Abstract
Abstract The article explores the dichotomy between nineteenth-century Russian writers’ personal experiences at spas and their literary descriptions of them. In private correspondence, authors praised the effect of spa treatments on their health, and they returned year after year to these locations of leisure, calling them ‘beautiful’ or ‘charming’. Yet in their fiction and essays they were sarcastic, if not downright negative about their stays at spas. The keys to understanding such a contradiction appear to be the commercialization of fashionable spas over the course of the nineteenth century; the evolution of a system of shared social values in Russia; and the way Russian writers increasingly perceived literature as a duty towards society.
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