The Revolution gave me the most precious thing in life – it made an artist out of me. If it had not been for the Revolution I would never have broken the tradition, handed down from father to son, of becoming an engineer … The Revolution introduced me to art, and art, in its own turn, brought me to the Revolution …
The summer of 1914, the last before Eisenstein finished school, was spent with his mother at a dacha in Staraya Russa. During that holiday two events made even more of an impact on him than the fact that war was declared in July. The first was a procession on a patron saint’s day at a recently opened church, which informed the fanatical religious procession in The General Line. It is a sequence that Eisenstein later examined as an example of how his montage advanced uninterrupted, weaving ‘diverse themes and motifs into a single, cumulative movement.’1 In the manner in which he analysed Leonardo’s catalogue for The Deluge, he itemised the motifs of the sequence, demonstrating how he would utilise and transmute vivid impressions from his life onto the screen, only slightly diluted by ideological prerequisites.
In The General Line, the motifs were those of progressive heat. They grew from sequence to sequence, matching the mounting intoxication of religious fanaticism which was illustrated by successive close-ups of the faces of peasant men and women, who were singing and carrying icons.
The second most memorable event of that summer, but with less direct significance than the procession, was Eisenstein’s meeting with Anna Grigoryevna Dostoevskaya, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s widow, ‘my first ever literary encounter.’2 His mother had invited her to the dacha, and in preparation for the meeting, he rapidly read The Brothers Karamazov for the first time ‘so that I would have something to talk to the great lady about.’3 But when Madam Dostoevskaya arrived, he had gone into the kitchen where he encountered a young girl called Nina, one of the servants’ daughters, with whom he took large slices of blackberry pie to eat in the park. Eisenstein was so intrigued by this slender, dark girl, whom he thought looked like a young monk, that he was late for tea with the honoured guest, only managing to kiss her hand just before she was leaving.
No literary conversation took place, and he reproached himself for reading The Brothers Karamazov ‘for nothing, instead of playing tennis the whole time.’4 However, Dostoevsky was a novelist who would come to mean a great deal to Eisenstein, and among his final unrealised wishes was to follow Ivan the Terrible with a film of The Brothers Karamazov. One of the courses he gave in 1933 at the G.I.K., the Cinema Institute, where they had the cost-free luxury of imagining and acting out any film they desired, was getting the students to construct a scenario of Raskolnikov’s murder of the money-lender from Crime and Punishment.
Vladimir Nizhny, a student at the Institute, quoted his teacher thus: ‘The murder of the money-lender – this is the outer subject of the scene. The real, inner, subject – is the fall and dethroning of Raskolnikov. “Freedom and power – power above all. Power over all the trembling vermin, and over all the ant-hills.” That is his motto. It is precisely in this passage we are treating that he himself becomes one of the “trembling vermin.”’ Nizhny adds: ‘Carried away as he speaks of the task set by the scene, S.M. simultaneously portrays Raskolnikov’s action.’5
In July 1914, while the sixteen-year-old Eisenstein was reading Dostoevsky, swimming and playing tennis, the Russian government had been drawn into the war with Germany – nothing but an ‘imperialist war’, according to the exiled Lenin – and a general mobilisation was ordered. At the holiday resort, people began panicking. ‘In the Kursaal galleries, complete strangers threw themselves into each other’s arms, sobbing,’ Eisenstein recalled. ‘A colonel sat weeping in his wheelchair, covered by a tartan rug; he wore dark glasses and had doffed his forage cap, showing a scanty head of hair …’6
The panic resulted in people being turned away from the station because it was so crowded. There were others who tried to sail across Lake Ilmen, down the River Volkhov, and then take the train to Tikhvin. Eisenstein and his mother took a steamer, which sailed from Staraya Russa to Lake Ilmen, and then on to St Petersburg.
‘We sailed down the Volkhov, past Novgorod, bathed in moonlight. Dazzling white churches, too many to count, in the still night air. We glided silently past. A magical night! Where had these temples come from, that appeared to have come down to the stately river? Had they rolled, like white currents, to drink the water? Or had they come to moisten the hems of their white garments?’7
Eisenstein never forgot the image of the white mass of churches on the banks of the Volkhov, and returned to Novgorod in 1938 to film sequences for Alexander Nevsky. Captured on screen are the white domes of the Church of Soas-Nereditsa in front of which gather the merchants of Novgorod calling for Nevsky to save them from the Germans. Six years later, during the Second World War, the church that Eisenstein had seen as a boy, and filmed as a man, was destroyed by the Germans.
