Charlottengrad: Russian Culture in Weimar Berlin by Roman Utkin (review)

Reviewed by: Charlottengrad: Russian Culture in Weimar Berlin by Roman Utkin Anoushka Alexander-Rose Charlottengrad: Russian Culture in Weimar Berlin. By Roman Utkin. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. 2023. xvii+256 pp. £78. 68; 99. 95. ISBN 978– 0–299–34440–5. Although Paris is often portrayed as the home of 'Russia Abroad', over half a million émigrés found a temporary home in Berlin between 1921 and 1925. Roman Utkin addresses this scholarly oversight with Charlottengrad (the name given to the Russian colony in the district of Charlottenburg, in Berlin's western inner city). His thesis—that the geography of Russia Abroad does not fit a simplistic dichotomy of exile versus home—is reflected through five chapters displaying the heterogeneity of this 'unlikely cultural ecosystem' (p. 11). Although each of his case studies could be read in isolation, Utkin's authoritative Introduction emphasizes his core point: that Russian culture in Weimar Berlin was not neatly contained or unified. He understands the city as a 'site of encounter' (p. 13), which facilitated the conflicting perspectives experienced by émigrés: regarding exile and return; assimilation and isolation; and liberation and displacement. While some writers clung onto Imperial Russia's legacy, others who came of age in emigration found Berlin a dynamic incubator for new ideas, embracing modernity and the avant-garde. There were over seventy Russian publishing houses in the German capital, with its four million residents, where these authors clearly found fertile ground for a substantial and richly diverse literary output. Drawing on poetry, prose, visual art, and correspondence from ten different émigré writers, Utkin asks: 'What does it mean to be Russian. . . when the Russia of old no longer exists? ' (p. 5). We might reflect on how, a hundred years later, an ugly Russian historical legacy has re-emerged, forcing the issues of identity, exclusion, and exile on our attention once again. Charlottengrad's first two chapters challenge the Soviet/émigré binary. In 'Unsentimental Journeys: Berlin as Trial Emigration' Utkin explores 'Pasternak's pivotal ambiguity, Mayakovsky's internationalist avant-gardism, and Khodasevich's extraterritorial aesthetic' (p. 62). His view of Berlin as a site for anxiety-inspired innovation, political decay, and despairing displacement continues in Chapter 2, 'Guides to Berlin: Exiles, Émigrés and the Left'. Studies of Shklovsky, Bely, and Ehrenburg demonstrate how the epistolary form acts as a 'rhetorical bridge' (p. 78) between the émigrés' Russian past and their German present. The topography of the city, through which exiles wander aimlessly, reflects the indeterminacy of migrant life, of political ambivalence, and of lost love. In Chapter 3, 'Performing Exile', Utkin examines the Berlin production of Rimsky-Korsakov's 1908 opera The Golden Cockerel as an example of transposition before a backdrop of 'competing versions of Russianness, where tradition and modernity collided' (p. 101). Pavel Tchelit-chew's 1923 production, although dividing critics, exemplified émigré art through its Pushkinian source text, Primitivist designs, and socio-political critique. Utkin reads the opera as a form of 'fabulous dissent', a mode of subversive creativity which he unpacks through theories of camp and carnival (pp. 95–97). All of Chapter 4 is dedicated to Vladimir Nabokov, the most internationally successful Russian émigré author, who, unlike many of his peers, remained in Berlin until 1937. Despite his End Page 291 political and linguistic self-isolation (Nabokov claimed that his awkwardness with German protected his native Russian fluency), 'Nabokov put Berlin on the map of Russian literature' (p. 148). Utkin focuses on the latter's Berlin-set novel The Gift (Dar, 1937), portraying its hero Fyodor as both an insider and an outsider with the aid of Bakhtin's theory of 'aesthetic empathizing' (p. 132). Despite Weimar Berlin's reputation for sexual openness, many accounts from this period betray intolerance and exclusion. Chapter 5, 'Queering the Russian Diaspora', displays real flair, uncovering archival material to exhibit the interiority of being 'an exile within exile' (p. 150). Sergei Nabokov, rightly treated as a focus in his own right (instead of merely as the famous author's brother), reveals in his letters to Dmitry Shakhovskoi 'the rarely acknowledged richness, complexity and interconnectedness of the narratives of culture in exile' (p. 167. . .