The Childhood Scenes of Ivan the Terrible
Alexander ZHOLKOVSKY (USC, Los Angeles)
The central theme of the film–‘Ivan’s emergent autocracy’–is richly emblematized in the childhood flashback.1 Originally planned as Prologue, it was eventually presented as the recollections/arguments which the Tsar addresses to Fedor Kolychev (Part Two, shots 133-205).2 Here is a shot-by-shot transcript of the sequence’s dialogue–in the Russian original and my quasi-literal English translation3:
I-1. 136 Глинская: Отравили! Умираю! 139 Сынок! 140 Умираю! Бойся яда! Берегись бояр! 145 За кадром: Елена Глинская 146 скончалась!
I-2.[Сценарий] За кадром: Души княгинина любовника! Телепнев: Великий князь Московский, защити! Шуйский: Взять его!
II-1. 154 Бельский: Великий князь Московский Иван Васильевич 155 счел за благо договор торговый заключить 156 и за пропуск товаров по Балтийскому морю платить 157 великому 158 Ганзейскому союзу 159 немецких торговых городов. 160 Шуйский: Великий князь Московский 161 передумал: договор с Орденом меченосцев ливонских 162 заключает. 163 За кадром: Крепко 164 перекупили Шуйского! Бельский: Ганзе! 165 Ганзе!.. Да и ближняя Дума Ганзе порешила! 167 Шуйский: Воля великого князя–и решение Думы отменить! Бельский: Ей слово государево дано. Шуйский: Великий князь и слову своему один хозяин. Хочет–даст, а хочет–отменит. Воля великого князя–закон! Но воля великого князя 168 Ганзе немецкой отдать!..169 Воля великого князя–привилей Ливонскому ордену вручить. 170 Шуйский, за кадром: Воля великого князя–закон!..
II-2-1. 176 Бельский: Ганзейцам платить надобно!–Шуйский: Ливонцам платить будем! 177 Бельский: Ганзейцы государству полезнее!—Шуйский: Не государству—тебе полезнее!—Бельский: А тебя ливонцы купили!.. Ганзейцам платить 178 надобно!—Шуйский: Ливонцам платить будем!..
II-2-2 …Иван за кадром: Никому платить не будем! 179 Никому платить не обязаны! Приморские города деды наши строили. 180 А потому земли те–исконные наши вотчины—Москве принадлежать должны. Шуйский: Дураков нет—181 приморские города обратно отдавать! Бельский: Что с возу упало–то пропало. 182 Иван: Добром не отдадут–силой отберем! 183 Шуйский: Силой?! 184 Бельский: А откуда силу такую взять? 185 Иван: Сила русская вами расторгована! По боярским карманам разошлась! 187 Шуйский: Уморил еси! Господи! 188 Иван: Убери ноги с постели! 190 Убери, говорю 192 Убери с постели матери.. матери, вами, псами, изведенной! Шуйский: “Я–пес?! 193 Сама она–сукою была! С Телепневым-кобелем путалась! 196 Неизвестно, от кого она тобою ощенилась! 197 У, сучье племя! 198 Иван: Взять его! 200 Взять! 203 Бельский: Старшего боярина–псарям выдал! 205: Иван: Сам властвовать стану! Без бояр! Царем буду!
I-1. 136 Glinskaia: They have poisoned me! I am dying! 139 My son! 140 They have killed me! Beware of poison! Beware of the boyars! 145 Voice off: Elena Glinskaia 146 is dead!…
I-2.[script] Voice off: Strangle the Princess’ lover! Telepnev: Grand Duke of Moscow, defend me! Shuiskii: Seize him!
II-1. 154 Belskii: Ivan Vassil’evich, Grand Duke of Moscow 155 has graciously decided to conclude a commercial treaty 156 and to pay duties for the transit of goods via Baltic 157 to the great 158 Hanseatic league 159 of German merchant towns. 160 Shuiskii: The Grand Duke of Moscow 161 has reconsidered. He has concluded the treaty 162 with the Order of Livonian Knights 163 Voice off: [They] have 164 outbribed Shuiskii off all right! Belskii: To the Hansa! 165 Hansa!.. It was also the Boyar Council’s decision. 167 Shuiskii: The Grand Duke can at will annul the Council’s decision! Belskii: But he has pledged his word to the Council! Shuiskii: The Grand Duke is the sole arbiter of his word. When he pleases–he gives it, when he pleases [otherwise]–he rescinds it. The Grand Duke’s will is law! Belskii: But the will of the Grand Duke 168 is to deal with the Hansa! 169 Shuiskii: The Grand Duke’s will is to concede the privileges to the Livonian Order. 170 Shuiskii, voice off: The Grand Duke’s will is law!
