Odessa has not forgotten Nikolai Gogol, the nineteenth-century author who gave the world Dead Souls.
At the city’s Literary Museum, an entire wall is devoted to the Russian-Ukrainian writer, with first editions of his books and even a handwritten manuscript proudly on display beneath the glass. Other books are opened to the pages with the letters that Gogol wrote from Odessa during his two visits to the city. If a visitor presses his or her nose to the glass, it is possible to read the words: Gogol writes that he came to Odessa in search of milder weather, to spend the winter in a place that has some natural warmth – not artificial, indoor heat. Artificial heat, he writes, makes it hard for him to work.
Not far from the Literary Museum, a visitor can find Gogol Street and a trendy restaurant named “Gogol-Mogol.” Inside, the tablecloths and curtains look like they were borrowed from a nineteenth-century drawing room, the bill arrives folded inside the pages of a book, and customers are encouraged to draw on the menus. Paintings of Gogol decorate the walls.
Gogol Mogul restaurant, across the street from the fenced off Gogol House, where customers are encouraged to draw on the menus.
Yet just across the street, the home where Gogol stayed during his visit to Odessa is vacant and abandoned; the windows are boarded up; on the walls, the paint is peeling and vegetation is growing; the roof looks like it is about to cave in. Two memorial plaques – one in Russian, the other in Ukrainian – inform passersby of the home’s historic significance:
“Here, between 1850 and 1851, lived the great Russian writer, Nikolai Gogol.”
From the backyard, one can walk up the marble steps to a door that is bolted shut, but only after pushing away the tall grasses that block the way. Clearly, no one has walked up these steps for a long time. On the door, near the padlock, a sticker says, “Welcome to Hell.”
Gogol visited Odessa twice. His first visit to the city was in April and May of 1848, arriving by boat from Constantinople on his way back from a trip to the Holy Land. Because of a fear of cholera in the region (indeed, it was a fear throughout Europe that year), he and all the other passengers spent two weeks in quarantine. A friend who visited him in quarantine later remembered that Gogol made inquiries about Odessa. In particular, he wanted to know if the locals liked reading, how many bookshops the city had, and whether it was possible to find books in English.
The second time Gogol visited Odessa was in late 1850 and early 1851, not long before his death. This time he stayed longer, for five months, and spent much of his time working on the second volume of Dead Souls. He stayed in the home of his relative, Andrei Troshinsky, at 11 Gogol Street, site of the currently boarded-up building.
The chief of Odessa’s Cultural Heritage Protection Department, Andrei Shelugin, said that the building used to house communal flats, but is now privately owned. Built between 1846 and 1849 and designed by a well-known French architect, it is a historic structure and therefore cannot be demolished, according to city law.
Andrey Shelugin.
The city, he explains, has asked the owners to renovate numerous times, but to no avail.
“They say, ‘We will do it, but we are currently having financial problems,’” Shelugin said. “The court can oblige them to start working on the building. If they do not, the court can take the property away from them, with compensation… determined by the market value. But in Ukraine, there are no precedents for this law being applied. In reality, it is not used.”
According to Shelugin, the apartments at 11 Gogol Street started being bought up about ten years ago and the building has been unoccupied for years. “They wanted to turn it into a hotel. I think they were looking for investors or sponsors. That is just my assumption.”
According to government documents, which list neither a phone number nor email address, the owners are Petr Semyonovich Shlemis, his father, Semen Petrovich Shlemis, and his father’s wife, Marina Davidovna Goyfman.
As it turns out, Petr Shlemis resides at 9 Gogol Street, just next door. The hallway of his apartment building features Renaissance fresco-style paintings on the walls and a skylight. Yet all attempts to reach Shlemis by ringing his doorbell, slipping a note under his door, or sending messages to his Facebook profile went unanswered.
On Shlemis’s public profile on the dating site Badoo there is a photo of him in a swimming pool with two toy crocodiles, but he does not list among his interests Russian literature or reading. Instead, he writes that he enjoys chocolate cakes, whisky, saunas, comedy shows, singing in the shower, and traveling to Barcelona, Rome and Paris. His Facebook profile indicates that he is a graduate of Odessa’s Civil Engineering Institute.
Additional research uncovered a possible link between Shlemis and a property in San Francisco, as well as over a dozen other apartments in Odessa, some of which may have been obtained after their owners used the properties for equity to obtain loans. The Shlemis family could not be reached for comment.
Alex Naum, who works at the youth hostel at 9 Gogol Street, said Shlemis purchased the Gogol house with plans to turn it into a hotel, but was prevented from doing so after a government official allegedly requested a bribe.
“The city wanted a $50,000 bribe to give permission for the hotel. That’s just a bribe, without the cost of the work,” Naum alleged.
Rather than paying the bribe, Naum said, the Shlemis family decided to just wait things out.
“In the meantime, the weather does its job – the wind and rain and everything – and now you have to spend I don’t know how much [to renovate it],” he said. “So it just sits there, falling apart – and it’s a real shame, because that building is one of Odessa’s jewels.”
Naum said Shlemis tried to sell the property a few years ago, but there were no takers.
“I’d be surprised if someone took it for free,” he said, noting that a couple of poor residents are squatting in the building, because they have nowhere else to go.
Given the fame of Gogol’s name around the world, wouldn’t it be easy enough to raise the money from his fans to restore the building? Perhaps, Naum said, but then someone would have to manage it, and then “the money would be stolen.”
Of course, Gogol’s Odessa residence is not the only place he lived in Ukraine.
In fact, there are at least three Gogol museums in the country: the house where he was born in Poltava oblast; a second one 37 kilometers away, in the village of Gogolevo, where he grew up (the village was then called Vasilyevka); and a third in the city of Nizhyn, where he attended university (the state university was named after him).
