Sewage and the City: Filth, Smell, and Representations of Urban Life in Moscow, 1770–1880 ALEXANDER M. MARTIN

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nyone curious about the aroma of Moscow in the past will notice a peculiar pattern. In the 1770s, the city reportedly smelled awful. By the 1870s, it reeked once again. But during the intervening decades, the stench mysteriously vanished from the primary sources— indeed, we are told, the air in Moscow was positively “balsamic.”1 Such accounts reveal little about Moscow’s air itself but a great deal about those sniffing it. In an influential study, the historian Alain Corbin argues that affluent Frenchmen in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries regarded Paris’s rising tide of sewage as a portent of the urban social order’s own degeneration. Consequently, their attention to sewage— the miasmas that pre-Pasteurian epidemiology believed it emitted, its presence among different social strata, and the means for its elimination—intensified continually, in proportion to their own fear of the literally unwashed masses.2 Suitably modified, Corbin’s insight can help us understand olfactory sensibilities in Moscow as well, although the picture that emerges is different from what he found for Paris. In Moscow, I will argue, filth raised fears at the dawn of Catherine II’s reign, not as a telltale symptom of urban degeneration, but as an atavistic feature of an archaic populace whom the state hoped both to repress and uplift. Subsequently, as educated society gained confidence in the efficacy of its formula for social stability—an “enlightened” upper class, serfdom, and police regulation—fetid odors still offended sensitive noses but no longer haunted the social imaginary. However, when this confidence was shaken in the era of the Crimean War, the attention to odors returned with a vengeance. The research for this paper was made possible in part by funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Councils for International Education, and the National Council for East European and Eurasian Research. I thank Martin Aust, Cathy Frierson, Olga Maiorova, Elise Kimerling Wirtschafter, and the two anonymous readers for The Russian Review for their insightful comments on earlier drafts. 1 F[riedrich] Raupach, Reise von St. Petersburg nach dem Gesundbrunnen zu Lipezk am Don: Nebst einem Beitrage zur Charakteristik der Russen (Breslau, 1809), 89. 2 Alain Corbin, The Foul and the Fragrant: Odor and the French Social Imagination, trans. Miriam Kochan et al. (Cambridge, MA, 1986). The Russian Review 67 (April 2008): 243–74 Copyright 2008 The Russian Review

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This study examines how educated Russians imagined the urban social order—an important problem in Russian history, since the imperial regime’s goal of Westernizing the country while maintaining political stability was unattainable in the nineteenth century if educated society lost confidence in the state’s management of the empire’s growing urban centers. The wider historiographical context involves a central problem in the history of Western societies in the same period—how changes in intellectual and material culture combined to create the modern urban world, and how the political and literary elites made sense of these changes. In Imperial Russia, these social representations emerged through a three-way dialogue between the state, educated society, and “Europe”—actual European commentators as well as the image of Europe that Russians themselves constructed. Recent scholarship has shown that educated Russians in the eighteenth century exhibited a growing interest in public affairs. Their discussions focused initially on their own relationship as (usually) nobles with the monarchy and each other,3 and were molded by exposure to the culture and realities of Europe as well as to their own country’s image as it was refracted in foreign literature.4 By the end of the century, various forces—the upheavals generated by the French Revolution, the use of statistics and ethnography in analyzing society, the preoccupation with national identity, and sentimentalist literature’s sympathetic engagement with the “other”—prompted an interest in the alterity not only of Russia within Europe but also of the masses in relation to the elite. Meanwhile, the educated public itself was evolving: the secular literary world, at first mainly a handful of noble amateurs, came to include a growing number of professional journalists, scholars, administrators, and literati, many of them non-noble by origin and outlook, whose writings in turn reached ever broader, socially more diverse audiences. The shifts in the debates about urban life were driven in part by this transformation of who was writing and reading about cities. The ensuing literary forays into the terra incognita of the common people were particularly active from the 1790s to the 1880s; reaching growing audiences through Russia’s burgeoning press, they evolved from abstract theorizing to sociological exploration, and portrayed the common people alternately as repository of all virtue, as stunted and primitive, or as indecipherably “other.”5 This intellectual history was embedded, in turn, in the history 3 Cynthia Hyla Whittaker, Russian Monarchy: Eighteenth-Century Rulers and Writers in Political Dialogue (DeKalb, 2003); Elise Kimerling Wirtschafter, The Play of Ideas in Russian Enlightenment Theater (DeKalb, 2003); John Randolph, The House in the Garden: The Bakunin Family and the Romance of Russian Idealism (Ithaca, 2007). 4 Marshall Poe, “A People Born to Slavery”: Russia in Early Modern European Ethnography, 1476–1748 (Ithaca, 2000); Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford, 1994); Martin Malia, Russia under Western Eyes: From the Bronze Horseman to the Lenin Mausoleum (Cambridge, MA, 1999); Claude de Grève, ed., Le Voyage en Russie: Anthologie des voyageurs français aux XVIIIe et XIXe siècles (Paris, 1990); Franco Venturi, The End of the Old Regime in Europe, 1768–1776: The First Crisis, trans. R. Burr Litchfield (Princeton, 1989), 55–68, 80–82, 91–100, 154–65; Marcus C. Levitt, “An Antidote to Nervous Juice: Catherine the Great’s Debate With Chappe d’Auteroche Over Russian Culture,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 32 (Fall 1998): 49–63. 5 David Herman, Poverty of the Imagination: 19th Century Russian Literature about the Poor (Evanston, 2001); Cathy Frierson, Peasant Icons: Representations of Rural People in Late Nineteenth-Century Russia (New York, 1993); Louise McReynolds, The News under Russia’s Old Regime: The Development of a MassCirculation Press (Princeton 1991); Katia Dianina, “The Feuilleton: An Everyday Guide to Public Culture in the Age of the Great Reforms,” Slavic and East European Journal 47 (Summer 2003): 187–210; Nurit Schleifman, “A Russian Daily Newspaper and Its Readership: Severnaia Pchela 1825–1840,” Cahiers du Monde russe et soviétique 28 (April-June 1987): 127–44.

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of state efforts to construct a viable estate (soslovie) system as a means of social control. Scholars have examined the state’s efforts to fix fluid social identities6 and assign roles to individual social groups,7 but also the progressive loss of faith among officials in the usefulness of purely ascriptive estate identities that paralleled literature’s shift toward social realism.8 Drawing on this historiography, the present study places Moscow—widely regarded, in contrast with St. Petersburg, as the archetypal “Russian” city—in a European context, if only because the sources themselves are often explicitly comparative. In the Catherinian era, they express a desire to emulate “Europe” in general. By the turn of the nineteenth century, the nascent literature on Moscow was molded by German-language writers whose frame of reference was European. Under Nicholas I, finally, Russian-language commentators treated London and Paris as the paradigmatic cities that embodied what Eric Hobsbawm calls the “dual revolution” in economics and politics that many Russians hoped to avoid.9 Since France also supplied some of the literary templates for describing city life, writers and critics were left to debate whether urban Russia truly resembled France or whether a derivative literature only made it appear so. Before turning to the history of representations, we should briefly consider the empirical realities. Like other cities of the time, Moscow was a malodorous, insalubrious place. In the eight decades from the 1770s to the early 1850s, according to official estimates, the city’s population more than doubled, increasing from 161,181 to 356,511; in the next three decades it doubled again, reaching 753,469 by 1882.10 Disposing of the waste created by all these people posed a huge challenge. Experts estimated that the average human generated 700 puds (25,200 pounds) of “filth” annually; even allowing for the evaporation of 220 puds, this left 480 puds (17,280 pounds) of solid or liquid waste that required disposal.11 To this must be added the waste from tens of thousands of horses as well as tanneries, slaughterhouses, and other enterprises. 6 Elise Kimerling Wirtschafter, Structures of Society: Imperial Russia’s “People of Various Ranks” (DeKalb, 1994); Gregory L. Freeze, “The Soslovie (Estate) Paradigm and Russian Social History,” American Historical Review 91 (February 1986): 11–36. 7 On education and child-rearing see, for example, Rebecca Friedman, Masculinity, Autocracy, and the Russian University, 1804–1863 (Basingstoke, 2005); J. Laurence Black, Citizens for the Fatherland: Education, Educators, and Pedagogical Ideals in Eighteenth-Century Russia (Boulder, 1979); and David L. Ransel, Mothers of Misery: Child Abandonment in Russia (Princeton, 1988). On gender, religion, and penal policy see Irina Paert, Old Believers, Religious Dissent, and Gender in Russia, 1760–1850 (Manchester, 2003); and Abby M. Schrader, Languages of the Lash: Corporal Punishment and Identity in Imperial Russia (DeKalb, 2002). Urban policy is discussed in J. Michael Hittle, The Service City: State and Townsmen in Russia, 1600– 1800 (Cambridge, MA, 1979); and John T. Alexander, Bubonic Plague in Early Modern Russia: Public Health & Urban Disaster (Baltimore, 1980). 8 W. Bruce Lincoln, In the Vanguard of Reform: Russia’s Enlightened Bureaucrats, 1825–1861 (DeKalb, 1986); Richard S. Wortman, The Development of a Russian Legal Consciousness (Chicago, 1976); Susan P. McCaffray, “Confronting Serfdom in the Age of Revolution: Projects for Serf Reform in the Time of Alexander I,” Russian Review 64 (January 2005): 1–21. 9 E. J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution, 1789–1848 (Cleveland, 1962), 2. 10 A. N. Sakharov et al., eds., Istoriia Moskvy s drevneishikh vremen do nashikh dnei, 3 vols. (Moscow, 1997), 1:283, 2:9, 252. 11 M. A. Popov, “Kanalizatsiia goroda Moskvy: Po proektu inzhener-gidrotekhnika M. A. Popova,” Izvestiia Moskovskoi Gorodskoi Dumy (IMGD), 1880, vyp. 8, col. 7.

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Official reports from the 1870s paint a vivid picture of what happened to all this waste. In the absence of a sewer system, Moscow’s privies drained into cesspools. Private contractors could be hired to come during the night, transfer their contents into barrels, and cart these to dumps outside the city. However, penny-pinching landlords often delayed calling the cleaners until their cesspool threatened to overflow, the carts hauling the sewage spread a revolting odor, and the stench from the dumps wafted back into the city.12 The manure from tens of thousands of horses was left to rot in the courtyards of coaching inns that often did not even have privies for the coachmen. Refuse was drained illegally into storm drains, parks, and ponds, cesspool cleaners sometimes dumped their cargo before reaching the disposal sites, and heavy rains swept sewage into the unpaved streets where it combined with the mud into a revolting muck.13 The problem was worst in the spring, when the winter’s accumulated refuse began to thaw and rot.14 In addition, it was reported, “every nook and cranny of [every] courtyard—and especially the narrow strips of land that lie vacant between buildings or between the buildings and the fences or firewalls—is covered with human feces.”15 Conditions had deteriorated with the increase in population size and the overcrowding of squalid tenement buildings,16 and oldtimers recalled nostalgically that early-nineteenth-century Moscow had been far cleaner,17 but even the less-crowded Moscow of old had suffered from fundamentally the same problems—as one memoirist recalled of his first visit in 1824, the stench had reached him before the city even came into view.18 THE ATAVISTIC FILTH OF EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY MOSCOW The Moscow that Peter the Great bequeathed to his successors was turbulent and unstable. As state and society grew increasingly oppressive, growing numbers of lower-class Russians—for example, runaway serfs or army deserters—sought refuge in the poorly policed limbo of Moscow’s suburbs.19 Confronted with similar challenges, European governments 12 K. N. Nikitin, “Otchet sanitarnago vracha Meshchanskoi chasti,” IMGD., vyp. 18 (September 15, 1878): esp. 14–16, 28–29; V. N. Benzengr, “Otchet sanitarnago vracha Arbatskoi chasti,” ibid., vyp. 16 (September 1, 1878): 15–16; K. Kh. Inoevs, “Sanitarnyi otchet po 4 i 5 kvartalam Serpukhovskoi chasti,” ibid., vyp. 17 (September 15, 1878): esp. 45; V. K. Popandopulo, “Otchet sanitarnago vracha Presnenskoi chasti,” ibid., vyp. 17 (September 15, 1878): esp. 34; “Otchet sanitarnago vracha Prechistenskago uchastka, M. A. Tikhomirova, za period vremeni ot 20 ianvaria 1879 goda po 20 iiunia 1879 goda,” ibid., vyp. 16 (August 20, 1879): esp. 20; V. Shervinskii, “Otchet sanitarnago vracha Sushchevskoi chasti,” ibid., vyp. 2 (April 27, 1879): esp. 13–14. 13 Nikitin, “Otchet,” 16, 21-23; Shervinskii, “Otchet,” 7, 11–12, 18–19. 14 “Otchet sanitarnago vracha Meshchanskoi chasti, K. N. Nikitina: Za 5 mesiatsev deiatel'nosti vremennoi sanitarnoi Kommissii (s 20 ianvaria po 20 iiunia 1879 g.),” IMGD, vyp. 18 (September 17, 1879): 28. 15 A. S. Partsevskii, “Otchet sanitarnago vracha Sretenskoi chasti,” ibid., vyp. 20 (October 15, 1878): 20. See also Dmitrii Zavalishin, “London, Parizh i Moskva,” Russkii vestnik 64 (August 1866): 631. 16 Shervinskii, “Otchet,” 12, 15; P. A. Vul'fius and L. E. Bot, “Otchet sanitarnykh vrachei Lefortovskoi chasti,” IMGD, vyp. 16 (September 1, 1878): 22. 17 Boris Nikolaevich Chicherin, Moskva sorokovykh godov (Moscow, 1997), 173. 18 M. Nazimov, “V provintsii i v Moskve s 1812 po 1828 god: Iz vospominanii starozhila,” Russkii vestnik 124 (July 1876): 127. 19 Christoph Schmidt, Sozialkontrolle in Moskau: Justiz, Kriminalität und Leibeigenschaft 1649–1785 (Stuttgart, 1996), 394–406. For a lively evocation of Moscow’s criminal underworld see Matvei Komarov’s 1770s novel about the robber Van'ka Kain in V. D. Rak, ed., Istoriia moshennika Van'ki Kaina. Milord Georg (St. Petersburg, 2000).

