge, 1996), 3. 42. Bern­stein, Sonia’s ­Daughters, 122. 43. P. D. Boborykin, Zhertva vecherniaia, in Sochineniia v trekh tomakh, vol. 1 (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1993), 201. 44. Boborykin, Zhertva vecherniaia, in Sochineniia, 1:215. 45. For a detailed explication on the novel as a polemical response to Chernyshevsky’s and Nekrasov’s works, see Viktor Shklovskii, Za i protiv (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1957), 126–65; and V. L. Komarovich, “Mirovaia garmoniia Dostoevskogo,” in O Dostoevskom, ed. Donald Fanger (Providence: Brown University Press, 1966), 119–49. 46. Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” trans. Jay Miskowiec, Diacritics 16, no. 1 (1986): 27. 47. Eliot Borenstein, Men without ­Women: Masculinity and Revolution in Rus­sian Fiction, 1917–1929 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 50. 48. See Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: The Stir of Liberation, 1860–1865 (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1986), 342. 49. F. M. Dostoevskii, Zapiski iz podpol’ia in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v tridsati tomakh, vol. 5 (Leningrad: Nauka, 1973), 175–76, emphasis in the original. 50. See Tsvetan Todorov, Genres in Discourse, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 72–93; Frank, Dostoevsky: The Stir of Liberation, 333–43; and V. V. Zenkovsky, “Dostoevsky’s Religious and Philosophical Views,” in Dostoevsky: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Rene Wellek (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1962), 135. 51. Dostoevskii, Zapiski iz podpol’ia, in PSS, 5:152. 52. Alexandre Parent-­Duchâtelet, De la prostitution dans la ville de Paris: Considérée sous le rapport de l’hygiène publique, de la morale et de l’administration (Paris, 1836), 14. 53. Dostoevskii, Zapiski iz podpol’ia, in PSS, 5:166-67. 54. Dostoevskii, Zapiski iz podpol’ia, in PSS, 5:168. 55. Dostoevskii, Zapiski iz podpol’ia, in PSS, 5:148. 56. The primary source on the artist’s works, E. V. Zhuravleva, Vladimir Egorovich Makovskii, 1846–1920 (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1972), makes no mention of the image. 57. Molly Brunson, Rus­sian Realisms: Lit­er­a­ture and Painting, 1840–1890 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2016), especially chap. 4, “Repin and the Painting of Real­ity.” 58. Linda Nochlin, Misère: The Visual Repre­sen­ta­tion of Misery in the 19th ­Century (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2018), 66.

NOTES TO PAGES 3 9 – 4 5

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59. Charles Bernheimer, Figures of Ill Repute: Representing Prostitution in Nineteenth-­ Century France (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 183. 60. Steinberg, Petersburg Fin de Siècle, 13. 61. Christopher Ely, Under­ground Petersburg: Radical Pop­u­lism, Urban Space, and the Tactics of Subversion in Reform-­Era Rus­sia (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2016), 39. 62. Konstantin Klioutchkine, “ ‘I Smoke, Therefore I Think’: Tobacco as Liberation in Rus­sian Nineteenth-­Century Lit­er­a­ture and Culture,” in Tobacco in Rus­sian History and Culture: From the Seventeenth ­Century to the Pre­sent, ed. Matthew P. Romaniello and Tricia Starks (New York: Routledge, 2009), 96. On the po­liti­cal and social implications of w ­ omen smoking, see also Tricia Starks, Smoking u­ nder the Tsars: A History of Tobacco in Imperial Rus­sia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2018). 63. T. J. Clark, Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999); see also T. J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1999). 64. Allison Leigh, “Il’ia Repin in Paris: Mediating French Modernism,” Slavic Review 78, no. 2 (2019): 438. 65. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Proj­ ect, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 3. 66. Schrader, “Market Pleasures and Prostitution in St. Petersburg,” 70. 67. Schrader, “Market Pleasures and Prostitution in St. Petersburg,” 80. 68. Katia Dianina, “Passage to Eu­rope: Dostoevskii in the St. Petersburg Arcade,” Slavic Review 62, no. 2 (2003): 241–42. 69. Dan Healey, Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Rus­sia: The Regulation of Sexual and Gender Dissent (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 31. 70. Vladimir Mikhnevich, Peterburg ves’ na ladoni v 2 tomakh (St. Petersburg, 1874), 249. 71. Dostoevskii, Prestuplenie i nakazanie, in PSS, 6:122, 123. 72. Dostoevskii, Prestuplenie i nakazanie, in PSS, 6:41, 42. 73. The critical studies about Sonia Marmeladova are substantial in number. The following represent the plurality of views on Dostoevsky’s heroine, ranging in admiration of the writer’s depiction of a saintly character to a critical distrust of the romanticized prostitute. See Richard Curle, Characters of Dostoevsky: Studies from Four Novels (New York: Russell and Russell, 1966), 61–62; Louis Breger, Dostoevsky: The Author as Psychoanalyst (New York: New York University Press, 1989), 186–93; Harriet Murav, “Reading ­Woman in Dostoevsky,” in A Plot of Her Own: The Female Protagonist in Rus­ sian Lit­er­a­ture, ed. Sona Stephan Hoisington (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1995), 44–57; Heldt, Terrible Perfection, 32–37; and Nicholas Moravcevich, “The Romantization of the Prostitute in Dostoevsky’s Fiction,” in The Image of the Prostitute in Modern Lit­er­a­ture, ed. Pierre Horn and Mary Beth Pringle (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1984), 53–61. 74. Dostoevskii, Prestuplenie i nakazanie, in PSS, 6:337. 75. For recent interpretation of the novel’s epilogue, see Kate Holland, “The Clash of Deferral and Anticipation: Crime and Punishment’s Epilogue and the Difficulties of Narrative Closure,” Canadian Slavonic Papers 62, no. 2 (2020): 109–22.

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2. “Safety Valve of Social Passions”

1. On the ­Great Reforms, see Ben Eklof, John Bushnell, and Larissa Zakharova, eds., Rus­sia’s ­Great Reforms 1855–1881 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994); W. Bruce Lincoln, The ­Great Reforms: Autocracy, Bureaucracy, and the Politics of Change in Imperial Rus­sia (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1990); and Alison  K. Smith, For the Common Good and Their Own Well-­Being: Social Estates in Imperial Rus­sia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 125–31. 2. For an overview of how the G ­ reat Reforms impacted ­women in Rus­sia, see Barbara Alpern Engel, ­Women in Rus­sia, 1700–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 68–86; Irina Iukhina, Russkii feminizm kak vyzov sovremennosti (St. Petersburg: Aleteiia, 2007), 123–50; and Stites, The ­Women’s Liberation Movement, 49–60. 3. Engel, ­Women in Rus­sia, 68. 4. The most notable of ­these opportunities was the expansion of ­women’s education—­ particularly, supplemental trainings to gain status as a midwife and the “higher courses” in medicine made available to female students. The advancements made in ­women’s education ­were restricted a­ fter the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881 and the ensuing period of repressive policies. See Christine Johanson, ­Women’s Strug­gles for Higher Education in Rus­sia, 1855–1900 (Kingston: McGill University Press, 1987). 5. Vsevolod Garshin, “Proisshestvie,” in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 1 (St. Petersburg, 1910), 101. 6. Leo Tolstoy, Resurrection, trans. Anthony Briggs (New York: Penguin, 2009), 346. 7. N. K. Mikhailovskii, “O merakh k protivodeistviiu prostitutsii,” in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, ed. E. E. Kolosov, vol. 10 (St. Petersburg, 1913), 409. 8. See Bernheimer, Figures of Ill Repute, 34–40. 9. See Shashkov, Ocherk istorii russkoi zhenshchiny, 245–51; and M. G. Kuznetsov, Prostitutsiia i sifilis v Rossii (St. Petersburg, 1871), 67–79. For a comparison of Rus­sian and Eu­ro­pean knowledge of syphilis in the nineteenth ­century, see Laura Engelstein, “Syphilis Historical and A ­ ctual: Cultural Geography of a Disease,” Reviews in Infectious Diseases 8, no. 6 (1986): 1036–48. For a detailed overview on Rus­sian conceptualizations of the disease, see Engelstein, Keys to Happiness, 165–211. 10. Engelstein, Keys to Happiness, 128. 11. V. M. Tarnovskii, Prostitutsiia i abolitsionizm (St. Petersburg, 1888), 185–87. 12. As both Laura Engelstein and Sharon Kowalsky have pointed out, Tarnovskaia disagreed with Lombroso’s assessment that ­women’s sexual desire was pathological. See Engelstein, Keys to Happiness, 137–52; and Sharon Kowalsky, Deviant W ­ omen: Female Crime and Criminology in Revolutionary Rus­sia, 1880–1930 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2009), 40–48. 13. Cesare Lombroso and Guglielmo Ferrero, Criminal W ­ oman, the Prostitute, and the Normal ­Woman, trans. Nicole Hahn Rafter and Mary Gibson (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 182–226. 14. Kowalksy, Deviant ­Women, 45. 15. Tarnovskii, Prostitutsiia i abolitsionizm, 139. 16. Irina Ashcroft, “Peterburgskie trushchoby: A Rus­sian Version of Les Mystères de Paris,” Revue de Littèrature Comparèe 53 (1979): 163–74. 17. Institute of Rus­sian Lit­er­at­ure, Pushkin House (IRLI), St. Petersburg, f. 129, op. 1, no. 30.

NOTES TO PAGES 5 3 – 6 1

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18. Vsevolod Krestovskii, Peterburgskie trushchoby (Kniga o sytykh i golodnykh): Roman v 2-kh knigakh, vol. 2 (Leningrad: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1990), 640. 19. Krestovskii, Peterburgskie trushchoby, 620, 627. 20. Krestovskii, Peterburgskie trushchoby, 620, 624. 21. Bernheimer, Figures of Ill Repute, 88. 22. ­These include works like M. N. Al’bov, “Peterburgskie mizerabli,” Peterburgskii listok, September 4, 1866; Iu. Angarov, Novye peterburgskie trushchoby: ocherki stolichnoi zhizni (St. Petersburg, 1910); and N. I. Sveshnikov, Peterburgskie Viazemskie trushchoby i ikh obitateli (St. Petersburg, 1900). 23. The blatant failure of his anti-­Semitic novel The Jew is Coming (Zhid idet, 18881892) (The Jew is coming, 1888–1892) marked the end of his literary c­ areer. He continued writing for newspapers and was made editor of the government outlet Varshavskii dnevnik (Warsaw daily), a post he held u ­ ntil his death in 1895. On Krestovsky’s life and art, see V. A. Viktorovich, “V.V. Krestovskii,” in Russkie pisateli, vol. 3, ed. P. A. Nikolaev (Moscow: Bol’shaia Rossiiskaia Entsiklopediia, 1994), 146–49. 24. M.  V. Otradin, “Roman  V.V. Krestovskogo Peterburgskie trushchoby,” in Krestovskii, Peterburgskie trushchoby, 3. For a detailed account of the relationship between Dostoevsky and Krestovsky, see V. A. Viktorovich, “Dostoevskii i Vs. Krestovskii,” in Dostoevskii: Materialy i issledovaniia, vol. 9 (Leningrad: Nauka, 1991), 92–116. 25. On pochvennichestvo, see Wayne Dowler, Dostoevsky, Grigor’ev, and Native Soil Conservatism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982); and Frank, Dostoevsky: Stir of Liberation, 34–47. 26. S. N. Kaidash-­Lakshina, “ ‘Padshaia zhenshchina’ v tvorchestve Garshina,” in V. M Garshin na rubezhe vekov: Mezhdunarodnyi sbornik v trekh tomakh, vol. 1, ed. Peter Henry, M. M. Girshman, and Vladimir Porudominskii (Oxford: Northgate, 2000), 112. 27. On Garshin’s two known visits to brothels see Iakov Abramov, “Vsevolod Mikhailovich Garshin,” in Pamiati V.M. Garshina, ed. Iakov Abramov (St. Petersburg, 1889), 33; and Peter Henry, A Hamlet of His Time: Vsevolod Garshin: The Man, His Works, and His Milieu (Oxford: Willem Meeuws, 1983), 115. 28. Henry, A Hamlet of His Time, 69. 29. Henry, A Hamlet of His Time, 11–22. 30. Mikhailovskii, “O merakh k protivodeistviiu prostitutsii,” 409. The quote from Pierre Dufour reads “il est le gardien immoral de la moralité publique.” See Pierre Dufour, Histoire de la prostitution chez tous les peuples du monde depuis l’antiquité la plus reculée jusqu’à nos jours, vol. 1 (Paris, 1851), 7. 31. Colleen Lucey, “Vio­lence, Murder, and Fallen ­Women: Prostitution in the Works of Vsevolod Garshin,” Canadian Slavonic Papers 58 (2016): 362–85. 32. See Iu. Grigor’ev, “Dve dorogi. K istorii rasskaza V.M. Garshina ‘Proisshestvie,’ ” Prometei 7 (1969): 266. 33. Garshin, “Proisshestvie,” in PSS, 1:101. 34. Bern­stein, Sonia’s ­Daughters, 126–28. 35. Garshin, “Proisshestvie,” in PSS, 1:101. 36. “An Incident,” also served as an inspiration for ­future writers, including Anton Chekhov, whose story “A Ner­vous Breakdown” (“Pripadok,” 1889) was published in a volume to commemorate Garshin’s untimely death. Chekhov partially modeled Vasiliev, the sensitive hero of “A Ner­vous Breakdown,” on Garshin. In Chekhov’s story, Vasiliev suffers a ­mental breakdown when he realizes he is helpless to save prostitutes,

