Thursday
Watching events unfold in Ukraine, I’ve been struck by how Vladimir Putin sees no dividing line between Russia and Ukraine. Experts in the field will be able to speak to the relations between the two countries as I cannot, but I can observe that many of authors and works I associate with Russia either come from Ukrainian cities or speak fondly of them. Perhaps this fact helps convince Russians that Ukraine is, in fact, Russia.
That being said, sometimes you have to let go of what you love. Burning Ukraine’s cities to the ground would identify Russia as an abusive lover.
Chekhov’s sublime “The Lady with the Dog” first got me thinking along these lines. There we have couples strolling along the boardwalk in Yalta, located in the Crimea (which Putin annexed in 2014).
One evening he was dining in the gardens, and the lady in the béret came up slowly to take the next table. Her expression, her gait, her dress, and the way she did her hair told him that she was a lady, that she was married, that she was in Yalta for the first time and alone, and that she was dull there…. The stories told of the immorality in such places as Yalta are to a great extent untrue; he despised them, and knew that such stories were for the most part made up by persons who would themselves have been glad to sin if they had been able; but when the lady sat down at the next table three paces from him, he remembered these tales of easy conquests, of trips to the mountains, and the tempting thought of a swift, fleeting love affair, a romance with an unknown woman, whose name he did not know, suddenly took possession of him.
While Yalta shows up in a lot of Russian fiction, Odessa shows up even more—that same Odessa that is currently readying itself for a Russian attack, including mining popular tourist beaches to ward of a Russian sea invasion. Sally McGrane’s 2013 New Yorker essay on Odessa’s literary past has filled me in on the city’s literary side:
Walking along Pushkin Street on the kind of dazzling spring day the Odessan writer Aleksandr Kuprin warned visitors to avoid—the smell of acacias in bloom, he wrote, can induce newcomers to fall in love and take foolish steps, like getting married—I crossed Bunin Street, named for the Nobel Prize-winning short-story writer, then Zhukovskogo, a street named after the romantic poet said to have been Pushkin’s mentor. Near the opera, a golden sign announced the Odessa Literary Museum.
Writers fall in love with cities all the time. But ever since Pushkin spent thirteen months here in 1823, Odessa has been a city infatuated with its writers. At the Odessa Literary Museum—housed in a dilapidated palace in the city center, it is one of the largest shrines of its kind in the world—docents can tell you the number of days a given writer was here (Chekhov, who once spent half his paycheck on Odessan ice cream, came four times and stayed a total of sixteen days) and who wrote which chapters of their greatest works while in residence (Pushkin completed the second chapter of Eugene Onegin and half of the third here, but despite the popular claim that he began Onegin in Odessa, the poet actually rewrote the first chapter here, which more or less counts). They can also tell you who burned manuscripts written in Odessa (Gogol relegated most of the second part of Dead Souls” to the flames on his return to Moscow after wintering here), whose wife was probably Odessan (Nabokov’s, Vera), which great writers passed through here yet never revisited the city in prose (maybe Nabokov, definitely Leo Tolstoy), who included Odessa in his fiction sight unseen (Jules Verne, Arthur Conan Doyle, Balzac), who wrote in a letter to a friend of his intentions to visit but never did (Dostoevsky). And that’s just by the by: the museum’s twenty rooms feature some three hundred writers associated in one way or another with this city on the Black Sea that was, once upon a time, the glittering, cosmopolitan third capital of the Russian Empire.
Because the museum harkens back to the Soviet era, it underplays Odessa’s most famous native son, Isaac Babel. Give Ukrainians’ antipathy to Russia, however, I suspect Babel is going to grow in their esteem since he was victimized by the Soviet state. Author of Red Cavalry and Odessa Stories and acclaimed as “the greatest prose writer of Russian Jewry” (thanks Wikipedia), Babel was imprisoned and executed by Stalin.
At the time of the New Yorker article, Babel had only four modest displays (and no mention of how he died) in the Odessa Literary Museum. After the current war, Ukrainians may honor him more as they look for authors who can elevate the nation.
Russian authors have long performed this function. One reason that Russians see themselves as exceptional is because they are the country that produced Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. (The symbolic significance of the two authors helps explains why tens of thousands of Russians attended their funerals.) A poet currently functioning as a symbol of Ukrainian nationalism is Taras Shevchenko, a 19th century poet who was one of the first to write in Ukrainian and who is now the country’s national poet. At the moment in the besieged city of Karkiv, Ukraine’s second largest city, sandbags have been piled high in the city center to protect his statue against Russian shelling.
Years ago, when I visited Slovenia on a Fulbright fellowship, I was struck by the extent to which they honor their authors, most notably Francis Preseren, whose statue overlooks the central square in Ljubljana and who was the first great poet to write in Slovenian. Although authors are sometimes unappreciated when alive, they can grow in symbolic value after they die.
