Customer Reviews

Moscow Diary

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Benjamin's diary entries form a beautiful, lucid account of his trip to Moscow. They attach a personality and a humanness to the amazing scholar. There are a number of reasons someone may want to read this fascinating text.

First, the diary illustrates Benjamin's interactions with Moscow, a major metropolis, and his relationship to urbanism as such. This is particularly interesting if the reader encountered Benjamin's account of the Flaneur in The Arcades Project with some hesitation. In that text, Benjamin evaluates critically the role of the Flaneur, but he leaves some questions as to his method of evaluation and as to his way of experiencing urbanism/Paris. A reader will likely find answers to these sorts of questions in this text.

Second, the diary describes the reception of the Soviet Union by a very prominent Marxist critic. They describe the status of the arts, culture and humanities research meanwhile describing the social climate of Moscow. While they don't contain the unabashed political critique one may wish for, all of the circumstantial evidence can be found here for the basis of his later critiques. The diary itself is an important text within the social history of the Soviet Union. Think of it as a two-month version of Gertrude Stein's Autobiography of Alice B.Toklas, for Moscow.

Third, the diary contains an account of Benjamin's affair with Asja, whose mental condition has her hospitalized at the time of Benjamin's visit. This fills in a great deal as to Benjamin's personality and provides a fun intellectual distraction. I often found myself skimming the discussions of Soviet arts/scholarship and Moscow-the-metropolis in search of details about his romance.