Ethan Pollock, professor of History and Slavic studies at Brown, reveals the 1000-year story of the Russian bathhouse.
When so much in Russia has changed, the banya remains. For over a thousand years Russians of every economic class, political party, and social strata have treated bathing as a communal activity integrating personal hygiene and public health with rituals, relaxation, conversations, drinking, political intrigue, business, and sex. Communal steam baths have survived the Mongols, Peter the Great, and Soviet communism and remain a central and unifying national custom.
Ethan Pollock, professor of History and Slavic studies at Brown University and author of the first English-language history of the banya, tells the history of this ubiquitous and enduring institution. He explores the bathhouse's role in Russian identity, following public figures (from Catherine the Great to Rasputin to Putin), writers (such as Chekhov and Dostoevsky), foreigners (including Mark Twain and Casanova), and countless other men and women into the banya to discover the meanings they have found there.
The story comes up to the present, exploring the continued importance of banyas in Russia and their newfound popularity in cities across the globe. Drawing on sources as diverse as ancient chronicles, government reports, medical books, and popular culture, Pollock shows how the banya has persisted, adapted, and flourished in the everyday lives of Russians throughout wars, political ruptures, modernization, and urbanization. Through the communal bathhouse, he provides a unique perspective on the history of the Russian people.
Ethan will be in conversation with Dr Rachel Polonsky, fellow at Murray Edwards College, Cambridge, who reviewed Without The Banya We Would Perish for the New York Review of Books.
Ethan Pollock is a professor of Russian and Soviet history at Brown University. His new book, Without the Banya We Would Perish: A History of the Russian Bathhouse, is the first English-language history of an institution at the heart of Russian identity. His first book, Stalin and the Soviet Science Wars, examines Soviet politics, science, and ideology during the last years of Joseph Stalin's life and the first years of the Cold War.
Ethan was a faculty member in the History Department at Syracuse University from 2003-2006. At Brown he teaches courses on Russian history, the history of the Cold War, and the history of the nuclear age.
Rachel Polonsky is vice president and Fellow in Slavonic Studies at Murray Edwards College, Cambridge. Her scholarly interests include 19th, 20th and 21st century poetry, fiction, and memoir, often with a comparative emphasis, and the place of Russian literature in the overlapping contexts of cultural, intellectual, and political history. She has published numerous essays, articles, and reviews on a wide variety of subjects in scholarly journals and anthologies, and is a contributor to the The New York Review of Books and The Times Literary Supplement, among other periodicals. Rachel is the author of English Literature and the Russian Aesthetic Renaissance (Cambridge University Press) and Molotov’s Magic Lantern (Farrar, Straus and Giroux).