The Wolf Man's Russia

Freud's fascination with Russia is well-documented by many researchers. "My imagination is still living in Russian history" he writes in a letter to his fiancée (1885, p. 141). Within the Russian Empire, the large seaport city of Odessa, where many Jews and Russians prospered in the 19^th century, held a special and more personal place for Freud.

His mother Amelia Nathansohn and two of her brothers grew up in Odessa. His father travelled to Odessa on business. His paternal uncle Josef was imprisoned in Austria for trading in counterfeit rubles on the Romanian-Russian border near Odessa. Freud's famous patient, Sergei Pankejeff, or the Wolf Man, was a wealthy Russian Orthodox Christian from Odessa. The Pankejeff family were rich merchants, patrons of many talented artists and physicians in Odessa. They opened their houses and offered jobs to prominent painters, such as Golovkov and Kuznetsov, supported city orphanages and publishing houses, fought for local and national political causes, founded and sponsored the Odessa psychiatric clinic, and profoundly affected the lives of many residents. Yet their name does not show up anywhere on Odessa's map. This absence acutely reflects political and personal calamities of the 20^th century. This paper points out the Wolf Man's traces in modern Odessa, highlighting some buildings, artifacts, and archival materials recently uncovered by Ukrainian historians. I specifically would like to acknowledge the following publications: Sergei Lushchik's book Odessa Realities of the Wolf Man (Lushchik, 2003), Volodymyr Kudlach's catalog of Gerasim Golovkov's works (Kudlach, 2015), and Oleg Gubar's article about the discovery of Anna Pankejeff's poems (Gubar, 2014). Some photographs included in this publication were generously shared with me by Sergey Kotelko, an Odessa historian. Very thorough research about these authors came after nearly a century of Soviet neglect of psychoanalysis and its historical oblivion. The Wolf Man became known to the Western world as one of Freud's famous patients. However, in the context of the Eastern European world, his little known biography mirrors the misfortunes of Odessa, the city of his childhood.

Figure 1.

The Pankeev's city house at 20 Marazlievskaia Street, Odessa. Photograph by Sergey Kotelko

The Pankejeffs moved to Odessa from a little town near Kherson in the South of Russia when Sergei was five. His father, Konstantin, bought a two-story city house facing the central park, which spread to the Black Sea coast. He also bought a large estate called Vasilevka, 25 miles northwest of Odessa. When the Russian translation of the Wolf Man's memoirs was published in 1999 for the first time, the records in the Odessa archives immediately caught the attention of local historians. The city registry shows that the house on 20 Marazlievskaia Street was owned by Alexandra Pankejeff, the Wolf Man's mother, until it was nationalized in 1919 (Lushchik, 2003, p. 10) [Figure 1]. Since that time, Sergei had his recurring dreams of wolves sitting in the walnut tree just outside this castle-like villa. This architectural wonder was a subject of many paintings, poems, traveler's notes, and, finally, Freud's essay "From the History of an Infantile Neurosis" (1918). The painter Gerasim Golovkov [Figures 2 and 3], who tutored young Sergei, and lived in Vasilevka during seven summers, depicted the villa and the gardens in many of his landscapes (Kudlach, 2015).

Historians date Vasilievka back to 1792 (Argatiuk, 2015). In the early 1800's, the land was partially sold to the German colony Manheim until it was acquired by a wealthy Russian Army general, Vasilii Dubetskii, giving the village its name. According to some sources, the house was built around 1845 by the Italian architect Francesco Boffo (famous for the Potemkin stairs in Odessa). The Russian 19th century writer, Sergei Aksakov, mentioned Vasilevka in his letter of 1855:

It takes four days by foot between Tiraspol and Odessa. There is nothing to describe. We cross the steppe, thecolorless and sad now, in the fall when the harvest has ended. And suddenly the fields come to life when you see the...