Chapter 7
Eisenstein’s Pushkin project
Håkan Lövgren
Looking at Eisenstein’s career from the time of his Mexican-American adventure of 1931–2 to his last film, Ivan the Terrible in the 1940s, we find—with one ambiguous exception—a discouraging succession of planned, half-realised and completely aborted projects. Film projects were initiated, then abandoned for lack of official support; sometimes the shooting was started; and in one case several versions of the film were actually finished, only for the whole project to be abruptly cancelled. Set-backs and reversals of this sort came to play an ever greater role in Eisenstein’s artistic life after the undoing of his Mexican film. Stalin’s telegram to Upton Sinclair in November 1931, which declared that Eisenstein had lost his comrades’ confidence and was regarded as a traitor who had deserted his country, effectively signalled the end of his American sojourn as well as the beginning of a period of hardship that unquestionably hastened his death. When Soviet representatives failed or refused to purchase the Mexican footage from Sinclair and have it sent to Moscow, the director lapsed into serious depression and had to be hospitalised in August 1933. To my mind, Eisenstein never really recovered from the loss of Que Viva Mexico!
Although he was not a man to complain about his own situation, these frustrations obviously had to find some outlet. Two drawings made on the same sheet in September 1939 graphically illustrate his state of mind.1 The top one depicts a man blowing his head off with a gun, with the caption (in English) ‘That’s how I do feel’. The bottom one shows a mysterious one-eyed creature banging his head against the wall of a tower with the caption ‘ALSO’. This last drawing recalls one of a ram-like rendition of Pushkin that Eisenstein made some time later in connection with his Pushkin project, The Love of a Poet.2
It was toward the end of the 1930s that Eisenstein’s interest in Pushkin focused on the poet’s biography, on his fate as an original artist at loggerheads with artistic traditions and, above all, on a collision course with representatives of the highest power in autocratic tsarist society. It is my conjecture in this chapter that Eisenstein’s intense interest in Pushkin’s biography—in the tragic inevitability of an artist’s demise under oppression —was in part prompted by parallels he drew between his own life and Pushkin’s, based on his experiences in Stalin’s Soviet Union. It was characteristic of those times that, in February 1937, Eisenstein had been forced to publish a disclaimer of rumours circulating in the Western Press that he had been arrested. He knew of course about the harassment of many of his colleagues—the arrest and disappearance of his mentor Vsevolod Meyerhold in June 1939 probably affected him the most deeply —and he no doubt thought that he might be next in line.
His career soon took an abrupt series of contradictory turns. On 23 November 1938, the obviously patriotic Alexander Nevsky opened in Moscow and Eisenstein thanked Stalin for his personal support for the film. In February 1939, he was awarded the Order of Lenin for the direction of Nevsky. In August of that same year, the film was completely withdrawn from the repertoire following the Molotov-Ribbentrop non-aggression pact. In December he was asked to direct Wagner’s Die Walküre at the Bolshoi Theatre, also as a consequence of the pact. On 18 December 1940, he had to introduce a series of programmes on Radio Moscow directed at listeners in Nazi Germany. Eisenstein, a Jew, had to declare that the German-Soviet non-aggression pact was a solid basis for cultural co-operation between the two great peoples. Half a year later, when Germany attacked the Soviet Union, Alexander Nevsky was restored to the repertoire and Eisenstein made another broadcast, ‘To fellow Jews of the world’.
I have tried to reconstruct and analyse the project that grew during this period out of Eisenstein’s interest in the life of Pushkin, a colour film to be called The Love of a Poet (Lyubov’ poeta).3 The scenario is fragmented and incomplete, no doubt because it was worked out in several sketches and versions over an eighteen-month period. Although it did not come to fruition, Eisenstein seems never to have quite abandoned the idea. The script was to convey Pushkin’s life through the use of colours which would not be naturalistically motivated, but rather based on leitmotivs that would also govern the musical score Prokofiev was to compose for the film. Colour was to be applied symbolically as an expression of Pushkin’s situation and subjective perception of the world around him.
