On June 28, 1750, in Peterhof, Empress Elizabeth instructed her privy secretary, Vasilii Demidov, to go to St. Petersburg and “find an indecent woman [nepotrebnuiu zhenku],” a foreigner called “the Dresdener” (Drezdensha) who “rents upscale houses and keeps there debauched [skvernykh] women and girls … and to put her under arrest at the [St. Peter & St. Paul] Fortress along with her entire crew.” Demidov was also to search for other “indecent ones” and arrest them as well.Footnote 1 This order launched what turned out to be a large-scale campaign against all sorts of unacceptable sexual behavior in the imperial capital. Its active phase lasted for five months and resulted in the arrest and detention of over two hundred women and some men in the so-called Kalinkin House. The Drezdensha affair was apparently widely discussed in the city and made quite an impression on contemporaries. In his oft-quoted memoirs, Major Mikhail Danilov, who was posted in St. Petersburg at the time, recollects that the impact of this affair was such that he chose to renounce his own budding romance with a young German girl, the daughter of a coachman whose master was renting an apartment in the same building.Footnote 2
The Kalinkin Commission, as the ad hoc body that conducted this campaign came to be called (after a linens workshop that it eventually occupied), produced voluminous files filled mostly with minutes of the interrogations of suspected “indecent women” and other individuals implicated in “fornication.” These materials allow for fascinating insights into the social and sexual life of mid-eighteenth century St. Petersburg. These are also unique sources: whereas the Paris police of that era, most famously, developed a highly-sophisticated network of surveillance that penetrated deep into the capital's underworld, the very workings of the Kalinkin Commission underscore the primitive nature of policing in the Russian capital and the absence of regular routinized channels for monitoring the behavior of the city's populace.Footnote 3 In that sense, the rich material produced in the course of the Drezdensha investigation is invaluable when exploring the history of sexuality, social and cultural life, and the attempts at enforcing social discipline in eighteenth-century St. Petersburg. While extremely vivid and often salacious, many of the episodes related in these documents are also truly tragic, revealing stories of abuse and suffering.
This article does not seek to offer an exhaustive study of this episode, much less a comprehensive overview of prostitution and moral regulation in eighteenth-century Russia. Rather, it focuses on the insights provided by the Commission's materials into the sociable practices of the Russian elite. First, it maps out the demimonde, or “sexual underworld,” of mid-eighteenth century St. Petersburg.Footnote 4 It sketches out the institutional, social, and economic dimensions of the so-called “parties,” or perhaps, “soirées” (vecherinki, from vecher, “evening” in Russian), the informal, privately-run commercial venues for mixed-sex socializing. These parties also serve as a window onto a variety of other forms of illicit relationships, from prostitution to concubinage and unmarried cohabitation, as intertwined and hard to disentangle as these often were. Prince M. M. Shcherbatov, an eighteenth-century historian and social critic, famously decried the “corruption of morals in Russia” in the post-Petrine period, and memoirs, including those of Catherine II, bear witness to the widespread practice of adultery and extra-marital liaisons in court circles.Footnote 5 The existing literature on sexuality in Russia, however, mostly focuses on what we might call the traditional family and concentrates on either the pre-Petrine period or on the more “modern” nineteenth century.Footnote 6 In this sense, the anecdotes portraying Peter I's own relationships with women from Anna Mons to Catherine I, as well as the sexual habits of those at the courts of Elizabeth and Catherine II lack context in the literature. By reconstructing the realities of the eighteenth-century “sexual underworld” in Russia, this article seeks to fill this gap.
Second, this article employs the materials of the Drezdensha affair as a window into the evolution of sociability in Russia. It is exactly in the middle of the century that Douglas Smith discerns the proliferation of such forums as commercial (rather than sponsored by the state or by magnates) theatrical productions or, especially, masonic lodges in Russia.Footnote 7 More recently, the Free Economic Society (founded in 1765) has attracted special attention as a key site of the emerging Russian associational sphere.Footnote 8 Of course, such institutions are also the most obvious sites to be studied, as they left a paper trail—because they were composed of highly literate and articulate individuals, or perhaps, were even sanctioned by the state. As a result, however, it is the loftier dimensions of sociability that are privileged in standard accounts: “Westernization” and “Enlightenment” in Russia tend to be associated with highbrow practices, with joining the ranks of the “reading public,” with reflecting on the public good, and, generally, with becoming more civil and polite, with “curbing … base desires and passions.”Footnote 9
It is, however, fairly clear that the birth of sociability and associational life was not driven by elevated pursuits alone, and that the early nuclei of “society” were not anodyne oases of sophisticated politeness. The very coffeehouses and taverns that have been singled out as important early sites of sociability and the public sphere in western Europe were blurred, liminal spaces of transgression, bodily indulgence, and social inclusiveness; in fact, initially they formed a single continuum both with the emerging masonic lodges and clubs, on the one hand, and with the early, non-institutionalized brothels, on the other.Footnote 10 In Russia, of course, the roots of modern sociability and associational culture can be traced to Peter I, most striking, perhaps, to his (in)famous All-Drunken Assembly. With its pointed rejection and inversion of social and cultural norms and the taboos performed, inter alia, through the use of explicitly sexual imagery, it was not only an element, but also a key instrument of the tsar-led “transfiguring” of society.Footnote 11 In 1718, Peter also began to promote mixed-sex, socially inclusive “assemblies,” designed to initiate his elite subjects into new, “polite” forms of entertainment and social interactions; after the tsar's death these assemblies allegedly morphed into the much more formal and socially-exclusive kurtagi at court and the rigidly-ritualized balls at aristocratic houses.Footnote 12 Still, these more refined and subdued formats were only one facet of the wider universe of post-Petrine “westernized” socializing.
This article argues that the parties, with their “cold-blooded debauchery,” to use Pushkin's phrase in “Eugene Onegin,” had important social and cultural meaning. Certainly, young Russian nobles drank and whored both before and outside of such parties. Yet, the universe of parties had two important dimensions to it that, arguably, place these venues among the earliest recorded sites of truly autonomous and emancipated elite sociability in the empire.Footnote 13 On the one hand, the parties in mid-century St. Petersburg, just like the coffee houses in Paris or London, provided increasingly institutionalized and publicly accessible forums for regular and voluntary interaction outside the domain of state service and outside the emerging “polite” society with its rigid hierarchy. Chronologically, the world of the sexually-charged “parties” preceded the emergence of more obvious forms of public life; notably, the clientele of Drezdensha's events came largely from the same social circles as that of would-be masonic lodges and voluntary associations. In that sense, both the parties and the lodges reflect the elite's search for an autonomous social space.
