Odessan Selves: Identity and Mythopoesis in Works of the “ Odessa School”

“Odessan Selves” explores the literary cult and culture of Odessa in first-generation Soviet literature through a close reading of influential and problematic “autobiographical” works by prominent Odessa writers, including Isaac Babel, Yury Olesha, Valentin Kataev, and Konstantin Paustovsky. Issues of identity, selfhood, genre, canonicity, and narrative are also explored in an attempt to answer the vexed question: “What, if any, aesthetically significant characteristics did these writers have in common, beyond the city they claim as their collective point of origin?”

The Introduction discusses theoretical trends in the treatment of autobiography and identity poetics in Russia and the West, and lays the groundwork for the subsequent exploration of unconventional “autobiographical” works by Babel, Olesha and Kataev.

Chapter One examines the image of Odessa projected by nineteenth- and twentieth-century Russian literature, posits the existence of an “ Odessa text,” comparable to the “ Petersburg text” articulated by the Moscow-Tartu semioticians, and ponders the exploitation and transformation of that “text” by early Soviet writers. Characteristics of “Odessan discourse” are identified, including multivocality, the empowerment of Jews and other “outsiders,” motifs of exile and nostalgia, and a predilection for narratives that straddle, challenge, or transgress the boundaries between truth and fiction.

Chapters Two and Three discuss the childhood tales of Isaac Babel, which combine autobiographical narrative with the short-story form. The relationship between the works of Babel and those of Paustovsky is also explored. Chapter Four examines Yury Olesha’s fragmented “autobiography,” No Day Without a Line, and Valentin Kataev’s anti-memoir, My Diamond Crown . The strategies each author uses to negotiate (and breach) the nebulous boundaries dividing fiction and autobiography, “literature” and “memoirs,” “invention” and “authenticity,” are analyzed.

It is concluded that the Odessan writers examined share an interest in stories that break free of their generic and epistemological territory to invade other spaces and texts, including the “real world,” and that the “self” served as the canvas on which they created a literature that came to be seen as quintessentially “Odessan.”

Note on the book manuscript (Nov. 20, 2007): The book manuscript, tentatively entitled "Isaac Babel and the Self-Ishness of Odessan Modernism," reorganizes, refines, and expands the material outlined above in three major ways. First, it links the representation of Odessa -- as "joyful underground," as Foucauldian heterotopia, as embodied paradox, as exotic source text, and as nostalgic object -- more explicitly to the aesthetic gestures typical of the Odessan writers, and shows how these were necessarily submerged during high Stalinism but re-emerged (under the influence of Kataev and Paustovsky) in the post-Thaw era. Second, it considers the 1920s output of Babel and Olesha in more depth, and adds works by Ilf and Petrov and by Eduard Bagritsky to round out the portrait of the Odessan 1920s. Finally, it historically contextualises the return of "Odessanism" in three key autobiographical texts (Olesha's No Day Without a Line, Paustovsky's Golden Rose and A Time of Great Expectations, and Kataev's My Diamond Crown) published between 1955 and 1977. The manuscript also takes account of recent work done by historians and anthropologists on the mythology of Odessa, in an effort to render a full picture of the cultural importance of the city as it is perceived across the disciplines.

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