‘Colour/in film/begins where it no longer corresponds to natural colouration’, said Eisenstein in an interview shortly before his death in February 1948.4 The idea of expressive, as opposed to natural, colour was basic to the storyboard script he prepared on 4 March 1940. This mise-en-scène contained seventy-five frames, fifty-seven of which showed the prostrate Tsar Boris in his famous monologue, ‘I have attained the highest power’, from Pushkin’s ill-fated drama Boris Godunov. Eisenstein apparently planned a complete adaptation of Pushkin’s play, but this detailed storyboard, with frames coloured in red and blue pencil, is all that remains of an initial idea that eventually moved in two directions: first, towards the script and synopsis for the Pushkin biography; and second, into the script for Ivan the Terrible. The colour sequence from this, his last film, is also the only realised example of what he had in mind when he spoke of colour in film.
Why did Eisenstein begin his adaptation with Boris’s monologue, which is the seventh of the play’s twenty-three scenes? We might find an answer in an article he wrote in February 1940, which discussed the genre of Soviet historical films.5 In this he noted Pushkin’s recommendation for a proper theme in tragedy: ‘Man and the people. The fate of man and the fate of the people.’ He went on to suggest a careful study of Boris Godunov, in particular the well-known monologue and the equally famous last scene, in which ‘the people are silent’. These two scenes are the best foundation for an attempt to characterise the soloist and choir, the ‘highest power’ and the people, and their relationship. Contravening Pushkin’s advice and example, Soviet historical films had tended to show either the ‘highest power’ or the ‘silent people’.
Eisenstein’s version of Boris’s monologue gives great emphasis to the individual psychological reality of the tsar’s predicament. This is done through the framing of the shots, the topography of the set, hyperbolic acting and the application of colour, all of which later surfaced in Ivan the Terrible. The relationship between ruler and ruled, tsar and people and ultimately tsar and poet/artist (the poet as a kind of representative of the people), is made more dynamic in Eisenstein’s script through the tsar’s visible and hyperbolic reactions to the accusations of the people, as though he had heard actual voices. Eisenstein has Boris plead before the Last Judgement fresco in the Uspensky Cathedral, and when the only answer is silence, he darts through the cathedral into the palace in a frenzied chase from one chamber to the next, only to find himself at a dead end in a small prayer room. From this climactic point of prayer, he rushes back the same way he came, crashing back through the cathedral, overturning candelabra and appropriately setting the whole place on fire before he sinks down in front of the horrible visions of the Last Judgements.
This nightmarish conception of Boris’s emotions as he sums up his reign, from the glorious prospects outlined by the astrologers to the dismal isolation his own bad conscience has imposed upon him, is motivated by God rejecting Boris’s wish to repent and be absolved from the people’s accusations of having killed the true Tsar, Dimitri. I believe that the possibility of ‘orchestrating’ these elements of an individual psychological predicament—Boris being abandoned by God and responsible to the people only—was the initial reason for Eisenstein’s choice of the seventh scene of Boris Godunov. This choice almost immediately led him towards Pushkin’s biography, as is indicated by a comment on the first page of the script: ‘NB. Much better for “Pushkin”’.
Pushkin’s biography is structured as a number of overlapping triangular relationships, mostly involving an older and a younger man in rivalry over a woman. These relationships are for the most part based on themes from Pushkin’s works: Boris Godunov, the verse narrative The Gypsies and other poems. I have used Roman Jakobson’s idea of an emerging theme of destructive statues in Pushkin’s poetry (‘the myth of the destructive statue’) in my analysis, since this seems to cohere with Eisenstein’s notion of a ‘gradual loss of colour’, as Pushkin’s life is gradually dehumanised.6
It is at the end of 1829, when Pushkin courted Natalia Goncharova, that the theme appears of statues representing old men who interfere disastrously with the lives of younger men. In Pushkin’s work from this time the ‘old husband, terrible husband’ theme of The Gypsies—the work that provides the thematic starting point and leitmotiv of Eisenstein’s ‘First Outline’ of the Pushkin project—regresses into something primitive and atavistic, into magical statues or idols, which inexplicably come alive to wreck havoc in the lives of these young men; a theme of development from youthful, dynamic passions toward mechanical, inexorable Fate.7 Such was also the development Eisenstein outlined in his Pushkin biography: ‘the poet’s fate from the careless days in Odessa to the cold snow by Black Creek’, the site of the duel that ended Pushkin’s life.8 What we see in Eisenstein’s treatment is the evolution of a conspiracy to kill an artist.
