Abstract
Walter Benjamin reviewed the book Der Russe redet by Ssofia Fedortschenko, a Russian nurse during WWI, in 1926 for Die Literarische Welt. This article discusses the review in three respects: 1) as an interrelated component of the journal’s discursive embedding, 2) as part of the reviewed book’s transfer across Europe, and 3) as an element in Benjamin’s (cross-cultural) engagement with war reports and ‘mediating’ (Soviet) Russian affairs. Taken together, the three perspectives showcase how Benjamin interacted with forming discourses in Die Literarische Welt in 1926/7. He did so by working with intercultural and intermedial dimensions that both impacted and were impacted or reflected by the literary critic. (SB)
Among the first reviews Walter Benjamin wrote is a short piece for the Berlin-based journal Die Literarische Welt on Der Russe redet by Sofia Fedorchenko, a Russian nurse during WW I. A few months earlier, he had noted enthusiastically in a letter he sent from Paris on 5 April 1926:
Es bringt ohne Anmerkungen, Daten noch Namen Sätze aus Unterhaltungen russischer Soldaten, wie eine Samariterin, die an der Front war, sie von Fall zu Fall aufgezeichnet hat. Es ist vielleicht, wahrscheinlich, das aufrichtigste und positivste Buch, welches der Krieg hervorgebracht hat. (GB, 3 134f)
Reviews of this or other books, as one genre of the category ‘kleine Form,’ pose a specific hermeneutic task. They present a site and laboratory for Benjamin to publish on various topics and pursue overarching theoretical interests. Yet such reviews comment mostly on individual works only, thus raising the question of their more general relevance for Benjamin’s thought and the discursive field of literary criticism at the time.
Beyond adding to the image of Benjamin as a reader, reviews can offer a point of entry into a journal’s processual logic of ordering and formatting discursive patterns. Gustav Frank, Madlen Podewski, and Stefan Scherer would thus call its media-historical function a “kleines Archiv” that filters a discursive attention economy (Frank et al. 30–32). Or indeed, as the editor Willy Haas has put it, the journal operates as an “Art der Verständigung und Selbstverständigung [der deutschen Intelligenz]” (Haas 176). Instead of starting hermeneutically from a close reading of the reviewed book and then presenting the critic’s take on it, this article explores the review’s role in the logic of the journal and its placement in the medium. This “material philology” (Lechtermann 117) approach sheds light on the genetic, discursive, and strategic functions of Benjamin’s review and the process of his reviewing activity more generally. The former presents a lens into the particular meaning-making of a journal which juxtaposes, links, or drops thematic threads of published texts. And the latter showcases how those media parameters proved formative for Benjamin writing his reviews in the first place when strategically reacting to or interacting with ongoing topics in a journal.
This article discusses Benjamin’s review with regards to three aspects: 1) as an interrelated component of the journal’s discursive embedding, 2) as part of the reviewed book’s transfer across Europe, 3) as an element in Benjamin’s cross-cultural engagement with war reports and mediating Soviet affairs. The three aspects taken together showcase how Benjamin interacted with thematic trends that dominated Die Literarische Welt in 1926/27 by working with and intertwining intercultural and intermedial dimensions.
A Journal Contribution: Interrelated Component of its Discursive Embedding
Benjamin’s review was situated in the discursive formations of a journal promoting Franco-German relations and new media. The Berlin-based Die Literarische Welt was founded by Willy Haas in 1925 and modelled after the French Nouvelles Litérraires (Haas 153f). It gained momentum through initial public polemics around a scandal of the PEN Club in Paris and since then promoted Franco-German relations and understanding more broadly.
It is instructive to have a closer look at the publication context, specifically the journal’s media framework and layout, which configure its discursive formations. What elements are printed next to each other in any one issue remains coincidental to some degree, prestructured only through certain thematic journal sections. The precise juxtaposition thus goes beyond any individual author’s intention. But what surrounds Benjamin’s review “Ssofia Fedortschenko. Der Russe redet” in the printed edition can nevertheless be illuminating for broader shifts of discussions at the time.
Issue 45, published on 5 November 1926, loosely juxtaposes recurring sections and other contributions. It starts with the section “Deutsche Dichter über Dichtungen unserer Zeit,” the section “Zeitchronik der Literarischen Welt,” a feature, “Arthur Holitscher: Neues von Masereel,” an obituary on Franz Janowitz, the section “Buch-Chronik der Woche” (see Fig. 1)2, the section “Theater und Film,” and advertisements together with the section “Bibliographie der Woche.” Like other issues, this one also assembles diverse media forms by means of the layout. Text for contributions and advertisements appear in varying typographical forms. Visual components in this issue include a portrait drawing (page 2), woodcuts (page 3), a portrait photo (page 4), and a shot from a theatre scene (page 7). In the same way as there is no strict layout or type of printed image imposed on every issue, number 45 presents diverse takes on attitudes towards and discourses about the ways media forms relate to one another.
