Odessa Memories by Nicolas V. Iljine (review)

Abstract

342 SEER, 83, 2, 2005 After a short concluding chapter, drawing together the strandsof the case for a 'cultural revolution', the volume is rounded off with a useful, though briefchronology, the footnotes to the text and a shortguide to furtherreading, which concentrates on the major English-language works on the reign. Cracraft'snotes assiduouslydirect the reader to a decent range of materials, in both Englishand Russian,contemporaryaccountsandmodern scholarship. Given the wide-ranging nature of the work and the intended readership,it is certainly understandable that the author would wish to keep footnotes to a minimum. Nevertheless,thereare some omissionswhich seem puzzling, given the relatively limited number of English-languageworks on this subject. For example, although reference is made to the proceedings of the Fifth International Conference of the Study Group on Eighteenth-CenturyRussia (Rome, I996), no mention is made of Lindsey Hughes's paper on Peter's sister, Natal'ia Alekseevna, in that volume when Cracraft discusses Petrine women all too briefly in his first chapter. Similarly, in his discussion of the backgroundto the Great Northern Warin the chapteron militaryreform,the reader is not directed to Robert Frost'sexcellent 7heNorthern Wars(London, 2000). However, leaving aside these minor quibbles, it is difficultto find fault with a very readable and concise overview of a complex reign. The choice of subjectsmeans that Cracraftis undoubtedly writing to his strengths,thereby opening his importantworkon Peter'sreign to a much wider audience. I have little doubt that thiswill be a usefuladdition to any course on Russian history or culture. School ofSlavonic andEastEuropean Studies PAUL KEENAN University College London lijine, Nicolas V. (ed.). Odessa Memories. A Samuel and Althea Stroum Book. University of Washington Press, Seattle, WA and London, 2003. lv + 144 pp. Illustrations. Notes.Bibliography. Index.$40-00: ?30.50. ODESSA MEMORIES is a beautifulbook, lovingly constructedby its editor and the production team at the University of Washington Press. It considers the commercial and cultural entrep6t of Odessa in the period between c. I88o and the Russian Revolution, seeking to recreate diverse strandsof its history through both text and image. The front cover, with its reproduction of a postcard of the Potemkin Staircase and its italicized title, combines with the book's unusualphysical dimensionsto make the readerfeel that he is actually holding an illustratedsouveniredition fromthe turnof the nineteenth century. The first nineteen pages of the book confirm this impression being, without any explanation, furtherreproductions of early twentieth-centurypostcards of Odessa;without doubt the book'spicturesare its greateststrength.Dozens of postcards, with their rich and vivid aquatint colours, appear in the work, together creating a picture of late imperial Odessa that is at once both highly romanticizedand hyper-real. When it comes to text, Odessa Memories is an altogether less well-conceived creation. There is no clear policy with regard to the annotation of the work's many pictures;atleasthalfhave no captionswhatsoever.This ismost irritating REVIEWS 343 in those caseswhere the image contains itsown caption in Russianand French (common in pre-Revolutionary postcards), explicitly informing the Anglophone readerthat he is missinga piece of information(e.g., pp. vi, vii, xi, xxx, 39-4I, 43-47). Worse still, Nicolas Jljine has only rarely cross-referenced textual discussions with pictures of particularbuildings or places, and even lessfrequentlyattemptedto place correspondingtext and pictureson the same page, leaving the readerto makethesebasicconnections forhimself.In certain respects,image and text tell differentstories:the book contains no fewer than sixteen picturesof Odessa's many resorts,beaches and hydropathicestablishments (hardlysurprisinggiven that many who bought postcardswere visiting the city as 'curists')but only two paragraphsof Oleg Gubar and Alexander Rozenboim's articleare devoted to describingthisobviouslysignificantaspect of Odessa life (pp. 105-06). Moreover, in a work that so clearly sets out to examine topographies,both actualand conceptual, it is a greatshame that the only map of Odessa has been consigned to the last page and is not signposted in the contents. The articles in the book a preface by Iljine (pp. xxxiii-xxxv), a short memoir by Bel Kaufman (pp. xlix-lv), a supposedly central chapter by Patricia Herlihy (pp. 3-37) and Gubar and Rozenboim's examination of 'Daily Life in Odessa' (pp. 49-I22)- are not a coherent ensemble, on the one hand representingconflicting genres...