EISENSTEIN’S POETICS: DIALOGICAL OR TOTALITARIAN?

Alexander  ZHOLKOVSKY (USC, Los Angeles)

Sergei Eisenstein (1898-1948) was a theoretician as well as practitioner of art. His career and esthetic spanned revolutionary avantgardism and high Stalinism, variously expressing, reflecting, and subverting Soviet culture’s general line. This article proposes to reread, from the 1990s, Eisenstein’s criticism against the background of his films and his life–in the spirit of post-structuralist views of power and discourse, in particular, some recent insights into the links between the Avant-garde and Socialist Realism.

Eisenstein’s theory of art, as it emerges from his lectures for cinema students, discussions of his own films, and numerous analyses of works of literature and the arts, is based on the concepts of ‘theme’ and ‘means of expression.’ The artist follows, whether consciously or not, the imperative logic of maximum expressiveness, which consists in saturating the text with ‘representations’ (izobrazheniia) that are selected (vyiskany, lit. “sought out”) and juxtaposed (smontirovany, “spliced, montaged”) in such a way as to dictate to the recipient (viewer, reader) the ‘image of the theme.’ It is almost as if the author (resp. recipient) functioned in the manner of a “poetic machine,” programmed to do at every step “what is necessary” (neobkhodimo, Eisenstein’s favorite word) for packaging and driving home (resp. extracting and swallowing) the master theme of the work.

One analogy triggered by this deterministic theory of creativity is with structuralist/generativist models; I have pursued it elsewhere.[1] Another parallel that suggests itself would correlate Eisenstein’s centrally planned technology of artistic power with the industrial-totalitarian system that he served (albeit squirming along the way), whose style he was responsible for shaping (e. g. in October[2]), and whose controversial symbolic portrayal he accomplished in his last masterpiece, Ivan the Terrible.[3] This analogy could be developed by  recontextualizing Eisenstein as an integral part of Stalinist culture according to the schema that has the Russian Avant-garde heralding and preparing Socialist Realism and then suicidally mutating into it (Groys 1992). In that case, Eisenstein’s theory of art would be likely to forfeit its claim to generality and find itself occupying a modest corner in some “truly universal and polyphonic,” e. g. Bakhtinian, scheme of things. On the other hand, the totalitarian analogy could be countered by stressing Eisenstein’s complexity and virtual dialogism.

Dialogical?  Eisenstein was an avowed dialectician, and ‘contradictions’ figure prominently in his theory and practice. He saw art in general, especially its “progressive” variety, as a conflict/synthesis of the highest abstractions and the basest (emotional, archetypal, material, formal, and otherwise “lower”) strata of the psyche, culture, and text. His theory of montage was based on ‘representations’ clashing to produce the ‘image.’ He described the ideal composition as “implacable,” “merciless,” “stabbing” (neumolimaia, besposhchadnaia, vonzaiushchaiasia), yet dependent for its success on the pattern of ‘recoil’ (the Meyerholdian otkaz), which prescribes, before going for the jugular, moving in the opposite direction to gain greater momentum. His favorite devices hinged on conflicts of points of view, meter and rhythm, picture and sound, and on discrepant movements of different parts of the same body,–ramifications all of his dialectical idea of montage.

Eisenstein often resorted to the metaphor of ‘translation’–of literature into film and of themes into texts. The latter tranformation he envisaged as proceeding via a series of increasingly more concrete intermediate stages: theme–script–mise-en-scene–mise-en-cadre. Now, translation by definition implies a ‘dialogue’ of some sort, be it between the literary original and the scriptwriter or between the abstract theme and the material onto which it is projected. Such a tension is at work in Eisenstein’s lecture on “Problems of Composition” (1982: 155-83), where he engages in a misreading–rereading and subsequent rewriting–of a scene from a Soviet war novel (Viktor Nekrasov’s In the Trenches of Stalingrad). The changes he introduces affect both the composition and message of the episode, furnishing an instructive test case for the study of authorship as a struggle, between the original writer and the director/rewriter, over the text’s structure and meaning.

