The Onslaught of Civilization

Despite the concerns of doctors about the horrendous conditions in them, banyas remained popular with a broad spectrum of the population. The banya became a battleground on which the process of the modernization and urbanization of the fin-de-siècle empire played out. Literary and artistic figures such as Bely, Chekhov, Kuzmin, Rozanov, and Serebriakova explored anonymity, community, belief, belonging, and sex. Grigory Rasputin, the monk and advisor to the tsar, saw the banya as curative not of physical ailments but of the spiritual void at the center of elite society. He also saw it as a place to take prostitutes.