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1. They lived mostly in Charlottenburg, which they renamed
Charlottengrad, and where a "German spoken here"
sign was not a paradox. They met between the Memorial Church,
Kanstrasse and Kurfüstendamm. "In this part of Berlin-wrote
Andrei Bely-you meet everyone whom you haven't met for years,
not to mention friends; here [I] met the entire Moscow and
Saint Petersburg community of recent years, Russian Paris,
Prague, even Sofia and Belgrade." The Russian formalist
critic and writer Viktor Shklovsky described them orbiting
the Memorial Church "like flies around a chandelier"
These were the Russians in Berlin. It is estimated that in
the period between the end of the civil war, in late 1920,
and 1923, half a million Russians lived in Germany, and most
of them chose to settle in Berlin. They were mostly aristocrats,
defeated by the dramatic turn of Russian history, agonizing
in their new lives of common people; they were intellectuals-writers,
poets, literary critics-eager to speak out and write, in search
for publishers and, most of all, printing paper; they were
artists and filmmakers, lawyers and politicians. And, as the
writer Ilia Erenburg observed, they all carried a "mandatory
crack in the soul" that kept them distant from the German
surroundings, and nourished their desire of recomposing the
coordinates of the lost Russian culture on the German soil.
2. But why Berlin? In the early 20s there were already Russian
colonies all over the world, from Cairo, to Rapallo, to Buenos
Aires, but Berlin was the preferred destination in Europe
for the intellectual émigré (lower classes preferred
Prague or the Balkans) and became the center of a brief but
intense cultural Renaissance. There were various reasons:
access to Germany was still easy and Berlin was geographically
the central node in the pathway to all other possible destinations,
one could exorcise the ongoing hyperinflation because life
here was still relatively affordable, and yet the most appealing
attractions were a strong Social Democracy and the best publishing
infrastructure in Europe. In 1924 there were 80 Russian publishing
houses that had published 2,300 titles and some of the most
crucial artistic events and phenomena were Russian: El Lissitsky,
Kazimir Malevich, Sergey Eisenstein and Vsevolod Meyerhold
made sensation and influenced the local German avant-garde.
But towards the end of the 20s it all ended, together with
the dream of cultural rebirth and continuity. Hidden inside
the Russian Berlin there was the same irreconcilable contrasts
that were afflicting the motherland: the aristocratic and
nostalgic estheticism, for instance, was to clash here too
with the fresh energy of the proletarian artists and poets.
And when the revolutionary wind moved across the border, the
dream ended. Some left Germany for other Western destinations,
many returned, defeated, to Russia. 
3. We will narrate this fascinating world of excitement
and desperation, hope and disillusionment, through the lives,
the memories, the works and the images of those Russian writers
and poets who lived in Berlin during this period, i.e., Vladimir
Nabokov, Andrey Bely, Marina Tsvetaeva, Vladislav Khodasevich,
Nina Berberova, or briefly visited the German capital, i.e.,
Vladimir Mayakovsky and Sergey Esenin. We will observe their
exploration of a foreign topography, their fast adaptation
to it, and its modification inside their own displaced artistic
and cultural dimensions.
List of Pictures to Incorporate in this Text:
Andrey Bely
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