LITMIR.BIZ

       8 ODESSA 1823–24

      I lived then in dusty Odessa …

      There the skies long remain clear,

      There abundant trade

      Busily hoists its sails;

      There everything breathes, diffuses Europe,

      Glitters of the South and is gay

      With lively variety.

      The language of golden Italy

      Resounds along the merry street,

      Where walk the proud Slav,

      The Frenchman, the Spaniard, the Armenian,

      And the Greek, and the heavy Moldavian,

      And that son of the Egyptian soil,

      The retired corsair, Morali.

      Fragments from Onegin’s Journey

      IN 1791 THE TREATY OF JASSY, which brought the Russo – Turkish war to an end, gave Russia what its rulers had sought since the late seventeenth century: a firm footing on the Black Sea littoral. To exploit this a harbour was needed; those in the Sea of Azov and on the river deltas were too shallow for large vessels, and attention was turned to the site of the Turkish settlement of Khadzhibei, between the Bug and Dniester, where the water was deep close inshore, and which, with the construction of a mole and breakwater, would be safe in any weather. Here, where the steppe abruptly terminated in a promontory, some 200 feet above the coastal plain, the construction of a new city began on 22 August 1794. Its name, Odessa, came from that of a former Greek settlement some miles to the east, but was, apparently on the orders of the Empress Catherine herself, given a feminine form. The city’s architect and first governor was Don Joseph de Ribas, a soldier of fortune in Russian service, born in Naples of Spanish and Irish parentage. With the assistance of a Dutch engineer, he laid out a gridiron plan of wide streets and began construction of a mole.

      Under Richelieu, governor from 1803 to 1815 – whose little palazzo in Gurzuf had sheltered Pushkin and the Raevskys – the city prospered and gained in amenities: a wide boulevard was constructed along the cliff edge, overlooking the sea; and ‘an elegant stone theatre, […] the front of which is ornamented by a peristyle supported by columns’,¹ was built. It was usually occupied by an Italian opera company: Pushkin became addicted to ‘the ravishing Rossini,/Darling of Europe’.² However, the town ‘was still in the course of construction, there were everywhere vacant lots and shacks. Stone houses were scattered along the Rishelevskaya, Khersonskaya and Tiraspolskaya streets, the cathedral and theatre squares; but for the most part all these houses stood in isolation with wooden single-storey houses and fences between them.’³ Very few streets were paved: all travellers mention the insupportable dust in the summer, and the indescribable mud in the spring and autumn.

      In 1819 Odessa had become a free port: the population increased – there were some 30,000 inhabitants in 1823 – as did the number of foreign merchants and shipping firms. The lingua franca of business was Italian, and many of the streets bore signs in this language or in French, until Vorontsov, in a fit of patriotism, had them replaced by Russian ones. But this could not conceal the fact that the city was very different in its population and its manners from the typical Russian provincial town: ‘Two customs of social life gave Odessa the air of a foreign town: in the theatre during the entr’actes the men in the parterre audience would don their hats, and the smoking of cigars on the street was allowed.’⁴

      Odessa, with its opera and its restaurants, might seem a far more attractive place for exile than Kishinev. Nevertheless, Pushkin was to be considerably less happy here. He had lost the company of his close friends: Gorchakov’s regiment was still stationed

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