Review of Moscow, the Fourth Rome: Stalinism, Cosmopolitanism, and the Evolution of Soviet Culture, 1931–1941 by Katerina Clark. Cambridge, MA: harvard University Press, 2011. Pp. 432. $38.50 cloth

Lee, Steven S

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CriticismVolume 58 | Issue 1 Article 92016Stalinist CosmopolitanismSteven S. LeeUniversity of California, Berkeley, stevenlee@berkeley.eduFollow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/criticismPart of the Slavic Languages and Societies CommonsRecommended CitationLee, Steven S. (2016) "Stalinist Cosmopolitanism," Criticism: Vol. 58 : Iss. 1 , Article 9.Available at: http://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/criticism/vol58/iss1/9 163Criticism Winter 2016, Vol. 58, No. 1, pp. 163–167. ISSN 0011-1589. doi: 10.13110/criticism.58.1.0163© 2017 by Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201-1309It has long been common practice to see Western metropolises like Paris and New York as compet-ing centers of global modernism, as capitals in the “world republic of let-ters.” Katerina Clark’s magisterial Moscow, the Fourth Rome presents an alternate mapping of world cul-ture, with the Soviet Union emerg-ing as another potential center, one beyond capitalist bounds. This is a formidable task, given Clark’s focus on the 1930s rather than the 1920s. Few would dispute Bolshevik claims to worldliness in the ear-lier decade—the topic of her 1995 Petersburg: Crucible of Cultural Revolution—which witnessed the heyday of the Soviet avant-garde and Third International. Not so with the 1930s, typically regarded as a time of terror and retreat—with avant-gardism giving way to socialist realism, and with dreams of international revolution over-shadowed by Stalinist realpolitik. By this dominant account, the 1930s marked Moscow’s abandonment of worldly, utopian aspirations—its turn inward in the name of “social-ism in one country” amid heighten-ing Russian nationalism.Clark does not dispute that the 1930s marked various disillusion-ing retreats. Rather, her project is to “integrate a rather neglected inter-national dimension into the overall interpretation of Stalinism” (6)—in short, to draw connections between Stalinist culture and the rest of the world, particularly Western STALINIST COSMOPOLITANISMSteven S. LeeMoscow, the Fourth Rome: Stalinism, Cosmopolitanism, and the Evolution of Soviet Culture, 1931–1941 by Katerina Clark. Cambridge, MA: harvard University Press, 2011. Pp. 432. $38.50 cloth.Criticism 58.1_06_BM.indd   163 17/03/17   11:17 am164 STEVEN S. LEEstate. Throughout the book, Clark resolves this seeming contradiction by emphasizing the ambiguity of cosmopolitanism—the fact that one could be “driven by a desire to interact with the cultures and intel-lectuals of the outside world” (5) but do so from the vantage of a particu-lar nation. For instance, she shows Tretiakov—the futurist writer who advocated the journalistic writing technique known as the literature of fact—in 1930 Berlin, where he was sent by an official organiza-tion to assist with propaganda efforts. however, he also used the opportunity to acquaint himself with members of the German left-ist avant-garde—many of whom (most prominently Bertolt Brecht) he later hosted in Moscow. A more unexpected example of cosmopoli-tan patriotism comes in the form of Eisenstein’s exoticist embrace of Chinese writing, which in 1935 he described as “a unique model for how, through emotional images filled with proletarian wisdom and humanity, the great ideas of our great land must be poured into the hearts and emotions of the millions of nations speaking different lan-guages” (201). That is, Eisenstein saw Chinese as a formula for the advancement of Soviet cultural hegemony, and Clark describes how he arrived at this view in part by attending Chinese actor Mei Lanfang’s 1935 performances and lectures in Moscow—which also occasioned Brecht’s “first published Europe. One goal here, of course, is to correct the historical record—to counter the simplified view of Stalinist culture as merely autarkic and totalitarian. Clark shows that, as the Kremlin abandoned avant-garde iconoclasm and centralized state power, Moscow remained “a center for a transnational intellec-tual milieu” (25). Socialist realism and Stalinist architecture emerged not simply from official decrees, but from cultural currents circulating across East and West. I specify some