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strengthened their executive agencies and either integrated marginal groups into corporate estate bodies or repressed them. In France and Germany by the late eighteenth century, the shortcomings of these long-standing strategies of social control imperiled the entire old regime.20 In Russia, the monarchy hoped to achieve order by tightening serfdom and strengthening—or even just creating—administrative and estate institutions, and knitting all three into a seamless web of social control. This dovetailed with its wider effort to enhance Russia’s prestige in Europe, spread “enlightenment” among the elite, construct the institutional armature of a “well-ordered police state,” and infuse the public culture—from the rituals of monarchy to the layout of city streets—with a utopian vision inspired by Western Europe and from which the unfree masses were largely to be excluded. Upperclass Russians were less alarmist than Europeans about urban problems, for they were more sanguine—because less jaded by experience—about the effectiveness of “police state” institutions and less anxious about the boorishness of the urban masses. These concerns shaped upper-class perceptions of urban filth and smell. In prerevolutionary France, Daniel Roche tells us, “men of letters and journalists, moral observers and physicians shared a pathological view” of Paris, whose poverty and dehumanizing social conditions supposedly denatured the common people both morally and biologically in ways that no public administration could hope to reverse.21 Fears of social upheaval, Corbin argues, merged with medical theories about the power of the emanations from putrid effluvia to penetrate and sicken the human body; in combination, they produced a profound anxiety about the stench of the big city.22 Catherine II’s government shared these medical concerns but not the attendant social pessimism. We find an early indication of her priorities in Moscow electors’ instruction to the Legislative Commission of 1767, which reflected primarily the views of her government, not necessarily those of the Moscow homeowners for whom it was supposed to speak.23 Its thrust was to call for state action to remedy various social ills, including those connected with sanitation. To protect the population from their dangerous emanations, it was requested that slaughterhouses, fish markets, and cemeteries be removed from the city, waste dumps be established, and waterways be kept free from pollution. The goal, the instruction asserted, was to make Moscow more like other European cities.24 The terrible plague epidemic of 1771 dramatically heightened these concerns: “There is no cause to doubt the ease” with which epidemics could spread among Moscow workers, one government physician noted, “because of these people’s very bad dietary regimen and especially their astoundingly unclean way of life, since the stench in their dwellings would be unbearable even to an insensitive beast.”25 20 Richard van Dülmen, Kultur und Alltag in der Frühen Neuzeit, 2nd ed., 3 vols. (Munich, 1999), 2:218– 19; Benoît Garnot, Justice et société en France aux XVIe, XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles (Paris, 2000), 7, 73; Daniel Roche, Le peuple de Paris: Essai sur la culture populaire au XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1998), 32. 21 Roche, Le peuple de Paris, 58–70. 22 Corbin, Foul and the Fragrant, chap. 3. 23 Schmidt, Sozialkontrolle, 177–78. 24 “Nakaz ot zhitelei goroda Moskvy,” in Sbornik Imperatorskago Russkago Istoricheskago Obshchestva 93 (1894): 119–35. See also John T. Alexander, “Petersburg and Moscow in Early Urban Policy,” Journal of Urban History 8 (February 1982): 145–69; and Alexander, Bubonic Plague, 63, 67–68, 69–70, 96–97. 25 Afanasii Shafonskii, Opisanie morovoi iazvy, byvshei v stolichnom gorode Moskve s 1770 po 1772 god (Moscow, 1775), 234.

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Catherine’s own memoirs suggest that she saw Moscow’s filth as proof that the city remained mired in an archaic past. Looking back on her visit of 1750, she wrote that Moscow’s nobles were demoralized and corrupted by the juxtaposition of extravagance and squalor: “It is not unusual to see a richly-gowned lady, in a wonderful carriage with six shabby horses in dirty harness, drive forth from a great court filled with heaps of dirt and trash and belonging to a wretched barrack made of rotten boards.” The typical nobleman’s own “uncleanliness” reflected “the complete disorder of his household and his way of life” and matched the “uncouth manners” of his “unkempt lackeys in handsome livery.” “All that [the nobles] see and do is sordidness,” which explained why “nowhere in the inhabited world is the ground so favorable to despots as here.”26 “Furthermore,” she noted elsewhere, “never has a people held before its eyes more objects of fanaticism, such as miraculous icons at every step, churches, priests, convents, pilgrims, beggars, thieves, useless servants in the houses.”27 This archaic lack of rationality and discipline, up and down Moscow’s social hierarchy, encouraged Europeans to see Moscow as an outpost of Asia, thereby hampering Catherine’s efforts to portray Russia as European; in addition, she blamed these conditions for the disastrous 1771 plague and the ensuing urban revolt, which seemed on the verge of repeating itself during the Pugachev rebellion. “I do not like Moscow at all,” Catherine admitted candidly.28 Russian writers might celebrate Moscow as the symbol of national tradition,29 but Catherine and her heirs saw nothing charming in its archaic ways.30 Instead, they launched a broad program of reforms designed to integrate broader social strata—particularly the new “middle estate” that the state hoped to foster 31—into the regime’s vision of Memoirs of Catherine the Great of Russia, trans. Katherine Anthony (New York, 1935), 196. Quoted in Alexander, “Petersburg and Moscow,” 164. For a denunciation of Moscow’s juxtaposition of oppulence and squalor by a provincial moralist see Istinnoe povestvovanie ili Zhizn' Gavriila Dobrynina (St. Petersburg, 1872), 260. See also George E. Munro, “The Petersburg of Catherine II: Official Enlightenment Versus Popular Cults,” in Moscow and Petersburg: The City in Russian Culture, ed. Ian K. Lilly (Nottingham, 2002), 50–51. 28 Quoted in Alexander, “Petersburg and Moscow,” 163. On the plague revolt see Shafonskii, Opisanie, 96, 324, 441, 453, 512; and Alexander, Bubonic Plague. The references to Moscow as “Asiatic” were quite common. See, for example, Engelbert Wichelhausen, Züge zu einem Gemählde von Moskwa (Berlin, 1803), 6, 45, 53; Robert Lyall, The Character of the Russians and a Detailed History of Moscow (London and Edinburgh, 1823), 34; Marchioness of Londonderry and H. M. Hyde, eds., The Russian Journals of Martha and Catherine Wilmot (London, 1934), 213–19. See also the comments by Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, LouisPhilippe de Ségur, Charles-Joseph de Ligne, Elisabeth-Louise Vigée-Lebrun, Germaine de Staël, Jacques Ancelot, Astolphe de Custine, and Charles de Saint-Julien, all in de Grève, Le Voyage, 386, 393, 394, 396, 401, 403, 408, 412, 415, 425. Russian observers sometimes shared this view. See Filip Filipovich Vigel', Zapiski, 2 vols. (1928; reprint ed. Cambridge, England, 1974), 1:348. See also Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe, 24, 33, 363. The perception of Russia as “Asian” or “Oriental” is a central theme in Malia, Russia under Western Eyes. 29 See, for example, E. L. Afanas'ev, “Moskva v razdum'iakh russkikh myslitelei poslepetrovskogo vremeni,” in Moskva v russkoi i mirovoi literature: Sbornik statei, ed. N. D. Bludilina (Moscow, 2000), 42–50. 30 John T. Alexander speaks of “Catherine’s initial dislike [for Moscow, which] gradually festered into deep disgust,” in his Catherine the Great: Life and Legend (New York, 1989), 44 (see also pp. 103, 160). 31 Marc Raeff, The Well-Ordered Police State: Social and Institutional Change through Law in the Germanies and Russia, 1600–1800 (New Haven, 1983), 237–38; Elise Kimerling Wirtschafter, Social Identity in Imperial Russia (DeKalb, 1997), 73; Manfred Hildermeier, Bürgertum und Stadt in Russland 1760–1870: Rechtliche Lage und soziale Struktur (Cologne, 1986), 56–73; M[aia] B. Lavrinovich, “Sotsial'no-politicheskaia programma Ekateriny II: ‘Tret'e soslovie’ kak utopiia russkoi istorii,” in Filosofskii vek: Almanakh, vol. 12, Rossiiskaia 26 27

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“enlightenment.”32 A new master plan for the city, backed by an improved city administration, attempted to free the city center of narrow alleys, muddy streets, ramshackle wooden houses, stagnant bodies of water, and foul-smelling businesses, while educational institutions multiplied and Moscow’s aristocracy joined its European peers in discovering a love for a genteel, civilized domestic life in a setting of elegant parks and gardens.33 The promotion of cleanliness and hygiene, and an appreciation for clean air and water, were integral to this program. ORIGINS OF THE MYTH OF CLEAN MOSCOW, 1790–1812 The first authors to analyze Moscow as an urban community did so between about 1790 and 1812, when the Catherinean reforms had had time to take hold and their legacy had become a subject of debate in the context of revolutionary turmoil in Europe and political instability in Russia itself. These authors were mostly Germans who approached the urban problématique using the tools of cameralism, medical topography, and/or ethnography. Cameralism, together with its companion Polizeiwissenschaft,34 called for the state to mold society’s socioeconomic development, which in turn required the collection of adequate data on society itself. Medical topography studied the manifold features of a community that pre-Pasteurian epidemiology held responsible for public health. Lastly, the emerging discipline of Volkskunde (folklore) encouraged administrators to explore the culture and customs of their subjects, and romantics to seek out their people’s mysterious national essence, even while the discipline’s twin, Völkerkunde (anthropology), drew attention to the otherness of faraway peoples.35 Among Russian-language authors on Moscow, the first generation followed the Germanborn academician Gerhard Friedrich Müller (1705–83) and the concerns of cameralism in focusing on locating geographic features and gathering statistical data; a qualitative impression of the city was provided mainly by the description of antiquities, not ethnography.36 The effect was to define Moscow mainly by its Orthodox and monarchical utopiia: Ot ideal'nogo gosudarstva k sovershennomu obshchestvu (St. Petersburg, 2000), 60–73; Hittle, Service City, 223–24. 32 See, for example, Ransel, Mothers of Misery, 31–38; Daniel Brower, “Urbanization and Autocracy: Russian Urban Development in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century,” Russian Review 42 (October 1983): 377– 402; Boris Mironov, “Bureaucratic- or Self-Government: The Early Nineteenth Century Russian City,” Slavic Review 52 (Summer 1993): 233–55; and Joseph Bradley, “The Moscow Workhouse and Urban Welfare Reform in Russia,” Russian Review 41 (October 1982): esp. 430–31. 33 Albert J. Schmidt, The Architecture and Planning of Classical Moscow: A Cultural History (Philadelphia, 1989), chap. 4; Randolph, House, 44; Thomas Newlin, The Voice in the Garden: Andrei Bolotov and the Anxieties of Russian Pastoral, 1738–1833 (Evanston, 2001), 27–32, 98. 34 For a definition of these terms see Keith Tribe, “Cameralism and the Science of Government,” Journal of Modern History 56 (June 1984): esp. 273; and Raeff, Well-Ordered Police State. 35 Uli Linke, “Folklore, Anthropology, and the Government of Social Life,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 32 (January 1990): 117–48. See also Anne Godlewska, “Traditions, Crisis, and New Paradigms in the Rise of the Modern French Discipline of Geography 1760–1850,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 79 (June 1989): 192–213. 36 See Gerard Miller, “Moskva,” in his edited volume Geograficheskii leksikon rossiiskago gosudarstva (Moscow, 1773), 182–94 (reprinted in V. V. Zubarev, ed., Akademik G. F. Miller—pervyi issledovatel' Moskvy

