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The Soviet Union was a notoriously closed society until Stalin's death in 1953. Then, in the mid-1950s, a torrent of Western novels, films, and paintings invaded Soviet streets and homes, acquiring heightened emotional significance. To See Paris and Die is a history of this momentous opening to the West. At the heart of this story is a process of translation, in which Western figures took on Soviet roles: Pablo Picasso as a political rabble-rouser; Rockwell Kent as a quintessential American painter; Erich Maria Remarque and Ernest Hemingway as teachers of love and courage under fire; J. D. Salinger and Giuseppe De Santis as saviors from Soviet clichâes. Imported novels challenged fundamental tenets of Soviet ethics, while modernist paintings tested deep-seated notions of culture. Western films were eroticized even before viewers took their seats. The drama of cultural exchange and translation encompassed discovery as well as loss. Eleonory Gilburd explores the pleasure, longing, humiliation, and anger that Soviet citizens felt as they found themselves in the midst of this cross-cultural encounter. The main protagonists of To See Paris and Die are small-town teachers daydreaming of faraway places, college students vicariously discovering a wider world, and factory engineers striving for self-improvement. They invested Western imports with political and personal significance, transforming foreign texts into intimate possessions. With the end of the Soviet Union, the Soviet West disappeared from the cultural map. Gilburd's history reveals how domesticated Western imports defined the last three decades of the Soviet Union, as well as its death and afterlife.-- Provided by publisher

pFeaturing innovative research by historical, literary, and film scholars from across the world, this book helps to answer fundamental questions about the nature and ultimate fortune of the Soviet order - both in its internal dynamics and in its long-term and global perspectives./p

The epoch that was born when Joseph Stalin died in March 1953 was a time of great expectations. Contemporaries described these years as a moment of awakening. With metaphors of air, freshness, and light, writers and film-makers created an image of dawn. And the fiery publicist Ilya Ehrenburg (1891–1967) gave his otherwise inconspicuous novella the title that has demarcated the Soviet 1950s and 1960s. Ehrenburg titled his book The Thaw. Ehrenburg’s title belonged to, but also worked against, some of the most stable and meaningful associations in Russian poetry and lyrical imagination. For many poets, thaw was not a

Around the corner from Nikitskii Boulevard, on Vozdvizhenka, stands one of the strangest buildings in Moscow. An ornamented castle with heavy arched portals, laced balcony rails, shell-shaped stucco moulding, two round towers, twisted columns of sandstone, and an entrance in the shape of a horseshoe for luck, this building transports visitors to the Lisbon of Vasco da Gama and the Age of Discovery, to the Salamanca of Isabel and Ferdinand. If the building’s central ensemble and its decorative grapevines bear strange similarity to the Sintra Castle near Lisbon, while the shell-embossed facade is reminiscent of the Casa de las Conchas

Au milieu des années 1950 et pour la première fois en près de dix ans, l'Union soviétique commença à accueillir des expositions étrangères d'œuvres impressionnistes, expressionnistes, cubistes et abstraites. Les expositions occidentales d'art moderne devinrent bientôt parties intégrantes du cadre de vie à Moscou et à Leningrad. Cet article étudie la transformation de la notion d'étranger en celle de familier dans le processus de médiation culturelle et d'appropriation. Il examine la façon dont les visiteurs faisaient la part des choses entre ce qu'ils voyaient et ce qu'ils lisaient, interprète leurs réponses à ces expositions en prenant en considération leurs notions de culture et du \"barbare\" ainsi que leurs lapsus et leurs insultes et il met en lumière les émotions suscitées par leur rencontre avec l'art moderne occidental. L'objet central de cette étude est l'exposition Picasso de 1956, événement majeur qui reste l'un des souvenirs les plus marquants du Dégel. Ce n'était pas la première exposition de peinture moderne étrangère de la décennie, mais elle a éclipsé toutes les suivantes, qu'elles soient d'autres artistes occidentaux ou de Picasso lui-même. Elle arriva en Union soviétique pendant une période troublée par des mouvements étudiants, des remous au sein des syndicats des artistes et la révolution hongroise. En conséquence, pour tous les participants, personnel du musée, représentants du parti, étudiants, administrateurs d'universités et visiteurs de tous âges, le nom de Picasso devint synonyme de parole débridée, de foules désordonnées et de perturbations politiques. Le mot \"Picasso\" devint une métaphore centrale dans le discours sur le passé et les nouveaux départs, la force et l'innocence, la liberté d'expression et par laquelle se définissait la génération de la fin des années 1950-début des années 1960. L'article explore le sens politique et poétique accolé au nom de Picasso dans la culture du Dégel. La politique de 1956, la poésie de la première moitié des années 1960 et la publication de témoignages sur Picasso par des médiateurs culturels ont facilité la reconnaissance de cet artiste par un public lettré et libéral. /// In the mid-1950s, for the first time in almost a decade, the Soviet Union began to host foreign exhibitions of impressionist, expressionist, cubist, and abstract painting. Modern art exhibitions from the West were soon to become a habitual presence in Moscow and Leningrad. This article investigates the transformation of the foreign into the familiar in the process of cultural mediation and domestication. The article considers how viewers negotiated between what they saw and read; it interprets their responses to foreign exhibitions by taking into account the viewers' notions of culture, \"barbarity,\" and the museum, as well as language slips and verbal abuses; and it highlights the emotions that accompanied the encounter with modern Western art. I focus on the 1956 Picasso exhibition -- one of the central events and enduring memories of the Thaw. This was not the first exhibition of modern foreign painting in the 1950s, but it overshadowed all subsequent ones -- of other Western artists and of Picasso himself. The exhibition arrived in the Soviet Union at a particularly charged moment, overlapping with student disturbances, the commotion in the creative unions, and the Hungarian revolution. As a result, for all participants -- museum staff, party officials, students, university administrators, and exhibition visitors of various ages -- Picasso's name became synonymous with unbridled speech, disorderly crowds, and political upheaval. \"Picasso\" was a key metaphor with which viewers discussed the past and new beginnings, force and innocence, debate and creative freedom, and with which generational identities were delineated in the late 1950s and early 1960s. This essay explores the political and poetic meanings attached to Picasso's name in Thaw culture. The politics of 1956, the poetry of the early-mid 1960s, and the publication of first-hand accounts of Picasso by cultural mediators facilitated the recognition of the artist among broad viewing and reading audiences.