What is Russia’s place in the West or, alternatively, the place of the West in Russia? Bearing over the entirety of modern Russian history, this question gains additional significance under the geopolitical framework of the Cold War and the evolution of the Soviet domestic political project after Stalin’s death. Despite the proverbial Iron Curtain, the movement of ideas, people, and objects between the capitalist and socialist worlds has long attracted the attention of historians. To See Paris and Die is not, however, another study of cultural exchanges signaling the porosity of the frontier. Taking translation as its central analytical framework, the book recreates, with virtuosity, the Russian-language lives of Western cultural imports and the Western affects of the Soviet public. Gilburd argues that Soviet translation culture – understood as an act of transformation and appropriation – simultaneously generated the political project of the late socialism as well as its double, and constitutive, Western Utopia.

This Western dreamland is not localized in the two-dimensional space of geopolitical confrontation and diplomatic history. Instead, To See Paris and Die captures the dynamic development of the Western Utopia within three interconnected spheres – those of cultural diplomacy, mediation, and reception – across a stunning variety of artistic forms. While privileging textual expressions, Gilburd’s account encompasses sounds, images, and bodies, thus testing the limits of linguistic expression and drawing attention to multimedia interactions. Names, titles, opinions, and institutions proliferate in the book’s four hundred pages to provide substance to its arguments about the very nature of the key notions of late Socialism and those of the global twentieth century. Gilburd contributes to multiple discussions, with topics ranging from the periodization of the Thaw to the limits of Americanization. But the book’s most powerful historiographic revision relates to the nature of late Soviet language.

Steven Kotkin’s 1995 Magnetic Mountain famously introduced the notion of „speaking Bolshevik“ to describe the personal and collective identity formation shaped by Bolshevik ideology.1 In Everything Was Forever Until It Was No More (2005), Aleksei Yurchak explained the experience of the 1991 collapse and documented how the last Soviet generation operated with an ossified and ritualized official language in which words lost all moral authority.2 Although similarly grounded in the primacy of language, To See Paris and Die does not rest easy between these two paradigm-setting accounts. Rather, meticulously documenting the practices of translation and the processes of meaning-making, Gilburd approaches linguistic phenomena as continuously evolving. In her account, Soviet language is neither a tool for civilization-building nor a fixed „hypernormalized“ entity. In the words of one historical protagonist arguing against insincerity in literature in a 1953 essay, sincerity coalesced into a political mission allying „belief, text, and the greater [Soviet] cause“ (p. 105). This citation captures the gist of the historical experiences under study in Gilburd’s book. Accordingly, the expressive power of the Soviet language and textual production was not static but grounded in shifting alliances and open to both interpretation and misinterpretation. Therefore, translation (both linguistic and cultural) emerges as a major terrain for generating Socialist meanings embedded in a wealth of hitherto under-explored sources. These evolving meanings represent nothing less than a redemption of the late Soviet history from its status as an in-between, a loop stretching from the formative years of the Soviet project to its collapse. Translation is a fundamental concept for appreciating the intellectual agendas underlying the book’s structure.

War and peace, the defining categories of the post-Hiroshima world, were the stuff of the diplomatic preoccupations of the 1950s. This was the historical context in which cultural exchanges came to occupy a central place in the Soviet conception of foreign relations, new institutions were established to enlighten a large domestic audience, and in which the idea of „peaceful coexistence“ became an explicit policy (1956). The first chapter of the book devoted to Soviet internationalism reveals a growing contradiction as Western imports reached the masses. The official anti-elitist rhetoric met real public enthusiasm. Its scope left the Soviet authorities perplexed in the face of certain inquiries, such as numerous requests for addresses to engage in personal correspondence with foreigners. Not authorized on a national scale, the practice in fact became possible on one particular occasion in 1957 and would ultimately be amongst the most salient and lasting effects of the Moscow International Youth Festival. The festival became the landmark event in the mythology of the Thaw and left many long-lasting material traces on the city of Moscow itself. The second chapter does not only offer an original analysis of an exceptional event but a key methodological argument. Exposing mechanisms that connected textual manifestations of the event to the behavior of the participants, the link between scripts and acts, the chapter is an analytical step toward the argument about how certain Western books become real life models for several Soviet generations.