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past and by statistics that reflected the administrative concerns of the “police state.” Virtually nothing else was produced in Russian until the 1820s. It was mainly foreigners who introduced a more sophisticated, multipronged approach to urban studies. The first book (apparently) to deal seriously with public health in Moscow, the German-educated physician Afanasii Shafonskii’s massive report on the 1771 plague, had elements of a medical topography in that it discussed the conditions that had allowed the plague to break out in the first place.37 After Shafonskii, however, the only significant studies to focus on health conditions in Moscow before the accession of Nicholas I were the books, published abroad and not in Russian, by the German physician Engelbert Wichelhausen (1760–1814) in 1803 and his Scottish colleague Robert Lyall (1780s–1831) in 1823. No medical topographies appear to have focused on St. Petersburg or any other Russian city, either.38 Similarly, an ethnographic interest was first evinced by ethnic non-Russians who published for European audiences, such as the teachers Friedrich Raupach (c. 1773–1819) and Georg Reinbeck (1766–1849) or the scholars Johann Gottlieb Georgi (1729–1802), Georges Lecointe de Laveau (?–1827), and Johann Richter. These were typically longtime Russian residents with close ties to local society; three of them—the Baltic Germans Heinrich von Reimers (c. 1760s–1812), Heinrich Storch (1766–1835), and Storch’s student Georg Engelhardt (1775–1862)—were, in fact, life-long subjects and career officials of the Russian Empire.39 Mostly these were Protestant Germans who felt an affinity for “enlightened absolutism” and regarded good government and the spread of what amounted to middleclass Protestant values as the benchmark of “enlightenment.” They also believed in the i moskovskoi provintsii [Moscow, 1996], 47–56); V. G. Ruban, Opisanie imperatorskago, stolichnago goroda Moskvy (1782; reprint ed. Moscow, 1989); “Moskva,” in L. M. Maksimovich, Novyi i polnyi geograficheskii slovar' rossiiskago gosudarstva, 6 vols. (Moscow, 1788–89), 3:212–52. A revised version of Maksimovich’s reference book is Shchekatov, ed., Slovar' geograficheskii Rossiiskago gosudarstva, 6 vols. (Moscow, 1801– 8). On Shchekatov see Russkii biograficheskii slovar' (RBS), 27 vols. (1896–1918; reprint ed. New York, 1962), 24:37. See also the 1775 manuscript by F. A. Okhtenskii, “Gorod Moskva,” in Moskva v opisaniiakh XVIII veka, ed. S. S. Ilizarov (Moscow, 1997), 121–54; and the anonymous 1787 “Istoricheskoe i topograficheskoe opisanie goroda Moskvy,” in ibid., 177–224. Later works in this vein are somewhat more descriptive, as, for example, A. F. Malinovskii, Obozrenie Moskvy (1820), ed. S. R. Dolgova (Moscow, 1992); and Aleksandr Kuznetsov, Almanakh na 1826 dlia priezzhaiushchikh v Moskvu i dlia samikh zhitelei sei stolitsy, ili Noveishii ukazatel' Moskvy (Moscow, 1825). 37 Shafonskii, Opisanie. On Shafonskii see RBS 22:567. 38 On the phenomenon of medical topographies see also Roche, Le peuple de Paris, 65–67; and Jean-Luc Pinol, Le monde des villes au XIXe siècle (Paris, 1991), 46–47. On Wichelhausen see Deutsches Biographisches Archiv (Munich, 1982–87), fiche 1362, p. 113. On Lyall see British Biographical Archive (Munich, 1984– 95), fiche 707, pp. 279–80; and Dictionary of National Biography, 63 vols. (London, 1885–1900), 34:304–5. 39 Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie, 55 vols. (1875–1910; reprint ed. Berlin, 1967–71), 27:430–34 (Raupach), 28:1 (Reinbeck), and 36:437–38 (Storch); Deutsches Biographisches Archiv, fiche 1013, p. 404 (Reimers), and fiche 1362, p. 113 (Wichelhausen); RBS 4:425–28 (Georgi), 23:428–32 (Storch), and 24:253–57 (Engelhardt). Lecointe de Laveau was secretary of the Moscow Society of Naturalists; for information on him see the online archive of foreigners in imperial Russia, compiled by the Osteuropa-Institut in Munich from the files of Erik Amburger (http://www.lrz-muenchen.de/~oeihist/amburger.htm). Richter first came to Moscow around 1789; Storch, who cites him as a source of information for his own publications about Russia, identifies him as a “Russian imperial councillor and court councillor of Saxony-Weimar” who “resided in Moscow as an independent scholar (privatisierender Gelehrter)” before moving back to Germany in 1804. See Johann Richter, Russische Miszellen, 3 vols. (Leipzig, 1803–4), vol. 1 (no. 1):143; and Heinrich Storch, Rußland unter Alexander dem Ersten, 9 vols. (St. Petersburg, 1804–8), vol. 9 (nos. 26–27):261.

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symbiotic character of their own relationship with Russia—Germans contributed technical skills and modeled “enlightened” behavior, while Russia defended their shared values against the aggressive rationalism of revolutionary and Napoleonic France.40 These authors played a key role in linking Russia with wider European debates. After years spent among Russia’s elite, they both echoed and influenced Russian views. Storch, for instance, was the tutor of the future Tsar Nicholas I, while Engelhardt served as director of the lycée of Tsarskoe Selo. In addition, they spoke Russian, met diverse social strata— Wichelhausen’s patients, for example, ranged from serfs to aristocrats—and read Russian journals, deepening their familiarity with Russian thinking. Yet their academic training and European experience distinguished their outlook from the natives’, while their writings reflected a broader European discourse about Russia, enlightened absolutism, and urban issues. For example, the very titles of Storch’s 1794 Picture of St. Petersburg (Gemaehlde von St. Petersburg) and Wichelhausen’s 1803 Sketches for a Picture of Moscow (Züge zu einem Gemählde von Moskwa) recall Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s influential 1780s Picture of Paris (Le Tableau de Paris),41 while Storch’s books in turn contributed to European debates by being translated into English, French, and Dutch.42 By and large, these authors showed little interest in stench, filth, or other symptoms of social or organic decay in Russian cities, in deliberate and self-conscious opposition to contemporaneous urban debates in the West. In early-nineteenth-century Paris, debates about urban life revolved around the threat to the social and political order posed by the lower classes. Urban filth and stench, disease, crime, and the menacing darkness of the urban night—medical topographies of Paris made the connection when, in the words of the historian Simone Delattre, they tellingly “saw nighttime as an immense open-air sewer”43— were all facets of the same threat of social collapse, personified by the mythical figures of the criminal (or the revolutionary) who lurked in the darkness of the sewers and the prostitute who plied her trade at night and reeked from the surfeit of sperm she received.44 By contrast, 40 On the centrality of the German Aufklärung in Russian Enlightenment culture see Marc Raeff, “Les Slaves, les Allemands et les ‘Lumières,’” Canadian Slavic Studies 1 (Winter 1967): 521–51. On Wichelhausen see Martin Dinges, “L’Image de Moscou entre la description standardisée des Lumières et la recherche de la singularité russe: La topographie médicale (1803) de Engelbrecht Wichelhausen,” Cahiers du Monde russe 44:1 (2003): 35–56. While Wichelhausen was an advocate of the “well-ordered police state,” Storch favored Smithian economic liberalism. For contrasting assessments of Storch see Roderick E. McGrew, “Dilemmas of Development: Baron Heinrich Friedrich Storch on the Growth of Imperial Russia,” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 24:1 (1976): 31–71; Esther Kingston-Mann, “In the Light and Shadow of the West: The Impact of Western Economics in Pre-Emancipation Russia,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 33 (January 1991): 93–94; and McCaffray, “Confronting Serfdom,” 12–13. 41 Dinges, “L’Image de Moscou,” 42 n.36. 42 See, for example, The Picture of Petersburg. From the German of Henry Storch (1801; reprint ed. Boston, 2002); and Tableau historique et statistique de l’empire de Russie à la fin du XVIIIe siècle, par M. Henri Storch, 2 vols. (Basel, 1801). On the impact of Storch and Johann Richter on British views of Russia see A. G. Cross, “Der deutsche Beitrag zur britischen Rußlandkunde im 18. Jahrhundert,” in Literaturbeziehungen im 18. Jahrhundert: Studien und Quellen zur deutsch-russischen und russisch-westeuropäischen Kommunikation, ed. Helmut Graßhoff ([East] Berlin, 1986), esp. 277–81. Richter’s German translation of Karamzin’s Letters of a Russian Traveler was subsequently translated into English (ibid., 281). 43 Simone Delattre, Les douze heures noires: La nuit à Paris au XIXe siècle (Paris, 2000), 28–29. 44 Donald Reid, Paris Sewers and Sewermen: Realities and Representations (Cambridge, MA, 1991), 18– 21; Corbin, Foul and the Fragrant, 46.

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the German observers of Moscow provided a mostly sanitized, deodorized account that focused on the cultural peculiarities of various social strata and the accomplishments of the state and elite in promoting medical and social services. They mostly saw the Russian “police state” as an effective instrument of social control and progress, and while they often condemned serfdom as a source of moral corruption and economic retardation,45 their criticisms evoked archaic, rural, “Asiatic” associations, not images of decay in a European urban setting. In this view, the lower classes were transplanted peasants whose temperament, physical vigor, and folk culture remained essentially rural: endowed with a sanguine temperament, they were a nation of cheerful extroverts—friendly, peaceful, quick learners, and resistant to hardship.46 As the Frenchman Jacques Ancelot observed approvingly in 1826, why “cross the seas” and “brave a thousand dangers” to “examine a new people in its original simplicity” when one had only to visit Moscow to “see natural man in the midst of civilization”?47 Their unattractive sides also reflected this archaic essence: Russians were prone to superstition, drunkenness, and petty cheating, lacked manners and (especially female) sexual delicacy and restraint, and generally focused on the appearance rather than the substance of things.48 (According to Georg Engelhardt, if one complained to a Russian carriagemaker about his slipshod workmanship, “he responds cheerfully with his all-purpose nichego [no problem], and adds reassuringly: ‘sokrasitsia, it’ll get painted over.’”49) Opinions were 45 Lyall, Character, vii–viii, lxvi–lxvii, cxxx, 9; Raupach, Reise, 184, 199–200; Johann Wilhelm Pfaff, Rußland: Bemerkungen eines Deutschen der fünf Jahre dort lebte (Nuremberg, 1813), 110; G[eorg] Reinbeck, Flüchtige Bemerkungen auf einer Reise von St. Petersburg über Moskwa, Grodno, Warschau, Breslau nach Deutschland im Jahre 1805, 2 vols. (Leipzig, 1806), 1:90–92, 2:45–55, 112–24; W[illiam] Richardson, Anecdotes of the Russian Empire: In a Series of Letters, Written, a Few Years Ago, From St. Petersburg (London, 1784), 210; Wichelhausen, Züge, 257–65. 46 These impressions about Russians can be found in [Georges Lecointe de Laveau], Moscou avant et après l’incendie, ou Notice concernant la description de cette capitale et des moeurs de ses habitans, par deux témois oculaires, 2nd ed. (Paris, 1818), 38–39; Lyall, Character, lxviii, lxxvi–lxxxi, 45, 136; Raupach, Reise, 26, 154–55, 168; Pfaff, Rußland, 16–28, 25–26, 60–61; Reinbeck, Flüchtige Bemerkungen 2:126–27; Richter, Russische Miszellen 1 (no. 1):153–64, 2 (no. 6):59–61, 75–79, 81, and 3 (no. 7):43–53, 85–86; J[ohann] Richter, Spiele und Belustigungen der Russen aus den niedern Volks-Klassen (Leipzig, [1805]), 5, 13, 21; Heinrich Storch, Historisch-statistisches Gemälde des Russischen Reichs am Ende des achtzehnten Jahrhunderts, 8 vols. (Riga, 1797–1803), 1:483–95, 3:196; and Wichelhausen, Züge, 286, 293–98, 301–3, 305–7, 328. Similar observations were made about St. Petersburg. See Johann Gottlieb Georgi, Versuch einer Beschreibung der Rußisch Kayserlichen Residenzstadt St. Petersburg und der Merkwürdigkeiten der Gegend (St. Petersburg, 1790), 13, 372–74; Richardson, Anecdotes, 65, 209–10; and Heinrich Storch, Gemaehlde von St. Petersburg, 2 vols. (Riga, [1794]), 2:278–82. 47 De Grève, Le voyage, 893. 48 Georg Engelhardt, Russische Miscellen zur genauern Kenntniss Russlands und seiner Bewohner, 4 vols. (St. Petersburg, ?–1832), 3:71–76; Lyall, Character, xxvii, xxxvii–xlix, lv, cxiv–cxxiii, cxxx; Raupach, Reise, 184–85, 201–2; Reinbeck, Flüchtige Bemerkungen 1:208, 252; Richardson, Anecdotes, 215–17; Richter, Russische Miszellen 3 (no. 7):64–67; J[oachim] Graf von Sternberg, Reise von Moskau über Sofia nach Königsberg mit einer kurzen Beschreibung von Moskau nebst meteorologischen und mineralogischen Beobachtungen (Berlin, 1793), 7, 15–17; Storch, Gemaehlde 1:196–97; Storch, Historisch-statistisches Gemälde 3:177–80; Wichelhausen, Züge, 51–52, 303–5, 356–59. Russian authors adopted these views as well. See, for example, Androssov’s remarks about Russian workers’ attitudes toward work (V[asilii Petrovich] Androssov, Statisticheskaia zapiska o Moskve [Moscow, 1832], 172) and their fatalistic carelessness (ibid., 78–82); the latter point drew objections from an otherwise very favorable review in Zhurnal Ministerstva Vnutrennykh Del (ZhMVD), chast' 6, no. 3 (1832): 84. 49 Engelhardt, Russische Miscellen 3:73.

