After Pushkin’s Journey to Arzrum, a further attempt was made to orientalise the Sanduny by hiring Asiatic banshchiki and adopting new washing rituals with woollen gloves and soap lather. On his way through Georgia during the Russo-Turkish War of 1829, Pushkin had visited the luxurious Tiflis Baths on ladies’ day, where, to his delight, the ‘lovely Georgian maids’, oblivious of their nakedness, carried on laughing and gossiping as he passed. The poet was washed by a noseless Tatar named Hassan, who laid him on the stone floor, cracked his limbs, stretched his joints and beat him fiercely. ‘Asiatic banshchiki are sometimes transported into ecstasy,’ Pushkin reported; ‘they jump on your shoulders, slide their legs across your thighs, and do squatting dances on your back, e sempre bene …’ But non-Russian banshchiki were a passing fashion at the Sanduny; for their beatings, Muscovites preferred birch twigs to Tatar fists.
As my neighbour slept, the woman beside me ate cherry dumplings with sour cream; the best in Moscow, she said. An Armenian woman with a perfect nose, whom I had often seen before at the Sanduny, demonstrated to her companion (who was in the grandeur of late pregnancy) a circular scrubbing motion with the loofah. ‘Steam and then scrub, then steam and miss one scrub,’ she instructed, mimicking the abrasions in the air, ‘then your skin will be clean and perfect, just like mine.’ An attendant sat down beside me and proposed, in a stage whisper, various services off the books: especially good tea with fresh mint, a scalp massage, or perhaps a vigorous beating by the parilshchitsa with the thickest veniki of birch and oak. The Sanduny’s new computerised accounting system had upset the generally agreeable traditions of casual hand-to-hand cash payments, and the employees were still figuring out ways round it.
‘Every culture has its own way of thinking in money,’ Spengler observed. Founded on the sale of Lizanka’s imperial diamonds, the Sanduny was soon caught up in the city’s rapidly growing web of self-made fortunes, speculation and graft. In the middle of the nineteenth century, Moscow’s banya king was the merchant Pyotr Biryukov, once a banshchik at Lamakina’s Sanduny, whose wealth had been founded on tips for his skill in soaping, beating and scrubbing the bodies of the rich. Some of Biryukov’s bathhouses were notorious as places of disrepute. Streetwalkers would pick up men on Tsvetnoi Boulevard or Rakhmanovsky Lane and take them to the numbered banyas at the Samotyochny Baths, where Biryukov had whitewashed the windows. Biryukov rented the Sanduny from its new owner, the firewood magnate Ivan Firsanov, and, with his intimate knowledge of the banya and hard eye for revenue, did away with Sila Sandunov’s romantic luxuries. Silver basins were replaced with wood, curtained booths disappeared, mirrors came off the walls. Biryukov’s economies allowed him to acquire more bathhouses around the city, and he vied with other proprietors for permission to build on open ground near the Kremlin, driving in his carriage to the Duma in its palace on Vozdvizhenka to deliver applications to build, which filled the files of the city administration with ‘opinions’, ‘outstanding matters’ and ‘investigations’, and the pockets of its bureaucrats with bribes.
For the 1860s liberal poet Pyotr Shumacher, the banya embodied cherished ideals of freedom and brotherhood. His body was uncomfortably large and gout-ridden, but the steam and the birch switch elicited from him verse in rich Russian of a passionate physical intensity. He described laying his tired bones on the high shelf, soft and free, in the berry-scented steam, as the venik, ‘boyar of the banya’, became fragrant and swollen. He would sleep at the Sanduny for hours at a time and then take home his venik to use as a pillow. Ennui and spite would evaporate from his spirit, and he would emerge from the bathhouse feeling light and kind. His poem about the equality with men he found in the simple Volkovsky Baths on the Yauza River was so politically piquant that it could not be printed, and was passed hand to hand at illegal gatherings. For all his radical sentiments, Schumacher lived the last years of his life on the charity of the Sheremetevs, spending the winters in the magnificent almshouse on Sukharevka (built in honour of Praskovia), and summers as a guest of the Count in the ‘Dutch House’ at the Sheremetev estate Kuskovo.
The young Chekhov, who would one day live by the Sanduny, used the banya, with its blurrings of social identity, as a setting for comic prose. ‘In the Banya’, first published in 1885 under the writer’s alias, A. Chekhonte, is composed of two self-contained miniatures of Moscow life. The steam room is a chamber for the immediate spoken life of the city. Merchants, priests, Tatars and gentry wash and groom together, discussing money, marriage, contemporary manners and ideas. Hard to identify, they are reduced to their speech and the facts of their nakedness. Mikhailo, the savvy barber, applies blood-drawing cups to the crimson body of a fat man, while a gaunt man with long hair, whom Mikhailo takes for some kind of ‘anti-Christian’ writer ‘with ideas’, beats himself with a venik on the top shelf. The gaunt man tells Mikhailo in a wheezing bass that there have been many writers in Russia ‘who have brought enlightenment and should be honoured, not profaned’. When he descends, Mikhailo sees that the unclothed speaker is in fact a man of the cloth. ‘Father Deacon,’ Mikhailo begs, ‘forgive me, for the sake of Christ, for the fact that I thought you had ideas in your head.’
In Chekhov’s time, the Sanduny continued to be a place in which money, art and the commerce between cultures combined around the simplest desires of the body. Romantic dreams of Eastern pleasure and theatrical glamour returned to the banya in the last decade of the nineteenth century, when the Sanduny was rebuilt. Firsanov lived in grand style in a noble mansion on Prechistenka with chandeliers and lackeys, and owned a country estate, Srednikovo, which had once belonged to Lermontov. His daughter, Vera Voronina, heir to his fortune in Moscow property, was a highly cultivated young widow, who hosted a salon in the Prechistenka mansion. Voronina married Alexei Gonetsky, a disinherited cornet with an eye for fashion, an invented past and an ardent interest in steam bathing. The Gonetskys decided to rebuild the Sanduny as a place of unsurpassed luxury, a pleasure palace blending East and West.
The couple read everything on the subject, from the then-fashionable Letters of the English traveller Lady Mary Wortley Montagu to dissertations by students at the Imperial Military Medical Academy on the banya’s effects on digestion and stomach acid, haemoglobin levels, breastmilk yield and weight regulation. Gonetsky made a tour of European bathing spots, and invited a Viennese architect, B. V. Freidenberg, who had read Sanches and specialised in bathhouses, to come to Moscow.
After numerous bureaucratic objections and delays, the governor of Moscow admiringly approved Freidenberg’s lavish plans for the new building in 1894. Vera, who provided the money, graciously pretended that her husband was financing the venture. The proposed ensemble of two-and three-storey buildings included a luxury bazaar and furnished apartments. There were to be arches and columns, grille-work, bas-reliefs of horses and female figures leaping out of the sea foam, cupolae, three closed courtyards and a fountain. Inside would be swimming pools with glass roofs. A separate building would house an electricity generator, steam boilers and oil supplies. It was to be the first large building in the city completely illuminated by electricity. Within a week of the governor’s signature, workmen began to demolish the old Sanduny, in which Pushkin had bathed. It was early spring. Passers-by stopped to look as brick dust blew down Neglinnaya.