Wooden constructivism. On the poetics of Walter Benjamin’s “Moscow Diary”

Abstract

Walter Benjamin’s two strongest aesthetic impressions during his trip to Moscow, the theatrical avant-garde and folk toys, are connected not only by the immediacy of the testimony. His “Moscow Diary” is a complex construction, simultaneously a declaration of love for Moscow and a chronicle of an unfamiliar approach to known phenomena. A man of the constructivist era, Benjamin views the scenography of Meyerhold and Tairov avant-garde theater on a micro level, seeing small wooden structures. Those constructions produce a switch from a mode of protocol observation to a mode of disinterested play, of wondering what is happening. In Benjamin’s text, then, images of fairytale space emerge. Benjamin not only collects toys, but also perceives the constructions of avant-garde theater as a collection, as a way to erase the distinction between model and reality, something that cannot be achieved in the capitalist world. But the search for a job was also perceived by Benjamin as a construction of his destiny, stopping the action of the fairy tale.