A Russian Journey, Part II: A Life-Changing Year in Odesa
How Ukraine Transformed My Language, My Studies, and My World
In part 1 of this series, I discussed the Russian literature I studied in my first two years as a student of Russian language and literature at the University of St Andrews. In this part I’ll be looking at the year-abroad component of my degree, which I spent in Odesa, Ukraine from 1995–96.
In part 3, I cover the literature I studied in my junior and senior honours years back at St Andrews.
It’s almost 30 years to the day since I boarded the plane at Gatwick and my life changed.
Students studying Russian to honours at St Andrews had a decision to make: whether to complete our degree in five years by spending the middle year in a Russian-speaking country, or completing the degree in four years and spending only a semester abroad. I opted for the year abroad. It turned out to be one of the most life-changing decisions of my life, with repercussions that have reverberated through my life ever since.
Our university had links with Odesa, though we could have chosen any Russian-speaking region. I was one of three students to opt for Odesa and, to be honest, I don’t really remember much about the planning and preparation. I wish I’d been keeping a diary, but I didn’t start doing that until departing on the trip. I’m grateful that I at least did that, because it’s become a valuable record that I’ve referred to many times over the years.
I spent the night of 27 August 1995 at a fellow student’s parents’ house in Dagenham, then set off early doors with him for Gatwick Airport. We met the third student that was going with us at Gatwick and boarded a flight for Moscow. And we were off!
We spent a couple of nights in Moscow before catching a flight to Odesa. It was quite a culture shock, let me tell you. I didn’t realise at the time just how crazy the 90s were in Russia and other former Soviet countries; I guess I had nothing to compare it to and it really didn’t matter what it was like, as it was was going to be a culture shock regardless.
The university had arranged accommodation for us, living with families in the city, and had also organised teaching jobs for us at state schools. My room was in an old apartment building on Zhukovsky Street (now Sviatoslava Karavanskoho Street), slap bank in the city centre. My landlady lived with her teenaged son and neither of them spoke any English. I expressed dismay at that in my diary, but of course it turned out to be the best thing for my language.
Teaching
I taught English to young kids for a few weeks in State School No 117, but that didn’t last too long before I was assigned some pupils to tutor privately in their homes. I shared teaching duties with one of the other St Andrews students and we formed some nice relationships with the pupils and their families over the year. The mother of one of the pupils was also a teacher, so we exchanged English lessons with her daughter for Russian lessons with her. That was how I got to read Eugene Onegin in Russian. I still cherish my copy of that book.
I also found work at a local business school, teaching business English to adults. That was pretty scary, as I knew absolutely hee-haw about business. It ended up being a good job and I would sometimes visit the Odesa Opera House with the director of the business school.
I also found myself a Russian teacher from Odesa university and she and her family became like a lifeline to me. I’m sad that I don’t have any photographs of her and her family; I’ve lost touch with them and I think of them often. They helped me to get through the year as I struggled with depression for a large part of my time there, and that led to alcohol abuse. I don’t want to dwell on that in this essay, so I’ll keep it positive and say only that I have so much gratitude to Natalia Teacher and Sasha Husband for making me so welcome in their home. They lived at the 10th Station of the Big Fountain, a beach resort down the coast from the city, so getting there involved trams and trolley buses. Looking back I’m glad I got to experience that. I used buses, trams and trolley buses a lot, just as I did many years later when I lived and worked in Sochi and Almaty. An enduring memory I have of my commute is of standing on a busy tram down Fontanskaya Street on a sunny afternoon with the radio playing on my headphones, and The Captain of Her Heart came on by Double. It felt as if the world suddenly became a beautiful place; I could see all the people going about their business and I felt a real connection. I’ve had a few moments like that through my life, but I think that was the first one that I remember, possibly because my mood was so bloody low most of the time. So that song has made its way onto my Desert Island Discs playlist, just in case I’m ever invited on, you know? It pays to be prepared!