     The game starts with Eisenstein challenging his cinema class to identify the focal point in the conflict between the Germans bombing the city and its defenders. The students finally zero in on the orderly’s offer to serve food as symbolic of the Soviets’ natural, “gut,” resistance to the onslaught. But Eisenstein rejects their choice precisely because of its elemental and thus unconscious nature, similar to Tolstoy’s concept of Russian 1812 patriotism in War and Peace. He suggests coupling the orderly’s words with those of his commanding officer to the effect that he will eat even if he does not want to, into which Eisenstein, in his obsessive search of ‘higher, rational’ control of the ‘lower, irrational’ strata, reads a purposeful will to overcome the enemy.[4] To set this exchange in greater epiphanic relief, Eisenstein then decides to omit the subsequent description of the actual eating, invoking the  golden rule of “a period placed where it must be.”[5] He sums up the problem he has thus resolved as follows:

[T]he author’s mistake [is] <…> that he does not carve out [ne vysekaet] compositionally <…> the most significant element in the episode (173-4).

 [T]he material <…> lacks a clearly accented aim or direction that would govern the grouping of its separate elements. The material is too mellow [or “raw,” or “porous”–rykhlo opisatelen] in its descriptiveness (169).

      Taking a meta-theoretical look at Eisenstein’s own procedure today, one cannot help but notice a striking similarity between his ideological and stylistic concerns. Thematically, he wants the episode to stress ‘the commander’s purposeful will’ over ‘the orderly’s elemental vitality’; compositionally, he proposes an operation–a ‘carving out’–that would provide the ‘mellow/porous material’ with a ‘purpose’ and ‘governing direction.’ The affinity between the two decisions leaves little doubt that Eisenstein’s departure from his literary source was not accidental or purely structural. Rather than simply “perfecting” Nekrasov’s text, he was recasting it into an Eisensteinian one–overcoming the ‘elemental inertia’ he spotted both in the novella’s story/characters and its discourse. In doing so, he was consciously distancing himself from its ‘Tolstoyan’ sensibility in the name of a Soviet/avantgardist esthetic. By the same token, perhaps unconsciously but no less fittingly, he was drawing closer to the aggressive posture embodied in the text by the Germans. For Nekrasov’s existential contrast between the ‘implacable’ planes and the ‘raw,’ potato-eating Russians, Eisenstein substituted the conflict of two cognate agencies: the well-organized attackers and defenders, locked in a merciless combat and in an equally purposeful/piercing (vonzaiushchaiasia) machine of composition.[6]

The problem of Eisenstein’s intercourse with ‘other voices,’ as posed by the rereading/rewriting of Nekrasov’s text is twofold. A theoretical issue concerns the degree of its dialogicity. A practical task is to pinpoint the specific idiosyncrasies underlying Eisenstein’s avantgardist/Socialist-Realist thematic and stylistic preferences.

Dialectical. It is thus clear that contradiction, translation, and misreading are typical processes in Eisenstein’s theory, driven by the intra- and intertextual play of opposites. The ‘other voice’ is inevitably there; moreover, it is carefully amplified–but only in order the more spectacularly and implacably to be defeated, the defeat having been arranged in advance and meticulously factored into the recoil process. The image resulting from the montage of representations is always monovalently pre-planned; the “unexpected” compositional reversals inexorably lead to a predestined closure. The same goes for all the shifts and discrepancies,  consciously devised to create a dynamic, provocative but safely pre-conceived, “vivid” yet dead certain, effect of “natural” movement, modeled, in fact, on the single-centered manipulation of marionettes.[7]

As for Eisenstein’s obsession with engaging the “lower strata,” he insisted on their subordination to the higher ones. He grappled painfully (especially in his unpublished manuscripts, as reported by Ivanov [1976: 70 ff.]) with the essential “corruptness,” tainting the use of the lower–archetypal, beastly–element. The latitude given in art to these “regressive” forces he made contingent on their being tightly harnessed to “progressive” goals. Ironically, in ruling out free play of voices as dangerous, Eisenstein seems to have lost sight of the even greater risk inherent in channeling “base” means into the service of “lofty” ends.[8] A telling example is his disquisition on how atavistic emotions (for instance, ‘revenge’) can be generalized–sanitized, sublimated–into abstract esthetic figures (in this case, the pattern of ‘action/reaction’).[9]

Thus, Eisenstein’s treatment of other voices was of a rather authoritative kind. After all, dialectics, leading ineluctably from thesis via antithesis to synthesis, does not equal dialogism, i. e., an open contest of independent voices. And yet, one wonders whether a great artist’s work can really be as single-mindedly and imperviously closured as presupposed by Eisenstein’s personal esthetic myth–in defiance of what is known about the problematizing nature of art.

