“I have not felt so much at home for a long time,” wrote Mark Twain of arriving in Odessa in 1867. It was a curious sentiment. The jewel of New Russia—an oasis of Italian opera on the Ukrainian steppe—would seem a long way from the riverboat culture from which Twain sprang. But its resemblance to his hometown of Hannibal, Missouri, was surprisingly strong. Odessa, like Hannibal, was a fast-growing limestone city laid out on a grid at the water’s edge. Twain knowingly sized up its broad streets, brisk-paced pedestrians, low and sparsely decorated houses, and “familiar new look.” When a “smothering cloud of dust” greeted him, Twain and his party welcomed it as “a message from our own dear native land.”
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