On the other, it is the realities of this social space that also provided some of the themes that members of elite concerned themselves with intellectually and artistically, thus also contributing to the creation of a common ideational space. In western Europe, the role of lowbrow and explicitly-pornographic literature in driving the development of publishing and reading has been widely acknowledged ever since Robert Darnton's pioneering work.Footnote 14 More generally, “it is in a variety of forms of sexual talk and action, as much as anything, that enlightenment vernacularized and dispersed itself, finding new ways into new public spheres.”Footnote 15 Scholars emphasize the role of a “libertine enlightenment” in which “sexual freedom and dissident behavior allowed for a broad range of social and intellectual formations to be disturbed and refashioned in the eighteenth century.”Footnote 16 As this article demonstrates, it was largely through discussion of debauchery and the foppish ways of the petimetry (petit-maîtres), intimately and directly linked to the “sexual underworld” as these were, that mid-eighteenth century Russians began to enter into a quasi-public intellectual dialogue with each other and to articulate their (critical) reflections on the west and on the Petrine transformation.
Nests of Indecency
Having received the order from the empress, Demidov instructed Assessor Beketov of the Police Chancellery to establish Drezdensha's whereabouts, to detain her, and to interrogate her regarding other “indecent women” in the capital. By July 5, Demidov was reporting directly to Elizabeth that Drezdensha and two other women of her household were in custody. Torture (first, the batogs, and then the cat o’ nine tails) was applied to some of them, and the unfortunate women “revealed many other nests of indecency.” On the basis of their confession the investigators detained over fifty fornicators (bludnitsy) and pimps (svodnitsy), “in various places, households, and taverns, hiding in wardrobes and under the beds.” Drezdensha in particular provided the names of scores of potentially suspect girls including those whom she had helped to find employment as maidservants and advised others to confess. Demidov was hoping “to gather a sizable herd of them, as … many places at the Admiralty Side, and on Vasilievskii Island are full [of indecent women], and there are some at Milionnaia Street.” Some women went into hiding on the smaller islands on the Neva, so teams of soldiers had to be dispatched there.Footnote 17
It is clear from the documents that Elizabeth was very intensely involved with the investigation: she followed the reports closely, decided how to proceed if an important dignitary or foreign envoy was involved, and used her own information channels to monitor and steer the investigation.Footnote 18 Overall, Demidov reported to Elizabeth almost daily.Footnote 19 She also requested additional information: for example, on July 11 she ordered a census of all the private rental dwellings along the Moika and Fontanka Rivers and their inhabitants.Footnote 20 The Empress did not provide, however, any clear definition of “indecency” for Demidov to operate on. If anything, the ever-widening scope of the investigation reflected the fact that the boundaries of “indecency” were being renegotiated as the campaign unfolded. By July 12 the investigators reported having seventy individuals under lock already and projected that the number might grow to 500.Footnote 21 In fact, the round-up was so successful that the Peter and Paul Fortress could not accommodate all the detained women, and the Commission had to be transferred to the Kalinkin House.Footnote 22 Eventually, Demidov's July projections proved to be too optimistic, but still by September 26 the Commission had 178 individuals in its custody, while a further thirty-seven suspected pimps and thirty-six fornicators were still at large.Footnote 23 All the detainees were interrogated by the commission, which sought to establish whether indeed fornication took place, the circumstances in which it had taken place, whether anyone had facilitated or encouraged fornication, or whether the accused knew of any other fornicators. In practice, the Commission detained all sorts of women, ranging from streetwalking prostitutes to someone like Charlotte Garp, who lived in a sort of concubinage with the architect Carlo Giuseppe (Osip Petrovich) Trezzini (1697–1768) and bore a child acknowledged by him. Rather than enforcing specific norms and boundaries, the Commission was creating them in the course of the investigation, marking hitherto routine forms of behavior as illicit. Footnote 24
Arguably the most fascinating among the social practices reflected in the materials of the Kalinkin Commission are the “parties.” Certainly this was only one among many formats of unofficial socializing in the capital. A description of St. Petersburg composed at about the same time claimed that the city had close to two hundred drinking establishments of different kinds. While occasionally one finds evidence of a “comedy” being performed at such modest venues, the government—probably, rightly so—tended to associate them with debauchery. Thus, in June 1732, Field Marshal von Münnich sought to prevent the cadets and officers of the Cadet Corps from visiting taverns and coffeehouses “where there are billiard tables and other entertainments” because of the “quarrels and fights and other indecencies” supposedly endemic there.Footnote 25 Social gatherings at private homes were, apparently, also wide-spread, and one such event held at a private residence on Milionnaia Street in November 1744 turned into a large brawl involving officers and NCOs of the guards, artillery, and the Cadet Corps. In response, St. Petersburg General-Politsmeister (police chief) António Manuel de Vieira, or Devier (1682?–1745)—the very same man who twenty years earlier had drafted Peter I's decree introducing the “assemblies”—decided to regulate the matter. As he acknowledged, it was “widely known that in St. Petersburg in certain places many [residents] stage puppet-plays and other comedies and organize parties.” Now this practice was declared potentially disruptive of public order: all those who wanted to hold “parties” had to obtain permission from the police, who would issue a “ticket” and dispatch soldiers to keep order.Footnote 26 The Kalinkin Commission naturally turned its attention towards these “parties,” since it emerged that Drezdensha and some of her colleagues in “indecency” were among the prominent and frequent hosts of such events.
