THE CONFESSIONS OF VICTOR X

Victor X was the pen name of a Russian nobleman born about 1870 and brought up “in several large towns of southern Russia, mostly in Kiev.” He wrote Confession Sexuelle d’un Russe du Sud,  a frank and vivid account of his sexual life, in French in 1912 and sent it that year to the English sexologist Havelock Ellis for publication in his ongoing Studies in the Psychology of Sex. Ellis only finally published it as an appendix (pp. 101-208) to volume VI of the French edition of his work, Études de psychologie sexuelle, published by the Société du Mercure de France in Paris 1926. It was translated into English by Donald Rayfield as The Confessions of Victor X, published by Grove in New York in 1985, from which the following passages, the only ones of Greek love interest, have been taken. Rayfield discovered the true identity of Victor (and thereby confirmed the essential veracity of his story), but kept it secret out of respect for Victor’s wishes.

Chapter 7. Final Fall

The title of this last chapter of the memoir refers to the author having become fatally addicted to masturbation, of which he had no previous experience, in Naples when he was thirty-two, so in about 1902/3.

I was sent to Naples by my firm’s management with some colleagues to look into the planned installation of an electrical factory and plans for harnessing hydraulic power from the mountains around. I made my first visit there - the most pleasure-loving city of all Europe, not forgetting Munich, Paris and Berlin. One thing Naples is noted for is an enormous traffic in little boys and girls, and openly too: if you buy something in a shop the shopkeeper who may look quite respectable will offer to show you a little girl of twelve, ten or eight. Pimps accost strangers in the street offering them the same goods or even little boys. Families who are not badly off and who have some standing - petty shopkeepers, clerks, tailors, cobblers &c. - also traffic in their prepubescent girls. For the reasonable price of twenty, thirty, forty francs you are just allowed to have fun or to play with them. If you want to deflower one, that costs more - hundreds or a thousand francs, depending on the family’s social status. At the right price you can sometimes find this pleasure even in families that seem to be quite ‘comme il faut'. You admire an elegant lady at the theatre surrounded by her family in her box. The person next to you in the stalls notices your enthusiasm and tells you that the lady is yours at quite a moderate price and offers to help by introducing you. The Neapolitans are a very practical lot indeed: they make money every way they can except by working: work is a source of income that does not appeal to them. The big San Carlo theatre has a large ballet which operates independently of the opera. Several hundred children of both sexes form part of the ballet and it is just a great centre for prostitution. […]

Within days, Victor was tempted into trying out sex with two very enthusiastic girls, aged eleven and fifteen, being offered for prostitution by their parents in their own home.

By the way I observed that the English were the mainstay of child prostitution in Naples, as the Italians were not rich enough for this costly debauchery. Now German customers are behind the rapid expansion of pederasty in particular: little Italian boys have a great reputation in Germany and the Krupp affair was an advertisement for them.^[1]

The two little girls were both as expert as each other: they told me all sorts of things about pederasty and lesbianism in this city - they went in for the latter with each other and with girl friends. […]

I had no homosexual leanings and so I did not bother with male prostitution in Naples.

^[1] The Krupp affair erupted in the summer of 1902 when first Italian and then German newspapers reported allegations that Friedrich Alfred Krupp, the elderly leading German arms manufacturer had indulged in sex orgies with local boys on the Italian island of Capri, soon leading to Krupp’s suicide. Since then controversy has raged as to the degree to which the allegations were true. See Norman Douglas’s memoir Looking Back both for an early account of the affair asserting Krupp’s “innocence” (despite Douglas strongly approving of Greek love) and, quite separately, for another account of pederasty involving foreigners (in this case, Douglas himself) and Neapolitan boys in the same era.