THE LOVE OF A POET
Part I:
The Gypsies: the theme of superstition, colour and the terrible husband
The Love of a Poet was Eisenstein’s solution to the search for a suitable theme for a film in colour, ‘where colour would not be used as colouration, but as an internally motivated dramaturgic factor’.9
A biography of Pushkin in colour would result in the same vivid colour dramaturgy, the same motion of a colour spectrum in the key of the poet’s developing life story as the one displayed in Gogol’s output—not in his biography, but in the sequence of his works, 10
The idea was inspired by Andrei Bely’s monograph, Gogol’s Mastery, which described how the spectrum of colour epithets in Gogol is increasingly ‘depleted’ to end with a range of only white, grey and black.11 According to Bely, the reduction of colours followed a cyclical pattern that closely corresponded to the pattern of Gogol’s psychological crises.12
The central conflict in Eisenstein’s ‘First Outline’ is one of colour, the conflict between black and white in which traditional semantics is reversed: ‘how nice that evil is not black but white’, he writes to Tynyanov with obvious delight.13 This first synopsis, dated two days after the Boris monologue, is a triptych with a prologue.
Prologue. Hannibal. The scene of a black among whites. One against all.
Like the nucleus of the scene that develops later (in Part III).
Pushkin alone against all of society and Nicholas I.14
Part I describes Pushkin’s stay in Bessarabia and how his Don Juan tendencies develop. The point of departure is The Gypsies and the setting a shabby gypsy camp. We find Pushkin in the company of Aleko, the stranger-husband of the Gypsy Zemphira, the Old Man and Mariula, her mother who ran away with a younger Gypsy. Three basic themes are presented: (1) Bes arapskii, ‘The Black Demon’, Eisenstein’s title for Pushkin’s life in the South; (2) the Gypsy fortune-teller’s warning to stay clear of a man in white; and (3) the composition of the romance ‘Old husband, terrible husband’.
Eisenstein seems to have explored two variations of The Gypsies’ plot. First he places Pushkin in the arms of Mariula, as a rival of the Old Man. In the second version, Pushkin plays the role of Zemphira’s young Gypsy lover, who is killed by Aleko in the poem: ‘Bessarabia. Tents. The Old Man wakes them up. Goodbye to Zemphira. Hasty departure; husband (with bear) returning. She meets husband with song, “Old husband, terrible husband”. Pushkin grasps motive and escapes.’15 By settling on the latter version, Eisenstein attaches Pushkin to a ‘poetic myth’ which predicts his fate to be killed, although that fate is postponed a number of times in the course of his Don Juan escapades (including the seduction of a Greek and a Turkish woman, of his superior’s wife, Vorontsova, etc.). To underline the myth of The Gypsies and bring the theme of superstition and antithetical, fateful ‘whiteness’ into Pushkin’s adventures, Eisenstein introduces an encounter with a Gypsy fortune-teller, who conveniently passes the old graveyard where Pushkin is hiding:
The prediction: ‘Beware of a man in white’. Pushkin laughs. In this series the motif is established. The motif is clothed in the words: ‘Old husband, terrible husband….’ He rides across the steppe. (His white shirt is flying open. Close-fitting black pants.)16
The background colours of the steppe are toned down and diluted, Eisenstein suggests, as though painted with thin washes in the soft style of early nineteenth-century water colours.17
Part II:
The Mikhailovskoye scene
Part II is set at Mikhailovskoye, Pushkin’s estate. Here the theme of the devil is shifted from Pushkin’s person (‘The Black Demon’) and expanded into a concept of Pushkin as the banished poet, haunted by real as well as imaginary devils and demons.
