This article is taken from PN Review 284, Volume 51 Number 6, July - August 2025.
Benjamin in Moscow
It’s 1926, and the porters of the third-class Moscow Hotel ‘Tirol’ are sitting in a little room off the lobby, bored to death. Outside the night air is silent and the pavements are treacherous, covered in damp ice. Occasionally a sleigh passes on the ring road, but otherwise sound has been sucked out of the world.
Follow the dimly-lit narrow corridor from the lobby, a threadbare runner tacked to the boards, and it leads to Walter Benjamin’s room. There are low voices inside, speaking in German; one reading, another commenting from time to time. The Austrian theatre director, Bernhard Reich, is going through the draft of an article about a landmark Meyerhold production. The stale air of the hotel room, the cigarette smoke, the poor light and the smell of boiling laundry and sweat – it all presses in on his listener and produces a familiar sense of abjection, but also an intoxication with the moment, a strange and foreign moment.
*
Moscow all around him, a low-built bazaar of a place, its deep infrequent church bells rising through the late afternoon. And that very afternoon he had walked under the widest skies, prairie skies; pink, sharp winter air. Moscow: a large plant in its own atmosphere, its shoots struggling to breach the earth and meet the twentieth century.
*
Theatre is a fleeting artform, but Meyerhold’s historic 1926 production of Nikolai Gogol’s The Government Inspector has been well documented in film, articles, memoirs and critical essays. We can never really know what it felt like to be in the audience, and every show would have been different anyway – productions evolve and shift depending on the relationship between audience and cast on any given night. It’s only in retrospect that a theatrical event assumes historical importance, only in its surrounding documentation and not in itself. It assumes a defining shape once its vitality is gone and its actors are dispersed. In this it is much like a life.
The action of the play took place on a curved stage with little jutting platforms; a semicircle of polished wood and fifteen opening doors formed the backdrop. The action, compressed into short episodes in this claustrophobic space, had the appearance of a ‘moving bouquet’ or ‘structured kaleidoscope’ according to one critic. Unlike Meyerhold’s earlier iconic constructivist productions (already in the theatre’s museum), the constricted set of The Government Inspector was extravagantly furnished: antique bureaux, brocade and crystal, bronze and mahogany. It was an interior with all its signs of life, but no inhabitant: an opened-up and preserved corpse.
*
In 1991 I slept in a large room with a varnished parquet floor, creamy old-fashioned plaster ceiling and some stiff, formal furniture: an armchair, a patterned divan and a large showy desk. An alcove on the right-hand side holds a narrow single bed upholstered in faded damask, covered in cotton sheets and a blanket. A fridge hums in the corner of the room, filled with plastic bags of food. The window behind the desk is typically deep-set, doubled-paned, with only the thinnest curtains clipped to a rod. When the top windows are open for ventilation, the noise outside pours into the room: the rumbling of a tram, the clang of its bells, crows, the dripping of icicles on the building’s pediments and sills.
Inside the apartment, voices; shouting from the kitchen, shouting on the telephone in the hall.
A little gold hostess trolley clatters past my door, towers of china cups, wobbling. Bookshelves line the walls of the living room, the odd book pressed flat against the glass like a sign: a glossy album of the Jack of Diamonds artists; another on theatre designs of the twenties; Hemingway in black and white, the Karsh portrait in the fisherman’s jumper; Soviet bards on vinyl sleeves.
It’s not a preserved corpse, this interior, but a mineral accretion, a geological formation, stopped in its tracks. There is no energy left to adapt to the new chaotic situation: no one even reads a book from cover to cover any more because a storm is blowing in Paradise and Benjamin’s Angel of History is being irresistibly propelled into the future.
The kitchen is small and heaped with diaries, glass jars, enamel pans, a little conical vase with a dying rose. The woman whose kitchen this is goes out to work every morning in a woollen suit with an onyx brooch at the throat, but her scientific research and her scavenging for food are interchangeable. There is nothing in the shops and no one would look askance if she left her laboratory to buy or barter something. Sometimes she comes home with a briefcase full of sugar.
In the evening this woman I loved so much perches on a stool, holding a thin piece of bread and butter and an elegant cup of tea, and tells me how she was left on her own in the kitchen of a Moscow communal apartment in the 1940s while her parents were at work. She was so scared of the mice and rats she could hear behind the walls she would sit and drum on a saucepan.
On winter afternoons when she is at work I sit in the kitchen alone, reading the newspaper with a dictionary close by. There is a rubbish chute in the corner with a heavy hopper for a door, and in the silence I hear packets floating down the chute and brushing gently against the walls like wings on their long fall to earth.
*
Meyerhold described his working approach as ‘musical realism’ in a newspaper interview in November 1926. This musicality is expressed in such gestures as the fifteen polished doors opening simultaneously to reveal townspeople with cash bribes in their hands, or the whole cast moving as one rhythmic whole to the ‘Gogolian nerve’. Khlestakov was depicted variously as a chameleon, a devil, an infernal creature, something from Hoffmann.
*
Honesty and the lyric principle are not always aligned. I must keep them both in view as I train my eye to focus on one, and then the other. ‘When we speak of honesty, in relation to poems, we mean the degree to which and the power with which the generating impulse has been transcribed’, writes Louise Glück, in her essay ‘Against Sincerity’. But who knows the generating impulse? It comes from an unseen place and so the degree of transcription is more like a trick of geometry.