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b­ ecause as one man, he could never marry all of them. For a detailed explication on how Chekhov’s story uses Dostoevskian motifs, see Carol A. Flath, “Chekhov’s Under­ ground Man: An Attack of Nerves,” Slavic and East Eu­ro­pean Journal 44, no.  3 (Fall 2000): 375-92. Recently, Anne Eakin Moss has persuasively argued that “Vasiliev’s breakdown comes in response to a vision of w ­ omen as an international, modern, cosmopolitan mass, a synecdoche of the crowd or the proletariat that immobilizes him and prevents him from acting effectively as an individual.” See Anne Eakin Moss, Only Among ­Women: Philosophies of Community in the Rus­sian and Soviet Imagination, 1860-1940 (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2020), 89. 37. Foucault explains the push for regulation of commercial sex as part of a “strict hierarchy” that made it pos­si­ble “to canalize and to recover by a ­whole series of intermediaries the enormous profits from a sexual plea­sure that an ever more insistent everyday moralization condemned to semiclandestinity and naturally made expensive.” Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1995), 278. 38. Corbin, ­Women for Hire, 16. 39. See A. F. Koni, Sobranie sochinenii v 8 tomakh, vol. 6 (Moscow: Iuridicheskaia literatura, 1968), 474; and L. N. Tolstoi, Voskresenie, in Sobranie sochinenii v 22 tomakh, vol. 13 (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1983), 459–62. 40. Louise McReynolds, Murder Most Rus­sian: True Crime and Punishment in Late Imperial Rus­sia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013), 3. 41. Tolstoy, Resurrection, 75. 42. Tolstoy, Resurrection, 282. 43. Tolstoy, Resurrection, 464. 44. Anton Chekhov, quoted in Hugh McLean, In Quest of Tolstoy (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2008), 86. 45. Dmitry Mirsky, A History of Rus­sian Lit­er­a­ture: From its Beginnings to 1900 (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1999), 320; Hugh McLean, “Resurrection,” in The Cambridge Companion to Tolstoy, ed. Donna Tussing Orwin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 96-110; Ani Kokobobo, “Estranged and Degraded Worlds: The Grotesque Aesthetics of Tolstoy’s Resurrection,” Tolstoy Studies Journal 24 (2012): 2. 46. Edwina Cruise, “The Ideal W ­ oman in Tolstoi: Resurrection,” Canadian-­American Slavic Studies 11, no. 2 (1977): 281–86; Donna Orwin, “The Riddle of Prince Nexljudov,” Slavic and East Eu­ro­pean Journal 30, no.  4 (1986): 473–86; Daniel Rancour-­ Laferriere, Tolstoy on the Couch: Misogyny, Masochism, and the Absent M ­ other (New York: New York University Press, 1998). 47. Tolstoy, Resurrection, 84–85. 48. On the topic of pathology and prostitution in late imperial Rus­sia, see Engelstein, Keys to Happiness, chap. 4, “Female Sexual Deviance and the Western Medical Model”; and Kowalsky, Deviant ­Women, 40–43. 49. While in Rus­sia in 1897 for a medical conference, Lombroso visited Tolstoy at the writer’s estate in Yasnaya Polyana. Writing his reflection of the encounter, Lombroso admits that Tolstoy deeply disagreed ideas on ge­ne­tic criminality. See Cesare Lombroso, “Mein Besuch bei Tolstoi,” Das freie Wort 1 (1902): 391–97. 50. Tolstoy, Resurrection, 9, 13, 73.

NOTES TO PAGES 6 5 – 7 2

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51. Tolstoy, Resurrection, 170. 52. See, for example Tarnovskii, Prostitutsiia i abolitsionizm, 165–66. 53. Tolstoy, Resurrection, 173. 54. Tolstoy, Resurrection, 55. 55. M. M. Bakhtin, “Predislovie. ‘Voskresenie’ L. Tolstogo,” in L.N. Tolstoi: Pro et contra (St. Petersburg: Izdatel’stvo russkogo Khristianskogo gumanitarnogo instituta, 2000), 770. 56. Tolstoy, Resurrection, 347. 57. In Julie Buckler’s perceptive reading of Tolstoy’s novel, Nekhliudov’s critical response to the theater production is somewhat ironic given that he “fails to make the connection between La Dame aux camélias and his own circumstances.” Julie Buckler, The Literary Lorgnette: Attending Opera in Imperial Rus­sia (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 152. 58. Laura Mulvey, “Visual plea­sure and narrative cinema,” in Constance Penley (ed.), Feminism and Film Theory (New York: Routledge, 1988), 64. 59. Tolstoy, Resurrection, 22. 60. Leo Tolstoy, The Kreutzer Sonata, trans. David McDuff and Paul Foote (New York: Penguin, 2008), 126, 128. 61. Olga Matich, Erotic Utopia: The De­cadent Imagination in Rus­sia’s Fin de Siècle (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005), 51. 62. For critical analyses of The Kreutzer Sonata, see Ruth Crego Benson, ­Women in Tolstoy: The Ideal and the Erotic (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1973), 111–38; Peter Ulf Møller, Postlude to the Kreutzer Sonata: Tolstoj and the Debate on Sexual Morality in Rus­sian Lit­er­a­ture of the 1890s, trans. John Kendal (New York: E. J. Brill, 1988); Natalia Dame, “The Search for Female Sexuality in Tolstoy’s ­Family Happiness and The Kreutzer Sonata,” Ulbandus Review 16 (2014): 158–76; and Stephen Baehr, “Art and The Kreutzer Sonata: A Tolstoian Approach,” Canadian-­American Slavic Studies 10, no. 1 (1976): 39–46. 63. Andrea Dworkin, Intercourse: The Twentieth Anniversary Edition (New York: Basic Books, 2006), 9, 13. 64. Tolstoy, The Kreutzer Sonata, 117. 65. Tolstoy, The Kreutzer Sonata, 121. 66. Engelstein, Keys to Happiness, 375. 67. Frederick H. White, “Peering into the Abyss: Andreev’s Rejoinder to Tolstoi’s Kreutzer Sonata,” Canadian Slavonic Papers 50, nos. 3–4 (2008): 471–86. See also Frederick H. White, Degeneration, De­cadence and Disease in the Rus­sian Fin-­de-­Siècle: Neurasthenia in the Life and Work of Leonid Andreev (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2014), chap. 4, “Controversy and Success.” 68. Sofiia Tolstaia, “Pis’mo v redaktsiiu,” Novoe vremia, February 7–20, 1903. 69. Laura Engelstein, The Keys to Happiness, 373. See also James Woodward, Leonid Andreyev: A Study (Oxford: Clarendon, 1969), 72–75, 230–40. 70. Leonid Andreev, “V tumane,” in Sobranie sochinenii v shesti tomakh, vol. 1, ed. I. G. Andreeva et al. (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1990), 445–46. 71. Andreev, “V tumane,” in SS, 1:456. The father’s patronymic is abbreviated to Andreich in the text. 72. Andreev, “V tumane,” in SS, 1:456, 457, 458, 463.

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73. Andreev, “V tumane,” in SS, 1:446, 456, 450. 74. The correspondence between Andreev and Izmailov was published by V. Grechnev in Russkaia literatura vol. 3 (1962): 193-201. The specific letter regarding “V tumane” dates from February 11, 1903. 75. Andreev, “V tumane,” in SS, 1: 465, 466, 467, 468. 76. Andreev, “V tumane,” in SS, 1: 462, 467. 77. Eva Buchwald, “The Silence of Rebellion: W ­ omen in the Work of Leonid Andreev,” in Gender and Rus­sian Lit­er­a­ture: New Perspectives, ed. Rosalind Marsh (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 239. 78. Tarnovskii, Prostitutsiia i abolitsionizm, 139. 79. George Sand, quoted in Ferents List, O Shopene (Moscow: Iurait, 2018), 118; quoted also in Franz Liszt, The Collected Writings of Franz Liszt, vol. 1, ed. Janita Hall-­ Swadley (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow, 2011), 220. This phrase is attributed to George Sand, although w ­ hether the famous writer declared this statement to Chopin is uncertain. 80. See, for example, Aleksandra Kollontai, “Dorogu krylatomu erosu!” Molodaia Gvardiia 3 (1923): 111-124. For a comprehensive study on early Soviet discourse on sexuality, including Kollontai’s contribution to the discussion of the f­amily, see Eric Naiman, Sex in Public: The Incarnation of Early Soviet Ideology (Prince­ton: Prince­ton University Press, 1997). 81. See Aleksandra M. Kollontai, “Prostitution and Ways of Fighting It,” in Selected Writings, trans. Alix Holt (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977), 261–75. 3. Tricks of the Trade

1. The French terms demimonde and demimondaine entered Rus­sian parlance ­after the publication in 1855 of Alexandre Dumas fils’ play Le Demi-­Monde. Alternatively referred to by its Rus­sian equivalent, polusvet, the sexual subculture of Rus­sia’s demimonde became associated with the city of St. Petersburg from the second-­half of the nineteenth ­century through the fin de siècle. 2. In ways similar to repre­sen­ta­tions of fallen ­women in British culture, Rus­sian depictions align the elite prostitute with high fashion. See Mariana Valverde, “The Love of Finery: Fashion and the Fallen ­Woman in Nineteenth-­Century Social Discourse,” Victorian Studies 32, no. 2 (1989): 168–88. 3. I. I. Panaev, Ocherki iz peterburgskoi zhizni novogo poeta (St. Petersburg: Izdanie Martynova, 1889), 56, 240, emphasis added. 4. On the Rus­sian reception of La dame aux camélias (1848) and its operatic version La Traviata (1853), see Buckler, The Literary Lorgnette, 125–52; and Priscilla Meyer, How the Rus­sians Read the French (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2008), 163– 65, 194–200. 5. Victor Turner, The Ritual Pro­cess: Structure and Anti-­structure (Chicago: Aldine, 1969). 6. Shashkov, Ocherk istorii russkoi zhenshchiny, 261. 7. Panaev, Ocherki iz peterburgskoi zhizni, 71. 8. The most notable example from the Rus­sian context is Terese Lachmann (1819– 84) who pulled herself out of the Moscow slums to become one of the most celebrated courtesans of Pa­ri­sian society. Known as La Païva, Lachmann was famous for

NOTES TO PAGES 8 1 – 8 6

213

her extravagant be­hav­ior. According to legend, one of her suitors, Adolphe Gaiffe, desperately sought her affections; a­ fter much chagrin, she told Gaiffe to bring her ten thousand francs. When Gaiffe arrived with the money, La Païva began burning the notes in front of every­one in attendance. See Joanna Richardson, The Courtesans: The Demi-­Monde in 19th-­Century France (Edison, NJ: ­Castle Books, 2004), 54. 9. Catherine Schuler, ­Women in Rus­sian Theatre: The Actress in the Silver Age (New York: Routledge, 1996), 27. 10. Julie Cassiday, “The Rise of the Actress in Early Nineteenth-­Century Rus­sia,” in ­Women in Nineteenth-­Century Rus­sia: Lives and Culture, ed. Wendy Rosslyn and Alessandra Tosi (Cambridge: Open Book, 2012), 142. 11. Chernyshevsky, What Is to Be Done?, 123. 12. M. E. Saltykov-­Shchedrin, Gospoda Golovlevy, in Sobranie sochinenii v 20 tomakh, vol. 13 (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1972), 233–47. 13. My use of the term “theatricality” in this context draws from Erving Goffmann’s descriptions in The Pre­sen­ta­tion of Self in Everyday Life (Harmonds­worth, UK: Penguin, 1990). 14. Abigail Solomon-­Godeau, “The Other Side of Venus: The Visual Economy of Feminine Display,” in The Sex of ­Things: Gender and Consumption in Historical Perspective, ed. Victoria de Grazia and Ellen Furlough (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 125. 15. M. D. Chulkov, The Comely Cook, or The Adventures of a Debauched W ­ oman, trans. Harold Segel, in The Lit­er­a­ture of Eighteenth-­Century Rus­sia, vol. 2, ed. Harold Segel (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1967), 29. 16. Ulrich Wicks, “The Nature of the Picaresque Narrative: A Modal Approach,” PMLA 89, no. 2 (1974): 242. 17. Lois Chaber, “Matriarchal Mirror: ­Women and Capital in Moll Flanders,” PMLA 97, no. 2 (1982): 212. 18. As Striedter convincingly argues, ­there is ­little evidence to prove that Chulkov could have read Defoe’s text. See Iurii Striedter, Plutovskoi roman v Rossii: k istorii russkogo romana do Gogolia (St. Petersburg: Aleteiia, 2015), 157–58. 19. Chulkov, The Comely Cook, 30. 20. Elise Kimerling Wirtschafter, “Social Misfits: Veterans and Soldiers’ Families in Servile Rus­sia,” Journal of Military History 59, no. 2 (1995): 228, 229. 21. On the supposed promiscuity of soldiers’ wives, see also Bern­stein, Sonia’s ­Daughters, 18–19; David Ransel, ­Mothers of Misery: Child Abandonment in Rus­sia (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1988), 154–60; and Beatrice Farnsworth, “The Soldatka: Folklore and Court Rec­ord,” Slavic Review 49 (1990): 58–73. 22. Chulkov, The Comely Cook, 47. 23. David Gasperetti, The Rise of the Rus­sian Novel: Carnival, Stylization, and Mockery of the West (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1998), 28. 24. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 3. 25. Chulkov, The Comely Cook, 31. 26. Gary Marker, Publishing, Printing, and the Origins of Intellectual Life in Rus­sia (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1985), 120. 27. Gasperetti, The Rise of the Rus­sian Novel, 57–59, 60. 28. Striedter, Plutovskoi roman v Rossii, 133.

