The Russian communal bathhouse, or banya, where people are steamed at extreme heat, beat each other with birch branches, and then jump into cold water or snow, has struck many observers as a foretaste of hell. Svidrigailov, the debauched cynic of Dostoevsky ’s “Crime and Punishment,” suggests that the other world, far from being vast and imposing, as Dante and Milton imagined, resembles “a little room, like a banya in the country, grimy and sooty, with spiders in every corner.” When in 1919 the Princess Sofia Volkonskaya, having been deprived of her property, was forced to visit an urban banya, she saw filth, soot, deformity and—as she wrote in a later memoir—“itching scabes . . . necks and shoulders powdered with the pink patches of syphilitic roseolas . . . lice of many months accumulation. . . . If hell exists, it surely resembles that bathing room.”
As Ethan Pollock explains in his delightful, if sometimes nauseating, history of the banya, Russians take pride in this peculiar institution, which they have long regarded as intrinsic to Russian identity. As one doctor in czarist days opined, if someone likes the banya, you can be sure of his Russian ancestry. Russians point to their earliest historical document, the 12th-century Primary Chronicle, which purports to describe the Apostle Andrew’s reaction to the Russian banya: “He wondered [at the] extreme heat. . . . ‘They actually lash themselves so violently that they barely escape alive . . . though tormented by none, they actually inflict such voluntary torture upon themselves.’ ” In another passage, pagan sorcerers explain that man had been made when “God washed himself in the banya, and after sweating, dried himself with straw and threw it out of heaven upon the earth,” where the straw became human (or at least Russian).
