Benjamin began work on his Arcades Project immediately after his return from Moscow. The vast never-finished collage of suggestive quotations and fragments of insight was an attempt to characterise Second Empire Paris, the ‘capital of the nineteenth century’. Rather than using the inventory style of traditional histories of civilisation, he tried to capture the city in all its changing manifestations, revealing how the riches of civilisation are passed on and ‘strangely altered by the constant efforts of society’, both conscious and unconscious. He grasped at history by stealth, exploring the crepuscular city, radiating artificial light, refracted in glass, from ever-changing angles, looking for correspondences, gathering random scraps and traces that could be assembled and juxtaposed to make a picture of its inner life, which he called a ‘dialectical fairyland’.
I have been drawn back to the Diary for precise historical reasons too. Benjamin found Moscow ‘an exact touchstone for the foreigner’. Its reality drove off the abstractions that ‘so effortlessly come to the European’s mind’. No theory would hold. Everything was material fact. Life leapt out at him, ‘combative, determined, mute’, from the arches of gates, the frames of doors, the lettering on street signs, the images of boots or freshly ironed laundry, a worn stoop or a stairway’s solid landing. He registered acutely the disorientation of the city as it was transformed by the communist dream of a leap out of the history of things, as the bonds of ownership were broken and private life ‘withered’.
‘It has to do with fashioning a shell for ourselves’, Benjamin noted of the verb ‘to dwell’. He saw ‘indwelling’ as the condition of the nineteenth century, the century of the bourgeoisie, when the residence ‘was conceived as a receptacle for the person, encasing him with all its appurtenances so deeply … that one might be reminded of the inside of a compass case, where the instrument lies embedded in deep, usually violet folds of velvet’. Like so many foreign onlookers, Benjamin thought the Russian Revolution was the beginning of the end of that world. He believed that Marxian dialectical thinking was the ‘organ of historical awakening’. With this new organ of perception, he believed one could see history at its secret work: ‘with the destabilising of the market economy, we begin to recognise the monuments of the bourgeoisie as ruins even before they have crumbled,’ he wrote. When he came to Moscow, he was convinced that everything in the new collectivist society contrived against the bourgeois ‘melancholia of cosiness’. The bourgeois city centred on the distinction between work and home had been shaken up. Living arrangements were ‘a difficult question’. People had abandoned domesticity; they lived in the office, the club, the street. As part of the communist credo, love and marriage had become a ‘bagatelle’; sex should be like taking a glass of water, declared People’s Commissar Alexandra Kollontai. The idea of the completed bourgeois interior – wall-coverings, pictures, sofa cushions, antimacassars, coverlets, knick-knacks on the consoles – had been discarded. Of all Moscow institutions, only the street children on Tverskaya, sitting in rags against the wall of the Museum of the Revolution, refused to be budged. Everything else in the city was ‘under the banner of the remont’.
Now, in the twenty-first century, since the sudden official abandonment of the communist dream, the city was back under the banner of the remont. As the price of oil and gas, Russia’s great sources of wealth, rose on global markets, the transformation of Moscow took on a quality of frenzy. It was dialectical, I suppose. Things revolved and became their opposite. It was certainly loud. Through the mask of the environment, the embourgeoisement of Moscow resonated day and night, echoing from building sites on every side. It was hard to sleep. I lay in bed and thought of a phrase in Mandelstam’s Fourth Prose, ‘the hound-dog nights of Moscow’. Yes, the nights were hound-dogs. Everyone was restless, busy fashioning a shell, searching out a new interior in which to work or dwell.
Moscow Diary is a record of homelessness and erotic failure. Benjamin’s longing to find a place of rest with Lacis, to possess her, threads its way from the first pages when he sights her standing in the slush on Tverskaya Street in a fur hat, to the end, where he is carried away from her through the twilit streets, clutching on his knees a suitcase full of possessions, weeping tears of loss. There is no interior space in the city in which the lovers can find comfort together. The only time they are alone in the dark is in a horse-drawn sleigh on the Arbat where they embrace. Instead he spends money, buying things for his collection, gifts for Asja: three little houses made of coloured paper from a stall on the far side of the Moscow River, ‘for the enormous price of thirty kopecks’, which he carries awkwardly in his arms in the bitter cold; hand-painted lacquer boxes (he is captivated, of course, by small closed caskets); sweets, blouses, stockings. The only fully furnished interior he finds in the city is in an odd little museum dedicated to daily life in the 1840s, where he sees a room full of Louis-Philippe furniture: chests, candelabras, pier glasses, folding screens, even writing paper and shawls draped over chairs. In a tender moment alone in a room, Benjamin reads Lacis his translation of the lesbian scene in Proust’s Du Côté de chez Swann. ‘Asja grasped its savage nihilism’, he writes,
how Proust in a certain fashion ventures into the tidy private chamber within the petit bourgeois that bears the inscription sadism and then mercilessly smashes everything to pieces, so that nothing remains of the untarnished clear-cut conception of wickedness, but instead within every fracture evil explicitly shows its true substance – ‘humanity’, or even ‘kindness’.
He can only experience Moscow through Asja, he says. Animosity and love shift in him ‘like winds’. He imagines her conquest of his heart as a feat of urban engineering; she has laid a street through him. Sometimes, when he catches sight of her, she does not look beautifuclass="underline" wild beneath her fur hat, her face puffy from time spent bedridden. He reads a passage from his new book One-Way Street, filled with metaphors of home, of the longing for refuge in a great and populous city, for the mysteries of the interior, out of sight of passers-by. Benjamin fails to grasp Moscow, just as he fails to possess Asja Lacis: ‘nowhere does Moscow really look like the city it is’. Buildings seem to be holding something back. He wants to find a way in, to touch their spirit, their combative, determined life, to ambush them with his eye, from above, from the height of an aeroplane. He tries to work out how best to take a place in, from ‘as many dimensions as possible’. ‘The same thing with houses. It is only after having crept along a series of them in search of a very specific one that you come to learn what they contain.’
Until Stalin’s death, V. S. Zhukovsky remembers, there were carpets on the outer steps of each entryway at the ‘Fifth House of the Soviets’. As a young boy growing up next door, he could see into the courtyard of No. 3 from his friend Slava’s kitchen window. One day he watched four Packard limousines sweep into Granovsky; sitting together in the back of one of the cars were Stalin’s henchmen Lavrenty Beria and Georgy Malenkov. The cortège turned into No. 3, where Malenkov got out, and Beria was driven off round the corner, in the direction of his mansion on the Garden Ring. Molotov moved into the house later, after his expulsion from the Central Committee. Zhukovsky occasionally saw him in the street, walking with his wife, Polina Zhemchuzhina. Molotov was always painstakingly well-dressed, Zhukovsky recalls, with a sleek, healthy appearance that belied his age, and a penetrating glance. Polina (who was seven years younger than her husband) was small, withered and bent. (She had been beaten in the Lubyanka and spent three years in exile in Kazakhstan, where she was officially referred to as ‘Object No. 12’.) It was admirable, Zhukovsky says, the solicitous way Molotov led his wife down the street, holding her by the arm.