This Thing of Darkness: Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible in Stalin's Russia by Neuberger Joan (review)

Abstract

SEER, 98, 2, APRIL 2020 370 Elphick finds in the music, his Weinberg emerges as a resilient figure. Like Witold Lutosławski, a Polish contemporary Weinberg reportedly considered ‘one of the greatest musicians of our century’ (p. 203), Weinberg helps to exemplify the diversity of post-traumatic aftermaths behind the Iron Curtain. Not to suggest Elphick’s study does not capture the intensity of Weinberg’s life experiences. The fifth and most poignant chapter in the book, ‘Return and Retreat’, documents the composer’s single return visit to Poland as part of a Soviet delegation attending the 1966 Warsaw Autumn Festival. Two body blows ‘shattered his illusions of his lost homeland’ (p. 175) on this trip: learning the exact fate of his sister and parents (who perished in the Trawniki labour camp), and being shunned by most Polish composers, who knew little of his work. The former is tragic, the latter ironic. At the time of Weinberg’s visit, many Polish composers were beginning to consider a rapprochement between the avantgarde experimentation of their post-Stalinist period and earlier traditions. The fruits of Weinberg’s reactionary modernism offered templates for such music — as the composer himself could be read to suggest, albeit inadvertently, in his ‘Word to My Polish Friends’ (1969), which Elphick translates in full (pp. 271–73). Weinberg suggested that ‘common ideals and similar creative tasks’ for Polish and Russian composers amount to a ‘solidarity of the artists’ — ‘a great force in our complex but remarkable era’ (p. 203). Elphick’s fine study invites one to revaluate such complex commonalities. Royal Northern College of Music Nicholas Reyland Neuberger, Joan. This Thing of Darkness: Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible in Stalin’s Russia. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY and London, 2019. xvii + 404 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $48.95: £40.00. Joan Neuberger notes that, at least in the United States, Sergei Eizenshtein’s Ivan the Terrible ‘has been relegated, for the most part, to the museum of film studies: acknowledged as a masterpiece but rarely watched in general film history classes’. One of her objectives in writing this book is to make Ivan ‘watchable and watched again’ (p. 7). If inclusion into an American film history course is an indicator of success to the author, then her criteria for evaluating the impact of a film is surely in dire need of reconsideration. As for making the movie ‘watched again’, in this case the aim of an academic monograph, however worthy, certainly exceeds its possible reach. The author need not overly worry about the continuing reception of Ivan the Terrible, because for filmgoers interested in Eizenshtein’s oeuvre, or more generally, Russianlanguage films of the Soviet era, Ivan the Terrible remains vital. REVIEWS 371 Despite the rather maladroitly expressed goals of the author, the fine monograph under review is an excellent addition to both Eizenshtein studies and to studies of Stalin-era Soviet films. If only Neuberger had revised much of her overwritten and repetitive introduction, though. Neuberger spends rather too much time engaging in long historiographical asides on the reception of the film by various scholars which really belong in the endnotes. Nor does she have to demonstrate to anyone the seminal, ‘radical’ qualities of either Ivan the Terrible, or its director; generations of moviegoers and films scholars have long celebrated the film as a masterpiece. Ivan the Terrible (part one released in 1945; part two in 1958; part three was unfinished at Eizenshtein’s death in 1948) is an extraordinary film; the story of its production, during the Second World War is itself astonishing. With the Soviet Union facing a war of extermination against the Germans, Eizenshtein was in Kazakhstan working hard to complete his study of the reign of Ivan IV. Alternatively, the film can be seen as his attempt to understand Stalin’s violent transformations of Soviet society. Eizenshtein’s collaboration in creating Ivan with figures such as Sergei Prokof´ev constitutes merely an aspect of the complex vicissitudes of the production process, from literary scenario to ‘director’s script’ to filming and laborious editing, splendidly detailed by the author in her first chapter, ‘The Potholed Path’. The remaining chapters of the book analyse...