It is doubtless unwise for anyone who is not a Mexican to laugh at death. Whoever dares to mock her is punished by the terrible goddess of death. Her reward to me was the death of that scene and the death of the entire film. But even if I never managed to realise fully my conception of death, in the film as a whole I paid the homage due to her!
On February 2, 1946, Eisenstein completed the editing of Ivan the Terrible Part II. He put the final touches to it that night, leaving the studio to attend a dinner-dance to celebrate the award of the Stalin Prize for Part I. In jubilant mood, he joined in the dancing until, at two in the morning, while dancing with the actress Vera Maretskaya, he collapsed with a heart attack and was taken by ambulance to the Kremlin Hospital. Despite the doctor’s warning that if he moved he would be ‘a dead man’, he walked unaided to the car that took him to the hospital.
When Eisenstein described the fateful evening to friends who visited him in hospital after the first critical weeks of total immobility, he jokingly added, ‘I’m dead right now. The doctors say that according to all rules I cannot possibly be alive. So this is a postscript for me, and it’s wonderful. Now I can do anything I like.’1
In March he was allowed to sit up in his armchair and several days later to take his first steps. Towards the end of May he was moved to a sanatorium at Barvikha outside the city, and a month later was allowed to convalesce in his dacha at Kratov, where he occupied himself by reading, sketching, writing and watching films, many of them American. These were supplied to him by Elizabeth Eagan of the US Embassy, who brought or sent 16mm copies to him, along with a steady flow of books. Part of a letter to her reads:
‘…Bring me the picture Meet Me In St Louis. I’m terribly fond of Judy Garland! And don’t you have by any chance a copy of Forever Amber? I’d like to read that very much. Is there no way to find Agatha Christie’s Murder of Roger Ackroyd in Moscow (the old detective story).’ Another letter reads: ‘Dear Miss Eagan! I want to thank you so much for the enormous pleasure you provided in sending me the National Velvet and Lewis Jacobs’ book [The Rise of the American Film]. Always eager to see more films and books …’
Eisenstein’s appetite for Hollywood films was insatiable. While in hospital, he had asked to see Harvey, obviously intrigued by the story of a gentle alcoholic (James Stewart) who believes he is being accompanied everywhere by a giant rabbit. His diary of March 27 to June 11, 1945, indicates the films he had seen, many marked with either an X for approval or a G for govno (crap). Eisenstein’s wide-ranging tastes were well known. Apart from the British-made Henry V, his eclectic list of American films reveals a hunger for top-rate escapist entertainment.
Of those, he gave three cheers (or crosses) to Clarence Brown’s The Human Comedy, starring Mickey Rooney, an over-sentimental William Saroyan-scripted family drama. Of Victor Fleming’s A Guy Named Joe, a wartime fantasy in which a dead pilot (Spencer Tracy) is sent back to earth to watch over fledgling pilots, Eisenstein noted, ‘American inventiveness and skill at extracting from situations a range of possibilities – from lyricism to farce, from low comedy to tragedy … the idea that the hands of each trainee would be guided by the thousands that perished before him attains the height of pathos.’
One can only suppose that his enjoyment of Paramount’s Star Spangled Rhythm was one of nostalgia, born of recognition of a multitude of stars, and the musical numbers, including a literally flag-waving routine, ‘Old Glory’, sung by Bing Crosby and company against a studio backdrop of Mount Rushmore.
The films to which he gave the thumbs down were those that strayed into his own territory, and/or had artistic pretensions. William Dieterle’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame, starring Charles Laughton, was not Eisenstein’s idea of the Victor Hugo novel; he failed to be flattered by a direct homage to the Battle on the Ice from Alexander Nevsky in Laurence Olivier’s Henry V, and disliked The Kid from Spain, despite the Busby Berkeley numbers, of which the opening one was supposed to be in a college girls’ dormitory, where the students (!) rise from their sumptuous satin beds in transparent nightdresses. Perhaps he found it painful to watch the absurd bullfighting scenes in Mexico, where saucer-eyed Eddie Cantor is mistaken for a celebrated matador.
