Love for Sale: Representing Prostitution in Imperial Russia

By Colleen Lucey

Love for Sale is the first study to examine the ubiquity of commercial sex in Russian literary and artistic production from the nineteenth century through the fin de siècle. Colleen Lucey offers a compelling account of how the figure of the sex worker captivated the public's imagination through depictions in fiction and fine art, bringing to light how imperial Russians grappled with the issue of sexual commerce. Studying a wide range of media—from little-known engravings that circulated in newspapers to works of canonical fiction—Lucey shows how writers and artists used the topic of prostitution both to comment on women's shifting social roles at the end of tsarist rule and to express anxieties about the incursion of capitalist transactions in relations of the heart.

Each of the book's chapters focus on a type of commercial sex, looking at how the street walker, brothel worker, demimondaine, kept woman, impoverished bride, and madam traded in sex as a means to acquire capital. Lucey argues that prostitution became a focal point for imperial Russians because it signaled both the promises of modernity and the anxieties associated with Westernization.

Love for Sale integrates historical analysis, literary criticism, and feminist theory and conveys how nineteenth-century beliefs about the "fallen woman" drew from medical, judicial, and religious discourse on female sexuality. Lucey invites readers to draw a connection between rhetoric of the nineteenth century and today's debate on sex workers' rights, highlighting recent controversies concerning Russian sex workers to show how imperial discourse is recycled in the twenty-first century.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Northern Illinois University Press
• Release date: Sep 15, 2021
• ISBN: 9781501758874

Book preview

LOVE FOR SALE

REPRESENTING PROSTITUTION IN IMPERIAL RUSSIA

COLLEEN LUCEY

NORTHERN ILLINOIS UNIVERSITY PRESS

An imprint of Cornell University Press

Ithaca and London

For Ben

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Notes on Transliteration and Translation

Introduction

1. Russia’s Babylon

2. Safety Valves of Social Passions

3. Tricks of the Trade

4. The Dowerless Bride on Russia’s Marriage Market

5. Hyenas in Bonnets

6. Commodifying Domestic Bliss

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ILLUSTRATIONS

I.1. The Arrested Sweep the Streets, ca. 1840.

I.2. Aleksandr Lebedev, illustration from Fallen but Charming Creatures, 1862–63.

I.3. Illustration from The Alarm Clock, 1880.

I.4. G. Broling, Winter Garden in the Orpheum, 1871.

1.1. Petersburg Firsthand, illustration from The Dragonfly, 1882.

1.2. Petersburg Firsthand, detail.

1.3. Vladimir Makovsky, The Blessing of the Public House, 1900.

1.4. Amusement Venues in St. Petersburg and Its Suburbs, illustration from World Illustrated,1879.

1.5. Amusement Venues in St. Petersburg and Its Suburbs, detail.

1.6. Aleksandr Vakhrameev, A Couple on the Banks of the Moika, 1906.

2.1. Illustration from The Spark, 1867.

2.2. Viktor Shpak, Two Roads, illustration from The Dragonfly, 1878.

3.1. Mikhail Nevakhovich, illustration from Hodgepodge, 1847.

3.2. Aleksandr Lebedev, At the Masquerade, 1860.

3.3. Vasily Timm, illustration from Pictures of Russian Mores, 1842–43.

3.4. Vasily Timm, illustration from Pictures of Russian Mores, 1842–43.

3.5. Aleksandr Lebedev, illustration from Fallen but Charming Creatures, 1862–63.

3.6. N. Stepanov, A Meeting Between a Camellia and a Simple Flower, illustration from The Spark, 1859.

3.7. Commerce, illustration from The Spark, 1860.

3.8. Illustration by N. Stepanov, from The Spark, 1864.

3.9. Aleksandr Lebedev, illustration from Fallen but Charming Creatures, 1862–63.

3.10. Ilia Repin, A Parisian Café, 1875.

3.11. Ivan Kramskoi, Portrait of an Unknown Woman, 1883.

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.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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 matter. 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 career 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 great deal of thanks to Molly Thomasy Blasing, Jason Merrill, Melissa Miller, Larisa Moskvitina, Olga Permitina, Benjamin Rifkin, 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 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 European, 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.

NOTES ON TRANSLITERATION AND TRANSLATION

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.

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 behind 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 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. After 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 European 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 labor. 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 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.

Two women sweep the streets as a group of policemen supervise their work.

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.

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 women 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

Russia’s authors wrote about the prostitute because her sexual availability frustrated, confused, and excited them and their readers. The image of the wanton woman 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 women enjoying sexual and financial freedom attest to a celebratory tradition that resisted the dichotomization of prostitutes as either 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 eager 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 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 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.

A man and woman engage in intimate conversation while seated at an outdoor café.

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 will be yours alone.

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 because it simultaneously 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 woman’s agency in her decision to engage in transactional sex. My terminology, however, cannot be disassociated from the historical period under study, and thus I interchangeably refer to prostitution and sex work, prostitute and sex worker. Although the terms sex work and sex worker were 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 women’s sexual subjecthood. While some found the increase in registered prostitutes in the nation’s major cities a sign of moral demise, others celebrated the possibilities of anonymous sexual relations. Rarely, if ever, did Russia’s cultural producers consider prostitution as a form of labor for women; instead, they diagnosed sexual commerce as a symptom of the commodification of the country’s women. Whether a woman 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.

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 women. 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 women 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 women 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 women 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 political economy and gender, Russia’s cultural producers showed that imperial society was founded on the traffic in women.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 madams paying traffickers for new brothel workers. Russia’s literati noted that not only men but also women participated in this system of economic exchange. Whether forced, coerced, or of their own volition, women exchanging sex for financial benefit challenged the Russian intelligentsia to reconsider its ingrained beliefs about the sexual and social order.

An elegantly dressed woman looks away from her male companion, who seems shocked by her low-cut gown.

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.

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 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 century 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 century 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 women, dowerless brides, and procuresses all lived and profited by mobilizing 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 streetwalkers 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 woman 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 women holds a fan coquettishly across her face, coyly signaling a game of seduction. Standing beside her is a representative of a new class of women 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 with the man. The women might be arranging a tryst with the gentleman and his acquaintance, or they might not. That the women smoke, flirt, drink, and enjoy themselves in the bustling atmosphere attests to new possibilities for social and sexual behavior in 1870s St. Petersburg.

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.

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.

Womanhood under 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. These 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 women’s emancipation were early Russian activists who shaped 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 women’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 women’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