Mutiny and melancholy

摘要

Mysterious and melancholy, with the exotic airs of the Black Sea suffusing its stones, Odessa defies categorisation. It is Russian to its core, yet in many ways not Russian at all. "Scouted by a Neapolitan mercenary, named by a Russian empress, governed by her one-eyed secret husband, built by two exiled French noblemen, modernised by a Cambridge-educated count, and celebrated by his wife's Russian lover": with this thumbnail historical sketch Charles King, an American academic, opens his finely written and evocative portrait of the city, which is now a reluctant and semi-detached part of independent Ukraine.