II-2-1. 176 Belskii: It is necessary to pay the Hansa! Shuiskii: We will pay the Livonians! 177 Belskii: The Hansa is more profitable to the State! Shuiskii: Not to the State–it’s to yourself that it is more profitable! Belskii: And you, you have been bribed by the Livonians! It is Hansa that is 178 necessary to pay! Shuiskii: We will pay the Livonians!
II-2-2 …Ivan, voice off: We’ll pay no-one! 179 We are not obliged to pay anyone! The coastal towns were built by our ancestors. 180 Therefore, those lands are our inheritance–they must belong to Moscow. Shuiskii: There are no such fools 181 as to give them back?! Belskii: What fell off the wagon is lost. 182 Ivan: If they won’t return them voluntarily, we shall take them back by force! 183 Shuiskii: By force?! 184 Belskii: And where would one find such force? 185 Ivan: It’s by you that Russia’s strength has been frittered away!–lining boyar’s pockets! 187 Shuiskii: You tickled me to death! By Gosh! 188 Ivan: Take your feet off the bed!.. 190 Take it off, I say 192 Take them off the bed of my mother.. mother, poisoned by you dogs! Shuiskii: A dog, am I?! 193 She herself was a bitch! Ran around with that dog Telepnev! 196 No one knows from whom she whelped you! 197 Dogs’ offspring!! 198 Ivan: Seize him! 200 Seize! 203 Belskii: [He] has handed a senior boyar over to kennelmen! 205: Ivan: I shall reign alone! Without boyars! I will be Tsar!
The sequence begins with the murder of Ivan’s mother Elena Glinskaia (shots 133-146; henceforth abbreviated as I-1) and, in the script only, the arrest by Shuiskii of her favorite Telepnev, whom the little Ivan is unable to protect (I-2; Eisenstein 1971: 205). Then–after a close-up of the old Ivan complaining of his lifelong orphanhood (shot 147)–follows scene II-1 in the reception room (shots 148-174), demonstrating that the little Ivan’s power is purely nominal. In the name of “the Grand Duke of Muscovy”, whose legs are too short to reach the ground (in the script, “to reach the desired support”; shot 174), the matters of state are decided by de-facto boyar rulers, wrangling with one another. Ivan’s so far latent conflict with them comes to a head in the next scene: as the huge Shuiskii and minuscule Belskii continue their squabbling (scene II-2-1; shots 175-178), Ivan suddenly makes his voice heard, challenging the boyars (shot 178). Shuiskii goes on, hubristically, to humiliate Ivan in personal terms by calling his mother a “bitch” and treating Ivan himself as a sort of stray dog. Ivan raises the stakes even higher and avenges all past and present slights by delivering Shuiskii to the servants. Having thus availed himself of the support (!) of the people, he proclaims his intention to become Tsar (II-2-2; shots 178-205). As usual, his punitive and power-grabbing action is cast as a cornered victim’s self-defense (Thompson 1971: 92, 100-101, 104-109; Zholkovsky 1996: 255).
The climactic scene II-2-2 in the royal apartment builds on pointed references to the preceding ones. To single out two:
(i) The close-up of Shuiskii’s huge foot on the royal bed harks back to the close-up of the enthroned Ivan’s pathetically small foot/leg, the figure of the apocalyptic angel bestriding the universe in the background, and the trampling of Telepnev by Shuiskii’s henchmen (in the script).
(ii) Shuiskii’s fateful arrest resumes the issue of Glinskaia’s murder. Within scene II-2-2, his seizing is farcically foreshadowed on the verbal plane by the words with which he falls on the royal bed: “Umoril esi” (You’ll have me die laughing); plotwise, it is directly provoked by his response to Ivan’s mention of the poisoning: Shuiskii lunges at Ivan with his staff. In an additional symmetry (so appropriate to the theme of ‘revenge’), the script also had Ivan replicating verbatim Shuiskii’s order regarding Telepnev: “Seize him!”.
