Dichotomy of Public and Private on the Case of the Phenomenon of Sexual Commerce in Yenisei Province in the late XIX -early XX centuries

The article considers the phenomenon of sexual commerce through the prism of the dichotomy concept of public and private in the pre-revolutionary society of the Russian Empire in the middle of the 19th -early 20th centuries. Private is a category that included what was hidden from society, which was intimate in character. On the one hand, private is associated with individualism, the presence of internal moral counterbalances that delineate a space to which the rest of the participants of society, as a rule, have no access. The public, on the other hand, is associated with social relations. At the same time, the boundaries of the concepts are outlined in view of the coexistence of two opposite social institutions in pre-revolutionary Russia: the patriarchal family with a set of values and the institution of legalized sexual commerce, which was introduced into the rank of a craft after the reform of Count L. A. Perovsky. Sexual commerce as a phenomenon was used by researchers as a conceptual and categorical apparatus that denoted practices of sexual exchange, which had a compensatory nature, with multiple agents. The use of such a term excluded the moral burden of other concepts, such as prostitution. The concept of dichotomy through the mutually negative properties of appearances in the present study allowed us to conclude that the two institutions are not mutually exclusive. The social processes that were examined in thearticle through the prism of dichotomy allowed us to approach the essence of the contradictory nature of everyday life. The unique locus of Yenisei province within the space of the Russian Empire implied the presence of authentic everyday practices among certain social categories. They were not perceived as an anomaly, but at the same time violated the boundaries delineated by society in the locus of privacy. Synthetic correlates of behavioral norms and anomalies of Russian pre-revolutionary society allowed us to overcome some contradictions of theoretical and methodological obstacles.