In terms of broad topics, the issue dedicated the most printing space and thus reader attention to French modernity, journalism, travel and international matters, as well as media. None of the individual pieces is explicitly representative of the journal’s theoretical standpoint. But considered in combination, they form a discursive horizon for those overarching themes. The first broader topic, international matters, on page one is concerned with Theodor Däubler’s Hymne an Italien (1916). Page two features a conference on “Die Rolle des Geistmenschen im Aufbau,” a section on “Moderne Französische Literatur,” a list with “Deutsche Autoren im Ausland,” and advertisements for Paul Rohrbach’s Amerika und wir: Reisebetrachtungen (1926). On page four, Axel Eggebrecht‘s “Literarischer Streifzug nach Hamburg” discusses not international but literary travel. An advertisement for Oswald Spengler’s popular Der Untergang des Abendlandes (1918/1922), a cultural morphological history of philosophy regarding European cultures, even features twice. By thematizing cities, France, Europe and America, those selected contributions articulate an impression of fluid cultural crossings.
In this issue, the diverse discourses on media manifest in treatments of graphical work and the more general section on film and theatre. On page three, one feature is dedicated to Frans Masereel, a Flemish painter and graphic artist focusing on political and social issues. In the French and German-speaking sphere he gained popularity for his pacificist publications, along with his anti-war images and woodcuts. Arthur Holitscher, the feature’s author, discusses specifically the new epistemic effect of an intermedial methodology that extends and experiments by going beyond the “sonst übliche Art der Veröffentlichung”: “‘Filme in Büchern’ oder ‘Romane in Bildern’ sind Masereels Werke” (LW2, No. 45, 7). The last section of the issue on “Theater und Film” entails an essay by Béla Bálazs, “Vorstoss in eine neue Dimension?,” that also reflects on epistemic and methodological shifts brought about by new media. Like editor Willy Haas, the Hungarian intellectual Bálazs was a film critic and thus proponent of formalist film theory. Here, he characterizes the medium film as a “Kunst der Welt-Anschauung.” Despite different focal points, such texts in Die Literarische Welt tendentially share an interest in experimental media practices and their remodeling of perception.
Benjamin’s review is placed within these other textual and visual elements on page six in the section “Buch-Chronik der Woche” (see Fig. 1). In terms of placement and typography, it does not stand out visually from any other texts. The page is subdivided into four columns, the outer ones containing advertisements and the central two filled with contributions. The ads on the left aggravate the experience of life as entangled media, for example, with the promoted magazine Das Leben. Its slogan, “Lesen Sie das Leben,” posits life’s readability through a mixture of novellas, essays, photos, anecdotes, and riddles. On the righthand side, ads point again to Frans Masereel, featured more extensively on the previous pages. In the lower part, a visually striking advertisement of Spengler’s Der Untergang des Abendlandes brings up its underpinning imaginary of an East-West divide between the declining Western and rising Russian civilisation.
Conversely, we can consider not only the placement of Benjamin’s review as an integral element of the journal’s discursive embedding but his positioning towards the latter. As mentioned earlier, this examination cannot take other texts from the same page as explicit intertexts for his text genesis. Benjamin’s articulated standpoint can be approached as generally aimed at the processual meaning-making in the journal. Thus, its relation to discursive formations gains contour against thematic trends.
The review on Fedorchenko, in fact, contains a positioning towards two broader concerns of Die Literatische Welt in its early years—intermediality and international or cross-cultural mediation. First, Der Russe redet. Aufzeichnungen nach dem Stenogramm presents in the critic’s words, which echo the translated subtitle: “stenographische Fragmente von der Kriegsfront” (WuN 13.1, 54). Benjamin comments on the reader’s experience by intertwining media aspects and cultural crossings:
So tritt der Leser in dies Buch wie in die Stube: er weiß nicht, wovon die Rede ist. Er versteht schlechter, er hört schärfer, als er im Bild ist. Vernimmt die Stimmen aus den unabsehbaren Gesprächen, deren epische Breite in ihren unscheinbarsten Fragmenten noch liegt. Nichts vom Epigramm ist in all den Wendungen: die undurchdringlichen dunklen Gedanken heben sich wie Refrains eines Volksliedes ab, das in der durchgehaltenen Melodie den Russen und den Juden, Gott und Teufel, Vernunft und Niedertracht, Pogrom und Krieg, die Liebe und den Schlaf, die Weiber, Tiere, Glück und Jammer laut werden lässt. (WuN 13.1, 54)
Benjamin evokes a particular tension between visual and auditive modes of reception. Thereby, he crosses and interweaves allocated senses in an unusual manner. The visual sense, often underpinning epistemological metaphors, turns out to be unreliable: the reader “versteht schlechter,” “Gespräche sind unabsehbar” and there are “undurchdringliche dunkle Gedanken.” The phrasing, “er hört schärfer, als er im Bild ist” seems rather remarkable. The latter refers both to contextual knowledge (“im Bild sein”) and gains further currency in relation to contemporaneous discourses on the image, such as the being within visual culture more generally. After all, most contributions in the issue, taken as exemplary for thematic trends in the journal, would foreground reflections on the role and function of new (visual) media, such as film and photography.
