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Chapter One City Through the Looking-Glass: Literary Odessa THE RUSSIAN CULTURAL IMAGE of Odessa is a kind of mirror image, a faithful but inverted reflection of the "abstract and intentional" Petersburg. Each of the two cities, marking a highly prized seaport, stands as an architectural monument to the martial triumph of a specific Russian monarch (Peter I and Catherine II, respectively); but Petersburg is grammatically and associatively masculine, Odessa feminine. Both cities serve as "windows on the West," but Petersburg's window opens toward the chilly north, Odessa's toward the balmy south. The very architecture of the two cities is similar, boasting colonnaded, Italianate palaces in gay hues ofyellow and green (and later, in Soviet times, ringed by the same indistinguishable concrete housing complexes); yet if Petersburg was, in its heyday as capital of the Empire, a city full of lawmakers, Odessa was always popularly perceived as a city full of lawbreakers. According to a local police chiefin 1912, Odessa was home to more than 30,000 "suspicious characters," mostly concentrated in the notorious Moldavanka district, on certain blocks of which "every single resident is a criminal."l The historian Roshanna Sylvester reports that early twentieth-century newspaper accounts "portrayed Moldavanka as a kind of 'looking-glass world' in which the values, attitudes, and identities of respectable middle-class society were systematically subverted ."2 It was this world that Isaac Babel would immortalize in his Odessa Tales (written 1921-24; published 1931), which made that qUintessentially Odessan Jewish gangster, Benya Krik, a household name. The "looking-glass world" evoked by Sylvester alludes, of course, to Lewis Carroll's 1872 novel Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There, which similarly depicts a world where all normal values are reversed. Carroll famously imagines that on the other side of the mirror, one must run as fast as possible simply in order to stand still, and quench thirst not with water but with a biscuit; Similarly, in Odessa, "success in crime rather than in legitimate business led to high status and social prestige."3 The lOgiC of the looking-glass world thus depends upon the lOgiC of the ordinary world: it is illOgiC, but only when viewed from within the framework 17 Chapter One of what Sylvester calls "respectable middle-class society." Running to stand still is nonsensical to Alice, but second nature to the Red Queen; both these perspectives, normative and subversive, must be present simultaneously in order for the meaning of the episode to be understood. Michel Foucault uses the term "heterotopia" to describe this aspect of the mirror image, the way in which it simultaneously depends upon and subverts the "real world" space that casts the reflection: In the mirror, I see myself there where I am not, in an unreal, virtual space that opens up behind the surface; I am over there, there where I am not, a sort of shadow that gives my own visibility to myself, that enables me to see myselfthere where I am absent: such is the utopia ofthe mirror. But it is also a heterotopia in so far as the mirror does exist in reality, where it exerts a sort of counteraction on the position that I occupy. From the standpoint of the mirror I discover my absence from the place where I am since I see myself over there... . The mirror functions as a heterotopia in this respect: it makes this place that I occupy at the moment when I look at myselfin the glass at once absolutely real, connected with all the space that surrounds it, and absolutely unreal, since in order to be perceived it has to pass through this virtual point which is over there.4 When the mirror merely causes me to "see myself ... where I am not," it functions as a utopia, an obviously nonexistent and disembodied space; when, however, it shows me "my absence from the place where I am," in other words when the reality of the mirror eclipses the reality of the space where I am standing, it functions as a heterotopia, a place that is real and fictional at the same time. Unlike a utopia, which in Foucault's formulation is either directly or inversely analogous to the real world, and is fundamentally unreal, heterotopias are real (i.e., physically existing) spaces within which multiple conflicting perspectives on and relations with "the real space of Society" are simultaneously enacted: In every culture, in every civilization, [there are] real places-places...

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