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The Filmmaker in Wartime: Sergei Eisenstein Inside and Out

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 May 2020

Joan Neuberger
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Abstract

In 1941, Sergei Eisenstein had a decision to make. Iosif Stalin commissioned him to make a film about Ivan the Terrible, and in the months that followed he vacillated about how to depict the bloody tyrant. The Nazi invasion in June temporarily distracted him from work on the film, but by the time he was evacuated to Alma Ata in October, Eisenstein was committed to making the defiantly unorthodox, transgressive film that we have. What changed? The bombing of Moscow in July compelled Eisenstein to reflect on his public and private responsibilities and on individualism and collectivism in ways that complicated those categories and clarified his determination to make Ivan the Terrible a serious study of political power and violence. His diary from this period contributes a first-hand account of the bombing, and shows us Eisenstein's thinking about the political implications of interior and exterior at this critical stage in his life and work. This text, unpublished and unintended for publication, gives us a voice and a spectrum of positions that we have not heard before on this key set of discourses in Soviet history.

Keywords

EisensteindiaryIvan the TerribleWWIIMoscow bombingpublic/private
Type
Articles
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 79 , Issue 1 , Spring 2020 , pp. 76 - 92
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies 2020

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References

1 Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv literatury i iskusstvo (RGALI), fond 1923 (Eisenstein’s personal papers), opis΄ 2, delo 1165, list 4 (April 4, 1941).

2 There is now a large literature on Soviet subjectivity and the new Soviet Man and Woman, including Richard Stites, Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution (Oxford, 1991); Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Culture Front: Power and Culture in Revolutionary Russia Revolution (Ithaca, 1992), and Tear Off the Masks: Identity and Imposture in Twentieth-Century Russia (Princeton, 2005); Joachim Hellbeck, Revolution on My Mind: Writing a Diary Under Stalin (Cambridge, Mass., 2006); Igal Halfin, Intimate Enemies: Demonizing the Bolshevik Opposition, 1918–1928 (Pittsburgh, 2007); Soviet Culture and Power: A History in Documents, eds. Katerina Clark and Evgeny Dobrenko (New Haven, 2007).

3 Emma Widdis, Socialist Senses: Film, Feeling, and the Soviet Subject, 1917–1940 (Bloomington, 1917); Mark Steinberg and Valeria Sobol, eds., Interpreting Emotions in Russian and Eastern Europe (Dekalb, IL, 2011); Thomas Lahusen, How Life Writes the Book: Real Socialism and Socialist Realism in Stalin’s Russia (Ithaca, 1997); Lewis H. Seigelbaum, ed., Borders of Socialism: Private Spheres of Soviet Russia (New York, 2006); David Crowley and Susan Emily Reid, eds., Socialist Spaces: Sites of Everyday Life in the Eastern Bloc (New York, 2002); Svetland Boym, Common Places: Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia (Cambridge, Mass., 1994); Ilya Utekhin, Ocherki kommunal΄nogo byta (Moscow, 2001); Mikhail Ryklin, Prostranstva likovaniia: Totalitarizm i razlichie (Moscow, 2002); Abbott Gleason, Totalitarianism: The Inner History of the Cold War (New York, 1995); Raymond Bauer, The New Man in Soviet Psychology (Cambridge, Mass., 1952), Oleg Kharkhordin, The Collective and the Individual in Russia (Berkeley, 1999).

4 Lilya Kaganovsky, How the Soviet Man was Unmade: Cultural Fantasy and Male Subjectivity under Stalin (Pittsburgh, 2008); Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as Civilization (Berkeley, 1996); Jan Plamper, The Stalin Cult: A Study in the Alchemy of Power (Stanford, 2012); Lewis Siegelbaum, Stakhanovism and the Politics of Productivity in the USSR, 1935–1941 (Cambridge, Eng., 1988); Anna Krylova, “Imagining Socialism in the Soviet Century,” Social History 42, no. 3 (August 2017): 315–41; Pinsky, Anatoly, “The Origins of Post-Stalin Individuality: Aleksandr Tvardovskii and the Evolution of 1930s Soviet Romanticism,” Russian Review 76, no. 3 (July 2017): 458–83CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 Philippe Ariès and Georges Duby, eds., Histoire de la vie privée, 5 vols. (Paris, 1985–89).

6 Dena Goodman, “Public Sphere and Private Life: Toward a Synthesis of Current Historiographical Approaches to the Old Regime,” History and Theory 31, no. 1 (February 1992): 14.

7 Susan Gal, “A Semiotics of the Public/Private Distinction,” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 13, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 77–98.

8 Gal, “A Semiotics of the Public/Private Distinction,” 80–84. See also Katerina Gerasimov, “Public Privacy in the Soviet Communal Apartment,” in David Crowley and Susan Emily Reid, eds., Socialist Spaces: Sites of Everyday Life in the Eastern Bloc (Oxford, Eng., 2002).

9 Luka Arsenjuk, Movement, Action, Image, Montage: Sergei Eisenstein and the Cinema in Crisis (Minneapolis, 2018)

10 S. M. Eisenstein, Selected Works: Beyond the Stars, The Memoirs of Sergei Eisenstein, ed. Richard Taylor, trans. William Powell (London, 1995), 429 (translation corrected).

11 Irina Paperno, Stories of Soviet Experience: Memoirs, Diaries, Dreams (Ithaca, 2009); Alexis Peri, The War Within: Diaries from the Siege of Leningrad (Cambridge, Mass., 2017).

12 RGALI, f. 1923, op. 2, d. 1167, ll. 34–35 (Sept 16, 1941).

13 Iu. Iu. Kammerer, ed., Moskve—“vozdushnaia trevoga!”: Mestnaia PVO v gody voiny, 2nd ed. (Moscow, 1991); Rodric Braithwaite, Moscow 1941: A City and Its People at War (New York, 2006), 167–87.