On the contrary, Benjamin revaluates the auditive sense: “er hört schärfer,” “Refrain des Volksliedes,” “durchgehaltende Melodie, die etwas laut werden lässt.” While his thought is well-known for its attention to the visual—even condensing in methodological concepts such as his “dialektische Optik” or “Denkbilder”—some scholars have highlighted the persistent yet not systematically developed significance of his acoustic interests (see Goebel 48, Klein et al. 7–14, Mettin 12). Asmus Trautsch concludes for the recurring role of the auditory in Benjamin’s writings: “Das Andere von Bild und Sprache ist aber […] das Akustische, in dem die Gefühle wahrnehmbar werden” (45). For example, rhythm and echo as principles of acoustically organizing interruptions in perceiving time and history present one thread underpinning Benjamin’s late historical-philosophical thinking of “dialektische Bilder” and “Jetzt der Erkennbarkeit” (see Trautsch 26, Mettin 113–115). Although his epistemic preference for the auditory is not nearly so conceptually elaborated in this review from 1926, it appears nevertheless interesting for modelling potential cross-cultural mediation.
The above mentioned “Melodie” and music provide an alternative access to another culture than semiotics of language and its representational operations. The latter structure or impose a communicational transfer of signifying and interpreting foreign cultural knowledge adequately. Music in Benjamin’s treatments, on the other hand, enables for Reinhold Görling an “Ebene der Kommunikation, in der die Fetischisierung der Sprache, der Mythos der Repräsentation aufhört zu wirken,” thus accounting for the “Möglichkeit einer Sprache, die dem anderen keine Gewalt antut, die ihn nicht zu repräsentieren vorgibt” (Görling 590). And “Klangräume,” like in Berliner Kindheit nach neunzehnhundert (1930), foreground the affective and somatic dimension of recalling and reflecting on Benjamin’s formative surroundings, thus serving as his gateway to implicit layers of historically and locally specific cultural knowledge (see Trautsch 27–34, Kornmeier 52). Advocating, in that sense, the acoustics of Fedorchenko’s writings seemingly highlights an affective rather than communicational condition of possible understanding for readers unfamiliar with Russian language, history, and culture.
Such a tentative reading of modelling cross-linguistic and intercultural insight through acoustics, while not further theorized here by Benjamin, gains plausibility in two respects. First of all, it indicates a countermodel to a prominent gaze towards Eastern Europe, namely Spengler’s widely read and discussed Untergang des Abendlandes (1918/1922) and its assumptions about (inter)cultural analysis. His morphological philosophy of history, which predictably featured as advertisement in most issues of Die Literarische Welt, advocated in a “comparative paradox” (Swers 149–151) for one the impossibility of cultural comparison, insofar as Spengler posited cultures to be autochthonous and “only fully comprehensible by him whose soul belongs to that Culture” (Spengler 178). And yet, he also assumed the possibility of transcultural observations or comparisons on historical laws of cultural change for his method. Benjamin did not discuss a positivist or relativist interpretation of Spengler’s approach but would later only discredit him in passing as “trivialer Sauhund” (cit. Kraft 79). However, indicating the possibility of an acoustically induced and reflected cross-cultural understanding contradicts Spengler’s foundational assumption of exclusive epistemic access for cultural insiders (that is, his cultural isolation thesis). Instead of essentializing such a “cultural a priori” (Swers 145) for insight, Benjamin’s approach could be read as investigating meaning making and mediation within and across cultural spheres from the vantage point of a multisensory and media-phenomenological reflection. For his soon to follow Moscow writings, he likewise characterized his impressions about the unfamiliar sphere as “diese sehr neue, befremdende Sprache, die laut durch die Schallmaske einer ganz veränderten Umwelt ertönt” (GB 3, 442). However, he also evaluated his output as a “neue Optik” (GS 4, 308). Indeed, the tension between senses would remain prevalent, yet complicating the epistemically configured role of the visual and auditory paradigms further, which can only be indicated here.
Furthermore, Benjamin’s foregrounding of the acoustic interacts with the material and visual logic of the journal. He highlights the epistemic value of rhythmicity and a “laut werden” due to a sensory shift in a publication context in which his contribution for the section “Buch-Chronik der Woche” (see Fig. 1) would visually disappear among other text modules of the journal issue. Thus, Benjamin’s review somehow strikes out thematically only by reflecting on other senses.
Against this backdrop of the journal’s discursive embedding, Benjamin’s review thus varies or modifies two main topics by pondering their interrelatedness: he couples thinking about how to represent and mediate war experiences of Russian people to reflecting on new relations between senses and changing media parameters. The task of intercultural understanding is not just a matter of transferring or communicating cultural codes but of acknowledging the media’s formative role as an epistemic precondition in the first instance. Furthermore, Benjamin also reacts to the horizon of his publication’s focus on Western Europe by redirecting attention eastwards, shortly before he was to travel to Moscow. This trip would impact both Benjamin’s and Die Literarische Welt’s attention for Soviet affairs. In short, the review navigates the horizon of its publication by intertwining a perspective towards Eastern Europe with intermedial reflections for intercultural sensitization.
