Odessa text and Odessa myth in the Russian prose of the 1920s-1930s

Abstract

The article analyzes the Odessa text of Russian literature formed during the first post-revolutionary decades. The unfailing interest that modern literary studies show towards urban studies as well as the urban space and urban texts problems and also a substantial understudy of the Odessa urban text of the 1920s – 1930s determines the relevance of the chosen topic.

The purpose of this article is to identify the main components of the Odessa urban myth and the aspects of their representation in the Odessa text of Russian literature.The analysis of the works of I. Babel, V. Zhabotinsky, I. Ilf and Y. Petrov, Y. Olesha, S. Yushkevich, K. Paustovsky, V. Kataev allows us to highlight such unique features of the Odessa text as ludic aspect (carnivalization, theatrical and musical nature, gambling); the myth of Odessa being the free city, the city of peace, and the myth of Odessa Golden age; motives of memories and nostalgia; actualization of city toponyms – Deribasovskaya street, the Duke of Richelieu monument, the Opera House, the dachas of Big Fountain, as the symbols of Odessa glitz and gloss and Moldavanka, Peresyp, and Port as symbols of freedom and adventurous spirit. Odessa myth is described as an ambivalent construct, co-opting the archetypes of the mother and the whore along with the features of the concentric and eccentric cities, a construct where transcendental “capital/province”, “friend/foe” oppositions become blurred.

The motive of nostalgia realized through the idealized toponyms of Odessa, the autobiographical nature of the texts, personal memories of childhood and adolescence, focus on past events – those are the chief unitizing aspects in the prose of the selected period.  The instantaneous actualization of several timelines along with the longing for a place with no time at all, for a place at the crossroads of several historical eras – those are the distinctive features of a nostalgia concept in Odessa text. At the same time, the pathos of nostalgia is associated with a time gap and with geographical distance marked as impassable. The “past / present” opposition correlate with the other oppositions: the "past" means the “south”, the "friends", the harmony of the center and the province, the truce between the mother and the whore. The “past/present” binary opposition overlapping the “south/north” dichotomy introduces not only spatial but also temporal dimension into the semantics of the “south”.