“Countless Constellations”: Walter Benjamin’s Moscow Literarization

Introduction

In the spring of 1927, a few months after his stay in Moscow in the winter of 1926–27, the German critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin reflects on his travels and his own subsequent literary production in several letters to friends and colleagues. In a short note to the journalist Siegfried Kracauer he mentions his essay “Moscow,” albeit as a side note, and describes it as “keine volle réussite,” no full success.[1] Not only the literary “product” seemed unsuccessful; Benjamin’s stay in the capital of the new Soviet republic was an experience of failure on many levels. His so-called “Moscow Diary,” which he began in Moscow and completed in Berlin, bears witness to this.[2] Some of the passages of the diary were incorporated verbatim into texts that Benjamin produced after his stay: the lengthy essay “Moscow” for the ecumenical journal Die Kreatur, as well as several articles on Soviet culture, film, and literature, for the Berlin paper Die Literarische Welt.[3] It is only in retrospect that the demands and expectations that motivated Walter Benjamin to travel to Moscow in 1926–27 can be formulated: besides the disappointing reunion with his love interest, the Latvian communist Asja Lācis, Benjamin had expected to establish contacts for his journalistic activities. Due to his limited knowledge of Russian and his unorthodox position in the party apparatus, they hardly bore fruit. Finally, his cautious consideration of joining the German Communist Party, measured against the reality of proletarian life under Soviet standards, gave way to disillusionment in matters of political party agitation. In Moscow, Benjamin witnessed

the ignorance and opportunism with which people here vacillate between the Marxist scholarly agenda and the attempt to win prestige in Europe. But the difficulties and rigors of a stay in Moscow during the depth of winter, like this private disillusionment, are no match for the powerful impression made by a city, all of whose inhabitants are still reeling from the great struggles in which everyone was involved, in one way or another.[4]

In his writings after his return, Benjamin tried to communicate the “powerful impressions” of Moscow, the life-world of the city, and the “extraordinary value” of the Russian present (Benjamin, Correspondence, 310). This present was marked by political reconstruction, ruptures, and transformations in everyday political and social life, as well as in the aesthetic movements that attempted to cope with this conflictuality in representation.

A Historical Momentum

Between 1921 and 1941, around 900 travel pieces about the Soviet Union had been published in the German speaking press. The spectrum of their judgment ranged from unreserved support and praise to a benevolent, albeit reserved, assessment of what they had seen and witnessed in the young state.[5] The literary or journalistic production of those traveling to Soviet Russia was marked by this tension between an outside spectator, a distant observer and the active participation and reflection on their role as authors or journalists within the literary production of the new state. Opinion, judgment, and decisiveness in general and their transformation into literary form became markers of their engagement with the new environment.

However, 1927 already saw the beginning of the counter-revolution and bourgeois restoration within and beyond the party organization of the Bolsheviks. The internationalism of the Russian Revolution was slowly abandoned in favor of a “Socialism in One Country,” which appeared as the consolidation of political-national order rather than a global revolutionary movement. At the end of the 1920s, life in the Soviet Union, particularly in its capital Moscow, was characterized by complex struggles over authority on economic, political, social, and cultural positions. However, from afar, these ferocious fights served as a projection screen. The “experimental void” and collective momentum of possibilities in the Soviet Union was of interest specifically for Western intellectuals, writers, and journalists, either to enthusiastically witness the foretold “world revolution” or to critically oversee the political and economic changes that came with such a historical experiment–especially regarding their own failed German November Revolution in 1918–19.[6]

Walter Benjamin’s stance on the matter of post-revolutionary Soviet Russia is, until this day, mainly discussed through a close reading of his extensive diary and his disappointment with Soviet cultural production and party life therein. However, focusing on these private records runs the risk of overlooking an important feature of Benjamin’s work: that questions of representation, aesthetic and literary method were crucial to his writing. These questions became even more important in light of the arcane and indecipherable environment of post-revolutionary Moscow, and his witnessing of the emergence of new formal languages in Russian literature and theater, which—as Benjamin notes in his cultural-political articles—invoke a bourgeois canon and counter-revolutionary forms. Benjamin’s Moscow Diary, the “Moscow” essay, as well as the shorter articles on Russian literature, theater, and film in the Literarische Welt then must be read together to draw a concise and decisive image of his writing in and on Moscow. Only then the quest for literarization and Walter Benjamin’s efforts to transform the conditions of life into literary form become visible.