‘Not a mummy’s boy. Not an urchin. Just a boy. A boy aged twelve. Obedient, polite, clicking his heels. A typical boy from Riga. A boy from a good family,’ was how the forty-eight-year-old Eisenstein remembered himself.8 At seventeen, he was still ‘obedient, polite, clicking his heels’,9 his revolution (both public and personal) was yet to come. Thus, despite his passion for the arts, there seemed no question that Eisenstein, on completing his secondary schooling in Riga, would go to the Institute of Civil Engineering in Petrograd (as St Petersburg was renamed in 1914). This was certainly the wish of his father who had once studied there, but the decision seems to have been taken without reluctance or resistance. At the time, Eisenstein could see no other future for himself than to become an engineer like his father.
In his ironic manner, Eisenstein later wrote: ‘I do not smoke. Papa never smoked. I always followed my father’s example. From the cradle I was destined to become an engineer and architect. Up to a certain age I competed with my father in everything I did. Papa went riding. He was very corpulent, and only one horse from the Riga Tattersall could carry him: it was a massive draught horse, with a bluish wall-eye. I had riding lessons too. I did not become an engineer and an architect. Nor a great horseman.’10
Erwin Mednis, Eisenstein’s classmate at school, recalled that ‘in those days it was his intention, if not exactly his ambition, to become a professional engineer like his father, and to pass from the school in Riga to the Institute of Civil Engineering in St Petersburg, where his precocious gift for drawing would be an enormous advantage.’11 Eisenstein once declared, ‘I approach the making of a motion picture in much the same way that I would approach the installation of a water system’, the sort of remark that lent fuel to his detractors.12
Eisenstein’s period as a student at the Petrograd Institute of Engineering on Furstadt Street in the old Annenschüle was, until the Revolution, uneventful. But his studies would influence him long after he abandoned engineering because it was during this period that he developed his ‘leaning towards disciplined thinking’ and his love of ‘mathematical precision’. His mathematics professor at the Institute was Professor Sokhotsky, whom he was later to describe as ‘one of those flaming old fanatics … who could by the hour and with the same fire of enthusiasm discourse on integral calculus and analyse in infinite detail how Camille Desmoulins, Danton, Gambetta or Volodarsky thundered against the enemies of the people and the revolution. The temperament of the lecturer absorbs you completely … And suddenly the mathematical abstraction has become flesh and blood.’13 Thanks to his engineering training, Eisenstein ‘eagerly delved … deeper and deeper into the fundamentals of creative art, instinctively seeking the same sphere of exact knowledge as had succeeded in captivating me during my short experience in engineering.’14
The urge to become an artist, and especially to work in the theatre, became more persistent during his time as a student in Petrograd, where the opportunities were much greater than they had ever been in Riga. Now he was away from his father, living with his mother in the home city of so many of Russia’s creative artists: Dostoevsky, Gogol, Turgenev, Pushkin. There were two Leonardos in the Art Gallery, there was the circus and, of course, the theatre.
