A Female Poetics of the Imperial: Vera Inber’s Literary Conceptions of Odesa

Abstract

The present article examines Vera Inber’s literary conception of Odesa. The writer and poet (1890–1972) wrote about her hometown in an autobiographically inspired povest’ called Mesto pod solntsem (1928), and she mentions Odesa also in her writing during the Leningrad siege, both in her collection of poems Dusha Leningrada (The Soul of Leningrad, 1943) and in her diary Pochti tri goda (Almost Three Years, 1943–45). The article explores how Inber’s conception of Odesa is shaped by a Russian-imperial approach to understanding space and how her notion of Odesa constantly takes shape against the backdrop of the Petersburg text. These questions are examined in regard to how Inber writes the spaces of Ukraine, of Russia, of the Empire, and how she refers to the notions of province and center. One key moment consists of Inber’s attempt to ‘feminize’ narrations of belonging to cities and states, both in regard to Odesa and in regard to Leningrad. Inber’s imperial coloration of understanding space the article contextualizes with respect to her marginalized biographical position. It seems that through creating a ‘female’ poetics of the imperial Inber makes the imperial narrative her own and shapes her own belonging to it in a way that makes it meaningful and accessible to her.