More recently, Russia inaugurated its first Gogol museum in the Moscow home where Gogol died. And in 2013 a Gogol museum was opened in Rome, in the house where Gogol stayed during his time living and working in Italy.
So is it still important to preserve the building where Gogol lived in Odessa, even if he only stayed there five months?
Some Odessa residents seem to think so.
The house at 11 Gogol Street was featured in at least two television programs, and in several newspaper articles, one of which compared the building to a haunted house. Photographers have entered the vacant building, capturing images of a broken toilet bowl and the crumbling ceiling. And in September, self-exiled Russian billionaire Yevgeny Chichvarkin (founder of Yevroset mobile phone company) read excerpts from Gogol’s books in front of the building, in order to focus attention on the historic building’s condition.
“It’s important, because it’s our history, it’s our culture,” said Tatiana Rybnikova, a guide at the Odessa Literary Museum. “A person who doesn’t know his or her history has no future.”
Gogol Literary Museum exhibits.
Speaking for the Odessa government, Shelugin said he shares that view.
“It’s important to keep everything – especially since it’s in the historic downtown that is now being nominated to UNESCO,” he said. “You can build something new and amazing, but to replicate something built by architects in the nineteenth century – unfortunately, no one can do that now.”
But Rybnikova said she suspects that, while it is illegal to demolish a historic building in the center of Odessa, some real estate developers are just allowing historic buildings to collapse under the weight of their own decrepitude. Then the government has no choice but to allow a new structure to be built in its place.
Indeed, according to Shelugin, that was the fate of a two-story building that collapsed two years ago. After it came crashing down, the historic building was removed from the register of historic monuments, and a new shopping center is being built on its footprint.
Still, not all Odessans feel Gogol’s residence needs to be renovated.
Yekaterina Khomenko, a researcher at the Literary Museum, said that, given Ukraine’s dire financial situation, the preservation of historical buildings should not be given top priority – even if famous authors lived in them.
“Maybe we can keep memories in other ways – like republishing old books,” she said.
Rather than renovating houses where famous authors lived, limited funds would be better spent on lesser-known writers, she said.
“We have forgotten authors who need publishers,” she said. “We have no money to do research on authors who were executed by the Soviets.” RL
Nikolai Gogol’s five-month stay in Odessa during the winter of 1850 and 1851 was somewhat unplanned. Gogol had originally wanted to travel further south – to Greece or Turkey – to avoid the Russian winter, but was forced to halt in Odessa, because his passport was not sufficient for the international journey.
He arrived in October – too late to make the journey by land back to Moscow, given the poor state of Russia’s roads. So Gogol had to brave the winter in Odessa – fearing the chill of sea winds.
In letters he wrote from Odessa to his mother, sister and friends, he reported that he was getting work done, but was sometimes lonely in the home of his relative, who was not in the city at the time.
“I am comfortable, and no one can disturb me,” he wrote to a friend on November 7, 1850. “I have a lot of space to myself and sometimes the house feels even a bit too empty.”
Already famous, Gogol, friends remembered, did not like the attention he got on the street. Whenever a group of university students started following him, he would dive into the closest courtyard to get away from them.
A visitor to old Odessa cannot help but notice that much of the city’s beautiful historic buildings are in a sorry state. In some places, pieces of rusty pipes have fallen off, and balconies have rotted away. Facades are unpainted. Windows are broken or their glass is missing altogether. The old mailboxes are rusty. The sidewalks are full of potholes.
Even public buildings are suffering.
At the city’s art museum, the floors dip in some places and rise in others. The hardwood floors look like they have not been refinished for 20 years.
In 1992, the city’s last remaining active synagogue collapsed. It was only by sheer luck no one was inside at the time.
Odessa’s state archive, also located inside a mid-nineteenth-century synagogue, also seems on the verge of ruin. In 2003, one part of the building separated from the rest, and now the whole structure is supported by wooden beams. Cracks run through many walls. Employees put dates on the tape they use to cover them. This gives them a sense of how rapidly the cracks are expanding, when the tape rips.
“An architect came and told us that it’s in such bad condition that it could collapse at any moment,” said the archive’s deputy director, Liliya Bilousova. “What can we do? Close down and go home? We were closed for three years, but they asked us to reopen because so many people wanted to visit the archive.”
Government officials in Odessa attribute the poor condition of Odessa’s historic buildings to more than just insufficient maintenance.
The problem, they say, is that Odessa was built on top of underground passages – 2,500 kilometers of catacombs run beneath the city. The catacombs, originally dug to mine the stone from which Odessa was built, were later used by smugglers to avoid import taxes or to sell contraband, and again by partisans hiding from the Nazis during the Second World War. But the underground passages are also compromising the foundations of Odessa buildings.
Another problem is that most houses in Odessa were built from a kind of limestone called “rakushechnik” that weakens in humidity or moisture.
“In the open air, it will only last 120 years,” Andrei Shelugin said. “The rock absorbs moisture, but with certain coatings that prevent moisture from getting into the rock, it can stand for as long as a thousand years. It needs plastering to be protected from the atmosphere.”
The city’s nineteenth-century structures were built before water and sewer pipes were laid, Shelugin explained, and leaks can spell disaster for walls built from rakushechnik.
Gogol was of course not the only famous author who visited Odessa.
The Odessa homes of Alexander Pushkin and Konstantin Paustovsky, the Soviet author who wrote an autobiographical book about his life in the city soon after the communist revolution, are both museums.
The city also, at one time or another, welcomed or was home to Isaac Babel, Sholem Aleichem, Alexander Kuprin, Maxim Gorky, Korney Chukovsky, Anton Chekhov, and Anna Akhmatova, to name a few.
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