The Reviewed Book’s Transfer: A Part of its European Networks of Reception
Beyond its discursive juxtaposition within Die literarische Welt, this review also partook in broader European networks of Fedorchenko’s reception. Differences become notable, especially between responses in the Russian-speaking and a Western European, primarily German-speaking sphere. Fedorchenko’s book, initially printed in Russian during the tumultuous year 1917 by a Kyiv publishing house, was republished several times in slightly edited, expanded, and abbreviated versions until 1927.3
Initially, it enjoyed widespread popularity as an authentic testimony of the war and source material for voices of the people, thus also attracting more ethnographic and folkloristic approaches. The renowned socialist political thinker Maxim Gorki called it “весьма ценной [very valuable],” especially for a “народного [popular]” circulation (cit. Trifonov). Other initial responses called it “драгоценным памятником нашей эпохи [a precious monument of our era],” “подлинной правдой о войне, о русском народе [the real truth about the war, about the Russian people]” (Tugendhold, Понедельник [Monday] No. 10, 23 April 1918), “энциклопедией народной души [encyclopedia of the people’s soul]” (Voytolovsky, Киевская мысль [Kyiv’s Thought] No. 139, 16 August 1918). Iosif Vasilevsky even argued that “ни историк, ни социолог, ни беллетрист, ни политик не имеют права не знать этой книги [no historian, sociologist, novelist or politician has the right not to know this book]” (Накануне [On the Eve] (Literary Supplement) No. 57, 17 June 1923). In a nutshell, the book attracted attention and further public stylization as a piece of anonymous folk art which reinstated Fedorchenko’s self-fashioning as a mere collector, capturing snippets of overheard conversations.
In fact, Fedorchenko’s reception presents a curious case for formative Soviet discourses during the 1920s due to a later scandal. Critical voices started to appear in late 1927. In September, N. Khoroshev noted in the journal Огонек [Spark] that Fedorchenko actually had not written down “a single line from the soldier’s conversation” (Koroshev, Огонек No. 37, 12 September 1927). Likewise, the article “The Talent of Truth” by I. Poltavsky in Вечерняя Москва [Evening Moscow] cited a statement:
I have no records […]. It never crossed my mind to write right there in the war. I was neither an ethnographer nor a stenographer […]. At first, I thought of writing something like a war diary, trying different forms, even the form novel. Then I decided to write down my impressions in the simplest form. (Вечерняя Москва, No. 243, 24 October 1927)
Poltavsky was likely citing an essay from May 1927 by Fedorchenko about the genesis of her text, requested by the editors of Ogonyok for an unrealized almanac. In 1928, Demian Bedny, the poet laureate of the party and initially proponent of her text, launched a fierce controversy based on her confession and declared it a solid fiction. In his article “Mystifiers and falsifiers are not writers,” he wrote: “Народ на войне как сырой материал, как немудрые записи подслушанного у народа, как неопороченное свидетельство имел кое-какую цену. Но как обнаруженная мистификация он ломаного гроша не стоит [The People at War as raw material, as unreasonable recordings of what was overheard from people, as an uncorrupted testimony, had some value. But as a discovered hoax it is not worth a penny]” (Известия ЦИК СССР, No. 43, 19 February 1928).
As Michael Gorham has argued while examining early Soviet language culture and its ambiguous constructions of the “vox populi” or voice of the narod, Fedorchenko also illustrates unfolding paradoxical tensions on the way to the official aestheticized politics of socialist realism. The symbolic power of the people’s voice manifested in an array of forms, from a folkloristic and ethnographic assumption of a “живое слово [living word]” that could be authentically documented to the stylized form of Skaz (Gorham 12f). The latter, for example, was itself a cultivated writing practice of speaking in a clear and common voice that was precisely not that of the literatii. Gorham points out a historically ironical shift from Fedorchenko’s poetological “falsification” in a “pseudoethnographic” piece to the invention of a new folkloric genre as imaginative literature by Iurii Sokolov (Gorham 147). The latter would install folklorists in a (politicized) active intervention because “pseudoliterary creations allowed for a freer representation of that voice and made it more ideologically potent” (Gorham 146). The ironic shift goes from supposedly factual but actually fictional “collection of impressions” to a programmatically imaginary and thus realist “recollection” as aestheticized politics of real existing socialism (Gorham 151).4 It is noteworthy that in 1926 Benjamin values those aspects of Fedorchenko’s book that would receive harsh criticism in the USSR only two years later. Benjamin’s take, while he of course could not interpret the work as foreshadowing Soviet developments traced in literary historigoraphy, nonetheless points towards other discursive priorities in his German-speaking networks that he reacted to or even intervened in.
As for the reception in Western Europe more generally, the evaluation and visibility were considerably different. Here, the German translation in 1923 was the second one after the English Ivan speaks (1919) by Thomas Whittemore.5 Alexander Eliasberg, a translator of Jewish Russian origin and active mediator for Russian literature, translated Fedorchenko’s text as part of a new series, ‘Die Russische Bibliothek’ from the Drei Masken Verlag. With this short-lived series, which appeared between 1921–23, the Munich-based publishing house aimed at giving a representative overview of literature written in Russian. Its declared aims, printed on the back of each book, are bold and strangely essentializing:
Unser Plan ist, in dieser Bibliothek in vorbildlichen Übersetzungen alle die Bücher russischer Dichter zu vereinen, die für irgendeine wesentliche Seite Rußlands repräsentativ sind, so daß diese Bibliothek in ihrer Gesamtheit ein lückenloses Bild des russischen Menschen, seiner Seele und seiner Kunst ergeben wird (Drei Masken Verlag, editorial pages of Fedorchenko, Russe 142).