Organized by private entrepreneurs to provide a forum for mixed-sex socializing, the “parties” investigated by the Commission were explicitly commercial ventures intended to earn income for the hosts, as they themselves emphasized. To some extent, this insistence on profit-seeking motives reflect, no doubt, the hosts' efforts to present the parties as a legitimate and innocent enterprise. In many cases, organizing parties was a source of supplementary income in addition to some other trade: the vast majority of such entrepreneurs identified by the Commission were “foreigners” of lower-middling status, such as artisans, bankrupt merchants, former domestics, non-commissioned officers, and so forth. A good example is a native of Abo, “of Swedish nation,” listed in the records as Andrei Pomlin: he identified himself as a tailor; previously, he had also served as a domestic in the households of the Ambassadors to Denmark and the Holy Roman Empire. One Ivan Ferschter (Försher) explained that he decided to hold parties since “many of his comrades also held them … hoping to make profit.”Footnote 27 For some, however, Drezdensha herself being the most outstanding example, this was their main occupation. Similarly, while some hosts appear to have rented special facilities for holding parties, most organized them in their own apartments.Footnote 28
The business model was based on charging the male patrons an admission fee: in exchange, they got an opportunity both to enjoy socializing on the premises and to meet female guests willing to engage in illicit sex. The hosts also provided entertainment: at Maria Vintslersha's parties, guests were “entertained with grape drinks, tea and coffee, and dancing.”Footnote 29 Sometimes, guests could also play cards, and in a few instances a lottery draw took place. Musicians were invited from various regiments, especially the Guards: at one party, the band is reported to have included an alto, an oboe, and a violin.Footnote 30 Entrepreneurs nearly unanimously reported paying the musicians three rubles per night. Other costs included an unofficial honorarium of thirty to fifty kopeks per night paid to the soldiers appointed by the police to keep order. Male guests paid an entry fee that varied from fifty kopeks to one and one half rubles; females were admitted for free. The scale of these parties varied widely. While some events allegedly attracted about a dozen guests, others are described as drawing “multitudes.” One Ivan Kristophorov, “a foreigner,” claimed to have lost ten rubles on each of the two parties he organized due to the low attendance.Footnote 31
Naturally, when under investigation, entrepreneurs tried to minimize the scale of their activities, or even presented them as one-off, isolated events. Ivan Ferschter claimed having organized a party only once, “about six months ago” (that is, early in 1750), at his own apartment. Johann Gendel΄man (Heideman) recalled holding only four parties in 1747 in two different places, he held three in 1749, and one in 1750. Pomlin claimed to have organized only a “few” events, although he also confessed to having held a further “seven or eight” parties without obtaining a ticket, on the basis of informal permission from a police officer. Maria Vintslersha, however, admitted organizing about twenty parties in 1746 at the Admiralty Side, as well as “many” parties in 1747 on Vasil΄evskii Island.Footnote 32 Georg Gak (Haack), a tavern-keeper, and his wife reported that both Pomlin and Vintslersha “often” held parties, while Drezdensha claimed that Vintslersha, Gendel΄man, Pomlin, Corporal Fedor Podenskii of the Semenovskii Guards, and Uliana Maksheeva, known as Udachka (“Lucky”), ran such events “often, and almost every Sunday and on holidays.” According to her, Podenskii in particular “always had parties.”Footnote 33
The diversity of social types who patronized these events is striking. On one end of the spectrum were the parties run by Drezdensha herself and attended by “the officers of the guards, the regiments of the line, and those from the nobility.”Footnote 34 Parties organized by other entrepreneurs had a much more mixed audience: “officers and NCOs from various regiments, merchants, skippers, and clerks,” “officers, merchants, and other people,” “palace lackeys and other people,” and “a multitude of people of various ranks.” To give an example, guests of Johann Peter Gints, a regimental assistant medic, included: Prince Meshcherskii and another officer; an assistant medic from the Astrakhan Infantry Regiment; an infantry sergeant and his wife; a few males with Russian-sounding names whose ranks were not identified; the wives of Gints and Ensign Ulrich, his partner and an apparent pimp; a tavern-keeper's maid; and soldiers' wives residing in the same building. Another male guest is identifiable: it is John (or Ivan Fomich) Truscott (1721–1786), son of an English merchant and a student at the Academy of Sciences.Footnote 35
Obviously, the key attraction of these parties was an opportunity for male patrons to meet women who were potentially available sexually. One detainee claimed that female guests at such events were really “whores and pimps” (“bliadi i svodnitsy”), and that the patrons were coming in order to arrange sexual encounters “for indecent affairs and whorish amours, where they could better meet each other for this end” (“dlia nepotrebnykh del i bliatskikh amurov, gde b komu s kem dlia togo spoznanie lutshee vozymet΄”).Footnote 36 Drezdensha described Podenskii's operation: “to put it simply, a public house of whoring,” and he reportedly “kept there for fornicating” such women as Florentina, Greta, Katerina “the Little,” “Lotta, his own fiancée,” Barba, Christina, and Mariсhen.Footnote 37
And yet, reality appears to have been somewhat more ambiguous. For one thing, all the attendees insisted that no sex took place at the parties themselves. Ferschter, to give an example, adamantly denied that fornication was allowed at his parties, but whether the girls “voluntarily went elsewhere” with the patrons for this purpose he would neither confirm nor deny; Pomlin took the same line. Moreover, some of the women were brought along by the guests themselves. While Ivan Ferschter admitted that there were “wenches residing at his premises for whoring,” he also claimed that many patrons came accompanied by “girls, their so-called fiancées.”Footnote 38 Indeed, this indicates that picking up a potential sexual partner was not the only purpose of the parties. Entertainment provided at Pomlin's events included tea and dancing that could last until ten o'clock in the evening, or later.Footnote 39 At Gint's, musicians were hired from the Preobrazhenskii Guards, and the dancing continued until after four in the morning.Footnote 40 Thus, the parties were also sites for genuine merrymaking and socializing both for the males who already had a kept woman and for those men and women who were themselves involved in the business of the demimonde.