Articles for Die Literarische Welt

While Benjamin, much like his contemporaries, emphatically identifies a “turning point in historical events that is indicated, if not constituted, by the fact of ‘Soviet Russia’,” he already notes the small detriments and shifts in cultural politics (Benjamin, “Moscow,” 22). His articles on these matters, which appeared in the weekly Berlin journal Die Literarische Welt only a few weeks after his return from Moscow, testify to his attention to the heated discussions within the artistic groupings of the young Soviet Union. The article “The Political Groupings of Russian Writers” describes the various currents of Russian literature within the emerging culture of public control by “the press, the public, and the party” (Benjamin, “Political Groupings,” 6). The work of Russian writers is characterized by the “absolutely public nature,” which leads Benjamin to consequently describe the Russian ‘schools’ as “political groupings” rather than artistic schools: In the Soviet Union, the political determines the aesthetic (6).  Benjamin, however, points out that the assertion of revolutionary content does not necessarily have as its basis (or entail) an equally revolutionary shaping of form. Its lack could be observed in the development of Russian culture far longer, and not only as a consequence of the consolidation and pragmatic turn after 1921–22:

It is a remarkable fact that all the radical “leftist” formal trends that made their appearance in the posters, written works and processions of “heroic Communism” actually stem directly from the last Western bourgeois slogans of the prewar period – from Futurism, Constructivism, Unanimism, and so on. (7)

Instead of a radical transformation of form, Moscow culture production, in Benjamin’s interpretation, was displaying reactionary aesthetic developments. Yet, while these evaluations might give the impression of a damning rejection of the aesthetic experiments in the young Soviet Union, Benjamin pays closer attention to an overall aesthetic shift—namely the emerging idea of “Tendenzkunst” (tendentious art) at the points of fracture in technological development. In a review of the Russian director Sergei Eisenstein’s monumental film Battleship Potemkin, Benjamin emphatically rejects any idea of an art without political tendency. Especially with the emergence of the revolutionizing of technology through film, the collective gains a new status in art, as “the spaces of the immediate environment—the spaces in which people live, pursue their avocations, and enjoy their leisure—are laid open before their eyes in a comprehensible, meaningful, and passionate way” (Benjamin, “Reply to Oscar A.H. Schmitz,” 16–17).

It is striking to see how Benjamin, in his attention to the more fundamental revolutions in technology and artistic media, deciphers the progressive tendencies in the Soviet Union despite the official rehabilitation of pre-revolutionary cultural models. While the media revolution was obvious regarding the emergence of film technology, literature, in Benjamin’s view, was similarly affected by the changes in aesthetic perception and collective distribution:

There are times when things and thoughts should be weighed and not counted. But also—though this often escapes notice—there are times when things are counted and not weighed. In our time, Russia’s literature is—rightly—more important for statisticians than for aesthetes. . . . If Russian literature is what it ought to be, its best products can only be the colored illustrations in the primer from which peasants learn to read in the shadow of Lenin. (Benjamin, “Political Groupings,” 9)

Only later Benjamin summarized, as a consequence of the technological shifts of artistic production (that were already visible in Moscow), a radical transformation of the role of writers and authors. While in the crisis—of experience, of forms of expression and modes of production that were most manifest in the changes of the Russian life-world—nothing more could be expected from the great art forms committed to the bourgeois canon, aesthetic production had to be put into function. Nevertheless, as Burkhard Lindner has pointed out in his writings on Benjamin’s constellation of mass and technology, the crisis of artistic forms only partially correlated with the experience of the masses, since the latter had been “excluded from the cultural education and had not internalized the autonomy of art as a value,” and thus were little affected by the shifts in aesthetic values.[7] It is only in this regard that we can understand the above cited dissonance between Benjamin’s harsh criticism of Soviet aesthetic production and the emphatic embrace of the new collective forms of mediated experience and learning—as crystallized in the image of peasants learning to read in the shadow of Lenin.

