Introduction

"I ask you: what has Russian literature squeezed from all the nightmare of prostitution? Just little Sonia Marmeladova."
From Aleksandr Kuprin, Iama (1912)

Carrying a parasol and clad in a "fourth-hand, flowery silk dress . . . with its immensely long, ridiculous train and vast crinoline," Dostoevsky's Sonia Marmeladova could not be mistaken for anything but "indecent."^[1] "Fallen women" like Sonia figured prominently not only in the fiction of nineteenth- and early, twentieth-century Russia, but also in journalistic and anecdotal accounts. Prostitutes were a fixture on the main streets of Russia's cities—along Kiev's Kreshchatik, in Odessa on Deribasovskaia Street, and in Kazan on the Voskresenka. In Moscow, prostitutes "impudently badger[ed] male passers-by and importunately offer[ed] their services, spewing forth foul language, pushing those they [came] across, squabbling with cab drivers and amongst themselves."^[2] The poorer prostitutes in St. Petersburg congregated in the seedy neighborhoods around the Ligovka, the Viazemskii monastery, and the setting for Crime and Punishment, Sennaia Square's Haymarket.^[3] Better-

[1] Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment, trans. Michael Scammell (New York: Washington Square Press, 1963), p. 192.

[2] Iurii Iu. Tatarov, "Postanovka prostitutsii v gorode Moskve," in Trudy pervago vserossiikago s"ezda po bor'be s torgom zhenshchinami i ego prichinami proiskhodivshchago v S.-Peterburge s 21 do 25 aprelia 1910 grada, vol. 2 (St. Petersburg, 1911), pp. 396–97.

[3] A. Chivonibar, "Torgovlia zhivym tovarom," in Bosiaki. Zhenshchiny. Den'gi . (Odessa, 1904), p. 63. See also Prostitutsiia v Rossii: Kartiny publichnago torga (St. Petersburge, 1908), pp. 154–55.

heeled women sought clients along lively Nevsky Prospect, the scene of Nikolai Gogol's story about an artist who is ruined by his fantasies of a prostitute.

A Kazan journalist described the local prostitutes as "blondes, brunettes, tall, short, old, young, some still slips of things [devchonki ]," wearing fur coats or cloaks, with little caps, hats, or kerchiefs on their heads. Readily identifiable by signs of their trade—painted lips, rouged cheeks, and finery that seemed to mock the decorous dress of the proper lady—prostitutes might also be recognized from the look they cast at potential customers. Unlike "honest' women who remained elusive and demure, prostitutes gazed at men directly. Their "long, expressive glance," wrote the journalist, blended "restless curiosity, the timidity of a beaten dog," and "entreaty" with erotic promise.^[4]

In 1843, bowing to prostitution's seeming inevitability, the tsarist Ministry of Internal Affairs began to regulate commercial sex in the Russian empire. A compromise between absolute prohibition and decriminalization, "regulation" purported both to police the behavior of lower-class women and to curb the spread of venereal disease. "Medical-police committees" oversaw the operation of brothels and issued licenses known as "yellow tickets" to prostitutes, obligating them to appear for periodic medical examinations. Authorities incarcerated in hospital wards prostitutes believed to suffer from venereal diseases, releasing them only when the more obvious symptoms of infection abated.

Official counts in 1889 put the number of yellow-ticket holders at somewhere between 17,600 and 30,700.^[5] Policemen arrested thousands more each year on suspicion of prostitution. Not all of these women were prostitutes—many former prostitutes remained on the lists, mistakes were made, and overzealous policemen improperly railroaded some women into the system. But, significantly, officials believed that only a fraction of the women who exchanged sex for money had been counted and inspected. High rates of venereal diseases among soldiers, male civilians, and even peasants in the countryside seemed to prove that prostitutes were everywhere and that they presented a serious threat

[4] Aleksandr N. Baranov, V zashchitu neschastnykh zhenshchin (Moscow, 1902), pp. 42–44.

