To See Paris and Die: The Soviet Lives of Western Culture by Gilburd Eleonory (review)

Abstract

SEER, 97, 3, JULY 2019 586 of that resistance remains unclear. A more accurate understanding of the historical background and the Green Revolution would also have helped its argument that the corn campaign was part of the global processes of agricultural modernization. Department of History Mark B. Tauger West Virginia University Gilburd, Eleonory. To See Paris and Die: The Soviet Lives of Western Culture. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA and London, 2018. ix + 458 pp. Illustrations. Appendix. Notes. Index. $35.00:£25.95: €31.50. In recent years, the Khrushchev-era Thaw has been one of the most vibrant areas of Soviet historical research. Numerous studies of the cultural politics, penal policies and moral panics of the 1950s and 1960s have nuanced or even deconstructed the period’s defining metaphor. By contrast, Eleonory Gilburd’s work on the Thaw — in this outstanding first monograph, as well as an important earlier volume co-edited with Denis Kozlov — offers a compelling reassertion of the period’s liberalization, cultural renaissance and visceral excitement. The ‘opening to the West’ is an inescapable motif in historiography of the thaw, and especially in intelligentsia memoirs of the period, yet hitherto has not been the subject of a systematic study. The book of Gilburd’s award-winning PhD thesis — its elegance and élan bear almost no trace of its origins as a dissertation — has therefore been eagerly awaited. After a masterly analysis of the cultural-political mechanisms and institutions and the translation mentality enabling the rediscovery of Western culture after Stalin’s death, the book then treats in turn the ‘translation’ and ‘domestication’ of Western literature, film and art in the 1950s and 1960s. The final chapter and the rather strident epilogue turn to Soviet citizens’ physical travel to the West, first in the journeys undertaken by the privileged few citizens to Europe and America in the 1950s and 1960s, and then 1990s emigration to the West. In both these cases, ideas of the West gleaned from the cultural imports of the Thaw shaped perceptions of foreign countries and gave rise to widespread disillusionment as Soviet émigrés discovered quite how mythologized their ideas of the West had been. As this summary indicates, To See Paris and Die ranges across multiple media and cultures, from American literature and art to Italian neo-realism, Paris travelogues to Picasso, all set against a sophisticated account of postStalinist cultural politics and intellectual history. Another notable strength REVIEWS 587 of the book, though, is the rich detail lavished on individual translators and ‘domesticators’ of Western culture — notably I´lia Ehrenburg, Viktor Nekrasov and the translator Ivan Kashkin — and the meticulous tracing of the pathways by which Hemingway, Salinger, Picasso and other Western artists emerged into Soviet culture and took on new meanings there. The depth of research is staggering, and one senses that the already lengthy footnotes could easily have been twice or three times as long. So rich is the account of these processes of cultural importation and professional commentary, that ordinary citizens’ reactions are not explored in as much detail, despite the appendix’s explanation of the large volume of citizens’ letters underpinning its claims about popular reception. Ultimately, the Thaw emerges as an ephemeral yet deeply exhilarating slice of Soviet history, when Western culture was consumed with an unprecedented intensity and enthusiasm, which was already declining by the Brezhnev era (about which the book only makes a few, general claims) and, even more so, by the time of the Soviet collapse. The specificity of this brief period thus lies, paradoxically, in somewhat unspecific ideas of ‘sincerity’ and ‘authenticity’ that surrounded Western imports and in the fervent yet rather indefinable emotions invested in them. The interpretation of the Thaw mentality through the (inter-related) ideas of authenticity and emotion is not new, but Gilburd makes a powerful case for ‘domesticated’ Western culture to be considered its quintessential expression. In her reading, Western imports compensated for the insincerity and stiltedness of Soviet culture, which is here largely (and perhaps unfairly) dismissed as unpopular and aesthetically backward. To Hemingway, Remarque and Picasso, amongst other ‘translated’ American and European phenomena, are also attributed the changes within Soviet culture...