KNOWING NOTHING. When I translated Gombrowicz’s Argentine diary, I found a fragment that interested me a great deal and I almost believed to be my own: “Everything we know about the world is incomplete, is inaccurate. Every day we are presented with new information that nullifies previous knowledge, mutilates or widens it. Because this knowledge is incomplete it is as if we knew nothing.”
WALTER BENJAMIN ATTENDS THE THEATER IN MOSCOW. The romantic episode included in Benjamin’s Moscow Diary can only be understood as a treatise on despair. In 1924 he met Asja Lācis, a Latvian revolutionary, in Capri, and fell in love from the first moment. According to Gershom Sholem, a close friend of Benjamin, Lacis wielded a decisive influence over him. They met again in Berlin that same year. The next year, Benjamin traveled to Riga to be with her for a few days. In early 1926 he takes another trip, this time to Moscow, where he remains two months. Communication with Asja regrettably deteriorates. To begin with, Asja is maintaining a romantic relationship with Bernhard Reich, a director of German theater living in Moscow. Committed to a sanitarium for nervous disorders, Benjamin sees her little, in bursts, and their encounters in general are unpleasant. On the other hand, he must see Reich continuously; moreover, shortly after his arrival he is obliged to offer him lodging in his own hotel room, because the place where Reich lives is cold and humid and, as a result, injurious to his health. A few days later, as in a Chaplin film, Reich takes possession of the bed, and Benjamin spends his nights seated in a chair. The diary records moments of deep depression owing to Asja’s coldness, to her demands, to her scorn.
Benjamin had traveled to the Soviet Union in the hope of making a decision he had postponed during the last two years. Should he or should he not join the German Communist Party, or merely remain as a fellow traveler? His arrival to the country of the Soviets coincides with one of the most nebulous periods of history, around the denouement of the fierce battle that had raged for two years between the forces of Trotsky and those of Stalin. The approaching end causes the battle to become more insidious, more implacable. The shockwave is permanent, though beneath the surface; only the facts and bubbles rise to the surface. Benjamin is amazed by the impersonality of the responses. No one appears to have a direct opinion on anything. The responses are always elusive: There are those of the opinion that… It is said that… Some think… In this way personal responsibility disappears. When he speaks and holds personal opinions in front of others, Reich and, especially, Asja reprimand him, they tell him that he has understood nothing, that it is impossible for him to navigate such a setting; in short, he should stop expressing nonsense that could compromise him as well as them. The day of his arrival, Reich invites him to dine at the restaurant of the Union of Writers, where they hear that, in a theater in the city, a work in praise of the whites is being performed, and that at the premiere the police had to disperse a communist demonstration that was protesting such an effrontery. In an entry dated December 14,15 that is, eight days following his arrival, Benjamin records his opinion on that theatrical piece that seemed to produce so much conflict:
They were performing Stanislavsky’s production of The Days of the Turbins. The naturalistic style of the sets was remarkably good, the acting without any particular flaws or merits, Bulgakov’s play itself an absolutely revolting provocation. Especially the last act, in which the White Guard “convert” to Bolshevism, is as dramatically insipid as it is intellectually mendacious. The Communist opposition to the production is justified and significant. Whether this final act was added on at the request of the censors, as Reich claims, or whether it was there all along has no bearing whatsoever on the assessment of the play. (The audience was noticeably different from the ones I had seen in the other two theaters. It was as if there were not a single Communist present, not a black or blue tunic in sight.)16
During his stay in Moscow, Benjamin allows himself no respite. He pursues his beloved and is permanently spurned, he translates pages of Proust, writes an entry on Goethe for the New Soviet Encyclopedia under preparation, visits museums, attends the theater—especially that of Meyerhold, which fascinates him—pays visits, including one to Joseph Roth, who has traveled there at the expense of an important newspaper in Frankfurt, and buys beautiful wooden pieces to add to his collection of popular toys. The arguments that Roth expounds in opposition to Stalin seem unserious to him, banal anticommunist statements to satisfy the great capital, “[Roth] had come to Russia as an (almost confirmed) Bolshevik and was leaving it a royalist”; the proletariat expression in the literature of the Soviet Union seemed indispensable to him, but the absence of theoretical reflection and the canonization of excessively elemental forms discouraged him. His privileged intelligence becomes lost in the permanent comedy of errors that he lives in the Moscow of disinformation, of half-truths and lies with veneers of doubtful virtue. When Benjamin submits his text on Goethe, painstakingly contemplated, Karl Radek, a high functionary close to Trotsky and protector of certain writers on the edge of dissidence, rejects it as if it were a primitive sectarian pamphlet; according to Radek, “The phrase ‘class conflict’ occurs ten times on every page.” Benjamin, who had taken the text to the offices of the Encyclopedia, pointed out this wasn’t entirely true, adding, what’s more, that it was impossible to speak about the activity of Goethe that occurs during an era of great class conflict, without employing that expression. Radek added, apparently with disdain: “The point is to introduce it at the right moment.” Benjamin accepts that he has lost the match given that the “wretched directors of this project are far too insecure to permit themselves any possibility of a personal opinion, even when faced with the feeblest joke by someone in a position of authority.” As for the work by Bulgakov that so irritated the Communists and that he, Benjamin, had described as “an absolutely revolting provocation,” it remained in the theater on higher orders. Stalin, no less!, saw it fifteen times, according to the archives of the Moscow Art Theater. As I was saying: an exhausting comedy of equivocations.
IN BERNHARD’S VIENNA. Some time ago in Rome, in the fall of 1961 to be precise, I accompanied the Zambrano sisters to a literary banquet. I don’t recall if it was to celebrate the launch of a literary journal or a new publisher series. The locale was a restaurant in the Piazza del Popolo. The faction of Italy’s intelligentsia most privileged by fame seemed to have gathered there. I knew scarcely anyone, but the group dazzled me: the way they moved, greeted one another, approached or avoided others, how they drew a cigarette to their mouths. Everything was luxurious, brilliant, concentrated. It recalled a scene by Antonioni with hints of Fellini, and also of Lubitsch. The presence of those it was impossible not to recognize: Alberto Moravia, Elsa Morante, Pasolini, Carlo Levi. Who had not seen their photos in the press or on the cover of their books?
María and Araceli Zambrano had lived until a few years before in the piano nobile of the palace on whose ground floor the restaurant was located. Listening to them, one would think that they had never been happy, except in that apartment with sprawling balconies above the piazza. Some guests, who were accustomed to seeing them in that setting, greeted and congratulated them as if they were the hostesses. One writer greeted the philosopher with obvious affection, and she seemed to feel at last inter pares and no longer among shiny but in the end tinpot puppets. Suddenly I found myself seated at his table with my Spanish companions. I saw him only on that single occasion, but he was the intellectual who most impressed me during that time in Italy. From that day on, I read his literary page in Il Espresso weekly, and those readings complemented the profound impression that he left on me that day. I admired