Learning and teaching through authored works is a foundational component of the University of Chicago’s College’s style of education and rigorous pursuit of knowledge. Many faculty members in the College contribute through the authorship of countless impressive books, both within and beyond their academic interests.
In March, the College launched the UChicago College Book Club, featuring published books by College faculty that are anticipated to be of interest to the community. All book club entries will be housed on the College news website, and we invite all members of the community to read along and submit their own favorite faculty-written books for consideration.
The second selection of the year is "To See Paris and Die" by Eleonory GIlburd, an associate professor of history and the College. It can be purchased at the Seminary Co-Op bookstore on campus, or checked out at the University's library.
Published in 2018, Gilburd’s first book is a history of the Soviet Union’s cultural opening to the West during the 1950s and 1960s, following the death of former ruler Joseph Stalin.
The phrase “to see Paris and die ” was the Soviet Union’s version of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s famous idiom “Vedi Napoli e poi muori,” meaning that seeing Paris was “the ultimate fulfillment of life’s aspirations, with nothing else left to experience” (p.2).
While Western novels, films and art increasingly made their way into Soviet communities during this time, they often did so under the pressure of a government-imposed “translation culture” which restricted information and cross-border mobility. This both created and maintained a societal vision of a “Western utopia” (p.2) which gave rise to this book’s titular idiom.
This history covers the arrival of these cultural imports throughout a transformational era known in scholarly circles as the “Thaw.” Unlike the term “de-Stalinization,” the Thaw avoids “reducing a complex terrain to Stalin’s single-handed creation,” and rather represents a “world in the making, a cultural system open to chance and change” (p. 7).
Readers without extensive knowledge of Soviet history may be surprised to learn that these cultural exchanges took place during the height of the Cold War. Gilburd emphasizes that it is a very convoluted history. While the presence of Western culture in the Soviet Union is often mistakenly attributed to the 1990s, reverence for it had developed over decades as a result of the contradiction between state propagandistic tropes and a contrarian societal response to those tropes.
“My book tries to convey complex sentiments: an amalgam of appropriation and rejection, anger at the inaccessibility of the West, at inability to travel, defensiveness; envy toward privileged Soviets with special access to Western things; frustration about too much censorship or too little censorship; distrust of authorities and doubts about the truthfulness of official statements; embarrassment about ignorance, shame about excessive veneration, and relishing of Western things all the same,” said Gilburd.
Gilburd, who grew up in the Soviet Union during its late period, said that as a child she was exposed to cultural works that were “non-Soviet in origin, [and] Soviet in [their] habitus – a hybrid that back then felt organic and not at all foreign.” She recalls long lines outside her local movie theater to see “Crocodile Dundee,” classic Western books always in short supply, and how cities fell silent and streets emptied out upon the arrival of soap operas.
“I wanted to understand how this could have happened – when and why, and by what channels all this came to the Soviet Union, and how and what of these imports became invisible, transformed into an inseparable part of Soviet life,” Gilburd said of her inspiration for writing the book.
By differing from traditional Soviet realism with abstract themes (“free of political or technological editing”) previously unfamiliar to the Soviet audience, Western works by Pablo Picasso, Erich Maria Remarque, Ernest Hemingway initially confused, but later inspired audiences. In turn, these artists became larger than life figures in the Soviet Union (p. 105).
Soviet citizens who found themselves in the middle of this cultural encounter are in many ways this book’s main characters and Gilburd’s primary source material. Throughout the book, she shares several written accounts from the era of discovery and excitement. These accounts, in many cases, reflected a distinct longing to travel, an opportunity allocated only to some in the Soviet Union.
Towards the end, Gilburd summarizes descriptions of Paris from Soviet travelogues which became narrative “neighborhood guide[s] of great precision” (p. 282) for those who would never be able to see it. These guides contained colorful depictions of the city, reflecting a culture that had shifted, and embraced impressionism as a new form of realism.
“It always rained. A sound, a feeling, a smell, a prism for seeing Paris, rain was a refrain in Soviet travelogues. Rain covered the city in gloss. As Soviet artists painted the landscape, it glistened. This was the impressionists’ Paris, part painting, part mirage, as travelers realized and granted canvases a reality beyond art” (p. 283).
If you read "To See Paris and Die" and want your reflections to be shared in future posts, please send me a note at andybrown@uchicago.edu. The next book in the series will be "Don't Come Back" by Lina María Ferreira Cabeza-Vanegas, assistant professor of creative writing. Happy reading!