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29. D. D. Blagoi, Istoriia russkoi literatury XVIII veka (Moscow: Uchpedgiz, 1945), 461. 30. On Chulkov’s inability to find a proper conclusion to Martona’s narrative, see Viktor Shklovskii, Chulkov i Levshin (Leningrad: Izdatel’stvo pisatelei v Leningrade, 1933), 116. 31. Marcia Morris, The Lit­er­a­ture of Roguery in Seventeenth-­and Eighteenth-­Century Rus­sia (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2000), 91. 32. Gasperetti, The Rise of the Rus­sian Novel, 80. 33. Striedter, Plutovskoi roman v Rossii, 134. 34. Chulkov, The Comely Cook, 30, 31. 35. Emma Lieber, “Investigations into the Unpoliced Novel: Moll Flanders and The Comely Cook,” Slavic Review 74, no. 3 (2015): 589. 36. Chulkov, The Comely Cook, 31. 37. Venita Datta, Heroes and Legends of Fin-­de-­Siècle France: Gender, Politics, and National Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 22. 38. For an overview on how literati framed the discussion of womanhood in this period, see Wendy Rosslyn, “Conflicts over Gender and Status in Early Nineteenth-­ Century Rus­sian Lit­er­a­ture: The Case of Anna Bunina and Her Poem Padenie Faetona,” in Marsh, ed., Gender and Rus­sian Lit­er­a­ture, 55–74; and Judith Vowles, “The ‘Feminization’ of Rus­sian Lit­er­a­ture: ­Women, Language and Lit­er­at­ ure in Eighteenth-­ Century Rus­sia,” in ­Women Writers in Rus­sian Lit­er­a­ture, ed. Toby Clyman and Diana Greene (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1994): 35–60. 39. Rosalind Gray, Rus­sian Genre Painting in the Nineteenth C ­ entury (Oxford: Clarendon, 2000), 56. On lithography of this period, see Nataliia Solomatina, Iz russkoi zhizni XVIII-­nachala XX veka (St. Petersburg: Palace Editions, 2010), 5–18; A. F. Korostin, Russkaia litografiia XIX veka (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1953), 32–54; and Galina Miroliubova, Russkaiia litografiia 1810-­e-1890-­e gg: Ocherki istorii, mastera, pechatnye tsentry, izdatel’stva (Moscow: Tsentropoligraf, 2006), 22–149. For a historical overview on caricature with par­tic­u­lar attention to repre­sen­ta­tion of po­liti­cal figures and events, see John Bowlt, “Nineteenth-­Century Rus­sian Caricature,” in Art and Culture in Nineteenth-­Century Rus­sia, ed. Theofanis George Stavrou (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983a), 221–36. 40. Katia Dianina, When Art Makes News: Writing Culture and Identity in Imperial Rus­sia (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2013), 154. For additional contextualization on the graphic artists working in the 1840s, see L. M. Lotman, “Proza sorokovykh godov [XIX veka],” in Istoriia russkoi literatury: V 10 tomakh, vol. 7 (Leningrad: Pushkinskii Dom, 1955), 534–36. 41. See L.  R. Vershavskii, Russkaia karikatura 40-50-gg. XIX v. (Moscow: OGIZ-­ IZOGIZ, 1937), 59–64. 42. In her study of graphic satire from the 1860s, Carol Adlam persuasively argues that illustrations from broadsheet publications offer vital insight on the development of urban cultural life and the evolution of art criticism. See Carol Adlam, “The Frisky Pencil: Aesthetic Vision in Rus­sian Graphic Satire of the Period of the ­Great Reforms,” Nineteenth-­Century Art Worldwide 3, no. 2 (2004), http://­www​.­19thc​-­artworldwide​.­org​ /­index​.­php​/­autumn04​/­297​-­the​-­qfrisky​-­pencilq​-­aesthetic​-­vision​-­in​-­r ussian​-­g raphic​ -­satire​-­of​-­the​-­period​-­of​-­the​-­great​-­reforms. Art historian Margaret Samu has also written on the topic of caricature in the 1860s and shown how this medium became a vehicle to comment on shifting social norms in relation to images of the female nude.

NOTES TO PAGES 9 0 – 9 6

215

See Margaret Samu, “Making a Case for Realism: The Female Nude in Rus­sian Satirical Images of the 1860s,” in From Realism to the Silver Age: New Studies in Rus­sian Artistic Culture, ed. Rosalind Blakesley and Margaret Samu (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2014), 44–58. On literacy rates of the mid-­nineteenth c­ entury and the development of the popu­lar commercial publishing industry, see Jeffrey Brooks, When Rus­sia Learned to Read: Literacy and Popu­lar Lit­er­a­ture, 1861–1917 (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ ton University Press, 1985), 59–165. 43. Colleen McQuillen, The Modernist Masquerade: Stylizing Life, Lit­er­a­ture, and Costumes in Rus­sia (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2013), 12. 44. On the publication history of Eralash and the editors’ conflict with the censors, see Margaret Bridget Betz and Andrew M. Nedd, “Irony, Derision, and Magical Wit: Censors as a Spur to Rus­sian Abstract Art,” in Po­liti­cal Censorship of the Visual Arts in Nineteenth-­Century Eu­rope: Arresting Images, ed. Robert Justin Goldstein and Andrew M. Nedd (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 12. 45. See Cindy McCreery, The Satirical Gaze: Prints of W ­ omen in Late Eighteenth-­ Century ­England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); and Mark Hallett, The Spectacle of Difference: Graphic Satire in the Age of Hogarth (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999). For the repre­sen­ta­tion of ­women in French visual culture, see Vivian Cameron, “Gender and Power: Images of ­Women in Late 18th-­Century France,” History of Eu­ro­pean Ideas 10 (1989): 309–32. 46. On Aleksandr Lebedev’s artistry, see E.  I. Smirnova, “Aleksandr Ignat’evich Lebedev (1830–1898),” in Russkoe iskusstvo: Ocherki o zhizni i tvorchestve khudozhnikov. Seredina 19 veka, ed. A. I. Leonov (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1958); and E. Gollerbakh, Istoriia graviury i litografii v Rossii (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo, 1923) 104–6. 47. On V. F. Timm’s works, including Nashi, spisannye s natury russkim (1848) and Russkii khudozhestvennyi listok (1851–62), see Galina Miroliubova, Portret v russkoi litografii XIX veka (St. Petersburg: Izdatel’stvo gosudarstvennogo Ermitazha, 2012), 18–19; Gollerbakh, Istoriia graviury i litografii v Rossii, 103–4; and V. A. Vereshchagin, Russkaia karikatura: V.F. Timm (St. Petersburg: Sirius, 1911). 48. F. V. Bulgarin, Kartinki russkikh nravov, knizhka I (St. Petersburg, 1842), 42–43. 49. Bulgarin, Kartinki russkikh nravov, 45. 50. The natu­ral school received its name from none other than Bulgarin, who used the term as a criticism rather than a compliment when condemning the hyperrealism of his contemporaries. Undeterred by Bulgarin’s disparaging remarks, Vissarion Belinsky appropriated the term to affirm the literary movement’s attention to social reform and the a­ ctual, lived experience of common folk. See V. G. Belinskii, “Vzgliad na russkuiu literaturu 1846 goda,” in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v 13 tomakh, vol. 10 (Moscow: Akademiia nauk SSSR, 1956), 7–50; and V. G. Belinskii, “Vzgliad na russkuiu lit­er­a­turu 1847 goda,” in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v 13 tomakh, vol. 10, 279–359. On the cultural significance of the natu­ral school, see V. I. Kuleshov, Natu­ral’naia shkola v russkoi lit­er­a­ ture XIX veka. 2nd ed. (Moscow: Prosveshchenie, 1982); Victor Terras, Belinskij and Rus­ sian Literary Criticism: The Heritage of Organic Aesthetics (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1974); and V. V. Vinogradov, Evoliutsiia russkogo naturalizma: Gogol’ i Dostoevskii (Leningrad: Academia, 1929). 51. Brunson, Rus­sian Realisms, 30. 52. In her thorough study of late imperial leisure culture, Louise McReynolds traces the origins of the “legitimate” stage in Rus­sia, focusing par­tic­u­lar attention on

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the ­career of Alexander Ostrovsky in the formulation of a national theater that appealed to diverse audiences. See Louise McReynolds, Rus­sia at Play: Leisure Activities at the End of the Tsarist Era (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), 14–75. 53. Buckler, The Literary Lorgnette, 26–27. 54. Richard Stites, Serfdom, Society, and the Arts in Imperial Rus­sia: The Plea­sure and the Power (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 153. 55. Panaev, Ocherki iz peterburgskoi zhizni novogo poeta, 200–201. 56. Panaev, Ocherki iz peterburgskoi zhizni novogo poeta, 193. 57. Panaev, Ocherki iz peterburgskoi zhizni novogo poeta, 203. 58. Panaev, Ocherki iz peterburgskoi zhizni novogo poeta, 229. 59. Christine Ruane, “Clothes Shopping in Imperial Rus­sia: The Development of a Consumer Culture,” Journal of Social History 28, no. 4 (1995): 774. 60. On the history of Iskra and its importance to print culture in Rus­sia, see I. G. Iampol’skii, Satiricheskaia zhurnalistika 1860-kh godov. Zhurnal revoliutsionnoi satiry “Iskra” (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1964). 61. Sally West studies the cultural history of advertising at length in I Shop in Moscow: The Creation of Consumer Culture in Late Tsarist Rus­sia (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2011). West notes that the impulse to connect w ­ omen with consumption increases with “growing urbanization and the rise of wage ­labor ­after the emancipation of the serfs,” so that “by the late nineteenth c­ entury the identification of men as producers and w ­ omen as consumers spread in Rus­sia” (142). On similar tendencies in western Eu­rope to connect ­women and consumption, see Felski, The Gender of Modernity. 62. Engel, “St. Petersburg Prostitutes,” 21–44; Stites, “Prostitute and Society in Pre-­ Revolutionary Rus­sia,” 356. 63. Schrader, “Market Pleasures and Prostitution in St. Petersburg,” 80. 64. Mary Louise Roberts, “Gender, Consumption, and Commodity Culture,” American Historical Review 103, no. 3 (1998), 818. 65. For additional analy­sis of the ­album and its reception, see Colleen Lucey, “ ‘Fallen but Charming Creatures’: The Demimondaine in Rus­sian Lit­er­a­ture and Visual Culture of the 1860s,” Rus­sian Review 78, no. 1 (2019): 103–21. 66. The art historian Vasilii Andreevich Vereshchagin (1859–1931) notes that the ­album’s publisher Pol-­Peti sent copies of Pogibshie, no milye sozdaniia to all the bookstores and art-­selling establishments in St.  Petersburg. Few complete ­albums remain intact, in large part b­ ecause the printer did not bind the lithographs but sold them as in­de­pen­dent prints, ten at a time. The first a­ lbum contains thirty lithographs—­all of them by Lebedev. The remaining thirty images w ­ ere published separately and completed by a team of three artists: V. Griner, V. Kriukov, and Petrov (first name unknown) An additional a­ lbum, Eshche desiatok pogibshikh, no milykh sozdanii (Another ten fallen but charming creatures) was published in 1863; some of the prints in this ­album are duplicates of images from the first a­ lbum. All the lithographs in Eshche desiatok pogibshikh, no milykh sozdanii are the work of Lebedev. See V. A. Vereshchagin, Russkaia illiustrirovannye izdaniia XVIII i XIX stoletii: 1720–1870 (St. Petersburg, 1898), 125. 67. The ­album’s focus on ­women’s attire likely draws from pages in journals like Moda that advertised the latest French fashions for the public. See Christine Ruane, “Spreading the Word: The Development of the Rus­sian Fashion Press,” in Producing

NOTES TO PAGES 1 0 7 – 1 1 5

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Fashion: Commerce, Culture, and Consumers, ed. Regina Lee Blaszczyk (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008): 21–41. 68. Leigh, “Il’ia Repin in Paris,” 436. 69. David Jackson, “Western Art and Rus­sian Ethics: Repin in Paris, 1873–76,” Rus­ sian Review 57, no. 3 (1998): 394–409. 70. Ivan Kramskoi, quoted in Leigh, “Il’ia Repin in Paris,” 442. 71. Quoted in Andrey Shabanov, Art and Commerce in Late Imperial Rus­sia: The Peredvizhniki, a Partnership of Artists (New York: Bloomsbury, 2019), 171. 72. Trenton Olson, “Fallen Womanhood and Modernity in Ivan Kramskoi’s Unknown ­Woman (1883)” (master’s thesis, Brigham Young University, 2014), 4. 73. Allison Leigh, Picturing Rus­sia’s Men: Masculinity and Modernity in 19th-­Century Painting (New York: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2020), 209, 211. 74. Judith Butler, Gender Trou­ble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), 185. 75. Bonnie Gordon and Martha Feldman, “Introduction,” in The Courtesan’s Arts: Cross-­Cultural Perspectives, ed. Martha Feldman and Bonnie Gordon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 6. 76. Chernyshevsky, What Is to Be Done?, 75. 4. The Dowerless Bride on Russia’s Marriage Market

