Gothic Ivan the Terrible in the 1920s: Iurii Tarich’s Wings of a Serf and the Curious Case of Ignatii Stelletskii

Abstract

The article centers on close readings of Iurii Tarich’s little studied film Wings of a Serf (1926) and the life and times of the archaeologist Ignatii Iakovlevich Stelletskii (1878–1949), who obsessively sought to discover the legendary library of Ivan the Terrible, thought to lie concealed beneath the Moscow Kremlin. These examples show the peculiar fascination of early Soviet audiences with the tsarist past in its most extreme expressions of violence and cruelty. The alluring, frightening early Soviet Ivan the Terrible demonstrates post-Revolutionary society’s queasy sense that the excesses of the old regime threatened to reemerge in the new, Soviet era. The conclusion of the article considers how the Stalinist period, both in its unprecedented bloodshed and violence and in its positive myth of Ivan the Terrible as a great leader despite his cruelty, fulfilled this fearful anticipation in ways that could not have been foreseen in the 1920s. This macabre return of a superseded past undergirded the one Stalinist representation of Ivan to revisit the 1920s Gothic image of the tsar, Sergei Eisenstein’s ambivalent portrayal of despotic power and violence in his uncompleted film trilogy Ivan the Terrible (1942–1944).