Two figures in the theatre who had the most powerful effect on Eisenstein at the time were Vsevolod Meyerhold and Nikolai Yevreinov. The latter was a symbolist playwright who ran the Distorting Mirror Theatre on the Catherine Canal in Petrograd. There, Eisenstein saw What They Think, What They Say, which had characters speaking their thoughts long before Eugene O’Neill used the technique in a more ‘ponderous, painstaking’ manner in Strange Interlude.15 (The possibility of using ‘inner monologues’ on film excited him when preparing his script for An American Tragedy in Hollywood.) There was also In The Backstage of the Soul (aka The Theatre of the Soul), a monodrama, in which various aspects of the same person appear as separate entities. This was something which Eisenstein personalised, seeing in his own psychology the struggle between his emotional (or ‘romantic’ ego) and the rational ego, which ‘had been educated in the Institute of Civil Engineering on differential calculus and integrated differential equations.’16
In Yevreinov’s three-volume theoretical work called The Theatre for Oneself, the author argued that every individual was capable of metamorphosis and role-playing, everyday life could therefore be metamorphosed in theatre so that every individual could simultaneously be actor and spectator. The books contained plays which had no audience, critics or auditorium. One of them, The Trying on of Deaths, described the sensations Petronius, who committed suicide for political reasons, felt as he died: ‘his veins cut – a small incision of the auxiliary blood-vessels in his arm in a warm bath – monitored by a concealed accomplice (a doctor) to the strains of a distant harp.’17
Meyerhold, born in 1874, was an actor, producer, artistic director, pedagogue and theorist. In 1905 Konstantin Stanislavsky had invited Meyerhold to take charge of productions at the newly formed Studio which was to be an experimental laboratory for the Moscow Arts Theatre along the lines of the Symbolists, but it soon closed. From 1906–1907, Meyerhold was at the Theatre of Vera Komisarjevskaya, where he was able to put into practice the symbolic or stylised method he had envisaged at the Moscow Arts Theatre Studio (Komisarjevskaya had played Nina in the first production of Chekhov’s The Seagull, and was one of Stanislavsky’s teachers.) In effect, this amounted to ‘abstract’ theatre, placing the human element, the actor, on a level with the other elements of the production, thus reducing to nothing the actor’s individual contribution to the ensemble, and making him merely a super-marionette in the hands of the producer – in fact a realisation of Gordon Craig’s one-time ideal. This treatment of the actor led inevitably to a break with Komisarjevskaya. Meyerhold then staged some brilliant productions at the Marinsky and Alexandrinsky Theatres in Petrograd, at the same time continuing his experimental work in his own Studio where, from 1913 to 1917, he continued, under the influence of the improvisation and stylised traditions of the commedia dell’arte, to work out his own methods.
At the Alexandrinsky Theatre, Eisenstein saw Meyerhold’s productions of Calderon’s The Constant Prince (aka The Steadfast Prince), Molière’s Don Juan and Mikhail Lermontov’s Masquerade, which Eisenstein claimed was one of the reasons why he chose the theatre as his profession. ‘It actually defined my unspoken intention to abandon engineering and “give myself” to art.’18
Masquerade was Lermontov’s greatest play and the only one for which he is now remembered. The climax, in which a man poisons his wife whom he loves, is not the result of intrigue, but of the psychological state of the husband, driven to crime by the corrupt society in which he lives. Meyerhold introduced the figure of the Blue Pierrot (played by himself) who, during the masquerade of the title, intrigues Nina, the heroine of the play, with the lost bracelet, the motive around which the plot is constructed. Thus a character from the commedia dell’arte, integrated into the romantic tragedy through the device of the masked ball, became one expression of the theme of Fate which lay at the base of Meyerhold’s conception.
The profound effect of this production on Eisenstein cannot be underestimated. It distilled his early love of clowns into a life-long passion for commedia dell’arte allied to ‘the comedy of masks’, which, in turn, led to what he called – from the French – typage in his films. The latter has been defined by his American friend and former student Jay Leyda as ‘type-casting (by non-actors) elevated by Eisenstein to the level of a conscious creative instrument.’19 In other words, Eisenstein would choose people on the basis of their facial characteristics so that audiences would be immediately aware of their social and psychological characteristics, as theatre audiences recognised the masks of Harlequin, Pantaloon and Columbine, but in a wider spectrum.
So much has been made over the years of Eisenstein’s typage, that it is sometimes forgotten how much Hollywood has always depended on it. Not only in the use of type-casting, but in such signifiers as platinum blonde = dumb and sexy; bespectacled woman = spinster; bespectacled man = weakling; pipe-smoking bespectacled man = earnest intellectual etc. etc.
Masquerade opened at the Alexandrinsky Theatre on February 25, 1917, literally on the eve of the February Revolution. It was in Petrograd that the February uprising began, spreading throughout Russia. The Duma (the Russian parliament) assumed real power and the Tsar was forced to abdicate a month later.
The chaotic situation led to the serious disruption, and even cancellation, of classes at the Engineering School. The building was soon converted into a centre for law and order and assigned to the Izmailov regiment. Eisenstein was caught up in the revolutionary fervour and, with many of his fellow-students, joined the city militia. After an intense training period at a camp, he was issued with a service card and an arm band, and sent on night picket duty.
That period, when General Kornilov attempted a monarchist putsch, was recreated in a visually symbolic manner in October as Kornilov’s train moves closer and closer to the capital. Because, as Eisenstein argued, Kornilov tried to put an end to Kerensky’s Bonapartist plans, he showed the General’s tanks shattering a plaster figure of Napoleon that stands on Kerensky’s desk.
