This is a beautifully written book. In To See Paris and Die, Eleonory Gilburd tells the story of how the Soviet Union opened its borders—selectively but significantly—to western culture during the Thaw. As Gilburd explains, the cultural riches of the west had a place in the USSR from the start. For the Bolsheviks the west had given birth to literature, art, architecture, and music that rightly was part of the socialist inheritance. In the 1930s, paradoxically during the xenophobia of the Great Terror, the Soviet Union proclaimed itself the home of true, world culture. After Stalin's death and the termination of mass terror, as well as the anti-cosmopolitanism of the late 1940s, the stage was set for a revitalized and far more extensive engagement with the west.

The Cold War, Gilburd writes, led Stalin's successors to note the costs of postwar isolationism. Soviet officials realized the extent of American cultural influence in Europe and, to rival it, signed a series of bilateral cultural agreements, undergirded by the concept of “peaceful coexistence.” The Moscow International Youth Festival of 1957 was both an early example and a paragon of the Soviet opening. The Youth Festival existed first as a script; it was “a literary enterprise, a spectacular invention on paper, before it became real” (56). Painters helped to make the plans a reality; “color was the festival's second name” (102). Filmmakers recorded an event whose “sequences were distinctly cinematic” (102).

Cultural exchange as literature, painting, and film, as well as their reception by readers and viewers: these themes foreshadow the rest of the book. In the 1950s and 1960s, hundreds of American and European novels, paintings, and films arrived in the USSR, to be read and viewed by teachers, librarians, doctors, engineers, and students in Moscow, Leningrad, and far beyond. For Gilburd, the Thaw amounted to the largest episode of cultural westernization in Russian history since Peter the Great. For officials, translators, dubbers, and critics, “culture” was not class-based, but a universal language that expressed universal values. Yet the Soviets made the universal particular; the most universal country on earth, the USSR had a unique claim to understanding the cultural output of other lands. Novels by Ernest Hemingway and Erich Maria Remarque, paintings by Rockwell Kent and Pablo Picasso, and the films of Italian neorealism were not simply received; they were “translated.” In the case of literature and film, they were rendered into Russian; but, more profoundly, many imports became Soviet possessions. Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms and Remarque's Three Comrades became “books about us.” For readers and viewers, these possessions—literal, in the case of books, metaphorical, in the case of images—took on unanticipated meanings. The opening to the west may have been “controlled, censored, distorted” (53), but Soviet citizens proved inventive, constructing a west that was utopian and fantastic. It was a place, paradoxically, that delivered on a Soviet promise: there, fairy tale became reality.

In Gilburd's telling, the Thaw was intensely emotional, or physiological; cultural imports elicited joy and longing, but also revulsion (in the case of modernist painting, which the universalists could not understand). Her subjects, even as adults, are children; they see magic in the (western) world. In a fine treatment of travelogues, Gilburd discusses the link between this genre and memoirs of childhood. Soviet citizens traveled to the west for the first time as children, but vicariously, by book. For the lucky and elite few able to visit the west, in person and for the first time, it was in fact a return trip—to the world of their childhood. For those who remained at home, almost any text about the west—histories, biographies, memoirs, and so on—became “travelogues.” Gilburd's subjects are, despite their age, young people passionately in love—with a “no place.”

Youthful infatuations often do not end well, and the end of childhood is inevitable. In the epilogue, Soviets become westerners. Between 1971 and 1990, 350,000 people left the Soviet Union; in 1991, when the USSR collapsed, those who remained became foreigners in their own country. Gilburd emphasizes dispossession—of an emotional or existential sort; her subjects, whether in the United States, Europe, or in the countries of the former Soviet Union, have lost what they had once loved. In Russia, “they lugged to used bookstores Balzac's Collected Works, tomes by Zola, Maupassant, Walter Scott, and John Galsworthy, and the treasured books of the Thaw, Hemingway in two volumes, Salinger in [Rita] Rait-Kovaleva's translation” (329). Those who became the “Westerners” of their dreams, especially if they remained in the former Soviet Union, did so for only a fleeting moment. Tragically, the real west did not resemble the invented one.

Gilburd's research is as impressive as her prose. Almost all of the episodes of cultural transfer she describes—a commendable many—are painted with a fine-detail brush. This book is indeed, to invoke the subtitle, about the “Soviet Lives of Western Culture”; the imported artifacts come alive in the hands of the author. The overall argument seems about right. It would have been helpful to learn why Gilburd does not consider the reception and “translation” of Marxism in 1917 to be a chapter as significant as the Petrine era and the Thaw in the story of Russian westernization. Perhaps if the author had stepped back from the picture more often and included a broader stroke here and there—or added some texture to those she does include—the reader might have learned. Also, could more have been said about the nature of “Westernization” in the second half of the twentieth century? And did other phenomena not rival it? For example, in the discussion of Soviet emigration, Gilburd does not mention that the overwhelming majority of the émigrés were Jews, most of whom relocated not to the west, but to Israel. Might the focus on the lives of western culture have benefited from more attention to the lives of teachers, doctors, and students, as well as their geographic fates?

There is a notable congruence between how Gilburd's subjects approach western culture and how Gilburd tells their story. Soviet culture producers, readers, and viewers found western art and literature to be transparent, to be knowable if “translated.” For the translator and prominent theorist Ivan Kashkin, Gilburd explains, a text was a “‘screen’ that obscured ‘the initial freshness of the author's immediate perception of reality’” (117). And “the translator, like the writer, worked with raw reality—except that his task was to interpret foreign reality in a way that made sense to Soviet readers” (117). For Gilburd, too, the past is fundamentally knowable; sources from different periods—archival documents from the 1960s, memoirs from the 1990s, interviews from the 2000s—can be combined to form a resonant whole. With the epilogue, Gilburd, too, becomes a “translator,” writing a history of the Thaw in the United States for an English-language audience. Like the Russian translation of Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms and Remarque's Three Comrades, Gilburd's To See Paris and Die, it seems to me, is a “book about us”—in this case, Soviet citizens, like the author (as well as this reviewer), who ultimately emigrated to the west. It reads as a touching eulogy to lost love and the end of childhood, as experienced by members of her parents’ generation.

Yet, at the same time, a bit of distance—this time, critical—might have helped. Distance may have led not only to acknowledgment of the different destinations of Soviet emigres; it may have prompted the author to attend to less salutary aspects of this chapter of Russian westernization. A minor theme of Gilburd's history is hierarchy: it was an Enlightenment project, stubbornly rooted in the Stalinist past, which also drove the opening to the west. The book includes a fascinating passage about the reception of Picasso in 1956: “many young people ‘sought a Teacher, with a capital T’. . .The Great Father was gone and the Great Family was in disarray. To paraphrase [a] poem by Evtushenko, nobody really wanted to be ‘Stalin's heir.’ Progeny without patrimony, they became Picasso's heirs” (259). How does one write about a culture in which even youthful, progressive voices express a longing for a Great Father? To what extent is this desire symptomatic of older patterns of Russian westernization? And how much should it be foregrounded in a history of the Thaw and its legacy of “humiliation and loss”?

To be sure, even the most self-conscious author cannot fully shake off her position in a story. However Gilburd's own position may have shaped her study, To See Paris and Die, elegant and the product of enormous work, is an achievement; it teaches us a great deal about western imports and their late-Soviet readers and viewers. The book is surely to become essential and rewarding reading for scholars of modern Russia, the Cold War and, finally, cultural transfer—of which it is itself a rich, revealing artifact.