Across the social classes, every important event in Russian life was preceded by a visit to the banya. Primitive country banyas were called ‘black banyas’; sometimes peasants would fling water on to the stoves in their huts to turn them into steam baths. Princes and boyars traditionally washed on Saturdays to prepare for the sabbath. Royal banyas were fitted with smooth planks of lime, an unscented softwood that does not splinter. A boyar could prove himself by enduring the extreme heat on the top shelf of the banya, for which he might gain the privilege of beating the prince with birch twigs. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, foreign diplomats and travellers observed, and sometimes adopted, the bathing practices of their hosts. An English envoy at Vologda remarked that, in this land of long winters and no doctors, the steam bath was the only means of preventing illness. In 1720, Peter the Great issued an ukaz authorising the building of banyas for all ranks in society. In his ‘artificial’ city of St Petersburg, public baths were free of tax if built in stone (Spengler’s emblem of the timeless become space). The Tsar, who had taken the waters at Baden-Baden and Karlsbad, considered a policy of banya-building sufficient for improving the nation’s health. ‘No, no, for Russia banyas are enough,’ he responded when asked to increase the number of doctors serving the common people.
By the middle of the eighteenth century, the immemorial practice of steam bathing had metamorphosed into an established urban custom. The spread of public banyas provoked concern in the senate about standards of public morality. Under Tsarina Elizabeth, mixed bathing was forbidden. The widely ignored edict was reinforced four decades later under Catherine the Great, in a detailed decree which specified, to general dissatisfaction, that women should bathe in the mornings and men in the evenings.
It was a Portuguese Jewish doctor, educated in six European cities, who transformed the scarcely recorded folk rituals of the Russian steam bath into a subject of Enlightenment medical science. ‘In the concluding days of my life, dedicated to the service of the Russian Empire,’ António Ribeiro Nunes Sanches wrote in his treatise on the banya, ‘I cannot, it seems, do anything that would be of greater use to others, than to demonstrate the properties of the baths used by its inhabitants since the times of deep antiquity.’ Sanches had studied at Leiden under the Dutch humanist and physician Herman Boerhaave (who had briefly tutored Peter the Great in Holland in 1715). In search of qualified doctors, the Russian government turned to Boerhaave, who recommended Sanches. He entered state service in 1731 as ‘physicus’ to the medical chancellery. Sanches was soon working for the military, accompanying the army on campaigns. He took note of the Turkish baths in the southern city of Azov, when Russian troops entered the city in 1736. His reputation grew, and he moved to St Petersburg, where he attended the imperial family. At the age of forty-eight, Sanches was afflicted with an eye disease, and left Russia with a court pension and honorary membership of the Imperial Academy of Sciences. He settled in Paris to a life of study. A year later, he was summarily stripped of both his Academy membership and his pension. His friend Count Kirill Razumovsky, head of the Academy (and father of the Razumovsky count who sold the Corner House to Count Nikolai Sheremetev), explained in embarrassment that this sudden disgrace was because the conscience of Tsarina Elizabeth would not allow her to tolerate in her Academy anyone who lived ‘under the banner of Moses and the Old Testament prophets’. Sanches continued to devote himself to scholarship, treating the poor out of charity, kept from destitution by quiet donations from Russian aristocrats in Paris. The only work he published in these years was an influential study on the origins and treatment of syphilis. Aside from dozens of unpublished manuscripts on medical themes, he left a treatise entitled ‘The Origin of the Persecution of the Jews’. Catherine the Great (whom Sanches had cured of a life-threatening illness when she was fifteen) restored Sanches’s pension, but not his membership of the Academy. He never returned to Russia.
Sanches’s book, About Russian Banyas, is a work of wounded love. Published in Paris in 1774, and soon translated into many European languages, including Russian, it lauds the customs of the empire that had rejected him as alien. Catherine read the book and handed it round her court, which shared a sense of pride in his insistence that a Russian peasant custom should become an exalted feature of European civilisation. Far from Russia, the doctor’s one consolation, he wrote, was to visit the banya in his thoughts, to reflect scientifically on its virtues. In the steam, Sanches was sure he had discovered a secret of alchemical power that would dispense with the need for three-quarters of the medicines known to science, and most of the concoctions of apothecaries. According to Sanches, the unique power of the Russian banya lies in the constant renewal of steam. When water is thrown into the stove, the elements of fire and earth in it are liberated. The naked body, stretched full length, is touched, penetrated, nourished; the skin relaxes, vital juices multiply and circulate, unwholesome vapours are expelled, blood and breath flow freely. The bather begins to sweat, experiencing the most pleasant relaxation in all his limbs and organs, and inclines towards the sweetest possible sleep. The banya alleviates every ailment – from eye infections, digestive and menstrual disorders, to rabies, smallpox and venereal disease (which Sanches believed to be the most widespread health problem in the Russian empire). Fresh steam can even alleviate insomnia, anger at the loss of property, depression and aggrieved honour; the body is calmed, order restored, bad thoughts driven away. Birch twigs, honey, vinegar and kvass are essential to the curative rituals of the banya. The great classical and renaissance physicians, Hippocrates, Galen and Paracelsus, understood the strengthening and healing powers of steam, but since the rise of the power of Christian bishops determined to abolish pagan practices, Sanches writes in a firm spirit of Enlightenment anti-clericalism, bathing has died out in Europe. Only in Russia, where the climate is hard, doctors are few and pagan practices survive intact, is the custom alive in its most beneficial form. As the power of the imperial state depends on the vigour of the population, Sanches suggests that the establishment and maintenance of clean and affordable banyas in every town and village should be one of the responsibilities of the police.
Amid the eclectic luxury of the Sanduny, the practices that Sanches described are still dogmatically observed. After the ‘second steam’ women emerged gleaming into the washing room, grey leaves clinging to their heat-mottled skin, rustling birch switches now limp and bruised. ‘Your health, girls,’ the parilshchitsa said as the last woman left the sanctum of the steam room. In the changing room, the radio quietly played Italian pop. The masseuse and the hairdresser smoked Vogue cigarettes in the mirrored anteroom. Attendants in slippers brought glasses of beer, bowls of shrimps, dumplings in broth, green tea and honey. My neighbour had inclined to that sweet sleep that Sanches remembered so fondly, lying on the divan, ankles neatly crossed, Spengler serving as her pillow.
‘Intelligence is the replacement of unconscious living by the exercise of thought, masterly, but bloodless and jejune,’ Spengler wrote in a visionary chapter on ‘Cities and People’. The city means eye and intellect, money, tension, and causality; the countryside means blood and instinct, mother-wit, cosmic pulsation and destiny. History, to Spengler, is the history of the town, which grows and declines organically, moving in a majestic evolutionary arc from primitive barter-centre to ‘Culture-city’ and at last to world-city, ‘and so, doomed … on to final self-destruction’. The giant towns of civilisation are detached from the soul-root of culture, which is always tied to the landscape. Spengler imagines looking down from a tower upon a sea of houses overflowing in all directions, the noble aspect of old time destroyed by clearances and rebuildings. He discerns in the scene the exact epoch in the life-cycle of a town that ‘marks the end of organic growth and the beginning of an inorganic and therefore unrestrained process of agglomerations’. If the peasant, who is historyless, should find himself in the city, he ‘stands helpless on the pavement, understanding nothing and understood by nobody, tolerated as a useful type in farce and provider of the world’s daily bread’.