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divided over whether Russians were clean. However, even the more critical accounts stress the prevalence of filth, vermin, and foul odors indoors, and dust and mud outdoors—all typical afflictions of the countryside—but not the smell of the city itself or of individuals; Wichelhausen’s comment on the miasmas that spread in the springtime (when frozen refuse thawed) is highly unusual.50 In this view, “the Russian” might be an uncouth boor, but he had not been denatured by urban life. Evidence adduced in support of this thesis included the large cities’ low reported rates of crime and suicide,51 the traditionalism of gender roles, the common people’s nutritious diet,52 and the relative paucity of paupers.53 As for Moscow’s cityscape, what impressed these authors was its openness to sunlight and air circulation. They praised Moscow for being modern and backward at the same time. On the one hand they lavished praise on the order and cleanliness in the hospitals, prisons, almshouses, and so forth, which the regime eagerly showed off as proof that it was in the vanguard of European progress against incubators of putrid miasmas and sociomoral decay. On the other hand, they noted that both nature and rustic mores helped preserve Moscow from the afflictions of the dank, overcrowded cities of Europe: the cold winters, hilly topography (which inhibited accumulations of stagnant water), and wood houses without basements (which kept out moisture) counteracted the formation of dangerous miasmas indoors and out, while the low-density pattern of development and the vast gardens and parks permitted ample sunlight and fresh air to cleanse the atmosphere. When Friedrich Raupach commented in 1809 on Moscow’s “balsamic country air,” what he meant was probably not that the air was odor-free, but rather that the city’s aroma—complete with the smell of livestock and dungheaps—inspired thoughts of rural innocence, not urban squalor. Peopled by hardy rural migrants with deep roots in the countryside, and physically built like a large village, Moscow was apparently not “urban” enough to generate the decay characteristic of Western cities.54 Russia’s towns, in this view, were an extension of the pastoral idyll that flourished under the peaceful, humane, enlightened scepter of Catherine II and her heirs. Raupach aptly summed up this conception when he wrote that, unlike their German counterparts, Russian towns do not lie concealed behind bomb-proof walls that keep out all fresh air, nor have they narrow, filthy alleys with towering houses that barely admit the sun’s lovely Wichelhausen, Züge, 62. Masson, in de Grève, Le voyage, 1190; Reinbeck, Flüchtige Bemerkungen 1:209; Storch, Gemaehlde 1:167–68. 52 Storch, Gemaehlde 1:141, 152–54. 53 G[eorges] Le Cointe [sic] de Laveau, Guide du voyageur à Moscou (Moscow, 1824), 305; Shafonskii, Opisanie, 439; Richter, Russische Miszellen 2 (no. 6):66; Wichelhausen, Züge, 291–92. For a less sanguine perspective see Reinbeck, Flüchtige Bemerkungen 2:128–32. On the paucity of cripples and beggars in St. Petersburg see Richardson, Anecdotes, 201; and Storch, Gemaehlde 1:187. 54 Raupach, Reise, 53, 89; Wichelhausen, Züge, 45–47; Hildermeier, Bürgertum, 370–78; Le Cointe, Guide du voyageur à Moscou, 62, 215–18, 302–3; Lyall, Character, 34–35; Stephen Grellet, Memoirs of the Life and Gospel Labours of Stephen Grellet, ed. Benjamin Seebohm, 2 vols. (Philadelphia, 1860), 1:426–27, 429–32; Fanny Tarnow, Briefe auf einer Reise nach Petersburg an Freunde geschrieben (Berlin, 1819), 274–77; Storch, Rußland unter Alexander I 5 (no. 13):97–99, and 8 (no. 22):12–13; Heinrich von Reimers, St. Petersburg am Ende seiner ersten Jahrhunderts, 2 vols. (St. Petersburg, 1805), 1:337, 2:182. The regime was also quite sensitive to foreign criticism of sanitary conditions in such institutions (Grellet, Memoirs 1:410, 415). 50 51

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The first Russians to join this conversation approached the urban question from the perspective of belles-lettres, not social science. Russian sentimentalist authors followed the lead of Denis Fonvizin, Mikhail Shcherbatov, and others who criticized elite mores but remained confident in the essential soundness of the sociopolitical order.56 More than the European observers of Russia during this time, these authors sought to integrate the serfbased social order into their vision of Moscow as an “enlightened” urban community. Moscow’s most prominent sentimentalist writer, the future historian Nikolai Mikhailovich Karamzin (1766–1826), shared Storch’s and Catherine II’s opinion that the key to Russia’s future lay in gradual, organic change that raised the population’s cultural level without subverting the regime.57 Such cultural change had to include the spread of genteel sensibilities, which in turn raised the problem of securing a clean urban environment. One issue that his journal Messenger of Europe—a source frequently cited by the German proponents of Russia’s “enlightened absolutism”58—engaged was Moscow’s notorious shortage of clean water.59 Catherine II had initiated an ambitious project in 1779 to build an aqueduct that would meet all the city’s needs; after a quarter-century of construction delays and cost overruns, it was finally completed in the fall of 1804. Until then, wrote a nameless contributor to Messenger of Europe when the aqueduct opened, “among Moscow’s inhabitants, very few—only the well-to-do and the rich—could enjoy clean, healthful water.” Carted into the city from distant springs, it was so costly that many “townspeople of modest means” had to draw water from rivers and streams, stagnant ponds, and wells, and hence “consumed water that was either hard and foul-tasting, or stale and turbid, or rotten and harmful.” The aqueduct promised to change all that, giving common Muscovites a new sense of dignity and membership in a wider civic community. In Russia at this time, according to the historian John Randolph, poets and landscape architects alike saw in bodies of water “a symbol of holistic reason, encompassing not only calculation but also intuition and inspiration,” amidst “the dark and dangerous Russian countryside.”60 For Karamzin, the new aqueduct evoked just these kinds of associations: a veritable new age seemed to be Raupach, Reise, 53–54. On the eighteenth-century Russian upper class’s belief in the possibility of social harmony within the oldregime order see Wirtschafter, The Play of Ideas. 57 Richard Pipes, “Karamzin’s Conception of the Monarchy,” in Russian Thought and Politics, ed. Hugh McLean et al. (Cambridge, MA, 1957), esp. 36–37; A. G. Cross, “N. M. Karamzin’s ‘Messenger of Europe’ (Vestnik Yevropy), 1802–3,” Forum for Modern Language Studies 5 (January 1969): esp. 19. McGrew argues that “if Karamzin provides a critical insight into the historical perceptions which shaped Russian conservatism in the first half of the nineteenth century, Heinrich Storch frames conservatism’s political economy” (McGrew, “Dilemmas of Development,” 40; see also ibid., 42 n.33). 58 See, for example, Richter, Russische Miszellen 1 (no. 2):145–57, 177–83, and 3 (no. 8):28–61. 59 On the water problem see Androssov, Statisticheskaia zapiska, 3–5; Lyall, Character, 47; Raupach, Reise, 88; and Wichelhausen, Züge, 69–76. 60 Randolph, House, 69, 132. 55 56

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dawning, justifying an appeal to Russia’s remaining “pitiful foes of enlightenment” to “see the error of their ways,” cease hankering for the ancestral ways, and “join us in praising these golden times.” Observing a crowd that was inspecting the new aqueduct, the author noticed a wise old man who grasped the aqueduct’s significance: Judging from his appearance and dress, I am certain that he belonged to the estate of townspeople or artisans who “eat their bread by the sweat of their brow.” ... Speaking in an exalted voice, he pronounced with the deepest emotion: “Do you see it? Do you see it? What a treasure! ... This is quite a gift, truly regal! How the Lord God will reward our Father [the tsar] for this!”61 Next to such exalted expectations, the aqueduct sadly proved a disappointment. Faulty engineering caused it to lose almost 90 percent of its water along the nineteen versts from the springs at Mytishchi to Moscow. Thanks to a partial reconstruction, Moscow by the 1840s finally received between one-third and two-thirds of the water that entered the aqueduct and that Catherine had hoped would meet the needs of Moscow’s much smaller 1780s population. Even so, the water was piped only to a few public reservoirs, whence it was delivered across the city by commercial water transporters. Making drinkable water conveniently available to Muscovites was a slow and halting process.62 Clean air—away, presumably, from urban miasmas—was another of Karamzin’s concerns. In a contribution from one B. V., Karamzin’s journal enthused about Muscovites’ new-found love of nature, apparent from the popularity of suburban summer homes and Sunday strolls in the park. From the nobility, B. V. noted, the appreciation for clean air and natural beauty was spreading downward through society, to the point where now “tailors and shoemakers, with their wives and children, go to pick flowers in the meadows and bring bouquets back to town. You have seen this in foreign lands, but at home we have been seeing it only recently, and it should make us happy.” Access to clean air and water went hand-in-hand, in Karamzin’s view, with the spread of literacy, good manners, and a modest consumerism among the common people.63 Thus, in keeping with the ideals of Catherine II, would morals be refined and a wider social and civic solidarity be encouraged, all without touching the institutions that undergirded Russia’s old regime—autocracy and serfdom.64 In these sunny visions of Russia’s future, which permitted Karamzin an oblique 61 “Mytishchinskoi vodovod (Prislannaia stat'ia),” Vestnik Evropy, no. 23 (December 1804): 217, 220–21, 226–27. 62 I. F. Rerberg, Moskovskii vodoprovod: Istoricheskii ocherk ustroistva i razvitiia vodosnabzheniia g. Moskvy. Opisanie novago vodoprovoda (Moscow, 1892), 4–10. 63 Sara Dickinson notes the centrality of these themes, and of pre-1812 sentimentalism more generally, in the construction of Moscow’s literary image in her “Representing Moscow in 1812: Sentimentalist Echoes in Accounts of the Napoleonic Occupation,” in Moscow and Petersburg, 8, 26. 64 B. V., “Zapiski starago Moskovskago zhitelia,” Vestnik Evropy 10, no. 16 (August 1803): 281. See also “O knizhnoi torgovle i liubvi ko chteniiu v Rossii,” Vestnik Evropy 3, no. 9 (May 1802): 57–64; “O novom obrazovanii narodnago prosveshcheniia v Rossii,” Vestnik Evropy 8, no. 5 (March 1803): 49–61; and M., “Puteshestvie vokrug Moskvy,” Vestnik Evropy 7, no. 4 (February 1803): 278–89. In Letters of a Russian Traveler, first published in 1792, Karamzin describes Switzerland as an idyllic Arcadia; he also points out that the Swiss peasants’ social condition was enviable because of their personal freedom, moderate tax burden, and unpretentious taste. See A. G. Cross, N. M. Karamzin: A Study of His Literary Career (1783–1803) (Carbondale, 1971), 71–77. The contrast between traditional aristocratic slovenliness and ostentation and the newer culture

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criticism of present reality, the spread of gentility to the previously boorish classes was accompanied by cleanliness and physical health and hence integration into a harmonious civic community. Karamzin himself had doubts about this optimistic scenario. Thus, in his celebrated story “Poor Liza” (1792), urban civility confers the power not only to understand the other but also to deceive; when the naive peasant girl Liza falls victim to this power and then acquires it herself, her innocence is destroyed and she commits suicide.65 However, Karamzin set his tragic story in Moscow’s deserted outskirts, where Liza is alone and defenseless as she meets her silver-tongued seducer Erast; amidst the crowds of Moscow by contrast, David Herman argues, Liza is protected and Erast’s manipulative eloquence offset “by the presence of the rest of the audience—viewers of Erast’s play who are no less sophisticated than he.”66 Enlightened civility, Karamzin suggested, posed a moral threat principally when it encountered rustic innocence, not in an urban context where the new culture was widely shared. By contrast, other sentimentalists of the period attacked the city more directly, blaming the model of the Westernized elites’ lifestyle for corrupting the non-Westernized urban folk and peasant migrants.67 Efforts by Moscow’s middling strata to emulate the elite likewise encountered criticism. Echoing Storch and Karamzin, Engelhardt later praised the growing popularity of attractive restaurants among non-nobles as “a sign of more refined mores,”68 but his Russian contemporaries often disagreed. One example comes from an unsigned 1806 article in Petr Ivanovich Shalikov’s (1767–1852) Moscow Spectator. A minor sentimentalist who tried to follow in Karamzin’s foosteps, and himself a well-known dandy who affected a pose of haughty eccentricity,69 Shalikov recounted how, one Sunday evening, his attention was drawn to the “brilliant lighting and thunderous music” emanating from a restaurant that held Sunday “balls” in its “large round hall,” which it advertised in bills posted on mirrors inside the establishment. Bright lights, music, mirrors, large ballrooms, and elaborate after-dark entertainments were associated with upper-class life, but when he entered and surveyed the scene, all he saw was a crowd of “man-servants and clerks” waiting for Gypsy women to dance for them. Looking around the room, he saw “nymphs of joy to whom foppish valets were declaring their tender feelings,” and “priestesses of Venus who quickly drew everyone’s glances, carefully scrutinizing them for the immodesty from which they expected their reward.” On his way out, he read a bill advertising the ball: “‘The most esteemed Public is informed’ etc.—Now, think about the arrogance (vazhnost') of those words: the most esteemed Public! ... What an idea! ... Of course, for that place, the Public of cleanliness is also a theme in “Progulka po Moskve” in K. N. Batiushkov, Sochineniia, 2 vols. (Moscow, 1989), 1:esp. 295. 65 Herman, Poverty, chap. 1. 66 Ibid., 15. 67 See, for example, Maksim Nevzorov, Puteshestvie v Kazan', Viatku i Orenburg v 1800 godu, chast' pervaia (Moscow, 1803), 108–9. 68 Engelhardt, Russische Miscellen 4:91–92. 69 RBS 22:492–95; “Russkii dendizm,” in Iurii M. Lotman, Besedy o russkoi kul'ture: Byt i traditsii russkogo dvorianstva (XVIII—nachalo XIX veka) (St. Petersburg, 1994), 123–35. I thank Gitta Hammarberg for drawing my attention to Shalikov’s dandyism.