[5] The Medical Department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs provided a high number of 30,762. Cited in Konstantin L. Shtiurmer, "Prostitutsiia v gorodakh," in Trudy Vysochaishe razreskennago s"ezda po obsuzhdeniiu mer protiv sifilisa v Rossii, vol. 1 (St. Petersburg, 1897), p. 20. A census for the same year conducted by the Central Statistical Committee of the Ministry of Internal Affairs quoted the smaller figure of 17,603. A. Dubrovskii, ed., Statistika Rossiiskoi Imperii, vol. 13 (St. Petersburg, 1890), p. xi. I have not been able to determine the reason for the discrepancy between these two ministry totals.

to public health. To tsarist authorities, regulation seemed like the best strategy for tackling both these problems.

Although it was not implemented uniformly, throughout the Russian empire, regulation remained in effect from 1843 until the overthrow of the tsarist regime in February 1917. As state policy, regulation coincided with the era of late Imperial Russia's most momentous transformations, including the emancipation of the peasantry in 1861, the government-financed industrialization drive of the 1880s and 1890s, the revolution of 1905, and World War I. Yet even as social and economic structures changed and the autocratic political order underwent repeated assaults, regulation stood firm. The state never stopped treating prostitution as a "necessary evil" and never ceased to define prostitutes as women in need of supervision.

The tenacity of regulation reflects the fact that one aspect of Russian life stayed relatively constant: that of gender—the way in which male and female roles were socially constructed. The state enshrined the gender system in legal codes and rules that institutionalized male and female difference, such as the law that a wife "obey her husband as the head of the family" and render unto him "unconditional obedience."^[6] The regulatory system was a critical expression of this gender order in the way it created a category of "public women" (publichnye zhenshchiny ) whose bodies were supposed to be available to clients, doctors, and policemen on demand. The ideology of male and female difference provided regulation with a steady anchor, enabling the yellow ticket to weather historical currents relatively intact.

Central to this ideological underpinning of regulation was an understanding of sexuality based on gender difference. State officials and educated society conceived of males as requiring outlets for their natural sexual energy, of females as exempt from such needs. Consequently, women who engaged in prostitution were seen either as having been tricked into acting sexually—against their nature—or, at the other extreme, as depraved by definition. In both instances, they deserved medical and police supervision. Men, by contrast, could patronize prostitutes without any interference. In keeping with this double standard of sexual morality, prostitutes were acknowledged as necessary to men's physio-

[6] Svod zakonov Rossiiskoi Imperii, vol. 10, pt. 1 (1914. ed.), quoted in Dorothy Atkinson, "Society and the Sexes in the Russian Past," in Women in Russia, ed. Dorothy Atkinson, Alexander Dallin, and Gail Warshofsky Lapidus (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1977), p. 33. See also William Wagner, "The Trojan Mare: Women's Rights and Civil Rights in Late Imperial Russia," in Civil Rights in Imperial Russia, ed. Olga Crisp and Linda Edmondson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989).

logical well-being at the same time they were vilified as "fallen women." Regulation exacerbated their position by setting them apart and branding them as threats both to public health and the social order.

Gender worked in tandem with class to define who would fall under state surveillance: the regulatory system primarily embraced women from the lower classes. Economic prospects available to these women expanded while regulation was in force, but not sufficiently to provide them with the money they needed to flourish. In the countryside, peasant custom tended to keep women from gaining control over household land; in the cities, female workers were paid one-half to two-thirds of the (low) wages earned by men. Even though industrialization created jobs for tens of thousands of women, there were few paths to female economic independence. As if by design, the wages of working women were too meager and too uncertain to sustain them.

Gender made women economically vulnerable, but it also afforded them the opportunity to supplement their salaries with prostitution or to give up "honest work" completely. Prostitution remained the one (predominantly female) trade that seemed to promise both good money and freedom. Most prostitutes, in thrall to brothelkeepers, exploited by landlords and pimps, and stricken with alcoholism and disease, failed to see those promises materialize. Nevertheless, prostitution had its attractions when compared to other forms of female labor and always held out the possibility that commercial sex could provide an exit from a life of poverty.

Prostitution and its regulation were integral to Russia's structures of gender, class, and politics. Gender ideology and the economic system together guaranteed that there would be a supply of women ready to satisfy the demands of men. The overwhelming majority of prostitutes came from the lower classes, but males from all social strata depended on prostitutes for sexual relief. Sex with prostitutes violated the moral precepts of religion and ethics, but it was as woven into the fabric of Russian society as the larger patriarchal and hierarchical threads. The government for its part strove to protect prostitutes' clients as well as the overall polity through the regime of the yellow ticket.