Devoted to Soviet cult books such as the works of Ernest Hemingway, Erich Maria Remarque, and J. D. Salinger, chapter 3, „Books about Us,“ traces patronage networks and publishing policy connecting Soviet presses and Western authors. The chapter demonstrates that selective censorship and translation did not limit but rather enabled the large-scale circulation of certain Western texts. The role of translation was not that of a passive channel, however. The chapter documents how the particular philosophy of translation, namely the rejection of transparency in favor of an explicit interpretation and domestication by the translator, helped Soviet readers to perform transactions between text and context and to appropriate Western works and integrate them into their everyday lives. The triple action of editing, translating and reading facilitated affections and attachments, marking long lasting effects of the books beyond the reach of state control. Yet the domestication of Western imports was far from ubiquitous. Chapters 4, 5 and 6 complicate the exposed mechanisms of translation and appropriation.

„Cinema without the Accent,“ Chapter 4, pays close attention to the role of Soviet dubbing practices. Insisting on all forms of synchrony – phonetic, kinetic, and temporal – the Russian language dubs succeeded in producing an illusion of authenticity, a sensory forgery. This success resulted in a hybrid, or even disorienting, cultural object of unclear origin, at once „accessible for understanding and foreign in everything else“ (p. 215). The limits of the comprehension that this perfect synchrony enticed found its most marked expression in audience reactions to depictions of intimacy in Western films, as some craved and others denounced eroticism in cinema as pornography. Modern Western art was another source of miscomprehension. From the incorporation of impressionism into the Soviet cannon, to the prominence of American artist Rockwell Kent, and to the polemics generated by the 1956 and 1966 exhibitions of Pablo Picasso’s work, Chapter 5, „Barbarians in the Temple of Art,“ demonstrates how the viewers of Western art were confronted with the received belief that no experience is inscrutable or culture impenetrable. But the very limits of comprehension make the verbalization of relations to art objects a revealing source in terms of the constitution of a space of public debate under an authoritarian regime. Whereas the limits to translation observed in Chapters 4 and 5 belong to the sphere of subjective perception and demarcation, the last chapter adds a novel perspective according to which mediation as annihilation of distance loses its meaning in the face of a real-life encounter.

The low level of international mobility among Soviet citizens was also a gain and a form of expansion: the genre of travelogue surpassed its own limitations to encompass all textual forms. Its proliferation and large audiences allow Gilburd to highlight one of the key issues of translation, namely, the issue of credibility and trust. The conventions of the genre operated within a set of obligatory itineraries and a stable ideological vocabulary, and eventually gave birth to particular reading techniques. Dropping depictions of misery, which were perceived as propagandist clichés, and selecting representations of beauty and prosperity, Soviet audiences fabricated their own versions of the West made up of foreign names and fragments but empowered with internal consistency by fantasy. When some of the privileged were finally allowed to visit the world of their dreams such as the French capital, they came to realize that their Paris existed only in Russia. „‚To see Paris and die‘, the Soviet version of ‚Vedi Napoli e poi mori,‘“ writes Gilburd in the opening pages of the book, „was a dream and a death wish“ (p. 2). The disillusionment was particularly severe and the sense of loss touched upon the very self and coherence of the world.

The book’s argument about the co-creation of the Western and Soviet utopias finds its logical endpoint in the epilogue „Exit: How Soviets Became Westerns.“ Offering an intimate view, according to which the disappearance of Soviet and Western utopias is not simply a collapse of a dysfunctional state but the devaluation of affections, Gilburd’s story of double loss is violent twice over. Yet it is still a more forward-looking vision than most historiography that ends with the collapse of the Soviet political project. For Gilburd, the Thaw is not a political event but a condition of possibility centered on the human capacity to question and to produce meanings. To See Paris and Die is a manifesto of human-centric transnational history that enables an understanding of the post-Soviet period as a process of becoming which takes place on a global scale and will draw in readership across all disciplines and specialties.

Notes:
1 Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain. Stalinism as a Civilization, Berkeley 1995.
2 Alexei Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More. The Last Soviet Generation, Princeton 2005.