Odessa was founded on the fault line between autocratic agricultural Russia and the international trade routes of emerging global capitalism. It was the place where the use value of agricultural products was converted into the exchange value of commodities. In the rift between these two systems of values, and between the epistemological and psychological perceptions associated with them, a third kind of ontological and epistemological space emerged. This space was conditioned by the evolving patterns of the Odessa grain trade regulated by stock trading, and induced in its turn a unique perception of time, history, and the relation between the real and fi ctitious. This article pinpoints the link between the mechanisms of the Odessa grain trade, the patterns of subjectivity and temporal perception that were molded by Odessa's business culture, and the modes of literary representation that elaborated these patterns into a specific literary idiom associated with Odessa literature.