„Fizjologia miasta”. Józefa Ignacego Kraszewskiego studium wielokulturowej Odessy

Abstract

This paper focuses on the study of Odessa, made by Józef Ignacy Kraszewski in his Wspomnienia Odessy, Jedysanu i Budżaku (Memoirs from Odessa, Yedisan and Budjak; 1845–1846). The figure of the multicultural city and the literary form, commented by Kraszewski using physiological metaphors, are read here from the postcolonial perspective. The book of the Polish writer was compared with the work Kaleidoscopic Odessa. History and Place in Contemporary Ukraine (2008), which author, Tanya Richardson, refers to postcolonial studies and to Walter Benjamin's historiography. The analyses conducted resulted in the following conclusions: in a syncretic text, combining principles of a scientific hearing with the poetics of a subjective report, an image of Odessa was created, which is a description of the reality, but also its creation, formed according to the rules of the organistic discourse, yet close to the present-day form of urban studies. Drawing on concepts from physiology and physiognomy, Kraszewski outlined such a vision of the city, where its main feature is the integration of conflict: different cultures, nations, languages, religions and ways of organizing the urban space. With the corresponding figures of the palimpsest and kaleidoscope, the track of a "mixture" was referred by the creator to his own writing practice, to the realities of the nineteenth-century Odessa, in addition to its multi-layered history, considered important for the present. Memoirs... were supposed to have not only a cognitive, but also a causative function – to save the past and in this way to affect the present, so that the multicultural essence of Odessa would not get destroyed. Using Aesopian language, Kraszewski showed analogies between the history of Poland and the history of lands dominated by Russia in Ukraine, in order to make a more general reflection on colonialism. Himself, he did not, however, escape the colonial discourse, taking the rhetoric that Mary Louise Pratt considered characteristic of the imperial reports from travelling: he aestheticised the city, projected the highly artistic code of the West as otherness and came into the role of such an "I" that is changing the world into images.