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I have described really is most esteemed.”70 Storch provides a similar description of balls held in St. Petersburg taverns that are attended by a very mixed public and where the fancier class of local ladies of pleasure holds center stage. ... Instead of the French gallantry or the awkward German flattery [with which prostitutes are courted in Paris or Berlin] ... these poor creatures are abandoned here to the clumsy assaults or brutal moods of coarse people. No sweet chitchat, no delicate show of tenderness disguises the purpose of the assembly and the station of these girls.71 Storch thus suggests that Russia’s lack of “enlightenment” is to blame for such vulgar scenes, not the unseemly pretensions of “man-servants” and “foppish valets.” Shalikov’s observations were unusual in touching even gingerly on circumstances— prostitutes posing as lovers, “valets” masquerading as gentlemen, a rabble that pretended to be “the public” and usurped the locales of aristocratic pleasure, all of it under cover of darkness—where the city’s essential ambiguity stymied both the hierarchies of serfdom and the state’s efforts to impose order and transparency. Besides, prostitution itself was associated with foul smells, biological illness, and social decay, and the foreign authors who discussed it hastened to add that it was less conspicuous in Russia than in Europe.72 However, even Shalikov’s account eschews the language of filth, stench, disease, and decay that was common in France at the time (and in Russia later in the nineteenth century) to characterize urban vice. The element of disease briefly appears in an 1811 article in Sergei Nikolaevich Glinka’s (1776–1847) journal Russian Messenger. Its author wrote in alarm that subversive foreign books were reaching commoners whose immunity to moral corruption was weakened by the ambiguity of their position in the hierarchy of estates, for example, peasants who worked as itinerant traders; as they traveled the country, they lived dissolute lives and spread diseases—physical and moral—that undermined the peasantry’s natural purity of body and mind. He also worried about upscale pubs patronized by “merchants, artisans, servants, [and] all manner of indecent women.” Like Shalikov, Glinka thus saw the recourse to prostitutes—paying money for sex without love—as a logical companion to efforts by urban social groups, with their subversively fluid boundaries, to buy a noble lifestyle disconnected from the social role that it was supposed to represent. “Perhaps all this is bringing us closer to the customs of London, Paris, and Berlin,” he noted in a wry commentary on decades of effort to Europeanize Moscow, “but I don’t know what we would gain from such a similarity.”73 “Smes',” Moskovskii zritel', ch. 4 (December 1806): 74–75 (ellipses in original). Storch, Gemaehlde 2:321. 72 Ibid., 322–24; Raupach, Reise, 205–7; Reinbeck, Flüchtige Bemerkungen 2:134. See also G[rigorii] S[tepanovich] Vinskii, Moe vremia, ed. P. E. Shchegolev (St. Petersburg, n. d.), 21. 73 “Vypiska iz Ruskoi knigi, nazvannoi: Sobranie otryvkov, vziatykh iz nravstvennykh i politicheskikh Pisatelei, i izdannoi G ... 1811,” Ruskoi vestnik, no. 6 (June 1811): 76–86. Glinka’s views should be understood in the context of the eighteenth-century luxury debate. See John Shovlin, “The Cultural Politics of Luxury in Eighteenth-Century France,” French Historical Studies 23 (Fall 2000): 578–606. On Glinka’s views on the social order see Alexander M. Martin, “The Family Model of Society and Russian National Identity in Sergei N. Glinka’s Russian Messenger (1808–1812),” Slavic Review 57 (Spring 1998): 28–49. 70 71

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Russian authors at the beginning of the nineteenth century were thus open to the idea that the gulf separating Russia’s elite from its commoners might be narrowed if genteel sensibilities spread to the urban masses; conversely, they also saw that questioning the legitimacy of this gulf might have deleterious moral and physical consequences for the poor. Catherine II’s response had been to combine “enlightened” efforts to improve urban living conditions with support for absolutism and serfdom. Under her successors, the values of militarism (with its attendant emphasis on order and neatness), but also of Pietism and the evangelical Awakening, increasingly shaped the dynasty’s approach to social issues. Especially Alexander I and his mother Mariia Fedorovna actively promoted the penetration into Russian life of Protestant European movements for social and spiritual uplift; the results were apparent in the work of the Russian Bible Society, the Imperial Philanthropic Society, the prison reform movement, and the Lancaster school system, but also in the network of widows’ homes, schools for noble girls, and other institutions under Mariia Fedorovna’s patronage. All of these institutions placed great emphasis on the notion that cleanliness and obedience to authority were important means for overcoming poverty and moral degradation. Educated Russians, like their contemporaries elsewhere, saw a connection between physical filth and the moral and medical well-being of both individuals and society, and they understood that the living conditions of commoners fell far short of elite sensibilities. For example, the general’s widow Mariia Tuchkova (1781–1852), driven by grief over the deaths of her husband (at Borodino) and her son to found a women’s religious community and devote herself to the poor, admitted with shame that their odor disgusted her.74 The vivid accounts of the unexpected filthiness of Napoleon’s soldiers in 1812, and the relentless propaganda for the cleanliness of state institutions—including the modernization of their toilet facilities75—likewise demonstrate that upper-class Russians knew filth when they saw and smelled it. Their eloquent silence on the topic of Moscow’s everyday grime and stench was therefore another way of affirming the success of the regime and the vitality of their social order. APOGEE AND DECAY OF THE MYTH, 1812–55 For Moscow, the era separating the Napoleonic Wars from the Crimean War seemed a time of both fulfillment and anxiety. Fulfillment, because Russia seemed be having its cake and eating it too, in that forces earlier imagined as antagonistic were now seen as colluding in fostering social harmony. The patriotic commemorations of the Time of Troubles (which had culminated in the liberation of Moscow in 1613), the heroic role of the plebeian masses and the city of Moscow 74 Brenda Meehan, Holy Women of Russia: The Lives of Five Orthodox Women Offer Spiritual Guidance for Today (San Francisco, 1993), 36. 75 On the introduction of updated toilets in public institutions see the official Istoricheskaia zapiska o Moskovskikh uchilishchakh ordena sv. Ekateriny i Aleksandrovskom (Moscow, 1875), 144, 205; and Lyall, Character, 380. Engelhardt reported seeing the world’s largest water closet, capable of accommodating three hundred users at a time, at the Nizhnii Novgorod trade fair in 1830 (Russische Miscellen 4:165–66).

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in the 1812 war, the instant popularity of Karamzin’s History of the Russian State, the romantic vogue for medieval cityscapes, and even the popularity of English-style gardens with their love of the picturesque and distrust of geometry76—all of this helped inspire a new respect for the archaic, irregular quality of Moscow that Catherine II had sought to overcome. Accordingly, the stubborn resistance of the masses and many aristocrats to “enlightened” values was increasingly perceived as an asset: even Aleksandr Sergeevich Griboedov’s mordant satire, Woe from Wit (1820), represented aristocratic traditionalism as a force for social stability, not a symptom of a decaying old regime.77 At the same time, the urban renewal following the destruction of 1812 made Moscow greener, cleaner, airier, and more elegant. Thus, in the city center, the polluted little River Neglinnaia was shifted underground, making way for the beautiful Theater Square and Alexander Garden; nearby, Red Square was enlarged and embellished when the weedinfested Kremlin moat was filled in and the clutter of market stalls was removed; and farther out, the tree-lined Boulevard Ring was completed.78 The regime could therefore reasonably claim that it was fulfilling the “enlightened absolutist” project of turning Moscow into a model urban space—clean, brightly lit, well policed—that was the opposite of the literally and figuratively sinister and morbid urban centers of a Western Europe just then embarking on the Industrial Revolution. At the very outset of Nicholas I’s reign, S. A. Rimskoi-Korsakov gave expression to this view: “Moscow’s geographic location, the width of the streets, the gardens, and the ubiquitous cleanliness and order are the reasons why in this, our Capital, the air is cleaner and more wholesome than in other European cities.” He elaborated on the beneficent role of the state: “Perhaps no other Power in the world enjoys such internal tranquility as Russia, protected as she is by wise laws. ... Moscow, a city of such immense size and population, which contains in itself all types of estates without exception, can always serve as a model of the internal good order that reigns in our entire blessed realm.” Thanks to the authorities, “cleanliness, organization, order, security, quiet, justice, and care for the sick, the disabled, and even those unfortunates who bear the mark of crime—in Moscow all this has been raised to the highest level of perfection.”79 Such views were widespread, and Russian nationalists and conservatives stressed that any “real” Russian was loyal to throne, altar, and the existing social order. Moscow’s cityscape, they suggested, reinforced these loyalties through its idiosyncratic, non-Europeanized layout and architecture and its Kremlin and other monuments to Orthodox piety and pre-Petrine grandeur. This interpretation gained wider credibility after 1812, when it became a cliché that Moscow’s physical space, united with heroic memories of the war, created an aura of “Russianness” that transcended social divides and shaped the character of the city and its inhabitants.80 76 Andrei Zorin, Kormia dvuglavogo orla...: Literatura i gosudarstvennaia ideologiia v Rossii v poslednei treti XVIII–pervoi treti XIX veka (Moscow, 2001), chap. 5; Newlin, Voice, 113. 77 I thank Olga Maiorova for drawing my attention to this point. 78 Schmidt, Architecture, 65, 143–53, 169–71. 79 S. A. Rimskoi-Korsakov, Moskva, ili Istoricheskii putevoditel' po znamenitoi stolitse Gosudarstva Rossiiskago, 4 vols. (Moscow, 1827–31 [all four volumes were approved by the censor in 1826]), 1:308, 314–15. 80 See, for example, Dickinson, “Representing Moscow in 1812”; Iu. V. Mann, “Moskva v tvorcheskom soznanii Gogolia,” in Moskva i “moskovskii tekst” russkoi kul'tury: Sbornik statei, ed. G. S. Knabe (Moscow,

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Yet the 1820s–1840s were also a time of growing anxiety. After Griboedov, depictions of the Moscow aristocracy acquired a bittersweet character, suggesting that what Talleyrand called that special old-regime plaisir de vivre had been lost in the flames of 1812 and the subsequent growth of commerce and industry; meanwhile, influential authors such as Gogol and Chaadaev began to question the Russian nation’s potential for cultural progress.81 State officials increasingly shared the doubts about the cherished myth that Muscovites formed a cohesive, hierarchical community whose elements, like so many planets, orbited obediently around the nobility and government that were their sun.82 In the fall of 1830, Europe’s first-ever cholera epidemic put Moscow to its third brutal test in sixty years. However, more than the 1771 plague or even the 1812 war, this experience seemed to validate the existing order. Most of the population stayed put instead of fleeing in a panic. Cooperation between the city’s burgeoning medical community and the army and police ensured that quarantine and sanitary measures proceeded efficiently and without disrupting public order. When Nicholas I bravely visited the stricken city, he received a hero’s welcome. Lastly, peasant migrants proved far more resistant to illness than merchants and townspeople. All in all, the regime’s effort in Moscow to balance support for sociocultural traditionalism with police-state modernization seemed vindicated. Even so, it was a close call, for cholera-related disorders erupted both in provincial areas that were more rural and tradition-bound than Moscow, and in cities that were faster-growing and more industrial, such as St. Petersburg and many European cities. Meanwhile, in Russia and across Europe, such traditional police-state measures as quarantines and cordons sanitaires proved to be of little use while often triggering popular unrest. Russia thus faced a triple threat—from a rebellious, archaic peasantry, restless modern cities, and clumsy, oppressive authorities.83 Muscovites could take comfort in the stability of their own city but had little cause to be sanguine about Russia as a whole, let alone the rest of Europe. Particularly after the crisis years of 1830–32, when cholera and revolution shook much of Europe, the Russian state was anxious to show that Russia was free from the moral decadence and urban tensions—and hence the filth—that gnawed at the stability of Western states. The articles on urban issues that appeared in the Journal of the Ministry of Internal Affairs (ZhMVD) give an indication of how the government made its case. West European sociological debates after 1815 acquired a novel character due to the unprecedented use of quantitative data to explore the alarming social pathologies of the early industrial age. Thus, the historian Ian Hacking argues, it was “Anglo-French squabbling about suicide”—whether Londoners or Parisians were statistically more prone to suicide 1998), 66–67, 71; A. V. Gulin, “Moskva 1812 goda v romane L. N. Tolstogo ‘Voina i mir’ (Motivy pravoslavnoi eskhatologii),” in Moskva v russkoi i mirovoi literature, 156–69; and N. P. Velikanova, “Moskva v knige ‘Voina i mir,’” in ibid., 170–84. 81 On Gogol see Herman, Poverty, chap. 4. 82 See, for example, Wirtschafter, Social Identity, 73–74; “Meshchanskoe soslovie v Moskve (za 1845 god),” ZhMVD (January 1847): 71–86; and “Otchet komiteta, vysochaishe uchrezhdennago v Moskve, dlia razbora i prizreniia prosiashchikh milostyniu, za 1840 god,” ibid., ch. 39 (March 1841): esp. 310, 312–13. 83 Roderick E. McGrew, Russia and the Cholera 1823–1832 (Madison, 1965), esp. chap. 4; Richard J. Evans, “Epidemics and Revolutions: Cholera in Nineteenth-Century Europe,” Past and Present 120 (August 1988): 123–46.

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and hence in worse emotional health—that formed “the beginning of numerical sociology,”84 which Russia’s Interior Ministry gleefully took up to trumpet the advantages Russia derived from the traditionalism of its own urban populations. For example, the ZhMVD noted in 1832 that Moscow was fortunate to have grown more slowly than London or especially Paris, whose masses of paupers contributed to France’s political turmoil; the same report noted that crime—whose incidence “provides the measure, more or less, of the corruption of morals”—was less common in Moscow than in other European capitals, while Moscow’s suicide rate was less than one-seventh of Paris’s because “we do not have as yet the kind of destitution that deprives unfortunates of all hope for their lives. Desire remains undeveloped and religious belief undiminished.”85 The Interior Ministry’s journal was not above playing fast and loose with statistics when that suited its purposes. For example, without critically examining the sources or nature of its data, it announced that Moscow had suffered just under 180,000 rubles’ worth of thefts in 1831 compared with over 52 million in London; since London was home to many thousands of paupers, “it is no surprise that in England, theft has become an industry for a significant portion of the lower class of the people, and it is unlikely that a means will be found to stop it because the galleys and Botany Bay represent paradise for the victims of pauperism.”86 The ministry was similarly disingenuous when it compared admissions to mental hospitals in St. Petersburg and Paris and concluded that the lower levels of hospitalization in the Russian capital proved its population’s superior mental health.87 Cleanliness was the natural corollary to such social and medical well-being, and in keeping with the times it had to be documented statistically: hence the police reported as late as 1847 that the average inhabitant of Moscow went to the bathhouse at least ten times a year, which supposedly proved that “among all European nations, the Russians alone are distinguished by personal cleanliness.”88 Nevertheless, cracks began to appear in this confident self-image. A medical topography of St. Petersburg published after the cholera epidemic of 1830–31 began with the obligatory paeans to the excellent pavement and long, wide, open streets that never failed to impress foreigners unaccustomed to such things in their own countries. It praised the success of the “police state” at creating and enforcing an urban environment free from dangerous miasmas: “The spaciousness of the streets in Petersburg and the cleanliness that is everywhere observed is unarguably one of the main causes that help preserve the inhabitants’ health. The daily cleaning of the streets and courtyards, [and] the removal of all refuse to sites outside the city assigned by the police, is without any doubt a highly beneficial measure.” Yet an uncooperative reality sometimes subverted these beneficent policies. Pipes draining wastewater from houses were required to be separate from privies, but “this is perhaps not Ian Hacking, The Taming of Chance (Cambridge, England, 1990), 64. “Zamechaniia na otchety Ober-Politseimeisterov po obeim Stolitsam,” ZhMVD, ch. 6, no. 2 (1832): 58– 61, 63, 65. 86 “Zamechaniia o chisle krazh, sdelannykh v Moskve, S.P.burge i Londone,” ibid., ch. 8, no. 3 (1833): 334. See also “Sravnitel'naia statistika prestuplenii v Parizhe i v Londone,” ibid., ch. 2, “Smes'” (1843): 443–57. 87 “Zamechaniia o chisle umalishennykh, pol'zovannykh v bol'nitse Vsekh Skorbiashchikh v S. Peterburge 1832 goda,” ibid., ch. 8, no. 2 (1833): 199–208. 88 “Moskva v 1846 godu: Izvlechenie is otcheta g. Moskovskago ober-politsiimeistera,” ibid. (November 1847): 267. 84 85