*
I recognise in Benjamin an ability to generate the spirit-life, which is something apart and has its own geometry.
*
In August 1991 there was a sudden and defiantly historical event: a putsch. Tanks lined the streets, so for three days we stayed indoors. When it ended we stood around the television in the kitchen and watched the funeral of three men who died in a clash with armed forces. Everyone cried, so I cried too.
What shall I call you, history?
I have no name
I am but two days old –
*
Meyerhold was arrested, tortured, and then executed in 1940 (in the same year that Benjamin took his own life trying to escape from occupied France) and he was only rehabilitated in the fifties, after Stalin’s death. Benjamin testifies to the fact that this 1926 production of The Government Inspector was not well received: the Party had pronounced against it, the critics weighed in, and Benjamin felt the applause was measured, as if each audience member was calibrating their personal response to the political atmosphere. Meyerhold’s indisputable reign was coming slowly to an end, and official approval for this work was subtly withheld.
*
Fragments of the production can be seen online: in one clip a woman, dressed like a doll in full skirts and laced slippers, waves a black feathered fan mechanically. Like all early film it’s hard to see in her the real woman who comes off a stage fifty years before I was born and asks another woman in the dressing room to unbutton her corset. Meanwhile the last audience member files out of the auditorium and the house lights are dimmed.
*
During those putsch days, a woman I became friends with much later in my life, and then lost to political persecution, was having an affair in a Moscow apartment lent by a friend. She sat naked in bed with her lover, eating watermelon. When they heard tanks passing on the road outside, her lover rose and switched on the television: Swan Lake was on the screen, replacing the usual programmes with an endless parade of white tutus fluttering the alarm across a wide stage.
* *
Walter Benjamin watched The Government Inspector himself on 19 December 1926. It lasted over four hours, finishing at midnight, and Benjamin notes that it was ‘non-dramatic’, an observation that fills me with sympathy. I picture him arriving just before eight, taking off his coat and galoshes in the cloakroom, squeezing his hat into his coat sleeve before handing it all over to an attendant, and receiving a heavy wooden tag in return. It was not a cold December, but the pavements were still a choppy sea of ice and his shoes were damp. He checks his appearance in the long mirrors: a slightly untidy man in shining round spectacles. At midnight, when the show finally comes down, he is buffeted by the throngs collecting their furs, greatcoats, felt coats, padded jackets, and he leaves the cloakroom last. I see him being scolded for dropping a galosh; or standing in front of the mirror to drag his arm through his coat sleeve, forgetting his hat was lodged there.
*
Benjamin knew The Government Inspector and went alone to the theatre that night. Usually Asja, the woman he loved, or Bernhard Reich, her lover and companion, translated for him in the theatre. It’s tiring work. I know, because I’ve done a lot of sitting by non-Russian speakers in theatres, explaining the narrative in a hissing whisper, to the fury of everyone around us.
*
Asja Lācis, a Communist and theatre practitioner, his collaborator, the woman he loved and to whom he had dedicated Einbahnstrasse (One-Way Street):
*
Benjamin comes onto the city’s stage, under the glare of carbide, a backdrop of churches where pogroms might have been hatched, to play in a nightmarish three-hander: Asja, Bernhard Reich, Benjamin. All four walls are intact in this staging. There is no escape. The air is filled with smoke.*
Gogol was given the subject of his 1835 play by Pushkin. In a letter to Pushkin, Gogol promises to make the play ‘funnier than the devil’.
A small and remote provincial town is waiting for the arrival of a government inspector from the capital, St Petersburg. The town is corrupt, its officials are incompetent, criminal, desperately worried they will be exposed. When Khlestakov, a hungry young flibbertigibbet, arrives in the town and is taken for the inspector, he is quick to exploit the situation.
Khlestakov has a wonderful monologue on city life which unfolds from his mouth like a surreal contraption, clause after clause, like a confection, a vast layer cake. He’s a liar who knows what his audience wants to hear, a skinny proto-Trump, who constructs rickety delight like a scaffold from which bodies will subsequently dangle:*
The epigraph of Gogol’s The Government Inspector:
На зеркало неча пенять, коли рожа крива
No point blaming the mirror if your face is crooked.
*
I set out to walk to the metro station Yugo-Zapadnaya, at the end of the red line. Thirty-five years ago it was still on the outskirts of the city. I walked a lot in Moscow on wintery days in the early nineties, miles and miles every day. The walk took me south down the broad pavements of Leninsky Prospect. The Moscow I knew was the Stalinist and postwar Moscow: monstrous blocks occupying whole streets; apartments with high stucco ceilings, built before the decree on ceiling height; wide avenues broken by engineers and surveyors through the neural maze of alleys and low wooden buildings.
The snow is heaped up along the sides of the avenue and coated in a sooty dust, the road itself is iron-grey asphalt. There are very few foreign cars and the traffic still looks like a Soviet postcard: trolleybuses with their grasshopper-leg trolley poles; snub-nosed jangling buses and Kamaz trucks. I pass a bread shop with a very long queue waiting outside on the pavement. A shop woman opens the door very slightly in order to unlock it, and then lets it crash shut again in the faces of the shoppers.