Regulation was not unique to Russia. In fact, it had been imported from Paris's police des moeurs, and analogous rules governed prostitution in most of continental Europe.^[7] Throughout Europe in the late nine-

[7] On prostitution in Britain and the United States, see Judith Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class, and the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980); Ruth Rosen, The Lost Sisterhood: Prostitution America, 1900–1918 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982). Other recent histories of prostitution include Alain Corbin, Women for Hire: Prostitution and Sexuality in France after 1850 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990); Mary Gibson, Prostitution and the State in Italy, 1860–1915 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1986); Jill Harsin, Policing Prostitution in Nineteenth-Century Paris (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985); Linda Mahood, The Magdalenes: Prostitution in the Nineteenth Century (New York and London: Routledge, 1990).

teenth and early twentieth centuries, regulation was a troublesome and controversial system that raised questions about medical ethics, civil liberties, police authority, and class and gender equality. Regulation prevented a woman from engaging in prostitution on a casual basis; once registered, she generally had no choice but to earn her living from commercial sex alone. Moreover, regulation gave clients illusory notions about the health of registered prostitutes, for physicians often failed to diagnose diseases accurately, and prostitutes contracted and spread infections between examinations. Mandatory hospitalization also failed to justify itself medically. Not only were hospitals unable to house prostitutes through syphilis's elusive contagious periods, but medical science lacked reliable methods for identifying and curing venereal diseases. Regulation, furthermore, created a category of prostitutes that resisted registration. Afraid of detection, many women who genuinely needed medical attention avoided doctors for fear of regulation's consequences. Finally, by limiting compulsory, medical supervision to the women and exempting their customers, regulatory agencies defeated their very purpose, since men remained free to spread venereal diseases.

Prostitutes in all of Europe lived and worked in contrasting degrees of degradation, luxury, and exploitation, with customers ranging from the poorest working man to the richest aristocrat.^[8] Russian women turned to prostitution for reasons that varied little from those that motivated women in Europe: financial need, the desire to make "easy money," desperation, unemployment, and personal inclination. As happened in nineteenth-century Europe, prostitution in Russia became associated with the combined traumas of industrialization and urbani-

[8] On prostitution in Imperial Russia, see Barbara Alpern Engel, "St. Petersburg Prostitutes in the Late Nineteenth Century: A Personal and Social Profile," Russian Review 48, no. 1 (January 1989): 21–44; Laura Engelstein, "Morality and the Wooden Spoon: Russian Doctors View Syphills, Social Class, and Sexual Behavior, 1890–1905," Representations, no. 14 (Spring 1986): 169–208; Laura Engelstein, "Gender and the Juridical Subject: Prostitution and Rape in Nineteenth-Century Russian Criminal Codes," Journal of Modern History 60 (September 1988): 458–95; and Richard Stites, "Prostitute and Society in Pre-revolutionary Russia," Jahrbücher für Osteuropas 31 (1983): 348–64. See also Laurie Bernstein, "Yellow Tickets and State-Licensed Brothels: The Tsarist Government and the Regulation of Prostitution," in Health and Society in Revolutionary Russia, ed. Susan Gross Solomon and John F. Hutchinson (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990).

zation, and, like prostitutes in European countries, many Russian prostitutes suffered from venereal disease and alcoholism. But in other important respects, prostitution in Russia differed. Conditions peculiar to the Russian economy, political environment, and society itself affected the character of prostitution and regulation.^[9]

To begin with, regulation took shape in the context of strong patriarchal and paternalistic traditions that lingered well into the twentieth century. Russian society was based on a three-tiered hierarchy of rule, with the father as head of the peasant household, the lord as master of his peasants, and the tsar as the "little father" (batiushka ) of them all. This arrangement was meant to encompass, protect, and restrain all of the ruler's subjects. However, the system began to break down in the mid-nineteenth century, with enough individuals falling through the cracks to warrant official concern. By regulating prostitutes, the state could monitor women who no longer had fathers or lords to control their behavior. Regulation was designed to protect public health, but it was also in place to shore up the patriarchal order.