A blizzard rages, as in Pushkin’s poem ‘The Demons’. Here the saturated colours return to create a full spectrum of colour contrasts. Pushkin hears news of the Decembrist uprising at Senate Square and is horrified. Eisenstein writes:
The poet perceived the image of the Tsar and tsar-murderer, Alexander, in Boris’ face.
The smouldering fire in the Mikhailovskoye fireplace flares up.
It seems as if Tsar Nicholas stares at the poet from the fireplace (a quite permissible transition in film).
The poet’s hand is nervously drawing gallows on a piece of paper. Gallows, gallows, gallows.
‘And maybe I… Even I…’—he nervously remembers the Decembrists.18
Another version of the scenario first presents the terrified Pushkin drawing gallows on a piece of paper.19 There is a distant sound of church bells. His glance into the smouldering fire reveals the dim face of Tsar Nicholas. Pushkin violently throws the crumpled piece of paper into the fireplace. The flames flare up and turn into lit candles. The bells get louder and blend with the image of burning candles in the Uspensky Cathedral. Boris begins: ‘I have attained….’ His face resembles that of Tsar Nicolas. Pushkin jumps up in anger, shouting at the fireplace: ‘Yes, wretched he whose….’
In Eisenstein’s shooting script, when Boris finally falls in front of the fresco after the last lines of the monologue, there is a shot of a fire burning, another of a fireplace, and we see Pushkin hurl himself back into an armchair, away from the vision in the fire. ‘Yes, wretched he whose conscience is not clear’, is heard from an unknown source. The face of Nicholas appears in the fire; and a second shot shows Nicholas in front of his own fireplace ‘with all the conceivable terror caused by an unclear conscience (when one is alone with oneself) reflected in his face. Or rather the horror caused by his fear of revenge.’20
The last version presents a more ambiguous state in which the idea of blame and guilt is transferred by association through cutting. The repeated cuts between shots of Pushkin and Nicholas in identical positions in front of a fireplace indicate that both suffer from an uneasy conscience through their association with the tormented Boris in front of the Last Judgement fresco, before a higher authority in the cathedral and before the people in the text of the monologue. Pushkin has a bad conscience because of his Decembrist connections and may still have to answer for his political views in the subsequent phase of reaction. History has turned Pushkin’s Boris Godunov, whose monologue might have been conceived only weeks before the uprising, into something potentially dangerous to the poet himself.
Part III:
Petersburg: the duel
In Part III Pushkin is ordered to leave Mikhailovskoye and he travels in a covered wagon to Petersburg. He appears at the theatre and the image of Boris recurs when Tsar Nicholas is seen sitting with a lady in a rear box entirely covered in red. The Tsar is dressed all in white (‘beware of a man in white’), while the red of the box echoes the carpet and candles in the cathedral. Boris should be dressed in white as well, Eisenstein reflects.
With the image of Boris, Nicholas I and the theatre stage, a ballet or ball scene is introduced. The famous ballerina Istomina, from Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, dressed in violet and white, is juxtaposed with Natalia Goncharova, also in pale violet and white. Pushkin notices his wife-to-be at the theatre. Eisenstein writes:
The intoxication of love will end in marriage. The wedding (with Karamzina’s blessing). Down to the last detail (there is no carriage, etc). The wedding ring falls. A bad omen. The first morning—she is not beside him…. He sees her in an adjoining room, by the window. And Nicholas passes by. A coincidence…or?21
Natalia is now presented as the pale violet and white doll who flirts with Boris and with the henchman Nicholas. She is becoming an instrument of death, a means of killing the poet. She becomes, as Marina Tsvetayeva wrote, ‘that empty place toward which they are all drawn, around which all forces and passions clash’.22
Events begin to swirl in a gigantic vortex in which the ‘devils’ and ‘demons’ of Petersburg, characters and sites from literature associated with the city, Natalia, Pushkin’s younger rival D’Anthès, Tsar Nicholas—all merge into something insubstantial. The themes of the ballet and ball return with the leitmotiv from ‘The Demons’. Eisenstein describes a masquerade scene where colours shift from pitch-black to red in a kind of chromatic whirlwind.
