At the beginning of this century, Remy de Gourmont was the embodiment of the literary avant-garde, not only for urbane European writers but for “American imbeciles,” in Ezra Pound's term. As this book shows, Pound himself was one of the many young artists who learned from him. Gourmont was a brilliant teacher, and the breadth of his imagination and the scope of his interests had a special impact on Pound, whose “provincial” mind was moving in the same ways but without the so-called civilized places to go.

Instead of elaborately tracing influences or sources, Sieburth juxtaposes various aspects of Gourmont's and Pound's works in order to arrive at a better understanding of their individual achievements as “instigators.” In doing so, he reveals unexplored dimensions of Pound's development—from his early reading of vers fibre to his discovery, through Gourmont, of the French Enlightenment. Pound emerges as a modern-day philosophe, and Sieburth's reevaluation casts new light on Pound's complex political ideas and on difficult areas of the late Cantos.

The life of the German-Jewish literary critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) is a veritable allegory of the life of letters in the twentieth century. Benjamin’s intellectual odyssey culminated in his death by suicide on the Franco–Spanish border, pursued by the Nazis, but long before he had traveled to the Soviet Union. His stunning account of that journey is unique among Benjamin’s writings for the frank, merciless way he struggles with his motives and conscience.

Perhaps the primary reason for his trip was his affection for Asja Lācis, a Latvian Bolshevik whom he had first met in Capri in 1924 and who would remain an important intellectual and erotic influence on him throughout the twenties and thirties. Asja Lācis resided in Moscow, eking out a living as a journalist, and Benjamin’s diary is, on one level, the account of his masochistic love affair with this elusive—and rather unsympathetic—object of desire. On another level, it is the story of a failed romance with the Russian Revolution; for Benjamin had journeyed to Russia not only to inform himself firsthand about Soviet society, but also to arrive at an eventual decision about joining the Communist Party. Benjamin’s diary paints the dilemma of a writer seduced by the promises of the Revolution yet unwilling to blinker himself to its human and institutional failings.

Moscow Diary is more than a record of ideological ambivalence; its literary value is considerable. Benjamin is one of the great twentieth-century physiognomists of the city, and his portrait of hibernal Moscow stands beside his brilliant evocations of Berlin, Naples, Marseilles, and Paris. Students of this particularly interesting period will find Benjamin’s eyewitness account of Moscow extraordinarily illuminating.