From Battleship Potemkin Mutineer to Fish and Chip Entrepreneur.

I have always been curious about the various characters who were either involved in the actual Battleship Potemkin mutiny or were part of Eisenstein's non-professional acting ensemble for the film. Walking down Preobrezhenskaya Street on my first trip to Odessa, I recall seeing a memorial plaque erected in Soviet times dedicated to one of the actors in Eisenstein classic film. So yesterday reading a tweet from a Russian Heritage page about Ivan Beshov (or Beshoff) really intrigued me. Born not far from Odessa in the early 1880s, Beshoff ended up as part of the mutinying crew of the Battleship Potemkin in 1905. Then there is a fascinating tale of how he fled first to Roumania and then to various parts of the world including London where he apparently met Lenin (and in other accounts even Trotsky) and then to Dublin where he was (at least) twice arrested as a spy. But he seemed to have led quite a peripatetic existence before he finally put roots down in Dublin. Although different accounts seem to give slightly different readings of the facts. In this link, for example, he tells an Italian journalist of his journeys to Italy and Argentina. Other links tell of putative meetings with Lenin and Trotsky and short visits back to the Soviet Union It also hints that the centenerian Beshoff' managed to drink the heavy drinking Taoiseach, Charles Haughey under the table on the day of his hundredth birthday.

In short, a curious life which also included working for a Soviet oil distribution company in Dublin and then devoting much of his life to founding what was said to be one of Dublin's major fish and chip shops. Comments on a post on a Russian facebook page has expressed some doubt as to whether Beshov (or Beshoff) ever did serve on the Potemkin given age and class considerations- the son of a judge would unlikely to have been born in a little place outside Odessa and serve as a mechanic at the age of 20. Though there may well be doubts as to what age he actually was given discrepancies between his stated age and official documents about him. All in all a fascinating story.

While not an Odessa-Buenos Aires-Trieste connection, his life did connect Odessa with Rosario and Dublin (Dublin and Trieste having their obvious Joycean topographical associations).

Dino Campana: Buenos Aires

Dino Campana

 
The impressions of Dino Campana on his trip- alongside other Italian emigrants- to Buenos Aires at the age of 23.

Buenos Aires

The vessel advances slowly 
In the morning greyness through the fog
Upon the yellow waters of a fluvial sea.
The city emerges- ashen and veiled
Past the threshold of a strange port.
Thronging in the harsh elation of impending battle
The emigrants rage and rampage.
Oranges are tossed by a group of Italians
Clothed in the absurd fashion of the portenos
To the wild-eyed and shrieking villagers.
A boy, of slight frame,
An offspring of liberty, surges forth,
A colourful ribbon in his hand.
And makes as if to greet them.
But the Italians snarl savagely.

Buenos Aires

Il bastimento avanza lentamente
Nel grigio del mattino tra le nebbia
sull'acqua gialla d'un mare fluviale
Appare la citta' girgia e velata.
Si entra in un porto strano. Gli emigranti
Impazzano e inferocian accalcandosi
Nell'aspra ebbrezza d'imminente lotta.
Da un gruppo d'italiani ch'e' vestito
In un modo ridicolo alla moda
Bonarense si gettano arance
Ai paesani stralunati e urlanti.
Un ragazzo dal porto legerissimo
Prole di liberta', pronto allo slancio
Li guarda colle mani nelle fascia
Variopinta ed accenna ad un saluto.
Ma ringhiano feroci gli italiani.

Odessa's Potemkin Steps Built from Triestine Sandstone.

"In addition to its palaces, churches, hotels, shops, museums, library, and schools, the city built a monument that has since become its best-known symbol: the giant stairway now known as the Potemkin steps. This city on a hill needed direct access to the harbour below it. Winding paths and rude wooden stairs served until the decision was made in 1837 to construct a 'monstrous staircase'. Using sandstone from Trieste, the Russian architects A.I.Mel'nikov and Pot'e laid 220 stairs. A man by the name of Upton executed the project... Through Eisenstein's famous film of the 1920s, the 'Battleship Potemkin' the stairs were made familiar to movie-gores all over the world. Koch commented: 'A flight of steps unequalled in magnificence, leads down the declivity to the shore and harbour'"

( from Patrick Herlihy, Odessa: A History 1794-1914 p 140)

Herlihy does go on to note that the Trieste sandstone was gradually replaced by granite from the Boh region. G. Sperandeo claims that it was two Italian architects, Rossi and Toricelli, who designed the staircase. 

