Professionals, “Harpists,” “Amateurs”

Provincial Kazan provides the material for this article's account of the growth in prostitution that resulted from the development of the consumer market and the leisure industry in the latter half of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The unprecedented increase and variety of “offerings” in the realm of “‘love’ for sale” made prostitution a permissible model of everyday existence and created a subculture that exerted no small influence on the daily practices and mentality of the lower and middle urban strata and on urban culture as a whole.