1. Engel, ­Mothers and ­Daughters, 25. 2. The scholarship on property rights in imperial Rus­sia has shown that unlike many of their counter­parts in the West, Rus­sia’s noblewomen could control their land and estates a­ fter marriage and w ­ ere considerable property ­owners in their own right. See Michelle Lamarche Marrese, A ­Woman’s Kingdom: Noblewomen and the Control of Property in Rus­sia, 1700–1861 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002). For a broader discussion on property transference and the importance of bridal wealth, see William Wagner, Marriage, Property, and Law (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994), 200–235; N. L. Pushkareva, ­Women in Rus­sian History: From the Tenth to the Twentieth ­Century, 44, 106–8; and Engel, ­Women in Rus­sia, 51–52. 3. F. M. Dostoevskii, “Krotkaia,” in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v tridsati tomakh, vol. 24 (Leningrad: Nauka, 1982), 10. 4. Barbara Alpern Engel, Breaking the Ties That Bound: The Politics of Marital Strife in Late Imperial Rus­sia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011), 51–64. 5. A. N. Ostrovskii, Bednaia nevesta, in Sobranie sochinenii i pisem v 16 tomakh, vol. 1 (Moscow: Goslitizdat, 1952), 158. 6. Rubin, “The Traffic in W ­ omen,” 39. 7. On the importance of Tatiana in Pushkin’s text, see Olga Peters Hasty, Pushkin’s Tatiana (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999). 8. Rosslyn, “Conflicts over Gender and Status,” 55. For additional context on the importance of female taste and the valorization of ­women’s moral superiority at the end of the eigh­teenth ­century, see Vowles, “The ‘Feminization’ of Rus­sian Lit­er­a­ture.” 9. A number of scholars have studied the image of the ball in nineteenth-­century Rus­sian lit­er­a­ture. The ball appears in literary production as a locus to explore romantic feelings, but also to decry deceptive, unnatural, “theatrical” be­hav­iors. See Valeria

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Sobol, “ ‘Shumom bala utomlennyj’: The Physiological Aspect of the Society Ball and the Subversion of Romantic Rhe­toric,” Rus­sian Lit­er­a­ture 69 (2001): 293–314; Stephanie Sandler, “Plea­sure, Danger, and the Dance: Nineteenth-­Century Rus­sian Variations,” in Russia—­Women—­Culture, ed. Helena Goscilo and Beth Holmgren (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 247–72; Elizabeth Aldrich, From the Ballroom to Hell: Grace and Folly in Nineteenth-­Century Dance (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1991). 10. A. S. Pushkin, Evgenii Onegin, in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v desiati tomakh, vol. 5 (Leningrad: Nauka, 1978), 139; all subsequent citations are from this edition, however I have made use of the following translation: Alexander Pushkin, Eugene Onegin, trans. James E. Falen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 168. 11. Pushkin, Evgenii Onegin, 140. 12. On the importance of female-­led literary salons in this period, see Lina Bern­ stein, “­Women on the Verge of a New Language: Rus­sian Salon Hostesses in the First Half of the Nineteenth C ­ entury,” in Goscilo and Holmgren, eds., Russia—­Women—­ Culture, 209–24. 13. Arja Rosenholm and Irina Savkina, “ ‘How ­Women Should Write’: Rus­sian ­Women’s Writing in the Nineteenth C ­ entury,” in Rosslyn and Tosi, eds., ­Women in Nineteenth-­Century Rus­sia, 166. 14. Rostopchina gained critical acclaim in the 1830s, but her reputation suffered in the 1850s when the radical critics (including Chernyshevsky) began attacking her works as retrograde. For an overview of Rostopchina’s life and art, see Laura Jo McCullough, “Evdokiia Rostopchina,” in Rus­sian ­Women Writers, vol 1, ed. Christine Tomei (New York: Garland, 1999), 89–120; M. Sh. Fainshtein, Pisatel’nitsy pushkinskoi pory: Istoriko-­ literaturnye ocherki (Leningrad: Nauka, 1989), 83–104; and Diana Greene, “Nineteenth-­ Century ­Women Poets: Critical Reception vs. Self-­Definition,” in Clyman and Greene, eds., ­Women Writers in Rus­sian Lit­er­a­ture, 103–4. Pavlova, like Rostopchina, ran an impor­ tant literary salon where she garnered a reputation as a “poet’s poet.” By the 1850s, though, prominent literary figures began criticizing Pavlova ­because they found her “unnatural, affected, insufficiently feminine” or, in the case of Saltykov-­Shchedrin, “for being an unprogressive Slavophile.” See Greene, “Nineteenth-­Century ­Women Poets,” 104–6. On Pavlova’s literary oeuvre, see Diana Greene, “Karolina Pavlova,” in Tomei, ed., Rus­ sian ­Women Writers, vol. 1, 313–31; Susanne Fusso and Alexander Lehrman, eds., Essays on Karolina Pavlova (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2001); Barbara Heldt, “Karolina Pavlova: The ­Woman Poet and the Double Life,” in Karoline Pavlova, A Double Life , trans. Barbara Heldt (Oakland, CA: Barbary Coast Books, 1986), i–­xxii; and Diana Greene, “Karolina Pavlova’s ‘At the Tea ­Table’ and the Politics of Class and Gender,” Rus­ sian Review 53, no. 2 (1994): 271–84. 15. On the rift between the two authors, see Rosenholm and Savkina, “ ‘How ­Women Should Write,’ ” 169–70. For a comparison on Rostopchina’s and Pavlova’s works and their reception by contemporaries, see Greene, “Nineteenth-­Century ­Women Poets,” 103–6. 16. Jehanna Gheith, “­Women of the 1830s and 1850s: Alternative Periodizations,” in A History of ­Women’s Writing in Rus­sia, ed. Adele Barker and Jehanne Gheith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 86. 17. Evdokiia Rostopchina, Rank and Money, in Rus­sian and Polish ­Women’s Fiction, trans. and ed. Helena Goscilo (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1985), 65.

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18. Rostopchina, Rank and Money, 82. 19. On the society tale in Rus­sian lit­er­a­ture, see The Society Tale in Rus­sian Lit­er­a­ ture: From Odoevskii to Tolstoi, ed. Neil Cornwell. Studies in Slavic Lit­er­a­ture and Poetics 31 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998). 20. Pavlova, A Double Life, 47–48. 21. Diana Greene, “Gender and Genre in Karolina Pavlova’s A Double Life,” in Fusso and Lehrman, eds., Essays on Karolina Pavlova, 99–117. 22. Pavlova, A Double Life, 122, 123, 124. 23. Pavlova, A Double Life, 59. 24. Greene, “Gender and Genre,” 105. 25. A number of scholars have addressed Sand’s importance in helping formulate discourse on w ­ omen’s emancipation in Rus­sia. For an overview on how Rus­sian writers ­adopted and responded to Sand’s works in their own writing, see Dawn Eidelman, George Sand and the Nineteenth-­Century Rus­sian Love-­Triangle Novels (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1994); Lesley Herrmann, “Jacques in Rus­sia: A Program of Domestic Reform for Husbands,” Studies in the Literary Imagination 12, no. 2 (1979): 61–81; Ol’ga Kafanova, Zhorzh Sand i russkaia literatura XIX veka: 1830–1860 gg (Tomsk, Rus­sia: Tomskii gosudarstvennyi pedagogicheskii universitet, 1998); and Stites, The ­Women’s Liberation Movement, 19–25. 26. Olga Demidova, “Rus­sian ­Women Writers of the Nineteenth ­Century,” in Marsh, ed., Gender and Rus­sian Lit­er­a­ture, 99. 27. N. D. Khvoshchinskaia [V. Krestovskii, pseud.], “Pansionerka,” in Povesti i rasskazy (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1963), 114, emphasis added. 28. Anne Lounsberry offers an insightful reading of “Pansionerka” by noting how Lelenka’s position as an artist allows her to appropriate a cultural heritage: “By earning money in a modern economy, she integrates herself into the cir­cuits of print culture and sociality that make pos­si­ble an explic­itly modern way of life in the metropole.” Anne Lounsberry, Life Is Elsewhere: Symbolic Geography in the Rus­sian Provinces, 1800– 1917 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2019), 160. 29. Khvoshchinskaia, “Pansionerka,” 188. 30. Stites, The ­Women’s Liberation Movement, 90–92. 31. Eidelman, George Sand, 84–86. 32. For a succinct summary on Sand’s influence on Dostoevsky, see Kenneth Lantz, The Dostoevsky Encyclopedia (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2004), 382–84. 33. While I focus on the w ­ oman question in literary culture of the 1860s, it is worth mentioning the impor­tant role that female members of the aristocracy played in advocating for w ­ omen’s rights. On w ­ omen’s philanthropic activities and their calls for educating w ­ omen, see Rochelle Ruthchild, “Reframing Public and Private Space in Mid-­ Nineteenth-­Century Rus­sia: The Triumvirate of Anna Filosofova, Nadezhda Stasova, and Mariia Trubnikova,” in The ­Human Tradition in Imperial Rus­sia, ed. Christine  D. Worobec (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2009), 68–94; Stites, The ­Women’s Liberation Movement, 64–88; and Adele Lindenmeyr, “Public Life, Private Virtues: W ­ omen in Rus­sian Charity, 1762–1914,” Signs 18, no. 3 (1993): 562–91. 34. Nikolai Shelgunov, “Zhenskoe bezdushie,” Delo 9 (1870): 11. Shelgunov’s article is discussed in Arja Rosenholm, “The ‘­Woman Question’ of the 1860s,” in Marsh, ed., Gender and Rus­sian Lit­er­a­ture, 112.

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35. Jehanne Gheith also provides illuminating information on Panaeva’s role as a journalist and a mediator for the many intellectuals in the circle of Sovremennik. See Jehanne Gheith, “Redefining the Perceptible: The Journalism(s) of Evgeniia Tur and Avdot’ia Panaeva,” in An Improper Profession: W ­ omen, Gender, and Journalism in Late Imperial Rus­sia, ed. Barbara Norton and Jehanne Gheith (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 53–73. 36. Panaeva is best remembered for her memoir, which appeared in 1889  in Istoricheskii vestnik (Historical herald) and l­ater in book form. She details monumental events of Rus­sian literary and cultural history, including the fallout between Ivan Turgenev and the editorial staff of Sovremennik. The full restored version of her memoir appeared in 1927 u ­ nder the editorial supervision of Kornei Chukovsky. On Panaeva’s Memoirs (Vospominaniia) , see Ruth Sobel, “Avdot’ia Panaeva,” in Tomei, ed., Rus­sian ­Women Writers, vol. 1, 299–311; and Marina Ledkovsky, “Avdotya Panaeva: Her Salon and Her Life,” Rus­sian Lit­er­a­ture Triquarterly 9 (1974): 423–32. 37. In his 1835 essay, Belinsky sets out to define the w ­ oman writer. For analy­sis of Belinsky’s views on the topic in general, and this essay in par­tic­u­lar, see Jehanne M. Gheith, Finding the ­Middle Ground: Krestovskii, Tur, and the Power of Ambivalence in Nineteenth-­Century Rus­sian ­Women’s Prose (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2004), 22–26; and Sibelan Forrester, “Introduction: Framing the View: Rus­sian ­Women in the Long Nineteenth ­Century,” in Rosslyn and Tosi, eds., ­Women in Nineteenth-­ Century Rus­sia, 4–5. 38. Gheith, “­Women of the 1830s and 1850s,” 93. 39. Panaeva, Roman v peterburgskom polusvete, Sovremennik 3 (1860): 131. 40. Panaeva, Roman v peterburgskom polusvete, 131. 41. Panaeva, Roman v peterburgskom polusvete, 439. 42. Susan Conner Olson, “Avdot’ia Iakovlevna Panaeva (N. Stanitsky)” in Rus­sian Novelists in the Age of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, ed. J. Alexander Ogden and Judith E. Kalb (Detroit: Gale, 2001), 236. 43. Avdot’ia Panaeva, Zhenskaia dolia, Sovremennik 3 (1862): 44. 44. Dmitrii Pisarev, “Kukol’naia tragediia s buketom grazhdanskoi skorbi,” in Sochineniia  D.  I. Pisareva polnoe sobranie v shesti tomakh, vol. 4 (St.  Petersburg: Izdanie Pavlenkova, 1894): 147–96. 45. As Jane Costlow perceptively notes, w ­ omen authors of the 1860s and 1870s “did not produce ‘positive’ heroines,” which “speaks not of their failure to address the ­woman question,” but that they distrusted the utopian visions that contrasted with lived reality. Jane Costlow, “Love, Work, and the ­Woman Question in Mid-­Nineteenth-­ Century ­Women’s Writing,” in Clyman and Greene, eds., ­Women Writers in Rus­sian Lit­er­a­ture, 63. 46. Elizabeth Valkenier, Rus­sian Realist Art: The State and Society; The Peredvizhniki and Their Tradition (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 1. 47. For an overview of the evolution of realism in Rus­sian art from the mid-­ nineteenth ­century onward, see John Bowlt, “Rus­sian Painting in the Nineteenth ­Century,” in Stavrou, ed., Art and Culture in Nineteenth-­Century Rus­sia, 113–39. 48. Gray, Rus­sian Genre Painting, 174. 49. Brunson, Rus­sian Realisms, 88. 50. V. M. Zimenko, Neravnyi brak: Kartina V. V. Pukireva (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1947), 12. 51. Gray, Rus­sian Genre Painting, 142.

