Odessa: Genius and Death in a City of Dreams

by King, Charles

  With a transient foreign population and a constant stream of newcomers arriving by ship and overland carriage—far more than in the empire’s twin capitals, St. Petersburg and Moscow—Odessa was ripe for the kind of swindles, trickery, and palm-greasing that helped ease the economic burden of the petty bourgeoisie. When visitors complained of the hotelier who charged extra for bedding, the cobbler who charged twice to repair the same shoe, or the droshky driver who charged different rates for the same ride, it was the city’s huge estate of meshchane who were the makers of the city’s reputation. They could be found in virtually any profession. In 1892 over half the city’s 607 prostitutes reported that they were meshchane by estate.15

  Odessa’s reputation was self-reinforcing. If it was the meshchane who were the foundation of the city’s culture of self-confident thievery, it was the same group that, by and large, loved to read, hear, and tell stories about their own exploits. Between the twilight of the nineteenth century and the dawn of the twentieth, a wealth of true-crime reportage filled the city’s panoply of Russian-language broadsheets and tabloids. It was a convenient fiction among upper-class Odessans that criminality was bred in the lower-class periphery, in places such as Moldavanka, and readers were treated to regular portrayals of life among the unhygienic and morally corrupt poor of these districts. But in reality the city’s thievish reputation depended on criminals’ talents for infiltrating and parroting the upwardly aspirant, if not upwardly mobile, petty bourgeoisie.

  The criminal class included an intricate array of specialized professions. Some were defined by the area of the city in which they worked: the rough and tumble port district; the central Boulevard district atop the cliffs; the southern dacha-filled suburbs of Maly, Sredny, and Bolshoi Fontan; or the sparse industrial reaches of the north and northwest. Others were known for the days on which they worked, such as the weekenders who targeted the crowds that filled Deribasovskaya on Saturdays and Sundays. Still others were infamous for their creative disguises. One Ekaterina Ratsinskaya passed herself off as a cook for a wealthy family—only to show up at one of the local bazaars with 300 rubles’ worth of jewelry she had spirited away from her employer by expertly picking the lock on a chest of drawers.16 A person dressed up in gentlemanly attire might hit the most popular theaters and restaurants—the main theater on Langéron Street known simply as the Opera, the New Theater, or cafés near Alexandrovsky Park—as part of a well-turned-out gang of thieves who put their marks at ease before expertly slipping their hands into the pocket of the unwary.17 A kind passerby who flicked the dust off a neighbor’s frock coat could also lift his wallet. A respectable lady browsing in a luxury-goods store could turn out to be a resourceful shoplifter casing the joint.18

  Other criminals were more creative. One P. Zhukov, “a coffee lover,” as a local newspaper called him, took employment with the trendy Fanconi café only to make off with thirty pounds of freshly roasted beans, for which he was sentenced to three months’ jail time.19 In the central districts of the city, there were stories of nighttime assignations and ingenious cons. Women threw vitriol in the faces of their cheating husbands. Men claimed to be wealthy in order to ingratiate themselves with the best families, only to abscond with their silver. Attractive young prostitutes, pretending to be bored but respectable housewives, sought the intimacy of leading businessmen—and then used the affair to blackmail their unsuspecting johns. A well-dressed gentleman might express a deep interest in a woman whose marital prospects seemed dim. He would return week after week, eventually popping the question and settling down for a life of bliss—until he ran off with whatever money she brought into the marriage.20

  In the city’s newspapers, tales of criminal mischief competed with more pedestrian accounts of neighborly disputes and everyday disturbances. A September 1894 issue of Odessky listok (Odessa Folio), one of the city’s more sober Russian-language dailies, carried the story of a small-time criminal syndicate run by the male-female team of Nikolai Yerginov and Aksina Oleinikova, probably Russians or Ukrainians by ethnicity. Their racket was selling stolen chickens to a middleman, Blum Goldberg, presumably Jewish, who claimed to be oblivious to the birds’ origin. In court, Yerginov and Oleinikova put forward a classic crook’s defense: that it was all a terrible misunderstanding, and that the chickens had been part of the estate of Yerginov’s late, lamented father. The judge didn’t buy the explanation, however, and Yerginov—a repeat offender, as it turned out—was given a year and a half in jail, while his female accomplice and Goldberg were set free.21

  Another issue carried news of eighteen-year-old Olga Popik, the daughter of an Odessa meshchanin who had fallen in love with a wandering sailor, Mikhail Filipenko. When Popik became pregnant with Filipenko’s child, the sailor made a quick getaway, marrying another woman shortly before Popik’s baby was due. At the end of her term and distressed by news of the sailor’s marriage, Popik stole away to a ravine running down to the sea and there gave birth to a baby girl. Passersby discovered the child’s body some time later. Popik was put on trial for murder. The young woman, frightened and alone, had smashed the child’s head with a rock.22

  The popular Fanconi café on Catherine Street, ca. 1913, from a contemporary postcard. Courtesy of Nic Iljine.

