From Nevskii prospekt to Zoia's apartment: Trials of the Russian procuress

Russian Review

Volumn 58, Issue 3, 1999, Pages 413-431

  Cassiday, Julie A ^a   Rouhi, Leyla ^b  

^a Williams College

^b WILLIAMS COLLEGE   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0006569137     PISSN: 00360341     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/0036-0341.00082     Document Type: Article

References (85)

1. Prostitutka/Ubitaia zhizn'iu (O. Frelikh, 1926)
2. For other silent films from the 1920s that include similarly negative depictions of procuresses see Kat'ka bumazhnyi ranet (F. Ermler, 1926)
3. and Predatel' (A. Room, 1926)
4. For a comparative analysis of the figure of the go-between from Antiquity to the end of the Middle Ages see Leyla Rouhi, Mediation in Love: A Study of the Medieval Go-Between in Key Romance and Near-Eastern Texts (Leiden, 1999)
5. Rouhi, Mediation in Love, chap. 2
6. and Marcel Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu (1914) are among the many plays and novels where the older woman acting as go-between appears in an unfavorable light
7. See also Catherine Campbell, The French Procuress: Her Character in Renaissance Comedies (New York, 1985)
8. See Francisco Marquez Villanueva, Orígenes y sociología del tema celestinesco (Barcelona, 1992)
9. Samuel G. Armistead and James T. Monroe, "Celestina's Muslim Sisters," Celestinesca 13, no. 2 (1989): 3-27
10. and Stephen Gilman, The Spain of Fernando de Rojas: The Intellectual and Social Landscape of La Celestina (Princeton, 1972)
11. James A. Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe (Chicago, 1987), 297
12. Emile Amt, ed., Women's Lives in Medieval Europe: A Sourcebook (New York, 1993), 60
13. Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society, 62
14. See in particular Paul Larivaille, La vie quotidienne des courtisanes en Italie au temps de la Renaissance (Rome et Venise, XVe et XVIe siècles) (Paris, 1975)
15. and Lynn Hunt, ed., The Invention of Pornography: Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity, 1500-1800 (New York, 1993)
16. See Charles Bernheimer, Figures of Ill Repute: Representing Prostitution in Nineteenth-Century France (Cambridge, MA, 1989)
17. E. J. Burford and Joy Wotton, Private Vices, Public Virtues: Bawdry in London from Elizabe-than Times to the Regency (London, 1995)
18. and Joanna Richardson, The Courtesans: The Demi-monde in Nineteenth-century France (London, 1967)
19. Williams W. Sanger, History of Prostitution (New York, 1972), esp. 142ff, 208, 315-17, 491
20. Jill Harsin, Policing Prostitution in Nineteenth-Century Paris (Princeton, 1985), 282
21. Eve Levin, Sex and Society in the World of the Orthodox Slavs, 900-1700 (Ithaca, 1989), 190
22. N. B. Lebina and M. B. Shkarovskii, Prostitutsiia v Peterburge (40-e gg. XIX v. - 40-e gg. XX v.) (Moscow, 1994), 19-20
23. The Muscovite Law Code (Ulozhenie) of 1649, pt. 1
24. Text and Translation, trans, and ed. Richard Hellie (Irvine, CA, 1988), 223
25. "Frol Skobeev, The Rogue," in Medieval Russia's Epics, Chronicles, and Tales, ed. and trans. Serge A. Zenkovsky (New York, 1974), 474-86
26. For two examples see "Volshebnoe kol'tso" and "Chudesnaia maz'," in Russkie zavetnye skazki, izd. A. Afanas'evym, ed. Yury Perkov (Oakland, 1988), 128-32, 158-60
27. Lebina and Shkarovskii, Prostitutsiia v Peterburge, 19-20
28. For histories of prostitution in prerevolutionary Russia see Laurie Bernstein, Sonia's Daughters: Prostitutes and Their Regulation in Imperial Russia (Berkeley, 1995)
29. Barbara Alpern Engel, Between the Fields and the City: Women, Work, and Family in Russia, 1861-1914 (Cambridge, England, 1994), 166-97
30. and Richard Stites, "Prostitution and Society in Prerevolutionary Russia," Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropes 31 (1983): 348-64
