Odessa: Genius and Death in a City of Dreams (15 page)

After a day or so, passengers could be disembarked on the long mole, or built-up breakwater, that defined the so-called quarantine harbor. Each passenger was rowed ashore separately and placed in the charge of a uniformed soldier, with rifle in hand and bayonet fixed, who in turn conducted the passenger to the custom house at the end of the pier. Once there, the passenger’s travel documents were checked by a team of officials seated behind an iron railing. A doctor carried out a preliminary examination from behind a similar barrier, requesting that the passenger punch himself smartly under the arms and in the groin. The telltale sign of the plague—inflamed pustules over the lymph nodes—would presumably be easily discovered if the passenger winced in pain, while the examining physician avoided any direct contact with the potentially infected.

Once a passenger had been deemed disease-free, he was escorted, again under guard, to the lazaretto, the central quarantine facility that housed passengers during their period of observation, usually fourteen days. Situated on high ground, the lazaretto featured a large enclosure, perhaps twenty acres, of lawns and gravel pathways. Fronting on the sea was a row of buildings with separate apartments, each with a small courtyard and a few acacias. There, passengers were assigned to their quarters, at which point they were asked to strip naked and surrender their clothes in exchange for a flannel gown, underwear, stockings, and a woolen cap, all provided by the quarantine authorities. Their personal effects were taken to a separate chamber, where they were hung and fumigated for twenty-four hours. The central rule in the quarantine was to avoid contact with other passengers. Armed guards, usually old soldiers working for food and whatever gratuities might come their way, followed passengers on their walks along the lazaretto’s pathways. If they witnessed contact between two passengers, the quarantine clock would start over again, with both passengers cooling their heels for another fourteen days.

This was the way things were supposed to go, and sometimes the system worked as it was intended. The food was decent and the surroundings pleasant enough, especially when the acacias were in bloom in midsummer. Already by the 1830s the lazaretto was said to rival the one at Marseille, which since the eighteenth century had been the outstanding model for port quarantine systems around the world.
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The city’s health did improve over time, and despite periodic outbreaks of the plague, Odessa was never again threatened with the wholesale destruction that had loomed in Richelieu’s day. But with so many rules to be observed, and so many foreign travelers spending so much time in enforced isolation, sooner or later Odessans were bound to discover ways of making money. In fact, the business of disease came to play significant and unexpected roles in Odessa’s public life.

In a city where rule-flouting was a form of art, the quarantine system was ripe for abuse. Some travelers avoided quarantine altogether if they were willing to pay sufficient bribes. Others had their time in quarantine reduced or received the privilege of making periodic forays into town, so long as they returned at night. For those without cash or connections, the wait could seem interminable, which probably explained the carvings—names, initials, and other graffiti—that reportedly covered the wood-paneled walls of the customs office.
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For those consigned to the lazaretto for the full stay, there were plenty of other opportunities to be relieved of cash. The café and restaurant, as the only sources of sustenance, charged whatever rates they wished. Captains and seamen, along with passengers, whiled away the hours at the billiard table, losing money to the more experienced guards or lazaretto staff in the process.

The supply of food in the lazaretto was contracted to a private firm, a way of saving money for the usually strapped city government. The contractor would buy up foodstuffs in the town and suburbs, which would then be passed on, at a considerable markup, to passengers effecting the required quarantine. With passengers confined to the lazaretto for two weeks and the contractor enjoying a monopoly on supplies during that period, the opportunities for enrichment were enormous. The contract was so coveted, in fact, that the government eventually decided to limit the length of the contract to six years, with a requirement that a new firm be brought in at the end of that period.

The term-limited contract opened up avenues for creative businessmen to propose exceptions to the rule. One particularly enterprising firm came up with the novel idea of taking over the operation of the opera house—often a money-losing operation but critical to Odessans’ civic pride—if the government would waive the contract limit. That produced an odd codependence of etiology and entertainment. The quality of entertainment during any particular season usually depended on the virulence of the plague on the other side of the Black Sea. When disease was raging in the Ottoman ports and passengers were subjected to the maximum quarantine in Odessa, revenue flooded into the lazaretto—and provided plenty of funds for scheduling serious talent: the soaring soprano of a renowned diva, a new work by Rossini, the output of an up-and-coming playwright, or the offerings of a promising but itinerant composer. When Franz Liszt gave a series of piano concerts in Odessa in 1847 or when Nikolai Gogol sat through a run of his new play,
The Inspector-General
, they probably had little idea that their work was funded in large part by the wildly successful business of disease.
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N
O ONE WAS
more familiar with the creative and destructive power of sickness than Ilya Mechnikov, a professor at Novorossiya University and the city’s foremost contributor to the science of infection. Mechnikov’s Odessa years were the most turbulent of his long and eventful life. It was in a despondent decade in his adopted city that he first formulated the theories of infectious disease and cell behavior that became his life’s work. He eventually went far beyond the old port, settling at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, becoming its deputy director, and garnering a string of accolades from scholarly academies in St. Petersburg, London, and Rome. In 1908 Mechnikov received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (shared with the German researcher Paul Ehrlich) for his work on immunity, specifically the idea that some cells have the natural ability to destroy microbes. Today when Odessa students walk along Pasteur Street, into a tree-shaded courtyard and through the dingy yellow facade of the city’s main institution of higher learning, they are entering a place that now carries his name: the Odessa National “I. I. Mechnikov” University.

