In the early sixteenth century, the monk Filofei proclaimed
Moscow the "Third Rome." By the 1930s, intellectuals and artists
all over the world thought of Moscow as a mecca of secular
enlightenment. In "Moscow, the Fourth Rome," Katerina Clark shows
how Soviet officials and intellectuals, in seeking to capture the
imagination of leftist and anti-fascist intellectuals throughout
the world, sought to establish their capital as the cosmopolitan
center of a post-Christian confederation and to rebuild it to
become a beacon for the rest of the world.
Clark provides an interpretative cultural history of the city
during the crucial 1930s, the decade of the Great Purge. She draws
on the work of intellectuals such as Sergei Eisenstein, Sergei
Tretiakov, Mikhail Koltsov, and Ilya Ehrenburg to shed light on the
singular Zeitgeist of that most Stalinist of periods. In her
account, the decade emerges as an important moment in the
prehistory of key concepts in literary and cultural studies
today-transnationalism, cosmopolitanism, and world literature. By
bringing to light neglected antecedents, she provides a new
polemical and political context for understanding canonical works
of writers such as Brecht, Benjamin, Lukacs, and Bakhtin.
"Moscow, the Fourth Rome "breaches the intellectual iron
curtain that has circumscribed cultural histories of Stalinist
Russia, by broadening the framework to include considerable
interaction with Western intellectuals and trends. Its integration
of the understudied international dimension into the interpretation
of Soviet culture remedies misunderstandings of the
world-historical significance of Moscow under Stalin.
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