Love for Sale: Representing Prostitution in Imperial Russia, by Colleen Lucey

Abstract

In her insightful analysis of literary and visual images of women who engaged in commodified sexual exchange in nineteenth-century Russia, Colleen Lucey shows that the very notion of women’s love being ‘for sale’ confounded the cultural elite. Increasing awareness of the slippery slope between engaging in commercial sex and marrying for money resulted in disorientation, inspiration, imitation and horror, all of which can be seen in late imperial Russian art and fiction. In the context of debates about gender, class and sexuality, the theme of prostitution served, writes Lucey, as a ‘metaphor to explore shifting economies of desire founded on transaction’ (p. 14). Starting with St Petersburg, ‘Russia’s Babylon’ (p. 19), Lucey demonstrates how the most Westernised city in the Empire functioned in the popular imagination as the most debauched. She analyses the way mid-century writings and drawings imagined commercial sex in the capital, both in terms of its erotic promises and perils. Redemption narratives, so common in Russian literature as to inspire parodies, reflected men’s fantasies of saving (and often having sex with) ‘fallen women’. Male writers, according to Lucey, got tangled up in their own confusion about sex and gender, especially when they tried to make sense of how encounters in urban spaces such as St Petersburg’s Nevsky Prospect blurred the lines between outright commercial and casual sexual encounters.