Carnivalesque? In Strike, there is an episode where the workers’ demonstration is being suppressed with the fire brigade’s hoses. The jets of water form a series of ornamental patterns that send rather mixed signals. Apparently intended to be ideologically ‘for’ the strikers and ‘against’ the firemen, the sequence betrays a stylistic fascination with the machine-like, geometric, cubist jets.    Similarly, in October, the ideological perspective on the looting of the Winter Palace loses some of its seriousness as the viewer senses the episode to be a thinly disguised pretext for displaying, in a modernist gesture of “thingism,” the looted treasures themselves.[10] Eisenstein’s identification with the ‘abstract,’ even a clearly repressive abstract, with ‘objects,’ or with both, as in the repressive abstract shapes of the Teutons in Alexander Nevsky, can be correlated with his own statements about his pre-human, a-human, and higher-than-human (nadchelovecheskii) tastes, his love of machines, geometry, and cruelty (1983: 29). Special attention in his autobiography is given to the early acquaintance with Sacher-Masoch (32) and other sado-masochistic writing.

Ivan the Terrible is even more ambiguous. True, its standard interpretation–be it in the blunt Solzhenitsyn formulation, as ‘toadying up to Stalin’ (see Note 3), or in the noncommittal “neoformalist” one by Thompson (1981: 67-8), as ‘struggle for power and Russia’s unity,’–is rather unproblematic. But then, it has all the typical characteristics of a face-value reading (taking its cues from the film’s social command, authorial intention, narratorial message, etc.)–an interpretative fallacy unsuspecting of the text’s more complex and disturbing hidden semantics.[11] The denouement of the film’s finished part comes as the “Feast of the Oprichniks” segues to the elimination of Vladimir and the entire Boyar threat: detecting the assasination plot, Ivan turns it against its authors. The ready-made mechanism for this pivotal reversal is provided by the carnivalesque hypogram underlying the episode (Ivanov 1976: 104-15). Foreshadowed by Fedor’s androgynous dance in drag and motivated by excessive drinking, the scene proceeds to the archetypal exchange of clothes and other attributes of power between Ivan, the reigning monarch, and Vladimir, the king of fools; then to Ivan grotesquely pretending to humble himself before the new czar; and to the ensuing assasination of the temporary mock-czar instead of the real one.

Directorial. If this is carnival, it is one with a difference. The real czar never relinquishes his power for a moment, remaining present, sober, and vigilant.[12] The mock-coronation of the fool is initiated and performed by Ivan and his bodyguards, who also provide the crowd of revellers. Vladimir’s march to his death in the cathedral is performed in what is known in Sovietese as a “voluntary-obligatory manner”: the victim is squeezed from all sides by the Oprichniks and pushed in the predetermined direction. This squeezing is effected in full accordance with Eisenstein’s recipes for “merciless” geometric compositions.[13]

Both the feast and the killing take place inside a closed space, thus enacting Eisenstein’s claustrophobic obsession with the womb,[14]–rather than in some Bakhtinian public square, amidst a laughing crowd.[15] The cathedral setting makes Vladimir’s death even more of a prearranged sacrifice. The perversely merciless, yet “just,” stabbing[16] is performed against the background of Last Judgment frescoes, which directly link Ivan to God (Thompson 1981: 183, 188), and of the implacable black monk-like formation of the Oprichniks. Another archetypal trope underlying the episode is that of ‘hunt,’ an Eisesnstein favorite, typically accompanied by the pattern of role-reversal.[17] Finally, the ‘mock-king’ is sacrificed without any prospect of eventual resurrection; thus, instead of leading to or at least symbolizing a renewal, Operation Carnival only reinforces the status quo.[18]

The net result is a carnival stage-managed by one of the parties: the authoritarian parental side. It is conceived, provoked, put on, and firmly controlled from above, so that all its contradictions, role-reversals, playfulness, intoxication, and irrational energy are pressed into the service of the tyrannical Father directing it. This, of course, is a grotesquely ironic fulfillment of Eisenstein’s precepts about reining in archetypal forces.