Among the other films he saw, and sometimes marked, while recuperating were Esther Williams in Bathing Beauty, Otto Preminger’s Laura, the all-black musical, Stormy Weather (X), the Chopin biopic A Song to Remember (G), Walt Disney’s Bambi (X), which had the rabbit Thumper battling on the ice; Charles Boyer and Ingrid Bergman in George Cukor’s Gaslight; Boyer waiting on the Mexican border in Hold Back the Dawn (X), reminding him of his own similar predicament; Claude Rains in Phantom of the Opera, Ronald Colman and Greer Garson in Random Harvest, Deanna Durbin in It Started with Eve, Billy Wilder’s Five Graves to Cairo, Alfred Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt, an army comedy See Here Private Hargrove (G), the boy-and-horse movie My Friend Flicka, and Betty Grable in Moon Over Miami.2
In 1945, Eisenstein wrote a chapter on Young Mr Lincoln (1939) for a collection of essays on John Ford in the series Materials on the History of World Cinema. He claimed that if there was one American picture he would like to have made, it was Young Mr Lincoln. ‘Some pictures are more effective, richer. Some pictures are more entertaining and enthralling. Some are more stunning. Even those by Ford himself … But – why do I love this film so much? First of all because it has that marvellous quality that a work of art can have: a striking harmony among all its component parts … I think that our epoch yearns for harmony … Henry Fonda, amazing actor that he is, has caught this sorrowful gaze, the bend of this spine, the childlike simplicity, wisdom, and childlike cunning in a miraculous character. But the maker of the film, John Ford, looked at the recreated images of the epoch with such a gaze before realising them on screen …’3 There is indeed a striking Eisensteinian moment at the rhetorical end of Young Mr Lincoln when Henry Fonda, still years from becoming president, marches up a hill during a storm, which cuts to rain falling on the Lincoln statue in Washington. In appreciation of the article, John Ford sent Eisenstein a letter and a still from Young Mr Lincoln.
Watching many of the better films made under the Hollywood system, Eisenstein, though it was fruitless to replay his own American tragedy, must have regretted not having been able to make at least one example of the kind of ‘bourgeois’ entertainment that he so enjoyed towards the end of his life. Regarding freedom of expression, however, as Eisenstein knew from personal experience, there were certain similarities between Hollywood autocracy and Soviet autocracy – although the ‘Siberia’ to which one could be sent in America was purely metaphorical.
In July 1946, Eisenstein wrote to Ivor Montagu: ‘I’m recovering very very slowly from my heart attack in February – and expect to return to my film activities sometime around October or November. Things were so drastic that even up to now I’m nearly out as to what might be labelled my writing activity – although I expected to give away most of the time of my reconvalescence to writing. (Four and a half months I had just to lay on my back – just waiting for my heart muscle to piece itself together, after it had split as a result of overworking. Now laying for months on one’s back and not being exactly a harlot – is not much fun?)’4
On September 30, 1946, Eisenstein was offered the making of a film, entirely in colour, to celebrate the eight-hundredth anniversary of the founding of the city of Moscow. He eagerly accepted, and started sketching two aspects of Moscow 800 that particularly interested him: the function of colour in films and the ‘montage of epochs’ that he had been trying to realise since Qué Viva México! ‘The spiral development of historical events, repeating and revealing new qualities and aspects in certain crucial moments of history.’5
Moscow would be seen saving Europe from ‘three hordes – the Tartars, Napoleon and the Germans.’ Eisenstein also noted down: ‘1) the Moscow of icons 2) Wooden Moscow 3) Moscow of white stone 4) Iron Moscow 5) Moscow of steel (planes, tanks – war) 6) Moscow of the rainbow (celebration of war’s end. A peaceful rebirth) 7) Moscow of growth and strength.’ However, Moscow 800 was to remain another tantalising film of the mind.