With such an idea of systematicity and representability, the series mostly contains anthologies including texts by popular and already canonical authors. More modern, contemporaneous, or experimental Russian texts would rather be taken up by smaller publishing houses (see Sippl, Verlagsprogramme)—a framework that helps unpack Eliasberg’s peculiar translational choice for the title. He turns Narod na voine. Frontovye zapis [The People at War. Front Records] into Der Russe redet [The Russian speaks]. This refashioning evokes a more general or universalizing idea of the (proto)typical Russian, thus eliminating the particular environment conditioning the data collection and underpinning its status as a war report or (fictional) documentary.
Benjamin’s review was seemingly the first and, for quite a while, the last public German reference to Eliasberg’s translation. While reviews can have a decisive function of enhancing such cross-cultural transfer by inducing wider visibility in a different linguistic zone, there were no immediate responses or reactions, for example, in subsequent issues of Die Literarische Welt. Fedorchenko was not completely unknown among Benjamin’s contemporaries, but probably not due to his reviewing efforts. Thomas Mann’s copy of Eliasberg’s translation is listed in his archive in Zurich as containing extensive notes. In fact, Mann was well acquainted with Eliasberg, with whom he had previously worked on publications (Sippl, Eliasberg 45–55). Also, he did not publicly comment on the book. Likewise, another contemporary of Mann and Benjamin, Elias Canetti must have come across the translation. But only in his recollections for the year 1980, published in Das Geheimherz der Uhr: Aufzeichnungen, 1973–1985 (1987), does he recall being intrigued by Fedorchenko’s text and its form of capturing voices from the war authentically, still without any knowledge about or assigned relevance to Fedorchenko’s “pseudo ethnographic” methods, as critiqued by her Russian-speaking contemporaries (Gorham 147, see Canetti 119f).
Unlike the review, Eliasberg’s translation would incite yet another international ‘transfer’, this time into Dutch. Jan Henrik Eekhout, a Dutch writer, poet and translator with National socialist affiliations, published it in 1932 under the title Russen (Lochem: De Tijdstroom, 1932). While its subtitle indicates “uitgekozen en vert. uit het Russisch door Jan H. Eekhout [selected and translated from Russian by Jan H. Eekhout],” a review later identifies it as a second-hand translation from Eliasberg’s German version. Eekhout’s chosen title Russen adds some plausibility to this finding as it modifies “The Russian speaks” rather than “The People at War. Front Records”. The anonymous reviewer wrote on 21 March 1938 in De Tijd: godsdienstig-staatkundig dagblad [The Times. The religious-political daily newspaper] that the poetic quality of those snippets might be obscured by both translators. It seems like another historical irony that this commentator suspects both of having obstructed the original poetic or literary quality inherent to the snippets, one which in the young USSR was first so programmatically rejected by Fedorchenko for justifying its documentary character.
One other translation into French, during Benjamin’s lifetime yet probably unrelated to him or Eliasberg, was published in 1930. As part of the Collection ‘Combattants européens,’ edited by José Germain (president of l’Association des Écrivains Combattants), it was translated by Lydia Bach and Charles Reber as: Sophie Fedorschenko. Le Peuple à la guerre. Propos de soldats russes recueillis par une infirmière [The People at War. Russian soldiers’ words collected by a nurse] (Paris: Librairie Valois, 1930). Both translators were actively engaged in Soviet affairs and thus unlikely part of a continuing reception wave from the low-level German one.6 The French translation received more immediate attention than the minimal public responses to Eliasberg’s translation and Benjamin’s review. Martin Maurice discussed their translation alongside the new book by Max Dauville, Boue de Flandres, in La Lumière: hebdomadaire d’éducation civique et d’action républicaine [La Lumière: Weekly Magazine for Civic Education and Republican Action] on 9 August 1930. Here, he would focus on possibilities to compare war accounts and their representations on an international scale. In L’homme libre: journal quotidien du matin [The Free Man: Daily Morning Newspaper] on 10 September 1930, Lucien Peyrin also reviewed the translation, concluding similarly that it is “un document pércieux et plein d’enseignements sur l’âme slave [a valuable and instructive document on the Slavic soul].” While one of the translators, Lydia Bach, had travelled to the USSR after the controversy around Fedorchenko, those accusations were only briefly mentioned in the French introduction as “ardents polémiques [harsh polemics]” and already neglected for her “fidélité et une exactitude remarquable [fidelity and remarkable accuracy]” (Fedorchenko, Peuple 5–6). The topic likewise did not feature in the discussion of the reviewers.
Concerning Fedorchenko’s early reception across Europe, then, Benjamin seems not to have played a decisive role. While a review of a translated book can become a gateway to promoting a contemporaneous (here, Russian-speaking) author in (here, German) literary discussion, it neither evoked a public response nor further direct references. Thus, Benjamin’s piece also illustrates the role of a so-called ‘failed’ transfer, regarding its visibility, or a ‘dead end,’ considering its function for the attention economy in the medium journal.