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observed everywhere.” When these pipes were cleaned out in the summer, their stinking contents were to be carted away, not dumped onto the streets—an admonition that implied that violations were common. Houses in St. Petersburg were usually built in a way that ensured adequate ventilation, but since “obviously there is no rule without exceptions,” the report went on to decry the insalubrious condition of dank, overcrowded basement apartments where the air was fouled by people doing their cooking and baking, drying their laundry, keeping domestic fowl, and heating their stoves, all almost without ever opening the window for fresh air. Unsanitary and smelly grocery stores, factories, and workshops were further sources of disease. In general, “everyone knows that in terms of health, the urban resident cannot be compared to the rural inhabitant,” but even by the low standard of the city, people who pursued sedentary indoor occupations were particularly sickly.89 A decade later, the ZhMVD reported on the growing use of running water and sewer systems to remove wastewater and sewage from streets and homes in London, Paris, and Berlin, as a result of which “the condition of public health has improved remarkably.”90 Reforms that modernized the police forces and other public services in London and Paris likewise received favorable coverage.91 The comparison with Russia’s capital cities was not made explicitly, but it was not hard to read between the lines. Redoubled efforts by the government to crack down on vagrancy and prostitution in Moscow and elsewhere point to similar concerns. Despite these inklings of a new anxiety, however, Moscow in the 1820s–1840s did not become associated in Russian culture with the filth and stench that surely prevailed in its physical reality. The regime’s belief that the “police state” plus an essentially rustic population was a winning formula for social harmony was widely shared; however, in a subtle but important shift, a note of (benign) irony entered the accounts of the bureaucracy’s efforts to enforce its version of social control. For example, observers agreed that crime was lower in Moscow than in West European cities, but the reason, they argued, was not so much the effectiveness of the police as the common Russian’s benign temperament and respect for authority.92 Mikhail Aleksandrovich Dmitriev, who served in Moscow’s criminaljustice system in the late 1820s, argued that premeditated crimes were generally rare; instead, “the starting point [of crimes] is always drunkenness and the dissolute company of lower-class people,” and the perpetrators were typically manumitted house serfs and townspeople because they had no clear position in the social hierarchy.93 This fundamentally 89 “Mediko-topograficheskiia svedeniia o S.P.burge, 1833,” ibid., ch. 11, no. 2 (February 1834): 153–98, and no. 3 (March 1834): 163, 167, 176, 290. 90 “Sistema ochishcheniia dvorov i ulits posredstvom vodoprovodnykh trub, predprinimaemaia v Berline, po primeru Parizha i Londona,” ibid., ch. 3, “Smes'” (September 1843): 503. 91 “Sravnenie politseiskago ustroistva v Parizhe i Londone,” ibid., ch. 9, “Smes'” (January 1845): 161–66; “Sostav i krug deiatel'nosti nyneshnei Londonskoi politsii,” ibid., ch. 42, no. 5, “Smes'” (May 1853): 317–27; “Preobrazovanie gorodskoi Politsii v Parizhe, po primeru Londonskoi,” ibid., ch. 8, otd. 4, “Sovremennaia letopis'” (October 1854): 79–83; “Soderzhanie chistoty v Parizhe,” ibid., ch. 22, otd. 2, “Izsledovaniia i opisaniia” (February 1857): 91–104; “Ustroistvo gospitalei i bogougodnykh zavedenii vo Frantsii,” ibid., ch. 29, otd. 2, “Izsledovaniia i opisaniia” (April 1858): 155–78. 92 Engelhardt, Russische Miscellen 4:118; N. Tourgueneff (Nikolai Ivanovich Turgenev), La Russie et les Russes, 3 vols. (Paris, 1847), 3:200–201; Aleksandr Bashutskii, Panorama Sankpeterburga, 3 vols. (St. Petersburg, 1834), 3:182. Storch had already made this argument in the 1790s (Gemaehlde 1:167–68). 93 Mikhail Aleksandrovich Dmitriev, Glavy iz vospominanii moei zhizni (Moscow, 1998), 289–90. See also Engelhardt, Russische Miscellen 3:81.

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benign view of the social order seems to have worked against any focus on filth and foul smells. The first major Russian-language studies that attempted to examine Moscow both statistically and ethnographically also came to conclusions that were on balance positive even while they confirmed that the “police state” and the estate system were increasingly inadequate analytical tools for understanding the city. The pioneer in this field was Vasilii Petrovich Androssov (1803–41), whose pathbreaking study—the first of its kind in Russian— appeared in 1832 and reflected the social concerns that had been brought to the fore by the recent cholera epidemic. A disciple of Jean-Charles-Léonard Simonde de Sismondi and Robert Owen in his ambivalence about a social order built increasingly on manufacturing and business,94 he concluded that economic changes had displaced the nobility from its previous social dominance and given pride of place to the “middle estate” (srednee soslovie). He then went farther and declared that the “estates” that determined every Russian’s legal identity and formed the basis for most official statistics had so little relevance to social reality that, for analytical purposes, he instead divided all but the nobles and clergy into socioeconomic categories of his own devising (traders, manufacturers, unskilled laborers). In Androssov’s view, the official estate system obscured social phenomena more than it illumined them. For example, soldiers’ wives (women who lived alone because their husbands had been conscripted), a distinct legal estate, operated many small businesses but were also prominently involved in prostitution, which in turn was tied to venereal disease, intermittent incarceration, alcoholism, and often a lonely death from exposure on cold winter nights. Also, general mortality rates were high and life expectancy low, but government data did not permit an accurate breakdown of the numbers by class. Alcoholism, rising illegitimacy, and fatal accidents due to carelessness were scourges of the poor. All in all, a sobering balance sheet for sixty years of state efforts to impose order and spread “enlightenment.” And yet, Androssov did not believe that Moscow was staring into the same abyss as Paris or London. While fewer than half its inhabitants—many of whom were temporary migrants—were registered with a local parish church, he estimated that over two-thirds strictly observed the Orthodox Church’s rules on fasting, which suggested that conservative values persisted independently of their enforcement by the authorities. Not only did Moscow have a remarkably low crime rate, but religious convictions also explained why Muscovites were seven times less likely than Parisians to kill themselves. “In Paris, Chabrol observes, suicides tend to be family men who take their own lives because of domestic troubles, disputes, illnesses, or destitution; in Moscow by contrast, they are mostly young men who are single or living apart from their families and are drawn to their doom by wild living and debauchery.” The character flaws of Muscovites were thus those of the stereotypical peasant serf—drink, irresponsibility, carelessness—as opposed to the more profound moral decay and despair that afflicted the contemporary West.95 94 N. G. Okhotin, “Andrósov, Androssov Vasilii Petrovich,” in Russkie pisateli 1800–1917: Biograficheskii slovar', vol. 1 (A–G), ed. P. A. Nikolaev (Moscow, 1989), 73–74. 95 Androssov, Statisticheskaia zapiska, 45–47, 66–67, 69–72, 78–79, 83, 90, 100, 116, 159–60. The reference to “Chabrol” is to Gilbert-Joseph-Gaspard de Chabrol de Volvic, Recherches statistiques sur la ville de Paris et le département de la Seine, 6 vols. (Paris, 1821–60). Mikhail Stepanovich Gast'ev’s work likewise provides

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The published reviews of Androssov’s book suggest the extent to which educated Russians shared his sense that a new urban society was coming into being. The ZhMVD, mouthpiece of the government whose estate system Androssov declared obsolete, agreed that his book “has every claim on our enlightened compatriots’ attention” and broadly praised his analysis of socioeconomic trends, though it cautioned that his statistical analyses were sometimes problematic (owing to the paucity of reliable statistics before 1812) and that some of his generalizations about lower-class pathologies, such as the people’s alleged carelessness, rested on merely anecdotal evidence. By contrast, Nikolai Nadezhdin’s journal Telescope, which spoke for the Moscow University milieu with its traditions of popularizing academic scholarship, effusively praised Androssov, pointedly endorsing his view that the government-mandated estate system was useless for sociological analysis and praising him precisely for the analysis of lower-class pathologies, incuding carelessness, that the ZhMVD had mildly criticized. Lastly, the Polevoi brothers’ journal Moscow Telegraph—the archrival of Telescope and critic of the university’s alleged penchant for abstract theorizing and pedantic academicism—launched into Androssov for not giving enough attention to what was in fact one of his central findings, namely Moscow’s transformation into “an industrial and commercial city, a city of the middle estate.”96 An engagement with urban social change also increasingly shaped Russian fiction, moving it away from what Sara Dickinson calls the “static or cyclical paradigms” underlying the earlier sentimentalist reading of Moscow.97 Literary traditionalists—Mikhail Zagoskin, the leaders of the pro-regime St. Petersburg press (Nikolai Grech, Faddei Bulgarin, Osip Senkovskii), and the Moscow Slavophiles associated with Mikhail Pogodin’s journal The Muscovite—saw Moscow both as reassuringly “Russian” and as “readable” through the prism of “police state” institutions and statistics, while their aesthetic taste, formed by classicism and romanticism, in any case recoiled at exploring the city’s underside.98 By contrast, the adherents of the emerging “natural school” expressed growing doubts about the state’s ability to render the city readable and controllable, while their interest in the new Western “physiological” literature drew their interest to the very aspects of urban life that repelled adherents of older literary traditions. Rather than make a priori generalizations based on a supposed primordial Russianness or static, ascribed estate identities, the natural school’s “physiological sketches” explored social change and the colorful variety of “types” to found among Muscovites.99 Conceptions of space and time changed accordingly: whereas earlier writers had focused on the patrician plentiful statistics, but acknowledges social problems (such as prostitution or substandard housing) mainly in the context of government measures to combat them. See Gast'ev, Materialy dlia polnoi i sravnitel'noi statistiki Moskvy (Moscow, 1841), 160–61, 210–11, 293. 96 ZhMVD, ch. 6, no. 3 (1832): 70; Teleskop 8, no. 7 (1832): 388–413; Moskovskii telegraf, no. 6 (March 1832): 258. On the journalistic rivalries in Moscow see D. P. Bak, “‘Teoriia iskusstva’ i ‘samoe iskusstvo’ (Moskovskaia zhurnalistika 1830-kh godov i universitetskaia nauka),” in Moskva i “moskovskii tekst,” esp. 32–37. 97 Dickinson, “Representing Moscow in 1812,” 30. 98 Kenneth E. Harper, “Criticism of the Natural School in the 1840s,” American Slavic and East European Review 15 (October 1956): 400–14. 99 This literature is discussed in Aleksandr Grigor'evich Tseitlin, Stanovlenie realizma v russkoi literature (Russkii fiziologicheskii ocherk) (Moscow, 1965).

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downtown, daylight hours, and the nocturnal aristocratic high life, their successors were interested in the plebeian outskirts of the city and the twenty-four-hour cycle that saw the bustling daytime crowds alternate with the gloom and unease of the night. The city’s sounds likewise acquired new prominence. Although spared the kind of scathing examination of its lower depths that Nikolai Nekrasov undertook in his Physiology of Petersburg, the “new” Moscow was far more colorful and disconcerting than before, but above all, it was an opaque place that neither the elite nor the “police state” of the Romanovs really understood, let alone controlled. Why, then, did it remain so unrealistically clean and deodorized? Answering that question requires a closer look at the vision of Moscow life put forward in the physiological sketches. The authors of the natural school were consciously and explicitly responding to contemporaneous literary developments in France but were also heirs to the earlier urban literature we discussed. The principal authors who described Moscow in this vein were Pavel Fedorovich Vistengof (1811–55) and Ivan Timofeevich Kokorev (1826–53), who were building on a literary agenda that had been developed in relation to St. Petersburg by Aleksandr Pavlovich Bashutskii (1803–76), particularly in the groundbreaking almanac he edited, Our People, Painted from Life by Russians, which was explicitly modeled after the 1839–42 French almanac The French, Painted by Themselves (Les Français, peints par eux-mêmes). Like Storch, the medical topographers, and Androssov, they went beyond the estate system, the “police state,” and totalizing notions of Russianness to explore the multifaceted realities of urban life. At the same time, like the Russian observers of the early nineteenth century (such as Karamzin, Shalikov, and Glinka), they offered a moral critique of elite society by foregrounding the experience of less-privileged social groups. Like its literary predecessors, the natural school ultimately did not believe that urban society faced a systemic social crisis. Urban Russia, in their view, suffered from the vices inherent in the human condition and the status ambiguities of modern urban life. To resolve the resulting tensions, the masses needed to accept their rightful position, which, according to the Moscow physiological sketches, they commonly did; as for the elites, to whom the books were explicitly addressed, the authors continually address the readers in the second person and urge them to recognize the degree to which their own prejudices and pampered lifestyle have blinded them to the wider realities of society. In a way that recalls Radishchev’s Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow, the authors of the natural school offered themselves as moralizing guides to the universe of the poor and downtrodden. This agenda dictated the place of sensory impressions and everyday physical realities in the authors’ narratives. Because of their desire to explore the diversity of social types existing in the interstices of Russia’s estate system, they follow Engelhardt in paying close attention to material possessions. Thus, the anonymous author of a sketch on nannies in Our People analyzes the content of the typical nanny’s handbag, while Vistengof explores in detail the physical possessions that a young woman in Moscow’s demi-monde acquires as symbols of her social ambitions.100 Also like Engelhardt, and amplifying a concern 100 —va, “Niania,” in Nashi, spisannye s natury russkimi, 14 issues (1841–42; reprint ed., Moscow, 1986), 102; P. Vistengof, Ocherki Moskovskoi zhizni (Moscow, 1842), 144–46. Another example of this literature, similar in tone to Vistengof’s, is N[ikolai] Poliakov, Moskvichi doma, v gostiakh i na ulitse: Razskazy iz narodnago byta (Moscow, 1858).