Especially close ties link II-2 to the preceding public episode II-1 (whose ‘publicness’ will be mirrored by the final entrance of Ivan’s servants). It is there that Ivan’s two contrasting but symmetrical adult opponents make their appearance. At first, both of them, albeit separately, lord it over the minor Ivan, with the ‘big’ Shuiskii defeating the ‘smaller’ Belskii–in a zigzag detour that eventually leads to the triumph of the ‘smallest of all’: Ivan. This typically Eisensteinian–“otkaznyi”–formal pattern is in this case firmly rooted in the archetypal motif of David and Goliath4 and its cinematic reincarnations, such as Charlie Chaplin’s clownish victories over the “Big Guy” bandits and policemen.
The integral theme of the childhood sequence–‘Ivan’s transition from infantile helplessness to autocratic power’–is conveyed tellingly through his speech behavior. Throughout the episode in the reception room, Ivan keeps silent, as he had in the preceding scene of Glinskaia’s murder, where he appeared literally as a speechless creature crawling on all fours. He only starts speaking in the second part of the scene in his chambers (II-2-2). Typologically, his ‘sudden acquisition of speech’ is akin to the Biblical passage about Balaam’s ass (Num. 22.28) and the corresponding chapter in Brothers Karamazov (III. 6-7), where Smerdiakov, who until then has been silent and considered quasi-subhuman, suddenly joins a theological discussion and is explicitly called Balaam’s ass,5 as well as to the entire topos of a cultural hero’s miraculously early speechifying, e.g. Christ’s dialogue with rabbis in the Temple at the age of twelve, i. e. before his bar-mitzvah (Lk. 2.46-47). According to the script, in scene II Ivan is thirteen; remarkably, Eisenstein in his memoirs sees himself as once and forever a twelve-year old (Eisenstein 1997, 1: 31).
Ivan’s long-drawn silence (the script stresses his growing desire to speak up for himself) is made even more dramatic by an additional contrast. He is not just silent while others aren’t; the point is that they speak in his name–in a solemnly official 3rd person.
Belskii: … The Grand Duke of Moscow, has graciously decided to conclude a… treaty and to pay duties… to the great Hanseatic league of German merchant towns…
Shuiskii: The Grand Duke … has reconsidered. He has concluded the treaty with the Order of Livonian Knights… The Grand Duke is the sole arbiter of his word. When he pleases – he gives it, when he pleases [otherwise] – he rescinds it… The Grand Duke’s will is law (see shots 154-170).
Moreover, the two boyars speak in what could be loosely called performatives: speech acts that, despite being couched in 3rd-person past-tense terms, describe, begin to enact, and promptly result in spectacular actions: the handing over of treaty scrolls to respective ambassadors.6 The peripeteia of the argument between the two boyars further dramatize the irony of Ivan’s silence, as his will is invoked in giving diametrically opposite orders.
In the royal apartment–backstage, as it were–the squabbling goes on but gradually shifts from the officially detached 3rd person to more direct forms, as the same arguments are transposed into a lower-style, almost criminal lingo. The grammatical perspective starts with such ostensibly normative impersonal forms as “nadobno” (it is necessary) and “poleznee” (it is more useful/profitable) and the infinitives they govern. But it soon turns out that lurking behind them have been rather personal, if so far inclusive, 1st-person plurals and even quite brazenly direct and mutually exclusive 2nd-person singulars: “We’ll pay the Livonians!–It’s to yourself [tebe] that it is more useful/profitable–And [as for] you [tebia], the Livonians have bribed you!” This crude personalization of discourse subverts its original solemnity–as have the two boyars’ earlier disagreements, which are now laid utterly bare in the ty-form. (In fact, even bribery has been similarly first brought up in 3rd-person plural: “They have outbribed Shuiskii all right”; shots 163-164).
The impregnability of the boyar’s official discourse is graphically breached by the defeat of at least one of its versions–that according to Belskii. This offers Ivan the much needed opening and shows him the way. In fact, emblematically, the ‘arbitrariness of power’ has already been formulated quite explicitly and that with reference precisely to the power of words, in Shuiskii’s remark about the Grand Duke as “the sole arbiter of his word.” (This remark, intended by Shuiskii as a mocking repartee, will soon turn out to have been a grotesque foreshadowing of his own demise on Ivan’s arbitrary orders.)