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52. Jacques Catteau, Dostoyevsky and the Pro­cess of Literary Creation, trans. Audrey Littlewood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 155–56. 53. Dostoevskii, “Krotkaia,” in PSS, 24:12, 13. 54. For an analy­sis of the story’s introduction, see Lewis Bagby, First Words: On Dostoevsky’s Introductions (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2016), 131–43. 55. Dostoevskii, “Krotkaia,” in PSS, 24:5, emphasis in the original. 56. Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: The Mantle of the Prophet, 1871–1881 (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2002), 345. 57. Dostoevskii, “Krotkaia,” in PSS, 24:8. 58. Benjamin, The Arcades Proj­ect, 345. 59. Dostoevskii, “Krotkaia,” in PSS, 24:10. 60. Dostoevskii, “Krotkaia,” in PSS, 24:17. 61. Dostoevskii, “Krotkaia,” in PSS, 24:27, 28, 29 emphasis in the original. 62. Frank, Dostoevsky: The Mantle of the Prophet, 350. Most readings of “Krotkaia” follow similar conclusions and point to the gentle creature’s inability to embrace the love of the pawnbroker as the motivating force in her suicide. Konstantin Mochulsky interprets the suicide as a result of the gentle creature’s inability to “sustain the shock” of her husband’s declaration of love. Konstantin Mochulsky, Dostoevsky: His Life and Work (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1971), 550. While such readings may have validity, they exclude the possibility that the gentle creature commits suicide ­because she prefers death to having to live with the pawnbroker and resume conjugal relations. 63. Irina Paperno, Suicide as a Cultural Institution in Dostoevsky’s Rus­sia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), 94. In her study of suicide in imperial Rus­sia, Susan Morrissey points out how the cultural elite pointed to despotic paternalism as a motivating ­factor for “the proliferation of social pathologies, including crime, hooliganism, prostitution, alcoholism, poverty, and suicide.” Susan Morrisey, Suicide and the Body Politic in Imperial Rus­sia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 269. 64. Dostoevskii, “Krotkaia,” in PSS, 24:35 emphasis in the original. 65. Dostoevskii, “Krotkaia,” in PSS, 24:30, 31. 66. On the subtext of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust in the story, see Inna Tigountsova, “Dostoevskii’s ‘The Meek One’ (Krotkaia) in the context of Goethe’s Faust and Tropes of Time,” Modern Language Review 112, no. 2 (2017): 459–74. 67. Charles Isenberg offers an insightful interpretation, positing that the icon “serves as a talisman that ­will return [the gentle creature] to her parents as well as put her ­under the Virgin’s protection.” Charles Isenberg, Telling Silence: Rus­sian Frame Narratives of Renunciation (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1993), 64. 68. In her discussion of w ­ omen in Dostoevsky’s fiction, Harriet Murav offers a persuasive reading of how the gentle creature is connected to and ultimately protected by the Virgin Mary. “In taking the icon in her arms, and leaping to her death, the ‘meek one’ transcends finalization,” explains Murav, ­because through the intercession of the ­mother of God, whose icon she carries in her arms, “we can imagine that she seeks and receives intercession.” See Harriet Murav, “Reading ­Woman in Dostoevsky,” in A Plot of Her Own: The Female Protagonist in Rus­sian Lit­er­a­ture, ed. Sona Stephan Hoisington (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1995), 50. 69. Ostrovskii, Bednaia nevesta in SS, 1:288. 70. Ostrovsky was placed u ­ nder police surveillance a­ fter the censors found his first play Svoi liudi-­sochtemsia suspect for its repre­sen­ta­tion of social corruption. Ostrovsky

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contended with the censors for his entire c­ areer. As Kirill Zubkov has shown, it was not uncommon for Ostrovsky to rewrite a play in order to obtain final permission for its staging. See Kirill Zubkov, “Tsenzurnaia redaktsiia komedii A. N. Ostrovskogo ‘Dokhodnoe mesto,’ ” Tekstologiia i istoriko-­literaturnyi protsess (Moscow: Lider, 2015), 54–65; and Kirill Zubkov, “Ostrovskii, ‘oblichitel’naia’ dramaturgiia i tsenzura Tret’ego otdeleniia,” in A.N. Ostrovskii: Materialy i issledovaniia vol. 4, edited by I. A. Ovchinina (Ivanovo, Rus­sia: Izd-vo Ivanovskii gosudarstvennyi universitet, 2013), 64–71. 71. McReynolds, Rus­sia at Play, 30. 72. N.  A. Dobroliubov, “Temnoe tsarstvo,” in Sobranie sochinenii v trekh tomakh, vol. 2 (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1987), 305–448. 73. For a comprehensive assessment both of Dobroliubov’s essay and Ostrovsky’s depiction of the merchant milieu, see Kate Rahman, “Alexander Ostrovsky, Dramatist and Director,” in History of Rus­sian Theatre, ed. Robert Leach and Victor Borozovsky (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 166–81; and V. Lakshin, Aleksandr Nikolaevich Ostrovskii (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1976), 355–66. For an overview on how Groza was received by literary critics of the period, see I.  N. Sukhikh, ed., Russkaia tragediia: P’esa A.N. Ostrovskogo “Groza” v russkoi kritike i literaturovedenii (St.  Petersburg: Azbuka-­k lassika, 2002). 74. Ostrovskii, Bezpridannitsa, in SS, 8:481, 484. 75. Some scholars, including Kate Rahman, place Paratov in a genealogy of the “superfluous man” type found in nineteenth-­century Rus­sian lit­er­a­ture by connecting his rakish be­hav­ior to literary pre­de­ces­sors like Mikhail Lermontov’s Pechorin. See Kate Rahman, Ostrovsky: Real­ity and Illusion (Birmingham, UK: Birmingham University Press, 1999), 144–45. 76. Marjorie Hoover, Alexander Ostrovsky (Boston: Twayne, 1981), 112. 77. Ostrovskii, Beshenye den’gi, in SS, 5:626–27. 78. Datta, Heroes and Legends, 22. 79. Ostrovskii, Beshenye den’gi, in SS, 5:630, 747. 80. Ostrovskii, Beshenye den’gi, in SS, 5:743, 751–52. 81. Ostrovskii, Svoi liudi-­sochtemsia, in SS, 1:132. 82. McReynolds, Rus­sia at Play, 31–35. 83. Ostrovskii, Beshenye den’gi, in SS, 5:593. 84. Dobroliubov, “Temnoe tsarstvo,” in SS, 2:437, emphasis in the original. 5. “Hyenas in Bonnets”

1. A. Belekhov, Peterburgskie kamelii (nravstvennyi etiud) (St. Petersburg, 1866), 28. 2. It is likely that Fedotov was influenced by William Hogarth’s series A Harlot’s Pro­ gress (1732) in his composition of A Poor Girl’s Beauty is a Fatal ­Thing. For a discussion of Fedotov’s affinity for Hogarth’s works, see Dmitri Sarabianov, Rus­sian Art: From Neoclassicism to the Avant-­Garde, 1800–1917 (New York: Harry Abrams, 1990), 86–88. 3. Jenny Kaminer, ­Women with a Thirst for Destruction: The Bad M ­ other in Rus­sian Culture (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2014). 4. Mikhail Kuznetsov, “Istoriko-­statisticheskii ocherk prostitutsii v Peterburge s 1852 g. po 1869 g,” Arkhiv sudebnoi meditsiny i obshchestvennoi gigieny 4 (1870): 5–38. 5. Keely Stauter-­Halsted discusses a similar set of anti-­Semitic rhe­toric blaming Jews for sex trafficking in partitioned Poland. “One of the most overwrought themes

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in Polish prostitution narratives,” she explains, “is the image of the power­f ul and omnipresent Jew dominating overseas trade in w ­ omen.” Keely Stauter-­Halsted, The Dev­ il’s Chain: Prostitution and Social Control in Partitioned Poland (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015), 169. 6. Alexander Kuprin, The Pit, trans. Bernard Guilbert Guerney (New York: Modern Library, 1932), 10. 7. Cassiday and Rouhi, “From Nevskii Prospekt to Zoia’s Apartment,” 421. 8. Cassiday and Rouhi, “From Nevskii Prospekt to Zoia’s Apartment,” 414. 9. Philippa Hetherington, “Prostitution in Moscow and St. Petersburg,” in Selling Sex in the City: A Global History of Prostitution, 1600s–2000s, ed. Magaly Rodríguez García, Lex Heerma van Voss, and Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk (Boston: Brill, 2017), 163. 10. Eve Levin, Sex and Society in the World of the Orthodox Slavs, 900–1700 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989), 190. 11. Lebina and Shkarovskii, Prostitutsiia v Peterburge, 19–20. 12. Igor Fedyukin, “Sex in the City That Peter Built: The Demimonde and Sociability in Mid–­Eighteenth ­Century St. Petersburg,” Slavic Review 76, no. 4 (2017): 907–30. 13. S.  S. Shashkov, “Russkaia prostitutsiia,” in Ocherk istori russkoi zhenshchiny (St. Petersburg, 1872), 270. 14. Bern­stein, Sonia’s ­Daughters, 160; see also, more generally, 146–61. See aslo Hearne, Policing Prostitution, 147–174. 15. Bern­stein, Sonia’s ­Daughters, 22–23, 146–61. 16. Krestovskii, Peterburgskie trushchoby, 622. 17. Krestovskii, Peterburgskie trushchoby, 626. 18. Krestovskii, Peterburgskie trushchoby, 621. 19. Tolstoy, Resurrection, 13. 20. Kuznetsov, Prostitutsiia i sifilis v Rossii, 19. 21. Boborykin, Zhertva vecherniaia, in Sochineniia, 1:206. 22. Shashkov, Ocherk istorii russkoi zhenshchiny, 256, 257. 23. On the role of male pimps in facilitating prostitution, see Schrader, “Market Pleasures and Prostitution,” 84; Hetherington, “Prostitution in Moscow and St. Petersburg,” 163; and Bern­stein, Sonia’s ­Daughters, 4, 32. 24. For a comprehensive study on the image of Baba Yaga in folklore, see Sibelan Forrester, Baba Yaga: The Wild Witch of the East in Rus­sian Fairy Tales ( Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2013), xxi–­li; and Andreas Johns, Baba Yaga: Ambiguous M ­ other and Witch of the Rus­sian Folktale (New York: Peter Lang, 2004). 25. Christine Worobec, Possessed: ­Women, Witches, and Demons in Imperial Rus­sia (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2001), 107. 26. Bern­stein, Sonia’s ­Daughters, 23. 27. On tendencies to pathologize menopausal w ­ omen, see Paul  A. Komesaroff, Philipa Rothfield, and Jeanne Daly, “Mapping Menopause: Objectivity or Multiplicity?” in Reinterpreting Menopause: Cultural and Philosophical Issues, ed. Paul Komesaroff, Philipa Rothfield, and Jeanne Daly (New York: Routledge, 1997), 3–16. 28. Nina Pelikan Straus, Dostoevsky and the ­Woman Question: Rereadings at the End of a ­Century (New York: St. Martin’s, 1994). 29. On the rumors concerning Dostoevsky’s alleged crime, see A.  S. Dolinin, “ ‘Ispoved’ Stavrogina,” Literaturnaia mysl’ 1 (1922): 139–62; Robert Louis Jackson, Dialogues with Dostoevsky: The Overwhelming Questions (Stanford, CA: Stanford University

