Yama

Yama

Aleksandr Kuprin

Yama (The Pit) recounts the lives of a group of prostitutes living and working in Anna Markovna's brothel in the town of K⸺. The women, subject to effective slavery through the removal of their papers and onerous debts, act out a scene of easy affability every evening for the part ignorant, part monstrous clients, while keeping secret their own pasts and wished-for futures.The book was Kuprin's attempt to denormalize the cultural ambiguity of the legal brothels of the t...