Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) is a remarkable figure even within the extraordinary variety of German intellectual culture of the 20th century. Beginning with studies devoted to German Romanticism, Goethe, and the theater of the Baroque era, he later turned to searching for patterns in the development of culture, striving to proceed from specific, tangible phenomena of human life—often completely simple and everyday ones. Chaplin’s comedies, children’s books, tabloid newspapers, old photographs, or Parisian arcades—all became for him a reason to reflect on how culture is constructed. His research on literature—on Baudelaire, Kafka, Proust, and Leskov—turned out to be immeasurably broader than traditional literary scholarship. A restless nature brought Walter Benjamin to Moscow in the winter of 1926–1927, and the meeting played an important role in shaping his fate.