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found in Karamzin, Glinka, and Shalikov, the natural school examines how consumerism unites society: elite material possessions get resold to the masses and commoners seek to enhance their (self-)image by obtaining consumer goods associated with the upper classes, all of which blurs the boundaries between the elite and the masses.101 Vistengof was interested in temporal as well as social boundaries. As far back as Mercier and Restif de la Bretonne in the 1780s, writers describing Paris had been fascinated by the way the urban night subverted the daytime social order.102 Their contemporaries in Russia, by contrast, had sought to document either Russia’s progress toward enlightenment (Karamzin, Storch) or the decline of traditional morals (Shalikov, Glinka)—either way, the chief aspect of the dark that interested them was how the public authorities and the aristocracy extended their own daytime world past nightfall. By the 1830s, however, writers came to appreciate the nights of St. Petersburg as an eerie world in which the imperial city’s relentless reguliarnost' seemed suspended—one thinks of Evgenii’s nightmare of being pursued by Peter the Great’s statue in Pushkin’s The Bronze Horseman, or Akakii Akakievich being robbed of his coat in Gogol’s The Overcoat. In Moscow, the upper class’s gothic nocturnal fantasies were sometimes nostalgic rather than subversive: Apollon Grigor'ev later thought it typical of the febrile Zeitgeist of the 1830s that as a youth, after he heard his aunt speak of the lost aristocratic splendor of his grandfather’s time and “surrendered myself to her stories, her dreams of a fantastical golden age,” he had come to “love wandering around Moscow by night” in hopes of a mystical encounter with his grandfather’s spirit.103 Following the model of Bashutskii’s description of nighttime St. Petersburg,104 Vistengof was among the first to argue that Moscow had multiple lives that occupied distinct chronological niches. Early in the morning, when the upper class “is still fast asleep,” sundry working folk would begin their labors, while drunks made for the tavern and beggars set out for church to ply their trade; day and night briefly intersected as these denizens of the daytime began their routines of work or vice even while the ladies of the demi-monde discreetly concluded theirs. The evening belonged to the nobility, but by two in the morning opposite worlds once more collided, as decadent aristocratic stragglers (“the tired gambler dozing in his comfortable carriage”) crossed paths not, as in Apollon Grigor'ev’s fantasies, with the ghosts of the departed, but more prosaically with the wagon trains of the cesspool cleaners. Honest labor commenced in the early morning, idle privilege preferred the afternoon and evening, and the wee hours cast a modest veil over vice and filth; venturing out at odd hour entailed the risk of straying into an entirely unfamiliar social world.105 This passing reference to the cesspool cleaners is significant because it is so unusual. Vistengof and Kokorev differed considerably in background and tone. Vistengof, a 101 See, for example, A. Bashutskii, Ocherki iz portfelia uchenika naturnago klassa, 2 vols. (St. Petersburg, 1840), 1:1–25; and I. T. Kokorev, Ocherki Moskvy sorokovykh godov, ed. and intro. N. S. Ashukin (Moscow, 1932), 226. 102 Delattre, Les douze heures noires, 33–77. On the liminal qualities of nighttime see Murray Melbin, “Night as Frontier,” American Sociological Review 43 (February 1978): 3–22. 103 Apollon Grigor'ev, Vospominaniia, ed. B. F. Egorov (Moscow, 1988), 14. On Grigor'ev’s contribution to the transformation of Moscow’s literary image see Robert Whittaker, “‘My Literary and Moral Wanderings’: Apollon Grigor'ev and the Changing Cultural Topography of Moscow,” Slavic Review 42 (Fall 1983): 390–407. 104 Bashutskii, Panorama 3:93–95. 105 Vistengof, Ocherki, 8–12.

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nobleman, tends alternately toward mockery or melodrama, and shows particular interest in exploring the glass ceiling that blocked the middling strata from reaching the top of society. By contrast, Kokorev—the educated but penniless son of an impoverished former serf—adopts as his fictional alter ego a streetwise denizen of the slums who, with bitter irony, introduces the prissy, disdainful reader to the poverty, disease, alcoholism, domestic violence, and constant humiliation that form the world of the poor, particularly those who struggle unsuccessfully to better their social position. Yet both authors depict a Moscow that is almost entirely sanitized and deodorized. Vistengof, while excruciatingly attuned to the manners and possessions that distinguish the aristocracy from its inferiors, is oblivious to their smells. Kokorev, meanwhile, emphasizes the sufferings of the poor and sets his short stories in tenements and taverns, yet smell is virtually absent. The absence of filth and odors in these tales does not mean that the authors were not aware of them, let alone that they did not exist. Thus, in his attempt at a broad sociological overview of St. Petersburg, Bashutskii acknowledges that “in many [lower-class] dwellings, the overcrowding, dampness, gloom, stuffy air, and filth stagger the imagination,” that many Russians “have little understanding of cleanliness,” and that the courtyards of many overcrowded houses were filthy despite the daily refuse removal.106 The unwillingness to problematize filth and smell in the physiological sketches, like the reticence about discussing crime and prostitution, reflects instead a reluctance to think of the lower classes as utterly “other.” Compared with Radishchev’s peasants, the lower-class characters of Bashutskii, Vistengof, and Kokorev are surrounded by a visually more realistic décor and use more realistic language, but otherwise they remain similarly dignified and appealing. For example, Kokorev has an entire short story devoted to a junk dealer. The protagonist goes “to the most remote places” to buy his wares, “into alleys where people live who aren’t prissy, who don’t know want and sorrow just by hearsay, who aren’t ashamed to show their cast-offs. ... The little boy in his gown of coarse cloth, the barefoot little girl, the old woman dressed half in rags—those are his usual acquaintances; any type of rags, any useless junk—that’s their merchandise.” The dealer himself lives on a muddy street, where “the apartments are cheap and there are little rooms and corners where people can afford to live whose only wealth is their relentless labor.” Yet nowhere does this story describe filth or smell. Instead, Kokorev’s focus is on the dignity and humanity of the junk dealer, whose hard work ultimately allows him to become a successful merchant.107 The writings of Vistengof, Bashutskii, and Kokorev suggest various explanations for this approach to the world of the urban poor. Vistengof caters crudely to the state’s propaganda image of its own ability to read and shape society; thus, in a book whose tone is otherwise flippant and ironic, he gushes with almost sarcastic hyperbole that “during the night, the capital is luxuriously illumined” down to its smallest alleys, so “those satirists who tell us that you cannot drive in Moscow at night because of the darkness, are writing utter falsehoods.”108 Bashutskii grounds his explanation in a sociological contrast with Western Europe. Writing shortly after the 1830 revolutions and the cholera, he asks, Bashutskii, Panorama 3:29, 184. “Star'evshchik,” in Kokorev, Ocherki, 137–47. 108 Vistengof, Ocherki, 165–66. 106 107

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observing that most Petersburgers are temporary migrants from the countryside who come to work in the city: Now tell me, why is it that in the vast and populous capital of the North you don’t encounter those hungry, sullen crowds of the [common] people, with their rags, their disorderly noise, their insolence and rowdy behavior? Tell me, why are the streets here more often empty than crowded? Is it [as Westerners claim] due to “the people’s beastial unreason and ingrained ignorance,” or because they are meek, humble, occupied, well fed, and not made up of idlers, vagrants, and paupers? No one but an utterly depraved lazybones could be a pauper in St. Petersburg.109 Kokorev—whose hardships infused his work with a social bitterness absent in Bashutskii and Vistengof—comes closest to suggesting that only his upper-class readers’ reluctance to confront unpleasant truths restrained his pen. Thus, he describes the various “industries” by which the working poor eke out their living. Alluding to Eugène Sue’s gothic bestseller The Mysteries of Paris (Les mystères de Paris), he assures us that “Thank God, this isn’t Paris, and mysteries have never been our custom.” On the very next page, however, he remarks cryptically that the poor have another industry, one that “lives and operates in the dark, and hides from good people like a bat; if I weren’t afraid of offending your good taste, we would make its acquaintance as well.”110 Moscow, as it turned out, did indeed have its own dark mystères. Even the hint that Moscow might share urban pathologies with Western Europe was unacceptable to those who embraced the Nicholaevan brand of Russian exceptionalism. Moscow was different, they declared. Faddei Bulgarin’s and Nikolai Grech’s Northern Bee accused Vistengof of recycling outdated, cartoonish clichés about the city “with an admixture of Muscovite mores lifted from the Parisian physiologies and the novels of Paul de Kock.” Osip Senkovskii’s Library for Reading likewise attacked Vistengof’s work for being derivative and depicting society in Moscow as being “like in Paris, Naples, Petersburg, and Beijing.”111 In depicting a Moscow of upstarts and snobs, of petty-bourgeois vulgarity and mass poverty and alienation, they suggested, he was not only betraying his art by dwelling on topics that were unseemly and distasteful but also challenging cherished myths about the Russian people’s spirituality and communalism by likening Moscow to urban incubators of hypocrisy and despair, like those hotbeds of revolution, Paris and Naples. THE MYTH CRUMBLES, 1855–81 Pushkin and Gogol had, in the 1830s, launched what would become a formidable Russian literary tradition or “supertext” that depicted St. Petersburg as a cruel, inhuman, artificial, masculine place—as Ian Lilly puts it, “an inert mass of granite and cast iron” with an oppressive climate and populated by “either alienated bachelors who starve in stifling attics Bashutskii, Panorama 3:16. “Melkaia promyshlennost' v Moskve,” in Kokorev, Ocherki, 76–77. 111 Severnaia Pchela (April 26, 1843): 358–59; Biblioteka dlia chteniia 56, otd. 6 (1843): 49–53. 109 110

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or young women who are forced into prostitution.” While less systematically studied by scholars, the contrasting “Moscow text” had at least three features that all “stress the positive relationship between the city and its inhabitants”: Moscow was constructed as warmly and maternally feminine, it had religious and ideological connotations associated with the Third Rome doctrine, and it evoked “organic” images of harmony with the “natural and architectural surroundings,” including an abundance of food that suggested hospitality and well-being.112 This image, which underlay the regime ideology of the Nicholaevan era and which Vistengof and Kokorev had already called into question, came under merciless attack in the 1860s, when the raznochintsy writers reveled in graphic portrayals of the common people’s everyday misery. For instance, the short stories of the impoverished ex-seminarian Aleksandr Ivanovich Levitov (1835–78) continue the serf’s son Kokorev’s exploration of Moscow’s non-noble classes in ways that belie the image of harmony and contentment implicit in the Moscow “text.” Levitov engages the same themes as Kokorev but without the stress on the dignity and moral integrity of the poor, instead presenting poverty in Moscow as an atomized, dog-eat-dog existence ruled by cynicism and hopelessness.113 Consequently, nasty odors—absent in Vistengof and Kokorev—play a role in Levitov’s work. For example, one story unfolds in a dismal flophouse where people of diverse social backgrounds wash up when their luck runs out. Among them is one Bzhebzhitskii: like other tenants, he has dubious pretensions to a distinguished pedigree—he calls himself an ensign and a descendant of Polish magnates—and hence feels entitled to treat those he deems inferior with unspeakable haughtiness. So far, the story’s premise of poverty and opaque identities recalls the natural school, but what is new is the evocation of smell as a metaphor for oppression and backwardness. The air in the hallway of the flophouse is nauseating with odor, both from the cook’s plebeian primitiveness and from the disgusting animal excreta that express the pseudo-patrician Bzhebzhitskii’s disdain for humanity: It was dark, like in hell, and Bzhebzhitskii’s dog and the proximity of the kitchen— which was saturated with the peculiar odor of cabbage soup and of Luker'ia’s bed, which she covered with her coat of sour sheepskin—made it smell so bad that there was no way a fresh person could bear the stale air for more than five minutes. Yet there were people who grew so accustomed to this darkness and stench that they became completely indifferent to it.114 Though writing in a very different key, the former Decembrist Dmitrii Irinarkhovich Zavalishin (1804–92) concurred that Moscow had no mysterious essence to ward off the 112 Ian K. Lilly, “Conviviality in the Prerevolutionary ‘Moscow Text’ of Russian Culture,” Russian Review 63 (July 2004): 428, 430, 431. 113 On Levitov see RBS 10:144–45. Ian Lilly dismisses Levitov on the grounds that “Levitov’s image of Moscow is extremely vague,” with little but a “large and socially diverse population” to distinguish it from a provincial town (“Female Sexuality in the Pre-Revolutionary ‘Moscow Text’ of Russian Literature,” in Moscow and Petersburg, 42). However, this is precisely the point: Levitov stripped the city’s image of the layers of patriotic mythology that otherwise deflected socially critical scrutiny. 114 “Moskovskiia ‘komnaty snebil'iu,’” in A. Levitov, Moskovskiia nory i trushchoby, 2nd ed. (St. Petersburg, 1869), 65.

