Sergei Eisenstein

"The particular problem with Eisenstein’s life is that he’d already said so much about it. He’s completely dominated all approaches to his life, and provided the best, most attractive and seductive account of it imaginable – all those wonderful chapters and phrases in what he called his ‘immoral memoirs’. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Bulgakowa went into the archives and got access to the diaries, which have never been published or made widely available. She used a huge amount of material to provide a kind of corrective view of Eisenstein, and the result is extraordinary – because it just brings you back to the materiality, the everydayness of what life was like. One of the great moments in the book is: how did Eisenstein find out about Freud? Well, he found out about it by reading Leonardo (quite a lot of Freud was available in Russian translation) in 1918 on a tram. He got so excited reading it that he spilt a whole bottle of milk all over himself. This wonderful Freudian moment! An everything moment – like something out of Dr Zhivago. But Eisenstein continued reading – he read the whole thing on that journey. And he went out and read everything he could before Freud was forbidden in 1924. There was a period when Freud was exactly what you would read if you were a keen young disciple of the Revolution . People have forgotten that. Freud ’s writing I think chimed with what people were interested in in Russia: that funny mixture of quite scientific physiological interest allied to the metaphysics of Freud. Exactly. But then of course there was a suppression of psychoanalysis. I think the neurological institute was transformed or closed down in 1924 and from about then it starts being a forbidden subject. By 1928 it’s a very forbidden subject, and seen as a very bourgeois science and part of bourgeois intellectual terrorism. Yes, that too. So time and time again Bulgakowa’s book takes you to the circumstances of Eisenstein’s life. You finish reading with a fantastically renewed sense of: how did he pack so much in? You see how difficult it was, but also what his appetite was for new experiences. It took Bulgakowa to reorientate the whole vision of Eisenstein. It’s an extraordinarily important book."