Odessa: Genius and Death in a City of Dreams (7 page)

In addition to the hundreds of sailors stopping off at Odessa each trading season, the city had begun to attract a mottled collection of individuals seeking their own fortune at the border of sea and steppe. Some of the earliest informal censuses recorded contingents of Greek and Albanian soldiers; Italian, Jewish, Greek, and Bulgarian merchants; runaway Russian serfs; as well as communities of Cossacks. The city was already gaining a reputation as a place in Russia—barely—but decidedly not of it. It was located on a sea that had become, in just a few short decades, “the common domain of the Nations of Europe,” wrote Robert Stevens, and Odessa now lay at the center of the “vast speculations” launched by the opening of trade.
¹⁹
As the comte de Lagarde noted, “Through beautiful squares planted with trees and crossed with footpaths circulate the Turk, the Greek, the Russian, the Englishman, the Jew, the Armenian, the Frenchman, the Moldovan, the Pole, the Italian, and the German, most of them wearing the costume appropriate to each and speaking different tongues.”
²⁰

As the owners of the major trading houses and with strong family and business connections with the Mediterranean, Italians dominated city life, a recapitulation of their role when Genoese and Venetian trading centers ringed the Black Sea. Italian became the city’s lingua franca, lilting through the commercial exchange and wafting up from the docklands. Street signs—another innovation of Richelieu’s tenure—were written in both Italian and Russian, a practice that lasted well beyond his days in office.
²¹
An eight-hundred-seat opera house, established by Richelieu only three years before the plague and designed by Jean-François Thomas de Thomon, one of the great shapers of St. Petersburg, featured a visiting Italian company performing a standard repertoire of classics. The company offered an early-nineteenth-century version of surtitles: a Russian actor would helpfully summarize the libretto for any audience members who happened not to speak Italian.
²²
Even the city’s ubiquitous carters and petty traders, or
chumaks
, were known to break into choruses of “La donna è mobile”—that is, unless they were singing their own ditties about the glories of the city at the end of the drover trails:

Richelieu finally retired his post on a cool Monday in late September of 1814. Vehicles clogged the streets, and well-wishers trailed behind his carriage as it exited the city’s environs. It was said at the time that he left Odessa with no more than a small leather trunk and a few days’ change of clothes. Unlike administrators in other parts of the empire, he had developed a reputation for modesty and honest dealings, and a supreme aversion to using his position as
gradonachal’nik
for personal gain. He not only built the city but also saw it through its first devastating crisis.

As Richelieu passed the quarantine barrier on his route out of town, his heart was already in his native France. The previous spring a grand coalition of European armies had pushed into the streets of Paris. Napoleon had abdicated as emperor. The Bourbon monarchy, in the person of Louis XVIII, was returned to the throne. The heady thrill of restoration drew Richelieu westward. He eventually translated his family name and his international connections into a new career in service to France. He witnessed Napoleon’s escape from exile on Elba, his momentary return to power, and his final defeat at Waterloo. As France’s years of crisis wound to a close, he was named prime minister of a country from which he had been absent for most of his adult life. He died in 1822, not yet sixty years old. France and Russia were in positions they had not enjoyed for decades: at peace with each other and with most of their neighbors.

Far to the east, in Odessa, Richelieu had realized the vision first laid out by de Ribas. He had bridged the period from Catherine to Alexander, from the era of exploration and Enlightenment to that of modernity. “Odessa…will flourish without me,” he wrote to one correspondent several months before his death.
²⁴
As French ships continued to visit the growing port, now recovering from the creeping death and providential arson of 1812–13, a new generation of builders and visitors was making Odessa a vibrant, thriving, and—for one long-suffering husband, his wife, and an exiled poet—supremely romantic corner of the Russian Empire.

The great modernizer: The statue honoring the duc de Richelieu, which stands at the top of the “Potemkin steps,” shown in a late-nineteenth-century photograph.
Author’s collection
.

O
n a fine and sunny Saturday morning in late May of 1828, a huge crowd gathered along Nikolaevsky Boulevard to welcome the duc de Richelieu back to Odessa. The duc himself had died six years earlier, but Odessans were now turning out to witness the installation of a statue in his honor—the first public monument in the entire city—on the tree-lined street running above the harbor.

His immediate successor—Louis Alexandre Andrault, comte de Langéron—had improved on Richelieu’s original design for the boulevard, installing trees and pavements for the citizens who regularly gathered each weekend to take in the sea air. Langéron was there among the crowd, but ill health had caused him to give up the leadership of the city several years earlier. Like Richelieu, he had escaped the French Revolution by hiding out in the court of Catherine the Great and had skillfully translated that experience into a lifetime of service to his adopted country. As chief administrator of Odessa and New Russia, he had continued Richelieu’s work, most importantly by securing “free port” status for the city, a position that rendered Odessa a gigantic duty-free zone and made it even more of a magnet for foreign commerce.