The ‘directorial’ metaphor can be taken to epitomize the core situation of the film and of Eisenstein’s entire esthetic. Several ‘theatrical performances’ foreshadow the carnival scene: the wedding-feast “spectacle” of white swans–ordered by Ivan for Anastasia (Thompson 1981: 166); the rebellion of Muscovites–orchestrated by Efrosinia; the Tatar prisoners’ St. Sebastian-like martyrdom–staged by Kurbsky; the quasi-terminal illness, half-real, half-faked–dramatically exploited by Ivan; the poisoning of Anastasia “with Ivan’s own hands”–choreographed by Efrosinia; the anti-Nebuchadnezzar Fiery Furnace play–produced by Philipp; the popular recall of Ivan to the throne–scripted by Ivan and his Oprichnik lieutenants. Only then comes the assasination–plotted by Efrosinia and re-directed, in every sense of the word, by Ivan. Thus, the carnivalesque/scapegoating performance, executed by the czar on a real-life stage and culminating in an actual death (unlike the merely play-acted martyrdom of the Fiery Furnace play), crowns the film’s major thematic and structural dominant.

All this makes the ties between Eisenstein’s esthetic theory-and-practice and Ivan’s directorial activities suspiciously similar: Eisenstein’s terrible protagonist turns out to be his double. To be sure, the image of Poet-Czar has a venerable Romantic lineage,[19] but it is not easy to recognize Eisenstein in the merciless old Ivan’s clothing.[20] Eisenstein’s is, of course, a radically different–avant-gardist–treatment of that paradigm, stemming from the activist, atheist, world-remaking stance of post-Nietzschean art. Also, as far as the Dionysian aspects of the sacerdotal amalgam of Czar/Priest/Director are concerned, it should be noted that, according to Eisenstein, cinema, as a young art form, is closer to the archaic syncretic rituals than the other–“older”–arts (Ivanov 1976: 57).

Spectacles–theater, circus, street festivals, etc.–were prominent in the system of artistic genres fostered by the Avant-garde after the Revolution. They were inherited and transformed by Stalinist culture into staged mass demonstrations, Soviet-style elections, political show trials,[21] Stakhanovite feats of productivity, and carnivalesque role-reversal campaigns (e. g., harvest trips, with intellectuals performing manual work under the guidance of peasants). Theater naturally became the Art par excellence as Stalin assumed the role of the supreme Director of the totality of real life (Groys 1992).[22]

Revenge complex. Eisenstein’s identification with Ivan on ‘directorial’ grounds may have had strong psychological motivation. According to his autobiography, he had been deeply traumatized by his despotic father, “daddy the terrible” (groznyi papen’ka), whom he obeyed, rebelled against, and secretly identified with (1983: 22). He transferred this attitude onto his “spiritual father”, Vsevolod Meyerhold, whom he loved and resented at the same time, seeing in him a living refutation of the incompatibility of genius and villainy, proverbialized by Pushkin (1983: 75).

Eisenstein confesses to the feelings of “injured pride” (ushchemlennost‘; 1983: 10), vengefulness, narcissism. He concentrates repeatedly on his self-perception (at the time of writing, i. e., at the age of fifty) as a victimized twelve-year old, despite his world fame (8-9). The image of Eisenstein as a perennial, prematurely old child–the product of a dysfunctional family; inadequately socialized; emotionally crippled; substituting clowning for adult communication; paranoid and concealing his traumas behind external “armor”; intermitently shy and overcompensating (with wisecracks, practical jokes, pornographic drawings) for his small height and presumed sexual defects/difference; sometimes hysterical–emerges from the story of his life as told by himself (1983), Seton (1960), and Barna (1973).

Authority figures, rebellion against and/or acceptance by them form a pervasive theme in the autobiography (1983: 16). A fixation on the figure of Napoleon both opposes and links Eisenstein to his father, whose idol Napoleon was,–as, remarks the autobiographer, is typical of every “self-made man” (10, 12) and, therefore, equally applicable, shall we add, to the rebelling Eisenstein-fils. Incidentally, Dessalines, the protagonist of the “Mise-en-scene” chapter in Nizhny’s Lessons with Eisenstein (1979: 19-62) and of Eisenstein’s unrealized film, was a Napoleonic general, of the liberator-turned-despot kind, one of the founders of the modern Haiti. In the mise-en-scene, the young Dessalines, not unlike the old Ivan, turns tables on a conspiracy, surrounding and squeezing his recent surrounders in a mirror-like pattern of reaction to previous action, and thus implements his powerful revenge.

