»Moscow! I had asked myself beforehand what the first thing to make an impression upon me might be.« So begin Christa Wolf’s writings about a city which she visited for the first time in 1957. In October 1989, right in the middle of those tumultuous weeks of change, she took what was to be her last trip to the Soviet Union. All in all, she had visited the country a total of ten times, shadowed, however, each and every time by the secret services of both the USSR and GDR.

As a tourist, together with Dostoyevsky’s grandson, she traces the great Russian writer’s footsteps through Saint Petersburg. With Max Firsch she travels along the Volga River to Gorki. In Gagra on the shores of the Black Sea she meets a quick-witted female lawyer from Moscow. She visits Vilnius and Riga and stands at the side of Anna Akhmatova’s grave in Komarovo. Above all, however, she is a sharp observer of the social and political circumstances of the day, which wins her the friendship of dissidents like Lev Kopelev.

From out of the diary entries emerges a multifaceted portrait of the giant country – all the way up to the days of its dramatic end – in a time of change, while, at the same time, we experience Christa Wolf in personal dialogue with herself and her Russian friends. Her entries have been complemented by explanatory notes from her husband Gerhard Wolf in addition to letters, photographs of the time, and documents.

Patterns of Childhood