To go back to the turning-point shot 178, Ivan chimes in at a rather high pitch, unexpectedly shrill against the somewhat relaxed background of the boyar’s after-the-fact bickering, which this time is constative, not performative. Ivan retraces, as it were, the grammatical course of their exchange. He starts off by grammatically echoing but semantically negating Shuiskii’s peremptory line (“We’ll pay the Livonians!”) in the same inclusive 1st-person plural:
“We’ll pay no-one (nikomu)! We are not obliged to pay anyone (nikomu). The coastal towns were built by our ancestors. Those lands are our inheritance… If they won’t return them voluntarily, we shall take them back by force (siloi)… It’s by you (vami) that Russia’s strength (sila) has been frittered away!–lining boyar’s pockets!… Take your (thy) feet off…”
But already Ivan’s first words exhibit a tendency toward ‘exclusion,’ which is essential for his ‘autocratic’ drive. It is signaled right away by the multiple negatives (“nikomu,” “ne budem”) and becomes more and more pronounced as from castigating the 3rd-person absent foreigners he proceeds to antagonize first the unspecific 2nd-person plural boyars, present and absent, and finally, the present Shuiskii himself, unceremoniously identified in 2nd-person singular (“Uberi…” [Take… off…]). Ivan’s grammatical bluntness is, again, presented as ‘defensively imitative’: indeed, the ty-form has already been broached by Shuiskii: “Umoril esi!” (lit. Thou hast made me die laughing). (Incidentally, the punned upon word “morit’” [lit. to make die] can typically mean “to exterminate by poisoning rats and other vermin” and thus foreshadows the use by Ivan of the word “izvedennoi” regarding his mother’s murder.) Characteristically, as Ivan quarrels with one boyar, he does not ally himself with the other either. In fact, despite their minor previous feuds, the two boyars are shown (in a special shot, 181) to mock and oppose Ivan together, thus once again pushing him, as it were, to fall back on an ‘exclusive, solitary-autocratic use of force,’ already prefigured by his insistent references to “sila.”
The climax of the minidrama II-2-2 unfolds almost entirely in ‘canine, dog-eat-dog’ terms: Ivan engages Shuiskii in a ‘bitching match’ and effectively ‘outbitches’ him. This Riffaterrean (see Riffaterre 1978) matrix of the scene–in idiomatic Russian terms, “oni sobachatsia”–is likely to have been quite consciously devised by Eisenstein, who insisted on identifying the precise ideological, proverbial, etymological, archetypal, subconscious, autobiographical etc. formulae underlying the artistic structures that he analyzed, taught, and created. Several such hypograms–‘canine’ and other–overdetermine the scene:
(i) The archetypal motif of a ‘manipulative metamorphosis,’ of the type that underlies the episode in Charles Perrault’s “Puss in Boots” where the feline trickster asks the sorcerer cannibal to turn first into a lion and then into a mouse, at which point he swallows him.7 Unlike the Puss (and the historical Ivan), Ivan leaves physical action to his helpers, which highlights his superior power–in the spirit of Eisenstein’s remark about the superior role of a film director, who he needn’t act himself as he can just manipulate the footage (Eisenstein 1997, 1: 276). An even closer parallel is furnished by the legend of Actaeon: the hunter whom Artemis punishes by turning him into a stag and having his own hounds tear him to pieces. This plot is couched in ‘hunting/canine’ terms and casts the avenger in a superior hands-off role.
(ii) Self-fulfilling “performative” proverbs and maxims, of the type: “Nazvalsia gruzdem–polezai v kuzov” (If you call yourself a mushroom, go right into the basket), “Sobake–sobach’ia smert’” (Unto a dog a dog’s death), which emphasize the magic power of the word.
(iii) Sergei Eisenstein’s and his parents’ own ‘canine and “pup-ist”‘ private semantics, where puns like “plodit’ eisen-shcheniat” (lit. to breed Eisen-pups) were current; moreover, in Eisenstein’s memoirs, this ‘pup’ motif is discussed precisely in the context of Sergei’s Oedipal relationship with his father, whose method of educating him as to the facts of life he compares with the way pups are taught to swim by being simply thrown into the water (Eisenstein 1997, 1: 349-352).
Eisenstein’s love of wordplay brings us back to the verbal texture of the childhood sequence, its poetry of grammar, as it were.8 We have already noted the prominence of quasi-performatives in the official scene II-1; indeed, the illocutionary force of speech acts offers a perfect linguistic icon for the theme of ‘power.’ Let us, therefore, take a closer look at the illocutionary dynamics of the ‘dog-eat-dog’ episode II-2-2.
