Moscow Diary

Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) is a remarkable figure even for the extraordinary diversity of German intellectual culture in the 20th century. Starting with studies dedicated to German Romanticism, Goethe, and the theater of the Baroque era, he then engaged in searching for the patterns of cultural development, striving to move from concrete, tangible phenomena of human life, often completely simple and mundane. Chaplin's comedies, children's books, tabloid newspapers, old photographs, or Parisian arcades – all became reasons for him to reflect on how culture is structured. His studies on literature - on Baudelaire, Kafka, Proust, Leskov - turned out to be immeasurably broader than traditional literary criticism. The restless nature led Walter Benjamin to Moscow in the winter of 1926-1927, an encounter that played an important role in his fate.
This edition is supplemented for the first time with an article by Sergey Fokin, dedicated to the hidden contexts of "Moscow Diary" and ways of its contemporary reading.