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

Taking a fresh look at the long relationship between "Russia" and "the West," this book examines Soviet encounters with Western culture during the Thaw years of the 1950s and 1960s, when Stalinist insularity was replaced by cautious but sincere openings to the West, when Soviet intellectuals could engage with Western culture without fear but also without guidance. Eleanory Gilburd uses the concept of translation as a mechanism of transfer and process of domestication to analyse the ways in which Soviet people appropriated Western cultural artifacts and created their idea of Western culture. This is a rich theme in studies of the post-Stalinist USSR, and anthropologist Alexei Yurchak has written productively of an "imaginary West" in his influential study, Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (Princeton, 2006). Gilburd takes this idea of an imagined West and applies it to a series of concrete encounters, each explored in thick chapters based on thorough and extensive research in cultural and political archives. Each chapter follows a similar form of presenting policy and channels on communication, the act of translation itself, and responses by those receiving the translation.

The first chapter on Soviet internationalization lays out the effect of the thaw in cultural relations on the ability of Soviets to engage in specific instances of cultural exchange. It contains valuable information on these opening years of transnational contact. A richly documented chapter on the 1957 Moscow Youth Festival explores the logistics and impact of that event on local understandings of Western arts that were so prominent at the festival. The next chapter explores the translation of Western literature, with long sections on the favorites Ernest Hemingway, Erich Maria Remarque, and J.D. Salinger. She discusses both the politics of their translations and their reception. Moving to a chapter on cinema, she emphasizes the business of film, the pleasures of film festivals, the centrality of dubbing when foreign films came to be translated into Russian, and the particular appeal of Italian neorealism in shaping Soviet ideas of "the West." She notes the general disapproval by viewers of the license taken by Western (especially Hollywood) films to depict scenes of passion. In another chapter, Gilburd looks at Western art and its reception inside the USSR, through the collections of the Hermitage and Pushkin Museums and also traveling exhibitions, such as the Pablo Picasso show of 1956. Soviets had a difficult time accepting modern art, and she traces the inroads made first by impressionism and then by "friends of the Soviet people" like the American painter Rockwell Kent, obscure in today's USA but still enjoying substantial wall space in the Hermitage. Picasso was complicated: "Viewers had trouble reconciling communism with cubism" (254). She argues that some of this difficulty was the presumption of Soviet viewers to see painting through the medium of words. "The very idea of the visual as a distinct experience was controversial and difficult to impress upon audiences" (267). A final substantive chapter takes on tourism, the travelogue, and the particular Soviet appropriations of Paris (seen through the idiom of Emile Zola), Italy (Renaissance painting), and America (retracing the narrative of Il'ia Il'f and Evgenii Petrov's 1936 American Road Trip).

An epilogue pursues the disappointments of Soviet emigres who were finally able to encounter the real West, so different from that of their imaginations, emphasizing the profound sense of dispossession of the Western cultural capital that had been shaped through translation. One cannot imagine this book having been written in 1990 or before, because its whole 340 pages of text in many ways anticipates this emotion of loss. Nor would Gilburd have had access to the multiple and rich archives that provide her evidence. She makes particularly effective use of letters written to publishers and to authors, and of museum comment books, which provide much of her insight into the reception by educated Soviet citizens of...