It was about this time that Eisenstein’s artistic interest in the fermenting public events was first aroused. With his characteristic keen-eyed and caustic powers of observation, he started sketching the scenes around him. His first attempt at selling his work was a caricature of the haloed head of Louis XVI above the bed of Nicholas II, which carried the caption: ‘He got off lightly!’ This he took to the editorial offices of the Satirikhon review, only to have it rejected by the editor, the writer Arkady Averchenko, with a scathing ‘anyone could produce that.’20
Undaunted, Eisenstein continued to draw cartoons. His next effort depicted a fracas between a group of housewives and militia men above the caption: ‘What’s going on? Looting?’ ‘No, it’s the militia keeping order.’ For this he chose the Petersburgskaya Gazeta, a paper taken by his father and familiar to him since childhood. Now he was actually in the paper’s editorial offices, seeing its staff reporters for the first time. Eventually, he was summoned to the editor Sergei Khudekov himself. The editor scrutinised the sketch, nodded, and tossed it into the in-tray on his desk. A few days later, it appeared in the paper under the pseudonym, Sir Gay (an English pun). For it, Eisenstein received his first payment as an artist – ten roubles.
In the first week of July 1917, he was on the corner of Nevsky Prospect and Sadovaya Street, moving towards a crowd of demonstrators brandishing banners, when the army opened fire with machine guns. People fled in all directions. ‘I saw people quite unfit, even poorly built for running, in headlong flight. Watches on chains were jolted out of waistcoat pockets. Cigarette cases flew out of side pockets. And canes. Canes. Canes. Panama hats.’21
Eisenstein managed to dive under the arches of Gostiny Dvor, the city’s largest department store. ‘My legs carried me out of range of the machine guns. But it was not at all frightening … These days went down in history. History for which I so thirsted, which I so wanted to lay my hands on!’22
When filming October ten years later, he attempted to recreate this scene by stopping the traffic for half an hour at the same spot, the juncture of Nevsky and Sadovaya. ‘But I was not able to film the street strewn with hats and canes, in the wake of the fleeing demonstrators. (Even though there were people in the crowd who were there for the purpose of strewing things.) Some economically minded old men who took part in the crowd scene diligently picked them all up as they ran, no matter where they had landed!’23
His first record of those July shootings took the form of sketches, among them a series of four, the last of which featured a man with a shell protruding from his back, carrying the laconic caption: ‘Look out, citizen, you’ve been hit!’ – ‘What are you talking about? Really?’24 When Alexander Kerensky became premier on July 12, 1917, Sir Gay’s name appeared on vicious caricatures of Kerensky in the Petersburgskaya Gazeta.
At the same time, Eisenstein had formed an interest in the French 18th-century engraver Jean Moreau, and collected articles about him as well as a number of engravings, some of which he bought for ten roubles from an antiquarian dealer in the Alexandrovsky market. One evening, he was sorting them out with other 18th-century engravings, when ‘there seemed to be more shooting than usual coming from one part of town. But it was quiet in our house in Tauride Street. Before going to bed, I pedantically wrote the date on the cuttings to show when they were put into order. October 25, 1917. By evening, that date was already part of history.’25 Eisenstein was not present at the storming of the Winter Palace, but he was able to compensate for his absence by filming it for October ten years later.
As the Russians had yet to convert to the Gregorian calendar as used in the Western world, the October Revolution actually took place on November 7, 1917 i.e. October 25 in the Russian calendar. On that date, the provisional government under Kerensky was overthrown by the Bolsheviks led by Lenin, who had been allowed to return to Russia by the German government, and ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat’ was proclaimed.
Having been fascinated by stories of the 1905 revolt, of which he had vague and somewhat tantalising memories of the disruption of every day existence, as well as his reading of the French Revolution in childhood, and his hatred of the bourgeois, stoked by his father’s tyranny, Eisenstein welcomed the Bolsheviks enthusiastically. It was the Revolution of 1917 that gave him that precious ‘freedom to decide’ his future.
