"Ukrainian Detox": Odessa, a City Where Hearts Are Broken

With this post, Intent continues its series of reviews dedicated to contemporary Ukrainian publications. The reviews for Intent as part of this project are written by Maria Galina—a Ukrainian writer, poet, and literary critic, and winner of several literary awards.

I think I’ve already mentioned here that Odessa is, in a certain sense, a unique city, because it derives its meaning almost exclusively from nostalgia. This nostalgia is fueled by those Odessans who left the city to pursue their careers (during the Soviet era, this usually meant moving to Moscow), but emigration played the most significant role here: pre-revolutionary (when people left in search of a better life), the 1920s (when they fled first from civil unrest and then from the Soviet regime), the 1970s (again from Soviet rule, as people began to be allowed to leave), and the 1990s (when people fled the 1990s—because, well, it was the 1990s). Have I forgotten anything?

Now there’s a new wave: those who left because of the full-scale invasion. And we’re about to see (and are already seeing) a new wave of literature. It’s mostly devoted to the small and not-so-small dramas that accompany a forced separation from one’s roots (I recently wrote here about Nataliya Vorozhbit’s plays). Importantly, this latest wave has a certain distinctive feature. It consists mainly of women—with children, without children, but women nonetheless. The men stayed behind, and the women have to cope on their own with the challenges of relocation, navigate a new life, start from scratch, and so on. And worry about those who stayed behind.

So it’s no surprise that the literature of this new wave of emigration will be predominantly female. It will be about adaptation. About alienation and the growing misunderstanding between those who left and those who stayed behind. About the severing of family ties. About forging new ones. These will be so-called “women’s” novels (Kateryna Zaremba’s *Yevshan* has just been published), travelogues, literary diaries—you name it. But—women’s literature. Here—war prose; there—struggling with a foreign way of life, rebuilding from scratch... Will it be nostalgic? That, in fact, isn’t such an easy question.

Olena Boryshpolets, a poet, writer, and journalist from Odesa, stands somewhat apart here, as at the start of the active phase of the war she moved to the United States as a writer-in-residence at the University of Pittsburgh. The book of short stories and essays *Ukrainian Detox* (*Kondor*, 2023) was published with the support of the Kraków Institute of Literature, so this is, obviously, a bit different. But “constant search and escape” is a theme already mentioned in the blurb. “Search and escape” refers to the uncertainty that usually accompanies a change in life, country, and language. It “resets” everything external—all past experiences, all connections—leaving only what remains in memory, what one can take with them. But memory is a treacherous beast.

It is precisely in this state of complete uncertainty (the book, as mentioned above, was published in 2023) that the author writes a book intended to help her find some sense of direction. What does it mean to find one’s bearings? First, who am I? And second, what is my purpose?

“I’m a thirty-nine-year-old cisgender woman. I’ve been married twice… I have a dog, a bicycle, a vivid imagination, but no illusions”—that’s how the story that gave the entire book its title begins. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? “I’m comfortable, small, compact, and well-equipped. I have a small, undemanding stomach, strong lungs, a flat stomach, and strong arm muscles. I don’t take any medication, don’t wear glasses, and don’t need hormones...” — yes, this is Olga Tokarczuk’s *Runners*. When you’re constantly shifting social roles and geographical locations, you have to find a way to anchor yourself. That is, to define what makes you who you are. Here, though, the existential situation is a bit different—the protagonist explores herself through a literary reimagining of the COVID chronicles. So, you could say we’re lucky—we have an “existence within an existence” (that’s irony, just so you know).

And this is precisely where I ran into (as a reviewer) certain problems. Because, you see, I’m a systematic reviewer.

Here’s what I mean. The first story, “Beautiful People,” is dated. It’s November 2015, and the setting is Odesa. The entire story is a letter addressed to a friend. The protagonist mentions two key cities at the same time—Odesa and Paris—both of which turn out to be dangerous, almost hostile, although Odesa is still a city where one can somehow hide from the horrors of life. But here’s the thing. The other stories aren’t dated, and we can only guess when they were written based on indirect references. Well, yes, the story “Ukrainian Detox,” which gave the collection its title, was most likely written in 2020, since by 2021, COVID had already become routine. Yes, the last story in the collection, “Red Moon,” ends with the line: “At home, the war had been raging for two years. I was returning to Odesa.” Most likely, it’s from 2015, but theoretically, it could also be from 2023. So I can’t really trace the author’s evolution or the direction of her explorations—which is always important to me when it comes to a collection. The problem here is that memories are fluid. At different times, you remember different things, and even if it’s the same thing, it’s different each time.

So, about memories. Usually, it’s nostalgia that takes us back to a golden age—which is, of course, an illusion, but that’s how it works. Odessa, as portrayed by Boryshpolets (by the way, in the story “Testa Rossa,” she uses that now-classic definition of Odessa as a city “between the Black Sea and the steppe”), is, first and foremost, a dangerous city, riddled with childhood and teenage traumas; people are rarely happy here; people die and kill here. Second, it’s a closed-off city and, despite the traditional perception, not very hospitable. “I’m warning you, girl from Kherson herself…” Strangers aren’t very welcome here, but the locals are indifferent to their own people, too. Love is still possible here—even between a boy “from this side” of the ravine and a girl “from that side”—but loss is still more likely. As a result, Boryshpolets’ heroes and heroines feel suffocated (such is the paradox of a city between the sea and the steppe), and, perhaps, that is precisely why they set out on their quests, running anywhere just to run—even to Starobilsk, to the set of the film adaptation of Serhiy Zhadan’s novel, “on the stinking ‘Kyiv–Lysychansk’ train.” But mostly to “cultural landmarks.” Paris, Florence. The protagonist of the last story flies to Greece. Why? Because he was “deeply captivated by the culture of Greek mourners.” The protagonist travels in search of “a philosophy of attitudes toward death.”

So it turns out that Boryshpolets’ characters are traveling not so much “away from” as “toward,” and they are traveling in search of meaning, needing not so much new cities as new myths in order to somehow rid themselves of the past. The thing is, these myths turn out to be anything but new. And one of them is the myth of “cultural Europe,” which the heroine debunks as early as the first story. Because Paris turns out to be, well, just so-so Paris (though, by the way, that’s where she meets me and my husband, because we’re, of course, cool). And this search, this new state of being, needs to be reflected upon somehow.

This is where a certain paradox arises. Although, maybe it’s perfectly natural. Because when it comes to Odesa—to the recognizable Odesa bohemian scene, to the geography of Odesa’s shady outskirts—the literary material, with all its tension, is noticeably denser, because all of one’s previous life experience—with its traumas and memories—is poured into it. Memory captures vivid episodes, random images, and intense emotional moments—even if they’re traumatic.

It’s a different story with other cities, as they emerge more as vivid, fleeting sketches; they are developed on the fly, without any deep personal experience behind them. Perhaps this is precisely why the author attempts to fill in the gaps in her own experience through cultural parallels and references. Over the course of 80 pages (it’s a short book), we encounter the names of Miller, Kafka, Suetonius, Marcus Aurelius, Tacitus, Cervantes, Velázquez, Flaubert, Wagner, Mahler, Virginia Woolf, and others—and even a quote from Dante. Incidentally, the opening lines of *The Divine Comedy* are accompanied by a note explaining that these are indeed the lines in question. Clearly, the author doesn’t have much faith in her readers’ education. It’s nice that neither Zhadan nor Khaetsky, when they appear in the text, require any explanation.

I’ll return once more to the absence of dates beneath the texts. Because if they were there, I’d be certain. As it stands, I can only assume that the author, in her literary evolution, is experimenting with a toolbox such as the “new European style”—whatever that may mean: this includes any English-language prose, Balkan literature, and so on. In other words, once again, an escape and a search—this time, an escape from the post-Soviet mainstream and a search for an answer to the question, “Why am I here?” And it is precisely here that we observe the transformation of narrative prose into essays—or at least essay-like inserts and layers. The experiment itself is interesting, but essays are actually such a tricky thing...

As for the “new European narrative” as such, as awkward as it may be for me to admit, I have to say that I don’t really understand it myself. That’s precisely why the story “His Name Was Christ, and He Killed Her” remains a mystery to me. Perhaps this can be interpreted as a coded tragic fate of a European family, presented through Gospel allusions, but I could be wrong. Maybe you’ll come up with a different interpretation—it’ll be interesting to see.

But for now, let’s talk about the overall message of *Ukrainian Detox*, at least as I understood it. Life is turbulent; the traumas of childhood and coming of age won’t let you go (I can attest that Odessa, in this sense, was—or at least used to be—a very harsh city). If escape is even possible, it’s only into “world culture.” But…

Yes, Odessa isn’t the coziest place to live. But the thing is, all cities other than Odessa are illusory and are perceived mainly through cultural or chance experiences—because where else are we to find another...

And so the protagonist of the last story does return from the warm Greek islands to Odessa, where he suffered trauma and defeat.
 

Марія Галіна