‘The war on fascism ends, the war on capitalism begins’, was one of the slogans of the Party after the armistice. During the war, the Soviet Government and the Central Committee of the Communist Party had not paid close attention to literary and artistic orthodoxy and, with control thus relaxed, artists had insensibly begun to take liberties; the old evils of ‘formalism’ and ‘subjectivism’ had started creeping back.
Early in 1946, Stalin decided to bring Andrei Zhdanov from Leningrad to conduct a full-scale ideological attack on those who had expressed admiration for the West and, by implication, dissatisfaction with the regime. He thundered: ‘Does it suit us, the representatives of the advanced Soviet culture, to bow before bourgeois culture, which is in a state of miasma and corruption!’
At the start, Zhdanov’s fire was directed at literature, especially the poet Anna Akhmatova, whom he called ‘a harlot and a nun who mixes harlotry and prayer.’ Michael Zoshchenko, perhaps the most popular Soviet humorist, he labelled ‘a literary swindler.’ In August, the Party Central Committee passed a resolution declaring that ‘Soviet literature neither has nor can have any other interests except those of the people and of the State. Hence all preaching of that which has no idea-content, of the apolitical, of “art for art’s sake”, is foreign to Soviet literature, harmful to the interests of the Soviet people and State.’ Charges of neglect of ideology and subservience to Western influence were levelled at men prominent in the other arts. The Union of Composers did not fail to notice the danger signals.
While awaiting the release of Ivan the Terrible Part II, Eisenstein was recuperating at his country home, watching ‘harmful’ bourgeois films. It was then that he heard from Cherkassov that Stalin had seen the film and disliked it. There were those who believed, and still believe, that the reason for his dislike was, that as the story developed, the Tsar’s acts of cruelty in the name of a unified Russia came uncomfortably close to home.
Many of Eisenstein’s friends had warned him to change Part II, with its pointed allusions to Stalin in Ivan, to Lavrenti Beria, chief of the secret police, in Malyuta, and in the oprichniki, to Stalin’s hatchet men. Pera commented, ‘We tried to persuade Eisenstein not to try and produce Part II as per script he had prepared. He was firm, though he had a sick heart. He was told it would be the end of him. But he would not retreat.’6 Herbert Marshall believed that Eisenstein deliberately and consciously risked his freedom and his life to expose the degeneration of Stalin and his regime.7 But Ivan the Terrible Part II was not the only film severely criticised, and in some cases banned, in 1946; others were Kozintsev and Trauberg’s Simple People, Pudovkin’s Admiral Nakhimov, and Leonid Lukov’s A Great Life Part II. The most successful film of the year was Chiaureli’s The Vow, a flattering review of Stalin’s work.
On September 4, the Central Committee issued a statement attacking a number of Soviet film-makers, including Ivan Bolshakov, the first Minister for Cinema. The Committee maintained that he had ‘poorly managed the work of the film studios, and the work of their directors and scriptwriters … doing little to raise the quality of the films being released, uselessly squandering large resources.’ The Committee’s main reprimand was reserved for Leonid Lukov’s The Great Life Part II, the first part of which had been released in 1940 and, like Ivan the Terrible Part I, had won the Stalin Prize. ‘The film … champions backwardness, coarseness and ignorance. The film-makers have shown workers who are technically barely literate and hold outdated views and attitudes being promoted en masse to management positions … [it] shows Soviet people in a false, distorting light … the film is evidence that some workers in art, living among Soviet people [as if they were not part of them], fail to notice their high ideological and moral qualities and are unable to turn them into convincing characters in their works of art … the director Pudovkin has undertaken to put on a film about Nakhimov, but he has not studied the details of the matter, and he has distorted the historical truth. The result is not a film about Nakhimov, but one about balls, dances and scenes from Nakhimov’s life … The director Sergei Eisenstein, in Part Two of Ivan the Terrible, has revealed his ignorance in his portrayal of historical facts, by representing the progressive army of Ivan the Terrible’s oprichniki as a gang of degenerates akin to the American Ku Klux Klan: and Ivan the Terrible, a strong-willed man of character, as a man of weak will and character, not unlike Hamlet … Workers in the arts must understand that those among them who continue to take an irresponsible and flippant attitude to their work may easily find themselves overboard as progressive Soviet art forges its way ahead, or find themselves withdrawn from circulation … the Party and the State will continue to inculcate good taste in the people, and high expectations of works of art.’8
It was clear, given Stalin’s later conversation with Eisenstein, that these were the dictator’s own opinions of the film. (It was said that Stalin’s favourite films at the time were the wartime weepie Waterloo Bridge and The Great Waltz, nicknamed by some wag The Great Schmaltz’.)