With the Institute dissolved, Eisenstein joined his fellow students in enlisting in the Red Army as an engineer. When the civil war broke out in 1918, fifty-one-year-old Mikhail Osipovich Eisenstein joined the opposing White Army as an engineer. At the Revolution, Eisenstein had sketched a caricature of his father horrified by the raising of the red flag, which was coloured in with red crayon, rather like the colouring of the flag in The Battleship Potemkin. To reverse the expression in Bezhin Meadow, ‘If a father betray his own son, let him be slaughtered like a dog.’ Now Eisenstein was literally at war with his father and defending Russia against any incursions made by Latvia, the country of his birth.
Petrograd, once the well-guarded capital of Imperial Russia, was left dangerously exposed to attack. In less than six months, five new independent states emerged in the Baltic lands that once had been part of the Russian Empire – Poland in the west, Finland in the east, Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia. Half a millennium of antagonism and conflict made it certain that all of these states would be anti-Russian, and there were trials and executions of Communist sympathisers in these countries. Further to the north, in the area centred on the White Sea ports of Murmansk and Archangel, Finnish, White Russian and British and American forces clashed with Bolsheviks. England had moved a fleet into the Finnish Gulf to threaten Petrograd’s defences at the Bolshevik’s naval base at Kronstadt. The greatest threat to Petrograd came from North Russia, where the Allies had increased their forces rapidly between July and October 1918, the Tsar and his family having been assassinated by firing squad at Ekaterinburg on July 17.
At the beginning of the Civil War, Eisenstein, as a member of the College of Ensigns of the Engineering Corps, was sent to build bridges over the Neva River and fortifications around Petrograd. In a chapter in his memoirs, headed ‘Why I Became A Director’, he describes a particular scene that also indicates one element of what made him the kind of director he was.
‘An ant hill of raw fresh-faced recruits moved along measured out paths with precision and discipline and worked in harmony to build a steadily growing bridge which reached hungrily across the river. Somewhere in this ant hill I moved as well. Square pads of leather on my shoulders supporting a plank, resting edgeways. Like the parts of a clockwork contraption, the figures moved quickly, driving up to the pontoons and throwing girders and handrails festooned with cabling to one another – it was an easy and harmonious model of perpetuum mobile, reaching out from the bank in an ever-lengthening road to the constantly receding edge of the bridge … all this fused into a marvellous, orchestral, polyphonic experience of something being done, in all the variations of its harmony … Hell, it was good! … No: it was not patterns from classical productions, nor recordings of outstanding performances, nor complex orchestral scores, nor elaborate evolutions of corps de ballet in which I first sensed the rapture, the delight in the movement of bodies racing at different speeds and in different directions across the graph of an open expanse: it was the play of intersecting orbits, the ever-changing dynamic form that the combination of these paths took and their collisions in momentary patterns of intricacy, before flying apart forever. The pontoon bridge which extended across the immeasurable breadth of the Neva, towards the sandy shore of Izhora, opened my eyes for the first time to the delight of this fascination that was never to leave me.’26
This became a seminal image of Eisenstein’s aesthetic. Something specific had been created out of the complex movements of man and material. Many things happening simultaneously with one effect; it was the polyphonic construction which fascinated him.
Eisenstein may have interjected ‘Hell, it was good!’ when watching (and participating) in the building of the bridge that so impinged upon his imagination, but it was hard work, even for a fit young man in his early twenties. Much more endurance was required on the Eastern Front on the White Sea, but the comradeship and shared passionate belief in the defence of the Revolution kept him going.
Although the subjects of each of Eisenstein’s films, whether historical or modern, are ostensibly about significant collective events, the director’s personal associations and reminiscences would not merely be integrated into the work, but often permeate them. A small specific incident at that period found its way into The General Line.
At a military work site close to Khom, seventy kilometres from the nearest railway in one direction and ninety-five kilometres in the other, where more fortifications were being built, Eisenstein acted as adjutant to the chief of works. A kulak (rich peasant) family named Pudyakov invited Eisenstein to dinner one night with the aim of getting him to ensure that their only son – a section leader at Eisenstein’s site – would not be posted further away.