First within one shot, then from shot to shot, then in a climax of smudged, out-of-focus shots (blood-red from the light of the candles) with a cut from one to the other; and then from a bright whirlwind to an absolutely black distorted shot. Pushkin runs out (to the Bronze Horseman). Everything around is an unclear hurricane…. A maddening whirlwind. (Devils in might and main). A whisper. At the very peak of the whirlwind a door is thrust open. Pushkin comes home.23
The theme of ‘The Demons’, superfluousness and exile, is appropriately transcended by the theme of doom, damnation and impending death. The whole action takes place in a nocturnal Petersburg and, while all colours begin to change, only black remains unaltered. Eisenstein makes the rhythm and fantastic character of the masquerade continue in Pushkin’s sleigh ride to the site of the duel, Black Creek. Pushkin and his second meet all the familiar and indifferent faces, faces of people who ought to recognise the poet, but do not reveal that they do.
No one feels sorry for him.
And he is pleased.
He is on his way to a duel.
And he is very glad no-one interferes.
They pass a luxurious sleigh.
In it sits a fashionably dressed woman.
But the woman is near-sighted and does not recognise the curly-haired gentleman.
Although this curly-haired poet is her husband. […]
A fleeting burst of cherry-red—it is the satin of Natalia’s muff.
Natalia, the ‘cross-eyed madonna’.
A dim grey tonality dominates now.
And the contrast of black and white.
Snow.24 […]
Meeting his rival.
The line Pushkin—D’Anthès—Nicholas.
The Bronze Horseman.
The disc of the moon in the blue-black darkness of the night.
Nicholas’ bronze face.
‘Just you wait!’
The theme of Othello.
The Gypsies once again. Not in the freedom of the South, but in a poor Gypsy apartment at Black Creek.
Morning pancakes.
The Gypsies sing Pushkin’s own song from The Gypsies for him.
‘Old husband, terrible husband…’
Just as they sang byliny to Ivan the Terrible in his old age, sang stories about him, about his taking Kazan.
Now the ‘old husband’ (although he is only thirty-seven), ‘terrible husband’ is Pushkin himself.
The order of cuckolds.25
The symbolism of the dominant colours, white, red and black, is simple, although the manner in which it is represented, the way themes and colours interweave, is quite intricate and technically sophisticated. The evil of white, the bloodstained guilt of red and the good of black: Boris Godunov dressed in white on the red carpets in the cathedral; Nicholas I in the theatre in a similar colour combination; the dancing couples at the masquerade suddenly looking like blood-red flames; Natalia’s red muff and the red reflection striking her white hands through the red stained-glass window (a Lady Macbeth theme, of course) at Pushkin’s home, after the mortally-wounded poet has been carried there; and finally, when all colours have been reduced to black, the poet himself, a black man, is visited by a lady all in black, Karamzina, the historian’s wife. She watches him being lowered into the dark coffin, which is hurriedly taken away to the accompaniment of Prokofiev’s Requiem into the black night.
