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Filth, Smell, and Representations of Urban Life in Moscow, 1770–1880

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Filth, Smell, and Representations of Urban Life in Moscow, 1770–1880 Sewage and the City: Filth, Smell, and Representations of Urban Life in Moscow, 1770–1880 ALEXANDER M. MARTIN Anyone 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. 1F[riedrich] Raupach, Reise von St. Petersburg nach dem Gesundbrunnen zu Lipezk am Don: Nebst einem Beitrage zur Charakteristik der Russen (Breslau, 1809), 89. 2Alain 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 244 Alexander M. Martin 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 3Cynthia 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). 4Marshall 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. 5David 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 Mass- Circulation 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. Sewage and the City 245 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. 6Elise 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. 7On 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).
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