31. Bernstein, Sonia's Daughters, 22-23
32. Laura Engelstein, The Keys to Happiness: Sex and the Search for Modernity in Fin-de-Siècle Russia (Ithaca, 1992), 39, 74-75, 90
33. A. Dubrovskii, ed., Prostitutsiia po obsledovaniiu 1-go avgusta 1889 goda (St. Petersburg, 1890), xii-xv
34. Englestein, Keys to Happiness, 304-13
35. and A. S. Meliksetian, "Prostitutsiia v 20-e gody," Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniia 3 (1989): 72
36. Stites, "Prostitution and Society," 356
37. "Luka Mudishchev," Pod imenem Barkova: Eroticheskaia poeziia XVIII-nachala XIX veka, ed. N. Sapov (Moscow, 1994), 249-60 (the quotation is from p. 252)
38. See also William H. Hopkins, "The Development of 'Pornographic' Literature in Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century Russia" (Ph.D. diss., University of Indiana, 1977), 478-85
39. Pornographic literature of the late nineteenth century often takes a much more playful tone in its replication of these stereotypes of the procuress. See, for example, "Stsena v odnom deistvii," in Stikhi ne dlia dam: Russkaia netsenzurnaia poeziia vtoroi poloviny XIX veka, ed. A. Panchin and N. Sapov (Moscow, 1994), 372-75
40. Alexander Kuprin, Yama: The Pit, trans. B. G. Guerney (Westport, 1977)
41. Stites, "Prostitution and Society," 353
42. Bemslein, Sonia's Daughters, 155-61
43. For histories of prostitution after 1917 see Elizabeth Waters, "Victim or Villain: Prostitution in Post-revolutionary Russia," in Women and Society in Russia and the Soviet Union, ed. Linda Edmondson (Cambridge, England, 1992), 160-77
44. and Elizabeth A. Wood, "Prostitution Unbound: Representations of Sexual and Political Anxieties in Post-Revolutionary Russia," in Sexuality and the Body in Russian Culture, ed. Jane T. Costlow et al. (Stanford, 1993), 124-35
45. For a discussion of the debates surrounding prostitution during war communism see Elizabeth A. Wood, The Baba and the Comrade: Gender and Politics in Revolutionary Russia (Bloomington, 1997), 111-16
46. L. Eratov, "Nakazumena li prostitutsiia?" Ezhenedel'nik sovetskoi iustitsii, 1922, no. 4:4-6
47. Prostitutsiia i mery bor'by s nei (Smolensk, 1925), 45
48. G. A. Bordiugov, "Sotsial'nyi parazitizm ili sotsial'nye anomalii? (Iz istorii bor'by s alkogolizmom, nishchenstvom, prostitutsiei, brodiazhnichestvom v 20-30-e gody)," Istoriia SSSR, 1989, no. 1:64
49. Waters, "Victim or Villain," 167
50. Wood, "Prostitution Unbound," 132
51. Prostitutsiia i mery bor'by s nei, 49
52. Aleksandra Kollontai, "Prostitution and Ways of Fighting it," in Selected Writings, trans. Alix Holt (Westport, 1977), 272
53. Meliksetian, "Prostitutsiia v 20-e gody," 72
54. Stites, "Prostitution and Society," 363-64
55. For a discussion of the rise of prostitution during the NEP see Wendy Z. Goldman, Women, the State and Revolution: Soviet Family Policy and Social Life, 1917-1936 (Cambridge, England, 1993), 118-22
56. and Wood, The Baba and the Comrade, 173-79
57. For a fictional account of the relationship between the housing crisis and the rise of prostitution in the 1920s see Aleksandra Kollontai's short story, "Sisters," in Love of Worker Bees, trans. Cathy Porter (Chicago, 1978), 212-22
58. Lebina and Shkarovskii, Prostitutsiia v Peterburge, 10, 217
59. "Prostitutsiia i narkomaniia," Rabochii sud, 1925, no. 7-8:320
60. During the 1920s attending the cinema was seen as another dangerous activity that, according to one specialist, brought young women into the hands of brothel madams: "Experienced procuresses often recruit their young victims among the lonely adolescent girls who regularly visit the cinema" (P. I. Liublinskii, Kinematograf i deti [Moscow, 1925], 20)
61. Waters, "Victim or Villain," 161