*
I do not think Benjamin walked around Moscow for pleasure. He walked the streets like a creature with compound eyes, noting and recording. I think he walked around Moscow with the clearsightedness of the abject, the erotically disturbed, the displaced, the angelic.
Benjamin notes that the shop signs indicate what is for sale with a simple word or a picture. No brands or glossy advertising. In 1991 the same is still true: bread, cheese, watch menders, umbrella repair, meat.
He is drawn to Moscow’s cakes. Fantastic foamy creations, frosted with spun sugar and bright icing, laid out in drab shop windows. He even compares a scene in Meyerhold’s production to the architecture of a cake. Such a Moscow comparison! The cakes in the nineties had names to match their grandeur: Napolean, Prague, Bird’s Milk, Natasha, Kiev. The roses and ribbons of fondant icing were so sticky sweet that it seemed to me they weren’t really for eating, they were for giving and receiving and decorating the table. Shop assistants deftly popped them into oblong boxes and parcel-wrapped them in brown paper and string, looping the string into a handle to carry away.
*
I was walking because I walked almost every day, filled with an anxiety I could only alleviate in perpetual movement. Once out of the apartment there was nowhere to perch so I would trudge along, thinking my million thoughts which, like starlings, would come together into whirling clumps and then disperse, unrecorded.
I can’t remember the thoughts. Only the smells.
*
When I walked I thought of Moscow as a snowglobe, the city rising out of the earth’s curvature in a layering of lace and skirts. Place a telescope against the curved glass of the globe and you can see, very far away, a kiosk of chrysanthemums lit from inside like a stage.
*
Just beyond Yugo-Zapadnaya I came across a privately-owned restaurant and I was tired and cold so I went in. The restaurant was called Habana, a nod to the Socialist Brotherland that supplied the sugar for Moscow’s cakes. The name was exotic, it promised warmth. I could cautiously enter such a curious and expensive place on my own – never with anyone I knew.
Benjamin found Moscow expensive, he didn’t have enough money, but I recognised in his notes on Moscow the bewilderment at the value of money: he buys little treats and items, visits cafés and canteens, brings his toys and boxes back to the sanatorium where Asja is a patient – and suddenly has not enough cash to get home to Germany.
Currency from the outside world was stuffed deep in my inside pocket like a little bomb. The small amount of money I had saved as a teenager was a wealth in this momentarily sealed economy and I could in theory buy anything I wanted in Soviet shops: wooden skis, coffee sets, solid gold earrings. In fact my actual purchases were childlike, as were Benjamin’s: postcards, wooden souvenirs, Christmas tree toys.
We both witnessed a tiny slice of history, a mere millisecond when a sealed globe was breached and the air outside and the fluid inside began to merge and mix and pollute each other. With the strange impediment of two heads, one pointing outwards, the other in, I could see the past and the future colliding like tectonic plates.
I watched the wreckage piling up.
*
I went into Habana and ordered a coffee. It was beyond the means of my friends and I couldn’t rid myself of the feeling I was doing something underhand. I must have divested myself of my heavy, childish garb in the cloakroom, my bright head scarf, which had a lambswool crocheted shawl doubled inside for warmth; my shapeless sheepskin.
I sat reading. There were tiny triangles of paper napkin on the table. Other than this I remember very little. Perhaps I walked home, perhaps I took the metro – the day folds into a thousand others.
*
When I recently went online to check whether this restaurant had actually existed, I found only an account describing it as the watering hole of the district’s gangsters and racketeers in the early nineties. The article described how gangsters would leave their guns with their coats in the restaurant cloakroom, safe in the knowledge that the local police would tip off the management if they or another gang were planning a raid.
These small-town gangsters were tubby men with moustaches, knitted sweaters and leather coats. They looked like the flabby-faced functionaries of The Government Inspector. They belong with the spider-plants, fatty soups and marbled-floored foyers of the period.
*
Commerce flourished in the mid-twenties as a result of the New Economic Policy: kiosks sprang up in the streets, makeshift bazaars lit brightly by carbide lamps, selling all manner of produce, Christmas baubles, flowers, handmade ornaments. Mongolians stood in a line selling briefcases; speculators; women with pockets of meat.
Benjamin often drags his companions into shops, or is dragged past them himself with a child’s grasping eyes, glancing back, trying to remember where the shop is so he can return alone to examine these dreams of colour and minute form. He is palpably excited by what is being traded: ‘cloth and fabric form buttresses and columns’, its surreal variety.
In the early 1990s the aisles of sellers and stalls around the metro had the architectonic function of spokes – sodden gangways leading you to the station at the hub of the wheel. Men and women in bulky coats stood in lines with laundry bags between their legs: stockings and tracksuits; make-up; alcohol; cake; fried meat pies, each folded in a scrap of paper; an old man standing in the sleety rain, holding out a single packet of cigarettes. Then commerce spilled itself into all places, it evolved, splitting cells, reproducing and forming new organisms, inhabiting basement offices, institutional foyers, bare earth patches of park, ledges, anywhere a seller could find purchase and purchaser. And with it came the racketeers, the gangs that controlled the markets, the Jesus pamphleteers, the Black Hundreds, the fakeries, the speculators, the grim smell of survival.