“Idle Chatter”

While the cultural-political articles in the Literarische Welt were already published, Benjamin was still working on the longer and extensive essay “Moscow” that had been commissioned by Martin Buber (who had also partially financed Benjamin’s travels). This process proved difficult to Benjamin, as he reflects on in a letter to his friend Gershom Scholem at the end of February 1927:

You will have already seen a few tiny essays by me in the Literarische Welt, or you will be able to find them in the next issue you receive; it is very difficult to write anything fairly coherent without sliding into the abyss of idle chatter, which gapes almost everywhere you tread in pursuit of such a project. (Benjamin, Correspondence, 312)

The “abyss of idle chatter” was a fear Benjamin did not only relate to the publication context of the Literarische Welt—a journal that at times focused on, in Benjamin’s words, “light and easiest things”—but the challenge of positioning himself in relation to the historical momentum in general (Benjamin, Gesammelte Briefe, 116). While in Moscow “political concepts, party slogans, declarations, and commands are firmly lodged,” and “every alleyway shows its color and every word has a password for its echo,” the quest for Benjamin’s own literarization of his Moscow experience—rather than the condensation into short, informative journalistic articles—proved difficult.[8] The “everyday life of today, this gray little daily struggle with millions of gray little worries,” as Benjamin’s contemporary Joseph Roth had described it, seemed obscured by the prevalence of quick-fix judgments, dogmatic theories, mere convictions, and abstract resolutions, so that its concreteness in the literal sense was almost unfathomable:[9]

In schematic form, Moscow, as it appears at this very moment, reveals the full range of possibilities: above all, the possibility of the revolution's utter failure and of its success. In both instances, however, there will be something unforeseeable whose appearance will be vastly different from any programmatic painting of the future. The outline of this is today brutally and clearly evident in the people and their environment. (Benjamin, Correspondence, 313)

While the “little notes” and “tiny essays”—the articles in the Literarische Welt—delineate the field of possible forms of aesthetic representation descriptively, the larger essay “Moscow” had a more reflexive endeavor in mind; a ‘“fairly coherent” description of the city of Moscow, which had to take into account the “struggle in and with the city,” the “difficulties with the language and the rigors of daily life”—experiences within the space of the city, whose “echoes” Benjamin meticulously gathered in his diary during his stay (Benjamin, Correspondence, 311–312).

A Portrait of a City

In the Moscow Diary, Walter Benjamin noted questions of writing and cultural policy, from which he did not only derive the articles published in the Literarische Welt, but also observed conversations on the positioning of the author, and reflections on method and aesthetics, which informed his idea of ‘distilling’ an essay from his notes and materials.

I did . . . concede that I was in a critical situation as far as my activity as an author was concerned. . . . [M]ere convictions and abstract decisions were not enough, only concrete tasks and challenges could really help me make headway. Here he [Bernhard Reich] reminded me of my essays on cities. This was most encouraging to me. I began thinking more confidently about a description of Moscow.[10]

The form of the essay—the Städtebild or city portrait—had already been of interest to Benjamin’s writing practice some years earlier, as an experiment in form accompanied by the search for adequate concepts of form itself. His Moscow companion, the director and theater critic Bernhard Reich probably knew Benjamin’s essays on cities through their mutual friend Asja Lācis. Benjamin had explored the Italian city Naples with her in the autumn of 1924 and based their collectively written text “Naples” on this experience. That the urban space was the privileged site of the fragmented experience of modernity offered the possibility of the literary form of Städtebild—“city portrait” or, more precisely, “city image”—in which the volatility, porosity, and permeability, the fragmented nature of the city and its experience should come to light in observations, each of which configures itself into a new text, the very image of a city.