‘Merciless revenge disguised as justice’ seems a likely candidate for the  deep-level theme underlying Ivan the Terrible and the entire Eisenstein oeuvre, including his theoretical texts. A similar generalization (“the theme of vengeance”) has been formulated by Barna,[23] who also notes another leitmotif recurrent in Eisenstein’s life and work: an ‘implacable impersonal force,’ traceable to the “fixed stony face” of Eisenstein’s mother disowning her son and to the nocturnal image of the faceless, unheeding railway car in Smolensk (Eisenstein 1983: 198; Barna 1973: 27, 43-4, 58, 98, 159, 201, 208, 229-30; Kozlov 1968: 72-3). It was only natural that the ‘implacale force’ should call forth a no less ‘implacable, often cunning, revenge.’

Eisenstein claimed that his rebellion against his father was what brought him into the revolutionary camp[24]. This motivation, as well as its retrospective rationalization, is, of course, in tune with Marxist-Leninist mythology and revolutionary discourse in general. Eisenstein’s childhood experiences and his parents’ divorce left him without a sense of family and without friends (1983: 16, 17, 21)–both themes very prominent in Ivan’s characterization (Thompson 1981: 76, 78, 83). In fact, the early chapters of the autobiography leave little doubt about the personal basis of the childhood flashback in the film. One salient parallel is between the perversely primal scene of the parents’ quarrel, with papen’ka carrying mamen’ka across the room before the little Sergei’s eyes,[25] and the sequence in the film where Ivan’s poisoned mother is carried away past the boy by some Boyars. Parallels between the two childhoods are also discussed by Barna (1973: 241), with special reference to a photograph (reproduced in Marie Seton’s biography [1960]) of the director of October sitting on the Czar’s throne, with his legs hanging in the same way as Ivan’s legs in the childhood flashback. Marie Seton juxtaposes not only these two postures (plates 66, 67), but also two others: one taken at the commencement of October, this time with Eisenstein’s legs “defiantly flung over the arm of the throne,” the other, of “a small boy welcoming the Revolution in the closing scenes of October in a similar lolling pose” (plates 20, 21, p. 96). Seton also stresses the “impishness of an incorrigible child” with which, in shooting October, Eisenstein “took possession of palaces like [a] Tsar,” enjoyed his “power to turn the imperial bed into his director’s seat,” and indulged in “mock gestures of [a] Majesty,” “the iconoclastic emperor of a new art form” (96). Later on, she mentions his German friends interpreting his initials, S. M., as Seine Majestat (132).

Eisenstein has, in fact, explicitly stated that his cherished anti-father rebellion was what animated the bold posture of Ivan in the coronation scene.[26] But he sounds less unilaterally pro-Ivan as he writes about the “scuffle” and “brawling” around the throne (28). As far as the aging Ivan is concerned, Eisenstein evidently both identifies with and distances himself from him–as a double of his own father. The latter is in turn identified, elsewhere in the autobiography, with Alexander III: the tearing apart of that czar’s statue in October is revealed to have been prompted by the destruction of some metal statues made by Eisenstein-pere, an architect (1983: 26-8).[27]

This double identification (both anti- and pro-paternal, with the young and the old Ivan) is made even more plausible by Eisenstein’s confessions of identity splits and references to Freud and a Evreinov play involving fragmented selves. He writes that he hated Meyerhold with one of his selves, admired him with another, and tried to wait out and transcend him with a third (1983: 76-7). In fact, it has been argued (Kozlov 1987) that the character of Ivan can be read as an ambivalent portrayal of Meyerhold (in particular, Kozlov juxtaposes a frame of Ivan with Meyerhold’s very similar picture). As far as split identification is concerned, Eisenstein has admitted, for instance, that being haunted by the memories of a film he had seen in his early years, he tended to identify now with the victimizer, now with the victim. The film imprinted on him the cruel image of a blacksmith branding his wife’s lover, like a criminal, with a hot metal rod.[28]

