For years there was a Real Madrid fan club in Odessa, I don’t know if it still exists. On a memorable night in the winter of 1973, Mariano García Remón kept his goal clean against Dynamo de Kyiv attacks and earned the nickname ‘El gato de Odessa’, to which the fan club paid lasting tribute. Today the attacks on the city do not take place in the imaginary land of symbols and games, but in the physical, material reality riddled with war and death. So there is something obscene about talking about art and war at the same time. But it is also necessary, if only to undo that deadly truism that encourages us to confuse art and life.
The Odessa airport was rendered unusable, the Zatoka Bridge was blown up to connect areas of Russian influence. However, Odessa is characterized above all by cultural signs, like Kyiv by religious ones. In other words, they are not only real but also imaginary cities. In 1905, the tsar’s army with a terrible charge repressed the people outraged by the sailors of the Potemkin ship. A chapter of Eisenstein’s famous film is rightly titled “The Odessa Stairs”: the woman driving a baby carriage is hit by one of the bullets aimed at the insurgents; the cart jumps down the stairs leading to the port; the torment of the viewer owes much to Eisenstein’s handling of the camera: the floating time of the narration, the acoustic isolation of the silent film…
Facade of the Odessa Literary Museum. DEA/W. BUSS (De Agostini via Getty Images)
One reason or another can lead us to believe that all the great Russian writers were Ukrainians: Pushkin (his museum is there), Gogol, Bulgakov, Anna Akhmatova, Svetlana Aleksievich… It’s not like that, of course, but it makes you believe it dizzy to think that even then the space – the immense boundless expanse – was not homogeneous and that artistic magic could compress it into a (relatively) small fragment of unusual symbolic density. Why, if not, are there people willing to give their lives in its defense – we had forgotten, by the way, that human purposefulness which we thought was typical of old wars – and others commit great atrocities for their garrison?
In the so-called Gagarin Palace in Odessa, founded by a former KGB officer like Putin, there is an extraordinary museum dedicated to Soviet literature. The avant-garde installation in a neoclassical palace with baroque decoration is an exact aesthetic correlate of the revolution. The museum has already integrated other materials from post-Soviet culture, but the photomontages, the cracked geometries, the sculptures like frames that keep the constructivist evocation more or less fresh remain. Isaac Babel, the amazing writer who is now part of the city’s tourist merchandising, was instrumental in shaping the literary, European and southern symbol of Odessa and performed the miracle of making us – as happens with all authentic symbols – believe these qualities are part of the reality that the writer before them only acted as a midwife. It is the gift of art.
For Babel, the city is bright, simple, calm: “The inhabitant of Odessa is the opposite of the man from Petrograd”
Stalin shot him in 1941. In his Extraordinary Tales of Odessa there is no title like “Odessa” which begins with the words: “Odessa is a terrible place. Everyone knows that the Russian language is being destroyed here. Still, I think there’s a lot that’s good about it and that it has more charm than any other city in the Empire.” Published in a newspaper around 1917 and saved many decades later by his daughter Nathalie Babel, in an edition published in Spain by the Title You must know everything was Relatos 1915-1937 (Alianza, 1976), these pages reveal the anxiety of a young writer contemplating the problems of inspiration, the hectic literary elaboration of the experience… But what is said about Odessa is enough out to understand how brutal the facts are reality can return disastrously.
Babel admired Maupassant above all others; One of his stories is titled with his name. But the two things, I think, are connected: Odessa and Maupassant, Odessa and France, Ukraine and Europe. For him, the city is bright, simple, calm: “The resident of Odessa is the opposite of the man from Petrograd”. Above all, it is “the only city in Russia that can produce what we so urgently need: our own Maupassant”. Joy, summer, the sun on young people, the scent of acacias in spring, all this is Maupassant for Babel, and what an early Bolshevik like him would like is the heaviness of Dostoyevsky, that of all Russia, the slowness of snow the steppe, the oppression of the soul next to the samovar were overcome by clarity and lightness, not the other way around. “Russia,” he wrote, “is a tortuous and corrupt Paris, because the people of Nihzny, Pskov, and Kazan are limp, ponderous, impenetrable, pathetic, and sometimes endlessly and amazingly boring.” That’s why I thought that for many centuries, Russians have been drawn to the south, by the sun and by the sea.
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