Odessa is an awful place. Everybody knows how they murder the Russian language there. All the same, I think there's a lot to be said for this great city, which has more charm than any other in the Russian Empire. Just think how easy and straightforward life is in Odessa. Half the population consists of Jews, and Jews are people who are very clear about a few very simple things: they marry so they won't be lonely, they make love so their tribe will live forever, they make money so they can buy houses and give their wives astrakhan jackets, they're fond of children because—well, isn't it a very nice thing to love your children, and aren't you supposed to? Poor Jews in Odessa are very confused by provincial governors and official forms, but it's not easy to get them to abandon positions they took up a very long time ago. You can't get them to do that, but you can learn a lot from them. It's to a large extent because of them that Odessa has such an easygoing, straightforward atmosphere.

The Odessan is the opposite of a man from Petrograd. It's becoming axiomatic that Odessans do very well for themselves in Petrograd. They earn money there. Because Odessans are dark, the plump blondes of Petrograd fall in love with them, and, in general, they have a tendency to settle on the Kamennoostrovsky Prospekt. You might think I'm just trying to be funny. No, sir. It's a matter of deeper things: the fact is that these dark Odessans bring a little sun and lightheartedness with them.

But apart from gentlemen who bring with them a little sun and a lot of sardines in the original cans, I think there must also come—and soon—the fructifying, life-giving influence of the Russian South, of Odessa, perhaps (qui sait?) the only city in Russia which might give birth to something we need so much: our own national Maupassant. I can even see some young girls, some very young girls (I'm thinking of Izya Kremer), who augur well for the future of singing in Odessa: their voices are not very strong, but they have joy, artistically expressed joy in all their being, high spirits, lightness of touch, and a charming, sad, and touching feeling for a life which is both good and bad, but extraordinarily—quand meme et malgré tout—interesting.

I have seen Utochkin, an Odessan pur sang: nonchalant yet profound, reckless but thoughtful, handsome but too long in the arm, brilliant but stuttering. He is now a total wreck from cocaine or morphine—this, they say, happened after he fell out of an airplane somewhere in the marshes of Novgorod Province. Poor Utochkin—he has gone out of his mind, but I know for sure that there will soon come a time when Novgorod will make pilgrimages to Odessa.

Most of all, this city simply has the material conditions in which the talent of, say, a Maupassant could be nurtured. In its swimming pools in summer, the bronzed figures of muscular, young sports enthusiasts glisten in the sun, as do the powerful bodies of fishermen, who have no time for sport; then there are the fat, potbellied, and good-natured "commercial gentlemen"; the pimply,
 scrawny dreamers, inventors, and brokers. And a little way from the wide sea there are the smoking factories where Karl Marx is up to his usual business.

In Odessa there is a very poor, crowded, and much suffering Jewish ghetto, a very self-satisfied bourgeoisie, and a very "Black Hundred" city council.

In Odessa there are sweet and relaxing spring evenings, the strong scent of acacias, and, over the dark sea, a moon which radiates a steady, irresistible light.

In Odessa, in the evening, out at their comic and vulgar dachas, fat and comic bourgeois lie in their white socks on couches under a dark velvet sky, digesting their lavish suppers, while in the bushes their powdered wives, fat from idleness and naively corseted, are passionately squeezed by ardent students of medicine and the law. In Odessa the luftmenschen haunt the coffeehouses trying to make a ruble to feed their families, but the pickings are not good, and who would give a ruble to anyone as useless as a luftmensch?

In Odessa there is a port, and in the port there are boats hailing from Newcastle, Cardiff, Marseilles, and Port Said. There are Negroes, Englishmen, Frenchmen, and Americans. Odessa has known prosperity, and now it's in decline —a poetic, rather carefree, and very helpless decline.

"Odessa," the reader will say at last, "is a city like any other city, and this is all special pleading."

All right, it's special pleading, and I suppose I'm really doing it on purpose, but, parole d'honneur, there is something about the place. And this something will be seen by anybody worth his salt, and he will say that, true enough, life is sad and monotonous, but that all the same, quand meme et malgré tout, it is extraordinarily, but quite  extraordinarily, interesting.

From these thoughts about Odessa my mind turns to deeper things. If one thinks about it, doesn't it seem that in Russian literature there has so far been no real, joyous, and vivid description of the sun?

Turgenev has given us the morning dew and the still of the night. In Dostoevsky you can feel under your feet the dismal, uneven roadway as Karamazov goes to the tavern, the heavy, mysterious fog of St. Petersburg. It is these dismal roads and shrouds of mist that stifle people and, in so doing, distort them in a way at once terrible and comic, giving rise to the noisome fumes of passions and making the usual human bustle even more frantic. Do you remember the bright, fructifying sun in Gogol, a man from the Ukraine? But such passages are rare. It is "The Nose," "The Overcoat," "The Portrait," and "Notes of a Madman" that predominate.

It is a victory of Petersburg over Poltava. Akaki Akakiyevich, modestly enough, but with terrifying preponderance, forces out Gritsko, and the work begun by Taras is finished off by Father Matvei. The first Russian writer to speak about the sun with excitement and passion was Maxim Gorky. But the mere fact that it is done with excitement and passion means that it's still not quite the real thing.

Gorky is a precursor, and the most powerful one of our time. But he is not a poet of the sun, merely a herald of the truth that if there is any subject worthy of a poet, then it's the sun. In Gorky's love of the sun there's something cerebral, and it's only through his enormous talent that he can overcome this handicap. IIe loves the sun because Russia is rotten and devious, because in Nizhny, Pskov, and Kazan
 people are flabby, ponderous, unfathomable, pathetic, and sometimes immeasurably and stupefyingly boring. Gorky knows why he loves the sun, and why one should love it. It is this self-conscious approach that makes Gorky a precursor—often a magnificent one, but still only a precursor.

Now it may be that Maupassant doesn't know anything —or perhaps he knows everything there is to know. He has a carriage clattering down a road scorched by the heat, and in this carriage there's the fat, sly youth Polyte and a strapping, ungainly peasant girl. What they're doing in there, and why, is their own business. The sky is hot and the earth is hot. The sweat is pouring off Polyte and the girl, and the carriage is clattering down the road scorched by the heat. That's all there is to it.

Recently there has been a spate of writing about how people live, love, kill, and conduct local elections in the province of Olonetsk, Vologda, or, for that matter, Arch angels. All this is rendered in the authentic accents of the language exactly as it is spoken in Olonetsk or Vologda. We learn that life in these parts is bleak and primitive. We have heard all this before. And soon we shall be quite sick of reading about it. In fact, we're sick of it already. This is why I think Russians will be drawn to the South, to the sea and the sun. Though it's wrong to use the future tense here: they have been drawn there for many centuries. It is in her drive to the steppes, perhaps even in her drive to the "Cross of St. Sophia," that we may see Russia's essential path.

There is a feeling that the blood must be refreshed. The atmosphere is stifling. The literary Messiah who has been awaited so long and so hopelessly will come from there— from the sunny steppes washed by the sea.