A Steppingstone: Preparing Benjamin’s (cross-cultural) Engagement with War Reports and ‘mediating’ (Soviet)Russian Affairs
Benjamin’s review may operate as a dead end in Die Literarische Welt for the reviewed book. But if the critic’s primary target was not to mediate this text specifically but to take it as a site for deliberately interacting with and relating to ongoing discourses in a German-speaking sphere, terms like “dead end” and “failed” no longer fit. Another perspective on the review’s function is to consider it as an integral element of the way Benjamin gradually redirected his engagement (and printing space in the journal) from Franco-German to Soviet Russian matters. Adding plausibility to this evaluation, the review surprisingly neglects to acknowledge instances of any concrete mediation of Der Russe redet, specifically, the translator’s linguistic transfer. This fact is remarkable insofar as Benjamin, a translator from French himself and theorist of the task of translation, did do so for other reviews of translated Russian literature. In the review “W. I. Lenin: Briefe an Gorki” (LW2, No. 52, 24 December 1926), published during his Moscow stay, Benjamin does not comment on the translation but mentions the foreword by Olga Kamenewa. For “Fjodor Gladkow: ‘Zement’” (LW3, No. 23, 10 June 1927), he addresses it as “in dem Medium einer seltenen vollendeten Übersetzung” (WuN 13.1, 67). In the same issue, he also evaluates Käte Rosenberg’s work in “Iwan Schmeljow: Der Kellner” as “vollendet geschrieben, (nicht minder vollendet übertragene) Unterhaltungslektüre” (WuN 13.1, 70).
There are two explanations for Benjamin’s hesitancy in his review of Fedorchenko. First, he did not read Russian. Linguistically dependent on Eliasberg’s translation, he had no competency to evaluate those achievements directly. The significance of highlighting translation might have become more pressing after Benjamin severely struggled with the language in Moscow, as he did refer to translations and translation programs of publishing houses in reviews and reports afterwards. Second, Eliasberg’s programmatic self-fashioning can be instructive. In the book he states:
Bei der Übertragung der Aufzeichnungen war ich in erster Linie auf die Wörtlichkeit bedacht und habe darum bei der Wiedergabe der im Volksliederton vorgetragenen Stücke auf die Nachbildung von Reim und Rhythmus verzichtet. Einige volksliederartige Improvisationen, deren Reiz mehr im Sprachlichen und Rhythmischen als im Inhalt liegt, habe ich ganz fortgelassen’ (Eliasberg, Translator’s Comment of Fedorchenko, Russe 7).
The underpinning methodological tension here concerns a translation’s ‘literalness’ versus its ‘literariness’. One pretext here is a controversy between Eliasberg and Benjamin’s close friend and Jewish intellectual Gershom Scholem in January 1917 regarding linguistic and cultural relations between German and Yiddish. The latter is embedded in identity politics of assimilation of Jews and linguistic acculturation of Eastern European Jewry (Groiser 270–97). In Die Jüdsche Rundschau, Scholem had opposed Eliasberg’s dictum of a comprehensible translation (literalness) suitable to communicate those texts also to a non-Jewish audience at the cost of transporting and preserving the at times strange particularity of original texts (literariness). Benjamin’s friend fiercely rejected such a “bourgeoise idea of language” that requested to accommodate culturally to the reader’s world (cit. Groiser 280). He, in fact, condemned people like Eliasberg who had aimed at a “bourgeoise compromise” to entangle German and Yiddish efforts in the wake of the war time (cit. Groiser 280). In short, Benjamin’s programmatics from “Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers” (1923), which can only be alluded to here, tends to favor likewise a translation’s ‘literariness’, which does not render it an instrumental communication of the ‘content’ only. For other translations mentioned above, the critic highlights explicitly the value of transferring the “Sprachliche” over the mere “Stoffliche”. On the contrary, Eliasberg had declared an opposite approach towards Fedorchenko’s poetic aspects of the folk song rhyme structure, which would have lowered Benjamin’s inclination to refer to it.
As has become evident, the review neither focused on nor can exemplify efforts of mediating this translation specifically. Instead, the review gains its discursive currency in two other respects: First, it presents another element in Benjamin’s engagement with the matters of war representations, international encounters, and the pacifism movement in Die Literarische Welt. Second, it is part and parcel of advancing a gaze towards and printing space for Eastern European affairs in the journal more generally, which would manifest notably only a few months later.
Among Benjamin’s early writings for Willy Haas’ journal, the review presents a reaction to or continuation of a previous piece. Drawing attention to Fedorchenko contrasts German attitudes to and representations of the war in the first place. Benjamin’s initial review in Die Literarische Welt, “Friedensware,” takes issue with Fritz von Unruh, an implicitly addressed opponent in “Ssofia Fedortschenko. Der Russe redet,” and a scandal at the PEN club meeting in Paris. The controversy around the latter was a decisive moment for the journal to establish its visibility and thus encapsulates both reviews in Benjamin’s attempts to strategically maneuver the journalistic field.
On 14 May 1926, the “Sondernummer: PEN-Club” of Die Literarische Welt contains several furious articles about the earlier Paris-based and recent Berlin-based PEN meetings, for example, from the editor Willy Haas and French critic Benjamin Crémieux. Benjamin’s review in the subsequent issue polemicizes against Fritz von Unruh’s self-fashioning as a peace ambassador. Benjamin criticizes, in short, von Unruh’s hypocritical self-stylization as “Friedensbote” or “Friedensengel,” and thus as part of the pacifist movement within literary expressionism more generally. During the first World War, von Unruh had advocated military action and national war efforts. Benjamin mockingly recalls this contrary agenda by citing von Unruh’s poem “Reiterlied” in the review (WuN 13.1, 35). His advocacy of pacifism and “Völkerverständigung” reveals something else for Benjamin: “Die große Prosa aller Friedenskünder sprach vom Kriege. Die eigene Friedensliebe zu betonen, liegt denen nahe, die den Krieg gestiftet haben” (WuN 13.1, 32). Thus, he takes issue with a specific attitude towards war and peace that corresponds to certain rhetorical and literary forms or representations once they manifest in the institutional irony of a war enthusiast being celebrated as a pacifist and mediator.