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demoralizing effects of modern urban life. After methodically surveying the backwardness relative to London of Moscow’s public infrastructure, including sanitation and sewage disposal, Zavalishin concluded that “nothing antagonizes a man and embitters his mood as much as when he meets these irritating inconveniences at every step and in everything, especially when there is nothing at all inevitable about them.”115 Once the Crimean War had shaken the public’s faith in the Nicholaevan ideology, every area of life was opened up to a critical scrutiny that consciously eschewed traditional notions of propriety. A new olfactory sensibility was one aspect of the change. For example, the nobleman N. V. Davydov later recalled his childhood in 1850s Moscow in terms replete with images of smell. He remembered that even the elite had cared little about fresh air, seeking instead to dispell miasmas by artificially scenting the air in their dwellings and in public places such as the Bolshoi Theater. (Similarly, noblewomen had earlier carried snuffboxes filled with aromatic leaves to revive them if they fainted “owing to body odours [not to mention restrictive corsets] and insufficient fresh air at indoor public events that lasted many hours.”116) He also recalled that the streets were littered with dung, most courtyards reeked of human waste, the cesspool cleaners’ carts spread a revolting stench at night, and the downtown markets had a sickening smell of rotting fish and spoiled lard.117 The organic imagery implicated in the Moscow text could thus signify not only abundance but also putrefaction. Nowhere was this clearer than in the reports on sanitary conditions that the city council commissioned from the police physicians in the late 1870s. While Moscow’s policemen were traditionally soldiers who had learned on the parade ground to equate public order with the neatness of appearances, these physicians represented an emerging stratum of scientists and professionals who looked for the social or medical realities behind those appearances. Moreover, not only had the Crimean War made clear the fatal consequences of Russia’s backwardness, but the capitals of Russia’s erstwhile enemies were developing solutions to the problems of urban modernity just as Moscow entered a phase of explosive population growth, fueled by the end of serfdom and the expansion of the railways, that exposed the inadequacy of its urban infrastructure. The earlier sense of superiority over London and Paris therefore yielded to a deepening sense of backwardness. The police physicians’ reports focused in large measure on spaces where the public and the private intersected (for example, the open-air courtyards of private homes or the privies of tenement houses) and where the police attempted to regulate the sanitary behavior of private individuals. While they blamed the increasing population density for aggravating conditions, the reports’ primary concern was that neither the population nor many officials had any real understanding of hygiene.118 The resulting pollution, as the physician of Zavalishin, “London, Parizh i Moskva,” 636. On Zavalishin see S. V. Mironenko, ed., Dekabristy: Biograficheskii spravochnik (Moscow, 1988), 69–70. 116 Helena Goscilo, “Cosmetics—or Dying to Overcome Nature in an Age of Art and Artifice,” in Women and Gender in 18th-Century Russia, ed. Wendy Rosslyn (Aldershot, 2003), 79. 117 Iu. N. Aleksandrov, ed., Moskovskaia starina: Vospominaniia moskvichei proshlogo stoletiia (Moscow, 1989), 29, 33, 35, 43, 46–47. 118 On the sorry state of the police’s own guardhouses, for example, see P. Pokrovskii, “Sanitarnyi otchet po Iakimanskoi chasti, za 1878–1879 god,” IMGD, vyp. 20 (October 17, 1879): esp. 68; “Otchet sanitarnago 115

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Sushchevskaia district reported, literally swamped the institutions and popular habits that the regime had earlier portrayed as promoting cleanliness. The grounds of the Orthodox Seminary, the St. Catherine boarding school for noble girls, and the Hermitage Gardens were so polluted that rather than serve as “a reservoir of good, fresh air” for the neighborhood, they “act as a refuse dump and spread foul odors.” Also, the Mary Hospital never drained its latrines, which instead overflowed into a pond used for bathing by local inhabitants who patronized the adjacent bathhouse.119 Another police physician reported that “the food shops are in general kept in filthy condition, like everything else that serves only the common people: the food shops are filthy, the restaurants are filthy, the taverns are filthy—everything is filthy, just like the customer himself is also filthy.”120 Taking the inversion of the Moscow “text’s” “organic” imagery to its logical conclusion, one report noted the fecal contamination of the soil and well water and concluded that “the inhabitant of Moscow (at least in Prechistenskaia district) lives in his own excretions and partly even uses them for food!”121 Two principal factors accounted for the new sensibility about filth and smell. First, a key driving force promoting cleanliness in pre-reform Russia was the militarized, foreignoriented ethos of the state, which demanded the external appearance of neatness and order and extended deep into urban life. Moscow’s policemen were usually soldiers, its senior administrators were generals, the fire department prided itself on the parade-ground smartness of its men and equipment, and each fire station had horses of a distinct color, just like cavalry units.122 Yet militarism was widely resented in Russian society, by elites and commoners alike, as a European import that conflicted with “Russian” values of warmth and informality.123 After 1815, Alexander I attempted to achieve a more profound transformation of values by encouraging a form of quasi-Protestant religiosity and social activism, but again, many people joined this movement only to show their external deference to the regime but fundamentally rejected it as a foreign import. A second, related factor is sociological. Much of Moscow’s population—the nobles included—consisted of rural migrants whose outlook was shaped by village life, while the urban middle classes remained fragmented. Not only were there were few physicians and no lawyers, but the merchantry and the clergy remained insular, tradition-bound groups that were only beginning to develop ties to a wider European middle-class culture and in whose value system cleanliness and hygiene played a limited role. Looking back after 1900, Nikolai Petrovich Vishniakov (b. 1844) recalled that even though his family was made up of prosperous Moscow merchants, their privy was so shabby that his older brother nearly fell through its rotten floorboards on his wedding day; when the family later installed vracha, po Miasnitskoi chasti, G. F. Markonet: Za period vremeni ot 20 ianvaria 1879 goda po 20 iiunia 1879 goda,” ibid., vyp. 18 (September 17, 1879): esp. 11; and Tikhomirov, “Otchet,” 20. 119 Shervinskii, “Otchet,” 7, 12. 120 Benzengr, “Otchet,” 20. 121 M. A. Tikhomirov, “Otchet sanitarnago vracha Prechistenskoi chasti,” IMGD, vyp. 14 (August 1, 1878): 46. 122 Le Cointe, Guide du voyageur à Moscou, 198-202. See also the recollections of M. M. Bogoslovskii and N. D. Teleshov in Moskovskaia starina, 406, 410–11, 413, 427; and Vladimir Giliarovskii, Moskva i moskvichi (Moscow, 2003), 227, 235. 123 On Russian nobles’ penchant for anarchic behavior in reaction to the state’s rigid regimentation of their lives see “Iskusstvo zhizni,” in Lotman, Besedy o russkoi kul'ture, esp. 189.

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a water closet, in 1860, it was considered important enough to show off to guests, some of whom found this a pointless luxury.124 The priest Filip Filipovich Ismailov (1794–1863) later defended the administration of the seminary at Pererva near Moscow for not enforcing cleanliness and good manners among the seminarians on the grounds that Metropolitan Platon, though himself “a man of the [imperial] court and familiar with Europe,” had found it necessary to “take into account that the sense of external propriety was as yet undeveloped” in Russia in the early nineteenth century.125 A half-century later, the clergyman Vasilii Ivanovich Marenin (b. 1849) recalled that in St. Petersburg in the 1860s, seminarians were willing to “sit [in the privy] for an hour or two, even under the most awful hygienic conditions,” for the sake of a furtive smoke that also symbolized their autonomy from the seminary authorities.126 Such recollections indicate that filth and stench had long been taken for granted, but also that attitudes were evolving even before the Crimean War. One of Vishniakov’s tutors, an immigrant from Germany, was a man of deep kindness but little education and antiquated ideas. After finishing his tea or wine, he would rub the last drops into his hands, and he washed up in dirty household water because he actively disliked clean water. All of this, he thought, had medicinal value, but even the Vishniakov family’s Russian servants were so appalled at his odor that they volunteered to bring him clean water.127 By the last decades of the imperial period, Moscow resembled Paris in that its filth and stench had become topics of public debate, both because they had grown objectively more severe and because the assumptions underpinning the earlier silence had collapsed. Increasingly, educated Muscovites questioned whether the estate system and the “wellordered police state” with its militaristic ethos were adequate to the challenge of uplifting urban Russia. The “return” of foul odors during the Great Reforms thus symbolized a loss of public faith in the regime itself. A central aim of many Russians during that era was to replace a system under which an authoritarian bureaucracy and nobility ruled over a backward populace with one that reconciled educated society with the common people in a harmonious civic community. One assumption implicit in this vision was that henceforth, not bureaucrats and constables, but civil society and scientific professionals—journalists, literati, the elected city council, police physicians, the engineers who debated how to build a modern sewer system—would take charge of finding solutions to urban society’s persistent problems.128 The other assumption was the participation of the common people themselves. Cathy Frierson has argued that educated opinion entered the reform era with a romanticized, essentializing image of the peasantry as an undifferentiated narod, but that sobering encounters with rural reality in the 1870s gave rise to ideas that were more nuanced, realistic, and attuned to the Moskovskaia starina, 282. Vzgliad na sobstvennuiu proshedshuiu zhizn' Ismailova (Moscow, 1860), 100–101. 126 Prot. V. M—n, Shkol'nyia i semeinyia vospominaniia (Ocherk dukhovnoi shkoly i byta dukhovenstva v polovine proshlago veka) (St. Petersburg, 1911), 53. 127 Svedeniia o kupecheskom rode Vishniakovykh, 3 vols. (Moscow, 1903–11), 3:123–27. 128 Paradoxically, this disillusionment with the limited accomplishments of the Nicholaevan regime in the area of sanitation and public services subsequently led to an even less effective reliance on private contractors. See Alison K. Smith, “Public Works in an Autocratic State: Water Supplies in an Imperial Russian Town,” Environment and History 11 (August 2005): 319–42. 124 125

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formative influence of the village environment.129 In the urban environment of Moscow, the literary exploration of social realities had begun decades earlier, and there was likely less disappointment when the urban masses fell short of romantic fantasies. Even so, the problem remained: as the city grew and estate barriers fell, how would the plebeian masses be integrated into the reformed social order? Representations of smell offer an important clue. Unlike contemporary observers of Paris, whose thinking about the lower classes was often shaped by pessimistic fears of racial degeneration,130 educated Muscovites rarely problematized the body odor of the poor, although there is evidence that they were aware of that discourse and were capable of employing it when they saw fit. For example, one merchant memoirist recalled that the Zariad'e area near the Kremlin had earlier been “Moscow’s Whitechapel,” a malodorous neighborhood where Jews in un-Russian garb conducted a sleazy “gesheft”in stolen goods. However, in 1882 “this Jewish cloaca was cleansed of the Jews,” who were expelled and replaced with Russian artisans, after which “Zariad'e took on a more respectable appearance.”131 In this instance, the stigma of excremental odor clung to a lower class identified emphatically as foreign, not Russian. But even such observations were rare in a Russian culture generally averse to racial thinking.132 Instead, filth and stench were mostly treated as evidence that the regime and elite had not (yet) succeeded in uplifting the masses. Enlightening the benighted masses was a goal that Catherine II had pursued with her policies of spreading “enlightenment”—including cleanliness and deodorization—through educational institutions, propaganda, and the genteel lifestyle modeled by the nobility, and by ruling the remaining “unenlightened” masses through the estate system and an improved police. While this strategy essentially remained in place until the Crimean War, it also acquired a new conservative orientation: the Russian populace, like the entire city of Moscow, was officially declared to be physically and sociopolitically “clean” by virtue of its rootedness in tradition. In the spirit of “Orthodoxy, Autocracy, Nationality,” popular custom and enlightened absolutism were deemed allies, not antagonists. Many educated Russians appear to have accepted these views, for a variety of reasons: they shared the regime’s sentiments; they were personally indifferent to smell and filth or at least took them for granted; they had no international experience to make comparisons possible, or they took the squalor of 1840s London and Paris for a glimpse of the West’s future; or it offended their cultural sensibilities to discuss filth and stench in writing. All of this changed in the era of the Great Reforms: Moscow’s population doubled while the estate system eroded; the inadequacy of the Nicholaevan system was highlighted by the growing order and prosperity of Western Frierson, Peasant Icons, 11–12. Corbin, Foul and the Fragrant, chap. 9, and 209–10, 274 n.90; Annick Le Guérer, Scent: The Mysterious and Essential Powers of Smell, trans. Richard Miller (New York, 1992), 27–34; Eugen Weber, France: Fin de Siècle (Cambridge, MA, 1986), 20–21, 61, 134. 131 I[van] A[ndreevich] Slonov, Iz zhizni torgovoi Moskvy (Polveka nazad) (Moscow, 1914), 128–31. On the racist element in Russian anti-Semitism see Eugene M. Avrutin, “Racial Categories and the Politics of (Jewish) Difference in Late Imperial Russia,” Kritika 8 (Winter 2007): 13–40. 132 Marlène Laruelle, Mythe aryen et rêve impérial dans la Russie du XIXe siècle (Paris, 2005), 45–50. 129 130

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cities; and the growth of middle-class sensibilities, scientific inquiry, and literary naturalism changed the rules of public debate. The monarchy’s approach to managing Moscow’s problems thus lost credibility among the country’s expanding educated population, but its guiding idea—that the rulers of society should promote cleanliness in order to uplift a benighted, downtrodden people—survived into the twentieth century. In Moscow and the Muscovites the veteran journalist Vladimir Alekseevich Giliarovskii (1853–1935) recalled, in his old age after the Bolshevik Revolution, the Moscow he had covered as a reporter from the 1870s on. To evoke old Moscow’s unstable identities, harsh social relations, oppressive and archaic power structures, and general colorful diversity, Giliarovskii’s vignettes about city locales and their history rely heavily on sensory images, especially odor. However, at the conclusion of certain vignettes, he wished to pay homage to the new regime, so he observed that the Soviets had succeeded at last where every tsar had failed: they had brought enlightenment and dignity to the people, so their Moscow was orderly and clean and did not smell.133

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Giliarovskii, Moskva i moskvichi, 92, 99–100, 238, 450–59.