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

Reviewed by: Charlottengrad: Russian Culture in Weimar Berlin by Roman Utkin Annemarie Sammartino Charlottengrad: Russian Culture in Weimar Berlin. By Roman Utkin. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2023. Pp. xvii + 292. Cloth 99. 95. ISBN 9780299344405. The cultural ferment and political turmoil of Weimar Berlin are well known and well documented. The experiences and contributions of Berlin's large and diverse Russian population are less so. Weimar's "Russian Berlin" encompassed émigrés who left to escape the Russian Revolution and Soviet ideologues alike. It was linguistically and ethnically diverse—including ethnic Russians, Jews, Ukrainians, and nearly every other group that made up Russia's polyglot empire. While exact figures do not exist, the largest estimate of Russian Berlin put its population at its height at over 300, 000, encompassing 10 percent of the population of the German capital. What existing studies of this community often do is to fold it into the broader narratives of "Russia abroad"—the transatlantic émigré community of former Russian subjects—or the story of international communism. Utkin instead seeks to explore the "complicated, dramatic and rewarding story, not captured by the familiar communist/anticommunist and exile/homeland dichotomies" (4). His study insists upon the permeability and ambivalence of Berlin's Russian community, which was defined less by dichotomies than by encounters and cross-pollination. Berlin became the temporary homeland of many Russians and "stepmother of all Russian cities" (52) for many reasons but maybe most importantly for its geographical proximity to the territory of the former Russian Empire itself. The city's status as a crossroads or way station for many physically or psychically displaced Europeans allowed it to serve as a site of "trial emigration, " as Utkin terms it, "a political and cultural environment that enabled deliberations about whether to emigrate permanently or to return to Soviet Russia" (20). Nevertheless, Utkin stresses the embeddedness of Russian Berlin within the physical and cultural geography of the city itself. As much as some Russians may have longed for their lost homeland, they were not an isolated or deterritorialized group unaffected by their Berlin surroundings. The book largely focuses on already well-known members of the Russian Berlin community—Ilya Ehrenburg, Boris Pasternak, and Vladimir Nabokov feature prominently and will be familiar to readers. Others, such as the poet Vera Lourié, may be less so, but they are nonetheless part of Utkin's revealing portrait of this community. In chapter one, Utkin's authoritative interpretations of poetry by Pasternak, Vladimir Mayakovsky, and Vladislav Khodasevich provide a fascinating window into the fluidity and lack of certainty these figures felt toward Berlin. A later chapter provides an extended close reading of Nabokov's novel The Gift, which is set in the Berlin émigré community itself. Utkin provides an inspired reading of Nabokov's metaphor of a crossword puzzle for Berlin's urban landscape. In the book, Nabokov compares the streets of a neighborhood near Grunewald to "dark crossword puzzles, " an apt metaphor for a lexophile. Utkin extends this metaphor from the streets of this leafy End Page 349 suburb to the Mietskaserne (tenement) that make up so much of the working-class housing in the city (125–26). This is a suggestive and deft interpretation, albeit one that would be usefully boosted by additional evidence. Some of the chapters of this book are more successful than others. For example, the final chapter on "Queering the Russian Diaspora" offers some tantalizing hints about the queer lives obscured by standard historical accounts but spends more time on the need to "recover a history of Russian queer subjectivity" (149) than actually revising the traditional historical narrative. Perhaps also due to the paucity of evidence that Utkin was able to find, this chapter is the least centered on Berlin. Nevertheless, while Utkin does not find as much concrete evidence of links between "queer Berlin" and "Russian Berlin" as he proposes to (149), this may be a useful invitation to further research on the topic. Chapter three on "Performing Exile" provides a welcome expansion of the book's focus beyond literature to instead discuss the Berlin State Opera's 1923 production of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov's The Golden Cockerel. Utkin's point that. . .