Bernhard Reich’s reference to Benjamin’s cityscapes must have opened up to him the possibility of presenting the factuality of the empirical without theoretical digressions or “mere convictions” but rather in vivid description, beyond subjective judgment or abstract theory—the fatal aesthetic consequences of which had become clear to him in his confrontation with the literary schools and groupings in Moscow. While waiting for the publication of the “Moscow” essay, Benjamin reflects on his project in a long letter to Hugo von Hofmannsthal:

In this work [the essay “Moscow”], I made an attempt to depict the concrete phenomena of daily life, which affected me most deeply, just as they are and without any theoretical excursuses, even if not without taking a personal stance toward them. Because I did not know the language, I was of course unable to get beyond one specific and narrow stratum of society. But I concentrated even more on rhythmic experiences than I did on visual ones. As far as the rhythmic experience is concerned, I found that the time in which the people over there live, and in which a primeval Russian tempo is intertwined with the new tempo of the revolution to produce a whole, was much more incommensurable by Western European standards than I had expected. (Benjamin, Correspondence, 314)

The observation of and the sensual attention to the tactile and rhythmic experience of massified movement in the city, that characterize the thirty-page essay, are thanks to a “new optics”: liberating the city-visitor from the usual confinement of urban space, this optics is used by Benjamin as a strategy of representation that takes one of its models in film. While many of the descriptions are marked initially by over-tension, disorientation, and confusion, the constellative arrangement of these accounts serves as an emphatic enunciation of the collective and the reflection on Moscow as a spatial and urban phenomenon. Rich in reflections of the concrete, the text assimilates itself to its subject matter while on the other hand paying close attention to the textuality of the city itself: its signs, street names, references, or billboards. But not only observations of spatial, rhythmic, or tactile concreteness are found in the essay. Benjamin also and especially attentively observes the new living environment, that particular Russian existence, to which, as he writes, “no time remains,” which “becomes beautiful and comprehensible only through work” and is so taken possession of by the collective that “life without meetings and committees, debates, resolutions, and votes . . . can no longer be imagined” (Benjamin, “Moscow,” 30, 36). These countless constellations of everyday life, the “unconditional readiness for mobilization” of the Moscow inhabitants, produces a spatial setting in which the boundaries between private life and social existence become untenable, and practices and meanings transition and shift: “There is no knowledge or faculty that is not somehow appropriated by collective life and made to serve it. . . . The new Russians say that milieu is the only reliable educator” (29, 31). While everybody and everything is involved in the mobilization and the process of laboratory experimentation, “the real unit of time [in the Soviet Union] is the seichas,” which means “at once,” and which describes “time catastrophes, time collisions,” that push the observer beyond the usual horizon of experience in time, but also in space (32). Everything happens simultaneously, each hour proves to be “superabundant, each day exhausting, each life a moment” (32). This fragmentation while also condensation of the “whole” into its indivisible parts resonated with Benjamin’s own aesthetic method of representation, “to present a picture of the city of Moscow as it is at this very moment” (Benjamin, Correspondence, 313). While the Russian life-world offered “countless constellations” that were breaking in on the stranger visiting the unknown city, the mode in which it was represented on the textual level was the mode of constellation in itself: a cityscape meandering between the vivid description of optical, tactile or sensoric phenomena, but also the meticulous attention to the Russian byt—the Lebenswelt and everyday life.