On the evening of February 25, 1947, Eisenstein and actor/Supreme Soviet member Cherkassov were summoned to the Kremlin for a meeting at 11 p.m. At 10.50 they entered the reception room. At precisely eleven o’clock, Poskrebyshev, Stalin’s principal secretary until his arrest in 1952, came out to take them into the study. Stalin, Molotov and Zhdanov were at the back of the study. They went in, shook hands and sat at the table. As recorded by Eisenstein in his diary immediately afterwards, the following grimly comic encounter took place:
Stalin: (to Eisenstein): How is your heart?
Eisenstein: Much better, Comrade Stalin.
Stalin: You look very well. You wrote a letter. The answer has been somewhat delayed. I thought of replying in writing, but then decided it would be better to talk it over, as I am very busy and have no time. I decided after considerable delay to meet you here. I received your letter in November.
Cherkassov: (reaching out for the box of cigarettes) Is it alright if I smoke?
Stalin: There is no ban on smoking, as such. (Chuckling) Perhaps we should take a vote on it. Go ahead. (To Eisenstein) Have you studied history?
Eisenstein: More or less.
Stalin: More or less? I too have a little knowledge of history. Your portrayal of the oprichnina is wrong. The oprichnina was a royal army. As distinct from the feudal army, which could at any moment roll up its banners and leave the field, this was a standing army, a progressive army. You make the oprichnina look like the Ku Klux Klan.
Eisenstein: They wear white headgear; ours wore black.
Molotov: That does not constitute a difference in principle.
Stalin: Your Tsar has turned out indecisive, like Hamlet. Everyone tells him what he ought to do, he does not take decisions himself. Tsar Ivan was a great and wise ruler and, if you compare him with Louis XI (you have read about Louis XI, who prepared the way for the absolutism of Louis XIV?) he dwarfs Louis XI. Ivan the Terrible’s wisdom lay in his national perspective and his refusal to allow foreigners into his country, thus preserving the country from foreign influence. In showing Ivan the Terrible the way you did, aberrations and errors have crept in. Peter I was also a great ruler, but he was too liberal in his dealings with foreigners, he opened the gates too wide and let foreign influences into the country, and this allowed Russia to be Germanised. Catherine even more so. And later – could you really call the court of Alexander I a Russian court? Was the court of Nicholas I really Russian? No, they were German courts. Ivan the Terrible’s great achievement was to be the first to introduce a monopoly on foreign trade. Ivan the Terrible was the first, Lenin was the second.
Zhdanov: Ivan the Terrible comes across as a neurasthenic.
Molotov: There is a general reliance on psychologism; on extraordinary emphasis on inner psychological contradictions and personal experiences.
Stalin: Historical figures should be portrayed in the correct style. In Part I, for instance, it is unlikely that the Tsar would kiss his wife for so long. That was not acceptable in those days.
Zhdanov: The picture was made with a Byzantine tendency. That was also not practised.
Molotov: Part II is too confined to vaults and cellars. There is none of the hubbub of Moscow, we do not see the people. You can show the conspiracies and repressions, but not just that.
Stalin: Ivan the Terrible was very cruel. You can depict him as a cruel man, but you have to show why he had to be cruel. One of Ivan the Terrible’s mistakes was to stop short of cutting up the five key feudal clans. Had he destroyed these five clans, there would have been no Time of Troubles. And when Ivan the Terrible had someone executed, he would spend a long time in repentance and prayer. God was a hindrance to him in this respect. He should have been more decisive.
