Benjamin in Moscow

It’s 1926, and the porters of the third-class Moscow Hotel ‘Tirol’ are sitting in a little room off the lobby, bored to death. Outside the night air is silent and the pavements are treacherous, covered in damp ice. Occasionally a sleigh passes on the ring road, but otherwise sound has been sucked out of the world.

Follow the dimly-lit narrow corridor from the lobby, a threadbare runner tacked to the boards, and it leads to Walter Benjamin’s room. There are low voices inside, speaking in German; one reading, another commenting from time to time. The Austrian theatre director, Bernhard Reich, is going through the draft of an article about a landmark Meyerhold production. The stale air of the hotel room, the cigarette smoke, the poor light and the smell of boiling laundry and sweat – it all presses in on his listener and produces a familiar sense of abjection, but also an intoxication with the moment, a strange and foreign moment.

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Moscow all around him, a low-built bazaar of a place, its deep infrequent church bells rising through the late afternoon. And that very afternoon he had walked under the widest skies, prairie skies; pink, sharp winter air. Moscow: a large plant in its own atmosphere, its shoots struggling to breach the earth and meet the twentieth century.

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Theatre is a fleeting artform, but Meyerhold’s historic 1926 production of Nikolai Gogol’s The Government Inspector has been well documented in film, articles, memoirs and critical essays. We can never really know what it ...