THE LETTER TO TYNYANOV
In Eisenstein’s synopsis, Pushkin is relentlessly driven to his own destruction by his uncompromising attitude towards his art and because of an early unspoken, but never forgotten, love for an older woman—his ‘nameless love’, as Yuri Tynyanov called it. In a letter intended for the critic, Eisenstein wrote about the Pushkin project: ‘But—mon Dieu!—how to find a path for a compositional fairway in this ocean of adventures!’26 The letter was written in 1943, while Eisenstein was filming Ivan the Terrible in Alma Ata, after he had read Tynyanov’s novel Pushkin and an earlier article The Nameless Love’, but was never sent due to Tynyanov’s death.27 Tynyanov’s hypothesis was that Pushkin’s entire life had been determined by his efforts to find an Ersatz for his youthful love, Yekaterina Andreyevna, wife of the writer and historian Nicholas Karamzin. Tynyanov believed he had found proof of this hypothesis in his own and others’ analyses of the poet’s correspondence and poetry, and in the fact that on his deathbed Pushkin calls first for Karamzina.28 Eisenstein is enthusiastic:
That’s the theme. Of course! The clue to everything…. The immediate psychological credibility of your hypothesis is of course connected with the memory traces of the Freudian (assez possible) interpretation of ‘Don Juanism’ as a search for the one, the only one (there isn’t a Don Juan in Pushkin’s works ‘for nothing’).29
In an interview with Ilya Vaisfeld two days before he died, Eisenstein explained his own hypothesis about the reasons for Pushkin’s tragic relations with women.30 He maintained that the old man who prevents a young man from realising his dream is a theme that permeates Pushkin’s work and has a strong autobiographical basis. Pushkin’s frustrated love for Karamzin’s wife is the motor behind his lifelong search for a woman to replace her, and the real explanation for his ‘Don Juanism’. Eisenstein thought this also answered the mysterious question of why Pushkin fell in love with and married Natalia Goncharova. The frivolous and coquettish Natalia somehow reminded him of Karamzina—‘Natalia as a “formal” Ersatz for Karamzina’.31
Pushkin’s relation to the twenty-year-older Karamzina has, in Tynyanov’s characterisation, an obvious ring of the mother substitute. According to the Freudian account of the Oedipus complex, Karamzin then becomes a competing, threatening and potentially castrating father figure. Such father figures also played a decisive role in Pushkin’s life and in his choice of artistic themes and symbols. As for Freud’s explanation of ‘Don Juanism’, Eisenstein rejects this: ‘No, Freud has nothing to say here. Pushkin’s love had nothing to do with eroticism. This love becomes the tragedy of his life which marks his entire creation.’32 Both Tynyanov and Eisenstein want to hold at bay the idea of Pushkin as a careless Don Juan.33 Their ‘de-eroticised’ Pushkin may have less to do with reality than with a certain prudish wish to elevate the biographical to the same level as the artistic motives of a great poet.34
THE LIVING STATUES
The collapse of the Decembrist revolt resulted in political quarantine for Pushkin and a ban on publishing Boris Godunov. According to Jakobson, it was also the beginning of a gradual resignation that culminated in Pushkin’s marriage to Natalia.35 The poet became more and more convinced that the revolt had been premature and suicidal. His ‘capitulation’ was expressed in a letter to Zhukovsky in 1826: ‘No matter what my political and religious views are, I intend to keep them for myself alone, and I do not intend to oppose madly the established order and necessity.’36
Towards the end of 1829, as Jakobson has shown, the ‘myth of the destructive statue’ emerges in Pushkin’s poetry.37 This finds expression in ‘The Stone Guest’ (1830), The Bronze Horseman’ (1833) and The Golden Cockerel’ (1834) and its appearance coincides with Pushkin’s proposal to Natalia in 1829. Jakobson’s three principles for the plot development in these poems are:
- A man is weary, he settles down longing for rest, and this motif is intertwined with desire for a woman.
- The statue, more precisely the being who is inseparably connected with the statue, has supernatural, unfathomable power over the desired woman.
- After vain resistance, the man perishes through the intervention of the statue, which has miraculously set itself in motion, and the woman vanishes.38
The relationship implied in Eisenstein’s scenario, the ‘line of Pushkin—D’Anthès—Nicholas’, ‘The Bronze Horseman’ and ‘Nicholas’ bronze features’ is one of three men’s rivalry over the same woman, Natalia. But this relationship of four is in fact triangular, since D’Anthès is only an agent of Tsar Nicholas in the conspiracy to eliminate the poet. Thus the inexorability of fate, the bronze features of Nicholas, come alive in D’Anthès, just as the statue of the Bronze Horseman comes alive to hound Eugene in Pushkin’s poem. There is then a certain convergence of perspective between Jakobson’s triangular scheme and Eisenstein’s plotting of Pushkin’s fate in Parts II and III of his scenario.
