{"id":94521,"date":"2016-02-17T11:00:20","date_gmt":"2016-02-17T16:00:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=94521"},"modified":"2016-02-17T12:43:25","modified_gmt":"2016-02-17T17:43:25","slug":"unexpected-eisenstein","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/02\/17\/unexpected-eisenstein\/","title":{"rendered":"Unexpected Eisenstein"},"content":{"rendered":"<div><center><div id=\"attachment_94533\" style=\"width: 610px\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-94533\" class=\"wp-image-94533\" src=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/02\/2-1024x749.jpg\" alt=\"Sergei Eisenstein, Set design for Act III of Heartbreak House (unrealised),  1922, paper, pencil, ink and watercolour on paper \u00a9Russian State Archive of Literature and Art, Moscow \" width=\"600\" height=\"439\" \/><p id=\"caption-attachment-94533\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Sergei Eisenstein, Set design for act 3 of <em>Heartbreak House<\/em> (unrealized), 1922, paper, pencil, ink and watercolor on paper. \u00a9Russian State Archive of Literature and Art, Moscow<\/p><\/div><\/center><\/div>\n<div>\u00a0<\/div>\n<div>In November 1929, the thirty-one-year-old Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein was the world\u2019s most notorious film director. Four years earlier,\u00a0<i>Battleship Potemkin<\/i>, his euphorically reviewed, highly influential tour de force about mutiny on the eponymous naval vessel, had brought him both acclaim and infamy. Infected with wanderlust, Eisenstein won permission from Stalin to leave Russia on a short research trip. He took off in August 1929, with twenty-five dollars\u00a0in his pocket. He returned home, reluctantly, just under <span class=\"aBn\" tabindex=\"0\" data-term=\"goog_1606093370\"><span class=\"aQJ\">three years later<\/span><\/span>.<\/div>\n<div>\u00a0<\/div>\n<div>During the ensuing whirlwind\u2014to Berlin, Paris, London, then on to Hollywood\u2014Eisenstein met with the world\u2019s leading intellectuals, actors, and avant-garde artists: James Joyce, Jean Cocteau and Robert Desnos in France, George Bancroft in Germany, Charlie Chaplin, Marlene Dietrich and Gary Cooper in the United States. His grand tour often gets overshadowed by his disastrous film collaboration in Mexico with the novelist Upton Sinclair\u2014framed in Peter Greenaway\u2019s 2015 movie\u00a0<i>Eisenstein in Guanajuato\u2014<\/i>but British culture was a significant and often neglected long-term source of interest.<\/div>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<div>\u00a0<div id=\"attachment_94534\" style=\"width: 363px\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-94534\" class=\"wp-image-94534\" src=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/02\/1-e1455671604899.jpg\" alt=\"Letter from the London Workers\u2019 Film Society to \u2018Comrade Eisenstein\u2019, 27 December 1929 \u00a9Russian State Archive of Literature and Art, Moscow \" width=\"353\" height=\"437\" \/><p id=\"caption-attachment-94534\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Letter from the London Workers\u2019 Film Society to \u2018Comrade Eisenstein\u2019, December 27, 1929. \u00a9Russian State Archive of Literature and Art, Moscow<\/p><\/div><\/div>\n<div>\u201cSeryozhenka learned English quickly and became familiar with the literature read by English children,\u201d writes Marie Seton, Eisenstein\u2019s one-time travelling companion, in her 1952 biography. As a child of affluent parents in Riga, Eisenstein wrote poetry in English, conversed in the language with his governess, read Dickens and Edward Lear, graduated to Rudyard Kipling, Lewis Carroll, and Oscar Wilde. The British establishment, and its heroes, fascinated him.<\/div>\n<div>\u00a0<\/div>\n<div>Arthur Conan Doyle\u2019s Sherlock Holmes novels had become a huge success in Russia, and Eisenstein was a longtime fan. It turns up in the archives: in 1922, while he was still a theatre director in Moscow, he designed costumes for a fantasy amalgam of two fictional sleuths, Holmes and the dime novel private detective Nick Carter. In 1934, two years before\u00a0Stalin\u2019s Great Terror, the director, a pathological bibliophile, ordered a copy of Vincent Starrett\u2019s <i>The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes,\u00a0<\/i>a blend of literary critique and historical analysis, from a British bookshop.