ABSTRACT
Peter the Great is widely celebrated as the first to develop and visit spas in Russia, but numerous legends give Russian curative waters (and thus Russia itself) much earlier provenance, linking them to native tribes, horses, and cattle that indulged in water cures well before Russians developed spas per se.2 But pre-Petrine legends also lend Russian spas prestige by linking them to the West, for example, Alexander of Macedonia or Roman thermae. Peter himself saw the development of Russian spas as a distinctly Westernizing enterprise. After visiting European spas, he issued a decree to “locate in our State … spring waters, which can be used for illnesses, in applications, waters of the kind that are used in our part of the world like those in Pyrmont, Spa, and other waters” (Kugushev, Appendix). European engineers, spa landscapers, and medical experts were invited to develop and run Russian spas. Like spas in other countries on the edges of Europe, Russian spas were thus developed on Western models and by Western expertise to showcase Russia as a European power. Nevertheless, Russian discourse about spas, be it technical or literary, often became the site of patriotic expressions of superiority to the West or a vehicle for questioning behaviors deemed Western, such as a lavish lifestyle, conspicuous consumption, or dandyism.3 Dandyism, or the art of self-creation and self-display, entered spa accounts especially prominently after Richard (“Beau”) Nash was made Master of Ceremonies at Bath and later at Tunbridge Wells, and made them the most fashionable European resorts. Beau Brummell, who set the tone for all subsequent dandies, would accompany his royal mentor, the regent and subsequently king, George IV to Brighton, another fashionable English seaside resort. Many British playwrights set their comedies at spas and poked fun at “fashionable” dandy behavior and conspicuous consumption, notably Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s “The Rivals.” Similar satires on fops had appeared in Russian satires at least since Antiokh Kantemir and later saw a renaissance in Russian spa comedies and polemical works set at other bodies of water. Dandyism became particularly prominent as a means of parodying the adherents of Nikolai Karamzin, many of who used a dandified jargon and showed all the hallmarks of dandyish behavior. Since dandyism was always perceived as something foreign (to the English it was something French, to
the French it was English, to the Russians it was distinctly non-Russian) it could be nicely combined with the theme of patriotism or its lack. The pros and cons of patriotism and/ or a Western lifestyle at Russian spas were in turn used to question literary skills. I will investigate how spas, dandyism, patriotism, Westernization intersected in literary polemics in late eighteenthto early nineteenth-century Russia and what sorts of literary devices using water were perfected in the process. I will look at two Sentimentalist spa texts from 1803 set at Lipetsk spa, which show the basic themes for later spa literature, at a major polemical manifesto and a “dialogue of the dead” set at the rivers Styx and Lethe, which set the polemical tone for the later texts, and finally I will focus on the specific literary devices perfected in spa dramas and the ensuing verse retorts.
