Book Review - Yama (The Pit) by Alexandra Kuprin

 

Yama [The pit] by Alexandra Kuprin
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A Russian version of GB Road, Sonagachi, Kamatipura, this is the story of the red-light area in an unnamed Russian town on the southern frontier called Yamskaya Sloboda (Stage-drivers’ Borough) that mutated to Yamskaya (Little Ditches) and finally, to Yama – The Pit

Right up close to his eyes he saw the eyes of the woman – strangely large, dark, luminous, indistinct and unmoving. For a quarter of a second or so, for an instant, it seemed to him that in these unliving eyes was impressed an expression of keen, mad hate; and the chill of terror, some vague premonition of an ominous, inevitable calamity flashed through the student’s brain.

Here she is – I! A public woman, a common vessel, a cloaca for the drainage of the city’s surplus lust…But for a second of this sensuality in haste – thou shalt pay in money, revulsion, disease and ignominy.

At fourteen years she was seduced, and at sixteen she became a patent prostitute, with a yellow ticket and a venereal disease. And here is all her life, surrounded by and fenced off from the universe with a sort of a bizarre, impenetrable, and dead wall. Turn your attention to her everyday vocabulary – thirty or forty words, no more – altogether as with a baby or a savage: to eat, to drink, to sleep, man, bed, the madam, rouble, lover, doctor, hospital, linen, policeman – and that’s all. And so her mental development, her experience, her interests, remain on an infantile plane until her very death…

Sated after a libidinous bout, the patrons discuss philosophical questions about prostitution

I ask you, what is prostitution in the end? What is it? The extravagant delirium of large cities, or an eternal historical phenomenon? Will it cease some time? Or will it die only with the death of all mankind? Who will answer that?

While there will be property, there will also be poverty. While marriage exists, prostitution also will not die. Do you know who will always sustain and nourish prostitution? It is the so-called decent people, the noble paterfamiliases, the irreproachable husbands, the loving brothers. They will always find a seemly motive to legitimize, normalize and put a wrapper all around paid libertinage, because they know very well that otherwise it would rush in a torrent into their bedrooms and nurseries. Prostitution is for them a deflection of the sensuousness of others from their personal, lawful alcove. And even the respectable paterfamilias himself is not averse to indulge in a love debauch in secret. And really, it is paling to have always the one and the same thing, the wife, the chambermaid, the lady on the side. Man, as a matter of fact, is a poly – and exceedingly so – a polygamous animal. And to his rooster-like amatory instincts it will always be sweet to unfold in such a magnificent nursery garden.

The imposing Madam of the “establishment of ill repute”

She is a tall, full woman of forty-six, with chestnut hair, and a fat goitre of three chins. Her eyes are encircled with black rims of hemorrhoidal origin.

Here is a scene from a mortuary

all, probably, the poorest of the poor: picked up on the streets, intoxicated, crushed, maimed and mutilated, beginning to decompose. Certain ones had already begun to show on their hands and faces bluish-green spots, resembling mould – the signs of putrefaction. One man, without a nose, with upper hare-lip cloven in two, had worms, like little white dots, swarming upon his sore-eaten face. A woman who had died from dropsy, reared like a whole mountain from her board couch, bulging out of the lid (of the coffin).

The macabre scenario post-post-mortem

All of them had been hastily sewn up after autopsy, repaired, and washed by the moss-covered watchman and his mates. What affair was it of theirs if, at times, the brain got into the stomach; while the skull was stuffed with the liver and rudely joined with the help of sticking plaster to the head

A well-meaning lady educates her ardent young client about the nemesis of a pre-antibiotic generation – syphilis

…not only the nose! The person becomes all diseased. Some doctors say such nonsense as that it’s possible to be cured of this disease. Bosh! You’ll never cure yourself! A person rots ten, twenty, thirty years. Every second paralysis can strike you down, so that the right side of the face, the right arm, the right leg die – it isn’t a human being that’s living but some sort of little half-man-half corpse. The majority of them go out of their minds. To all syphilitics the children are born monsters, abortions, goitrous, consumptives, idiots

A powerful, raw, moving book - only marred by poor translation and printing.

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