<\/div>\n<div>\u00a0<div id=\"attachment_94532\" style=\"width: 611px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-94532\" class=\"wp-image-94532 \" src=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/02\/4.jpg\" alt=\"Sergei Eisenstein, preparatory drawing for Ivan the Terrible Part III (unrealised),  1942, pencil on paper \u00a9Russian State Archive of Literature and Art, Moscow \" width=\"601\" height=\"413\" \/><p id=\"caption-attachment-94532\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Sergei Eisenstein, preparatory drawing for <em>Ivan the Terrible<\/em>, part 3 (unrealized), 1942, pencil on paper. \u00a9Russian State Archive of Literature and Art, Moscow<\/p><\/div><\/div>\n<div>\u00a0<\/div>\n<div>Eisenstein\u2019s writing extensively references the deductions of detective fiction and dissects it to understand the mechanics of art. \u201cIn literature, we also find examples of the physical assembly of a person or an event out of fragments,\u201d he wrote in one essay upon his return to Russia. He describes Holmesian logic as having \u201cDionysian\u201d intensity, says Holmes\u2019s ability to pick out clues is akin to the ability to \u201cselect at a moment\u2019s notice an isolated detail in close-up.\u201d<\/div>\n<div>\u00a0<\/div>\n<div><span lang=\"EN-US\">\u201cSherlock Holmes for him was the ideal example to how you can bring your intuitive sensual comprehension of the world, together with your rational knowledge,\u201d said Eisenstein biographer Oksana Bulgakowa in a telephone interview. Bulgakowa is currently translating a section of Eisenstein\u2019s writing on detective fiction and said the director was especially interested in \u201cpre-logical thinking,\u201d borrowing the term from French anthropologist Lucien L\u00e9vy-Bruhl. \u201cHe tried to explain that novels such as Sherlock Holmes show us the evolution of our system of thinking,\u201d she added. \u201cWe first go through the pre-logical, sensual analysis of spatial connections and then we discover the abstract, the cause and effect connections that defined our rational mind.\u201d<\/span><\/div>\n<div>\u00a0<div id=\"attachment_94531\" style=\"width: 610px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-94531\" class=\"wp-image-94531 \" src=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/02\/7.jpg\" alt=\"Sergei Eisenstein, Thoughts on Music, 1938, pencil on paper \u00a9Russian State Archive of Literature and Art, Moscow \" width=\"600\" height=\"843\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/02\/7.jpg 2550w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/02\/7-214x300.jpg 214w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/02\/7-768x1079.jpg 768w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/02\/7-729x1024.jpg 729w\" sizes=\"auto, (min-width: 62.5em) 67vw, 100vw\" \/><p id=\"caption-attachment-94531\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Sergei Eisenstein, <em>Thoughts on Music<\/em>, 1938, pencil on paper. \u00a9Russian State Archive of Literature and Art, Moscow<\/p><\/div><\/div>\n<div>\u00a0<\/div>\n<div>Because of the scattergun nature of his memoirs and theory, structured like a modernist text and incomplete, we don\u2019t know for sure if Eisenstein turned his magnifying glass to the hoards outside 221B Baker Street during his British sojourn. His frenetic itinerary reflected his passion for the hoary old clich\u00e9s of British society. He saw an El Greco at the National Gallery, went on an East End pub crawl, grazed the bookshops of the Charing Cross Road, dined at High Table at Trinity College, Cambridge, visited Eton College. \u201cThe young gentleman, at the very moment of his birth, is entered for this cold prison ten years in advance,\u201d he writes of Eton College\u2019s pupils in his essay \u201cMuseums at Night.