The first, as yet rather cautious step is taken by Ivan, who mouths the word “dogs” subliminally prompted by Shuiskii’s lying–like a dog–with his feet on the bed. The script specifies that Ivan mutters this “between his teeth,” which connotes a dog-like baring of teeth. Ivan’s half-repressed attitude is subtly iconized by the syntactic structure of his very elaborate one-sentence speech spanning shots 188-192. It features a forcefully reiterated imperative “Uberi,” each time accompanied by increasingly peripheral grammatical dependents, lit. “Take off your feet–from the bed–take off, I say–take off from the bed of my mother–mother, poisoned by you dogs.” The offensive D-word is thus tucked away in the sentence’s remotest grammatical corner: “psami” (dogs) is an apposition to the instrumental-case agent “vami” (by you) of a passive participial phrase qualifying an oblique-case attribute “materi” (of my mother) of a prepositional object “s posteli” (from the bed). The subordinate grammatical role of the 2nd-person “vami” also reduces that pronoun’s predicative and illocutionary potential; the latter is further diluted by the plural number of both words (“you dogs”), which may be plausibly taken to refer to boyars in general rather than specifically to the two on hand.
Shuiskii, of course, is not fooled by these grammatical subtleties. Accepting the challenge, he first transposes Ivan’s words into a direct–1st-person singular nominative-case predicative–reference to himself (“Ia–pes?!”), which is interrogative in form but a clear threat in speech-act terms (meaning approximately: “Don’t you dare call me a dog to my face!”). At the same time, visually he turns into a metaphorical animal. The script has: “A dog, am I?!–Shuiskii bellowed, rearing like a beast from the bed.” In the film, this is realized through his beastly look and fur outfit, contrasting with Ivan’s innocent semi-nudity. (To be sure, as Tsar, Eisenstein’s Ivan will wear furs himself.)
Shuiskii then proceeds to return the insult. He begins in the constative mode–indicative mood, past tense, 3rd person: “She was a bitch. Ran around with that dog Telepnev.” But he retains the direct and personal quality of the canine reference–the singular number and predication of his preceding sentence (“Ia–pes?!”). Indeed, he exacerbates the insult by a stinging moral and sexual innuendo. Shuiskii’s next step is to produce a canine verb that links, somewhat hypothetically so far, the mother’s peccadilloes to her son and address him in 2nd-person singular: “Neizvestno, ot kogo ona toboiu oshchenilas’!” (No one knows from whom she whelped you), thus impugning Ivan’s dynastic legitimacy. He then rounds it all off with a blunt nominative-case noun phrase “Such’ie plemia” (Bitch’s offspring), whose offensiveness is only slightly tempered by its ambiguous status as either a predicative or an appositive phrase. The appositive reading (“Ugh, you [or: you-all], bitch’s offspring”), as well as the noun’s collectiveness, neatly conclude the circle begun by Ivan’s plural appositive phrase “you dogs.” Shuiskii’s accompanying play with his staff, in addition to being a sort of assassination attempt on the young prince, tends to metaphorically demote Ivan to a dog: a creature to be handled with a stick. (Ivan’s earlier crawling on all fours may be subliminally tapped here.)
To Shuiskii’s upping of all the personal, political, and illocutionary antes Ivan responds–self-defensively, to be sure–with a similar yet even more drastic violence, based on the power of the word. The repeated imperative “Seize (him)!” crowns the dramatic spiral begun by Ivan’s relatively modest initial order to take the feet off the bed and provides closure to the entire childhood plot triggered by the murder of Glinskaia and “seizing” of Telepnev.
The ‘canine’ seme appears to be absent from this last speech act. According to the script, the order, first uttered by Ivan as an “hysterical scream” (Eisenstein 1971: 214), only the second time around is addressed to the kennelmen, of whose presence he has now become aware. In the film, they actually enter only after his first cry, and their professional identity remains indeterminate even as they grab Shuiskii. This pause in the development of the canine motif lasts until a shocked Belskii’s ex post facto clarification: “[He] has handed a senior boyar over to kennelmen!”; shot 203). This remark is already strictly constative–3rd person, indicative mood, past tense–as befits an epilogue-like summary of a dramatic denouement.
The use of the 3rd person builds on Ivan’s preceding words (“Seize him”); Belskii objectivizes this usage and expands it to cover all three actants: who handed whom over to whom. This results in an overarching plot rhyme to that same Belskii’s opening 3rd-person remark in the earlier scene about what “the Grand Duke graciously decided” to do. The grammatical repetition underscores the semantic contrast between what was then effectively said and done in Ivan’s name and what he has now decisively accomplished himself, proving that he, indeed, is “the sole arbiter of his word” and “his will is the law.”