Molotov: The historical events should have been shown in the correct interpretation. Take Demyan Bedny’s play The Knights for example. In that play, Demyan Bedny made fun of the conversion of Rus to Christianity, whereas the acceptance of Christianity was a progressive event at that particular historical period.
Stalin: We are not, of course, particularly good Christians. But it is wrong to deny the progressive role of Christianity at that stage. It had great significance, as it marked the point where the Russian state turned away from the East and towards the West. Recently liberated from the Tartar yoke, Ivan the Terrible was very keen to unite Russia as a bulwark against any Tartar invasions. Astrakhan had been subdued, but could at any point attack Moscow. As could the Crimean Tartars. We cannot scrap our history. Now, criticism is useful. Pudovkin followed our criticism and made Admiral Nakhimov into a good film.
Cherkassov: I am sure that we shall do just as well, because I am working on the character of Ivan, not only in cinema but also in theatre. I like the character very much and I am sure that our reworking of the script may turn out to be correct and truthful.
Zhdanov: I have held power for six years myself, no problems.
Stalin: Well, let’s give it a try.
Cherkassov: I’m sure that the reworking will be a success.
Stalin (Laughing): God willing, every day would be like Christmas.
Eisenstein: It would be better not to rush the production of this film.
Stalin: On no account rush it. As a rule, we cancel films made in a hurry and they never go out on release. Repin spent eleven years painting The Zaporozhian Cossacks. If Ivan the Terrible takes eighteen months, two or even three years to produce, then go ahead, make sure of it, let it be like a work of sculpture. The overall task now is to improve the quality. Higher quality even if it means fewer pictures. Tselikovskaya was good in other roles. She acted well, but she was a ballerina.
Eisenstein: No other actress could make the journey from Moscow to Alma Ata.
Stalin: A director must be unyielding and demand whatever he needs. Our directors compromise too readily.
Eisenstein: It took two years to find our Anastasia.
Stalin: The actor Zharov did not bring sufficient gravity to his role, and the result was wrong. He was not serious enough for a military commander.
Zhdanov: He was not Malyuta Skuratov, more of a flibbertigibbet.
Stalin: Ivan the Terrible was more of a national Tsar, more circumspect. He did not admit foreign influences into Russia. It was Peter who opened the gates on to Europe and let too many foreigners in.
Zhdanov: The film overdid the use of religious ceremonies.
Molotov: Yes, it gave it a mystical edge which should not have been so prominent.
Zhdanov: The scene in the cathedral, with the ‘bloody deed’ was filmed too broadly, which was a distraction.
Stalin: The oprichniki looked like cannibals when they were dancing, reminiscent of Phoenicians or Babylonians.
Eisenstein: Do you have any specific instructions about the film?
Stalin: I am not giving instructions so much as voicing the thoughts of the audience.
Zhdanov: I think that Comrade Eisenstein’s fascination with shadows distracted the viewer from the action, as did his fascination with Ivan’s beard: Ivan lifted his head too often so that his beard could be seen.
Eisenstein: I promise that Ivan’s beard will be shorter in the future.
Stalin: I thought in Part I, Kurbsky [Mikhail Nazvanov] was splendid. Staritsky [Pavel Kadochnikov] was very good. The way he caught flies was very good. He was a future Tsar but caught flies with his hands. You need details like that. They reveal a man’s true character.
Cherkassov: What about Ivan’s physical appearance?
Stalin: His appearance is fine and does not need changing. Ivan the Terrible’s physical appearance is good.
Cherkassov: Can we leave the scene of Staritsky’s murder in the film?
Stalin: Yes, murders did happen.
Cherkassov: There is one scene in the script where Malyuta Skuratov strangles Metropolitan Philip. Should we leave that in?
Stalin: It must be left in. It was historically accurate.