*
Yet Benjamin writes: ‘It is precisely this transformation of an entire power structure that makes life here so extraordinarily meaningful. It is as insular and as eventful, as impoverished and yet in the same breath as full of possibilities as gold rush life in the Klondike.’
*
Irrepressible vitality. I come to write it up and it reproaches me. I am looking at this life from outside and containing it, but nothing in my life in Russia has ever been containable. It opens in front of me, wry, mocking, more than me. It writes me up.
*
In the days after the putsch I went with my friends to pro-democracy demonstrations. To see the new Federal flag over the Kremlin in place of the red flag of the USSR. We ended up at Lyubyanka, the building of the Secret Police, to see the toppled statue of the murderous 1920s secret police chief Felix Dzerzhinsky. A crowd of elderly protesters with placards and plastic bags stood outside the building, but I paid them scant attention and to this day I don’t know what they actually felt about Dzerzhinsky’s toppling.
*
Benjamin travels to Moscow with an unresolved dilemma. He is wondering whether to join the Party. Joining the Party would give him more work, he notes. But he wonders about a central paradox in Russian Communism which amounts to this: the postwar restoration of bourgeois cultural values meant they were being popularised in ‘precisely the bleak, distorted guise for which, in the end, imperialism is to be thanked.’
*
One day I went into the main bedroom of the apartment to close a banging window. The walls were lined with years of Soviet literary periodicals and there was an old ornate mirror on a dressing table. All that writing. I sat on the corner of the bed in a room of print and stared into the mirror and suddenly it all struck me: I had arrived in the Soviet Union and it had suddenly disappeared.
A teenager sat in someone else’s bedroom, and looked at the debris around her, the literary periodicals mounting skyward.
Every day I saw it in a different light and I thought there would be a resting point, a point at which I would conquer space and conceive it, and from that point
I would emerge. I didn’t know I was witnessing a disappearance and that, when I began to write, it would all be gone.
*
When we recall our earlier lives, when we fish moments from our own history, are we able to see these moments through the eyes we had then, or are the memories transfigured as they rush to the surface of our consciousness? Does this rushing transfiguration corrupt and destroy the intact memory? We see what we saw then – but we see it through our now-eyes, and with our now-thoughts, and so actually we no longer see what we once saw, and never will again.
Recalling past experience is like exposing an undeveloped film to light.
*
Meyerhold’s 1926 production of The Government Inspector was, according to Benjamin, in line with a policy of using classic texts to overcome a ‘catastrophic lack of education’ in the Soviet population. Its failure was a politically important one.
Not all the criticism is political: Viktor Shklovsky comments acidly that the feedback form should have asked ‘which act did you leave in?’. He writes that he held on till the bitter end, like an Eskimo waiting for a seal to pop out of a hole in the ice: alas no seal appeared.
But a number of prominent cultural figures defended the production. The writer Andrei Bely saw it as a tragedy, an interpretation that could not have been made in the Russia of Tsars Nikolai I or II. Meyerhold had brought Gogol into the twentieth century. ‘It is not the real Government Inspector who arrives at the end,’ writes Bely, ‘but the future.’
*
If the real Government Inspector is the future, then the past is petrified under his stern gaze. Gogol’s original play ends with an extended ‘mute’ scene – after the announcement of the real Inspector’s arrival, the final stage direction states that the cast hold their positions ‘petrified’ for nearly a minute and a half.
However in Meyerhold’s final coup de théâtre the cast leave the stage to music, dancing out of the auditorium. The coming of the real Inspector is announced as the curtain lifts again on a stage of unmoving wooden puppets.
*
That was me! I see it now. I stared and stared and could not speak. The future arrived in 1991 and I watched it, but failed to write it. It gradually became the past, and still
I failed to write it. And now, by and large, it is barely spoken of, this vital, shame-filled interval between the snarling years.
But those of us who saw it and felt it, carry it within ourselves. I spent much of it walking the streets, always walking, seeing it with the same compound eye as Benjamin, but an eye unmoored, a language building itself. If I can say very little about it, then it is because I am partly made by it, this abject-erotic confection of dirty snow and fondant cream and tobacco and the suddenness of an evening blizzard.
Notes:
Benjamin, Walter, Moscow Diary, translated by Richard Sieburth and edited by Gary Smith (Harvard University Press, 1986)
Glück, Louise, Proofs and Theories (Carcanet, 1999)
Мейерхольд в русской театральной критике: 1920–1938 (Meyerhold in Russian theatre criticism: 1920–1938), edited by T. V. Lanina (Артист. Режиссер. Театр, 2000)
Two opening stanzas from Osip Mandelstam’s poem ‘За гремучую доблесть грядущих веков’ in my translation. Gogol’s Ревизор (The Government Inspector) is freely accessible online and quotes from the original are in my translation.
Follow the dimly-lit narrow corridor from the lobby, a threadbare runner tacked to the boards, and it leads to Walter Benjamin’s room. There are low voices inside, speaking in German; one reading, another commenting from time to time. The Austrian theatre director, Bernhard Reich, is going through the draft of an article about a landmark Meyerhold production. The stale air of the hotel room, the cigarette smoke, the poor light and the smell of boiling laundry and sweat – it all presses in on his listener and produces a familiar sense of abjection, but also an intoxication with the moment, a strange and foreign moment.
