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as the events that happen to people. This does away with bizarre
quirks and itches . The past is a painting by Paolo Uccello , full of
sharp spears and prancing horses, bright shields and vivid banners
stiffening in an unfelt breeze. The world is frozen into moments of
furious inactivity contained neatly within rectangular gilt frames .
The images are strangely mute, the time and place supplied by the
viewer. Everything everywhere is happening now. At once.
The man-who-swims-into-history is, let us say, from Odessa,
where cream-colored warehouses and gray piers reflect sharply in
the dark port waters of a darker sea. As a Russian port, it is rather
new. Early in the eighteenth century , Czar Peter the Great was not
content with merely being seven feet tall; he also wanted to shake
Russia , if not the world . Peter had a gargantuan appetite for experi–
ence. He traveled to Holland and learned how to repair clocks. He
returned to Russia and decided to build a European capital on the
swampy shores of the Gulf of Finland. When he was not fighting
Swedes, tinkering with clocks, or shivering in the damp and gloomy
climate of his new capital, Peter dreamed of a warm-water port on
the Black Sea. But that body of water was far away from Moscow
and even farther from St. Petersburg. In 1884, more than one hun–
dred fifty years after his death, it was exactly nine hundred thirty–
three miles from Moscow according to the
Encyclopedia Britannica.
By
the time of the 1911 edition it was eighty-four miles farther away.
Later in the eighteenth century , Catherine the Great was smart
enough to build her palace on high, cool ground thirty miles away
from Peter's capital. Between taking lovers and attending executions
- sometimes of the same men - she sent Cossacks to seize all the
Turkish positions along the north shore of the Black Sea. One of the
key fortresses was Haji-Bey, on land that had in reverse order been
ruled by Tatars , Poles, Lithuanians, Slavonians, Huns, and, in very
dim and distant days , countrymen of Aristotle. For twenty-five years
the troops of the Sultan, the soldiers of the Prophet with their fierce
moustaches and high, soft, flowing headgear, kept their scimitars
polished with the blood of northern barbarians. But shortly before
Catherine succumbed, so did they . In 1794 French engineers were
called in to build both a city and a port. Haji-Bey became Odessa .
When Western Europeans arrive, when engineers arrive , his–
tory becomes more complicated, less attributable to love affairs , dys–
pepsia and feelings of inferiority. Something as humble as a Bill of
Lading becomes an important force. Few Russians in the Age of En–
lightenment could read letters or numbers, and who was to protect the