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Press, 1993), 104–20; and Susanne Fusso, Discovering Sexuality in Dostoevsky (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2006), 39–41. 30. Fusso, Discovering Sexuality in Dostoevsky, 40, emphasis in the original. 31. On the novel’s flaws, see Edward Wasiolek, Dostoevsky: The Major Fiction (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1964), 30. For an analy­sis of the narrative and how it predicts Dostoevsky’s subsequent writings, see Frank, Dostoevsky: The Stir of Liberation, 110–31. 32. Dostoevskii, Unizhennye i oskorblennye in PSS, 3:266. 33. Dostoevskii, Unizhennye i oskorblennye in PSS, 3:258. 34. Dostoevskii, Unizhennye i oskorblennye in PSS, 3:276. 35. Fusso, Discovering Sexuality in Dostoevsky, 20. 36. Dostoevskii, Unizhennye i oskorblennye in PSS, 3:259. 37. Dostoevskii, Prestuplenie i nakazanie, in PSS, 6:17. 38. Dostoevskii, Prestuplenie i nakazanie, in PSS, 6:16, 24, 141. 39. Dostoevskii, Prestuplenie i nakazanie, in PSS, 6:228. 40. Dostoevskii, Prestuplenie i nakazanie, in PSS, 6:368. 41. Leskov formed a friendship with Krestovsky while both w ­ ere working for the journal Notes from the Fatherland (Otechestvennye zapiski). See Andrei Leskov, Zhizn’ Nikolaia Leskova po ego lichnym, semeinym i nesemeinym zapisiam i pamiatiam (Moscow: Goslitizdat, 1954), 320, 357–59. 42. Nikolai Leskov, Voitel’nitsa, in Sobranie sochinenii v 11 tomakh, vol. 1 (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo, 1956), 147. 43. Hugh McLean, Nikolai Leskov: The Man and His Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977), 154. 44. Leskov, Voitel’nitsa, in SS, 1:150. 45. For more detailed analy­sis of Leskov’s use of skaz, see B.  M. Eikhenbaum, “Leskov i sovremennaia proza,” in Literatura. Teoriia. Kritika. Polemika (Leningrad: Priboi, 1927), 210–25. 46. Leskov, Voitel’nitsa, in SS, 1:151. 47. Leskov, Voitel’nitsa, in SS, 1:167. 48. Leskov, Voitel’nitsa, in SS, 1:188, 189. 49. K. A. Lantz, Nikolay Leskov (Boston: Twayne, 1979), 48. 50. McLean, Nikolai Leskov, 161. 51. Gogol, “Nevsky Prospect,” in The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Vintage, 1999), 277–78. 52. Leskov, Voitel’nitsa, in SS, 1:207. 53. Leskov, Voitel’nitsa, in SS, 1:211. 54. Leskov, Voitel’nitsa, in SS, 1:215. 6. Commodifying Domestic Bliss

1. V. V. Vinogradov, Istoriia slov (Moscow: Institut russkogo iazyka im. V.V. Vinogradova, 1999), 647–48. 2. Kuznetsov, Prostitutsiia i sifilis v Rossii, 7. 3. For an overview of the vari­ous obstacles impeding w ­ omen from obtaining divorces, see Engel, Breaking the Ties That Bound, 14–47.

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4. See Susan Layton, “Eros and Empire in Rus­sian Lit­er­a­ture about Georgia,” Slavic Review 51, no. 2 (1992): 195–213. 5. Dostoevskii, Brat’ia Karamazovy, in PSS 14:396. 6. Heldt, Terrible Perfection, 37. 7. Olga Matich, “What’s to Be Done about Poor Nastja: Nastas’ja Filippovna’s Literary Prototypes,” Wiener slawistischer Almanach 19 (1987): 47–64. 8. Robin Feuer Miller, Dostoevsky and The Idiot: Author, Narrator, and Reader (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981); Straus, Dostoevsky and the W ­ oman Question, 53–70. 9. Nina Pelikan Straus, “Flights from The Idiot’s Womanhood,” in Dostoevsky’s The Idiot: A Critical Companion, ed. Liza Knapp (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1998), 110. 10. Tat’iana Kasatkina, “Istoriia v imeni: Myshkin i ‘gorizontal’nyi khram,’ ” in O tvoriashchei prirode slova: Ontologichnost’ slova v tvorchestve F.M Dostoevskogo kak osnova “Realizma v vysshem smysle” (Moscow: IMLI RAN, 2004): 381–93; Sarah Young, Dostoevsky’s The Idiot and the Ethical Foundations of Narrative: Reading, Narrating, Scripting (London: Anthem, 2004), 70–73. 11. On the importance of the Holbein painting in the novel’s narrative, see Carol Apollonio, Dostoevsky’s Secrets: Reading against the Grain (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2009), 93–103; Nina Perlina, Teksty-­kartiny i ekfrazisy v romane F.M. Dostoevskogo “Idiot” (St.  Petersburg: Aleteiia, 2017); and Sarah Young, “Holbein’s Christ in the Tomb in the Structure of The Idiot,” Rus­sian Studies in Lit­er­a­ture 44, no. 1 (2007–8): 90–102. 12. Edward Wasiolek interprets Nastasia Filippovna’s relations with men as indicative of her desire to be hurt by them; he explains that the heroine baits Rogozhin ­because she wants to be beaten: “As payment for her hurt she wants to be hurt again.” Nastasia Filippovna, in Wasiolek’s view, cannot part with her shame and guilt, which are more precious to her than Myshkin’s promise of freedom. Edward Wasiolek, Dostoevsky: The Major Fiction, 88–92, emphasis in the original. 13. Susan McReynolds, Redemption and the Merchant God: Dostoevsky’s Economy of Salvation and Antisemitism (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2008), 157. 14. Gerald O’Collins, SJ, “Redemption: Some Crucial Issues,” In The Redemption: An Interdisciplinary Symposium on Christ as Redeemer, ed. Stephen T. Davis, Daniel Kendall, SJ, and Gerald O’Collins, SJ (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 1–25. 15. Dostoevskii, Idiot, in PSS 8:62. 16. Dostoevskii, Brat’ia Karamazovy, in PSS 14:311–12. 17. Dostoevskii, Brat’ia Karamazovy, in PSS 14:319. 18. Dostoevskii, Brat’ia Karamazovy, in PSS 14:320. 19. Dostoevskii, Idiot, in PSS 8:144. 20. Dostoevskii, Brat’ia Karamazovy, in PSS 14:323. 21. Dostoevskii, Brat’ia Karamazovy, in PSS 14:48. 22. Barbara Alpern Engel begins her study of the “marriage crisis” in imperial Rus­sia with Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. “Tolstoy can imagine no fate for Anna other than death,” explains Engel, although “this was rarely the fate of the real-­life ­women . . . ​who left their husbands in the de­cades ­after the publication of Tolstoy’s novel.” Engel, Breaking the Ties that Bound, 1.

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23. See O. V. Riabov, Russkaia filosofiia zhenstvennosti (Ivanovo, Rus­sia: Isdatel’skii tsentr ‘Iunona,’ 1999), 300; and Joanna Hubbs, ­Mother Rus­sia: The Feminine Myth in Rus­sian Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988). 24. Barbara Alpern Engel, “Transformation versus Tradition,” in Rus­sia’s ­Women: Accommodation, Re­sis­tance, Transformation, ed. Barbara Evans Clements, Barbara Alpern Engel, and Christine Worobec (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 136. See also William Wagner, “The Trojan Mare: ­Women’s Rights and Civil Rights in Late Imperial Rus­sia,” in Civil Rights in Imperial Rus­sia, ed. Olga Crisp and Linda Edmondson (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989), 79–80. 25. Andrew Wachtel, The ­Battle for Childhood: The Creation of a Rus­sian Myth (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), 48–50. 26. See Catriona Kelly, Refining Rus­sia: Advice Lit­er­a­ture, Polite Culture, and Gender from Catherine to Yeltsin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 43–45. 27. Kaminer, ­Women with a Thirst for Destruction, 29–30. 28. For an explication of how Tolstoy responds to French novels on adultery, particularly Madame Bovary, see Priscilla Meyer, How the Rus­sians Read the French: Lermontov, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2008), 152–209; and Boris Eikhenbaum, Lev Tolstoi, semidesiatye gody (Leningrad: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1974), 127–75. 29. Edwina Cruise, “­Women, Sexuality and the ­Family in Tolstoy,” in The Cambridge Companion to Tolstoy, ed. Donna Orwin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 201; emphasis in the original. 30. Renato Poggioli succinctly describes Tolstoy’s didactic emphasis: “Tolstoy projected Anna’s drama through a double perspective, based on the sublime absurdity of the Christian injunction to love the sinner and to hate his sin. He wanted the reader to be merciful, not merciless as was society, which punished Anna not for sinning, but for confessing her passion before the world . . . ​Anna was to be pitied but not absolved nor was her guilt to be forgiven.” Renato Poggioli, “Tolstoy as Man and Artist,” in Tolstoy: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Ralph Matlaw (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1967), 24. 31. Tony Tanner, Adultery and the Novel: Contract and Transgression (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), 14. 32. Amy Mandelker, Framing Anna Karenina (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1993), 50. 33. For an insightful analy­sis of how Tolstoy represents motherhood through Anna and Dolly’s attitudes ­toward breastfeeding, see Jane Costlow, “The Pastoral Source: Repre­sen­ta­tions of the Maternal Breast in Nineteenth-­Century Rus­sia,” in Sexuality and the Body in Rus­sian Culture, ed. Jane Costlow, Stephanie Sandler, and Judith Vowles (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), 230. 34. Kaminer, ­Women with a Thirst for Destruction, 46. 35. Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, trans. Constance Garnett, ed. Leonard Kent and Nina Berberova (New York: Modern Library, 2000), 863. 36. Kaminer, ­Women with a Thirst for Destruction, 57. 37. Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, 336, 321. 38. Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, 330. 39. Gary Saul Morson argues that “totalism and the belief that a person can be one ­thing ­causes Anna g­ reat harm.” He adds that “her trou­bles with Vronsky worsen pri-

NOTES TO PAGES 1 8 4 – 1 9 5

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marily ­because she imagines that love must consume the ­whole of a person, with no thoughts or interests left over.” Gary Saul Morson, Anna Karenina in Our Time (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 119. 40. Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, 722–23. 41. Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, 837, 842. 42. In her study of the novel, Judith Armstrong aligns Anna’s writing as a form of the heroine’s masculinization. See Judith Armstrong, The Unsaid Anna Karenina (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988). 43. Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, 786. 44. When the author Vsevolod Krestovsky began publishing widely in the 1860s, Khvoshchinskaia tried to avoid confusion by adding the addendum, “Krestovsky—­a pseudonym” to her byline. 45. Hilde Hoogenboom, “Introduction,” in Sofia Khvoshchinskaya, City Folk and Country Folk, trans. Nora Seligman Favorov (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017), xiii. 46. For an analy­sis of The Boarding ­School Girl, see Jehanne Gheith, Finding the ­Middle Ground: Krestovskii, Tur, and the Power of Ambivalence in Nineteenth-­Century Rus­sian ­Women’s Prose (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2004), 171–77. 47. In her study of Khvoshchinskaia’s short story collection, Karen Rosneck proposes that the origin of Ridneva’s decline is located in her youth: “As the ­daughter of a highly placed official in the alcohol tax-­farming system, [Ridneva] learns to value the intoxicating effects of wealth, material acquisitions, and plea­sure more than the benefits of community and cooperation.” Rosneck also suggests that b­ ecause Ridneva first witnesses the transgressions of o ­ thers on stage, she is better suited to take part in transgressive be­hav­ ior in real life. Karen Rosneck, Understanding Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaia’s Short Story Collection An A ­ lbum: Groups and Portraits (Lewiston, PA: Edwin Mellen Press, 2010), 60. 48. Jehanne Gheith, Finding the ­Middle Ground, 178. 49. Nikolai Shelgunov, “Zhenskoe bezdushie,” Delo 9 (1870): 11. 50. Costlow, “Love, Work, and the ­Woman Question,” 63. 51. Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaia, Svidanie, in Svidanie: Proza russkikh pisatel’nits 6080kh godov XIX veka, ed. Viktoriia Uchenova (Moscow: Sovremennik, 1987), 414–15. 52. Khvoshchinskaia, Svidanie, 410. 53. Costlow, “Love, Work, and the ­Woman Question,” 70. 54. Beth Holmgren and Helena Goscilo, “Introduction,” in Anastasya Verbitskaya, Keys to Happiness: A Novel, trans. Beth Holmgren and Helena Goscilo (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), xviii. Conclusion

1. “Otkrovenno s Oksanoi Bairak, “muzhchiny predpochitaiut okhotnits ili dich’?”, May 10, 2017. https://­www​.­tvc​.­ru​/­channel​/­brand​/­id​/­2851​/­show​/­episodes​/­episode​ _­id​/­49702. 2. Irina Maslova, a prominent ­human rights defender, is a vocal advocate for sex workers’ rights in Rus­sia. Her organ­ization Serebrennaia roza (Silver Rose) fights for the decriminalization of prostitution. See “Irina Maslova,” DefendHer, https://­www​ .­globalfundforwomen​.­org​/­irina​-­maslova​/­; Silver Rose (website), http://­silver​-­rose​.­ru​

22 8 NOTES

TO PAGES 1 9 5 –1 9 9

/­company; and “Irina Maslova, Saint Petersburg,” Amnesty International, June 8, 2018, https://­www​.­amnesty​.­org​/­en​/­latest​/­campaigns​/­2018​/­06​/­irina​-­maslova​-­human​ -­rights​-­defender​-­in​-­russia​/­. 3. Eliot Borenstein, “Selling Rus­sia: Prostitution, Masculinity, and Meta­phors of Nationalism ­after Perestroika,” in Gender and National Identity in Twentieth-­Century Rus­ sian Culture, eds. Helena Goscilo and Andrea Lanoux (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2006), 176. 4. Vladimir Putin, quoted in Ivan Beliaev, “Putin i devushki s sotsial’noi otvetsvennost’iu,” Radio svoboda, January 18, 2017, https://­www​.­svoboda​.­org​/­a​/­28240​ 611​.­html, emphasis added. 5. Jenny Stallard, “The Dark Real­ity of Rus­sia’s Domestic Vio­lence Laws,” BBC, March 7, 2018, https://­www​.­bbc​.­co​.­uk​/­bbcthree​/­article​/­0dd0ab91​-­145a​-­4137​-­bf87​ -­28d0​498c8d56. 6. Tolstoy, Resurrection, 347.

