Violent Spaces in Odessa 1905: Yushkevich, Kipen, Aizman

Odessa, founded in 1794, grew rapidly from port city on the "Yiddishland" border to a multi-ethnic metropolis of the Russian empire and a Jewish centre of Eastern Europe. At the beginning of the 20th century the city became a space of violence and an area of conflicts for the historical, social, religious and cultural transition phases. 1905 is characterized by workers’ strikes, revolutionary wave, brutal anti-Jewish pogroms, conversion and assimilation into Russian culture, which were all destructive for Jewish self-understanding. After the violence of 1905 Odessa lost its cosmopolitan European flair and Jewishness and became a city of myths.

Russian-Jewish authors like Semen Iuškevič, Aleksandr Kipen, David Aizman reflect in their literary texts this period in Odessa 1905, depicting not only the resulting collective violence but also its political, topographical and social spaces in the city. Till now this literature is not translated in any other language and this field is not investigated in any historical, cultural or literary research.

The focus of this paper is to analyse public and private, sociological and geographical violent spaces in Odessa in these literary texts as well as their transition areas. These spaces of conflict will be constued in the light of rhetoric of violence and cultural space theories by Hannah Arendt, Jury Lotman and Georg Simmel.