Second, regulation represented one more restriction on an already encumbered population. The post-emancipation social structure of Imperial Russia adhered to a system of estates (sosloviia ), despite the transition to class society. The population of the Russian empire fell within legal social groupings that restricted each estate's occupational and geographic horizons and delineated its respective rights and obligations. The majority of individuals were part of the peasant category and lived on the land, but even many of the Russian workers in towns and cities were still formally inscribed in the legal peasant estate. Post-emancipation Russia therefore had anomalous qualities tied to the conventions of serfdom and the fact that the tsar's subjects never knew legal equality.

Third, notions peculiar to Russia about the peasantry and its role also affected the way prostitution was interpreted. Russian educated society analyzed prostitution in ways similar to the middle and upper classes in Europe, but native cultural traditions also influenced the nature of the discussion, particularly Russia's "populist" legacy of romanticizing the peasantry. Many observers characterized prostitutes as innocent peasant girls whose naïveté had left them vulnerable to the machinations of

[9] Paris regulations, as well as comparable rules for Berlin, Hamburg, Vienna, and Denmark, are in Abraham Flexner, Prostitution in Europe (New York: The Company, 1914), pp. 405–52.

brothel owners and "white slave traders." A State Duma deputy displayed an extreme side of this view when, in face of much evidence to the contrary, he denied an allegation that peasant families were sending their daughters to an annual fair in Nizhnii Novgorod to earn money as prostitutes. "The Russian peasant population," he declared, "has never engaged in this sort of business and never shall."^[10]

Fourth, although women throughout Europe faced terrible workplace oppression, Russian female workers were confronted with an especially hostile environment, working as they did up to sixteen hours a day in unsanitary conditions for wages well below subsistence levels. Industrialization in the Russian empire lagged far behind western and central Europe until the state promoted rapid, massive economic development at the end of the nineteenth century. That is, when most of Europe had already absorbed the shocks of industrialization and urbanization, Russia was just beginning to feel them. Both male and female workers in the Russian empire lacked the benefits of effective protective legislation or trade unions to redress their grievances. Women occupied the lowest rungs of the occupational ladder as domestic servants and unskilled and semiskilled laborers.^[11] While women everywhere, burdened with low wages, job discrimination, and sexual harassment, often found that prostitution spelled the difference between starvation and survival, Russian women had even fewer options. The dual legacy of serfdom and patriarchy kept them in an unusually downtrodden position, while Russia's legally structured estate system and the laws against labor organizing placed strict limitations on their social and geographic mobility.

[10] Gosudarstvennaia Duma. Stenograficheskie otchety (St. Petersburg, 1909), tretii sozyv, sessiia 2, zasedanie 109, May 8, 1909, p. 899.

[11] On women workers, see Rose Glickman, Russian Factory Women: Workplace and Society, 1880–1914 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984). For discussions of Russia's working class, see Victoria Bonnell, Roots of Rebellion: Workers' Politics and Organizations in St. Petersburg and Moscow, 1900–1914 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1983); Joseph Bradley, Muzhik and Muscovite: Urbanization in Late Imperial Russia (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985); Laura Engelstein, Moscow, 1905: Working-Class Organization and Political Conflict (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1982); W. Bruce Lincoln, In War's Dark Shadow: The Russians before the Great War (New York: The Dial Press, 1983); Gerald Surh, 1905 in St. Petersburg: Labor, Society, and Revolution (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989); Robert Weinberg, The Revolution of 1905 in Odessa: Blood on the Steps (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1993); Charters Wynn, Workers, Strikes, and Pogroms: The Donbass-Dnepr Bend in Late Imperial Russia, 1870–1905 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992).