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Index

Note: Page references in italics refer to illustrative m ­ atter. Adlam, Carol, 214n42 The Alarm Clock (publication), 8–9, 101, 165, 166 Aleksandra Nikolaevna (character), 98–99 Alexander II (tsar), 48 Andreev, Leonid, 17; “In the Fog,” 50, 70–74, 75 Anna Karenina (Tolstoy), 191; marriage crisis in, 179–185, 225n22, 226n39; sexual happiness in, 10, 168, 187–188, 226n30 anti-­Semitism, 17, 144–145, 209n23, 222n5 apocalyptic symbolism, 20–21, 76 The Arrested Sweep the Streets (illustration), 3 artistic repre­sen­ta­tions: of demimondaine, 4–6; by Kramskoi, 17, 107, 108–109; by Repin, 17, 107–108, 109; of sex workers, 15, 25–26; by Shilder, 17, 126–127, 149–151, 153. See also visual culture, as term At the masquerade (Lebedev), 91, 92 Baba Yaga, 153–154 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 66 balls. See masquerade balls Balzac, Honore de, 99, 204n14 The Battle-­Axe (Leskov), 146, 160–165 Benjamin, Walter, 7, 43, 131 Bernheimer, Charles, 39, 54 Bern­stein, Laurie, 148 bespridannitsa. See dowerless brides The Blessing of the Public House (Makovsky), 38–40 bludnitsa, as ­legal category, 147 Boarding School Girl (Khvoshchinskaia), 120, 123, 186 Boborykin, Petr, 34, 152 The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb (Holbein), 174

Borenstein, Eliot, 35, 195 Botkin, Vasily, 205n34 brides. See dowerless brides; marriage; persnickety brides brothel madams. See madams brothels: literary depictions of, 34–38; public raid of, 1–3, 196; state control of, 2–3, 17, 20, 36, 227n2; terms for, 3, 34; visual interpretations of, 38–40. See also demimonde and demimondaine; madams; procuresses; prostitution; sex workers The B ­ rothers Karamazov (Dostoevsky), 129, 173, 175–179, 183 Brunson, Molly, 39, 127 Budil’nik (publication), 8–9, 101, 165, 166, 197 Bulgarin, Faddei, 92–93, 95, 215n50 Butler, Judith, 109 Un café du boulevard. See A Pa­ri­sian Café (Repin) camellias. See kamelii Cassiday, Julie, 81, 146, 202n11 chastity, 7, 69, 102, 151, 168, 189, 191. See also sexual happiness; ­women Chekhov, Anton, 63, 188; “Living Chattel,” 172; “A Ner­vous Breakdown,” 209n36 Chernyshevsky, Nikolai, 20, 27, 121; What Is to Be Done?, 29–34, 37, 82, 110, 120, 169, 187, 197 Childhood (Tolstoy), 180 Christian salvation, 14, 63. See also salvation narratives Chulkov, Mikhail, 84, 213n18; The Comely Cook, 79, 83–89, 110 The Comely Cook (Chulkov), 79, 83–89, 110 Commerce (illustration), 101, 103, 109 commercial sex. See prostitution

247

24 8 I nde x

commodity exchange, 6–11, 16, 38, 43–44. See also consumerism; leisure culture; prostitution consumerism, 14, 24, 99–100, 137–139, 216n61. See also commodity exchange; demimonde and demimondaine Corbin, Alain, 9, 36 Costlow, Jane, 220n45 A ­Couple of the Banks of the Moika (Vakhrameev), 46, 47 Crime and Punishment (Dostoevsky), 20, 44–45, 154–155, 158–159; Sonia Marmeladova (character) in, 38, 45, 54, 129, 194, 207n74 The Criminal W ­ oman (Lombroso), 51 Cruise, Edwina, 63, 181 “­Daddy” (Nekrasov), 153 dama polusveta, as term, 78, 212n1. See also demimonde and demimondaine Datsik, Viacheslav, 1–3, 196 The Dead Donkey and the Guillotined ­Woman ( Janin), 22–23 Defoe, Daniel, 83–84, 85, 86 Le Demi-­Monde (Dumas), 212n1 demimonde and demimondaine, 78–83; in Chulkov’s The Comely Cook, 79, 83–89; fashion and, 212n2; imperial critics of, 4; as kamelii, 79, 100–110; in Panaev’s works, 78–80, 98–100; as term, 78, 212n1; visual interpretations of, 4–6, 25, 89–98. See also prostitution Demons (Dostoevsky), 154, 155, 156, 157–158 The Discriminating Bride (Fedotov), 129 Dobroliubov, Nikolai, 32, 119, 141 doma terpimosti, 3. See also brothels domestic vio­lence, 196. See also rape; vio­lence against ­women Domna Platonovna (character), 146, 160–165 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 7, 18, 121; The ­Brothers Karamazov, 129, 173, 175–179, 183; Demons, 154, 155, 156, 157–158; “A Gentle Creature,” 111–112, 113, 129–134, 221n62, 221n67, 221n68; Humiliated and Insulted, 154, 155–156, 157–158; The Idiot, 129, 155, 157, 173–179, 183, 225n12; Notes from Under­ground, 35–40; Poor Folk, 129. See also Crime and Punishment (Dostoevsky) A Double Life (Pavlova), 116–118 The Dowerless Bride (play by Ostrovsky), 136–137, 140, 142

dowerless brides, 4, 10, 110, 111–112, 141–142. See also marriage dowry, 111. See also marriage The Dragonfly (publication), 24–25, 59–60, 169, 171 Dumas, Alexandre, 66, 79, 99, 212n1 Dworkin, Andrea, 68 Easy Money (Ostrovsky), 137–139, 140, 141 economic exchange for sex, 6–11. See also prostitution education of ­women, 48, 208n4 elite prostitution. See demimonde and demimondaine Ely, Christopher, 40 “emancipated ­woman” narrative, 121–126 Engel, Barbara Alpern, 48, 112, 180 Engelstein, Laura, 51 Eugene Onegin (Pushkin), 114–115, 141 Eve­ning Sacrifice (Boborykin), 34, 152 Fallen but Charming Creatures (Lebedev), 5, 82–83, 96–97, 104–105, 106, 169, 170, 216n66 “fallen w ­ oman” narrative, 9, 15, 16, 54, 58–60. See also “kept ­woman” narrative; salvation narratives fashion, 100, 212n2, 216n67 fashion boutiques, 101–104 ­Fathers and ­Children (Turgenev), 172 Fedotov, Pavel, 113, 126, 128–129; A Poor Girl’s Beauty is a Fatal ­Thing, 144, 222n2 Fedyukin, Igor, 147 Felski, Rita, 21 “female pariahs,” as phrase, 143 la femme émancipée narrative, 121–126 Flaubert, Gustave, 173, 181 Foucault, Michel, 15–16, 35, 61, 85, 210n37 The French Painted by Themselves (broadsheet), 89 Fusso, Susanne, 155–157 Garshin, Vsevolod, 7, 50, 52, 197; “fallen ­woman” narrative of, 76; “An Incident,” 49; “Nadezhda Nikolaevna,” 57–61, 74–75; “An Occurrence,” 57, 60, 61 Gasperetti, David, 85, 86 “A Gentle Creature” (Dostoevsky), 111–112, 113, 129–134, 221n62, 221n67, 221n68 Gheith, Jehanne, 116, 123 Gogol, Nikolai, 20; “Nevsky Prospect,” 22–25, 27–28, 33, 34, 54, 62–63, 162–163

I n d e x Golos (publication), 130, 131 The Golovlyov ­Family (Saltykov-­Shchedrin), 82 Goscilo, Helena, 23, 192 ­Great Reforms, 12, 48, 118, 135 Grigorev, Apollon, 205n34 Grushenka (character), 129, 173, 175–179, 183. See also The B ­ rothers Karamazov (Dostoevsky) Healey, Dan, 44 Hearne, Siobhán, 13, 202n19, 203n26, 223n14 Heldt, Barbara, 29, 173 A Hero of Our Time (Lermontov), 171–172 History of Sexuality (Foucault), 15 Hodgepodge (publication), 90, 91 Holbein, Hans, 174 Holmgren, Beth, 192 homo­sexuality, 44, 196, 201n8 Hoogenboom, Hilde, 186 “houses of tolerance,” as phrase, 3, 34. See also brothels Humiliated and Insulted (Dostoevsky), 154, 155–156, 157–158 hyenas in bonnets, as phrase, 17, 143. See also procuresses The Idiot (Dostoevsky), 129, 155, 157, 173–179, 183, 225n12. See also Dostoevsky, Fyodor “An Incident” (Garshin), 49 “In the Fog” (Andreev), 50, 70–74, 75. See also Andreev, Leonid Irigaray, Luce, 7 Isenberg, Charles, 221n67 Iskra (publication), 54, 55, 101, 102, 103, 105 It’s a ­Family Affair, ­We’ll ­Settle It Ourselves (Ostrovsky), 140 Jackson, David, 107 Janin, Jules, 22–23, 204n14 Jewish communities. See anti-­Semitism kamelii, 79, 81, 96–97, 100–110 Kaminer, Jenny, 144, 180, 182 Karamzin, Nikolai, 7, 88 Katiusha Maslova (character), 62–66. See also Resurrection (Tolstoy) “kept ­woman” narrative, 18, 167–168; by Dostoevsky, 172–179; by Khvoshchinskaia, 18, 168, 172, 186–191, 196.

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See also “fallen w ­ oman” narrative; marriage; salvation narratives Keys to Happiness (Verbitskaya), 192 Khvoshchinskaia, Nadezhda: Boarding School Girl, 120, 123, 186; confusion from her pseudonym V. Krestovsky, 227n44; “kept w ­ oman” narrative by, 18, 168, 172, 196; A Meeting, 187–191, 196; “Ridneva,” 186–187, 227n47; on ­woman’s liberation, 16, 120. Kokobobo, Ani, 63 Koni, Anatoly, 61–62 Kramskoi, Ivan, 17, 107, 108–109 Krestovsky, Vsevolod, 7, 74, 197; Fallen but Charming Creatures, 105; “fallen ­woman” narrative by, 76; The Jew is Coming, 209n23; Leskov and, 160, 224n41; The Slums of Petersburg, 50, 52–56, 151, 153. Krestovsky, Vsevolod (real name), 227n44 The Kreutzer Sonata (Tolstoy), 64, 67–70, 73, 75 Kuprin, Alexander, 145, 153 Kushner, Nina, 8 Kuznetsov, Mikhail, 144, 152, 167 Lachmann, Terese, 212n8 The Lady With the Camellias (Dumas), 66, 79 Lebedev, Aleksandr: Fallen but Charming Creatures, 5, 82–83, 96–97, 104–105, 106, 169, 170, 216n66; At the masquerade, 91, 92; ­You’re Beautiful in any Clothing, Darling, 90–91 Leigh, Allison, 41, 107, 108 leisure culture, 40–46, 79. See also commodity exchange; demimonde and demimondaine Lermontov, Mikhail, 171–172 Leskov, Nikolai, 224n41; The Battle-­Axe, 146, 160–165 libertine values, 2, 12, 99, 110, 124 liminality, 79–80, 89 literary salons, 50, 115, 119, 160, 218n14 “Living Chattel” (Chekhov), 172 Liza (character in “Poor Liza”), 7, 88 Liza (character in Notes from Under­ground), 35–38. See also Notes from Under­ground (Dostoevsky) Lombroso, Cesare, 13, 17, 51, 64, 208n12, 210n49 Lounsberry, Anne, 219n28 love as a commodity, theory on, 16. See also commodity exchange

25 0 I nde x

Madame Bovary (Flaubert), 173, 181 madams, 4, 143–145, 147–149, 160, 164–165. See also brothels; demimonde and demimondaine; procuresses; prostitution; sex workers Madonna/whore binary, 6, 54. See also Mary, ­Mother of God; Virgin Mary The Major’s Courtship (Fedotov), 129 Makovsky, Vladimir, 38–40 male prostitution, 201n8. See also prostitution Mandelker, Amy, 182 marriage, 7; in Dostoevsky’s “A Gentle Creature,” 111–112, 113; vs. emancipated ­woman, narratives on, 121–126; of persnickety brides, 129; Rus­sian institution of, 4; of sex workers, 205n34; Tolstoy on, 179–185, 225n22, 226n39; unequal, 126–128. See also dowerless brides; “kept ­woman” narrative; ­women Martona (character), 79, 83–88. See also The Comely Cook (Chulkov) Mary, M ­ other of God, 179–180. See also Virgin Mary Maslova (character), 61–66, 69–70, 75, 145–146, 152. See also Resurrection (Tolstoy) Maslova, Irina, 227n2 masquerade balls, 89–90, 109, 115, 217n9 maternal myth, 179–185. See also motherhood Matich, Olga, 13–14, 68 Matlock, Jann, 3 McCracken, Jill, 6 McCreery, Cindy, 90 McLean, Hugh, 63, 162 McQuillen, Colleen, 90 McReynolds, Louise, 135, 215n52 McReynolds, Susan, 174–175, 178 medical discourse on prostitution, 13, 15, 19–20, 48–51, 64, 71–75, 197 A Meeting (Khvoshchinskaia), 187–191, 196 A meeting between a camellia and a s­ imple flower (illustration), 101, 103 men: paternalism by, 27–28, 157; pedophilia by, 154–157, 159, 173; prostitution by, 201n8; vio­lence against w ­ omen by, 38, 60, 72, 154–160, 196, 206n55 Mikhailovsky, Nikolai, 50, 57–58 Mikhnevich, Vladimir, 44 Miller, Robin Feuer, 174 Mirsky, Dmitry, 63 modernity, as term, 15