I would often have a lesson often on a Saturday morning and then stay on for lunch and good conversation. It was during those lunches that I got acquainted with the music of Vladimir Vysotsky and Akvarium, the latter of which has become one of my all-time favourite bands. They easily beat Pink Floyd, the Beatles and Genesis on my listening charts on last.fm, where I’ve been logging my music listening history since 2007.
I got to see Akvarium at the Albert Hall in 2014 and had a ticket to see them in Glasgow last year but BG got sick and cancelled. 😢
I have an enduring memory of Sasha Husband playing their album Navigator for me and my fellow student one Saturday afternoon, drinking Horilka (homemade Ukrainian liquor) and singing along to Ficus Religiozny and Customs Blues. We’d also have gone down to Chaika Beach near their house for a dip in the sea, something I did often at various beaches during my year in Odesa.
Part of my lessons with Natalia involved reading Chekhov’s short stories, again a book that I now treasure.
Natalia was also a big help when it was getting near the end of my time in Ukraine and I had to write a term paper in Russian. She proofread it for me and even lent me an old-school typewriter for me to type it out.
Without Natalia and her family, I’m not sure that I’d have seen the year out. I’m actually feeling quite emotional now thinking back on everything they did for me. I wish I could tell them!
Culture
I’ve touched on some aspects of the culture, with Vysotsky and Akvarium, but there was so much more. The biggest surprise to me was falling in love with ballet. I grew up in a working-class family on the west coast of Scotland. Going to see operas and ballets was just not something that we did. Billy Elliot was still seven years away and I think the only time I’d been in a theatre would have been to see pantomimes as a kid.
Odesa has one of the most beautiful opera houses in Europe. It also has its own philharmonic orchestra and theatre. The theatre was literally five minutes from my flat, and the opera house wasn’t too much further.
I think I went to the opera house for the first time with the two other St Andrews students and one of their landladies. It was Carmen, but sung in Russian. If I thought the outside of the opera house was beautiful, the inside absolutely blew my mind. I’d never seen anything like it. And the opera? I didn’t record much in my diary. Just this:
16 September 1995
We went to the Opera and Ballet Theatre at night and saw Carmen. I really enjoyed it. It was a bit hard to get what was going on, but enjoyable nevertheless. The theatre is breathtaking inside. I've never seen a building like it!
I saw Carmen again later when the director of the business school treated me, but that first time was the beginning of my love affair with the Odesa Opera and Ballet Theatre. I went regularly and became particularly fond of the ballet. I ended up writing my dissertation on the theatre and got to know some of the staff. I’d even go on my own sometimes, something I’d have found baffling just a year earlier.
Operas and Ballets I Saw
This list is from what I noted in my diary and kept programs for. Some of them I’ll have seen multiple times and there are probably others that I’ve not got programs for. It’s interesting to note that, of all the programs I have, the only one in the Ukrainian language was Madame Butterfly. I would imagine that it’s quite different today.
Operas
Carmen
La Traviata
Iolanthe
My Fair Lady
Eugene Onegin
Madame Butterfly
Aida
Ballets
Giselle
La Sylphide
Les Sylphides
Bambi
The Nutcracker
Swan Lake
Carmen Suite
Classical concerts
I wasn’t so much a stranger to classical music as I was to opera and ballet, but I still had never been to a classical concert. The big one that changed my life was when I heard Shostakovich’s 10th Symphony for the first time. I became a massive Shostakovich fan after that and have remained so to this day. One day I’ll get to hear my daughter playing principal horn on that piece, that famous Elmira motif, and my heart will burst.
The other concert that blew me away was Holst’s Planets Suite. I played it today as I was writing this and it’s so good. Honestly. What a suite!