  Stories such as these, repeated in their hundreds in the local press and in café-table conversations, reinforced Odessa’s image as a haven for larceny and sensational crime. But they also contributed to the persistent view among outsiders that the city’s real sin was its blatant arrivisme—the shallow, crass, impatient, and fly-by-night tendencies that passed for strivers’ virtues. Like the ambitious middle class everywhere, Odessa’s meshchane became practiced in spinning merits out of fate: celebrating pragmatism; reveling in melancholy; making their own distinctive patois out of the Italian, Greek, Yiddish, and Russian that tumbled out of doorways and courtyards; and trying, in an often unpolished and comical way, to turn fleeting trickster talents into something more permanent and profitable. “Experienced, shrewd, a trickster, a manipulator, a maneuverer, a man of ingenuity, a screamer, an exaggerator, a speculator” was how Vladimir Jabotinsky described the archetypical Odessan, labels that he intended as compliments.23 Even disease was something the city’s social classes learned to embrace.

  SINCE RICHELIEU’S DAY, Odessa struggled to fend off and manage infectious illnesses. Five separate outbreaks of plague devastated the city between the 1790s and the 1830s.24 Even as the threat of plague declined—in part because of improved enforcement of quarantine restrictions, in part because of the waning of the disease in the Ottoman ports across the Black Sea—other diseases such as typhus, cholera, and smallpox appeared with fatal regularity. Yet despite the frequent recurrence of serious disease, Odessans usually displayed a certain reticence to trade freedom for safety. “Your aim, young lady, is to inoculate smallpox, and with God’s help, you are inoculating it,” says a Jewish almshouse elder to a needle-wielding doctor in a story by Isaac Babel. “Our aim is to live out our life, not torture it!”25 In several senses, locals usually found disease to be a useful, if not always desirable, companion, especially when the Russian state was involved.

  The effort by captains and passengers to evade quarantine restrictions was a fact of life on the Black Sea, as certain as the circular migration of fish around the coast or the coming of violent storms in the winter. Already in the 1790s, Russian officials were complaining that ship captains routinely spent forty to sixty days making the easy journey from Constantinople to the north coast, a trip that should have taken no more than eight days under sail. The sluggish pace meant that goods rarely got to their destination with any rapidity, but it also ensured that those goods would be exempt from inspection or confiscation since they had been at sea long enough for any plague symptoms in passengers and crew to become manifest.26 That was a boon for asymptomatic passengers, but infected goods could still make their way easily into port, which in many cases guaranteed the spread of disease beyond the docklands.r />
  When the city government began to improve the quarantine system during Vorontsov’s time as governor-general, the goal was to create a model of modern efficiency, a real barrier against the leap-frogging of sickness around the Black Sea ports and into the Russian heartland. The experience of going through the quarantine usually left a rather different impression, however.

  The process started in the harbor. Ship captains were ordered to fly red flags if signs of plague had been noted on board or yellow flags for those effecting quarantine and thus off limits to new passengers. When a new ship arrived, a public health officer would row out from the quay and, bobbing along shipside, take charge of any mail the captain or passengers might have for delivery. To prevent any direct contact with potentially infected newcomers, the official would extend a long pair of iron tongs, using them to pick up the mail from the deck before securing it in an iron box and rowing away. The letters would then be fumigated at the quarantine facility, usually with sulfur dioxide to eliminate any disease-carrying insects, and delivered to their recipients the next morning.27

  After a day or so, passengers could be disembarked on the long mole, or built-up breakwater, that defined the so-called quarantine harbor. Each passenger was rowed ashore separately and placed in the charge of a uniformed soldier, with rifle in hand and bayonet fixed, who in turn conducted the passenger to the custom house at the end of the pier. Once there, the passenger’s travel documents were checked by a team of officials seated behind an iron railing. A doctor carried out a preliminary examination from behind a similar barrier, requesting that the passenger punch himself smartly under the arms and in the groin. The telltale sign of the plague—inflamed pustules over the lymph nodes—would presumably be easily discovered if the passenger winced in pain, while the examining physician avoided any direct contact with the potentially infected.

  Once a passenger had been deemed disease-free, he was escorted, again under guard, to the lazaretto, the central quarantine facility that housed passengers during their period of observation, usually fourteen days. Situated on high ground, the lazaretto featured a large enclosure, perhaps twenty acres, of lawns and gravel pathways. Fronting on the sea was a row of buildings with separate apartments, each with a small courtyard and a few acacias. There, passengers were assigned to their quarters, at which point they were asked to strip naked and surrender their clothes in exchange for a flannel gown, underwear, stockings, and a woolen cap, all provided by the quarantine authorities. Their personal effects were taken to a separate chamber, where they were hung and fumigated for twenty-four hours. The central rule in the quarantine was to avoid contact with other passengers. Armed guards, usually old soldiers working for food and whatever gratuities might come their way, followed passengers on their walks along the lazaretto’s pathways. If they witnessed contact between two passengers, the quarantine clock would start over again, with both passengers cooling their heels for another fourteen days.

