Eisen: The visually stunning autobiographical novel by the famous Sergei Eisenstein

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It is a mammoth of a book, a mammoth of a life story that the Russian-speaking author Gusel Yakhina has presented here: the entire life of the most famous Soviet director – Sergei Eisenstein (1898–1948). A life like a film, one might think. Even if Eisenstein himself may not have felt that way. But Yakhin does exactly that with his life. Anyone who immerses themselves in this novel of a whirlwind of a life will experience Eisenstein’s rise and fall as if it were one of his own films.

Where Eisenstein could rely on the genius of his favourite cinematographer, Eduard Tissé, Jachina unfolds the scenes from Eisenstein’s life with opulent eloquence, delving into the feelings, dreams, fears and fantasies of the man who revolutionised the world of cinema with his 1925 film *Battleship Potemkin* and became famous worldwide. The fledgling medium of film meets the young Russian Revolution.

Yet to this day, it is predominantly this film that springs to mind when Eisenstein is mentioned. One pictures the grand Odessa steps, the soldiers herding the people along, the solitary pram rolling down the steps … Striking images that show how Eisenstein was one of the first to grasp the impact of the medium of film. For better or for worse, one might say. For Jachina’s novel is also a novel about modern manipulation, about the rise of Stalinism, the inscrutability of censorship and the transience of bold successes.

Dream and Defeat: Mexico

And, of course, a novel about the life of this man who, throughout his life, never managed to break free from his bizarre relationship with his mother, who was adored by women and yet was never able to experience with any woman what we call love. Perhaps precisely because he was utterly obsessed with his profession, which he saw as a mission. Except that there was simply no place on earth that could actually offer this genius, tormented by his creative drive, a suitable sphere of activity. Even though in 1930 it looked as though he might find such a place in Hollywood.

It marked the start of a three-year absence from Russia, brought about primarily by the fact that the famous American author Upton Sinclair financed a film project with which Eisenstein – once again – sought to revolutionise the world of cinema. And, in a sense, he did just that. Even though ‘Que viva Mexico!’ is listed as ‘unfinished’ even in the very rudimentary Wikipedia article. This is because Eisenstein and his colleagues had to return to Moscow without the film footage after their frenetic shoot in Mexico. There are, of course, versions of the film produced in America.

But Gusel Yakhina describes very vividly and passionately in her novel how Eisenstein’s films were ultimately only created in the editing room, when he edited together from the mountains of footage those scenes that then formed the actual work of art. A film set in Mexico that Eisenstein himself might have edited would have turned out differently – even more electrifying, that’s for sure.

When the Heart Rebels

But Jachina’s novel also tells of how Eisenstein failed time and again, how his film projects were repeatedly rejected, and how, even with those he was permitted to make, he repeatedly failed – or was forced to fail – due to the inscrutable Soviet censorship. Even though he was awarded the Stalin Prize after *Alexander Nevsky* and *Ivan the Terrible*.

By that point, however, he was already a persona non grata and was shunned. And he was quite rightly afraid of soon falling into the clutches of the GPU (or, by that time, the NKVD) and – like his great role model Meyerhold and his friend Babel – being shot, burned and buried.

But ultimately, he was also terminally ill. His heart was rebelling – even against the material he intended to adapt into a three-part film, having been granted permission by Stalin himself. The grand finale in Yakhina’s book is shaped by Eisenstein’s struggle with the ‘Ivan the Terrible’ material. For, of course, the question smouldered beneath it all: Did Stalin wish to see himself reflected in this sinister tsarist figure? As a role model, even in his merciless brutality? Or would that very thing have spelled certain doom for the famous director? How does one tackle such a sinister historical figure without risking one’s own neck?

How history is twisted

And here something becomes apparent, which Gusel Yakhina recounts almost in passing after a scene in which Eisenstein ridiculed the then still powerful Mosfilm boss Shumyazki (who was shot dead shortly afterwards). For here she discusses, in vivid detail, why Eisenstein’s way of transforming historical material into film corresponds to something that, during the Stalin era, also determined how those in power dealt with history. From afar, George Orwell’s *1984* comes to mind.

