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Moscow Diary Author(S): Walter Benjamin Source: October, Vol Moscow Diary Author(s): Walter Benjamin Source: October, Vol. 35, Moscow Diary, (Winter, 1985), pp. 4+9-135 Published by: The MIT Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/778471 Accessed: 08/05/2008 16:24 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=mitpress. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit organization founded in 1995 to build trusted digital archives for scholarship. We enable the scholarly community to preserve their work and the materials they rely upon, and to build a common research platform that promotes the discovery and use of these resources. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. http://www.jstor.org First manuscriptpage of Benjamin'sMoscow Diary. Moscow Diary' WALTER BENJAMIN December9. I arrived December 6th. In the train I had made a mental note of the name and address of a hotel in case there should be nobody waiting for me at the station. (At the border they had made me pay extra to travel first class, claiming there were no more seats in second.) I was relieved that there was no one there to see me emerge from the sleeping car. But there was no one at the platform gate either. I was not overly upset. Then, as I was making my way out of the Belorussian-Baltic railway station, Reich appeared.2 The train had arrived on time, not a second late. We loaded ourselves and the two suitcases into a sleigh. A thaw had set in that day, it was warm. We had only been under- way a few minutes, driving down the broad Tverskaia with its gleam of snow and mud, when Asja3 waved to us from the side of the street. Reich got out and walked the short remaining distance to the hotel, we took the sleigh. Asja did not look beautiful, wild beneath her Russian fur hat, her face somewhat puffy from all the time she had spent bedridden. We stopped off briefly at the hotel and then had tea in a so-called pastry shop near the sanatorium.4 I filled her in about Brecht.5 Then Asja, who had slipped away during a rest period, 1. Benjamin obliterated the initial title of his manuscript, Moscow Diary, and wrote Spanish Journey beside it. It is unclear whether this subsequent title (which may have been added years later) was added for reasons of political or personal safety, or whether it may have been intended as a metaphorical characterization of his Moscow experiences or as a private literary allusion. 2. Bernhard Reich (1894-1972), playwright, director, and critic, was the lifelong companion of Asja Lacis. Originally Austrian, he became a Soviet citizen in the mid-1920s. He wrote a monograph, Brecht, in Russian (Moscow, 1960) and published his reminiscences as Im Wettlauf mit derZeit: ErinnerungenausfunfJahrzehnten deutscherTheatergeschichte, Berlin, Henschelverlag, 1970; this book appeared in Russian as V'ena Berlin Moskva Berlin, Moscow, Iskusstvo, 1972. 3. Asja Lacis (1891-1979), Latvian actress and theater director, whom Benjamin first met in Capri during the summer of 1924. She published recollections of Benjamin, Meyerhold, and Brecht in Revolutiondrim Beruf, H. Brenner, ed., Munich, Rogner and Bernhard, 1972. After publishing a book on German theater (Revolutsii teatrgermani, Moscow, Goslitizdat, 1935), she was interned for roughly fifteen years until after Stalin's death. A bibliography of her publications is appended to M. Miglane, et. al., Anna Lacis, Riga, Liesma, 1973, pp. 250-255. 4. In the wake of a nervous breakdown in September 1926, Lacis was living at the Rott sanatorium near Gorky Street. 5. According to Lacis's autobiography, Benjamin met Brecht in Berlin before his Moscow 10 OCTOBER took a side entrance back into the sanatorium in order to escape notice while Reich and I went in by the main stairs. Here, for the second time, encountered the custom of removing one's galoshes. The first time had been at the hotel, even though it involved no more than checking in the luggage; they had prom- ised us a room that night. Asja's roommate, a hefty textile worker, was absent, I would see her for the first time the following day. Here we were, alone to- gether for the first time under the same roof for a few minutes. Asja was look- ing at me very affectionately. An allusion to the decisive conversation in Riga. Then Reich accompanied me back to the hotel, we had a bite in my room, and went to the Meyerhold Theater.6 It was the first dress rehearsal for