Reciprocal Reflections: Nostalgia for the Present in Vladimir Nabokov’s “A Guide to Berlin” and Walter Benjamin’s “Moscow” Essay

Abstract

Reciprocal ReflectionsNostalgia for the Present in Vladimir Nabokov’s “A Guide to Berlin” and Walter Benjamin’s “Moscow” Essay Pascale Lafountain (bio) Introduction Coincidences often occur in literature, but it is rare that two prominent authors trade places, traveling to each other’s homelands for a time and thus giving readers reciprocal images of the new places through the eyes of a foreigner. One might say that this happened in the mid-1920s: Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977) wrote extensively about his life in exile in Berlin at a time when several German authors were traveling to Russia not as exiles, but as artists and political tourists, intrigued by the very Marxism that was so threatening to Nabokov’s family and personal livelihood. Almost simultaneously, in December 1926, Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) traveled to Moscow for two months to visit his “Communist girlfriend,” Asja Lacis.1 The other motivation for Benjamin’s trip to Moscow was to “get a closer look at the situation in Russia, and perhaps even to establish some sort of official tie with it,” as Benjamin’s friend Gershom Scholem describes in his preface to Benjamin’s Moscow Diary.2 It is perhaps not intuitive to bring together these two authors, whose work and politics are so different, and Will Norman, the only scholar to have treated this pairing in great depth, has acknowledged that for many Nabokov scholars in particular, this pairing must seem “unusual, if not perverse.”3 Two of Benjamin’s greatest influences, Marx and Freud, were at the same time Nabokov’s greatest intellectual nemeses, [End Page 93] and Nabokov’s and Benjamin’s views on Soviet culture could hardly be more disparate. There is, however, ample reason—and precedent—for this article’s emphasis on the implicit conversation between Nabokov’s and Benjamin’s work. The most superficial rationale is biographical: both spent time in Germany between the world wars; both directly experienced the effects of European anti-Semitism as Véra Nabokov as well as Walter Benjamin himself were Jewish; both struggled for success as they published short modernist works in Berlin; both eventually left Berlin for Paris (Benjamin in 1933, Nabokov in 1937); and both applied for visas to the United States, though Benjamin’s application was tragically denied, leading to his suicide in 1940. Both are heirs to French modernism and seem to respond to Proust and other authors exploring memory, even if these affinities carry differing implications.4 Both authors feature flâneurs strolling through major metropolises, though Nabokov’s Berlin narrator remains more distanced, as Norman puts it, “a figure consciously divorcing himself from the crowds, disdainful of purposeful activity, and ultimately defining himself in opposition to the bourgeois.”5 More important for the present inquiry is the shared interest in the material detail of urban surroundings and in the similar implications that these observations carry for their social critiques. Norman notes: Given the mutual interest in high modernist temporal aesthetics, the personal experience of an oppressive tyrannical regime, the incessant insecurity of political crisis and a marginalized social position as impoverished exiles, it should perhaps strike us as unsurprising that Nabokov and Benjamin took parallel steps in formulating a temporal perspective which aimed to redeem the present through the active reorganization of the past.6 Norman has fruitfully compared the “remarkably similar temporal constructions” and strategies of “historical resistance” in Nabokov’s Speak, Memory and Benjamin’s Berlin Childhood around 1900,7 emphasizing how their biographies inspire a “skepticism of nineteenth-century linear historicism and its attendant notions of civilized progress” as well as “how these two figures share a strategy to resist the progress of a determining, historical time by constructing a constellated temporal model [End Page 94] by which history can be disarmed and assimilated into personal experience.”8 Norman’s scholarship has thus pointed to some of the central dynamics of history and individuality in Nabokov’s and Benjamin’s work, but I would like to suggest both that these dynamics are already present much earlier than Norman observes and that the portrayal of the future in the present is just as important as the portrayal of the past.9 While Nabokov...