Molotov: Repressions could and should be shown, but it should be made clear what caused them and why. This requires a portrayal of how the State worked rather than scenes confined to cellars and enclosed spaces. The wisdom of statesmanship needs to be depicted.
Stalin: How will your film end?
Cherkassov: It will end with the rout of Livonia, the heroic death of Malyuta Skuratov and the expedition to the sea, where Ivan the Terrible will be surrounded by his soldiers and say, ‘We stand on the seas and always will.’
Stalin: Which is what happened. And more besides.
Cherkassov: Does the outline of the future script need to be shown to the Politburo for reading and approval?
Stalin: There is no need to submit it for approval. Sort it out for yourselves. It is always difficult evaluating a script; it is easier to talk about a finished work. (Turning to Molotov) You, of course, very much want to read the script?
Molotov: No, I specialise in a somewhat different area. Let Bolshakov read it.
Stalin: Well then, that is sorted out. Comrades Cherkassov and Eisenstein will be given the chance to complete their project and the film. Pass that on to Bolshakov. I wish you luck, and may God help you.
(They all shook hands, and the meeting ended at 1.10 a.m.)9
As a result of the meeting, permission was given to modify the film to comply with official demands. On March 14, 1947, Eisenstein sent a telegram to Jay Leyda: ‘Everything okay. Continue working Ivan.’10 But, although attempting to make the suggested alterations to Part II, he lacked the strength to make the new sequences that were needed. There were no further discussions or plans about completing Part III – all materials including four edited reels had, by then, been destroyed. Only one reel survived. It would be ten years after Eisenstein’s death before Ivan the Terrible Part II would be shown to the public.
It was finally released in 1958. The same year, as part of Khrushchev’s ‘thaw’, it was shown in the West under the title The Boyars’ Plot. But according to Ian Christie, ‘the world in which this Rip Van Winkle appeared was very different from the one in which Eisenstein had carved his tortured, dangerous and intensely personal epic. It could scarcely appear other than an anachronism – the long-awaited completion of the Eisenstein canon, itself something perceived as firmly rooted in the silent era of heroic montage and only reluctantly accommodating synchronised sound … And of course it was equally inevitable that the shadow of Stalin would lie across the film. How could it not be seen as either a brave critique of Ivan’s latter-day heir, or as an apologia for that tyrant?’11
Bosley Crowther of the New York Times, who had called Part I ‘a film of awesome and monumental impressiveness,’ found the second a ‘murkily monolithic and monotonous series of scenes with little or no dramatic continuity … The musical score of Serge Prokofiev fails to be much more than sound behind scenes … The place for this last of Eisenstein’s pictures is in a hospitable museum.’
Dwight Macdonald wrote: ‘Ivan the Terrible, Part II is the last work of the greatest talent the cinema has yet known … [It] is the late, final decadence of this talent … but the dying lion is still a lion … Its current release is part of the post-Stalin “thaw”. I applaud the decision of Khrushchev’s bureaucrats but I think Stalin’s were smarter … The film shows the disintegration of Eisenstein’s personality under the frustrations and pressures he had endured for fifteen years …’
What particularly disturbed Macdonald was that ‘his homosexuality now has free play … There are an extraordinary number of young, febrile and – there’s no other word – pretty males, whose medieval bobbed hair makes them look startlingly like girls. Ivan has a favourite, a flirtatious, bold-eyed police agent [Fyodor], and many excuses are found for having Ivan put his hands on the handsome young face … There are two open homosexuals in the film, both villains. The minor one is the King of Poland, who is shown in his effete court camping around in a fantastically huge ruff … The major one is the very odd character of Euphrosinia’s son, Vladimir … It is too much to speculate that Eisenstein identified himself with the homosexual Vladimir, the helpless victim of palace intrigues who just wanted to live in peace (read: to make his films in peace) …’12
It is extremely doubtful that Eisenstein, in that he identified with any character in the film, would have chosen the simple-minded, cowardly and effeminate Vladimir. Parker Tyler describes Vladimir as ‘pretty as a Hollywood starlet … constantly pursing his lips or batting his eyelashes.’13 For Thomas Waugh, ‘Gay artists have often been able to express an explicit interest in homosexuality only within the safe limits of the dominant stereotype of gayness.’14
Ivan’s relationship with the young Fyodor is not necessarily closer than that with his faithful follower Malyuta, and no more than can be seen between close friends in productions of Shakespeare’s plays, and other Elizabethan classics. Fyodor’s coquettish dance, wearing a woman’s mask and breast plates, is related to the style of female impersonation in Chinese Opera, as well as being a slightly risqué comical musical number for the all-male guests at the banquet. The effete Sigismond, King of Poland, is merely a classical convention and, in no way, is he an ‘open’ homosexual. However, Andrew Britton described the scene between the traitor Kurbsky and Sigismond as ‘decadent homosexual flirtation, Kurbsky presenting his sword and Sigismond stroking it languidly with jewelled gloves.’15 Was Eisenstein really planting a clandestine gay time-bomb under a perilously homophobic society?
