The infatuated admiration of the Russians for Odessa is carried to the utmost extreme, and they cannot understand how a stranger can fail to share in it. How indeed can any one refuse to be enraptured with a town that possesses an Italian opera, fashionable shops, wide footways, an English club, a boulevard, a statue, two or three paved streets, &c.? Barbarian taste or envy could alone behold all this without admiration. After all, this enthusiasm of the Russians may be easily accounted for: accustomed as they are to their wildernesses of snow and mud, Odessa is for them a real Eldorado comprising all the seductions and pleasures of the world.
If you will believe the Russians, snow is a thing of rare occurrence there, and every winter they wonder in all sincerity at the reappearance of sledges in the streets. But this does not hinder the thermometer from remaining steadily for several months at 25° or 26° R. below zero, and the whole sea from becoming one polished sheet of ice; nor does it dispense with the necessity of having double windows, stoves, and pelisses, just as in St. Petersburg and Moscow. Great, therefore, is the surprise of the traveller, who, on the strength of its flattering sobriquet, expects to find an Italian sun in Odessa, and who meets at every step nothing but frost-bitten faces and sledges. Besides these wintry rigours, there are the hurricanes that continually desolate the whole region, during what is elsewhere called the fine season. And these vicissitudes of the atmosphere are aggravated by another evil still more distressing, the dust, namely, which makes the town almost uninhabitable during a part of the year. Dust is here a real calamity, a fiend-like persecutor, that allows you not a moment's rest. It spreads out in seas and billows that rise with the least breath of wind, and envelop you with increasing fury, until you are stifled and blinded, and incapable of a single movement. The gusts of wind are so violent and sudden as to baffle every precaution. It is only at sunset that one can venture out at last to breathe the sea air on the boulevard, or to walk in the Rue Richelieu, the wide footways of which are then thronged by all the fashion of the place.
Many natural causes combine to keep up this terrible plague. First, the argillaceous soil, the dryness of the air, the force of the wind, and the width of the streets; then the bad paving, the great extent of uncultivated ground still within the town, and the prodigious number of carriages. The local administration has tried all imaginable systems, with the hope of getting rid of the dust, and has even had stones brought from Italy to pave certain streets, but all its efforts have been ineffectual. At last, in a fit of despair, it fell upon the notable device of macadamising the well-paved Rue Italienne and Rue Richelieu. The only result of this operation was, of course, prodigiously to increase the evil. A wood paving, to be laid down by a Frenchman, is now talked of, and it appears that his first attempts have been quite successful.
In order to give some idea of the violence of the hurricanes to which the country is subject, I will mention a phenomenon of which I was myself a witness. After a very hot day in 1840, the air of Odessa gradually darkened about four in the afternoon, until it was impossible to see twenty paces before one. The oppressive feel of the atmosphere, the dead calm, and the portentous colour of the sky, filled every one with deep consternation, and seemed to betoken some fearful catastrophe. For an hour and a half the spectator could watch the progress of this novel eclipse, which as yet was without a precedent in those parts. The thermometer attained the enormous height of 104° F. The obscurity was then complete; presently the most furious tempest imagination can conceive, burst forth, and when the darkness cleared off, there was seen over the sea, what looked like a waterspout of prodigious depth and breadth, suspended at a height of several feet above the water, and moving slowly away until it dispersed at last at a distance of many miles from the shore. The eclipse and the waterspout were nothing else than dust, and that day Odessa was swept cleaner than it will probably ever be again.
During the winter the dust is changed into liquid mud, in which the pedestrian sinks up to mid-leg, and in which he might soon drown himself, if his humour so disposed him. A long pole to take soundings with, would not come amiss to one who had to steer his course between the slimy abysses with which some streets are filled. Formerly, that is to say some fifteen years ago, ladies used to repair to the ball-room in carts, drawn each by a numerous team of oxen. At present the principal streets are paved and lighted, and one may proceed to an evening party in a rather more elegant equipage; but the poor pedestrian, nevertheless, finds it a most difficult task to drag his feet out of the adhesive mud that meets him whichever way he turns; those, therefore, who have no carriages in Odessa, are obliged to live in absolute solitude. The distances are as great as in Paris, and the only vehicle for hire is what is called in Russia a droshky; that is to say, a sort of saddle mounted on four wheels, on which men sit astride, and ladies find it very difficult to seat themselves with decorum. The droshky affords you no protection from either mud, dust, or rain, and at most is only suitable to men of business and Russians, who never go out of doors without their cloaks, even in the height of summer.
Odessa contains no remarkable building. In many private houses and in most of the corn warehouses, a lavish use has been made of the Greek style of architecture, which accords neither with the climate, nor above all with the materials employed. All those columns, pediments, and regular façades, with which the eye is so soon satiated, are in plaster, and they begin to spoil even before the building is finished. The mouldings must be renewed every year, and notwithstanding this care, most of the houses and churches have an air of dilapidation, that makes them resemble ruins rather than palaces and temples. The cathedral itself has nothing to distinguish it but its bulk. One must not look for the rules of architecture, or for elegance of form, or pleasing details in the religious edifices. They are monotonous in character, and shabby in structure and fittings. Their interiors are glaring with pictures and gilding, but all in the spurious taste of the Lower Empire. The oddly-accoutred saints, the biblical scenes so grotesquely travestied, the profusion of tinsel, and the reds, greens, and blues, laid one upon the other, in the coarsest discordance, far too disagreeably shock the sight to inspire any serious and pious thoughts.
Odessa has also some synagogues, a Catholic church, and one or two Protestant places of worship, which from their humble appearance might rather be taken for private houses. It has but one promenade, the Boulevard, which overlooks the whole harbour, and is exposed, from its situation, to frequent landslips. The vicinity of this promenade is the most fashionable quarter. The theatre, the exchange, the mansions of Count Voronzof and the Princess Narishkin; a line of very elegant houses, and the throng of carriages, all bespeak the presence of the aristocracy. Workmen have been employed for the last two or three years in constructing a gigantic staircase, to lead by a very gentle descent from the Boulevard to the sea-beach. This expensive and useless toy, is likely to cost nearly forty-thousand pounds. It is intended to be ornamented with vases and statues; but some considerable fissures already give reason to fear the speedy destruction of this great staircase, which after all can never be of any use, except to the promenaders on the Boulevard.
CHAPTER III.
THE IMPERIAL FAMILY IN ODESSA—CHURCH MUSIC—SOCIETY OF THE PLACE, COUNT AND COUNTESS VORONZOF—ANECDOTE OF THE COUNTESS BRANISKA—THE THEATRE—THEATRICAL ROW.
The brilliant fêtes that took place on the arrival of the imperial family, happened most opportunely for us, and enabled us to see many celebrated personages. All the foreigners of distinction who had been present at the famous review of Vosnecensk, followed the emperor to Odessa, and prolonged their stay there after his departure. The whole town was in revolution. The houses of dubious colour were most carefully re-coated, and even old tumbling walls were plastered and coloured. Te Deum was chanted in the cathedral the day their majesties arrived; the emperor and his eldest son attended, and were met at the great doors by the whole Russian clergy dressed in their richest robes, and headed by the archbishop.