A word’s illocutionary force depends on the appropriate social-political status of the participants. In the textbook example, the words “I pronounce you man and wife,” are only valid if addressed by a priest (or his civil-service equivalent) to unmarried consenting heterosexual adults. In the scene under discussion (and the film as a whole), political status is precisely what is at stake. Ivan becomes Tsar because he dares and manages to outperform–“out-performative”–his opponents. Plotwise, he defeats Shuiskii by having him effectively arrested. In terms of speech acts, by having his tall order obeyed, he dramatically establishes the desired illocutionary relationship with his interlocutors: instead of the boyars speaking and ruling in his name, he now literally has the last word. Finally, on the symbolic level, the entrance of professional dog-handlers meets one more role presupposition, resulting, as it were, in a magical metamorphosis: seized by kennelmen, Shuiskii, in effect, ends up a dog, or rather, a wild beast hunted down by kennelmen with the implied help of hounds. In a subtle foreshadowing, the script has actually already described Belskii as “leaping around Shuiskii yelping [like a pup]” (see the beginning of II-2-1, shot 176).
In the film at large, the ‘canine’ seme echoes the ‘hound’ leitmotif in the character of Maliuta, the boyars’ view of Ivan as a ‘wild beast,’9 and the ‘beaver’ song in the cathedral episode, whereby the killing of Vladimir Staritskii is symbolically transformed into a successful ‘beaver hunt.’ Indeed, the seizing of Shuiskii by kennelmen foreshadows the death of Staritskii and, in the script, the scene of “pravezh” (law enforcement by torture), where Maliuta sicks dogs on a boyar whom he had dressed in a bearskin (Eisenstein 1998: 252-253). In its turn, Ivan’s vow, at the end of the childhood sequence, to become Tsar (shot 205) prefigures the film’s closure with Ivan on the throne summing up his struggle for and meaning of autocratic power (shots 723-728).
So far we have focused largely on Eisenstein the scriptwriter, who masterfully interweaves the motifs of ‘official discourse,’ ‘coming of age,’ ‘dog-eat-dog hostility,’ and ‘verbal power,’ marshalling them in the service of the central theme of ‘autocratic power.’ It is time to go beyond this structural analysis in order to correlate it with Eisenstein’s personality as it comes across in his memoirs. Many parallels have been drawn–by Eisenstein himself and others (beginning with the trail-blazing study Aksenov 1991, written circa 1935)–between his works, especially Ivan the Terrible and its protagonist, on one hand, and their real author, on the other. I will briefly mention some of them.
One: The parallel between Eisenstein’s own childhood, marked by an Oedipal relationship with his father and other father figures,–and the recurrent image of defenseless children in his films, in particular, an almost naked child victimized by fully dressed adult antagonists, as in scene II-2. Incidentally, the little Ivan’s pathetic undershirt seems to boast autobiographical origins (and parallels in films and theoretical writings), as do the boyars’ innuendos about Glinskaia’s whoring, which may go back to the memories of the “undersexed papen’ka” leveling similar accusations at the “oversexed mamen’ka.” The parallel extends to the shot of Glinskaia’s being carried away and Eisenstein’s mother carried by the father after an attempt to throw herself down the stairwell.10
Two: The connection between the autocratic, sadistic, or otherwise painfully self-assertive motifs in the films–and Eisenstein’s own confessed inferiority complex and compensatory fixation on overachievement, fame, power, etc.
Three: The analogy between the ‘hunt’ motifs in the film–and Eisenstein’s obsession as reader, director, and scholar with corresponding mythological archetypes and detective plots (see Ivanov 1976).
Four: The close ties between the motif of ‘revenge justified as a defensive payback,’ in particular, ‘revenge of a hunted animal/cornered victim/defenseless child turned victoriously punishing hunter,’–and Eisenstein’s consistent theoretical and practical stylistic predilection for symmetrical, mirror-like, rhyming, and immaculately closured structures of the sort exemplified by the childhood sequence. Five: The affinity between oppressive physical violence and that enforced by stylistic means, as signalled by Eisenstein’s acknowledgement that the overarching invariant of his oeuvre–the theme of ‘unity’–can only be realized by doing ‘violence’ to the diverse material it has to subjugate (Eisenstein 1997, 2: 297)–in a telling parallel to the price of ‘violent autocracy’ paid for the ‘unity of Russia’ in Ivan the Terrible. It has been noted that Eisenstein’s directorial dominant was achieving an equilibrium of all artistic and technical means at the expense of–by doing violence to–the “live human factor” (see especially Aksenov 1991). Eisenstein’s confessed “inhuman” fixation on abstract, “superhuman” formulas and primitive, even “prehuman” archetypes may explain his reliance, in memoiristic discourse, on stereotypical devices.