The Inspector General.7 I was unable to get a ticket despite Asja's efforts on my behalf. So I strolled up Tverskaia in the direction of the Kremlin for half an hour and came back, carefully spelling out the shop signs, carefully proceeding over the ice. Then, very tired (and, very likely, sad), I returned to my room. On the morning of the 7th, Reich came to fetch me. Itinerary: Petrovka (to register with the police), the Kameneva Institute8 (for a 1.50 ruble seat at the Institute of Culture; talked, moreover, with their local German representa- tive, an utter ass), then via Herzen Street to the Kremlin, passing in front of the totally botched Lenin mausoleum and then on to the scenic view of the St. Isaac Cathedral. Return via Tverskaia, following Tverskoi Boulevard to Dom Herzena,9 the headquarters of the Organization of Proletarian Writers, VAPP.10 A good meal, which I barely appreciated, given the exertion which the walk in the cold had involved. Kogan"1 was introduced to me and expounded on his Rumanian grammar and his Russian-Rumanian dictionary. The tales Reich tells, which in the course of our long walks I am often too tired to listen to with both ears, are endlessly vivacious, filled with anecdotes and specifics, journey; most scholars, however, place their first meeting (arranged by Lacis) in Berlin in May 1929. See Rolf Tiedemann, Dialektik im Stillstand, Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1983, p. 45; and Klaus Volker, Brecht Chronicle, New York, Continuum, 1975, p. 54. 6. Vsevolod Emilevich Meyerhold (1874-1942) was given his own theater in 1923, the Teatr imeni Meyerholda (TIM). 7. The rehearsals for Meyerhold's production of Gogol's The InspectorGeneral lasted one and a half years. In contrast to the first half of the 1920s, when he staged a large number of plays, often simultaneously, over a short period of time, Meyerhold was diverted from his preparation of this production only briefly, to rectify the direction of Roar, China!. See note 91. - 8. Another name for VOKS Vsesoiuznoe obshchestvo kulturnoi sviazi s zagranitse (Federal Society for Foreign Cultural Relations), 1925-1958. Its director from 1925-1929 was Olga Kameneva (1883-1941), the sister of Trotsky. 9. Herzen House, named after the writer Alexandr Herzen (1812-1870), served as one of the meeting places of VAPP during this period. 10. Acronym of the Vserossiiskaia assotsiastsiia proletarskikh pissatelei (Federal Association of Proletarian Writers), founded 1920. 11. Petr Semenovich Kogan (1872-1932), critic and literary historian, professor of Romance and Germanic Philology at the universities of St. Petersburg and Moscow, president of the Acad- emy of Arts since its inception in 1921. Moscow Diary 11 sharp and amusing. Stories about a bureaucrat who works for the Treasury Department, and goes on vacation at Easter and celebrates mass as a pope. And then: the one about the conviction of a seamstress who struck her alcoholic husband dead, and the hooligan who attacked a male and female student on the street. And then: the one about Stanislavsky's staging of a white-guard play: 2 how it was initially submitted to the board of censors, only one of them taking notice of it and returning it, recommending certain modifications. Then months later, having made the necessary modifications, the play is finally per- formed for the censors. Banned. Stanislavsky to Stalin: I'm ruined, all my capi- tal was tied up in that play. Stalin deciding: "the play is not dangerous." It pre- mieres, protested by the communists, who are kept at a distance by the militia. Then the story about the novella a clef dealing with the Frunze case,'3 which supposedly was carried out against his wishes and on Stalin's orders . then the political news: members of the opposition removed from important positions. And in identical fashion: countless Jews removed from middle-level posts. Anti- Semitism in the Ukraine. - After VAPP, utterly exhausted, I proceed on to Asja's on my own. A crowd soon gathers. A Latvian woman arrives and sits down on the bed next to her, then Chestakov4 and his wife, and between these two, on the one hand, and Asja and Reich on the other, a violent argument breaks out in Russian about Meyerhold's production of The InspectorGeneral. The major point of contention is his use of velvet and silk, fourteen costumes for his wife;15 the performance, moreover, lasts five and a half hours.
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