Constellations of Material

The archival material related to the essay, accessible in the Walter Benjamin Archive in Berlin and published in the latest critical edition Werke und Nachlaß, offers a vivid source to follow these working methods and trace the concrete form in which Benjamin—starting from the extensive collection of material in his diary—experimentally, tentatively develops the constellation of these elements.[11] The Moscow Diary bears pencil marks that indicate the passages of text Benjamin wanted to use for later works—mostly for the essay, in which around 40 excerpts of the diary reappear. The archival material also presents several drafts to the essay, though we do not know if this material is complete or only a small glimpse into a much larger editing process. On these preliminary drafts, the previously marked excerpts from the diary are compiled, individual passages are crossed out or through, shifted and marked with references to their position in the continuous text. While at first sight, these notes seem like an impenetrable puzzle, a closer look reveals that Benjamin hardly changed the phrases and expressions of the parts taken from the diary—rather he changed their assembly and organization as passages in the final text of “Moscow.”

On several sheets, Benjamin also creates lists of various keywords, such as “flowers,” “toys,” “courtyards” and many more (Benjamin, Werke und Nachlaß, 533–534). One list presents exactly twenty keywords that match the numbers of chapters (or sections) of the final printed essay. It is most likely that these keywords were meant to serve as headlines to the sections, either conceptually or even in the final print. But not only the matching of number of keywords to the number of sections of the essay is striking; one can even precisely relate each keyword to a particular “theme” of each section matching them with the overall thematic focus of each text passage. Thus, a discontinuous narrative emerges, constructed out of careful observations of Russian life-world, manifest in themes such as “orientation,” “streets,” “housing,” “traffic,” to “clubs,” “posters” or “bars,” but also “children,” “beggars,” or the almost religious cult of the figure of “Lenin.” This discontinuous montage—a patchwork of (seemingly) unrelated images and themes of the Soviet life-world—still does not offer any personal voice or opinionated positioning. Although the essay was constructed immediately after the trip, the view of the city is already considerably distanced and alienated. While in the diary, for the sake of spontaneity and involvement, at times individual voices are audible, this is not the case in the essay. In his most recent publication on Walter Benjamin, Fredric Jameson has noted precisely that such eschewing of the subjectivity of sheer opinion illustrates “the drive, in modernism, to escape . . . the conscious direction of the ego in the search for a more objective aesthetic” as formal principle of artistic production.[12] The erasure of the personal voice, the fragmentation of a continuous narrative, as well as the attention to massified experiences such as “traffic” or “housing” nevertheless points to the notion that objectivity was not to be reached via the documentary, the authentication through personal experience, rather the medium and technologies of collective perception itself.

Decisiveness

Nevertheless, we can find traces of Benjamin’s own reflection of the matter of “personal judgement” in the archival material. In a draft that might have served as an introduction, but in the final version of the essay has been omitted, he notes:

One does not have to come to Russia in order to take a stand or to form a judgment about Bolshevism. One must bring one’s judgment, good or bad, perhaps, as a kind of safe container in which alone what is perceived can be transported without damage. [A] traveler seeking opinion will all too quickly be thrown back on his own problematics, on his instinct for self-assertion, and all that he sees, all that he studies, will become under the hand the document of a private confrontation with himself. (Benjamin, Werke und Nachlaß, 475.)

As I have mentioned, this ‘self-assertion’ was something prevalent in the German journalism on Russia at that time. The “account of ‘personal relations,’” which also Martin Buber asked him for, was a desire Benjamin well understood, but was not able or willing to communicate (Benjamin, Gesammelte Briefe, 242). In contrast, in an environment “in which ideas have become . . . sheer opinion,” the aesthetic transformation of reality was, in Benjamin’s view, to become operative (Jameson, Benjamin Files, 28). Fredric Jameson, commenting on Benjamin’s modernist writing method, notes that in particular “the montage, are means toward an art that thinks without opinion, that combines the multiple levels of the Real without filtering it through a ‘temperament’” (28). The notion of decisiveness becomes central—not in a theoretical stance, but in the aesthetic workings of the essay itself, as activation of the reader through the constellation of phenomena of tactile and optical experience that the “factum of Soviet Russia” produced through its new environment. In the “Moscow” essay, Benjamin forces his own personal opinion into the medium of perception and toward a collection and constellation of attentive description of the facticity of Russian life-world. However, as he notes, these facts were in the particular historical moment not ready-mades for opinion, rather, they provided the opening of a space of possibility. In the final published essay, Benjamin enigmatically frames this in the form of questions:

Which reality is inwardly convergent with truth? Which truth is inwardly preparing itself to converge with the real? Only he who clearly answers these questions is ‘objective.’ Not toward his contemporaries (which is unimportant) but toward events (which is decisive). (Benjamin, “Moscow,” 22).

The historical turning point of Soviet Russia in 1927 produced a critical momentum which asked for decisiveness, but not in light of personal opinion, but the possibility of judgment based on facts. Benjamin notes though that “someone who wishes to decide ‘on the basis of facts’ will find no basis in the facts” (22). Nevertheless, aesthetic production relies on representation, which led Benjamin to believe that only a montage of phenomena, discontinuous and constructed like a puzzle, was able to present “the facts” without theorizing, without narrative or opinionated explanations. That “such facts have scarcely ever become the basis of convictions” was something that only later led him to understand his own involvement in a “strict alternation between action and writing” and “its influence in active communities” (Benjamin, One-Way Street, 45, 444).

One might argue that Benjamin’s attempt at a literary description of Moscow, the literarization of the Russian life-world, was bound to fail in light of the arcane reality, the confusion and disorientation of Russian life (or, on a very basic level, his lack of the Russian language). While one might look at Benjamin’s diary and find several statements supporting this argument, the archival material presents us with a more complex picture of Benjamin’s involvement and positioning towards the communist experiment of the new Soviet Union, that he tried to present in his Städtebild “Moscow.” In his blue leather notebook, Benjamin later notes down an apparent defense to criticism of the essay:

Rigor is already very good and effective. . . . Here, however, it is still a question of how someone who doesn't know a word of Russian and who had to rely a lot on himself . . . struggled with the city; misunderstandings mean . . . nothing at all and are . . . like scratches a symptom of a struggle, . . .of which I have nothing to be ashamed of. . . . Of course; if I had known Russian, I would have been spared many mistakes and stupidities, but such an essay must not be read as a . . . highly official report, but as a document of how someone struggles with foreign circumstances, tries to understand and in any case does not shy away from a decision but states his point of view of pronounced sympathy for Soviet Russia. (Benjamin, Werke und Nachlaß, 39–40)

Just like in the journalistic article in the Literarische Welt, the “Moscow” essay ends with an enigmatic renunciation of the image of Lenin, this time “bent over a copy of Pravda,” “[h]is gaze is turned, certainly, to the far horizon; but the tireless care of his heart, to the moment” (Benjamin ,”Moscow,” 45–46). Since Lenin had died three years before Benjamin’s Moscow travel, the invoking of this leading figure of the Russian Revolution and its internationalism at the end of the essay can be understood as an awareness of the lost hopes of the Revolution, the “mourning for heroic Communism,” that also tainted Russian life in 1926–27 (Benjamin, “Moscow,” 45). Nevertheless, as Benjamin had already noted in his articles on literature in film, this particular “heroic” Communism was only the prolongation of bourgeois culture and the import of outdated aesthetic ideas.

Even though the critical historical momentum made it difficult for Benjamin to maneuver through the Soviet metropole, his engagement with matters of representation, especially the discontinuous montage of factuality, as well as the exclusion of self-assertion or the mere attention to revolutionary content, becomes decisive for his later works, condensed in the infamous ‘work instruction’ to the Arcades Project: “Formula: construction out of facts,”[13] as well as development of the idea of literarization of the conditions of living, that make the hidden and fundamental contradictions in every-day life recognizable.