We do not know exactly how potential guests were informed about the upcoming events; many of the detainees, however, referred to the “general echo,” “public rumors,” or other similar notions denoting informal networks of communication. Thus, Volemutsha reported “having heard the public rumor” regarding Gints as a keeper of “indecent houses.” Many other men and women also referred to “having heard” about one or another operator of an “indecent house”—the names Drezdensha, Vintslersha, Gendel΄man, Pomlin, and Corporal Podenskii come up most often. One detainee in particular pointed to “Drezdensha, Volemutsha, Gaksha, and Kenigsbergsha, for they are the most knowledgeable about each other.”Footnote 41 It is through these informal communication channels that the word would have been spread; some entrepreneurs stressed under interrogation that their female guests included both the women they themselves had invited and those who came without any invitation. Drezdensha claimed that she was not personally acquainted with all of her aristocratic guests, “but only five or so of them, yet I asked them to invite others, so all these [guests] came having talked to each other.”Footnote 42 Individual establishments and entrepreneurs were thus interconnected by numerous horizontal linkages and, it seems, unwritten norms. Natalia Selivanova, a prominent player in the demimonde, specifically noted that “the female sex is never charged by anybody [for attending such events], for they engage in dancing”—together with a nearly uniform fee for attendance, her wording indicates that there were well-known conventional rules for operating parties.Footnote 43
A Jolly House on the Moika
At the heart of the investigation were, naturally, Drezdensha and her establishment. Both in terms of the social profile of its patrons and the facilities employed, this operation really stood apart in the capital's demimonde. The story of this woman and the profile of her numerous clients also provide the best insights into the workings of the parties and into their role in the social life of the capital. Anna-Cunegonda Felkner, a native of Dresden (hence her nickname), was allegedly 38 in 1750. She claimed to have arrived in St. Petersburg in 1734 and found employment as a maid at the household of Karl Biron, brother of Empress Anna's favorite and a Major in the Horse Guards. Biron “persuaded her towards fornication and defiled her,” and this was the beginning of Drezdensha's career in vice. After quitting Biron's house, she moved to that of Colonel Sokovnin, but after three months there, married one Lieutenant Felkner (in 1735), who soon left for the war against the Ottomans, failing to provide for the maintenance of his spouse. So, Anna-Cunegonda bought a billiard table, rented a house, and started a business, in which she was assisted by two servants, a “foreigner” and a Russian soldier's wife. Her establishment was patronized by “officers, as well as merchants and government clerks,” and Drezdensha claimed that at this stage her business did not involve “whoring.”Footnote 44 Soon, however, she made a trip to Germany and brought back four girls from Berlin to prostitute them. In 1740, her husband divorced her on account of her “fornication,” and in 1741 she was brought to the Main Police Chancellery on charges of living in “indecency,” the only such arrest in the entire capital that year.Footnote 45
One of the places where Drezdensha had been renting premises for her business was the house of Vice Admiral Prince Mikhail Andreevich Belosel΄skii (1702–1755) by the Blue Bridge on present-day St. Isaac's Square.Footnote 46 The records of the investigation indicate that besides her, over a dozen other procuresses practiced their trade at this site, employing altogether close to fifty women and girls.Footnote 47 These catered mostly to low-ranking clients and seem not to have been in the business of organizing parties; they also rented appropriately-modest rooms, usually shared by at least a few women. The apartment rented by Drezdensha, however, was much more spacious: there was an antechamber with a lackey and separate rooms for dancing, for playing cards, and for dining. These quarters cost her fifteen rubles a month. The entry fee of one ruble, though, was also rather moderate, given the sort of clientele she catered to; it cost two rubles, for example, to enter the “public” masquerades organized at that time by Charles Serigny, the head of the French theatrical troupe, with Elizabeth's permission.Footnote 48 According to another entrepreneur, Drezdensha had a “great number of people” on her premises “every day,” but just as other detainees, she vehemently denied that her guests engaged in fornication, “for in any case, there was no room for that.”Footnote 49
Drezdensha claimed that her guests were “nearly all aristocrats” (znatnye) and kept records of sorts, apparently. Not all the names she mentioned during the interrogation could be deciphered, and not all individuals could be identified, but the list is certainly impressive, a “Who's Who” of St. Petersburg society. It included not only people who visited her parties, but also those with whom she “fornicated” personally. Some of her patrons she could identify by their first name, others by their last name only. She described one of her personal clients simply as Major Iazykov, “and what's his [given] name, she does not know.”Footnote 50 The most high-ranking on Drezdensha's list were Brigadier Count Grigorii Grigorievich Chernyshev (1717–1750) and Colonel Petr Ivanovich Panin (1721–1789) of the Izmailovskii Guards. Chernyshev was the brother of Zakhar, Ivan and Petr Chernyshev, who would become influential ministers during the Catherinian era. Panin was to become a leading general under Catherine, and was also the brother of Nikita Ivanovich Panin, of “Panin Party” fame. Similarly, Ivan Illarionovich Vorontsov (1719–1786), a lieutenant in the Preobrazhenskii Guards, was the brother of Roman and Mikhail Vorontsov, two leading ministers and courtiers of Elizabeth's era, while Ensign Petr Alekseevich Tatishchev (1730–1810) was the son of St. Petersburg's current General-Politsmeister. Footnote 51
The list of Drezdensha's notable clients also included numerous other junior members of the most illustrious aristocratic families. Among these were lieutenants Prince Shakhovskoi and Tolstoi and vakhmeister (NCO) Izmailov of the Horse Guards; Prince Golitsyn, a lieutenant in the Preobrazhenskii Guards; two unidentified sons of Prince Boris Vasl΄evich Golitsyn—presumably Vladimir Borisovich Golitsyn (1731–1799) and Aleksei Borisovich Golitsyn (1732–1792). Clients also included diverse other guardsmen from some of the best families: Ivan Kropotov; Sergeant Kolychev, Prince Iurii Dolgorukov, Prince Sergei Trubetskoi, kaptenarmus (NCO) Prince Volkonskii, Rzhevskii, Volynskii, Apraksin, Neledinskii, Voieikov, Koshelev; two Mamonov brothers, two Kologrivov brothers, a son of Major Veliaminov of the Guards. Additionally, imperial Kamer-pages and pages Aleksandr Ivanovich Naryshkin, [Petr] Sheremetev, Ivan Neronov, Vasilii Kar, and sergeants Nepluiev and Olsufiev of the Cadet Corps were among the clientele. Finally, officers of the most prestigious regiments of the line were also clients: Captain Schtok, lieutenants Korsakov, Siуvers, and Efim Durnovo of the Ingermanland Regiment, Captain Mishukov of the Astrakhan Regiment, and Lieutenant Ivan Siniavin and Ensign Nikolai Siniavin of the navy. Footnote 52 These cadets, pages, and guardsmen were the first post-Petrine generation of the Russian elite. Born around 1730, they would benefit from the emancipation of the nobility in 1762 and would also comprise the political and cultural elite of Catherine II's reign.Footnote 53