14 Braithwaite, Moscow 1941, 174–77.

15 RGALI, f. 1923, op. 2, d. 1168, 1. 59 (July 7, 1942).

16 RGALI, f. 1923, op. 2, d. 1170, l. 1.

17 Eisenstein often used ellipses to lend drama or indicate a pause in his writing. I use dashes to represent his ellipses so as not to confuse them with ellipses that indicate words omitted from a quotation. RGALI, f. 1923, op. 2, d. 1166, ll. 1–2 (July 25, 1941).

18 RGALI, f. 1923, op. 2, d. 1166, ll. 1–2 (July 25, 1941).

19 RGALI, f. 1923, op. 2, d. 1166, 1. 4 (July 25, 1941).

20 RGALI, f. 1923, op. 2, d. 1166, ll. 3–4 (July 25, 1941). Izvestiia was the official state newspaper.

21 Katerina Clark, “Socialist Realism and the Sacralizing of Space,” in Eric Naiman and Evgeny Dobrenko, eds., Landscapes of Stalinism: The Art and Ideology of Soviet Space (Seattle, 2003), 11.

22 Eisenstein, Selected Works: Beyond the Stars, 628; see also Mikhail Iampolsky, “The Essential Bone Structure: Mimesis in Eisenstein,” in Ian Christie and Richard Taylor, eds., Eisenstein Rediscovered (London, 1993), 187–88.

23 Stalin called artists “engineers of human souls.” RGALI, f. 1923, op. 2, d. 1166, ll. 5–6.

24 RGALI, f. 1923, op. 2, d. 1166, l. 14 (August 4, 1941).

25 Esfir΄ Tobak, “Moi gigant,” Kinostsenarii 6 (1997): 133.

26 RGALI, f. 1923, op. 2, d. 1166, 1. 6; my thanks to Katya Cotey for helping me identify the author of the play. It was made into a film in the US in 1922, entitled “The Sin Flood,” directed by Frank Lloyd.

27 As Anna Krylova, Anatoly Pinsky, and others have shown, the individual/collective was never a simple or clear-cut dichotomy in public, either.

28 RGALI, f. 1923, op. 2, d. 1166, ll. 8–9.

29 “Bombezhka ne bylo. Est΄. I ne budet.”–a political pun on the slogan: “Lenin lived, Lenin lives, Lenin will live.” Later he puns on Machiavelli (after re-reading The Prince): “The trench justifies the means”; the word for means, “tsel΄,” and for trench or dugout, “shchel΄,” are nearly identical; RGALI, f. 1923, op. 2, d. 1166, ll. 9–10 (July 25, 1941), and l. 18 (August 10, 1941).

30 RGALI, f. 1923, op. 2, d. 1166, ll. 10–11 (July 25, 1941). Emphasis added.

31 RGALI, f. 1923, op. 2, d. 1166, ll. 11–12 (July 25, 1941).

32 RGALI, f. 1923, op. 2, d. 1166, 1. 13 (July 25, 1941). Mikhail Ryklin writes in Spaces of Jubilation that public performativity was disastrous for the peoples involved: “world-historical posturing (pozerstvo), the centers of which were Moscow and Berlin, cost both peoples [Russians and Germans] dearly,” 261.

33 Sergei Eizenshtein, Izbrannye proizvedeniia v shestsi tomakh, 6 vols. (Moscow, 1964–71), 2:120–21.

34 Eisenstein prefigures this literature by exploring the animation of things at great length in his manuscripts and notebooks; see Joan Neuberger, This Thing of Darkness: Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible in Stalin’s Russia (Ithaca, 2019), 152–75; Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC, 2010), vii; W. J. T. Mitchell, What do Pictures Want: The Lives and Loves of Images (Chicago, 2005).

35 Anne Eakin Moss, “The Permeable Screen: Soviet Cinema and the Fantasy of No Limits,” Screen 59, no. 4 (Winter 2018): 420–43.

36 RGALI, f. 1923, op. 2, d. 1165, 1. 5 (April 16, 1941); Nonindifferent Nature, 3–4; also 9, 28–29, 36.

37 Richard Stites, ed., Culture and Entertainment in Wartime Russia (Bloomington, 1995), 5.

38 Comments on the topic of Eisenstein’s moral failings in the face of political pressure can be found in these diary entries and memoirs: RGALI, f. 1923, op. 2, d. 1152, ll. 9, 11; and d. 1167, ll. 34–39; Beyond the Stars, 739–42.

39 RGALI, f. 1923, op. 2, d. 1166, ll. 15–18 (August 4–16, 1941).

40 In French in the original: bryo, pestiféré.

41 RGALI, f. 1923, op. 2, d. 1166, ll. 18–19 (August 16, 1941). L’homme à l’oeillet is the title of a painting by Jan Van Eyck (1435) that depicts a man with big bags under his eyes.

42 RGALI, f. 1923, op. 2, d. 1168, 1. 59 (July 7, 1942); my thanks to Marina Alexandrova for help translating this passage.

43 Eisenstein, Selected Works: Beyond the Stars, 424–53.

44 Ibid., 437.

45 Ibid., 440.

46 Another iteration of this set of ideas can be found in Metod, Naum Kleiman, ed. (Moscow 2002), 2:415.

47 Eisenstein, Selected Works: Beyond the Stars, 424–53.

48 Ibid., 439

49 Ibid., 453.

50 Ibid., 451–52.

51 RGALI, f. 1923, op. 2, d. 1167, 1. 14 (August 23, 1941).

52 RGALI, f. 1923, op. 2, d. 1167, 1. 32–41 (September 16, 1941).