The Odessa State Literary Museum

The  Odessa State Literary Museum, it was built in 1842 in the style of Russian classicism   by  the  architect Ludwig Otton and used to be the residence of Count Gagarin.

The Museum describes the Southern (and Odessa) period in the life of more than two hundred writers, among them a number of foreign writers.

Pushkin’s words, “And so, I lived in Odessa…” could be echoed just as well by Appolon Maykov, Nikolai Gnedich and Pyotr Vyazemsky. At one time or another Odessa was visited by Lev Tolstoy, Sergei Aksakov, Nikolai Dobrolyubov, Stepan Skitalets, Vis-sarion Belinsky, Nikolai Gogol, Alexander Ostrovsky, Maxim Gorky, Anton Chekhov,  Leonid Andreyev, Alexei Tolstoy, Ivan Bunin, Alexander Kuprin, Vladimir Mayakovsky and Mikhail Svetlov.

Among the Ukrainian poets, writers and playwrights who lived and worked in Odessa were Lesya Ukrainka, Ivan Franko, Mikhail Kotsyubinsky, Mark Kropivnitsky, Pyotr Nishchinsky, Mikhail Staritsky, Ivan Nechuy-Levitsky, and Pavel Tychina.

Odessa was the home town of many famous Soviet writers, Anna Akhmatova, Isaac Babel, Eduard Bagritsky, Vera Inber, llya llf, Valentin Katayev, Semen Kirsanov, Yevgeny Petrov and Nikolai Chukovsky.

The names of many foreign writers are also linked with Odessa, some more than others. They include the Bulgarian writers and poets Christo  Botev, Ivan Vazov, Aleco  Konstantinov, Lyuben Karavelov,  Georgi  Rakovski, the great Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz, the Czech writer Svatopluk tech, the Hungarian writers Mate Zalka and Bela  Balazs,  the  Americans Mark Twain, Theodore Dreiser and William Saroyan, and the French writers Henri Barbusse and Georges Simenon.

Many Soviet writers lived for a time in Odessa. Among them were Yuri Olesha, Kons-tantin Paustovsky and Maximilian Voloshin, to name just a few.

But to return to Ulitsa Lastochkina. When you cross P’oshchad Kommuny and approach the beginning of Uiitsa Pushkinskaya pay attention to a small section of the street paved with an unusual light-yellow stone which differs from the bluish-black covering of the rest of the street. This is a type of clinker, made from clay and treated in a furnace until vitrified. It has proved to be exceptionally wear-resistant. This small section of road was paved with clinker in 1913, but the onset of World War I prevented further work, although it had originally been decided to pave three streets with clinker because it was found to be both wear- and frost-resistant.