The Capital of Sin? Sexuality and Urban Spectacle in Fin-de-Siècle Lviv

We invite you to a lecture by Michał Narożnak, to be held as part of the lecture series "Let's Have a City.” 

At the end of the nineteenth century, sexuality became an important subject of public debate in Lviv and Galicia. Ukrainian intellectuals, including Ivan Franko and Mykhailo Pavlyk, promoted ideas of so-called "free love," understood as a liberation of intimate relationships from state and church control. Polish novelists, such as Gabriela Zapolska, attacked bourgeois hypocrisy by exposing the sexual exploitation of domestic workers in supposedly respectable households. Jewish-Galician migrants in Vienna, some of whom, like Wilhelm Reich, joined the ranks of the first generation of Freudian psychoanalysts, developed their ideas of "sexual repression" on the basis of a comparison between the Austrian capital, perceived as sexually frigid, and the openness they had known in Lviv, Kolomyya, and Czernowitz (Chernivtsi). Famously, the novelist Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, after whom the term "masochism" was coined, set his best-known work, Venus in Furs, in Galicia. Thus, the supposedly parochial crownland pulsated with sexual inventiveness and a radical spirit.

In the lecture, Michał Narożnak will focus specifically on the new ideas formed through observation of Lviv’s city life. Within emergent modern popular culture, sexuality began to play an important role in the city's public image as a "city of sin," full of establishments offering burlesque-type performances, dance halls, and, of course, brothels. As a licentious metropolis, Lviv was an object of both moral contempt and fascination. The lecture will focus on the latter, presenting the story of Stanisław Brandowski, a Polish journalist who investigated sex work in the city and styled himself as an urban adventurer venturing into "taboo" zones where prostitution flourished. Michał Narożnak will also present another urban navigator, the Yiddish theater actress Bertha Kalich, who, in her autobiography, reminisced about her Lviv-based adolescence and described the city’s sexual customs. Both examples, of two very different individuals, Brandowski and Kalich, show how the lively urban spectacle centered on sexuality became an instrument of self-stylization and performance.

The lecture will be conducted in English with simultaneous translation into Ukrainian.

Credits

Cover image: Józef Mehoffer, The Conversation, Borys Voznytsky, Lviv National Art Gallery

Gallery: Mariia Varanytska