Here are the concerts I saw that I have made a note of or kept programs for:
Sergei Rachmaninoff, Piano Concerto No.1 in F sharp minor (revised version) op. 1 (1891,rev.1917), conducted by Igor Shavruk; Soloist—Boris Bloch
César Franck, Symphony in D minor, conducted by Igor Shavruk; Soloist—Boris Bloch
Gustav Holst, The Planets, conducted by Hobart Earle (USA)
Franz Liszt, Concerto for Piano and Orchestra No. 2 in A major, conducted by Vyacheslav Blinov; Soloist—Ethella Chupryk
Alexander Mosolov, Iron Foundry (Op. 19, 1926–27), Music of Machines
Alexander Scriabin, Symphony No. 2, Op. 29, in C minor
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Requiem, D minor, K. 626, conducted by Igor Shavruk
Sergei Rachmaninoff, Piano Concerto No.2 in C minor op. 18, conducted by Viktor Ploskina; Soloist—Ludmila Martsevich
Dmitri Shostakovich, Symphony No.10 in E minor, Op.93 (1953)
Film, TV and Radio
Ah yes, that old cultural touchstone. Russian cinema is very different from UK or American cinema. There were plenty of American movies played on the channels I had access to, often dubbed in a single, monotonous voice for every character. I’m sure any native Russian speaker reading this will know exactly what I’m talking about. It’s weird, but you get used to it.
TV Shows
Russians love their soaps as much as the Brits do. I grew up on Coronation Street, Eastenders, Brookside, Neighbours and Home and Away. A popular show in Odesa was Tropikanka, a Brazilian soap whose Portuguese title was Tropicaliente. For language acquisition, soaps are great. My landlady had this on in the kitchen at tea time every night, and if ever I went to visit my fellow St Andrews student in the village where she lived on the outskirts of the city, her landlady would stop what she was doing as soon as the theme music for Tropikanka started.
Another one I watched a lot was Hélène et les Garçons, or Элен и ребята in Russian. It’s a French sitcom for young people—think Hollyoaks—and it was on in the afternoons. Again, a fantastic show for language acquisition.
Movies
The big discovery for me was when my landlady knocked on my room to tell me that Stalker was on. I stuck it on and watched it, mesmerised by what I was seeing. I became an instant fan of Andrei Tarkovsky’s films and have remained so. Stalker is a sci-fi movie based on the book Roadside Picnic by the Strugatsky brothers. It’s dark and weird and deep, just my kind of film.
And then there was Leonid Gadai, the film maker who brought us such wonderful movies as Operation Y and Other Shurik’s Adventures, The Diamond Arm, 12 Chairs, Ivan Vasilyevich Changes His Profession and Kidnapping, Caucasian Style. There’s another movie I loved that I thought was a Gadai picture, Gentlemen of Fortune; on checking Letterboxd, I learned it was directed by Alexander Sery. My landlady loved these movies and would always tell me when they were coming on. I’m not sure how to describe them; maybe the closest I can think of would be the Pink Panther movies starring Peter Sellers, kind of slapstick comedies of errors. I loved them and ended up buying VHS copies of a lot of them before coming back home.
Another stand-out movie that I’ve watched countless times since then was The Irony of Fate, or Enjoy your Bath by Eldar Ryazanov. It’s a picture that Russian speakers love to watch at new year, as it’s set during that holiday. The music in it is wonderful too and I listen to the soundtrack a lot.
So it’s fair to say that movies and TV were a big part of cultural and language acquisition and have remained so. All of the films I mentioned above—and many, many more—are now available to watch for free with English subtitles on Mosfilm studio’s YouTube channel. How good is that!
Radio
I can’t mention media for language acquisition without talking about the two radio stations I had on in my room pretty much every day, Prosto Radio and Radio Glas. Those two stations were my constant companions and must’ve done wonders for my language. My favourite host to listen to was Eleonora Gratsiotova and I have a cherished cassette tape of Radio Glas that I recorded on my Walkman that includes an interview with the band Bravo—another band I loved and came home with some of their CDs—adverts and music. I made a Spotify playlist of the music that was on that tape, so have a wee listen. There’s are two tracks on there by Valery Syutkin, the former vocalist for Bravo. I once played one of those songs on guitar at a gig I was playing on Arran in Scotland where there just happened to be some Russians in the audience and they were blown away! That Syutkin solo album is one that my wife also has. It’s a belter!