Besides these blue-blooded guardsmen, Drezdensha's clients also included many members of the professions, merchants, and even skilled artisans. One such client was Dr. Abraham Kaau-Boerhaave, professor of anatomy and physiology of the Academy of Sciences and brother of Hermann Kaau-Boerhaave, director of the Medical Chancellery. Young guardsmen also mingled at Drezdensha's with French and German merchants, as well as the secretary of the French embassy, court musicians, the cook and the majordomo to Baron Wolf (the banker), a palace upholsterer, the tantsmeister (dancing teacher) of the Cadet Corps, and Russian merchants, including those from Iaroslavl΄ and Toropets.Footnote 54
Given the sort of clientele she had, Drezdensha's parties were not clandestine events. These parties were certainly not a secret for Drezdensha's landlord, Prince Belosel΄skii, who likely tolerated and abetted them, while the marines assigned to him for guard duty maintained order at the events.Footnote 55 Furthermore, his own sons and aides-de-camp were among the attendees. A naval band entertained Drezdensha guests, and Belosel΄skii's majordomo was relied upon to settle frictions with the police.Footnote 56 Indeed, Drezdensha seems to have enjoyed rather open business relationships with her clients. Among her documents, one finds a promissory note from Prince Volkonskii (who apparently died “the previous year”), confirming that he owed “Madam Felkner” eighty rubles to be paid a month later.Footnote 57 Drezdensha also provided girls for cohabitation (“accepted into his house for fornication”) for Baron Petr Shafirov; Prince Dolgorukov; Ludwig Siegfried Vitzthum von Eckstädt (1716–1777), the Saxon envoy from 1746 to 1747; Lieutenant-General Count Fedor Andreevich Apraksin (1703–1754); and Baron Sergei Grigorievich Stroganov (1707–1756), and she appears to have been summoned often by these dignitaries to commission her to find girls to their liking.Footnote 58
In a sense, this “sexual underworld” was another dimension of more legitimate forms of social life and social connections. For example, one of Drezdensha's most high-ranking clients, Brigadier Grigorii Grigorievich Chernyshev, was Prince Belosel΄skii's brother-in-law. Another client, Prince Vladimir Borisovich Golitsyn, years later married Natalia Petrovna Chernysheva, who was Chernyshev's and Belosel΄skii's niece (as well as the prototype for the “Old Countess” from Pushkin's Queen of Spades). Petr Panin was married to Anna Tatishcheva, the sister of Ensign Tatishchev, still another patron of the establishment, while a few years later, the son of Sergei Grigorievich Stroganov would marry the niece of Roman and Ivan Vorontsov. In that sense, socializing at Drezdensha's and similar venues went parallel to the more polite socializing that took place at aristocratic parlors, and Drezdensha's clientele was likely recruited through family and service networks. We can even see how attending such parties could help to cement important social connections, or to establish them to begin with. In her memoirs, Catherine II described the way in which one Brockdorf, an enterprising nobleman from Holstein, attained access to the Russian elite in the 1750s: at his St. Petersburg hotel he befriended another foreigner, who introduced him to “three German girls, quite attractive, called Reifenshtein.”Footnote 59 It is while visiting these girls at their apartment that Brockdorf managed to make an acquaintance with Count Petr Shuvalov, the leading minister of the era, a meeting that he used as a launching pad for subsequent political machinations. (Catherine II remarks, pointedly, that one of the sisters later became Shuvalov's kept woman).
Jealousy Most Sovereign
As is usually the case with causes célèbres, to have had such a broad resonance this affair had to have been located at the intersection of multiple phobias and anxieties. The exact circumstances that pushed Elizabeth to launch the investigation are unclear. Contemporaries suggested that it might have been triggered by complaints from jealous wives, or perhaps, by entreaties from the sovereign's confessor.Footnote 60 Personal jealousy on the ruler's part might have also been at play, since many courtiers were involved with the parties: it was probably not by chance that she ordered one of the women whipped “mercilessly” until she revealed “which one of the Korsakovs she was cohabiting with.”Footnote 61
But there are also signs of jealousy of another sort. In particular, vice in the Commission's documents became unequivocally associated with foreignness. Certainly, many of the entrepreneurs and dames of the demimonde were “foreigners,” that is, the German-speaking natives either of the recently conquered Baltic provinces, or as was the case with Drezdensha herself and many others, of various territories in Germany proper (but also of Sweden, Poland, and other foreign lands). We might surmise that their foreignness gave these women certain qualities that made them more desirable in the eyes of their Russian patrons (the ability to dress, converse, dance, or play musical instruments in western ways, perhaps). In fact, on one occasion, potential concubines were rejected by a potential patron on account of their “lack of comprehension in manners.”Footnote 62 Notably, the inventory of Drezdensha's possessions listed “two drawings of a shepherdess”—an echo of the contemporary fashion of painting allegories of gallantry and courtship in pastoral settings.Footnote 63 Another woman prostituted two daughters, one of whom is reported to have skillfully played a bandura (a plucked string instruments), and another a clavichord.Footnote 64 Visiting such women could clearly also include a cultural experience.
To an extent, this foreignness possibly placed these women outside the accepted social boundaries and gender roles that applied to Russians. Major Danilov asserts in his memoirs that the Commission detained not only the low-born “whores,” but also the “wives who came to Drezdensha's house to choose for themselves consorts to their liking”—in other words, that some aristocratic women, too, enjoyed the opportunities for sexual license offered by the underworld.Footnote 65 Yet, the Commission's records do not seem to confirm this point, although there are references to a certain pimp who prostituted a “daughter of an aristocratic (znatnogo) father” and to a Colonel's wife who used Drezdensha's premises to illicitly meet with Dr. Kaau-Boerhaave and other lovers.Footnote 66 Overall, unlike the more obviously “Enlightened” formats for sociability such as salons and aristocratic balls, the parties implied the exclusion of women, or more specifically, of “respectable” women. Drezdensha's venue played a role not unlike that of Moscow's German Quarter to Peter I: that of a social and cultural oasis where Russian elite men could experiment with new forms of sexual behavior.