Moscow all around him, a low-built bazaar of a place, its deep infrequent church bells rising through the late afternoon. And that very afternoon he had walked under the widest skies, prairie skies; pink, sharp winter air. Moscow: a large plant in its own atmosphere, its shoots struggling to breach the earth and meet the twentieth century.
Theatre is a fleeting artform, but Meyerhold’s historic 1926 production of Nikolai Gogol’s The Government Inspector has been well documented in film, articles, memoirs and critical essays. We can never really know what it felt like to be in the audience, and every show would have been different anyway – productions evolve and shift depending on the relationship between audience and cast on any given night. It’s only in retrospect that a theatrical event assumes historical importance, only in its surrounding documentation and not in itself. It assumes a defining shape once its vitality is gone and its actors are dispersed. In this it is much like a life.
The action of the play took place on a curved stage with little jutting platforms; a semicircle of polished wood and fifteen opening doors formed the backdrop. The action, compressed into short episodes in this claustrophobic space, had the appearance of a ‘moving bouquet’ or ‘structured kaleidoscope’ according to one critic. Unlike Meyerhold’s earlier iconic constructivist productions (already in the theatre’s museum), the constricted set of The Government Inspector was extravagantly furnished: antique bureaux, brocade and crystal, bronze and mahogany. It was an interior with all its signs of life, but no inhabitant: an opened-up and preserved corpse.
In 1991 I slept in a large room with a varnished parquet floor, creamy old-fashioned plaster ceiling and some stiff, formal furniture: an armchair, a patterned divan and a large showy desk. An alcove on the right-hand side holds a narrow single bed upholstered in faded damask, covered in cotton sheets and a blanket. A fridge hums in the corner of the room, filled with plastic bags of food. The window behind the desk is typically deep-set, doubled-paned, with only the thinnest curtains clipped to a rod. When the top windows are open for ventilation, the noise outside pours into the room: the rumbling of a tram, the clang of its bells, crows, the dripping of icicles on the building’s pediments and sills.
Inside the apartment, voices; shouting from the kitchen, shouting on the telephone in the hall.
A little gold hostess trolley clatters past my door, towers of china cups, wobbling. Bookshelves line the walls of the living room, the odd book pressed flat against the glass like a sign: a glossy album of the Jack of Diamonds artists; another on theatre designs of the twenties; Hemingway in black and white, the Karsh portrait in the fisherman’s jumper; Soviet bards on vinyl sleeves.
It’s not a preserved corpse, this interior, but a mineral accretion, a geological formation, stopped in its tracks. There is no energy left to adapt to the new chaotic situation: no one even reads a book from cover to cover any more because a storm is blowing in Paradise and Benjamin’s Angel of History is being irresistibly propelled into the future.
The kitchen is small and heaped with diaries, glass jars, enamel pans, a little conical vase with a dying rose. The woman whose kitchen this is goes out to work every morning in a woollen suit with an onyx brooch at the throat, but her scientific research and her scavenging for food are interchangeable. There is nothing in the shops and no one would look askance if she left her laboratory to buy or barter something. Sometimes she comes home with a briefcase full of sugar.
In the evening this woman I loved so much perches on a stool, holding a thin piece of bread and butter and an elegant cup of tea, and tells me how she was left on her own in the kitchen of a Moscow communal apartment in the 1940s while her parents were at work. She was so scared of the mice and rats she could hear behind the walls she would sit and drum on a saucepan.
On winter afternoons when she is at work I sit in the kitchen alone, reading the newspaper with a dictionary close by. There is a rubbish chute in the corner with a heavy hopper for a door, and in the silence I hear packets floating down the chute and brushing gently against the walls like wings on their long fall to earth.
Meyerhold described his working approach as ‘musical realism’ in a newspaper interview in November 1926. This musicality is expressed in such gestures as the fifteen polished doors opening simultaneously to reveal townspeople with cash bribes in their hands, or the whole cast moving as one rhythmic whole to the ‘Gogolian nerve’. Khlestakov was depicted variously as a chameleon, a devil, an infernal creature, something from Hoffmann.
Honesty and the lyric principle are not always aligned. I must keep them both in view as I train my eye to focus on one, and then the other. ‘When we speak of honesty, in relation to poems, we mean the degree to which and the power with which the generating impulse has been transcribed’, writes Louise Glück, in her essay ‘Against Sincerity’. But who knows the generating impulse? It comes from an unseen place and so the degree of transcription is more like a trick of geometry.
I recognise in Benjamin an ability to generate the spirit-life, which is something apart and has its own geometry.
In August 1991 there was a sudden and defiantly historical event: a putsch. Tanks lined the streets, so for three days we stayed indoors. When it ended we stood around the television in the kitchen and watched the funeral of three men who died in a clash with armed forces. Everyone cried, so I cried too.
What shall I call you, history?
I have no name
I am but two days old –
Meyerhold was arrested, tortured, and then executed in 1940 (in the same year that Benjamin took his own life trying to escape from occupied France) and he was only rehabilitated in the fifties, after Stalin’s death. Benjamin testifies to the fact that this 1926 production of The Government Inspector was not well received: the Party had pronounced against it, the critics weighed in, and Benjamin felt the applause was measured, as if each audience member was calibrating their personal response to the political atmosphere. Meyerhold’s indisputable reign was coming slowly to an end, and official approval for this work was subtly withheld.
