Rites of Place: Public Commemoration in Russia and Eastern Europe

"A Monstrous Staircase" : Inscribing the 1905 Revolution on Odessa

 “A Monstrous Staircase”: Inscribing the 1905 Revolution on Odessa Rebecca Stanton And the grand staircase, as wide as a broad street, two hundred low, lordly steps; it seems there’s no other one like it in the world, and if you tell me that there is, I wouldn’t go to see it. —vladimir jabotinsky, The Five: A Novel of Jewish Life in Turn-of-the-Century Odessa (1935) Russia’s revolutionary unrest of 1905 spawned narratives set in various locales , including the two imperial capitals, Moscow and St. Petersburg; but it was in comparatively sleepy,provincial Odessa that the most vivid—albeit fictional—images of the 1905 revolution were composed. As this essay will argue, it was these images of 1905, captured on film by Sergei Eisenstein and in literature by such writers as Isaac Babel, Aleksandr Kuprin, and Valentin Kataev,that established Odessa as an important site of Soviet political and cultural memory. The canonical, yet imaginary, version of history to which these images allude lives on in the architectural spaces of Odessa to this day, installed there by Eisenstein’s landmark film The Battleship Potemkin (1925), which has acquired several generations of fans and emulators, and reinforced by Odessites’ pride in the rich literary heritage of their city. City mythologies occupy a privileged place in Russian culture, and the two most celebrated “city-texts,” those of Moscow and St. Petersburg, have been extensively documented and explored by literary and cultural scholars .1 Without recapitulating that body of work, it is worth remarking that what brings these cities to life as significant places in the collective memory is a fundamental tension or contradiction at the heart of their mythol-  rebecca stanton ogy: thus, Petersburg is the site both of “Pushkin’s drawing-room” and of “Dostoevsky’s slum”; Moscow is simultaneously an overgrown village and Filofei’s “Third Rome.”2 Like its more celebrated counterparts, the comparatively understudied Odessa mythology rests on an uneasy consciousness of the city’s dual identity, well established by the turn of the twentieth century. On the one hand, Odessa stood as a monument to imperial Russia, complete with palaces and boulevards that, like those of Petersburg, boast an Italian pedigree and the distinction of having been frequented by Pushkin (during the latter’s extended exile from the capital); on the other hand, it was a notorious den of thieves, peopled by a hardy tribe of stevedores, smugglers, and swindlers who plied their interconnected trades amid the cosmopolitan atmosphere and mercantile bustle of Odessa’s international port.3 Architecturally, the first, “Pushkinian” Odessa was symbolized by its colonnaded opera and ballet theater, which first opened in 1810 but was rebuilt later in the nineteenth century following a disastrous fire, and by the Italianate palace of the governor general Mikhail Vorontsov,whose wife was said to be suspiciously intimate with Pushkin during the latter’s Odessan exile in 1823–24.4 The second Odessa,that of the workers and thieves,took as its architectural metonyms two spaces that were literally “below stairs”: the bustling, black-marketeer-friendly seaport, and the famous “Gambrinus ” tavern,located in a basement on Preobrazhenskaia Street,and immortalized by Aleksandr Kuprin in an eponymous 1907 short story.5 Basements and cellars play a significant role in literary works about Odessa, symbolizing a figurative “underworld” of unlawful activities as well as a social space literally beneath the notice of the aristocratic drawing-room society.6 In contrast to the lonely lair of Dostoevsky’s narrator in Notes from Underground, Odessa’s “below-stairs” spaces are characterized as sites of social encounter rather than of isolation; they represent a milieu in which—at best—weedy intellectuals rub shoulders with brawny laborers, Jews with Russians, and Odessa’s signature tricksters with the naive rubes on whom they ply their trade. In “Gambrinus,” which focuses on the events of 1905, Kuprin offers a portrait of the tavern’s clientele that might almost serve as a casting call for extras in a film about that eventful year: Sailors of various nations, fishermen, stokers, merry ships’-boys, harbor thieves, machinists, workers, boatmen, dockers, divers, smugglers —they were all young, healthy, and steeped in the strong odor of sea and fish; they understood hard work, loved the allure and terror of daily risk, and valued above all strength, prowess and the sting of strong language.7 “a monstrous staircase”  It is perhaps...