While their foreignness might have placed these women outside of certain social and cultural boundaries, it also made them more visible to the authorities, who described “parties” and whoring in terms of moral contagion. The very first order from Elizabeth to Demidov explicitly stresses Drezdensha's identity as a “foreigner” who invited “indecent women” from overseas. Besides Drezdensha, Demidov was also to search for “other, similarly indecent women and girls who arrived here from Gdansk and other foreign places,” to whip them, and to extradite them from the empire.Footnote 67 The commission, apparently, seriously considered investigating the behavior of all the females who had arrived by sea to the capital, and Russian consuls abroad were instructed to prevent suspicious foreign women from entering the country.Footnote 68 Eventually, of course, home-grown “whores” were also targeted by the investigators, but the very idea of turning the commission's attention towards Russian women came almost as an afterthought. It was only on July 12, two weeks after the beginning of the investigation, that Demidov put forward a proposition which, in his eyes, was so questionable that it required approval from his superiors: he suggested “searching for Russian [indecent women] as well.”Footnote 69
Indeed, Elizabeth appears to have perceived the alien women of the demimonde as contesting her monopoly in the social and cultural arena. Her reign was marked by efforts to organize official public events, balls, and especially masquerades: following in her father's footsteps, the Empress personally prescribed the ways in which such events should be conducted at court and in the houses of her most prominent subjects. Paul Keenan notes a “conscious attempt to create a forum for certain social and cultural changes,” where the court played the leading role in “promoting and regulating the city's cultural life.” Footnote 70 The initiative in the cultural domain is thus presented as emanating from the top, sometimes against the wishes of the public, while “other respectable social groups” (besides the nobility) were granted access to the new formats of socializing only occasionally and conditionally.Footnote 71 As we have seen, however, in reality there existed by the late 1740s a vibrant universe of unofficial, privately-run venues for socializing—with drinks, music, dancing, and illicit sex—catering to a fairly broad section of the capital's populace that was willing to pay money to attend them. In this sense, rather than “promoting” new forms of socializing, Elizabeth was trying to assert her control over this sphere, to suppress unauthorized appropriation by her subjects of those cultural forms that she herself promoted and patronized.
The masquerades were an especially sensitive matter in that regard. Insofar as they provided anonymity, gave women opportunities for choosing partners, made gender identities ambiguous, and hence had considerable destabilizing power, the masquerades were a source of fascination and anxiety all over eighteenth-century Europe.Footnote 72 In mid eighteenth-century Russia that was also the case. The masquerade organized by Elizabeth in 1741, right after her accession, had an explicitly political goal: it was meant to parody the previous reign. By the end of the 1740s, Elizabeth directed her courtiers to host masquerades for the elite in their own residences “on the appointed days,” while also authorizing Serigny to organize “public” masquerades for a broader audience.Footnote 73 Masquerades could also include cross-dressing. V. A. Nashchokin, a guards officer, noted in his diary that on February 24, 1750 “from five in the afternoon on, there was a metamorphosis at the court, that is, the males were all in female dress, and the females were all in the male one.” Footnote 74 Elizabeth herself is alleged to have enjoyed wearing male dress, which fit her well, while her elderly dignitaries looked clumsy and comically awkward in their elaborate female attire. The most consequential episode of Elizabeth's cross-dressing was her coup of 1741, when she put on a military uniform to claim the crown (as Catherine II would also do twenty years later).Footnote 75 Against this backdrop, Demidov had already reported to the Empress on August 2 regarding “such women who put on officer uniforms to visit honest houses and taverns, introduce themselves as officers and indulge in indecency (nepotrebstvovali) at Drezdensha's.” This issue must have touched a raw nerve with the Empress: detainees were routinely asked whether the parties they attended involved cross-dressing or wearing masks. At the end of the investigation, Demidov specifically requested instruction as to what should be done with “those whores who wore officer uniforms and masks” to attend entertainment at “honest houses” and a certain bankrupt merchant from Riga who tricked a cadet into giving him a Cadet Corps uniform to be worn by a “public whore.”Footnote 76
Of Fops and Masons
Thus, Drezdensha and her “company” became a tangible embodiment of an alternative social and cultural sphere that was emancipated from the state and did not fit the established hierarchies. This sphere, in fact, has been linked to what appears to have been a very specific category of elite youth and a very specific subculture. The investigators claimed that (unnamed) grateful subjects thanked the Empress for taming
the indecent ones, for from their sailing at night in their boats on rivers with horns and other music, and from their yelling on the streets, there was no respite; and now it has all calmed down. And so it was that the petimetry [petit-maîtres, or fops] multiplied to such an extent that lads of 19 or 20 years old walked shamelessly around with their hats cocked, and with tall walking sticks, in large companies, so that it was offensive even to look at them; and now this is not to be seen anywhere.Footnote 77
As best we can tell, these “lads” had to be precisely the same mixture of cadets, pages, subalterns and NCOs of the guards that patronized Drezdensha's parties; their dress (or rather, the way of wearing it), paraphernalia, and foppish behavior are presented here as signs of moral decay and subversion of public order. Thus, “whores,” loud noises, music, and irreverent youth with cocked hats who presumed to idly walk the streets in daylight were all intertwined as expressions of general nonconformity, amorphous yet clearly alien, that provoked nothing but shame in the spectator.
The reference to petit-maîtres is highly significant here. While it appears in the materials of the Kalinkin Commission, it is striking that it is precisely in 1750 that we have the first recorded use of this term in Russian literature.Footnote 78 It appears in A. P. Sumarokov's comedy The Monsters (Chudovishchi), in which one of the main protagonists, Del΄iuzh, is introduced disparagingly as a petimetr. According to Sumarokov, he wrote this comedy in June 1750, and its one and only recorded performance took place right in the midst of the Drezdensha investigation. It was staged by a group of cadets from the Land Noble Cadet Corps in Peterhof, in the presence of Elizabeth herself, on July 21, 1750. The term also appears in Sumarokov's Empty Quarrel (Pustaia ssora), another comedy from 1750.Footnote 79 Sumarokov, well on the way toward establishing himself as the leading poet and playwright of the era, must certainly have been aware of the Drezdensha investigation, both because of his proximity to the court and his numerous personal connections with the Cadet Corps (where he had previously studied) and the Preobrazhenskii Guards (where he presently served).Footnote 80 Given this context, the reference to the proliferation of irreverent petimetry in the Commission's papers is notable, as neither the investigators nor the playwright felt compelled to explain the term's meaning, indicating that by that time it had already gained wide circulation.
