Imet Valery Podoroga in May, 1987, at one of life's accidental intersections. I was in Moscow for no purpose of my own. My husband, a physicist, had been invited to speak at the Landau Institute and I was there to accompany him. As I had just finished the manuscript for a book on Walter Benjamin, a visit to Moscow, capital city of twentieth-century socialism, which Benjamin had visited sixty years before, seemed entirely appropriate.