Odesa, 1920

Traveling throughout my adult life to the part of the world once known as the Soviet Union opened up a multitude of wondrous opportunities. The region is full of natural beauty, exciting cities and largerthan-life personalities. Yet even in the Carnivalesque wreckage of the region’s collapsed political system, nothing quite compares to the city of Odesa. Odesa is not just a place, of course. It is more of a state of mind, or, at the very least, websites for a virtual Odesa that exists in the imaginations of the thousands of former residents who have moved to places as varied as Moscow, Tel Aviv, Sydney, Toronto and Brooklyn.

A “real” Odesa exists as much in the ironic short stories of the Odessa Tales by Isaac Babel, who was arrested and shot by Stalin’s NKVD, as it does in the compelling stage productions of Babel’s grandson, Andrei Maleev-Babel, who teaches acting in Florida. Odesa, in other words, is not just a city with a promenade with a famous staircase overlooking the Black Sea; psychically, it also extends from Siberia to Sarasota. It does so because, throughout its brief yet extravagantly tawdry history, Odesa has inspired people to create.

Officially, Odesa was established in 1794. Catherine the Great’s frontier settlement and Black Sea port swiftly became a randy mix of nationalities and cultures. It has remained so ever since. In her 2008 study Kaleidoscopic Odessa, anthropologist Tanya Richardson drew on the city’s complexities to explore how diversity and place combine to nurture innovation. Richardson wanted to understand how the city’s presumed peculiarities — its mix of nationalities, tolerant attitudes, cuisines, dialects, joie de vivre and sense of humor, southern temperament, resourcefulness and entrepreneurial spirit — defined a distinctive Odesan sense of place and history. For her, the various components of Odesa had been formed by the interaction of multiple lenses, which shifted as if through the prism of a kaleidoscope. 10

The Odesan kaleidoscope began spinning from the very beginning. The city took shape in the mind of a Neapolitan soldier of fortune, José Pascual Domingo de Ribas y Boyons (Osip Mikhailovich Deribas), before it assumed physical presence. De Ribas was the child of a Spanish consul and his aristocratic Irish wife. He entered into Russian service in the 1770s after a brief stint in the Neapolitan army. While he was serving on the staff of Catherine’s lover and imperial strategist, Grigorii Potemkin, de Ribas caught the attention of his superiors by watching over and covering over the multiple offenses of the dissolute American rear admiral John Paul Jones, who had come to Russia in search of fortune.

Armand Emmanuel Sophie Septimanie du Plessis, the duc de Richelieu (a greatnephew of the famous Cardinal Richelieu). De Richelieu was on the lam at the time, fleeing revolutionaries in Paris. He is still fondly remembered, and his statue stands atop Odesa’s iconic Potemkin Stairs, an urban ladder of 200 (now 192) steps leading from the city’s docks to its central districts. As the governor of New Russia, de Richelieu transformed Odesa into a city of Russia’s least-respected “estate” (soslovia, social class), the petit bourgeoisie (meshchane). Arriving semiskilled workers, tradesmen, shopkeepers, former serfs, Jews and other outcasts came seeking a new life, and they found it. The meshchane were much taken with themselves, even if others were not, and their love of reading and hearing about their lives fostered new forms of Russian literature, theater, song and media. Throughout its history, Odesa has prompted a constant re-juxtaposition of different historical, cultural and political fragments of past and present. It is a community that seems to encourage a turning of the kaleidoscope as residents seek new meaning in endless layers of cultural, religious, ethnic, political and class differences. The city itself encourages a melding, reconciliation and mutual borrowing of diverse cultural expressions and traditions to produce ever-new amalgams. Following the ultimate Russian victory over the Ottomans, de Ribas convinced Catherine and Potemkin that a patch of land near the mouths of four major European rivers — the Danube, Dniester, Dnieper and Bug — would make an excellent location for a city. On May 27, 1794, Catherine ordered that a port be built on the site. Following the Russian practice of identifying settlements in the empire’s recently acquired lands in the south — an area that became known as New Russia (following the pattern of New England, New France and New Spain) — de Ribas’s town was to be named after a classical Greek hero. In this case, the name Odysseus was feminized to Odesa in order to honor the empress. De Ribas set out to create a newer and more orderly version of his hometown Naples. However, Odesa’s sketchy origins, relying on a multitude of fortune hunters and adventurers representing any number of the corners of the late-eighteenthcentury world, made coherence difficult to achieve. In some ways he succeeded, as the city grew outward along a logical grid. Nonetheless, there was nothing well-ordered about the people who filled it up. The new city’s residents came from a variety of backgrounds, having been pulled together by a presumed opportunity to get rich quickly. Catherine’s grandson, Alexander I, replaced de Ribas as Odesa’s “city chief” (gradonachal’nik) with a French aristocrat,

In his 2011 urban biography Odessa, Charles King captures the city’s “taste for the witty and the absurd; a veneer of Russian culture laid over a Yiddish, Greek, and Italian core; a boom-and-bust economy; a love of the dandy in men and the daring in women; a style of music and writing that involved both libertine abandon and controlled experimentation; and an approach to politics that swung wildly between the radical and reaction.” 11 Odesa was and remains in King’s words, a city that “has continually sought to unleash its better demons, the mischievous tricksters that are the vital muses of urban society and the restless creators of literature and art. But it has often loosened its darker ones instead, those that lurk in alleyways and whisper of religious loathing, class envy, and ethnic revenge.” 12 This stunning combination of human achievement and malfunction marks the city to this day.

Odessa Opera and Ballet Theater 1900-1914. Photo: Romanov Empire Historical Society Media Collection, Odessa Collection. 1900-1914.