Fifth, questions of Russia's relations to the West occupied a prominent place in the minds of privileged society. In Western industrializing societies, prostitution became a symbol of what had gone wrong since the advent of "the city" and "the machine." Along with its dread companion, venereal disease, prostitution represented the corruption of sexuality itself.^[12] It mattered little that prostitution had existed for centuries; counterpoised against the transformations of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this trade assumed new cultural meanings. In Russia as well, prostitution took on symbolic importance as one of the malignant aspects of modern urban life. But because policies promoting industrialization were associated with the West, prostitution also became another lens through which to view "westernization." As one contemporary observer claimed, Russia had been unsullied by the Western vices that nurtured the growth of prostitution until Peter the Great looked to the West for technology and guidance and the German-born Catherine the Great increased burdens on the serfs. Nonetheless, prostitution never "attained such dreadful proportions" as it had "beyond the border."^[13]

Finally, the civil liberties cherished in the emergent bourgeois societies of western Europe never blossomed in Russia. Though revolution in 1905 loosened some of the tight shackles on society, censorship and police repression persisted. Individuals in the Russian empire felt political oppression not only as a lack of rights, but as an inability to develop organizational traditions outside state control and tutelage. Laws limiting the actions of educational institutions, charities, and professional groups stunted the growth of Russia's civil society. While labor unions and political parties were changing the nature of western and even central European states, similar organizations in Imperial Russia—at least until 1906—had to remain underground, their members subject to arrest and exile. In the years prior to World War I and the revolutions of 1917, Russian prostitution served as an ideal locus for the various strains of social dissatisfaction and political dissent. The tsarist government's control of prostitution meant that the general heading of prostitution also embraced larger political questions concerning the role of the state.

[12] Allan M. Brandt has argued that venereal disease symbolized "corrupt sexuality" and appeared to be a "sign of deep-seated social disorder." See his No Magic Bullet: A Social History of Venereal Disease in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 5.

[13] K. F. Griaznov, Publichnye zhenshchiny: Kartiny sovremennoi i drevnei prostitutsii u vsekh narodov (Moscow, 1901), pp. 108–10, 170, 172.

Prostitution and its regulation impinged on questions relating to labor, sexuality, urbanization, public health, and the status of women, and thus easily lent themselves to critiques of existing social, economic, and political structures.

The singular qualities of Russia's experience of prostitution suggest that it would be most fruitful to examine prostitution and regulation contextually and thematically, rather than chronologically. The advantages of the thematic approach are that, first, it provides a perspective from which to study the historical actors as they went about their business—the bureaucrats who contrived regulation, the doctors who conducted it, the policemen who enforced it, the members of society who accepted it or challenged it, and the prostitutes who lived with it. Second, it reveals the enduring power of the state as the author and executor of regulation. Last, the thematic approach makes clear how deeply entrenched was the system of gender in all of the factors that influenced prostitution and its regulation.

That is not to argue that historical events did not affect prostitution and regulation in significant ways; to be sure, historical developments strongly affected prostitution. Nevertheless, three key factors stayed constant: gender ideology, the role of the state, and the identification of women who engaged in prostitution as a class apart. Each chapter in this work therefore provides a different angle from which to view Russian prostitution and regulation. Taken together, they supply a panoramic view that is connected by persistent ideologies of gender, class, and power. The survival of prostitution—even into the Soviet period—underscores the way gender is a fundamental construction for the ordering of society.

This work begins with the advent of regulation, exploring the rules developed by the Ministry of Internal Affairs. In the mid-nineteenth century, concerns about morality, public order, and public health materialized in the form of regulation. The rules promulgated in 1843 were broken more than they were followed, and they left prostitutes and other women vulnerable to abuse and exploitation by policemen and other authorities. Yet they served an important purpose: they created a framework in which the state could order the lives of lower-class urban women.

When we understand the model world that Russian bureaucrats constructed for Russia's prostitutes, we can comprehend how women operated within and outside it. The second chapter examines how the regulatory system affected the lives of all women from the urban lower classes,

whether or not they were prostitutes. The existence of regulation necessitated coping with two groups that challenged the whole logic of the system, juvenile prostitutes and unregistered ("clandestine") prostitutes. Regulation also fashioned another stage—the medical-police clinic and venereal ward—on which prostitutes, doctors, and policemen acted out their prescribed roles.

Chapter 3 situates prostitution in Russian society, both as a response to male demand and female supply. It looks at how prostitution fit into the overall conception of male and female sexuality and then examines it in the light of the economic structure by discussing the wages and conditions that affected the female work force. Who were the women who turned to prostitution in Russia? Where did they come from? What kind of experiences did they have before they made the decision to engage in prostitution?

