In 1843, a system of state regulation of prostitution, fashioned after the French model, was introduced in imperial Russia. Prostitutes would be issued a “yellow ticket,” allowing the medical police to track and contain their activities and to monitor them for venereal disease. The regulation of prostitution was intended to neutralize the danger posed by sexual commerce to societal stability. Things did not go according to plan. As Colleen Lucey details in her compelling new book, the prostitute became a key locus for many of imperial Russia's most profound anxieties. Love for Sale expertly traces the contours of these anxieties in Russian literary and visual culture, focusing on works produced between 1840 and 1905. Unease about urbanization, shifting gender dynamics, the presence of women as consumers in the public sphere, and the infusion of capitalist elements into the economy—the prostitute emblematized all of these concerns for imperial Russia's cultural producers. In the era's depictions of prostitution, nothing less than the fate of the Russian nation was at stake.
Each chapter of the book focuses on a different category of commercial sex. Chapter 1 foregrounds the urban, registered prostitute. Lucey credits Nikolai Gogol΄'s story “Nevsky Prospect” with introducing “the theme of commercial sex” into Russian literature, adding that Gogol΄ “did so by connecting the sold woman with the image” of the imperial capital (23). Gogol΄'s story also articulates a question that would preoccupy subsequent Russian authors: Can the prostitute be “saved”? If so, how and by whom? In her discussion of how these questions undergird Fedor Dostoevskii's The Underground Man, Lucey adds a new dimension to well-covered territory by analyzing how the author “uses space as part of the symbolic language in the novel” (36). Obliquely highlighting the failure of the system of regulating prostitution, Dostoevskii reveals how women cannot escape being perceived as “commodity goods” even if they leave the confines of the brothel (36).
Chapter 2 continues the focus on the urban prostitute but explores how prose writers engaged with medical and sociological discourses, especially those normalizing prostitution as a “safety valve for social passions” (48). Lucey charts the struggle between vilifying and vindicating commercial sex workers that unfolds in the works of Vsevolod Krestovskii, Vsevolod Garshin, Lev Tolstoi, and Leonid Andreev. As with the discussion of Dostoevskii in the earlier chapter, she adds an original new dimension to the criticism of Tolstoi's Resurrection by detailing how it responds to the leading theories on sex work of the time. Chapter 3 turns from the urban prostitute to the elite one, or the demimondaine. With her “appropriation of the behaviors, pastimes, and clothing of the elite,” the demimondaine “confused sexual and social boundaries,” profoundly troubling the Russian intelligentsia in the process (78). The demimondaine emblematizes the threat posed by women's increasing emergence into the public domain as consumers. This chapter identifies an important divergence between literary works, which stress the demimondaine's “falleness as a moral dilemma (82),” and visual culture hinting that elite prostitution might offer a tantalizing, even liberating alternative to the strictures of the patriarchal family and reproductive sex.
In Chapter 4 the dowerless bride moves to the foreground of the discussion, and Lucey traces how writers and artists turn to this figure to “critique the commodification of marriage, and, by extension, Russian society” as a whole (110). A particularly fascinating section of the chapter focuses on Avdotia Panaeva's unjustly forgotten fiction of the 1860s, which offers a nuanced rejoinder to the “utopian promises of egalitarian unions” (122) touted by some of her contemporaries. In Chapter 5 Lucey turns her attention to the much-despised figure of the madam. Imagined to be more dangerous than the elite prostitute and more loathsome than even the men who frequented brothels, the madam conveniently acts as a repository for all blame connected with commercial sex in imperial Russia. Literary portrayals of the madam draw upon folkloric motifs, conjuring up the witch Baba Yaga to evoke the threat of a mother who may gleefully profit from her daughter's abjection. The “kept woman” (soderzhanka), a figure that—like the demimondaine—uncomfortably challenges boundaries and embodies ambiguity, is discussed in Chapter 6. Occupying the murky territory between mistress and wife, the soderzhanka “tested the social order by constituting a domestic sphere outside the legal bonds of marriage” (172). While crediting Dostoevskii with introducing the psychological complexity of the kept woman into Russian literature, Lucey also devotes attention to female writers, such as Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaia, who treat this figure less moralistically than their male contemporaries.
Love for Sale is a well-written, deeply researched, and highly engaging book. It provides provocative new readings of classical texts as well as introducing lesser-known works, particularly of visual culture, to a wider readership. It will prove valuable for students and scholars of Russian gender studies and imperial Russian literature and culture, as well scholars from any discipline interested in cultural representations of commercial sex.
