A Visit to a Unique Museum in Odessa

Excerpts from an article by the American novelist, A.D. Miller, author of Snowdrops, in the November/December issue of Intelligent Life.

…This wonderful museum, housed in a pale-blue, tsarist-era palace, isn’t devoted only to Odessa’s own, or to its magical and dreadful history, though it encompasses both. Because of its location – on the Black Sea, at what was the Russian and then the Soviet empire’s sunny southern limit – many of those empires’ greatest authors were exiled to Odessa, fled through its docks, or came here for their health or a debauch. Embracing the transients and flâneurs, this is, in effect, a museum of Russian literature. And, being Russian, it becomes a museum of censorship and repression as well as art: of genius and bravery, blood and lies.

There are lots of museums devoted to famous writers, but fewer dedicated purely to literature. This one was conceived and founded by Nikita Brygin, a bibliophile and ex-KGB officer. He left the KGB in murky circumstances, but remained sufficiently well-connected to secure a handsome venue near the sea for his eccentric scheme – the ceilings are cracking, but the chandeliers and reliefs conjure the mood of the aristocratic balls for which the palace was built. He sent a team of young women across the Soviet Union to secure writerly artifacts for the collection, which is arranged in a suite of bright first-floor rooms reached by a grand double staircase. Opened in 1984, the museum survived Odessa’s transition from the defunct Soviet Union to independent Ukraine. Today, it is overseen by elderly attendants whose sternness yields to solicitous enthusiasm when one of their infrequent visitors approaches. The place runs on love….

Pushkin is partly to blame for the city’s raunchy reputation. In the margins of the manuscripts of Eugene Onegin, which he started writing in Odessa, he doodled portraits of some of the women he slept with here. Facsimiles, complete with lavish crossings-out, are on view in the museum. You look at the sketches and think of the young poet, bored by his own genius. Legend has it that, exiled from St. Petersburg by the tsar, Pushkin began an affair with Countess Vorontsova, the wife of Odessa’s governor. Another of his local flames, Karolina Sobanska, was also the some-time lover of Adam Mickiewicz (a cherished Polish poet commemorated in the museum), and a long-term spy for the tsarist secret police. Count Vorontsov, the peeved governor, dispatched Pushkin to write a report about a locust infestation, before running him permanently out of town….

Yet, like many ports, Odessa stands for freedom as well as sleaze. Revolutionaries and their ideas have been smuggled in and out along with contraband goods. Each of the museum’s rooms represents a period in the city’s intellectual history, evoking a particular era through furniture and design, and often concentrating on a characteristic genre. In the room depicting the 1850s and 1860s, there is a run of issues of the Bell, the journal published by Alexander Herzen during his London exile, which was sneaked into Russia through Odessa’s docks.