The periodical October—published by the MIT Press in Cambridge, Massachusetts— recently devoted a whole issue, number 35, to printing a translation of Walter Benjamin’s Moscow Diary, which dates from December 6, 1926 to the end of January, 1927. Now Harvard University has issued the diary in book form. The manuscript lay in the Adorno archives in Frankfurt for many years and was published in German only in 1980. The delay is explained by the publishers’ regard for Asja Lacis, Benjamin’s great love for some five years, who died in Russia in 1979, at the age of eighty-eight. It is hard to see why and how she could have objected to its publication and in what way it could have embarrassed or endangered her. She appears in the diary as a committed Communist, and her relation to Benjamin shows at most that she liked gifts and money. Her loyalty to her then companion and lover, the Austrian playwright and director Bernhard Reich, whom she eventually married, is never in doubt. The more plausible explanation for the delay is that the diary was reserved for printing in the sixth volume of Benjamin’s Gesammelte Schriften, which contains all his other autobiographical fragments.

Moscow Diaryis edited by an American student, Gary Smith, and is substantially enriched by contemporary or near contemporary photographs of Moscow. It also contains a translation of a preface written in 1980 by the late Gershom Scholem, Benjamin’s lifelong friend. This great scholar of the