For Orwell had scrutinised the workings of Stalinism very closely – including its propaganda and its brazen (yet politically motivated) distortion of history. History was made to fit the narrative.

Or, in Jachina’s words: ‘True art was poison for Soviet history. That was soon realised. The country did not need art, but surrogates, as nourishing as margarine, produced according to all the rules of mass cuisine. Just as Eisenstein did. And if a cook added a pinch of art to the dish, then only in moderation and merely to give it a slightly sharper flavour. Just as Eisenstein did.”

History was tailored to suit; it was even reinvented if it didn’t fit. It wasn’t what had actually happened that counted, but what now flickered across the screens in a grand production. Jachina: “Just as Eisenstein reinvented the leader of the Revolution, so too did he take liberties with its events. He was the first to disregard historical facts in film. To alter them, Sovietise them, reshape them and adapt them.”

And that was not all. For this now-established official falsification of history also included retouching: ‘Twice he cut Trotsky out of episodes of the Revolution, just as a surgeon removes an inflamed appendix and throws it away as medical waste at school. Many now adopted this straightforward surgical technique, for in Soviet culture one could no longer do without butcher’s skills.”

Power and Fear

But Eisenstein also witnessed how ruthless censorship and Stalin’s purges brought an end to the brief era of a creatively effervescent Russia. A time when artists such as Meyerhold, Mayakovsky and Eisenstein were held in high esteem. Yet as Stalin’s grip on power tightened, this era came to an end, giving way to the paralysing period of the ‘purges’, to which anyone could fall victim. Eisenstein was well aware of this; he endured long periods of despair and an inability to work, only to then throw himself manically into the next film project, still driven by the ambition to find new, unprecedented solutions for cinematic expression.

Right up to his work on that ‘Ivan the Terrible’, which would ultimately remain a fragment, officially withdrawn from circulation. The director – had he now fallen out of favour? Would the people from the GPU (or the NKVD) now come to collect him – straight from the premiere to the Stalin Prize?

It is there that Eisenstein suffers his breakdown, with which Gusel Yakhina opens her novel in a visually striking manner and with which she also brings it to a close, before following Eisenstein’s life story with a deeply cynical paean to the ‘ruler’. Which – knowing the present day – cannot be applied solely to Stalin. For Gusel Yakhina quite deliberately dedicates her book to ‘Kazakhstan, the most hospitable of countries’, where she now lives and works.

And she is capable of writing novels like this one, which does not merely recount the shattered life of Sergei Eisenstein, whose heart gives out at the end – when he is just 50 years old. For in this portrayal of Eisenstein, she also reveals the conflicted man and artist who knows full well that he possesses all the talent required to produce for the ‘Great Leader’ precisely the films he desires to glorify his power.

A life of obsession

Yet that is precisely what this small, overweight director cannot do. His heart rebels against it. He feels the abysses opening up before him quite physically – to the point of being completely unable to work. Hardly any author has ever attempted to portray, with such vividness and intensity, the lives of people who, in a dictatorship as transparent as it was unpredictable as Stalin’s, not only tried to survive but also to create art with the quiet determination not to betray themselves in the process.

Even when – like Eisenstein – they reworked historical material until it became an entirely new narrative. Suitable for the cinema, stirring or – as in *Ivan the Terrible* – devastating. And, unfortunately, not at all to the liking of the great censor.

Consequently, the overall picture of this famous director’s life is not only mixed, but downright frustrating over long stretches. Except for the reader, who, alongside Gusel Yakhina, is literally immersed in Eisenstein’s turbulent life, one that was downright obsessed with his work. Here, he becomes a stirring fictional character, for the intensity with which Jachina depicts the stages of his life is the intensity of the narrator, who, with all her storytelling artistry, delves into Eisenstein’s life and empathises with it to such an extent that you yourself become the restless, desperate, euphoric and incorrigible Eisenstein.

Was the famous man’s life really like that? Who knows? Sometimes you need the imagination of an author with such life experience to truly empathise with such a torn existence. And a good translator who can then render the book into German with the same force, as Helmut Ettinger has done.

Gusel Jachina
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*Eisen*
, Kanon Verlag, Berlin 2026, 32 euros.