They supplied a hearty meal from a communal round bowl, the first Eisenstein had ever eaten at a peasant’s house. (In a few years, the kulaks, who were opposed to collectivisation, would be liquidated as a class.) After the meal, as Eisenstein described it, ‘there was an amazing sunset. And an unhealthy sleep at sunset lying on a very narrow bench … while the girls danced. And the accordion played uproariously … For some reason … I sensed this strange phenomenon, a marvellous farandole before my eyes – now a gigantic nose, the only one of its kind; now the peak of a cap, leading an independent life; now a whole line of dancing faces; now an exaggerated moustache, now just the little crosses embroidered on the collars of a Russian shirt, now the distant view of the village swallowed up by the twilight, now again the too large tassel of silk cord hanging around a waist, now an earring tangled in some hair, now a flushed cheek … Oddly, when I embarked upon the theme of peasants and collectivisation for the first time, just over five years later, I did not lose sight of this vivid impression. The kulak’s ear, and the fold of his neck filled the entire screen; another’s massive nose was as big as a hut; a huge hand hung limply above a jug of kvass; a grasshopper, the size of a reaping machine – all of these were constantly being woven into a saraband of countryside and rural genre pictures, in the film The Old and the New [The General Line].’27
Eisenstein’s first memory as a child was the close-up of white lilac swaying above his cot. A few years later, he would doze off while looking at a floral branch of a tree that stood out from a painted landscape on a Japanese folding screen near his bed. ‘And so I was aware of foreground composition before I saw Hokusai or was entranced by Edgar Degas … For me it was two Edgars who encapsulated the tradition of foreground composition. Edgar Degas and Edgar Poe.’28 The Poe story that particularly impressed him was one in which the author described looking out of a window and seeing a gigantic prehistoric monster crawling up the ridge of a distant mountain, only to discover that this supposed monster was a death’s-head moth crawling upon the pane. During the winter of 1918–1919, with howling winds dumping six feet of snow on Archangel on the Northern front, and with temperatures falling well below zero, the anti-Bolshevik forces suffered worse than their enemies. The Bolsheviks continued to spread propaganda everywhere. Now that the armistice with Germany had been signed and the fighting had ended in Europe, handbills nailed to trees and scattered along city streets asked, ‘British soldiers, why don’t you return home? What are you fighting for?’ There were mutinies among the Russian soldiers under the Allies in North Russia, that spread from Lake Onega to the Dvina river, where Eisenstein had been sent in the spring of 1919. As the Bolsheviks organised Latvian, Lithuanian and Estonian people’s armies on Soviet territory to ‘liberate’ the workers of their homelands, Stalin, the people’s commissar for nationalities, vowed that ‘proletarian revolution, awe-inspiring and mighty, is on the march through the world’, and that ‘petty kinglets’ on the Baltic would be ‘no exception’. Riga fell to the Reds at the beginning of January 1919. Eisenstein’s father had escaped to Berlin, where he settled down and remarried Elisabeth Michelsohn, a much younger woman.
More fearful of an attack by the Finns than by the Northwestern White Army, the Bolsheviks had already begun to mobilise the workers of Petrograd for the city’s defence. On May 17, Lenin had sent Stalin to take charge of the city’s defences. ‘Soviet Russia cannot give up Petrograd even for the briefest moment,’ the Central Committee announced. ‘The significance of this city, which first raised the banner of rebellion against the bourgeoisie, is too great.’
Although Petrograd was in a state of siege, the Whites were too weak and too disunited to launch an attack. At least the meagre army rations that Eisenstein had at the front were more than the daily ration of the population of Petrograd. A half-pound of bread and a bowl of watery soup comprised the basic meal for the adult citizen. Leon Trotsky, the minister of war, gave Petrograd’s starving men and women a new belief in themselves and a certainty that a place in the revolutionary pantheon awaited each who did his or her duty. ‘Happy is he,’ proclaimed Trotsky, ‘who in his mind and heart feels the electric current of our great epoch.’
Eisenstein, who was serving as a draftsman, technician and adjutant to the chief of works at Gatchina, felt the electric current. ‘The melting pot of the Civil War and military engineering work at the front made me acutely aware of the fates of Russia and the Revolution and gave me a fascinating sense of history in the making, which had made a deep impression with the broad canvas of the fates of nations and epic ambitions, and was then realised in the thematics of future films of monumental scale.’29 These ‘epic ambitions’ never left him as most of his projects testify. Unfortunately, his ideas were often too broad for the narrow minds that he had to confront in order to realise them.
On November 7, the second anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, and the day of his fortieth birthday, Trotsky stood before the Central Committee and announced, ‘In the battle of Petrograd, Soviet power showed that it stands on its feet firmly and indestructibly.’ Eisenstein, coming up to his twenty-second birthday, had been tempered in the fire of this victory, but his natural impulses as an artist were always to the fore.