With their strong opposition, both Die Literarische Welt as a whole and Benjamin in particular do not reject the idea of international encounter but rather a particular institutional framework and intellectual self-fashioning. On the contrary, both Benjamin and his publication venue are in search of quite another outlook and practice. Benjamin, for instance, develops his interest in cultural crossings as an epistemic and methodological endeavor.
With his review on Fedorchenko, immediately following the piece on von Unruh, Benjamin presents the Russian nurse’s self-stylization and literary representation as a contrastive model. In the end, he opposes two forms and implicit attitudes articulated in war reports. In the first instance, he differentiates the poetic movens “eitle Originalität,” exemplified in Fritz von Unruh’s “Reiterlied,” and the “besonnene Demut” (dienendes Werk) of Fedorchenko’s Der Russe redet. The characteristics of “Eitelkeit” here echo Benjamin’s furious criticism of Fritz von Unruh: “Die Geschäftsreise endet als Bierreise und die Völkerverständigung geht im Dreck aus. Denn weiter als die Dummheit dieses Buches reicht die spiegelgeile Eitelkeit des Verfassers” (WuN 13.1, 35). With a gendered perspective, the former structurally expresses “Vaterlandsliebe,” whereas the latter appears for the critic as “mütterliche Liebe zum Volkstum” (WuN 13.1, 55). In the course of the review, Benjamin certainly does not reflect on this stereotypical binary but mobilizes it to debunk and caricature a particular public posture and self-fashioning. In so doing, he rejects a subjective projection over a model of receptive empathy, seemingly as a precondition of acknowledging the Other.
In the last instance, Benjamin ironically inverts an institutional appreciation of such literary efforts and their respective attitudes to war. He alludes to a notable literary prize which Fritz von Unruh had received in 1914 for a war propagandistic text, Louis Ferdinand Prinz von Preußen: “So fuhr der erste Schrei der Friedenskrähe über die Schlachtfelder. Sie kam – in ihrem Schnabel hielt sie die Palme des Kleistpreises” (WuN 13.1, 36). In contrast, Benjamin characterizes Fedorchenko as being “auf den Knien ihres Herzens.” This unmarked quotation modifies a popular letter from Kleist to Goethe on 24 January 1808. Here, Kleist appears “auf Knieen meines Herzens vor dem Dichterfürsten” (cit. after WuN 13.2, 73). Associating Fedorchenko’s attitude towards and representation of war events with this gesture of “Demut” or humility indicates Benjamin’s indirect proposition for an alternative candidate for the Kleistpreis.
As becomes evident, this review might remain a ‘dead end’ when it comes to pieces taking it up afterwards. But it also demonstrates how Benjamin linked his reviews to continue and develop certain threads within the medium journal. Beyond triangulating Franco-German matters with Eastern European ones, his piece on Fedorchenko’s book is one accumulative element within a set of texts that manifest Benjamin’s shifting attention to ‘mediating’ Soviet Russian affairs. Benjamin gradually redirected his gaze eastwards, a development which gained considerable momentum between 1926/27 due to his Moscow trip in the winter. The majority of his writings, including reviews and reports about Russian literature and Soviet Russian topics, follow afterwards. In early 1927, Die Literarische Welt dedicated its first “Sondernummer” No. 10 of the year to “Das neue Russland.” This special issue featured predominantly Benjamin’s reports: “Die politische Gruppierung der russischen Schriftsteller” (see Fig. 2), “Zur Lage der russischen Filmkunst,” “Erwiderung an Oscar A. H. Schmitz.” A comment from the editor Willy Haas, titled “Meine Meinung,” attributes this reoriented and seemingly more systematic focus to the Weimar critic: “Es scheint uns wichtig, von dieser entscheidenden Übergangsepoche, die namentlich die Berichte Walter Benjamins andeuten, jenseits von jeder politischen Stellungnahme, unsere Leser einigermaßen zusammenfassend zu informieren” (LW3, No. 10, 11 March 1927).
Proportionally speaking, the years 1926 and 1927 saw a shift in the number of contributions published on French versus on Soviet matters. For the first 44 journal issues preceeding Benjamin’s review of Fedorchenko in 1926, Burschka’s indices of keywords for Die Literaische Welt lists in total 31 pieces related to French (Burschka II 78–81) and only 10 to (Soviet-)Russian affairs (Burschka II 219, 202–204). After Benjamin’s review and throughout the year 1927, the journal published only 15 texts on French matters (Burschka II 78–81) and a significantly risen number of 23 contributions about (Soviet-)Russian topics.7 Surely, this shift cannot be directly ascribed to Benjamin’s review of Fedorchenko. Numbers were definitely pushed by the special issue, for whose initiation Benjamin played a decisive role. However, his review from November 1926 exemplifies and sheds light on a re-adjusting of his own and the journal’s attention economy. In its function as “kleines Archiv,” this shifting discursive trend takes shape here not through a sudden and immediate rupture of the special issue. Benjamin’s three pieces before (November, December 1926; February 1927) indicate an accumulative foreshadowing within the journal’s specific media logic.