Eisenstein saw the “oceans of cruelty, which permeates [his] films” (1983: 33) as rooted in his childhood–just as Ivan did when justifying his ruthlessness. Indeed, the flashback of childhood is introduced by Ivan as an argument in his dispute with his friend-turned-foe Philip (much like Philip will then put on the Furnace play as his argument), and it becomes a kind of “film within the film” that Ivan shows to Philip and to us in an emblematic replica of Eisenstein’s own filmic gesture. (Ivan’s “movie” has even the same musical and visual overture as the entire film.) In yet another such parallel, Eisenstein’s avowed ‘non-human’ attitudes can be seen not only as a typical avantgardist syndrome, but also as a compensation for his ‘lack’ in the ‘human’ sphere, something that is true of Ivan as well (loss of wife and friends, betrayal by relatives). One way to achieve ‘superhuman’ transcendence is, of course, through sheer directorial/monarchical power.[29]

Wise man’s folly? The obvious equation, Ivan = Stalin, and the paradoxical, Ivan = Eisenstein, thus merge into one. This amalgamation corresponds to the Groysian dynamics of the Avant-garde’s grab for esthetic-political power zigzagging into Stalinist political-esthetic dictatorship. Ivan the Terrible is a film by an ex-avantgardist; it is structured with powerful unity; it is about ‘power and unity’; and it embraces and privileges the perspective of its authoritarian father-figure protagonist. The film centers on Ivan, who follows, in his personal, monarchical, and directorial behavior, the esthetic strategies formulated by his creator. Incidentally, Eisenstein liked to stress that his experience as a military engineer had prepared him for directing, having taught him how to manipulate human and technological materiel (1983: 57-9); what better school, indeed, for an “engineer of human souls.”

In other words, Eisenstein’s merciless poetic machine was, indeed, part and parcel of a ‘totalitarian complex.’ It was a counterpart to Ivan’s vengeful cruelty; an expression of the director’s compensatory desire for total power and of his revenge against/identification with the tyrannical father figure; and a typical, if outstanding, instance of the Avant-garde’s metamorphosis into Stalinist culture. To complete the irony, Stalin practically assumed the roles of co-author, producer, consultant, pre-viewer, critic, and censor of Ivan the Terrible. How could an artist and thinker of Eisenstein’s stature (indeed, one whose early production was an avantgardist version of Alexander Ostrovsky’s Enough Simplicity in EveryWise Man) have become an unwitting pawn in this play of political and psychological forces?

A key to the dynamics of his ambiguous predicament seems to lie in the theme of ‘revenge disguised as just punishment,’ notably, in the element of ‘disguise, dissimulation,’ always fraught with the danger of “honest” self-deception. Apparently the great scholar-director did not realize that ‘revenge’ continued to contaminate his pattern of ‘recoil action and reaction,’ that ‘atavistic anger’ had not been expurgated from his ‘merciless’ abstractions, and that his favorite geometric patterns were ambiguously apt to convey not only the generalized, nobly  sublimated aspects of lower forces, but their oppressiveness as well.

Or was he really that naive? He ends his chapter on Meyerhold with the vow not to be like him, in particular, not to hide what I find [i. e., the secrets of craftsmanship – A. Zh.]: to drag it out into the light of day in lectures, in the press, in articles, in books <…> But <…> do you know that the very surest means of concealment is complete revelation? (1983: 79).

To unmask in order to disguise! Not accidentally did he agonize over art’s evil roots, enjoy scaring his colleagues with grotesque masks and practical jokes, and cherish the nickname of “devil’s resident.”[30]

     The same insidious design of ‘precarious dissimulation’ underlies the design Ivan the Terrible. Thompson sees the film’s narrative structure as carefully devised to “permit Ivan to avoid guilt while still meting out punishment to Efrosinia;” “establish Ivan as above judgment;” “create a moral world in which the cards are stacked in Ivan’s favor;” reveal “the last character that has been apparently in a position to judge Ivan, his confessor [Eustace in Part III] <…> as a traitor;” and consistently to “allow the punishment of Ivan’s enemies without his participation” (1981: 92, 100-1, 104, 109).