Fragments of the production can be seen online: in one clip a woman, dressed like a doll in full skirts and laced slippers, waves a black feathered fan mechanically. Like all early film it’s hard to see in her the real woman who comes off a stage fifty years before I was born and asks another woman in the dressing room to unbutton her corset. Meanwhile the last audience member files out of the auditorium and the house lights are dimmed.
During those putsch days, a woman I became friends with much later in my life, and then lost to political persecution, was having an affair in a Moscow apartment lent by a friend. She sat naked in bed with her lover, eating watermelon. When they heard tanks passing on the road outside, her lover rose and switched on the television: Swan Lake was on the screen, replacing the usual programmes with an endless parade of white tutus fluttering the alarm across a wide stage.
For the future’s children and their fortune
For the highest mortal tribe
I lost my place at the fathers’ feast
My gaiety, my pride.
How the years leap snarling onto my back
Though no wolf blood runs in my veins
Thrust me deep, as you’d thrust a hat
In the sleeve of Siberian plains.
Walter Benjamin watched The Government Inspector himself on 19 December 1926. It lasted over four hours, finishing at midnight, and Benjamin notes that it was ‘non-dramatic’, an observation that fills me with sympathy. I picture him arriving just before eight, taking off his coat and galoshes in the cloakroom, squeezing his hat into his coat sleeve before handing it all over to an attendant, and receiving a heavy wooden tag in return. It was not a cold December, but the pavements were still a choppy sea of ice and his shoes were damp. He checks his appearance in the long mirrors: a slightly untidy man in shining round spectacles. At midnight, when the show finally comes down, he is buffeted by the throngs collecting their furs, greatcoats, felt coats, padded jackets, and he leaves the cloakroom last. I see him being scolded for dropping a galosh; or standing in front of the mirror to drag his arm through his coat sleeve, forgetting his hat was lodged there.
Benjamin knew The Government Inspector and went alone to the theatre that night. Usually Asja, the woman he loved, or Bernhard Reich, her lover and companion, translated for him in the theatre. It’s tiring work. I know, because I’ve done a lot of sitting by non-Russian speakers in theatres, explaining the narrative in a hissing whisper, to the fury of everyone around us.
Asja Lācis, a Communist and theatre practitioner, his collaborator, the woman he loved and to whom he had dedicated Einbahnstrasse (One-Way Street):
DIESE STRASSE HEISSTIn the poetic lines of his dedication the writer’s creative brain is a city with a street named after Asja, the loved one. She is also the engineer who breaches (durchbricht) the space to drive a new street through. Einbahnstrasse was published in 1928, but Benjamin brought the work to Moscow to show Asja, giving her a copy of the handsome photomontage cover by Sasha Stone.
ASJA-LACIS-STRASSE
NACH DER DIE SIE
ALS INGENIEUR
IM AUTOR DURCHGEBROCHEN HAT
Benjamin comes onto the city’s stage, under the glare of carbide, a backdrop of churches where pogroms might have been hatched, to play in a nightmarish three-hander: Asja, Bernhard Reich, Benjamin. All four walls are intact in this staging. There is no escape. The air is filled with smoke.
Benjamin short-circuits his reading lamp.
Benjamin waits for Asja in the cold.
Benjamin eats far too much cake.
Benjamin won’t buy her an expensive fur,
but he buys himself all manner of lacquered toys.
Benjamin rushes out of the room.
Child Benjamin can never get off the tram at the right stop because of the tight
press of furry bodies in the tramcar.
Benjamin comes home triumphantly with a candle.
Gogol was given the subject of his 1835 play by Pushkin. In a letter to Pushkin, Gogol promises to make the play ‘funnier than the devil’.
A small and remote provincial town is waiting for the arrival of a government inspector from the capital, St Petersburg. The town is corrupt, its officials are incompetent, criminal, desperately worried they will be exposed. When Khlestakov, a hungry young flibbertigibbet, arrives in the town and is taken for the inspector, he is quick to exploit the situation.
Khlestakov has a wonderful monologue on city life which unfolds from his mouth like a surreal contraption, clause after clause, like a confection, a vast layer cake. He’s a liar who knows what his audience wants to hear, a skinny proto-Trump, who constructs rickety delight like a scaffold from which bodies will subsequently dangle:
On the table, let’s say, a melon, a melon costing seven hundred roubles. Soup in a tureen straight from Paris on a ship. You lift the lid and the steam – well there’s nothing like it in all nature. I’m at balls day and night. We even have our own whist party at balls, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, the French Ambassador, the English one, the German one and me. I can quite wear myself out playing whist, it’s like nothing else…’
The epigraph of Gogol’s The Government Inspector:
На зеркало неча пенять, коли рожа крива
No point blaming the mirror if your face is crooked.
I set out to walk to the metro station Yugo-Zapadnaya, at the end of the red line. Thirty-five years ago it was still on the outskirts of the city. I walked a lot in Moscow on wintery days in the early nineties, miles and miles every day. The walk took me south down the broad pavements of Leninsky Prospect. The Moscow I knew was the Stalinist and postwar Moscow: monstrous blocks occupying whole streets; apartments with high stucco ceilings, built before the decree on ceiling height; wide avenues broken by engineers and surveyors through the neural maze of alleys and low wooden buildings.