Pursuing intercultural and intermedial aspects of “Ssofia Fedortschenko: Der Russe redet” allowed me to foreground how certain media operations from a journal impact and are impacted by the critic’s reviewing activity. It helps to reevaluate the status of individual reviews media critically by starting from the processual logic of the media framework and its porosity of intentional authorship. In this case, there are three main angles.
Regarding the issue of its publication (1), Benjamin’s review was situated in the discursive formations of a journal promoting Franco-German relations and new media. It reacted to the horizon of its publication by intertwining matters of intermediality and intercultural mediation. As for its object of commentary (2), this review partook in the broader European networks of Fedorchenko’s reception. But introducing the translated book into the German literary discussion did not evoke a public response. As stated above, Benjamin’s piece thus illustrates the role of a ‘failed’ transfer or ‘dead end’ in the medium of the journal. Instead, it opens a gateway into unpacking the media parameters conditioning his reviewing process. Concerning discursive developments (3), links and variations can be observed both for the critic and the journal more generally. The Weimar critic used Fedorchenko as a counterexample to the attitudes of particular (German) war reports by taking up a thread from a previous review. After initial reviews like this one and Benjamin’s Moscow trip, the editor supported Benjamin’s gaze towards the East by allowing more systematic accounts, thus also influencing the printing space and readerly attention dedicated to Soviet Russian affairs.
Seen in conjunction, the three perspectives showcase how Benjamin interacted with forming discourses in Die Literarische Welt in 1926/27. He did so by working with intercultural and intermedial dimensions that he mobilized for a tentative methodological reflection and self-positioning in this medium.
Footnotes
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↵1 The name of the nurse Софья Захаровна Федорченко will appear here in different transliterations to dinstinguish the reception lines in different languages. The variant from the title, Ssofia Fedortschenko, follows the German version from the 1920s to allude to Benjamin’s usage. Throughout the main text, however, her name will be transliterated in the English version Sofia Sacharovna Fedorchenko. Another French variant, Sophie Fedorschenko, will be mentioned for the searchability of that translation.
↵2 Provision of the Faksimiles was funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG)—Project number 233745993.
↵3 Fedorchenko’s writings about the war amounted to three volumes in total of which individual ones were republished and reworked. The first volume (1917, 1923) centers on the war experiences, the second on the theme of revolution (1925) and the third on the civil war (1927). The first volume: Narod na voine. Frontovye zapisi (Kiev: Izd. Izdatel’skogo Podotdela Komiteta Iugo-Zap. Fronta Vseros. Zemskogo Soiuza, 1917). Some extracts of the first edition were published already in newspapers before the book edition appeared: Северные записки, 1917, 1; Народоправство [Narodopravstvo], 1917, 9–13. The second edition was edited by N. Angarsky: Narod na voine, Biblioteka sovremnnikov (Moscow: Novaia Moskva, 1923). A third edition of the first volume was issued in 1925 by Zemlya i Fabrika publishing house with a foreword by the critic K. Lox: Narod na voine. T. II: Revoliutsiia (Moscow: Nikitinskie subbotniki, 1925); third volume in journal publications Novyi mir 3–4, 6 (1927), Oktiabr’ 6 (1927), Ogonek 27 (1927). All three volumes were published together for the tirst time after the collapse of the Soviet bloc, see Narod na voine (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1990). The first volume was still loosely organized material. In latter editions and volumes throughout the 1920s, the author applies more systematizing gestures of organizing the material, for example, with thematic headings.
↵4 For a more detailed collection of different responses to Fedortchenko book, see Trifonov’s introduction. The quotations here give a lengthy collection of the immediate reception that invite further critical assessment about the discursive developments and their interrelatedness.
↵5 I want to thank Polina Orekhova for drawing my attention to the English translation and sharing insights of her research on the different translations of Narod na voine. Her paper, currently in preparation, compares how the English, German and French versions curate and frame Fedorchenko’s writings, noting their shared claim of its “authenticity” despite their diverging interests and approaches.
↵6 Lydia Bach actively wrote on Soviet affairs with the same publishing house during those years, such as Le droit et les institutions de la Russie soviétique (1923), Moscou, ville rouge (1929), or Histoire de la révolution russe. I, La révolution politique (1930), or Orient soviétique (1931). Charles Reber was a journalist and translator who authored political philosophical writings and literary pastiches. He would also translate, for instance, Heinrich Mann or Joseph Roth.
↵7 The keywords for French matters are the following: France, France: und Deutschland/ geistige Situation/ Geschichte/ Intellektuelle/ Nietzsche Rezeption/ Presse/ Verlagswesen/ Zeitschriften, Französische Literatur, Französische Literatur: Deutschland/ Romane, Französische Literaturkritik/ Musik, Französisch-Sowjetrussische Kulturbeziehungen. The keywords for Russian matters are the following: Russland, Russland: Architektur/ Buchauflagen/ Buchmarkt/ Kirche/ Literarsches Leben/ Kulturpolitik/ Literatur/ Film/ Oper/ Presse/ Theater/ Verlagswesen/ Zeitschriften/ Zeitungen. The keywords for Soviet Russian matters are the following: Sowjetunion, Sowjetunion: Literatur/ Schriftsteller.
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