Towards the end of 1919, as the Red Army drew ever closer to victory in the Civil War, the 15th Army’s Military Construction Unit No. 18, to which Eisenstein was attached, was posted to Communist-controlled Velikie Lukie. Having more leisure time than was possible elsewhere, he and a number of young soldiers on his site decided that it might be diverting to form an amateur theatrical group. With this in mind, Eisenstein contacted the local House of Culture, which had a thriving theatre company run by the painter Konstantin Yeliseyev. Eisenstein asked Yeliseyev if he and his comrades could sit in on rehearsals to gain some knowledge of theatre. During the following weeks, Eisenstein, in his faded uniform, palely loitered around the theatre on every possible occasion. He was a shadowy presence at discussions between the actors and Yeliseyev, and sat in the dressing rooms staring at the actors making up.
Due to Eisenstein’s conscientious study of the troupe, added to his earlier reading and absorption of theatre pre-war, his new amateur group was able to make its debut on February 9, 1920, with several short plays, including Gogol’s The Gamblers and Arkady Averchenko’s The Double, which he directed. In the latter, Eisenstein himself took the small role of ‘the first passer-by’. But, according to witnesses, his words were barely intelligible because of a peculiar hoarseness of his voice which, the result of chronic laryngitis apparently, caused oscillations of pitch between high and low – ‘the two voices of my mother and father’, as he put it.30 In later years when he had to communicate coherently as a director and lecturer, the condition was treated with some success by a doctor who advised him to speak loudly. However, any thoughts of his becoming an actor were immediately curbed by the quirky timbre of his voice.
The first productions at Velikie Lukie were followed by Romain Rolland’s Quartorze Juillet/The 14th of July, about the first days of the French Revolution, which had the audience cheering the heroes and hissing the villains.
In the spring of 1920, the unit moved further south to Lepel, near Polotsk, not far from the Lithuanian border. Yeliseyev had been appointed director of two theatrical groups attached to the 15th Army and was planning a production of Victorien Sardou’s Madame Sans-Gêne for which he needed a designer. While Yeliseyev was travelling the area in a search for talent, Eisenstein contacted him in Polotsk. At their meeting, Eisenstein declared how much he wanted to leave the construction unit and join the theatrical group in whatever capacity. Yeliseyev was willing to take him on, but had to gain the permission of the chief engineer Peyich, Eisenstein’s superior. However, Peyich refused to grant Eisenstein a transfer, explaining that he was indispensable for the defence constructions. Yeliseyev, who obviously thought Eisenstein was worth fighting for, appealed to Peyich as a former actor – he had played leading roles in the amateur productions at Velikie Lukie – and eventually won him over. To celebrate his official entry into the theatre, the two colleagues drank a precious tin of condensed milk in Eisenstein’s room.
The celebrations were premature. While in Polotsk, Yeliseyev was informed that his troupe had been incorporated into the PUZAP (Political Administration of the Western Front), and that he was to report immediately to Smolensk, further south. Eisenstein and Yeliseyev travelled together by goods train to Smolensk. During the slow journey, both men expounded their theories on theatre, which were still unrelated to the momentous changes that were taking place in Russia. On one issue, especially, did they find themselves at odds. Since Eisenstein’s exposure to Meyerhold’s production of Lermontov’s Masquerade on the day before the February Revolution in 1917, he was predisposed forever towards commedia dell’arte and the ‘comedy of masks’. Yeliseyev, on the other hand, to Eisenstein’s disappointment, declared that he would never allow his actors to hide their faces with masks.
On arrival at Smolensk, they discovered that Dneprov, PUZAP’s drama chief, had amalgamated the various theatrical groups and that all theatrical projects had been temporarily suspended. As Smolensk was so overcrowded, many of those on the lower levels of the Political Administration had to live in a goods train, so that Eisenstein spent several weeks of stupefying inaction in the cramped quarters of a wagon at Smolensk station.
It was at the station at Smolensk that Eisenstein had what he described as one of the most terrifying experiences of his life. ‘When I was trying to find my way back to my freight wagon, making my way down between the rails and going under the wheels … How many times in the hours of my wanderings along the tracks did those night-time monsters of trains treacherously, with barely a rattle, steal up on me almost furtively, looming out of the darkness; and move past, dwarfing me and then retreating into darkness once more?