Ivan the Terrible can be read as an anti-Stalinist, gay fantasy, or a classical historical drama, with many of the genre’s traditions, about a heroically strong leader who had to be cruel to defend his power and the unity of his country – after all, he is more plotted against than plotting – or a Macbethian despot ‘in blood stepped in so far that, should I wade no more, returning were as tedious as go o’er.’ Yet, one question keeps hovering above one’s head. Although the rules of the game in the Soviet Union kept being changed by the referee mid-match without the players being told, how did Eisenstein ever imagine he could have got away with such a bold, often outrageous, all-encompassing work of art such as Ivan the Terrible or, for that matter, The General Line or Bezhin Meadow, in the stultifyingly conventional atmosphere of the times.
Eisenstein, who was never able to complete a film that he himself instigated, always made the film as close to his own conception as possible, wherein lay the danger. In contrast, most of his contemporaries ended up making exactly what they were asked to do.
Echoing his ‘confession’ after the condemnation and termination of Bezhin Meadow, Eisenstein published a magazine article in 1947 which generally accepted the criticism of Ivan the Terrible Part II. ‘I must admit that we artists … forgot for a time those great ideals which our art is summoned to serve … the honourable, militant and educational task … to build a Communist society. In the light of the resolutions of the Central Committee, all workers in art must … fully subordinate our creative work to the interests of the education of the Soviet people. From this aim we must not take one step aside nor deviate a single iota. We must master the Lenin-Stalin method of perceiving reality and history so completely and profoundly that we shall be able to overcome all remnants and survivals of former ideas which, though long banished from consciousness, strive stubbornly and cunningly to steal into our works whenever our creative vigilance relaxes for a single moment. This is a guarantee that our cinematography will be able to surmount all the ideological and artistic failures … and will again begin to create pictures of high quality, worthy of the Stalinist epoch.’16
In 1952, while Stalin was still alive, Cherkassov also expressed his doubts about Ivan the Terrible Part II in his ghosted autobiography. ‘My confidence in the film waned and my worries grew with each passing day. After watching scenes of the second part run through, I criticised some episodes but Eisenstein brushed my criticisms aside, and in the end stopped showing me edited bits altogether.’17 In addition, he complained of the painful positions that he had been forced to maintain. In fact, Nina, Cherkassov’s widow (he died in 1966) said he hated the book and was ashamed of it, and had later stoutly defended the film.
‘A small, ridiculous woman died today. Thursday evening. She was seventy-two. And for forty-eight of those seventy-two years she was my mother.’ Thus did Eisenstein note the death of Yulia Ivanovna in his diary dated August 8, 1946. In the same entry, he dispassionately recounts that they were never close, and argued a lot. But, she did mean a great deal to him, and the sadness at her parting is disguised by a certain forced flippancy he adopted to hide his emotions.
‘I had, to my horror, known all month that Yulia Ivanovna was dying …’ When Eisenstein visited her for the last time on her death bed, he was shocked to see ‘a small, white, old lady’ lying before him, more reminiscent of his grandmother, as he remembered her.
