In the story of the Sanduny, though, there is as much instinct, blood and destiny as money, eye and intellect. Indeed it is hard to say which epoch in the life-cycle of Moscow Spengler would have recognised if he had looked down in 1810 and seen the large brick building newly risen on the land where, to the mystification of the neighbourhood, the actor Sila Sandunov had recently demolished so many old houses. Was this a culture blossoming or beginning to die?
Sandunov’s real name was Silvio Zandukeli. He was born in Moscow of noble Georgian stock and raised in Bolshaya Gruzina, a new Moscow neighbourhood that had grown up after King Vakhtang VI of the Georgian province of Imeretiya was dethroned by the Iranians, and his followers emigrated to Russia. The first ‘gentry banya’ in Russia, accessible to any citizen who could afford its charges, had opened in Bolshaya Gruzina in 1790. Clean and expensive, with its heated changing room, it felt as cosy as a club. Sandunov’s grandfather Moisei Zandukeli, like the other Georgians in exile, would reminisce about the Tiflis Baths, and the healing iron-sulphur water that ceaselessly bubbled hot from the ground. Before a talent-hunter lured him to the Hermitage Theatre in St Petersburg, Sandunov worked for an English manager named Murdoch at a theatre near the Petrovsky Gates. Agile and bold on stage, Sandunov excelled in the stock role of the cunning servant.
The money on which Sandunov’s banya was founded came from his even more talented wife, Elizaveta (known as ‘Lizanka’), a mezzo soprano with an astonishing range, an actress of brilliant versatility and a favourite of Catherine the Great. The Tsarina had heard the beautiful dark-eyed Lizanka’s debut in 1790 in the role of Amor and sent her a diamond ring in a velvet case with a note saying, ‘As you sang yesterday about a husband, this ring is to be given to none other than your groom.’ She nicknamed the singer ‘Uranova’ after the newly discovered planet Uranus. When Lizanka married Sila Sandunov (after rejecting the attentions of a number of scheming older men) Catherine gave the beautiful couple a grand wedding and abundant gifts, including a nuptial song composed by herself and a collection of diamonds.
Sila and Lizanka Sandunov returned to Moscow to continue their careers on the stage, settling in the area where the Metropol Hotel now stands. Each of them was engaged by Count Nikolai Sheremetev to train actors and singers for his serf theatre; Lizanka gave acting and voice lessons to Praskovia. After Praskovia’s tragic death, she would perform for her wealthy audiences a peasant folk song, learned from Sheremetev’s serfs, about the actress’s love affair with the Count. With money from the sale of the diamonds, the Sandunovs speculated on the property market, buying up an area between the Neglinnaya and the recently drained and buried Samotyochny Canal. After a visit to Georgia (some provinces of which were now governed by Russia) Sila Sandunov decided what to do with the land. He had read Sanches in his days at court; Moscow did not need the healing springs of the Caucasus. Since 1802, when Alexander I had decreed that stone bathhouses be built all over the empire, numerous banyas with heated changing rooms had appeared near the banks of the Moscow River and the Yauza, or by ponds, streams and smaller rivers (long since buried) like the Nishchenka, the Khapilovka or the Neglinnaya. Sandunov decided to establish the finest, most expensive establishment in the city, with rituals and luxuries modelled on the cultures of the East. Unassuming from the outside, the interior of his bathhouse was palatial, with gilt-framed mirrors and marble-columned halls. In place of the hard benches found in other Russian banyas were soft divans answering the body’s desire for gentle sleep after steam, with tables set out for food and drink. Attendants provided clean sheets, and expert washing and grooming. Moscow’s rich, already admirers of the theatrical talents of the Sandunovs, were delighted. Generals, police chiefs and powerful city bureaucrats came first to bathe, as their guests. Rich men could be scrubbed and beaten by their own servants in the innovative private ‘numbered’ banyas. Brides took to visiting the numbered banyas to be washed from silver tubs before their wedding rites. The real profits, however, came from the unadorned two-kopeck section for the ordinary people of the city.
The pleasure-seeking spendthrift Sandunov left soon after the opening of the banya to take the waters in the Caucasus, leaving Lizanka in Moscow. On his return, their marriage disintegrated amid rumours of domestic violence and infidelity, professional rivalry and bitter disputes over money. The merchant woman Avdotya Lamakina, whose slovenly bathhouse on the other side of the Neglinka had suffered a loss of profits, observed the feud eagerly until, in early 1812, a court ruled that their property be sold and the proceeds divided. The coarse and illiterate Lamakina, with a shrewd commercial eye for the borrowed lustre of the stage, bought the banya and named it Sanduny.
For Spengler, the burning of Moscow as Napoleon’s army entered in 1812 was the ‘mighty symbolic act of a primitive people’, an ‘expression of Maccabaean hatred of the foreigner and heretic’. Russia was not ready for cities. Russia’s ‘destiny should have been to continue without a history for some generations’, but after Alexander I’s triumphal entry into Paris in 1814, the nation ‘was forced into a false and artificial history that the soul of Old Russia was simply incapable of understanding’. Built of stone, as the Tsar had decreed ten years before Napoleon’s invasion, the Sanduny survived the flames of 1812, a sanctuary, taken for granted in the nineteenth-century city, for the body of the citizen and the primitive practices of old Russia, reinvented by the medical investigations of a Sephardic physician and the fantasy and enterprise of a Georgian actor.
Naked at the banya, ethnicities and social classes mixed, differences blurring in the steam. Gilyarovsky describes the commerce in bathhouse attendants, banshchiki, between country and town in the nineteenth century. Banshchiki traditionally came from the same few villages in nearby districts: Ryazan, Tula and Zaraisk. Banshchiki made good would return to their villages, wearing caps with shiny peaks and fob watches, to pick out boys to serve in the bathhouses of the city. The barely literate youths would be given new bast shoes, two sets of rough undergarments, and official papers, often with faked ages. Relatives and friends from the village who had already established themselves in Moscow would wash and trim them, and teach them the ways of the city. The boys would learn to decant kvass, prepare loofahs and tie veniki, switches of leaves. Later they would assist the barbers in the changing rooms, learning to trim nails, cut off corns, address the city gentry and play their parts in the banya’s elaborate system of tip-sharing. A few would progress to the hard role of parilshchik, working barefoot from dawn till midnight in nothing but a short apron, cleaning out the washing room, raising and refreshing the steam.