Eisenstein’s image of Natalia also resembles a statue, a marble nymph like Dimitri’s Marina in Boris Godunov. She is a symbol of ‘whiteness’, the colour of evil and destruction. But while Marina is ambitious and intriguing, Natalia is portrayed as a mindless and myopic doll, a treacherous tool used in Pushkin’s destruction. In The Love of a Poet as a whole, the female and male roles remain largely constant in function, while their individual fates differ. They are all, men and women alike, unreliable, conniving, treacherous—apart from, of course, Karamzina and Pushkin. In Eisenstein’s scenario, all the tsars and D’Anthès are evil people, dressed in white, who are interchangeable: Boris becomes Nicholas, who in turn is likened to the Bronze Horseman, namely Tsar Peter, whose destructive role in Pushkin’s poem is assumed by D’Anthès, the poet’s killer.
Eisenstein’s intention is to have Pushkin change roles with the triangular relationship of two men and one woman, to have him change position in the rivalry between a married older man and a young man over the married man’s wife as his life comes to an end with the duel at Black Creek. In Part I of the scenario, Pushkin is temporarily saved from the fate of the young Gypsy in the poem, whose role he is playing. In Part III, he is overwhelmed by having to compete in two triangular relationships: both Tsar Nicholas and D’Anthès are rivals courting his wife Natalia. The younger D’Anthès seemingly wins and what remains is a triangle in which Pushkin suddenly has become the ‘old husband’. He then understands that Fate has caught up with him, that the ‘man in white’ has finally arrived. The final sleigh-ride is presented as a confirmation of this fate by both the poet and the public he meets on the way.
The main dynamics of The Love of a Poet revolve around the slow inversion of life into death, of somebody into nobody, a poet’s socially and politically induced resignation to fate. With it, Eisenstein wanted to use a new symbolic dimension of colour to decipher the social and psychological meaning of Pushkin’s life and work in particular, and no doubt of artistic work under autocratic and repressive conditions in general. The fact that the destroyed third part of Ivan the Terrible included a prostrate Ivan in front of the the Last Judgement, before the Tsar of Heaven in the Uspensky Cathedral, shows how important this issue of power, guilt and responsibility continued to be in Eisenstein’s work. The intervention of ‘old men’ in the lives of Pushkin and Eisenstein—Tsars Alexander and Nicholas in the former case, Stalin in the latter—led to the death of both artists. Pushkin from a bullet, Eisenstein more slowly from the decision to take his last unfinished project away from him.
EPILOGUE
When Eisenstein insisted on pursuing his proposal for Part II of Ivan the Terrible, he apparently understood that he could be signing his own death warrant.39 The decision to persist must have been made some time during his simultaneous reading of Tynyanov’s Pushkin works and further speculations on The Love of a Poet. On 2 February 1946, he finished editing the second part of Ivan and went to a reception and party in honour of the Stalin Prize winners later that evening. While dancing, he was struck by a severe heart attack and fell to the floor. He should have died, but miraculously survived, 48 years old. A fortune-teller in Hollywood had predicted that he would not die before his fiftieth birthday, but to Eisenstein what followed was a post scriptum, an extension to the life of an artist that in some sense was over. About three months after his release from hospital, the censors decided to shelve Part II of Ivan. It was never shown in Eisenstein’s lifetime, just as Boris Godunov was never performed while Pushkin was alive. Eisenstein died between the 10th and 11th of February 1948, two weeks after his fiftieth birthday and, as Naum Kleiman has noted, 111 years and 11 hours after the death of Pushkin.40 He was in the middle of preparing an article on colour in cinema and taking notes on the works of Pushkin and Gogol.