Erwin Piscator, Lotte Lenya and others in Odessa (1931) for shooting 'The Revolt of the Fishermen'

Erwin Piscator

"Piscator's task ... was to make a film of Anna Seghers' novella The Revolt of the Fishermen. Originally the idea was that it should be produced in two versions, German and Russian, and to this end a German cast was engaged, including Lotte Lenya, Paul Wegener and Leo Reuss, and brought to Odessa on the Black Sea where shooting was supposed to start around the beginning of November. Not much seems to have got done during the three months of their stay there; according to Asja Lacis, who acted as Piscator's interpreter throughout the making of the film, there were weeks of delays as they waited for a lens hood; then Piscator replanned the fishing town which the art director had built him (for which he roped in John Heartfield, who had come to show his work in Moscow); they had to wait again finally for the whole thing to be rebuilt after a storm had blown it down. As a result the German version had to be scrapped; since Wegener for one was due to play Mephisto in Darmstadt in January; none of the footage remains. The Russian version however went forward, though the seeming intention that Wegener should play the part of Kedennek in both versions had to be abandoned. Part was shot on trawlers in Murmansk on the Arctic, most of the rest once more in Odessa; little was done in the studio. Piscator felt that he was keeping close to the form of the book, which describes a lone agitator's arrival in a semi-mythical fishing village and his desperate, almost fatalistic, leadership of a broken strike. But much of its almost classical compactness was lost, and there was a general enlargement and intensification, not only in the severe expressiveness of the photography, but also in the introduction of such episodes as a storm at sea, the burning of the trawler company's offices and Kedennek's funeral procession with its hundreds of mourning fishermen whose top hats (specially dispatched from Moscow) were symbolically blown off by the storm. 1200 fishermen were involved in the strike episodes, which became near-revolutionary crowd series."

(from John Willett The Theatre of Erwin Piscator: Half a Century of Politics in the Theatre pp.128-9)

As the German version never got made, viewers have been deprived of seeing Lotte Lenya's playing the role of Maria in the film). 

Chekhov's final travel plans (Trieste to Odessa)

In Anton Chekhov's last letter to his sister Masha we hear of the author's final travel plans. Complaining of the heat which he wishes to get away from, he states that he would like to go to Como but that everyone is running away from the heat there. And then he states that:

"I should like to go from Trieste to Odessa by steamer, but I don't know how far it is possible now, in June and July... If it should be rather hot it doesn't matter; I should have a flannel suit. I confess I dread the railway journey. It is stifling in the train now, particularly with my asthma, which is made worse by the slightest thing. Besides, there are no sleeping carriages from Vienna right up to Odessa; it would be uncomfortable. And we should get home by railway sooner than we need, and I have not had enough holiday yet. ..."

He had visited Trieste ten years earlier in the autumn of 1894.

Pier Paolo Pasolini : Il di da la me muart (The Day of My Death). A Triestine Prophesy.

Pier Paolo Pasolini

The Day of My Death

In a city, Trieste or Udine,
along an avenue of lindens
when the leaves change
colour in spring,
I shall fall down dead
under a sun burning
blond and high
and close my eyes,
leaving the sky to its light.


Under a linden warm with green
I shall fall into the black
of death, which the sun
and lindens will dispel.
Beautiful boys
will run in the light
that I've just left,
flying out of schools,
curls falling onto their brows.


I shall still be young
in a bright shirt
my sweet hair streaming
in the bitter dust.
I shall be still warm
and a boy running down
the asphalt avenue
shall lay a hand upon
my crystal lap.

(Translation Stephen Sartarelli)

Il dì da la me muàrt.

Ta na sitàt, Trièst o Udin, 
ju par un viàl di tèjs, 
di vierta, quan' ch'a múdin 
il colòur li fuèjs, 
i colarài muàrt 
sot il soreli ch'al art 
biondu e alt 
e i sierarài li sèjs, 
lassànlu lusi, il sèil. 

Sot di un tèj clípid di vert 
i colarài tal neri 
da la me muàrt ch'a dispièrt 
i tèjs e il soreli. 
I bièj zuvinús 
a coraràn ta chè lus 
ch'i ài pena pierdút, 
svualànt fòur da li scuelis 
cui ris tal sorneli. 


Jo i sarài 'ciamò zòvin 
cu na blusa clara 
e i dols ciavièj ch'a plòvin 
tal pòlvar amàr. 
Sarài 'ciamò cialt 
e un frut curínt pal sfalt 
clípit dal viàl 
mi pojarà na man 
tal grin di cristàl. 

Tomaž Šalamun: Acquedotto (or A Birth in Trieste Rescheduled)

Tomaž Šalamun

ACQUEDOTTO

I should've been born in Trieste in 1884
on the acquedotto, but it didn't turn out that way.
I remember the three-storied reddish house,
the ground floor with its furnished living room,
my great-grandfather (my father)
nervously studying the stock market reports,
blowing cigar smoke and calculating quickly.
When I was already for months inside my great-
grandmother, there was a family council,
the result of which was the postponement
of my arrival for two generations.
The decision was written down, the sheet stuffed
into an envelope, sealed and sent to an archive in Vienna.
I remember traveling back toward the light
on my belly, and watching an old man
fusing as he measured the shelf, taking another body from the 
shelf
and shoving it by the head down the air shaft.
I had the impression I was seven years old,
and that my substitute, my grandfather,
was a bit older, nine or ten.
I was composed. At the same time these events disturbed me.
I remember that for a time I withered,
most likely because of a strong light,
and then my lungs flattened like a bag.
When I reached the proper tonus I fell asleep.
I knew my body was down below,
and in my dream I saw it many times.
It was that of a slow-moving man with mustaches,
a dreamer and banker his whole life. 

(Tomaž Šalamun translated by Charles Simic)