Spengler was promptly dropped on the divan when a large woman, naked and shining, swung open the door from the washing room and shouted, ‘Steam, girls! Under the steam, my beauties!’ Women rose from all corners of the opulent changing room, winding linen sheets around themselves, tucking damp strands of hair into felt cloche hats, as they followed one another through the swing door. At the far end of the washing room, the parilshchitsa, who wore a felt hat modelled on the budyonnovka, the Red Cavalry hat, held open a low wooden door, ushering everyone into the steam room. A skinny child in flip-flops, tipping her head back to see out from under her hat, moved forward with the rest and was told sharply by her mother to sit down on the marble slab outside among the tubs of soaking birch twigs, and come in after the steam had dropped. ‘What a brave little girl!’ an elderly woman exclaimed. ‘Teach them to steam when they’re little.’ The young woman in the turban was already lying, fully wrapped in her sheet, on the floor of the raised wooden platform, as the other women climbed the steps, chattering and sighing, bending double under the pressure of the heat. One by one, they arranged themselves on the floor, drawing the linen sheets over their heads.
‘Ready, beauties?’ the parilshchitsa asked, closing the door of the hot room and making the sign of the cross. ‘It’s going to be strong steam.’ From under the sheets came murmurs of assent. The iron hatch squeaked heavily as she levered open the stove. ‘God be with you,’ she said, and the next sound was the slap of cool water hitting the incandescent stones, exploding into a hiss of steam. As ladlefuls of water flew at the stones in steady rhythm, the heat thickened. ‘Is it moving yet?’ someone asked. ‘Oh, wonderful, it smells of kvass!’ ‘Enough, girls?’ the parilshchitsa called. ‘No, still too little,’ came a general reply. ‘It’s ready to drop, girls,’ the parilshchitsa finally announced, pushing shut the aperture, ‘it’s kind steam, good steam.’ ‘Oi oi, so good, so good, thank you, and the Lord have mercy on you,’ murmured the elderly woman uncovering her veiny legs, as the blanket of steam that had risen to the vaulted plaster ceiling descended through the shrouded bodies laid side by side along the wooden boards. ‘So that you will be soft and real, my beauties, and never unkind …’ replied the parilshchitsa, flicking a last ladleful on to the ceiling. ‘My next steam will be gentle steam!’
‘The transparent steam gathers above them’, Pushkin rhapsodised in a piquant scene in his long poem Ruslan and Lyudmila. A young khan is attended by enchanting maidens – gentle, silent, half-naked – who disarm him of his dusty shield, helmet, sword and spurs, and lead him to a ‘marvellous Russian banya’. They lay him on luxurious carpets among cool fountains; one soothes his tired limbs with rose essence, another scents his dark curls, and a third waves over him branches of young birch, burning with hot fragrance. The khan quite forgets his quest for the Russian princess Lyudmila.
Composed before Pushkin first travelled to the exotic south, the light iambics of Ruslan and Lyudmila overlay the reality of the Russian banya with a lavish fantasy of oriental rest and pleasure. The poet visited the newly luxurious Sanduny with his friends whenever he came to Moscow, though according to the oral lore of the Sanduny his visits were more about male drinking feats than soft maidens and essence of rose. In those days, Catherine the Great’s protegée Elizaveta Sandunova, whose diamonds had paid for the building of the bathhouse, was still alive. The Sanduny was a place for glamorous literary Moscow to congregate. The society that gathered at the English Club and Zinaida Volkonskaya’s salon on Tverskaya would come to be steamed and scrubbed by the practised banshchiki, to relax on clean sheets spread over the soft divans in its palatial mirrored changing rooms, and refresh themselves on vodka, kvass or chilled Moët. There was even a fashion then for dousing the hot stones with champagne. Pushkin, who lived for a time in a ‘pretty filthy two-roomed apartment’ in the Hotel Europe on Tverskaya, where he spent the days in a ‘silvery Tartar dressing-gown with a bare chest, without the slightest of comforts around him’, ‘loved a good hot steam’, the centenarian actor Ivan Grigorovsky told Gilyarovsky decades later. Like many Moscow theatre people, Grigorovsky came regularly to the Sanduny. Never without his hip-flask of vodka, he was taught to drink by the ‘hussar-poet’ Denis Davydov, who limped out of the steam room one day, settled on a divan opposite the actor and in characteristically heroic style downed a mix of arak and whortleberry vodka, while reciting verses by his friend Pushkin on the joys of alcohol.
When the steam had softened, women shook off their damp coverings and moved into new poses, cross-legged on the floor, crouching with arms wrapped around themselves, or full length on the higher benches, stretching, and gently scratching their limbs. A few made their way out of the steam room, muttering and exhaling heavily, as the little girl appeared at the bottom of the steps. After the dim hush of the steam room, the high-ceilinged washing room was full of white light, unrestrained chatter and the sound of free-flowing showers. Women scooped basins of icy water from a marble bathtub and poured it over themselves, climbed gasping in and out of a barrel, or pulled a chain to release a sudden gush from a wooden cask suspended high on the wall. Half visible behind a plastic curtain, an attendant leaned over a marble slab, scrubbing an outstretched figure with a foamy loofah. My changing-room neighbour was daubing her limbs with gritty brown paste. Among the battery of French cosmetics on the slab before her were a carton of cream and a jar of fresh coffee grounds from which she had contrived her pungent scrub.
What would Spengler have made of her? What would her washing rituals represent in his great scheme? Since the time of Peter the Great, according to Spengler, the primitive Russian soul had been forced, like molten volcanic matter, into the alien moulds of the baroque, the Enlightenment, and the urban culture of the nineteenth century. Russian cities are of ‘alien type’, like ulcers on the ‘townless’ land, ‘false, unnatural, unconvincing’. ‘Moscow had no proper soul,’ he wrote. The city that grew up around the Kremlin, ringing the ancient fortress, was an ‘imitation city’: ‘the spirit of the upper classes was Western, and the lower had brought in with them the soul of the countryside. Between the worlds there was no reciprocal comprehension, no communication, no charity.’
Spengler had not been to the Sanduny. Here, the primitive practices of townless ancient Russia survive within the elaborate stone structures of the nineteenth-century city. Throughout the history of this bathhouse, the city’s Europeanised upper classes have communicated, in intimate reciprocal touch, perhaps even in charity, with the Russian countryside. The practice of steam bathing grew out of the landscape itself, the rivers and woods, fire and snow. In pagan Slavic myths, gods drew magic power from baths of steam. Steam scented with fragrant grasses was believed to banish the evil spirits that bring disease. The eleventh-century Spanish-Arab geographer Abu Ubayd Abd Allah al-Bakri described the stone stove in a house of wood on to which the ancient ‘Rusichi’ poured water, agitating the air with switches of dry branches to draw it towards their bodies. The Primary Chronicle of Nestor, written in the early twelfth century, relates how the Apostle Andrew (according to Orthodox tradition, the ‘first-called’ disciple came this far from Jerusalem in the first century) observed the ancient Slavs lighting wooden banyas, throwing kvass on the fire, whipping themselves with branches of young birch until they wept, before reviving themselves with freezing water, calling it ‘washing’, not ‘torture’.