Moll Flanders (Defoe), 83–84, 85 Moss, Anne Eakin, 209n36 motherhood, 54, 86, 179, 181–182, 193, 226n33 Murav, Harriet, 221n68 murder, 60, 72. See also vio­lence against ­women “Nadezhda Nikolaevna” (Garshin), 57–61, 74–75 Nastasia Filippovna (character), 129, 155, 157, 173–179, 183, 225n12. See also The Idiot (Dostoevsky) Nastasia Kriukova (character), 30–33, 82. See also What Is to Be Done? (Chernyshevsky) national theater, 215n52 natu­ral school, 95, 215n50 Nekrasov, Nikolai, 31, 33, 35, 56, 98, 122; “­Daddy,” 153; “Whenever I’m driving down dark streets at night,” 28–29; “When from the darkness . . . ,” 27, 28, 29, 37 “A Ner­vous Breakdown” (Chekhov), 209n36 Nevsky Prospect (street), St. Petersburg, 16, 21, 26, 32–33 “Nevsky Prospect” (story by Gogol), 22–25, 27–28, 33, 34, 54, 62–63, 162–163. See also Gogol, Nikolai; “unknown ­woman” trope Nezabudkina, Maria, 135 neznakomka. See “unknown ­woman” trope Nicholas I (tsar), 2–3, 89 Nochlin, Linda, 39 Notes from Under­ground (Dostoevsky), 35–40 Notes of the Fatherland (Krestovsky), 52. See also The Slums of Petersburg (Krestovsky) “An Occurrence” (Garshin), 57, 60, 61 Ogudalova, Kharita, 142 Olson, Susan Conner, 125 Olson, Trenton, 108 Oni, Rozaliia, 61–62 Orwin, Donna, 63 Ostrovsky, Alexander, 113–114, 119, 199, 221n70; The Dowerless Bride, 136–137, 140, 142; Easy Money, 137–139, 140, 141; It’s a F­ amily Affair, ­We’ll S­ ettle It Ourselves, 140; The Poor Bride, 112, 134, 135, 138, 141; The Storm, 136, 137, 140 Osviashchenie publichnogo doma (Makovsky), 38–40

I n d e x padshaia zhenshchina. See “fallen ­woman” narrative La Païva, 212n8 Panaev, Ivan, 78–79, 98–100, 122 Panaeva, Avdotia, 16; on female self-­ sacrifice, 196; memoir by, 220n36; Romance in the St. Petersburg Demimonde, 123–124, 142; transactional marriage, 114, 141; A ­Woman’s Lot, 113, 123, 125–126; work with Panaev, 98 Paperno, Irina, 32 Paratov (character), 137, 221n68. See also The Dowerless Bride (play by Ostrovsky) Parent-­Duchâtelet, Alexandre, 2, 36 A Pa­ri­sian Café (Repin), 17, 107, 108, 109 Passazh, St. Petersburg, 43–44, 100 paternalism, 27–28, 157. See also salvation narratives Paul I (emperor), 2 Pavel Rybakov (character), 70–75. See also “In the Fog” (Andreev) Pavlova, Karolina, 115–116, 121, 218n14; A Double Life, 116–118 pedophilia, 154–157, 159, 173. See also vio­lence against ­women Perovsky, Lev, 2–3 persnickety brides, 129. See also dowerless brides; marriage Peter the ­Great, 2, 16, 89 Pictures of Rus­sian Mores (Bulgarin), 92–96 Pisarev, Dmitry, 125 Piskarev (character), 22, 23, 27, 33, 62. See also “Nevsky Prospect” (story by Gogol) The Pit (Kuprin), 145, 153 Poggioli, Renato, 226n30 Pogibshie, no milye sozdaniia. See Fallen but Charming Creatures (Lebedev) The Poor Bride (Ostrovsky), 112, 134, 135, 138, 141 Poor Folk (Dostoevsky), 129 A Poor Girl’s Beauty is a Fatal ­Thing (Fedotov), 144, 222n2 “Poor Liza” (Karamzin), 7, 88 Portrait of an Unknown ­Woman (Kramskoi), 17, 107, 108–109. See also “unknown ­woman” trope procuresses, 4, 17, 144, 149–154, 159–160, 164–165. See also brothels; demimonde and demimondaine; madams; prostitution; sex workers property rights, 111, 217n2 prostitution: by men, 201n8; public health discourse on, 13, 15, 19–20, 48–51, 64,

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67, 71–75, 196–197; Rus­sian lit­er­a­ture on, overview, 3–4, 194–199; state control of, 2–3, 17, 20, 36, 197, 227n2; terms for, 3, 6, 34. See also brothels; demimonde and demimondaine; madams; procuresses; sex workers Prostitution and Abolitionism (Tarnovsky), 51 public health discourse on prostitution, 13, 15, 19–20, 48–51, 64, 67, 71–75, 196–197 “public ­house,” as term, 33. See also brothels public spaces for ­women, 40–46 Pukirev, Vasily, 127–128 Pushkin, Aleksandr, 20; Eugene Onegin, 114–115, 141; “The Station Master,” 168, 191 Putin, Vladimir, 195, 196 Rancour-­Laferriere, Daniel, 63 Rank and Money (Rostopchina), 116, 117, 118 Raskolnikov (character), 44–45. See also Crime and Punishment (Dostoevsky) Red Tarzan. See Datsik, Viacheslav Repin, Ilia, 17, 107, 108, 109 research methodology, 13–16 Resurrection (Tolstoy): depictions of commercial sex in, 49, 50, 61–67, 73, 198; Maslova (character) in, 61–66, 69–70, 75, 145–146, 152 “Ridneva” (Khvoshchinskaia), 186–187, 227n47 Roberts, Mary Louise, 104 Romance in the St. Petersburg Demimonde (Panaeva), 123–124, 142 Rosenholm, Arja, 121 Rosneck, Karen, 227n47 Rostopchina, Evdokiia, 115–116, 121, 141, 218n14; Rank and Money, 116, 117, 118 Rouhi, Leyla, 146, 202n11 Ruane, Christine, 100 Rubin, Gayle, 7, 14–15 Rus­sian fiction on prostitution, overview, 3–4, 194–199 Rybka, Nastia, 194, 195, 196 Saltykov-­Shchedrin, Mikhail, 82 salvation narratives, 14; by Chernyshevsky, 29–34; by Dostoevsky, 34–38, 173–179; by Makovsky, 38–40; by Nekrasov, 27–29. See also “fallen ­woman” narrative; “kept w ­ oman” narrative; paternalism

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Samu, Margaret, 214n42 Sand, George, 74, 76, 119–120, 212n79, 120 Schrader, Abby, 24, 43, 104 Schuler, Catherine, 81 Serebrennaia roza (organ­ization), 227n2 sewer system and the sex worker’s body, 50–51, 67. See also public health discourse on prostitution sewing and dressmaking, 32–33 sexual assault. See vio­lence against ­women sexual happiness, 168, 180, 191–193, 198–199. See also ­women sex work. See prostitution sex workers: forced public marches of, 1–3, 196; marriage and, 205n34; Putin on, 195, 196; relationship with madams, 147–148; state regulation of, 2–3, 6, 20, 36, 197, 227n2; syphilis and, 19, 50–51, 64, 71–75, 197; as term, 6; visual interpretations of, 15, 25–26. See also brothels; demimonde and demimondaine; madams; procuresses; prostitution Shashkov, Serafim, 19, 81, 147, 152–153 Shelgunov, Nikolai, 121, 187 Shilder, Nikolai, 17, 126–127, 149–151, 153 Shoibes, Anna Markovna, 145 Striedter, Iurii, 86 Simmel, Georg, 21 sin: in Dostoevsky’s The B ­ rothers Karamazov, 177, 178; in Leskov’s The Battle-­Axe, 161, 164; in Nekrasov’s poems, 29; Shashkov on, 19; in Shilder’s The Temptation, 149–151; in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, 226n30 The Slums of Petersburg (Krestovsky), 50, 52–56, 151 Smith, Jill, 10 “social parasites,” as phrase, 143 soderzhanka. See “kept ­woman” narrative soderzhatel’nitsa. See procuresses Solomon-­Godeau, Abigail, 83 Sonia Marmeladova (character), 38, 44–45, 54, 129, 194, 207n74. See also Crime and Punishment (Dostoevsky) Sovremennik (publication), 121, 122, 125, 220nn35–36 The Spark (publication), 54, 55, 101, 102, 103, 105 “The Station Master” (Pushkin), 168, 191 Stepanov, N., 104 Stites, Richard, 96 The Storm (Ostrovsky), 136, 137, 140

St. Petersburg, Rus­sia: prostitution in, 19–22; public raid on sex workers in, 1–3, 196; public spaces for ­women in, 40–46; visual and print culture of, 16–17 St. Petersburg Imperial Theatre, 10, 66 Straus, Nina Pelikan, 154, 174 streetwalker. See sex workers Strekoza (publication), 24–25, 59–60, 169, 171 suicide, 7, 58, 130, 132–134, 179, 221nn62–63 Suvorin, Aleksei, 56 syphilis, 19, 50–51, 64, 71–75, 197 Tanner, Tony, 181 Tarnovskaia, Praskovia, 13 Tarnovsky, Veniamin, 13, 51–52, 64, 75, 203n27 The Temptation (Shilder), 149–151 theater, 66, 81, 215n52 “Thinking Sex” (Rubin), 14 This Sex Which Is Not One (Irigaray), 7 Timm, Vasily, 93, 94, 95 tolerance policies, 2–3, 20 Tolstaya, Sofia, 70 Tolstoy, Leo, 18, 197–198; Childhood, 180; The Kreutzer Sonata, 64, 67–70, 73, 75. See also Anna Karenina (Tolstoy); Resurrection (Tolstoy) Toporov, Vladimir, 20 transactional sex. See prostitution Tretiakov, Sergei, 108 Turgenev, Ivan, 56, 172, 186 Turner, Victor, 80 Unequal Marriage (Pukirev), 127–128 unequal marriages, 126–128 “unknown w ­ oman” trope, 22, 107–108, 109, 115. See also “Nevsky Prospect” (story by Gogol); Portrait of an Unknown ­Woman (Kramskoi) Vakhrameev, Aleksandr, 46, 47 Valkenier, Elizabeth, 126 venereal disease, 13, 22–23; in Andreev’s “In the Fog,” 70–72, 74, 76 Vera Klirmova (character), 116–117, 118. See also A Double Life (Pavlova) Vera Pavlovna (character), 30–33, 82, 120, 125–126, 187, 197. See also What Is to Be Done? (Chernyshevsky) Verbitskaya, Anastasiia, 192 Vereshchagin, Vasilii Andreevich, 216n66 vio­lence against ­women, 38, 60, 68, 72, 73–74, 154–160, 196. See also pedophilia

I n d e x Virgin Mary, 40, 130, 133–134, 179, 221n67, 221n68. See also Madonna/whore binary; Mary, ­Mother of God visual culture, as term, 201n10. See also artistic repre­sen­ta­tions Voskresenie. See Resurrection (Tolstoy) Vsiacheskii sport (illustration), 197, 198 Wachtel, Andrew, 180 Walkowitz, Judith, 11, 21 West, Sally, 216n61 What Is to Be Done? (Chernyshevsky), 29–34, 37, 82, 110, 120, 169, 187, 197 “Whenever I’m driving down dark streets at night” (Nekrasov), 28–29 “When from the darkness . . .” (Nekrasov), 27, 28, 29, 37 whore, as ­legal category, 147 Winter Garden in the Orpheum (Broling), 10–11 witches and witchcraft, 153–154 A ­Woman’s Lot (Panaeva), 113, 123, 125–126

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­women: chastity of, 7, 69, 102, 151, 168, 189, 191; as dowerless brides, 4, 10, 110, 111–112, 141–142; education of, 48, 208n4; “emancipated ­woman” narrative, 121–126; “fallen ­woman” narrative, 9, 15, 16, 54, 58–60; motherhood and maternal myth of, 54, 86, 179–185, 193, 226n33; as persnickety brides, 129; property rights of, 111, 217n2; public spaces for, 40–46; sexual happiness of, 168, 180, 191–193, 198–199; social reforms and emancipation of, 12–13, 17–18, 30–31, 121–126; “unknown w ­ oman” trope, 22, 107–108, 109, 115; vio­lence against, 60, 68, 72, 73–74, 154–160, 196. See also “kept ­woman” narrative; marriage; prostitution; sex workers Worobec, Christine, 153 ­You’re Beautiful in any Clothing, Darling (Lebedev), 90–91 Zholkovsky, Alexander, 13, 14