Authors

Discussion

This paper explores the cross-culturally entangled editing process of the 1929 ‘Goethe’ entry in the Great Soviet Encyclopedia which targets aims at complifying distinctions of ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’ Marxism or Marxist historiography. More specifically, it allows for unpacking diverging understanding of Marxism and Historical Materialism between the Soviet editors – Vladimir Ikov, Boris Purishev, Samuil Sobolʹ, Vasiliĭ Zubov, and Lev Tumermann – and a Western European, German intellectual Walter Benjamin (1892–1940).

In 1928, Benjamin submited the draft of an article on Goethe, which he was commissioned to write for the Great Soviet Encyclopaedia. At first glance, this project appears to be another failure or ‘failed transfer’. Met with criticism by Karl Radek and Anatoliĭ Lunacharskiĭ, Benjamin’s draft was heavily reworked by an interdisciplinary group of authors based in Moscow before its publication in 1929. Scholarship, too, mostly dismissed Benjamin’s piece, suspecting it of being tendentious. I undertake an in-depth comparison between Benjamin’s version and with the published Russian encyclopaedia article.

However, as I will show, Benjamin’s manuscript and the Russian GSE entry form a peculiar site of transnationally entangled attempts to pursue a materialist method when writing literary history. Neither position was as of yet clearly institutionalised. If studied in tandem, both versions form an excellent vehicle to unpack their respective manoeuvres to draw a line between ideology and tactics of innovating materialism. Benjamin, for example, attempted to intervene in the more sociological readings of Goethe dominant in the USSR, presenting is prospective Soviet readers with a critical mirror of their interpretational patterns. But considering the editorial contexts and practices of the GSE, as well as broader discourses on Goethe, Soviet Spinozism and the natural sciences, also allows me to carve out mutual blind spots and shortcomings between Benjamin’s draft and the published version.