Ilya Mechnikov—known after his move to Paris as Élie Metchnikoff—was born in May 1845 on the estate of Panasovka in the province of Kharkov in eastern Ukraine.
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The family fold was modest but hospitably appointed, an oasis on the flat expanse of steppe that surrounded it. One side of the family was descended from a branch of Moldovan nobles who, fleeing the advancing Ottoman armies, had found refuge in the domain of Peter the Great. The other side, Mechnikov’s maternal line, was Jewish. While he was studying at the local lycée, the loan of a microscope sparked his passion for scientific research. After earning a university degree at Kharkov and publishing regularly in biology journals, he settled down to an academic position at Novorossiya University in Odessa, where the sea breezes and the good Italian opera were major attractions.

A researcher with a growing scientific reputation, Mechnikov traveled frequently to St. Petersburg, where he was thrown into the center of Russian scholarly life, as well as the social world of learned societies and the Russian Academy. Before long he was introduced to a young woman of good breeding, Lyudmila, whose chief virtue was her ability to assuage his natural melancholy. “She is not bad-looking, but that is all,” he wrote to his mother in Kharkov. “[E]ven though I have dark previsions for the future (as you know, I am not given to seeing life through rose-colored glasses), I cannot help thinking that by living with Lussia I should become calmer, at least for a fairly long time.”
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Closer to the truth was the fact that Mechnikov found some diversion from his own dark introspection by caring for Lyudmila. Chronic bronchitis, probably the early stages of tuberculosis, struck her on their wedding day. She had to be carried to the church in a chair.

Their new life together was mainly spent apart, he in St. Petersburg and Odessa, she in Switzerland and Portugal, hoping to find some relief for her fluid-filled lungs. In the winter of 1873, during a break between two of his lectures, he received a letter from his sister-in-law saying that Lyudmila was nearly gone and that if he wished to see her again, he should come as quickly as possible to Madeira, where she was convalescing in the archipelago off the Portuguese coast. By the time he arrived—after a grueling journey across the breadth of Europe—she was only a shell, bedridden and morphine-dazed. She lasted only a few days longer.

On the return journey to Russia, his despair was obvious. He destroyed the scientific papers he had been working on. By the time he reached Geneva, he had downed a vial of morphine. He was saved by his own enthusiasm for death: the huge dose induced vomiting, which expelled most of the drug before it could be absorbed.

Surviving both his wife and his own botched suicide, Mechnikov redoubled his commitment to work. He took on new research projects on evolution and adaptation. He organized an anthropological expedition among the steppe nomads of Kalmykia along the Caspian Sea. To earn extra income, he took on tutoring jobs in Odessa, including for the children of the noisy neighbors who lived in the apartment one floor above his own. In time he grew attracted to one of the young girls in the family, Olga. In February of 1875 the wide-eyed teenager, still a schoolgirl and more passionate about art and the theater than science and nature, married the pale and gloomy professor.

Olga soon discovered that her new husband was a knotted skein. He was given to sudden, furious outbursts. An unexpected noise—a barking dog or a mewing cat—would unnerve him. He would fly into a rage if confronted with a difficult problem, no matter how frivolous. But he had reasons beyond his own mercurial nature for worrying about his own life and career.

Mechnikov was living through a time of immense change in Odessa and the empire. Students at the university were calling for better teaching and greater attention to science and the applied arts. Underground circles, from liberal to socialist and revolutionary, were thriving. Disturbances in the wider empire—village uprisings after the emancipation of the serfs in 1861, a failed rebellion in Poland in 1863—were causing the tsarist government to fear that any calls for reform were masks for revolutionary agitation.

Public disturbances pitted some of Odessa’s citizens against others: locals against newcomers, liberals against conservatives, young students against older professors, and nearly everyone against Jewish shopkeepers and merchants. A pogrom left stores ransacked and houses in Moldavanka razed. When a bomb-throwing terrorist assassinated Tsar Alexander II in March of 1881, Mechnikov fell into another deep depression, convinced that the political troubles spawned by the killing would surely reach Odessa and the university, which was already rent by student activism and the appointment of reactionary administrators.

Throughout his bouts with depression, with his classes canceled or the university closed, with crowds running through the streets and Olga periodically ill from typhus, and faced with a weak heart and failing eyesight, Mechnikov managed to proceed with the research that eventually made him famous. The problem that concerned him was the body’s response to crisis. His contemporaries, Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch, had begun to refine the germ theory of disease, the idea that small organisms such as bacteria—not the imponderable workings of a cold draft or a swampy miasma—were the true causes of infection and transmission for many diseases.

Ilya Mechnikov (right) with Leo Tolstoy in 1909, a year after Mechnikov received the Nobel Prize.
Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.

Mechnikov’s insight, obtained from early experiments on the regenerative power of starfish, was that cells can fight foreign agents introduced into the body. Cells rush to the infected site, surrounding the invading matter and consuming it, a process easily observed under a microscope. Phenomena that had previously been seen as by-products of infection—white pus around a wound, say—were actually evidence of the body’s healing process. He gave that process the name “phagocytosis.” Immunity, he reckoned, was simply the ability of an organism to deploy phagocytes against invaders. Inflammation was not only a problem but also a sign of the body’s own desperate attempt at a cure. The award of the Nobel Prize marked Mechnikov’s research as fundamental to the way scientists think about disease and the human body’s reaction to it, a theory of immune response covering everything from a splinter to the bubonic plague.