of these currents below, but Clark’s connection between Moscow of the ’30s and the competing cul-tural centers of Paris and Berlin undergirds the broader, more pro-vocative takeaway from this study: that lurking in current discourses of transnationalism and cosmopoli-tanism is a largely forgotten Soviet legacy—tucked away in the now underused, Comintern-inflected internationalism. Ultimately, this is a book not just about the Stalinist ’30s, but an effort to bring the Soviet Union back into models of our globalized, post-Soviet world.Clark goes about this task partly by following the travels and trajectories of four Soviet intel-lectual adventurers—filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein and writers Ilya Erenberg, Mikhail Koltsov, and Sergei Tretiakov. Clark calls these figures “cosmopolitan patriots,” who pushed for engagement with non-Soviet culture even as they remained committed to the Soviet Criticism 58.1_06_BM.indd   164 17/03/17   11:17 am ON MOSCOW, THE FOURTH ROME 165used to legitimate its postcapitalist, postreligious order. This is a city where words were sacred, where rulers were presented as writers, and, as Clark demonstrates, writ-ers around the world took notice. Most notably, a recurring presence in the book is Moscow’s colony of Germanophone writers and editors who were in exile from Nazism. Prominent among these was Georgy Lukács, and Clark traces his active participation in Soviet intellectual life and particularly in the development of socialist real-ism—according to him, bound to both the ancient Greek epic and the “great bourgeois realist novel” (165) of Western Europe.On the foundation of these con-crete physical exchanges, as well as explicit efforts to blur East and West, Clark paints a more abstract, at times impressionistic portrait of the techniques, themes, and fash-ions joining Stalinist culture to the rest of the world. Dispelling the notion that this culture simply reflected the whims of Stalin, Clark presents a field of cultural options circulating across Europe, from which Soviet intellectuals and (in the final instance) officials picked and chose. For instance, she sug-gests that the appearance of frescos and mosaics on Soviet buildings in the early ’30s can be related to a simultaneous reaction against Le Corbusier in France (109). Likewise, she posits a transatlantic conservative turn in the late ’30s, formulation of his theory of alien-ation” (192)—as well as by his expos ure to Lucien Lévy-Brühl’s La Mentalité Primitive (Primitive Mentality, 1923) and to Marcel Granet’s La Pensée chinoise (Chinese Thought, 1934). The latter book was a birthday gift to Eisenstein from the African American per-former Paul Robeson, who also visited Moscow in 1935. Moscow, the Fourth Rome is filled with such exchanges among artists and intel-lectuals across national and racial lines; taken together, they lend striking credence to the notion of a Soviet-centered world culture.Accordingly, Clark builds up Moscow as a place that aspired to be world class, as evidenced by efforts to reconstruct it as a “higher order place” (27) in the mold of ancient Athens and Rome. Describing various plans for the building of a “new Moscow,” she notes that the monumental, socialist realist architecture that predominated in the ’30s drew from classical and Renaissance traditions, as well as from contemporary Manhattan. Of course, Moscow was not the only city during the interwar years to claim ancient Rome as a precedent, but, in Clark’s presentation, what set it apart was a unique conver-gence of art and politics. Moscow emerged as a “lettered city”—able to be read, through its architec-ture, as a text; and obsessed with the written word and, in particu-lar, literature, which the regime Criticism 58.1_06_BM.indd   165 17/03/17   11:17 am166 STEVEN S. LEEFriedrich Schiller’s formulation and  “delightful horror” in Edmund Burke’s—is likewise made to dove-tail with Stalinist repression; as is the lyric, which Clark associ-ates with the cult of Byron in late 1930s Moscow, a sudden emphasis on personal over politicized poetry, and the feverish introspection found in “purge discourse.” This is Stalinist culture at its most legible for scholars of Western literature, but also at its most bloodstained and terror-stricken.In short, amid her efforts to open our understanding of 1930s Moscow—to unseat such distinc-tions as East versus West, socialist realism versus