Six: The kinship between the film’s words-turned-deeds leitmotif and a similar (auto)biographical pattern. Eisenstein’s memoirs abound in subplots where some early culturally encoded or otherwise distinctly structured impressions (visual–of photographs, drawings, book-covers, postcards, film sequences; verbal–of episodes from novels and newspapers, of famous people and places; imaginary–obsessive dreams and desires; and real-life–of children’s games and lonely pastimes) “come true” in his later life. The memoirist revels in describing how he eventually got to meet the celebrities, visit the places, stage and direct the favorite situations.
The influence of an artist’s early memories on his creations is, of course, a common place. Somewhat more specific is the strong self-fulfilling–“magical”–undercurrent: what had been only a memory, becomes enacted in real life/art, vindicating the impressionable bookish child-turned-artist. Furthermore, as many of those impressions had a cruel–sado-masochistic–tinge, their enactment puts Eisenstein in a class with his avantgardist coevals and their view of art as a vehicle for violence and power, as in Eisenstein’s favorite line from Babel’ “Guy de Maupassant” about the well-timed period entering the human heart more chillingly than any iron (see Zholkovsky 1996: 336). Finally and quite idiosyncratically, such ‘performative vindication of cherished words and images’ meant a successful settling of scores with ‘paternal authority.’ A graphic instance of such ‘childish revenge’ is the spectacular limb-by-limb tearing apart of the statue of Alexander III in October, which Eisenstein himself connected with the long-desired destruction of the ugly Riga facades built by his Chief Architect father (Eisenstein 1997, 1: 339).11
Eisenstein’s artistic progress, inspired by bookish images of cruelty and resulting in an obsessive portrayal of violent revenge in films, drawings, memoirs, and profiles of fellow artists,12 borders on circularity. Just as revenge does not break the cycle of vendetta, only turns the underdog into topdog, so the highbrow recycling of dime-novel violence by an artist of genius results in what could be called, to paraphrase Chukovsky on Blok’s The Twelve, cowboy movies played on a gigantic organ (Chukovskii 1976: 126).
Seven: The similarity between the dynamics of Ivan’s empowerment and that of Eisenstein’s own career. In the childhood sequence, Ivan proceeds from squirming in the silence imposed by the peremptory, paternalistic, official, and false discourse of the boyars to acquiring speech and using it in a bluntly forthright, forceful, and vindictive way. This parallels Eisenstein’s own story as an originally well-behaved child rebelling against his parents’ plans for his career and against traditional culture in general to become a revolutionary avantgarde artist. The irony becomes manifest at the “synthesis” stage of the dialectic triad, with the former rebel entrenched in his own rather rigid system of discursive power. The stylistic dimension of this dialectic deserves special attention.
Eisenstein’s memoirs are remarkable for the way they are styled. In accordance with his own paradoxical statement, they intend to reveal in order to conceal (Eisenstein 1997, 1: 358); yet, as it usually happens in such cases, they end up telltale. They are written in a brisk, self-assured manner, often in snappy script-like paragraphs cultivated by the Futurists. They pretend to be energetic, free, and open, but, already by the time of their writing, they had already become conventional and served to shield the writer’s persona from scrutiny. The memoirs make liberal use of stereotypes–as the great director used to in his films, fully deserving the ridicule heaped on him for his “fat kulak” in The Old and the New.13 In this respect, especially telling is the passage about the art of finding the proper extras to cast as, respectively, right and left Social Revolutionaries in October (Eisenstein 1997, 2: 389). The massive stereotyping of people (for instance, of Leon Moussinac as a Leftist “d’Artagnan”; ibid, 2: 324-333) and events (for instance, of Eisenstein’s struggle to avoid deportation from France as a high-society intrigue on behalf of a persecuted revolutionary) may have something to do with Eisenstein’s avowed admiration for Balzac. The hallmark of Balzac’s style, as identified by Roland Barthes in S/Z (Barthes 1974), was precisely the use of conventionalized generalizations–about thirty-year-old women, impoverished aristocrats, foreign-born bankers, provincial students, etc.–i. e. of the sort spoofed by Chekhov already at the time of Eisenstein’s birth14 and yet praised and emulated by Eisenstein time and again on the brink of his death (see, e. g., Eisenstein 1997, 2: 424).