Another psycho-thematic cluster that links Eisenstein to Ivan (and Stalin) stems from the motif of ‘ambiguous legitimation and recognition,’ recurrent in the film (Oudart 1970: 21-2). Rulers, especially revolutionaries/tyrants, need political acceptance; artists crave applause and critical praise; rejected children look for symbolic parental approval and sometimes have to supply it by playing parents to themselves. (In this connection, a comparison of Stalin’s and Eisenstein’s childhood experiences seems to invite itself.)

Both the fictional Ivan’s and Eisenstein’s own “life-texts”[31] read as typical Freudian scenarios. In the terms of another school of psychology, Eisenstein’s inner conflict can be interpreted as one between the two hemispheres of the brain. Ivanov (1978: 62-5) discusses the obvious predominance of the right, image-making, brain in Eisenstein. This idea was first broached by the director’s own statements and self-analysis and later corroborated by the post-mortem photo of his brain, showing, as reported by A. R. Luria, a huge right and a small left hemisphere. This also agrees with Marie Seton’s testimony that Eisenstein drew his sketches with amazing speed, but wrote slowly (1960: 262).

Eisenstein’s attempt at total rational control ended up letting the Unconscious pervade his poetic system with virulent ambiguity. If the very devices called upon to subjugate and ennoble the malignant material of art are not antiseptically clean, but on the contrary, infected, then the whole enterprise becomes a pathological contradiction, subverting–despite its monologically sublime intentions–everything: the films, their author, his heroes, sponsors, and theories.[32]

All this seems to place Eisenstein somewhere inside the Bakhtinian theory of discourse, namely, as a case of authoritative speech unaware (or at least insufficiently aware) of its internal conflict of voices. If that is so, Eisenstein’s theorizing sans merci loses its claim to universality,–but not necessarily its validity as a special discipline: it can now be reread as an exceptionally lucid and thorough, almost scientific, poetics of ‘revenge,’ i. e., a theory of the rhetorical expression of a major thematic complex.

To what extent Bakhtin’s thinking, in its turn, would prove immune to similar probing, is, however, another matter. One might, for instance, follow M. L. Gasparov (1984: 169-72) in historicizing Bakhtin as a member–along with his opponents the Formalists—of the “plebeian” generation that was storming the citadels of culture around the time of the Revolution. Bakhtin’s dialogism would then read not so much as an evenhandedly universal approach but rather as a particular strategy aimed at its own, quite definite–monologic and, for that matter, rather avantgardist–goals (see also Note 18), except that they are served up in “unfinalized” guise.

And that would make two of them: two masked pretenders to the coveted throne of the all-subsuming theory, a seat of discursive power that will have to remain vacant for the time being.

Agapov, Boris. 1974. “‘Rezident d’iavola,’” in Eizenshtein v vospominaniiakh sovremennikov, R. I. Iurenev ed., pp. 388-97. Moscow: Iskusstvo.

Barna, Yon. 1973 [1966]. Eisenstein. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Eikhenbaum, Boris. 1974 [1919]. “How Gogol’s ‘Overcoat’ Is Made,” in Gogol from the Twentieth Century, Robert Maguire ed., pp. 269-91. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Eisenstein, Sergei. 1964-1971. Izbrannye proizvedeniia, vls. 1-6. Moscow: Iskusstvo.

Eisenstein, Sergei. 1982. Film Essays and a Lecture. Ed. Jay Leyda. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Eisenstein, Sergei. 1983. Immoral Memories. An Autobiography. Transl. Herbert Marshall. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Gasparov, M. L. 1984 [1979]. “M. M. Bakhtin in Russian Culture of the Twentieth Century,” transl. and comm. Ann Shukman, Studies in Twentieth Century Literature (special Bakhtin issue, guest ed. Clive Thompson): 169-76.

Golomstok, Igor. 1990. Totalitarian Art in the Soviet Union, the Third Reich, Fascist Italy, and the People’s Republic of China. London: Collins.

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Groys, Boris. 1989. “Mezhdu Stalinym i Dionisom.” Sintaksis 25: 92-7.

Groys, Boris. 1992 [1988]. The Total Art of Stalinism. Avant-Garde, Aesthetic, Dictatorship, and Beyond. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Ivanov, V. V. 1976. Ocherki po istorii semiotiki v SSSR. Moscow: Nauka.

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