The snow is heaped up along the sides of the avenue and coated in a sooty dust, the road itself is iron-grey asphalt. There are very few foreign cars and the traffic still looks like a Soviet postcard: trolleybuses with their grasshopper-leg trolley poles; snub-nosed jangling buses and Kamaz trucks. I pass a bread shop with a very long queue waiting outside on the pavement. A shop woman opens the door very slightly in order to unlock it, and then lets it crash shut again in the faces of the shoppers.
I do not think Benjamin walked around Moscow for pleasure. He walked the streets like a creature with compound eyes, noting and recording. I think he walked around Moscow with the clearsightedness of the abject, the erotically disturbed, the displaced, the angelic.
Benjamin notes that the shop signs indicate what is for sale with a simple word or a picture. No brands or glossy advertising. In 1991 the same is still true: bread, cheese, watch menders, umbrella repair, meat.
He is drawn to Moscow’s cakes. Fantastic foamy creations, frosted with spun sugar and bright icing, laid out in drab shop windows. He even compares a scene in Meyerhold’s production to the architecture of a cake. Such a Moscow comparison! The cakes in the nineties had names to match their grandeur: Napolean, Prague, Bird’s Milk, Natasha, Kiev. The roses and ribbons of fondant icing were so sticky sweet that it seemed to me they weren’t really for eating, they were for giving and receiving and decorating the table. Shop assistants deftly popped them into oblong boxes and parcel-wrapped them in brown paper and string, looping the string into a handle to carry away.
I was walking because I walked almost every day, filled with an anxiety I could only alleviate in perpetual movement. Once out of the apartment there was nowhere to perch so I would trudge along, thinking my million thoughts which, like starlings, would come together into whirling clumps and then disperse, unrecorded.
I can’t remember the thoughts. Only the smells.
tobacco
urine
aftershave
mould
mazut
grease
the feel of shallow slippery steps into underpasses on the soles of my feet
the sight of grimy bags on shopping trolleys
the cold
When I walked I thought of Moscow as a snowglobe, the city rising out of the earth’s curvature in a layering of lace and skirts. Place a telescope against the curved glass of the globe and you can see, very far away, a kiosk of chrysanthemums lit from inside like a stage.
Just beyond Yugo-Zapadnaya I came across a privately-owned restaurant and I was tired and cold so I went in. The restaurant was called Habana, a nod to the Socialist Brotherland that supplied the sugar for Moscow’s cakes. The name was exotic, it promised warmth. I could cautiously enter such a curious and expensive place on my own – never with anyone I knew.
Benjamin found Moscow expensive, he didn’t have enough money, but I recognised in his notes on Moscow the bewilderment at the value of money: he buys little treats and items, visits cafés and canteens, brings his toys and boxes back to the sanatorium where Asja is a patient – and suddenly has not enough cash to get home to Germany.
Currency from the outside world was stuffed deep in my inside pocket like a little bomb. The small amount of money I had saved as a teenager was a wealth in this momentarily sealed economy and I could in theory buy anything I wanted in Soviet shops: wooden skis, coffee sets, solid gold earrings. In fact my actual purchases were childlike, as were Benjamin’s: postcards, wooden souvenirs, Christmas tree toys.
We both witnessed a tiny slice of history, a mere millisecond when a sealed globe was breached and the air outside and the fluid inside began to merge and mix and pollute each other. With the strange impediment of two heads, one pointing outwards, the other in, I could see the past and the future colliding like tectonic plates.
I watched the wreckage piling up.
I went into Habana and ordered a coffee. It was beyond the means of my friends and I couldn’t rid myself of the feeling I was doing something underhand. I must have divested myself of my heavy, childish garb in the cloakroom, my bright head scarf, which had a lambswool crocheted shawl doubled inside for warmth; my shapeless sheepskin.
I sat reading. There were tiny triangles of paper napkin on the table. Other than this I remember very little. Perhaps I walked home, perhaps I took the metro – the day folds into a thousand others.
When I recently went online to check whether this restaurant had actually existed, I found only an account describing it as the watering hole of the district’s gangsters and racketeers in the early nineties. The article described how gangsters would leave their guns with their coats in the restaurant cloakroom, safe in the knowledge that the local police would tip off the management if they or another gang were planning a raid.
These small-town gangsters were tubby men with moustaches, knitted sweaters and leather coats. They looked like the flabby-faced functionaries of The Government Inspector. They belong with the spider-plants, fatty soups and marbled-floored foyers of the period.
Commerce flourished in the mid-twenties as a result of the New Economic Policy: kiosks sprang up in the streets, makeshift bazaars lit brightly by carbide lamps, selling all manner of produce, Christmas baubles, flowers, handmade ornaments. Mongolians stood in a line selling briefcases; speculators; women with pockets of meat.
Benjamin often drags his companions into shops, or is dragged past them himself with a child’s grasping eyes, glancing back, trying to remember where the shop is so he can return alone to examine these dreams of colour and minute form. He is palpably excited by what is being traded: ‘cloth and fabric form buttresses and columns’, its surreal variety.
