Authors

Discussion

This talk will focus on the image of Odesa and its connection with the emigration in films of the Perestroika and early post-Soviet periods. Examples include Odesa during the Civil War in the 1983 film The Green Wagon (Zelenyi furgon), which adds an episode with a character inspired by Ivan Bunin; The Art of Living in Odesa (Iskusstvo zhit' v Odesse), an 1989 adaptation of Isaak Babel's Odesa Tales in which the gangster Benya Krik escapes to the emigration at the end; and Leonid Gaidai's last film, Weather Is Good on Deribasovskaia, or It Rains Again on Brighton Beach (Na Deribasovskoi khoroshaia pogoda, ili Na Braiton-Bich opiat' idut dozhdi, 1992), in which Odesa is not depicted but is evoked as a means of familiarizing the United States to Russian viewers, most notably through parallels with Brighton Beach. Taken together, these and other films produce an image of Odesa as a paradoxical cradle of emigration within Soviet borders, a space at once foreign and domestic, pointing to Russia's own refusal to acknowledge the city's (and, by extension, Ukraine's) existence independent from Russia's fate.