Travel
I did do some travelling from Odesa. Our school arranged a trip to the Bilhorod-Dnister fortress and the surrounding Sofiyivsky Park (Wikipedia). The fortress is on the estuary of the Dniester and is steeped in history.
I also took an overnight train to spend a weekend in the beautiful city of Lviv, a city with a checkered history of being passed back and forth over the years. I travelled with my fellow student and it was quite an experience on the overnight train there and back. We went coupe (2nd class) on the way there and lux (1st class) on the way back. Coupe was cool as we shared with a Russian-speaking man and his young son and enjoyed some good conversation with them.
I’m a bit annoyed at myself for not travelling more. I didn’t even visit Kyiv. I also had an invitation from the semester abroad students to join them on a trip to Yalta. I mean why would I not visit Yalta? The me writing this is appalled, although looking through my diary, I know fine well why I didn’t, and it was mainly down to depression. Same goes for Istanbul. In fact I never sailed anywhere from Odesa, Ukraine’s biggest sea port. But, again, rather than dwelling on what I didn’t do, I’m choosing gratitude for what I did do. And Lviv was lovely.
Books
Books, finally! I read a few books during my year. Besides reading Chekhov and Pushkin with my teachers in Russian, it was all English novels I read. I got a membership of the British Council library and used it a lot.
The Bone People, Keri Hulme
Sexing the Cherry, Jeanette Winterson
Imajica, Clive Barker
Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy
Walking on Glass, Iain Banks
Animal Farm, George Orwell
A Disaffection, James Kelman
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Muriel Spark
The Wasp Factory, Iain Banks
Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier
The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde
Emma, Jane Austen
Dissertation
I also got a membership of the Odesa State Library to do research for my dissertation, which I wrote on the Odesa Opera and Ballet Theatre.
It was an interesting paper to write, though not terribly academic in content. But it did get me access to go behind the scenes and get to know some of the theatre staff. I only wish I’d taken more photos! I have very few to look back on. If it were now I’m sure I’d be coming home with too many!
Conclusion
As I write this now, some 30 years later, I still have a strong sense of the impact that that year had on me. I remember it being difficult being back home again and that surprised me. I try hard not to dwell on how hard it was. Time helps with that. I prefer to think about what an achievement it was: I did the scary thing and I got through it. I’m glad I kept a diary because I’m sure I’d have forgotten a lot of how it felt without it.
What I will say is that my language improved in leaps and bounds, something that really became apparent when I started my junior honours year at St Andrews in September 1996. That alone would have made the decision to go the right one. But perhaps even more important was the culture that I took in, something that I hope I’ve managed to convey in this essay. Travel is so important and I hadn’t done a whole lot of it before that trip. I came back with a better sense of the world and myself, and I continued to live and work abroad after I graduated, before moving back to Scotland to raise my kids in 2008.
I still feel the pull of the Russian-speaking world and I’m enjoying this period of my life, looking back at the literature I read back then and reading it again now and making notes on my Substack.
If I were to sum up the year in a single word, it would be intense. Everything about it was intense: the relationships, the hardship, the emotions. I’d love to go back some day and see how much it’s changed.
Very neat and thoughtful reflections. I hope I'm able to visit some day!
It is so interesting to read how a foreigner sees your country, but actually, I have never been to Odessa. I hope your depression wasn't because of your trip to Ukraine. Reading your article, I am even more sad that I will never see Odessa. That theater building is much more beautiful than the Peterburg Mariinsky Theater. And the people you describe are so kind. And culture! Love it.