  This was the way things were supposed to go, and sometimes the system worked as it was intended. The food was decent and the surroundings pleasant enough, especially when the acacias were in bloom in midsummer. Already by the 1830s the lazaretto was said to rival the one at Marseille, which since the eighteenth century had been the outstanding model for port quarantine systems around the world.28 The city’s health did improve over time, and despite periodic outbreaks of the plague, Odessa was never again threatened with the wholesale destruction that had loomed in Richelieu’s day. But with so many rules to be observed, and so many foreign travelers spending so much time in enforced isolation, sooner or later Odessans were bound to discover ways of making money. In fact, the business of disease came to play significant and unexpected roles in Odessa’s public life.

  In a city where rule-flouting was a form of art, the quarantine system was ripe for abuse. Some travelers avoided quarantine altogether if they were willing to pay sufficient bribes. Others had their time in quarantine reduced or received the privilege of making periodic forays into town, so long as they returned at night. For those without cash or connections, the wait could seem interminable, which probably explained the carvings—names, initials, and other graffiti—that reportedly covered the wood-paneled walls of the customs office.29 For those consigned to the lazaretto for the full stay, there were plenty of other opportunities to be relieved of cash. The café and restaurant, as the only sources of sustenance, charged whatever rates they wished. Captains and seamen, along with passengers, whiled away the hours at the billiard table, losing money to the more experienced guards or lazaretto staff in the process.

  The supply of food in the lazaretto was contracted to a private firm, a way of saving money for the usually strapped city government. The contractor would buy up foodstuffs in the town and suburbs, which would then be passed on, at a considerable markup, to passengers effecting the required quarantine. With passengers confined to the lazaretto for two weeks and the contractor enjoying a monopoly on supplies during that period, the opportunities for enrichment were enormous. The contract was so coveted, in fact, that the government eventually decided to limit the length of the contract to six years, with a requirement that a new firm be brought in at the end of that period.

  The term-limited contract opened up avenues for creative businessmen to propose exceptions to the rule. One particularly enterprising firm came up with the novel idea of taking over the operation of the opera house—often a money-losing operation but critical to Odessans’ civic pride—if the government would waive the contract limit. That produced an odd codependence of etiology and entertainment. The quality of entertainment during any particular season usually depended on the virulence of the plague on the other side of the Black Sea. When disease was raging in the Ottoman ports and passengers were subjected to the maximum quarantine in Odessa, revenue flooded into the lazaretto—and provided plenty of funds for scheduling serious talent: the soaring soprano of a renowned diva, a new work by Rossini, the output of an up-and-coming playwright, or the offerings of a promising but itinerant composer. When Franz Liszt gave a series of piano concerts in Odessa in 1847 or when Nikolai Gogol sat through a run of his new play, The Inspector-General, they probably had little idea that their work was funded in large part by the wildly successful business of disease.30

  NO ONE WAS more familiar with the creative and destructive power of sickness than Ilya Mechnikov, a professor at Novorossiya University and the city’s foremost contributor to the science of infection. Mechnikov’s Odessa years were the most turbulent of his long and eventful life. It was in a despondent decade in his adopted city that he first formulated the theories of infectious disease and cell behavior that became his life’s work. He eventually went far beyond the old port, settling at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, becoming its deputy director, and garnering a string of accolades from scholarly academies in St. Petersburg, London, and Rome. In 1908 Mechnikov received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (shared with the German researcher Paul Ehrlich) for his work on immunity, specifically the idea that some cells have the natural ability to destroy microbes. Today when Odessa students walk along Pasteur Street, into a tree-shaded courtyard and through the dingy yellow facade of the city’s main institution of higher learning, they are entering a place that now carries his name: the Odessa National “I. I. Mechnikov” University.

  Ilya Mechnikov—known after his move to Paris as Élie Metchnikoff—was born in May 1845 on the estate of Panasovka in the province of Kharkov in eastern Ukraine.31 The family fold was modest but hospitably appointed, an oasis on the flat expanse of steppe that surrounded it. One side of the family was descended from a branch of Moldovan nobles who, fleeing the advancing Ottoman armies, had found refuge in the domain of Peter the Great. The other side, Mechnikov’s maternal line, was Jewish. While he was studying at the local lycée, the loan of a microscope sparked his passion for scientific research. After earning a university degree at Kharkov and publishing regularly in biology journals, he settled do
wn to an academic position at Novorossiya University in Odessa, where the sea breezes and the good Italian opera were major attractions.

  A researcher with a growing scientific reputation, Mechnikov traveled frequently to St. Petersburg, where he was thrown into the center of Russian scholarly life, as well as the social world of learned societies and the Russian Academy. Before long he was introduced to a young woman of good breeding, Lyudmila, whose chief virtue was her ability to assuage his natural melancholy. “She is not bad-looking, but that is all,” he wrote to his mother in Kharkov. “[E]ven though I have dark previsions for the future (as you know, I am not given to seeing life through rose-colored glasses), I cannot help thinking that by living with Lussia I should become calmer, at least for a fairly long time.”32 Closer to the truth was the fact that Mechnikov found some diversion from his own dark introspection by caring for Lyudmila. Chronic bronchitis, probably the early stages of tuberculosis, struck her on their wedding day. She had to be carried to the church in a chair.