Review: Yama -- The Pit
by David Loftus
[A version of this review appeared in the Winter 1994 issue of
Plant's Review of Books, a lively but shortlived Portland publication.]
Red Light, Red Light
Yama: The Pit by Alexander Kuprin
trans. Bernard G. Guerney 1922
Every week 1.5 million men in this country visit a prostitute. Millions of women across the globe are dependent on the temporary pleasuring of men for the few bucks, marks, or yen they need to live.
The surface of this everyday constant of life for many men and women has barely been scratched in print. In recent years we have had increasing numbers of quasi-nonfictional accounts, from Xaviera Hollander's smarmy memoirs and Sydney Biddle Barrows's self-serving "business" approach, to the more down-to-earth look in Working by Dolores French and Jeanne Cordelier's cool, unnerving, semi-literary The Life: Memoirs of a French Hooker.
As for literature, the pickings are a lot more slim. Alexander Kuprin's Yama: The Pit is not a great novel, but it is a memorable one, with a ragged, episodic flavor probably attributable to the fact that it was written over a number of years. It first appeared in the Russian journal "The Earth Anthology" in three installments between 1909 and 1915.
The cover of its first American edition, which appeared in the Twenties, depicts a feminine hand, wearing a bracelet and rings with large gems, scratching deep gouges in a stone ledge as it tries to claw its way out of a black abyss. Above this lurid image in red and black floats the quotation, "All the horror is in just this -- that there is no horror. . . ."
This charming packaging is unfair to the contents of the book, which presents life in a brothel on the Black Sea coast of Russia (the model city is probably Odessa) in mainly dry and straightforward style.
The first section describes the daily (or mostly nightly) routine of the business, introducing the various women, some of the typical clientele, and the author's mouthpiece, a jack-of-all-trades and sometime journalist named Platonov.
The second part is mostly devoted to the story of a well-meaning law student who attempts to rescue one of the girls and have his buddies collaborate in educating her out of ignorance and poverty.
In the final section we witness the collapse of the mid-range, two-ruble house -- including the suicide and funeral of one of its prime residents -- and of the entire red-light district itself.
Kuprin's writing is hardly free of the kind of verbal hand-wringing so tiresome in Dostoevsky and his contemporaries. The book goes into periodic convulsions of sentiment.
Kuprin writes that a prostitute cutting a deal with the brand new housekeeper kissed her "hypocritically," when it's pretty obvious from the context. Platonov, who gets to hold forth on the "truths" of life in the brothel for the benefit of some college students out on the town, is too perfect a character and a tiresome talker.
One of the students exhorts him with "No, you finish . . . I feel that you have a massive thought." Fortunately Platonov doesn't take up too many pages.
I always get a kick out of typos preserved for all time. The introduction to the early American edition with the lurid cover, written by translator/publisher Bernard Guilbert Guerney, asserts, " . . . femininity -- even though fallen, corrupt, abased, is still feminity.. . . ." How's that?
What's fine about Yama are the facts, ma'am, just the facts: the description of a whore's room, the meaningless conversation with a john prior to sex; fights and endearments between the various women of the house.
After the student Likhonen chastely deposits at his lodgings the young whore Liubka whom he intends to reform, he goes wandering through town and notices a peasant woman carrying twin pails of milk on a shoulder yoke:
And suddenly, unexpectedly to himself, he had a feeling for, and irresistibly desired, this woman, altogether unknown to him, homely and not young; in all probability dirty and vulgar, but still resembling, as it seemed to him, a large Antonovka apple which had fallen to the ground -- somewhat bored by a worm, and which had lain just a wee bit too long, but which has still preserved its bright colour and its fragrant, winey aroma.
Moving on, Likhonen notes the signs of the passage of spring, throws himself into a country dance, and returns to his quarters -- inevitably to succumb to the only relations Liubka knows how to conduct with a man.
There's a discussion of operations of a successful white slaver, who repeatedly marries pretty young women from the provinces and sells them off; a sobering visit to a morgue; descriptions of the paperwork and bribery required by local officials. When Kuprin attacks a specific story or scene without editorial or emotional interjections, he rolls along splendidly.
There are also several fine examples of what we might call "narratus interruptus." A story builds to its crisis, then leaves the reader hanging. Then, just about the time your anxiety has subsided with the distraction of another thread, a hapless character from the first crisis reappears quietly to pick up the pieces.
His narrator often manages an excellently wry commentary. An actor holding forth in the sitting room "proved not superfluous on the whole." Partying in the place leads to "a truly Russian hubbub, noisy and senseless." Of one of the students he says, "Like all the youths of his circle, he deemed himself a revolutionary, although he was oppressed by political disputes, dissensions, and mutual reproaches, and not being able to stand the reading of revolutionary brochures and journals, was almost a complete ignoramus in the work."
Kuprin is probably better respected for some of his short stories and a semi-autobiographical novel about the incomprehensible and brutal practices of military life, The Duel, but Yama will leave some indelible marks upon the reader who happens across a copy.