Translated by Anne Dwyer. PotemkinPress, Berlin and San Francisco, 2001. Xi + 290. Chronology. Bibliography. Notes. Index. $25.00.

MORE than fifty years after his death, Sergei Eisenstein (1898-1948) remains Russia’s most famous film director. Although his filmography is short (only six completed films), the bibliography of works written by and about him and his movies is long indeed. Therefore I approached Oksana Bulgakowa’s new biography, first published in German in Berlin to honor Eisenstein’s centenary, with a degree of skepticism. What could she tell us about Eisenstein that we do not already know from his own autobiography or from reminiscences by Ivor Montagu, Vladimir Nizhnyi, Marie Seton, and Viktor Shklovskii? Or from books and articles by scholars and critics like David Bordwell, Ian Christie, Rostislav Iurenev, Jay Leyda, Herbert Marshall, Leon Moussinac, Richard Taylor, Neia Zorkaia and many, many others?
Through meticulous archival excavation and a thorough knowledge of the voluminous secondary material, Bulgakowa has written the definitive biography of the mercurial director. It differs from previous works both in intention and execution. Although Bulgakowa has founded her scholarly reputation on her theoretically sophisticated and dense analyses of Eisenstein’s films and film theory, she has written is a rigorously traditional biography. Some may argue that this lucid, balanced, and objective biography is too traditional—especially given that its subject is a great avant-garde artist who had a famously complicated life. But I think that the straightforward chronological form is necessary to penetrate the layers of myth, half-truth, rumor, and obfuscation that obscured Sergei Eisenstein during his lifetime as well as in the more than half century since his death.
The Eisenstein that emerges in these pages is not much different from the one we have known: a brilliant, emotionally insecure, narcissistic ‘Renaissance man’ who was as much intellectual as artist. There are, however, many new nuances that arise from Bulgakowa’s extensive research. Particularly interesting is to learn how truly accidental the belated discovery of Eisenstein’s artistic talent was. Despite his protestations to the contrary, he owed much to the influence of his maligned mother, an ambitious artistic dilettante who encouraged him and introduced him to members of Petrograd’s cultural elite when he was in his teens.
It is even more interesting to learn how profoundly apolitical he was. This greatest of Russian revolutionary directors was completely uninterested in the historical drama of his times, not only the ‘Great War’ (until he was inconveniently drafted), but also the revolutions and civil war that followed. Eisenstein’s political disengagement lasted throughout the 1920s. Bulgakowa convincingly demonstrates that his legendary works from this period—Strike, Battleship Potemkin, and October—drew their inspiration not from any sense of commitment to the aims of the revolution but from his single-minded passion for artistic experimentation. As his contemporary critics charged, Eisenstein really was a ‘formalist’ in every sense of the term.
Only later, during the 1930s, did Eisensein become genuinely interested in Marxism. This interest resulted, however, from his restless intellect, certainly not from a sense of social justice. Although he was little concerned with in material possessions, he was not above jockeying for favors, especially with regard to living space and holiday trips. And while he was concerned with the impact of artistic orthodoxy and censorship on his own work, he never evinced any particular empathy for those in the Soviet cultural community who were persecuted or arrested during the purges. This is not to say that Bulgakowa paints a negative or revisionist portrait of the director; his many accommodations with the Stalin regime always seem more naïve than conniving. Art was all that mattered to him.
Also fascinating is Bulgakowa’s account of Eisenstein’s peregrinations through Europe, the U.S., and Mexico, from 1929 to 1932. In the company of his close friend and co-director Grigorii Aleksandrov and his cameraman Eduard Tisse, and an ever-changing cast of admirers and hangers-on, Eisenstein managed to get half-way round the world without any money, banking on his childlike charm and celebrity, as much as his talent. It is arguable that the débacle in Mexico, his encounter with the mercenary and puritanical Upton Sinclair, and the desecration of Qué viva Mexico! shocked and disappointed him as much as anything in his Soviet experience.
This is not to deny that the ‘shelving’ of Ivan the Terrible, part 2, was a terrible blow, one that certainly hastened his death at the age of fifty from a massive heart attack. What Bulgakowa’s story highlights is that Eisenstein truly died alone in 1948, spiritually as well as physically. Unlike other oppressed Soviet artists of his cohort, he had admirers, but no real friends. He cared for no one. This is a well-told cautionary tale that makes an important contribution to the collective biography of a generation. The lack of an index to this richly populated work does a disservice both to author and readers.

DENISE J. YOUNGBLOOD
Department of History, University of Vermont