\u201d Oddly, the school gets more attention than tourist attractions including the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Tower of London, or Windsor Castle. Something about the schoolboys carving their names into the desks captured his imagination in the same way Holmes had.<\/div>\n<div>\u00a0<\/div>\n<div>\u201cThere\u2019s some fusion of Windsor, Cambridge, Eton, the Tower, that nourishes his imagination when it comes to creating the medieval world of Ivan the Terrible,\u201d said Professor Ian Christie of London\u2019s Birkbeck College, curator of \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.grad-london.com\/whatson\/\" target=\"_blank\">Unexpected Eisenstein<\/a>,\u201d a show exploring Eisenstein\u2019s relationship to Britain opening at London\u2019s GRAD Gallery on <span class=\"aBn\" tabindex=\"0\" data-term=\"goog_1606093371\"><span class=\"aQJ\">February 17<\/span><\/span>.<\/div>\n<div>\u00a0<div id=\"attachment_94526\" style=\"width: 610px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-94526\" class=\"wp-image-94526 \" src=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/02\/9.jpg\" alt=\"Sergei Eisenstein, preparatory drawing for Ivan the Terrible, 1942, pencil on paper \u00a9Russian State Archive of Literature and Art, Moscow \" width=\"600\" height=\"779\" \/><p id=\"caption-attachment-94526\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Sergei Eisenstein, preparatory drawing for <em>Ivan the Terrible<\/em>, 1942, pencil on paper. \u00a9Russian State Archive of Literature and Art, Moscow<\/p><\/div><\/div>\n<div>\u00a0<\/div>\n<div>Bulgakowa said that Eisenstein\u2019s formal upbringing in an elite Russian family caused him to see Britain as a series of \u201cold stereotypes.\u201d She added: \u201cThese were given by Dickens, Chesterton, Conan Doyle, and only later by English modernism.\u201d<\/div>\n<div>\u00a0<\/div>\n<div>Eisenstein left Britain in December 1929, and sailed to New York the following May, unaware of the career-shattering troubles that would soon beleaguer him. His reading material for his Atlantic crossing was\u00a0<i>Lady Chatterley\u2019s Lover<\/i>.<\/div>\n<div>\u00a0<\/div>\n<div><em>Rob Sharp is a freelance journalist based in London.<\/em><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>\u00a0 In November 1929, the thirty-one-year-old Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein was the world\u2019s most notorious film director. Four years earlier,\u00a0Battleship Potemkin, his euphorically reviewed, highly influential tour de force about mutiny on the eponymous naval vessel, had brought him both acclaim and infamy. Infected with wanderlust, Eisenstein won permission from Stalin to leave Russia on a [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":935,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2384],"tags":[21186,21188,4846,6030,14072,21189,79,995,947,3450,21191,21185,447,21184,2307,13517,21190,123,3890],"class_list":["post-94521","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-look","tag-arthur-conan-doyles","tag-battleship-potemkin","tag-britain","tag-charlie-chaplin","tag-detective-fiction","tag-eisenstein-in-guanajuato","tag-film","tag-hollywood","tag-james-joyce","tag-jean-cocteau","tag-lucien-levy-bruhl","tag-marie-seton","tag-russia","tag-sergei-mikhailovich-eisenstein","tag-sherlock-holmes","tag-stalin","tag-the-private-life-of-sherlock-holmes","tag-travel","tag-upton-sinclair"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v25.4 (Yoast SEO v25.4) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Soviet Film Director Sergei Eisenstein&#039;s British Holiday<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Rob Sharp on the Soviet film director Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein\u2019s trip around Europe, obsession with Sherlock Holmes, and indulgence in old stereotypes.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/02\/17\/unexpected-eisenstein\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Unexpected Eisenstein by Rob Sharp\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"February 17, 2016 \u2013 \u00a0In November 1929, the thirty-one-year-old Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein was the world\u2019s most notorious film director. 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