Chapter 4 explores the reasons that impelled women to prostitution, first from the point of view of society and then from that of the women themselves. For educated society, prostitution functioned symbolically, with prostitutes either falling into commercial sex as passive victims or because they consciously chose a path of degeneracy. When we look at the prostitutes' own reasons, the meaning of their trade becomes more prosaic and, consequently, more comprehensible.

The world of the Russian brothel is the subject of the fifth chapter. Brothels were as much objects of prurient fascination as they were anathemas to a society that liked to think of itself as morally sound. Brothel prostitution and "white slavery"—forcing women into prostitution by kidnapping, drugging, and beating them—were synonymous in Russia. Although forced prostitution did exist, the reality of brothel life involved less sensational kinds of oppression—debt peonage, exploitation, and disease. The myth of widespread white slavery, particularly that element of the myth which labeled Jews as the chief perpetrators, nevertheless allowed Russians a comfortable way to pigeonhole prostitution and affirm popular, antisemitic images. The outcry against brothel prostitution and white slavery also helped fuel a grassroots movement to rid Russia of licensing altogether, with opponents of brothels battling in city councils and district meetings.

Chapter 6 discusses how men and women from Russia's privileged strata interacted with prostitutes as their self-appointed saviors in charitable societies. It explores the philosophy and routine of two institutions designed to rehabilitate prostitutes and the activities of Russia's main organization to prevent prostitution, the Russian Society for the

Protection of Women. Finally, it examines the conflict between two groups with antithetical definitions of prostitution—salvationists and socialists.

Official state attempts to reform regulation are the subject of chapter 7. Essentially, the state was stuck in the contradictory role of acting as both the protector of the Russian people and the sponsor of women who traded in sex. One way officials handled this situation was by trying to perfect regulation so that it served to protect not only prostitutes' customers and society, but, paradoxically, the prostitutes themselves. Criticism of regulation spurred these efforts and illuminated the hole that the state had dug for itself by regulating prostitution in the first place. For more than a decade, regulation underwent various projects of reform, most of which never moved off the paper on which they were scribbled. But governmental self-criticism in this area encouraged the efforts of opponents of regulation, who used critiques of the medical-police committees to pursue their own visions.

The final chapter analyzes the attempts by Russian educated society to abolish regulation altogether. Like "abolitionists" in Europe, opponents of Russian regulation attacked the system for its medical shortcomings, the way it oppressed women, and its institutionalization of the sexual double standard. But, although society raised a fairly strong voice for abolition of regulation at the First All-Russian Congress for the Struggle against the Trade in Women and Its Causes (Pervyi vserossiiskii s'ezd po bor'be s torgom zhenshchinami i ego prichinami) in 1910, the state turned a deaf ear. As much as it recognized regulation's many flaws, it could not see its way to turning prostitutes loose. Ironically, for all their antipathy to regulation, neither could the self-styled "abolitionists."

There is, finally, another group that explored and confronted Russian prostitution—Russian writers. Elevated into powerful literary symbols by authors like Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Gogol, and Chekhov, prostitutes became female archetypes who either disillusioned the men with whom they associated or raised them to a higher plane of being.^[14] Dostoevsky's

[14] For discussions of literary images, see George Siegel, "The Fallen Woman in Nineteenth-Century Russian Literature," Harvard Slavic Studies 5 (1970): 81–107; Mariia I. Pokrovskaia, O padshikh: Russkie pisateli o padshikh (St. Petersburg, 1901). Examples of literature with prostitutes as characters include Nikolai Gogol, "Nevsky Prospect"; Nikolai Nekrasov, "When from Thine Error, Dark, Degrading"; V. Krestovskii, "Pogibshee, no miloe sozdanie"; S. Nadson, "Slezy"; Vsevolod Garshin, "An Incident" and "Nadezhda Nikolaevna"; Leonid Andreev, The Dark; Nikolai Chernyshevsky, What Is to Be Done?; Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment and Notes from Underground; Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina and Resurrection; Anton Chekhov, "A Nervous Breakdown"; Aleksandr Kuprin, Iama .

Sonia, one of literature's most memorable characters, worked the streets, but her selflessness and inner purity helped cleanse the blood from the hands of the murderer Raskolnikov. Because the image of Sonia informed all educated Russians' perception of prostitution—whether they believed in her or not—this work is called "Sonia's daughters."