62. The accusation of parasitism would reappear in discussions of prostitution during glasnost. Interestingly, prostitution was not recriminalized in the Soviet Union until 1987, while the same 1922 statutes that prescribed imprisonment for pandering and procuring remained in effect throughout the Soviet Union's existence. See Andrea Stevenson Sanjian, "Prostitution, the Press, and Agenda-Building in the Soviet Policy Process," in Soviet Social Problems, ed. Anthony Jones et al. (Boulder, 1991), 283
63. and Elizabeth Waters, "Prostitution," in Soviet Social Reality in the Mirror of Glasnost, ed. Jim Riordon (New York, 1992), 137
64. For analyses of the agitsud as a genre of revolutionary theater see Julie A. Cassiday, The Enemy on Trial: Early Soviet Courts on Stage and Screen (DeKalb, IL, forthcoming), chap. 4
65. and Elizabeth A. Wood, "The Trial of a Prostitute: Theater and Political Culture in Revolutionary Russia, 1920-1930," manuscript by permission of the author
66. A. I. Akkerman, Sud nad prostitutkoi: Delo gr. Zaborovoi po obvineniiu ee v zaniatii prostitutsiei i zarazhenii sifilosom kr-ts Krest'ianova (Moscow-Petrograd, 1922)
67. A. I. Akkerman, Sud nad prostitutkoi i svodnitsei: Delo grazhd. Evdokimovoi, po obvineniiu v soznatel'nom zarazhenii sifilisom i grazhd. Sviridovoi v svodnichesve i soobshchnichestve (Moscow, 1924), 63
68. For notice of the censorship's ban see "Teatry osvobozhdaiutsia ot p'es Bulgakova," Vecherniaia Moskva, 6 March 1929, 3
69. For examples of contemporary scholarship focusing on theatrical politics of the 1920s see M. Chudakova, Zhizneopisanie Mikhaila Bulgakova (Moscow, 1988), 252-91
70. V. Gudkova, "'Zoikina kvartira' M. A. Bulgakova," in M. A. Bulgakov - dramaturg i khudozhestvennaia kul'tura ego vremeni: Sbornik statei, ed. V. Gudkova (Moscow, 1988), 96-124
71. and Leslie Milne, "Mikhail Bulgakov: The Status of the Dramatist and the Status of the Text," in Russian Theater in the Age of Modernism, ed. Robert Russell and Andrew Barratt (New York, 1990), 236-40
72. For criticism that focuses on the play's genre see Iu. V. Babicheva, "Zhanrovye osobennosti komedii M. Bulgakova 20-x gg. ('Zoikina kvartira')," in Zhanrovo-kompozitsionnoe svoeobrazie realisticheskogo povestvovaniia, ed. V. V. Gur (Vologda, 1982), 66-84
73. For accusations of pornography see B., "Na kholostom khodu ('Zoikina kvartira' v studii im. Vakhtangova)," Novyi zritel', 9 November 1926, 13-14
74. A. Orlinskii, '"Zoikina kvartira' (Studiia im. Vakhtangova)," Pravda, 13 November 1926, 8
75. and V. Pavlov, "Tri prem'ery ('Zoikina kvartira' v Studii im. Vakhtangova)," Zhizn' iskusstva, 16 November 1926, 11
76. For criticism that reclaims Bulgakov's play see N. N. Kiselev, "Komedii M. Bulgakova 'Zoikina kvartira' i 'Bagrovyi ostrov'," in Trudy, problemy metoda i zhanra, vol. 252 (Tomsk, 1974), 73-78
77. and D. I. Zolotnitskii, "Komedii M.A. Bulgakova na stsene 1920-kh godov," in Problemy teatral'nogo naslediia M. A. Bulgakova: Sbornik nauchnykh trudov (Leningrad, 1987), 60-67
78. Babicheva, "Zhanrovye osobennosti," 75
79. M. A. Bulgakov, P'esy 1920-kh godov (Leningrad, 1989), 539
80. M. A. Bulgakov, Sobranie sochinenii v piati tomakh, vol. 3, P'esy (Moscow, 1990), 621
81. Bulgakov, "Zoikina kvartira," Sobranie sochinenii 3:77
82. In his 1935 revision of Zoikina kvartira, Bulgakov makes Zoia a go-between even for the GPU inspectors who shut down the brothel at the play's end. After finding the dead body of Gus', they drag Zoia and Obol'ianinov from the stage, announcing, "But we were coming to your place as guests" (Bulgakov, P'esy 1920-kh godov, 248)
83. Ellendea Proffer, "Introduction," in The Early Plays of Mikhail Bulgakov, trans. Carl R. Proffer and Ellendea Proffer (Bloomington, 1972), 101
84. For these references see Bulgakov, "Zoikina kvartira," in Sobranie sochinenii 3:81, 109, and 138
85. Zh. El'sberg, "Bulgakov i MKhAT," Na literaturnom postu, 1927, no. 3:47