As Langéron and other dignitaries looked on, a canvas sheet lay draped over the new monument. Its four corners were attached to a short railing at the base of the stone plinth, with the flags of Great Britain, France, Austria, and Russia standing as sentinels. Soldiers from a battalion of the tsar’s own Ufa Regiment, resplendent in their colorful uniforms, stood at attention in front of the veiled statue. Facing them were ranks of bespectacled professors and students from the Richelieu Lycée, the city’s most prestigious school. Foreign consuls, dressed in formal attire, joined the spectators. Thousands of average Odessans pressed forward expectantly to catch a glimpse of the action.

At around eleven in the morning, a procession began to wend its way from the central cathedral. The local archbishop led a bevy of clergymen, his heavy, embroidered robes trailing in the dust. When the procession arrived at the ceremonial site, an official read out the tsar’s charter giving Odessans permission to erect a monument to Richelieu’s memory. The archbishop then mounted the rostrum and, in stentorian and ecclesiastical Russian, bestowed blessings on the city and its people.

When he had finished, the canvas was drawn back to reveal a glistening bronze statue of the duc, dressed in a Roman toga and garlanded with laurel leaves, his right hand extended as if showing off the city with a sweep of the arm. The crowd cheered. The troops saluted. A band struck up a martial tune. In the bay, cannons roared from warships drawn up for the occasion. More speeches followed—one in French from Charles Sicard, one of the city’s oldest inhabitants, others in Italian and Russian from two learned teachers at the lycée—before a march-past by the Ufa infantrymen and more festive music from the brass band. That evening, anyone walking past the monument found it illuminated by torchlight, the duc’s likeness glowing in the darkness.
¹

There were plenty of dignitaries in the crowd that May. But the master of ceremonies, taller than most of the men around him, with soft blue eyes and a round face, was the new governor-general of New Russia. He was a generation younger than de Ribas and Richelieu, a man of trousers and coatees rather than breeches and tricorns, now charged with governing a city that was squarely on the path toward becoming Russia’s premier southern metropolis. He was also the first of the crucial figures in Odessa’s history since Potemkin to have a Russian name.

M
IKHAIL
S
EMYONOVICH
V
ORONTSOV
was born in St. Petersburg in 1782 into a wealthy but recently titled aristocratic family. At the age of only two, he was whisked away to London by his father, who had been appointed Russian ambassador to the Court of St. James. Thus began an association with Britain that lasted the younger Vorontsov’s entire life. It also became the source of many jokes about his anglophile ways and cool manner. Leo Tolstoy, in his novella
Hadji Murat
, portrayed him much as he was seen by his contemporaries, as “ambitious, kind and gentle in his manner with inferiors and a subtle courtier in his relations with superiors,” with a “vulpine” face and possessing a “subtle and genial mind.”
²

Mikhail’s father, Semyon, was a courtly rival of Potemkin’s and had been one of the many nobles forced to resign from state service during the brief and turbulent reign of Catherine’s son, Paul. This personal familiarity with the caprice of tyranny, combined with a childhood diet of English liberal values and country estate vices, formed much of Vorontsov’s character. After graduating from Cambridge, Vorontsov returned to Russia for the coronation of Alexander I and began his own long and distinguished career of state service.

His early experience was a trial by fire, however. As a young man of considerable social standing, he was given a commission in the Preobrazhensky Guards, one of the most illustrious and storied of Russian military units, with origins stretching back to Peter the Great. When he took up his officer’s sword, in the late autumn of 1801, the place to be for a young and ambitious lieutenant was the Caucasus, the jumble of mountains on Russia’s southern frontier. There, a host of independent kingdoms, clans, and tribal groups formed a buffer between Russia and its rivals, the Ottoman Empire and Persia. The tsar had recently concluded an agreement with the Christian kingdom of Kartli-Kakheti (in modern-day eastern Georgia) that allowed for the kingdom’s absorption into the Russian Empire. Vorontsov requested a transfer to the military command in the kingdom’s capital, Tiflis. He soon found himself in a delicate set of circumstances.

The royal family of Kartli-Kakheti, although convinced of the need for Russian protection against its Muslim neighbors, was unenthusiastic about full-scale annexation. Other kings and princes in the neighborhood were similarly wary of Russian territorial ambitions masquerading as a desire to protect embattled Christians. Through a combination of skillful diplomacy, persistent cajoling, and sometimes brute force, Russia’s commander in the region, Pavel Tsitsianov, finally brought the reluctant Caucasus nobles to heel. Vorontsov’s role was relatively minor. He served on a series of diplomatic missions for his commanding officer and occasionally saw battle in skirmishes against highland raiding parties. But his brief Caucasus sojourn taught him a lesson that he would later take to Odessa: that Russia’s empire, like Britain’s, was now vaster and more complex—politically, culturally, and religiously—than anyone in St. Petersburg seemed to realize. To administer such a territory required skills more refined and nuanced than storming a citadel during the occasional summer campaign.