Four months later, Eisenstein observed his embarkation on a ‘comic autobiography … in that super-exact manner [‘stream of consciousness’] of Joyce’s description of Bloom.’ ‘Today I start to write my Portrait of the Author as a Very Old Man,’18 Eisenstein wrote on December 24, 1946. In fact, encouraged by Prokofiev, he had begun his memoirs on May 1 in the Kremlin Hospital, three months after his heart attack, but had been scribbling down notes for this undertaking since 1927. For Eisenstein, who sensed that he had not long to live, his ‘Post Scriptum’ period was the best time to put his thoughts down on paper, quoting Mark Twain’s Autobiography as he did so. ‘I am writing from the grave. On these terms only can a man be approximately frank. He cannot be straitly and unqualifiedly frank either in the grave or out of it.’
In March 1947, Eisenstein finally saw Thunder over Mexico and Time in the Sun – the films made by others from his footage for Qué Viva México! It was a last blow to his continuing hopes that something still might be recovered from the Mexican tragedy. He wrote an angry introduction to the Mexican script for the (unpublished) French edition of his writings. On May 10, in a letter to Georges Sadoul, the French film critic, he remarked: ‘The way they cut my film is more than heart-breaking.’19
For most of 1947, Eisenstein’s health prevented him from further film-making. He wrote some new essays and edited old ones, kept in touch with his students and wrote reminiscences. His last project for the stage was a ballet that Prokofiev had composed in 1936, based on Pushkin’s story The Queen of Spades. He supplied a libretto and sketched a choreography for the entire ballet, but this last collaboration between Prokofiev and Eisenstein was to remain unrealised.
There had been a time when he spoke of following Ivan the Terrible with The Brothers Karamazov, but he now knew he would make no more films. In one of his last essays, written in November 1947, he again felt the need to sing the praises of the regime, though neither he nor almost anybody else believed in it any longer.
‘I think that the basis of what our cinema has achieved, in its thematic, stylistic, ideological and artistic aspects, can be said to lie in the profound sense that every moment of our daily active existence is of the greatest historical significance – the emergence of Communism in our country and of the Communist future of a liberated mankind, with the Soviet Union in the vanguard … Fortunate the art born in such a country and such a people … It is to this country alone, to this people alone and to those people and countries alone who travel with us, along our path, that the Future of Emancipated Mankind belongs.’20
As his fiftieth birthday approached he became increasingly depressed, although outwardly he continued to make jokes, even about his own imminent death. When his friend, the director Grigori Rostotsky, planned to make a speech at a birthday celebration, Eisenstein told him, ‘You know, of course, that your speech will in fact be for my funeral, not for my birthday.’21
Despite being cared for by ‘Aunt’ Pasha, who slept in a room near his study, Eisenstein kept a monkey-wrench by the radiator, so in an emergency he could strike it to summon Tisse who had the flat below. Some weeks after his birthday he was immersed in his writings on the theory of colour. He broke off for a moment to doodle a maze on the paper, then he continued writing. But the writing suddenly petered out, to be followed by a single word in red crayon – ‘Attack!’ Maxim Strauch, who visited the flat on February 10, was shown the page by Eisenstein who told him, ‘That is the graph of my disease.’22 After Strauch had left, Eisenstein continued to work into the early hours of February 11, 1948. In the morning, ‘Aunt’ Pasha found him dead at his desk. On the desk was a letter. ‘All my life I’ve wanted to be accepted with affection, yet I’ve felt compelled to withdraw … and thus remain forever a spectator.’
Legend has it that the young doctor who was assigned to do the postmortem, and who did not know whom he was examining, was struck by the dead man’s brain. He asked, ‘Who was that man?’ ‘He was a film director.’ ‘How many films did he direct?’ ‘Eight.’ ‘What a pity! A man like that could have discovered a new theory of relativity.’
In his will, Eisenstein left his brain to science and his oeuvre to posterity.