Despite their rhetorical dazzle, erudite intertextuality, and occasional self-revelational insights into the psychology of creativity, Eisenstein’s memoirs, on the whole, read as a coldly detached, superficial account of brief superficial encounters with people portrayed cartoon- or poster-style in a jet-set Ilya Ehrenburg-like fashion. This imperviously opaque and condescendingly didactic discourse is naturalized by its being addressed to average Soviet audience, which their author rightly assumed to be ill-informed, unsophisticated, ready to be fed pious propagandistic stereotypes and fall for the game of elitist name-dropping with a Communist flavor. But then, the range of Eisenstein’s tastes–from detective novels to Balzac to Sade and Sacher-Masoch to Disney to cops and robbers (“I never liked Marcel Proust”, he confesses; Eisenstein 1997, 1: 19)–was essentially that of an adolescent who failed to mature. In this, he was, ironically, part and parcel of his Soviet audience, pointedly kept in the state of permanent adolescence. The best of Soviet literary production was for children or featured essentially boyish characters, such as Ostap Bender, while Socialist Realist literature for adults was such in name only.
The course of Eisenstein’s stylistic journey–from a rebellion against infantile acquiescence in paternalistic officialese to the creation/acceptance of new formulaic conventions, which were attractively infantile in form (“experimental,” “journalistic”) and ominously paternalist in function,–is sadly ironic and reminiscent of the story of the young and then grown-up Ivan. To a great extent, this was, of course, due to the double jeopardy of writing as an intellectual and a homo/bi-sexual in the time of severest political and cultural censorship. But it remains inescapably true that writing amidst arbitrary arrests and making films that justify them presupposes/results in an arrested development. To conclude where Eisenstein’s memoirs–and Ivan’s childhood–begin:
A boy aged twelve. Obedient, polite, clicking his heels… A boy from a good family. That’s how I was aged twelve. And that’s how I am now that my hair has turned grey [although] at twenty seven the boy from Riga became a celebrity” (Eisenstein 1997, 1: 31).
NOTES
1. In the formulation of the central theme I follow Thompson 1981 (67-68) and my modification (see Zholkovsky 1996).
2. The shots are referenced according to Eisenstein 1989: 136-46.
3. The transcript is based on Eisenstein 1989, emended according to the original script and at one point supplemented with unrealized script material (see Eisenstein 1971: 203-215).
4. David and Goliath are referred to directly in a similar scene in the script of The Old and the New (Eisenstein 1971: 98).
5. For the manifold relevance of Dostoevsky subtexts to Ivan the Terrible, see Kleiman 1998.
6. Performatives in the strict sense of Austin 1975, in and by themselves constitute the necessary actions, unlike imperatives, which do call for a separate realization of the issued commands, as argued in Benveniste 1966: 274.
7. Incidentally, Eisenstein participated in Meyerhold’s staging of Ludwig Tieck’s “Puss in Boots” (Aksenov: 27).
8. On the concept of poetry of grammar, see Jakobson 1985: 37-107.
9. Incidentally, when in the States, Eisenstein was nicknamed “red dog” and “Mesopotamian mongrel” by conservative journalists and “son of a bitch” by Upton Sinclair’s brother-in-law.
10. See Zholkovsky 1996: 253; on parallels between the little Ivan’s childhood and that of Alesha Karamazov, see Kleiman 1998: 320.
11. Incidentally, Eisenstein-pere’s aesthetic legacy seems uncannily present in the monumental stylistics of the son–judging by the samples reproduced in the recently printed and filmed Eisensteiniana.
12. Perhaps the most telling example is the literary portrait of Kazimir Malevich as a Clint Eastwood cum Arnold Schwarzenegger avenger type; see the essay “Nemchinov most” (Nemchinov Bridge) (Eisenstein 1997, 2: 310-315).
13. See, for instance, Il’f and Petrov’s “1001-ia derevnia” (The 1001st Village) (Ilf and Petrov 1961: 463-466).
14. For comments on such “absurdly overgeneralized” lines in Chekhov as “Prosecutors like angling, especially for ruff,” and “Students are often blond,” see (Berkovskii 1969: 54).
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