In the early 1990s the aisles of sellers and stalls around the metro had the architectonic function of spokes – sodden gangways leading you to the station at the hub of the wheel. Men and women in bulky coats stood in lines with laundry bags between their legs: stockings and tracksuits; make-up; alcohol; cake; fried meat pies, each folded in a scrap of paper; an old man standing in the sleety rain, holding out a single packet of cigarettes. Then commerce spilled itself into all places, it evolved, splitting cells, reproducing and forming new organisms, inhabiting basement offices, institutional foyers, bare earth patches of park, ledges, anywhere a seller could find purchase and purchaser. And with it came the racketeers, the gangs that controlled the markets, the Jesus pamphleteers, the Black Hundreds, the fakeries, the speculators, the grim smell of survival.
Yet Benjamin writes: ‘It is precisely this transformation of an entire power structure that makes life here so extraordinarily meaningful. It is as insular and as eventful, as impoverished and yet in the same breath as full of possibilities as gold rush life in the Klondike.’
Irrepressible vitality. I come to write it up and it reproaches me. I am looking at this life from outside and containing it, but nothing in my life in Russia has ever been containable. It opens in front of me, wry, mocking, more than me. It writes me up.
In the days after the putsch I went with my friends to pro-democracy demonstrations. To see the new Federal flag over the Kremlin in place of the red flag of the USSR. We ended up at Lyubyanka, the building of the Secret Police, to see the toppled statue of the murderous 1920s secret police chief Felix Dzerzhinsky. A crowd of elderly protesters with placards and plastic bags stood outside the building, but I paid them scant attention and to this day I don’t know what they actually felt about Dzerzhinsky’s toppling.
Benjamin travels to Moscow with an unresolved dilemma. He is wondering whether to join the Party. Joining the Party would give him more work, he notes. But he wonders about a central paradox in Russian Communism which amounts to this: the postwar restoration of bourgeois cultural values meant they were being popularised in ‘precisely the bleak, distorted guise for which, in the end, imperialism is to be thanked.’
One day I went into the main bedroom of the apartment to close a banging window. The walls were lined with years of Soviet literary periodicals and there was an old ornate mirror on a dressing table. All that writing. I sat on the corner of the bed in a room of print and stared into the mirror and suddenly it all struck me: I had arrived in the Soviet Union and it had suddenly disappeared.
A teenager sat in someone else’s bedroom, and looked at the debris around her, the literary periodicals mounting skyward.
Every day I saw it in a different light and I thought there would be a resting point, a point at which I would conquer space and conceive it, and from that point
I would emerge. I didn’t know I was witnessing a disappearance and that, when I began to write, it would all be gone.
When we recall our earlier lives, when we fish moments from our own history, are we able to see these moments through the eyes we had then, or are the memories transfigured as they rush to the surface of our consciousness? Does this rushing transfiguration corrupt and destroy the intact memory? We see what we saw then – but we see it through our now-eyes, and with our now-thoughts, and so actually we no longer see what we once saw, and never will again.
Recalling past experience is like exposing an undeveloped film to light.
Meyerhold’s 1926 production of The Government Inspector was, according to Benjamin, in line with a policy of using classic texts to overcome a ‘catastrophic lack of education’ in the Soviet population. Its failure was a politically important one.
Not all the criticism is political: Viktor Shklovsky comments acidly that the feedback form should have asked ‘which act did you leave in?’. He writes that he held on till the bitter end, like an Eskimo waiting for a seal to pop out of a hole in the ice: alas no seal appeared.
But a number of prominent cultural figures defended the production. The writer Andrei Bely saw it as a tragedy, an interpretation that could not have been made in the Russia of Tsars Nikolai I or II. Meyerhold had brought Gogol into the twentieth century. ‘It is not the real Government Inspector who arrives at the end,’ writes Bely, ‘but the future.’
If the real Government Inspector is the future, then the past is petrified under his stern gaze. Gogol’s original play ends with an extended ‘mute’ scene – after the announcement of the real Inspector’s arrival, the final stage direction states that the cast hold their positions ‘petrified’ for nearly a minute and a half.
However in Meyerhold’s final coup de théâtre the cast leave the stage to music, dancing out of the auditorium. The coming of the real Inspector is announced as the curtain lifts again on a stage of unmoving wooden puppets.
That was me! I see it now. I stared and stared and could not speak. The future arrived in 1991 and I watched it, but failed to write it. It gradually became the past, and still
I failed to write it. And now, by and large, it is barely spoken of, this vital, shame-filled interval between the snarling years.
But those of us who saw it and felt it, carry it within ourselves. I spent much of it walking the streets, always walking, seeing it with the same compound eye as Benjamin, but an eye unmoored, a language building itself. If I can say very little about it, then it is because I am partly made by it, this abject-erotic confection of dirty snow and fondant cream and tobacco and the suddenness of an evening blizzard.
Notes:
Benjamin, Walter, Moscow Diary, translated by Richard Sieburth and edited by Gary Smith (Harvard University Press, 1986)
Glück, Louise, Proofs and Theories (Carcanet, 1999)
Мейерхольд в русской театральной критике: 1920–1938 (Meyerhold in Russian theatre criticism: 1920–1938), edited by T. V. Lanina (Артист. Режиссер. Театр, 2000)
Two opening stanzas from Osip Mandelstam’s poem ‘За гремучую доблесть грядущих веков’ in my translation. Gogol’s Ревизор (The Government Inspector) is freely accessible online and quotes from the original are in my translation.
This article is taken from PN Review 284, Volume 51 Number 6, July - August 2025.