Rethinking Odesa's City Myth

“Rethinking Odesa’s City Myth”

A Lecture by

Prof. Vitaly Chernetsky
University of Kansas
 
Odesa is one of Ukraine’s most internationally famous cities. An oft-mythologized image of it, however, largely derives from Russian-language literary texts and has trickled into a stereotypical version exploited for decades by the Russian mass culture and propaganda. This outdated cliché narrative obscures many facets of the city's cultural diversity both past and present. The sea is at the center of both the old myth, on the one hand, and of the revisionist decolonial Ukrainian narratives, on the other. For the latter, Odesa is envisioned as a threshold linking the Black Sea with the "sea" of the Ukrainian steppe. The narratives it has generated tap into the cross-cultural contacts this contact zone has generated and into the aura of the city's climate and landscape, as emphasized by its nonconformist visual artists. This talk discusses the contemporary Odesa-focused revisionist projects pursued by writers and visual artists, as well as the efforts by local intellectuals to decolonize the Odesa narrative in the context of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine.