Kaleidoscopic Odessa provides a detailed account of how local conceptions of imperial cosmopolitanism shaped the city's identity in a newly formed state.

Breaking the Tongue examines the implementation of the Ukrainization of schools and children's organizations in the 1920s and early 1930s.

Cosmopolitan Spaces in Odesa: A Case Study of an Urban Context is the first book to explore Odesa’s cosmopolitan spaces in an urban context from the nineteenth to twenty-first centuries. Leading scholars shed new light on encounters between Jewish, Ukrainian, and Russian cultures. They debate different understandings of cosmopolitanism as they are reflected in Odesa’s rich multilingual culture, ranging from intellectual history and education to music, opera, and literature. The issues of language and interethnic tensions, imperialist repression, and language choice are still with us today. Moreover, the book affords a historical view of what lay behind the Odesa myth, as well as insights into the Jewish and Ukrainian cultural revivals of the early twentieth century.

Winner of a National Jewish Book Award "Fascinating.…A humane and tragic survey of a great and tragic subject." —Jan Morris, Literary Review From Alexander Pushkin and Isaac Babel to Zionist renegade Vladimir Jabotinsky and filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein, an astonishing cast of geniuses helped shape Odessa, a legendary haven of cosmopolitan freedom on the Black Sea. Drawing on a wealth of original sources and offering the first detailed account of the destruction of the city's Jewish community during the Second World War, Charles King's Odessa is both history and elegy—a vivid chronicle of a multicultural city and its remarkable resilience over the past two centuries.

Examining the way people imagine and interact in their cities, this book explores the post-cosmopolitan city. The contributors consider the effects of migration, national, and religious revivals (with their new aesthetic sensibilities), the dispositions of marginalized economic actors, and globalized tourism on urban sociality. The case studies here share the situation of having been incorporated in previous political regimes (imperial, colonial, socialist) that one way or another created their own kind of cosmopolitanism, and now these cities are experiencing the aftermath of these regimes while being exposed to new national politics and migratory flows of people. Caroline Humphrey is a Research Director in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. She has worked in the USSR/Russia, Mongolia, Inner Mongolia, Nepal, and India. Her research interests include socialist and post-socialist society, religion, ritual, economy, history, and the contemporary transformations of cities. Vera Skvirskaja is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Anthropology at Copenhagen University. She has worked in arctic Siberia, Uzbekistan and Ukraine. Her recent research interests include urban cosmopolitanism, educational migration in Europe and coexistence in the post-Soviet city.

Plot elements such as adventure, travel to far-flung regions, the criminal underworld, and embezzlement schemes are not usually associated with Soviet literature, yet an entire body of work produced between the October Revolution and the Stalinist Great Terror was constructed around them. In Writing RoguesCassio de Oliveira sheds light on the picaresque and its marginal characters – rogues and storytellers – who populated the Soviet Union on paper and in real life. The picaresque afforded authors the means to articulate and reflect on the Soviet collective identity, a class-based utopia that rejected imperial power and attempted to deemphasize national allegiances. Combining new readings of canonical works with in-depth analysis of neglected texts, Writing Rogues explores the proliferation of characters left on the sidelines of the communist transition, including gangsters, con men, and petty thieves, many of them portrayed as ethnic minorities. The book engages with scholarship on Soviet subjectivity as well as classical picaresque literature in order to explain how the subversive rogue – such as Ilf and Petrov’s wildly popular cynic and schemer Ostap Bender – in the process of becoming a fully fledged Soviet citizen, came to expose and embody the contradictions of Soviet life itself. Writing Rogues enriches our understanding of how literature was called upon to participate in the construction of Soviet identity. It demonstrates that the Soviet picaresque resonated with individual citizens’ fears and aspirations as it recorded the country’s transformation into the first communist state.