‘I think it was that; their implacable, blind, pitiless movement which migrated into my films; now got up in soldiers’ boots on the Odessa steps, now turning their blunt noses into the Knight’s helmets in the “Battle on the Ice”, now sliding in black robes along the stone flagging the cathedral, following the candle as it shook in the hands of the stumbling Vladimir Staritsky [in Ivan the Terrible] … This image of the night train migrated from film to film; it has become the symbol of fate.’31
The most obvious example is in a sequence of stills from Bezhin Meadow, showing a parade of tractors at night creating a sinister effect, the reverse side of the sunnier images of tractors in the earlier The General Line, when Eisenstein’s fate seemed brighter.
The months of inactivity at Smolensk ended when the Political Administration for the Western Front was transferred to Minsk, just after the Red Army had ‘liberated’ it from Poland. However, Eisenstein, with four other painters, was merely given the job of decorating the carriages of an agitprop train leaving for the front. Agit-prop was the Russian term coined from Agitatsiya-propaganda, a means of informing and educating the masses in political principles and ideas, often using mobile theatre troupes.
The term was used previously to apply to the sharp, folksy agitational poems of Demyan Bedny (pseudonym of E.A. Pridvorov), poet laureate of the Civil War period. It was one of Bedny’s satirical agitki that the Cinema Committee filmed in the autumn of 1918. In November of that year, Lenin inaugurated the first Red Train, which toured the towns and villages of Soviet Russia. He declared: There is no form of science or art which cannot be linked with the great ideas of Communism and the diverse work of building a Communist economy.’
The first intense use of agitka came as a result of a general inventory of suitable film material for Red Army screenings – in training and at the front. The agit-train that had done duty on the Eastern Front at Kazan was now sent in the opposite direction – to the Western Front for a three-month tour. The chief film carried along was Dziga Vertov’s first editing job, The October Revolution.
The particular train that Eisenstein was painting was called The Red Army Soldier, which would carry theatre productions around the country. It contained a collapsible stage, the sort which Eisenstein would design the following year for the Moscow Proletkult’s Studio Theatre ‘for shows either in the open air or in an enclosed space.’ But it seemed then, as Eisenstein worked from dawn to dusk on the train, that his theatrical ambitions were being thwarted. Eventually a production of Gorky’s The Lower Depths was planned, for which Eisenstein started painting the backdrop.
One evening, after his day’s work, he attended a Rosicrucian service given by Bishop Bogori, whose ‘worldly’ name was Boris Zubakin, a professor of archaeology. It was held in the back room of a building that the Red Army had taken over for billeting the troops. While the sound of a balalaika and accordion could be heard in the background, the Rosicrucian bishop, wearing a cape and holding a mitre, began initiating the small group into the Cabbala and the Arcana. Eisenstein claimed to have dozed off through most of it and to have found it rather comical, though he was obviously fascinated by all forms of the occult, particularly with those forms of ecstasy of which Rasputin was the most famous follower.
One day in October 1920, rehearsals for The Lower Depths were suddenly interrupted by the announcement that armistice negotiations had been opened with the Poles. (A peace treaty would be signed in Riga the following March.) Although the Civil War was not yet over – there were still areas for the Red Army to win – Eisenstein was now free to return to his engineering studies on the resolution of the Council of People’s Commissars. He was now faced with the painful choice between the Institute in Petrograd or moving on with PUZAP from whom he had permission to study Japanese at the Oriental Language Department of the General Staff Academy (Eastern Front) in Moscow. He spent a sleepless night rolling feverishly about on his bed, dishevelled, having to ‘undertake the most unpleasant task’ of his life, to take such a cardinal decision. ‘There – the Institute. Here – the Department of Oriental Languages. A thousand Japanese words. A hundred characters. The Institute? A stable way of life? … Every branch of higher mathematics was on offer. Right up to integrated differential equations (how much did mathematics teach me about discipline!). But I felt it might be time to see some Japanese theatre. I was ready to cram and cram words. And those astonishing phrases from a different way of thinking. Before that I wanted to see the theatres in Moscow. The career that my father had so carefully sketched out for me had been lost. By morning my mind was made up … the Institute was abandoned.’32
A few days later, Eisenstein was in Moscow. It would be his home – except for the three-year period in the West, which he called an ‘Épopée – for the rest of his life.