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Abstract

During the 1920s and 1930s a number of Ukrainian writers had connections to Odesa, including Mykola Kulish, Yurii Yanovsky, Oleksandr Dovzhenko, Mykola Bazhan, Oleksandr Korniichuk, etc. Each of them developed a unique vision of the City that is represented in their literary work and correspondence. The life of the half-forgotten Socialist Realist classic writer Ivan Mykytenko was also connected to Odesa. Moreover, Odesa played an important role in his life, for it was there that he developed as a personality, a writer, a journalist, and a political activist. Mykytenko’s story is a variant of a traditional plot in world literature, that of an ambitious provincial youth conquering the city. At first Odesa is for him an alien, confusing, even hostile space; the young man feels his dual disadvantage – a social one, as a villager in a large city, and a national one, as a Ukrainian in a multinational city, in which the Russian culture predominates. Soon, however, he successfully passes through the first stages of socialization. There have been three distinct periods in the evolution of Mykytenko’s „Odesan text”: 1) his early prose, in which we encounter certain traces of Odesan landscape; 2) his play Cadres, in which there is already a clear and more concrete topos of Odesa; 3) his novel Criminal Types, which further develops the characteristics of his „Odesan text.” The author’s main attention focuses on the writer’s early prose and his drama Cadres. The author argues that in Mykytenko’s story „Between Hillocks” (1924) the protagonists’ attitude to Odesa is determined by their value systems: for the grandfather the city is a space of temptations and trials, where the churches are closed down and traditional Christian spirituality destroyed, whereas his grandson Hryts sees Odesa as a city, where he can study to be a medical doctor. In the novel St. Anthony’s Fire the provincial protagonists interpret Odesa as an exotic locale characterized by luxury and glitter. In both texts, however, Odesa is just a background rather than an important artistic component of the text. In the play Cadres, on the contrary, the city itself becomes a protagonist by acquiring unique spatial and spiritual characterization. It does not yet possess a developed visual image, with only some disjointed details noted by the writer. They are the Odesan loci (the university, the sea, the railway depot, the railway station), the Odesan types (the criminal ones, such as Kotya, Shpak, Byk, and the residents of the traders’ suburb; but also the „former people” Professors Belyi, Bohoiavlensky, Sliozkin, Kukushkin, etc.), and the recognizable Odesan language. These details serve the central opposition of the play, that between „Old Odesa” and Odesa the proletarian city.