The Nineteenth Century in Odessa: One Hundred Years of Italian Culture on the Shores of the Black Sea (1794 – 1894) (review)

‘I was almost tempted to believe that, by some hocus-pocus, we had tumbled on an Italian town,’ marvelled one foreign traveller (Henry Wikoff) to Odessa in 1835, who was dazzled by the balmy climate, neo-classical architecture, abundant delicacies, and the Mediterranean joie de vivre seemingly out of place on the fringes of the barren and frigid Russian Empire. And he was not alone; nineteenth-century visitors and residents alike boasted of Odessa’s uncanny resemblance to an ideal Italian city. In The Nineteenth Century in Odessa: One Hundred Years of Italian Culture on the Shores of the Black Sea (1794–1894), Anna Makolkin attempts to excavate and document Odessa’s Italian heritage, claiming that this pre-eminent facet of the city’s history has been undeservedly neglected. Makolkin’s monograph is rich with detail and includes dozens of beautiful pictures (many in colour) of the numerous individuals and their great artistic achievements that set the ‘eternal Italian cultural compass of Odessa.’

The genesis of this wondrous ‘citta ideale,’ which Makolkin calls ‘the last Italian colony,’ was the direct result of Catherine the Great’s fervent desire to enlighten Russia through European culture. Italy, Makolkin insists, was the logical fountain of enlightenment for Russia, because Italy was the direct heir to Ancient Rome, a society that embodied all that was good and progressive: urban civility, cosmopolitanism, tolerance, and a reverence for learning and the arts. The Italian city-states of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment carried on these traditions, and Catherine, who inherited an isolated empire that knew neither renaissance nor enlightenment, turned to the genius of Italy to build Odessa, her envisioned oasis of urbanity and intellect. ‘Rome,’ accordingly, ‘begot Odessa,’ and ‘the Italian architects, designers, opera singers, actors, painters, sculptors and impresarios turned Odessa into . . . the “cultural Mecca” of the entire Russian and later Soviet Empire.’

The seven chapters in Makolkin’s book describe the Italians who built, enriched, and beautified Catherine’s city on the sparsely populated Ukrainian steppe. The Neapolitan Giuseppe de Ribas served as the city’s first governor, and through his intricate city planning and his benevolent rule de Ribas set the tone for all the pioneers who followed him. The book’s centrepiece is Odessa’s opera, a cultural edifice revered equally for its architectural beauty and its brilliant performances. For Makolkin, the opera is emblematic of what Odessa represented: an enlightened ‘city-paradise’ improbably located in backward Russia.

Although Makolkin presents a critical chapter in Odessa’s history, her work is riddled with methodological problems that undermine the credibility of her argument. She tends to be ahistorical, often discussing events separated by decades within the same paragraph, even though Odessa’s social composition and economy changed fundamentally during the intervening years. More troubling are her many conclusions that are not backed up with sufficient data. For instance, she contends that Italian served as Odessa’s lingua franca in culture and in commerce for much of the nineteenth century, but the only evidence she offers is a quotation from Alexander Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, which was written in the 1820s. Makolkin also presents sweeping generalizations about the mentality of Odessa’s inhabitants, their ‘collective psyche,’ which worshipped ‘Beauty, Music, and Theatre’ and (allegedly) little else. Yet Odessa was also notorious for its smugglers, gangsters, and sailors who filled the subterranean taverns in the city’s port district. How their stories intersected with Odessa’s ‘Italian cultural compass’ has no place in Makolkin’s work.

Odessa is eternally Italian for Makolkin, and she denies agency to any other group in shaping the city’s high culture. She argues that ‘none of the later settlers . . . could match the education, taste, and sophistication of Odessa Italians.’ Makolkin ignores the fact that 33% of the city’s inhabitants were Jewish by the late nineteenth century, a vibrant community that...