The notion of petimetry played an ever more important role in subsequent cultural debates. Three years later, Ivan Elagin (1725–1794), another guardsman and graduate of the Cadet Corps, wrote a “Satire on petit-maîtres and coquettes” (Satira na petimetrov i koketok), while other young amateur authors from among St. Petersburg's elite responded by attacking or defending the petimetry. These texts circulated in manuscript, and it was probably the first instance of such a literary exchange with a relatively broad, by the standards of its day, circle of participants in the history of secular Russian literature.Footnote 81 It is traditionally accepted that Elagin aimed his satire at the young francophone Ivan Shuvalov (1727–1797), who was entering Elizabeth's favor exactly at that very moment. The responses that Elagin's text provoked, however, indicates that in the eyes of his readers it might have been about much more than Shuvalov only. Against the backdrop of the Drezdensha affair the petimetry debate also appears to have served as a commentary on the actual everyday experiences of scores of young nobles in the capital, a commentary that could include both the rejection and affirmation of sexual license. It is not by chance that few years later, Lomonosov famously sought to disparage Sumarokov by claiming that the latter was “quite happy that all the youths, that is, pages, collegiate iunkera, cadets, and corporals of the guards, follow him,” a portrayal of the presumed readers of Sumarokov's writings that also fits well the social profile of attendees at Drezdensha's parties.Footnote 82 While in their contributions to this debate on petimetry Russian authors were certainly drawing on literary clichés borrowed from western Europe, the materials of the Kalinkin Commission also indicate, even if indirectly, that petimetry were not just a literary trope but a real subculture in mid-century Russia.
More generally, the 1750s were marked by heightened attention to the themes of love (including illicit love) in Russian poetry, and these literary debates were central to the evolution of Russia's cultural imagination and its search for cultural identity.Footnote 83 As O. A. Proskurin has pointed out, while the rejection and ridicule of Peter I's “Europeanization” as such was politically impossible at this stage, criticizing its “extreme” forms, such as petimetry, was permissible.Footnote 84 Not coincidentally, Prince Shcherbatov's On the Corruption of Morals in Russia, the first fully articulated critique of Peter's regime, focused on the very same themes of luxury and sexual license. Again, the Drezdensha affair provides broader social context for these attempts to spell out attitudes towards “foreign” cultural and sexual practices.
Finally, some of the denizens of this “sexual underworld” later played an important role in attempts to build more institutionalized structures of an autonomous elite sociability and associational life. The very first anti-masonic investigation conducted by the government in 1747 implicated none other than Zakhar and Ivan Chernyshev, Belosel΄skii's brothers-in-law—and the brothers of Grigorii Chernyshev, listed among Drezdensha's clients, who allegedly joined a lodge while in Prussia. The next investigation, launched in the late 1750s, discovered one of the first ever lodges in Russia made up overwhelmingly of Russian nobles, rather than resident foreigners. The capital had hundreds, if not thousands, of young nobles. It is striking, therefore, that among the forty known members of this first lodge, there was a notable number of those who previously had been listed among Drezdensha's clients and attendees of her parties. These included the lodge's grand-maitre himself, Roman Vorontsov, as well as Ivan Kropotov (himself a writer), Princes Vladimir and Aleksei Golitsyn, Prince Sergei Trubetskoi, and Petr Tatishchev; some other members were also their fellows from the Cadet Corps and the guards. These were joined by some of the key participants of the literary debates on petimetry and the corruption of morals: Elizabeth's one-time favorite Nikita Beketov, who in her presence starred in Sumarokov's The Monsters, Sumarokov, Prince Shcherbatov, and Ivan Shuvalov himself.Footnote 85
To a modern reader, masonic lodges with their focus on conscious self-improvement, and sexually-charged parties at Drezdensha's are likely to look as radically different and incompatible formats of socializing. This, however, might be an anachronistic view. In fact, it appears that different modes of elite fraternizing were not fully differentiated at this early stage: the key was the opportunitiy to socialize and to become socialized. Ivan Elagin, the author of Satire on petit-maîtres and coquettes, who would also become one of the most prominent masons of Catherine II's reign, later described his own early masonic experiences as simply “an amusement for people who want to entertain themselves, sometimes inexcusably and indecently.”Footnote 86 Elagin alleged that he was initially drawn to the meetings by their promise of social equality (“seeming equality, so flattering to one's ambition and pride”), but also by what he saw as a chance “to obtain patrons and friends from among dignitaries through this brotherhood.”Footnote 87 For many members, however, it was but an occasion to indulge in shouting “unintelligible and disharmonious songs at the ceremonial banquet, to become intoxicated on good wine at a brother's expense, and to end this dedication to Minerva with a worship to Bacchus.” Footnote 88 Robert Collis observes that in that sense “it appears that there was little to distinguish [the early lodges] from the earlier fraternal societies of the Petrine era”—or, we should add, from Drezdensha's parties.Footnote 89 Nor was the mixing of the high-minded and the mundane typical of the earliest lodges only. The 1775 minutes of the Urania, probably the most important lodge of its day, reveal that its premises were to feature a billiard table (five kopeks per game), cards (so-called “commercial” games only, not those of chance), dinners, and a bar with “red and white wines [sold by] by half-bottles, Danzig vodka by the glass, and English beer by the bottle.”Footnote 90
The picture that emerges from the materials of the Kalinkin Commission is that of an extensive and increasingly institutionalized domain of unofficial socializing in the Russian imperial capital. By the 1740s, privately-run “parties” offering opportunities to meet sexually available women were a standard, recognizable format of social gatherings, with individual venues in St. Petersburg coalescing into a broader underworld of entertainment and fraternization. Importantly, this domain of socializing was commercially-driven and autonomous from the state, even though it was inhabited by the very same set of servitors who also made up the court society and administrative elite; these parties were also sites of considerable social mixing.