modernism, dissi-dent versus stooge—Clark remains keenly aware of the ever-tighten-ing grip of Stalinism. Two of her four cosmopolitan patriots per-ished during the purges, the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact repulsed many from the Soviet orbit, and cosmopolitan emerged in postwar Moscow as a code word for Jewish. Indeed, Moscow’s failure to remain a nexus of world culture is sig-naled in the book’s title. As Clark explains in the opening pages, the sixteenth-century monk Filofei of Pskov declared Moscow the succes-sor to Rome and Constantinople: “Two Romes have fallen, and a third stands, and a fourth there shall not be” (1). Thus, Clark’s choice of “Fourth Rome” indicates the emergence of Moscow as “the capital of a different, post-Christian, as seen in the coincidence of the Soviet campaign against formalism, Nazi attacks on degenerate art, and the rise of hollywood puritanism. To her credit, Clark does not press such connections, nor does she go about the daunting task of explain-ing their root causes. Rather, these work as heuristic devices to open Stalinist culture to Western culture and vice versa.The result is disconcerting, particularly as Clark traces how Stalinist culture changed from the early to late ’30s—that is, to the peak of the Terror—for it is at this point that this culture becomes most familiar and, in many ways, appealing. Clark argues that the period witnessed a pan-European turn from classicism to romanti-cism, which in Soviet culture was marked by emphases on interior-ity, adventure, the sublime, and the lyric. After explaining inte-riority through the writings of Konstantin Stanislavsky—who by the late ’30s had been enshrined by the Soviet state—she proceeds to connect his insistence on “emo-tional truth” (228) to the show trials’ insistence on unmasking. Likewise, after tying Soviet adven-ture writing to the Spanish Civil War—comparing, for instance, the works of Ernest hemingway and Koltsov—she notes how, in his own trial, Tretiakov was forced to write a confession in the mode of a romantic adventure tale. The sublime—“bold disorder” in Criticism 58.1_06_BM.indd   166 17/03/17   11:17 am ON MOSCOW, THE FOURTH ROME 167historian Michael David-Fox puts it, the book serves as “a cautionary tale for naïve talk about transcend-ing the national or failure to distin-guish rigorously among different forms and meanings of cross-bor-der exchange.”1 On a more meth-odological level, readers might also be thrown by the book’s frequent use of analogy to bridge East and West, as well as the unclear sense of what determines the sweeping cultural shifts it tracks. Ultimately, however, Clark’s project is to open a whole new field of inquiry—leaving it to others to follow her lead, fill in the gaps, and weigh the consequences for contemporary cosmopolitanism.Steven S. Lee is an associate professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of The Ethnic Avant-Garde: Minority Cultures and World Revolution (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015).NOTE1. Michael David-Fox, “The Implications of Transnationalism,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 12, no. 4 (2011): 885–904, quotation on 897.belief system” (2, emphasis in the original), but also “the possibility that the Soviet desire to make the capital a world center was unreal-izable” (28). In short, Clark pres-ents both the rise and fall of this center—of this ideal of Soviet cos-mopolitanism that was arguably doomed from the start.The Cold War and such notions as the Iron Curtain and Three Worlds made it possible to for-get this ideal. Now that Clark has reminded us of it, the challenge now is to remap the concept of world culture so that it engages the previ-ously cordoned-off realms of really existing socialism. To be sure, many readers will find this challenge dis-comfiting. In revisiting this 1930s moment, Clark not only broadens the horizon of Stalinist culture, but also hints at the uneasy convergence of Stalinism and Western modern-ism—for instance, the fact that Soviet-oriented critics sympathetic to the latter (e.g., James Joyce’s Ulysses [1922]) used the purges to advance their positions (162). In other words, Clark reveals the trou-bled, Stalinist legacy of situating culture transnationally, of think-ing beyond the nation: As Soviet Criticism 58.1_06_BM.indd   167 17/03/17   11:17 am

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