For a few years at the beginning of the 1920s, Berlin became the cultural center of Russian artistic life. Russian writers, actors, and artists supplied Berlin’s newspapers, journals, and art exhibitions with an extraordinary array of creative output. Charlottengrad, a Russification of the Berlin Charlottenburg district, is an original re-examination of the Russian cultural experience in Weimar Berlin during the early twentieth century. As we commemorate the 100th anniversary of this dynamic era in 2023, Roman Utkin's work casts a much-needed spotlight on various aspects of Russian Berlin's cultural life between the two world wars.
Utkin's “panoramic overview” (180) is characterized by an emphasis not on the whole, but on selective figures of the Russian Berlin experience. His chapter on “Unsentimental Journeys: Berlin as Trial Emigration” highlights the literary cultural journal, Veshch΄, and analyzes the poems “Gleisdreieck,” by Boris Pasternak, “Germaniia” by Vladimir Maiakovskii, and “All is Stony” by Vladislav Khodasevich. The chapter, “Guides to Berlin: Exiles, Émigrés, and the Left,” highlights three sets of memoirs: Il΄ia Erenburg's “Letters from Cafés,” Andrei Belyi's Kingdom of Shades, and Viktor Shklovskii's Zoo. From poetry and prose, Utkin moves to “Performing Exile,” the opera, The Golden Cockerel, performed in Berlin in 1923 with special attention to the staging, costume, and set designer Pavel Tchelitchew. An entire chapter is devoted to “Nabokov, Berlin, and the Future of Russian Literature.” The concluding chapter is on “Queering the Russian Diaspora,” with the focus being Sergei Nabokov, Vladimir's brother, who was in Russian Berlin only briefly, and the poet Vera Lourié. This chapter attempts to recover “marginal voices” (96). It relies on a method the author describes as one “informed by archival research that is attuned to absences, omissions, and gaps as much as to the presence of evidence” (151). A valuable “Appendix” provides archival materials containing “The Russian Poet's Club Meeting Minutes, Berlin, 1928.”
So much can be said in praise of this work. It is a reminder of the glory of Russian Berlin and the centrality of that city in Russian intellectual life in the 1920s. There are brilliant new readings and analyses of works, including the Russian and English versions of Nabokov's novel, The Gift. The welcome renewed attention to Vera Lourié springs from a somewhat narrow reading of Vera's memoirs, Briefe an Dich, as “an explicitly queer text” (175), the significance of which seems somewhat inflated: “Lourié's book can likewise be read as an epilogue to Charlottengrad, written by its last inhabitant, a prologue to an entirely new tradition of immigrant writing in German” (175).
Utkin's highly selective overview is driven by his desire to recover marginalized voices, but his focus at times strays from the phenomenon of Russian Berlin (traditionally ascribed to the period 1921–23). The work expands the focus to include not only the 1920s but carry into the 1980s, well beyond the end of the Weimar Republic. His meticulous notes and bibliography provide readers with a wealth of references for further exploration and indicate a broad knowledge of the literature from and about the period.
Utkin's book successfully reminds us of a neglected part of Russian cultural history, one that remained largely ignored by Soviet and western scholars until the 1980s when it garnered newfound interest. The author sees his work primarily as a “contribution, however limited, to the ever-growing scholarship on the city of Berlin, on post revolutionary Russian literature,” with his intention being “to maintain the memory of how many roads led to and through Berlin for authors and intellectuals fleeing Russia, thinking of moving to Soviet Russia, and pondering their relationship to the changing country” (180).
Charlottengrad: Russian Culture in Weimar Berlin is a valuable addition to the study of Russian cultural history where the city “became a referent in defining aesthetic and ideological positions after the Revolution” (62). Utkin's in-depth analyses provide readers with a nuanced perspective on this unique period. While his selective approach may leave some gaps in the broader narrative, the book serves as an essential reference for anyone interested in this fascinating era. Today, 100 years later, little attention is being devoted to this truly golden era in Russian literature. Regrettably, given the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, acknowledged by the author, and the current state of German-Russian relations, further complicated by the Aleksei Naval΄nyi affair, it is unlikely that either nation or other western scholars will devote much attention to these glory years. Thus Utkin's exceptional work is likely its’ own epilogue to the scholarship on Russian Berlin for the foreseeable future.