Certainly, illicit sex and prostitution by themselves were nothing new in Russia. Yet, the examination of these parties allows us to place the eighteenth-century nobleman's quest for “heartless pleasure” into its proper historical context, as integral for “living the Enlightenment” in the context of post-Petrine Russia. The sexual underworld provided important opportunities for socialization for the post-Petrine generation of young Russian servitors as they were working out the formats and genres of fraternizing, experimenting with different associative modes, and searching for venues to connect and interact informally with their peers. Eventually, they forged ties and customs of sociability. In fact, it was precisely members of the same social and cultural milieu in mid-century St. Petersburg that patronized Drezdensha's and other parties—often, literally the very same people—who a few years later would also give rise to more institutionalized forms of associational life. Not surprisingly, this produced tension with a monarchy that sought to assert its monopoly over the domain of socializing. So, just as the antics and sexual escapades of Peter's All-Drunken Assembly prefigured the emergence of associational culture later in the century, so Elizabeth's anxieties regarding Drezdensha's parties prefigured Catherine II's moves to suppress autonomous sites of “serious” social interaction decades later.
The more institutionalized forms of associational life, such as masonic lodges, voluntary associations, or aristocratic salons, are privileged in scholarly accounts for encouraging and serving as forums for rational and critical discussion of public issues. Certainly, there is no direct evidence in our records that the attendees at Drezdensha's debated the sciences or arts, much less political theories or government policies. Yet, insofar as these parties were linked to a subculture of petimetry, they also provided the fodder and the social context for increasingly articulate self-examination by the Russian elite. It is through writing (and likely, talking) about foppery and sexual license associated with this subculture that some of the members of the elite began reflecting on and developing a critique of the contemporary cultural regime. Later on, these societal issues—including that most potent public topic of the era, the consequences of the Petrine transformation—would be debated in a much more explicit way at the emerging, loftier forums for socializing, produced, as we have seen, by many of the very same people.
Obviously, the parties did differ tremendously from these loftier forums that dominate our traditional vision of the eighteenth-century “lived Enlightenment,” most notably, in their focus on sexual license.Footnote 91 And yet, our fascination with salons and the sophisticated salonnières of the French capital notwithstanding, we must keep in mind that elite socializing in western Europe itself was not limited to highbrow pursuits only. Expansion of the associational culture there is inseparable from the history of seedy taverns and coffee-houses, sex clubs, “hell-fire” clubs, and even “molly houses”—sites of homosexual socializing—that played a similar role in the development of sociability, in the articulation and the communication of common identities among like-minded people.Footnote 92 In fact, in his recent magisterial study, Antoine Lilti persuasively rebelled against the rarefied notion of the Paris salons as the institutional basis of the Enlightenment: according to him, they were first and foremost about aristocratic sociability as such, focused on food, amusement, and flirting, not on philosophical debates.Footnote 93
The worlds of polite socializing and those of the sexually-charged demimonde were not necessarily separate. Take the eighteenth-century Venetian practice of keeping casinos (sing. casini), small apartments or rooms rented in the vicinity of St. Mark's Square, as private venues for entertaining one's acquaintances. Offering refreshments (“coffee, lemonade, and fruit”) and such amusements as “conversation and cards,” casinos also became associated in the public imagination and in the eyes of the authorities with sex: there, allegedly, “licentiousness was taken for gallantry, impudence for politeness, and vice for pleasantness.” Footnote 94 According to the police, there were casinos di conversazione for conversation, casinos di gioco for gambling, and casinos di bagattine for meeting prostitutes; already by mid-century the authorities sought to suppress the casinos as possible sites of political intrigue.Footnote 95 While a huge gap undoubtedly separates the Paris salons from the Drezdensha parties, the distance between the latter (tolerated and likely encouraged by Prince Belosel΄skii and patronized by his social circle) and the Venetian casinos is much shorter.
In that sense, the parties in St. Petersburg might conceivably serve as a missing link between Peter I's carousing “assemblies”—including the mother of them all, the boisterous All-Drunken Assembly—and the first fully-formed institutions of the public sphere that emerged in Russia in the second half of the eighteenth century. Examination of this sexually-focused sociability, made possible by the materials of the Kalinkin Commission, allows us to shift focus from the familiar, polite, and high-minded (and therefore, better documented) forms of associational life to what were likely the extensive domains of informal and unrecorded social practices that emerged spontaneously, without any sanction from “above,” driven by “low” desires and interests, and that do not otherwise register on historians' radars. Arguably, such ambiguous, socially and culturally undifferentiated and transitory forms of socializing were especially important at the “fringes” of Enlightenment Europe, such as in Russia.
The Drezdensha affair wrapped up as suddenly as it began. Already in the fall of 1750 Demidov was getting apprehensive: the scale of “indecency” he discovered was such, he realized, that “it would be quite impossible to [successfully] conclude the business of this Commission any time soon and to uproot all the indecency at once.” Footnote 96 Besides, he claimed that the campaign had already provoked “all sorts of rumors, not only here and in Moscow but also abroad, empty and completely unfounded as they are.”Footnote 97 In fact, Demidov suggested, the persecution organized by the Commission had already sufficiently impressed the populace, and the impact of this work was visible on the streets, so much so that both Russians and resident foreigners thanked the Empress for “taming the indecent.” Therefore, it was possible to end the active phase of the investigation.Footnote 98 His recommendations were agreed to, and only three new arrests are recorded for the year 1751, and none in the subsequent years.Footnote 99
While short-lived, the campaign certainly left a heavy mark on the fate of the women involved. Some managed to obtain pardons by converting to Orthodoxy, others were rescued by foreign diplomats, or by their husbands and fiancés who agreed to marry them. Many, however, were subjected to harsh punishments; foreigners were extradited, and Russian subjects exiled to Orenburg. Some women, including Drezdensha herself, died in detention, while others were exploited, sexually and otherwise, by their guards at the Kalinkin House, who turned the confinement facilities into a veritable brothel, collecting admission fees from eager men. None of the dignitaries implicated in the affair seem to have suffered the consequences, however. In December 1750, in response to “petitions from the inhabitants of St. Petersburg,” the empress allowed them “to hold private gatherings and parties for their entertainment with polite music and Russian comedies.”Footnote 100 The petition was presented by the General-Politsmeister, General Tatishchev, whose son Petr, as previously noted, was an avid patron of Drezdensha's establishment and would also go on to become one of the leaders of Russian masonry in the 1780s.