Portrait of Mikhail Semyonovich, Count Vorontsov
(1821) by Sir Thomas Lawrence.
State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg/The Bridgeman Art Library.

Vorontsov was a member of the generation of Russian soldiers and statesmen who were fully removed from the values and strategies of the eighteenth century and who were moving, however uncertainly, into the nineteenth. His performance in the Caucasus immediately recommended him to other commanders. Over the next thirteen years—from 1805 to 1818—Vorontsov found himself on the frontlines of nearly every major military engagement Russia faced: Napoleon’s initial thrust against the tsar’s ally, the king of Prussia; a new war against the Ottoman Empire; and finally the defense of the Russian heartland after Napoleon’s invasion of 1812.

In that conflict, Vorontsov—by now a major general—was a central character. He was present at the decisive Battle of Borodino, sustaining a serious bullet wound to his leg, and at the bloody engagement at Craonne, where he commanded troops arrayed against Napoleon himself. When the French invaders made their forced retreat from Russia, Vorontsov’s troops were close on their heels. In March of 1814 he walked at the head of his division down the Champs-Élysées. The following year, the tsar elevated him to the post of commander of the Russian occupation forces in Paris.

For the first time in his career, Vorontsov, now in his mid-thirties, was entrusted not only with overseeing a military unit in the field but also with administering a distinct and stationary population of thirty thousand men plus their dependents: the occupation army. Over the next three years, he introduced an array of innovations, including the development of a postal system for his corps, a literacy and educational program for his noncommissioned officers and men, and a reform of the existing disciplinary system—previously based on brutal corporal punishment—for unruly soldiers. Just as Richelieu was helping to remake the French government after the disruptions of the Napoleonic era, Vorontsov was helping to reshape Russia’s contingent of occupiers. When the occupation ended in late 1818, Vorontsov led his army on the long trek home. He soon returned to Paris to enjoy a period of relaxation after years as a field commander. It was there, at a grand party in the middle of a city just awakening from war and foreign occupation, that he met Elizaveta Branicka.

Lise, as she was generally known, was a member of a family of Polish landowning magnates on her mother’s side. Through strategic marriages with the Russian nobility, the family had become wealthy, highly regarded, and supremely well connected in European society. She was the great-niece of Potemkin, and her mother, Countess Alexandra Branicka, had cradled the great prince’s head as he wheezed with pneumonia in his final hours.

Lise was a woman who would today be described as handsome rather than beautiful, of finely chiseled, if not delicate, features, graceful and elegant, with blue eyes and raven hair, which she kept swirled in ringlets atop her head. She was rather coquettish by reputation even though she was now well beyond her youth. Her charm and poise, if sometimes too self-regarding, gave her a social stature and desirability that lasted well into her maturity.

At the dangerously old age of twenty-six, a suitable marriage partner had not yet crossed her path—or, more likely, no one had yet met the rigorous standards of her mother, by this time an aged and increasingly avaricious widow. When they met, Vorontsov was immediately smitten, and Lise returned the admiration. The old countess, in turn, was taken with the general, a man old enough to be well established, with an already storied career and trailing a long pedigree of titled and moneyed Russian and British relatives. Lise and Vorontsov were married in a magnificent ceremony in May of 1819.

Vorontsov was now at a turning point. He was comfortable in the salons of Paris and the drawing rooms of London, and he had also served the tsar gallantly on the battlefield. Where should he make his home and plot out the next stage of a well-managed career? He spent the next several years traveling back and forth to Russia, sometimes with Lise in tow, even after the couple had started a family. In the expanse of New Russia, he saw immediately the possibilities for settlement, commerce, and farming. He visited Odessa on the invitation of his friend, the comte de Langéron. The city was booming, and governing it required energy and drive, traits that Langéron himself admitted were not among his virtues. “I do as little harm as possible,” he wrote in a letter to Vorontsov. “I flatter myself always that if there is no longer war I will see you replace me one day in this post.”
³
Through delicate maneuverings at the tsar’s court and in the Russian civil service, Vorontsov scouted the possibilities for succeeding the fatigued Langéron. To ensure his livelihood, he used portions of Lise’s considerable dowry to purchase immense estates in the south, in Crimea and around Odessa and Taganrog, a port on the Sea of Azov. In the late spring of 1823 it was official: Vorontsov was to be the governor-general of New Russia, a title only recently created for the chief administrator. The Vorontsov family soon decamped to the shores of the Black Sea.