Dostoevsky and Soviet Film: Visions of Demonic Realism [1 ed.] 0-8014-1882-8

Table of contents :
Contents......Page 8
Preface......Page 10
Part I. Demons behind the Screen......Page 16
Prehistorical......Page 18
1. Shklovsky and Dostoevsky as Demons of Darkness......Page 23
House of the Dead: A Dossier......Page 40
2. Roshal's Socialist Realist Myth......Page 48
Shldovsky and Eisenstein on the New Myths......Page 58
3. Ermler's Pure Art of the Party Line......Page 60
The Problem of the Good Man in Silent Film......Page 62
Revolutionary and Counterrevolutionary Villains......Page 66
Shklovsky and Eisenstein on Ermler......Page 78
Subhistorical......Page 80
Part II. Power and the Exorcism of Genius......Page 82
Ideological......Page 84
4. Eisenstein's Cinema of Cruelty......Page 86
Dostoevsky and Eisenstein's Tragic Aesthetics......Page 88
Confluences......Page 99
Artistic Encounters......Page 103
The Personal Encounter......Page 108
5. Ivan Pyriev: Struggles of a Journeyman......Page 112
Self-portrait of the Auteur......Page 120
Part III. Restrained Polyphony......Page 152
Voices......Page 154
6. Gambles with(in) Socialist Realism......Page 156
The Meek One: Blandness and Humility......Page 157
The Gambler as an International Venture......Page 162
Twenty-six Days in the Life: An Anniversary Film......Page 164
Nasty Story: A Century of Sixties Liberalism......Page 167
The Uncle's Dream: A Note......Page 175
Kozintzev on the Inadequacies of the Ruling Model......Page 177
7. Kulidzhanov's Urbane Dangers......Page 179
Part IV. The Space of Tragedy......Page 192
8. Kozintsev: The Retrospective View......Page 194
FEKS (and Revolutionary Ferment)......Page 196
The Necessity of the Classics......Page 205
King Lear: A Dostoevskian Tragedy......Page 208
Demonic Tragedy......Page 216
The Russian Tradition......Page 227
Demonological......Page 231
Conclusion......Page 234
Appendix A. The Tragic Universe of Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible......Page 238
Appendix B. Eisensteines Notes for a "Chapter on Dostoevsky"......Page 256
Bibliographical Note......Page 266
Filmography......Page 269
Index......Page 274

Citation preview

Dostoevsky and Soviet Film

By the same author

Dostoevsky and Dickens: A Study o f Literary Influence

Dostoevsky and Soviet Film VISIONS OF DEMONIC REALISM

N. M. Lary

Cornell University Press I T H A C A AND L O N D O N

Copyright © 1986 by Cornell University

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, 124 Roberts Place, Ithaca, New York 14850. First published 1986 by Cornell University Press. International Standard Book Number 0-8014-1882-8 Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 86-47645 Printed in the United States of America Librarians: Library o f Congress cataloging information appears on the last page o f the book. The paper in this book is acid-free and meets the guidelines fo r permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines fo r Book Longevity o f the Council on Library Resources.

In memory of M. N. Boborykina and E. N. Heiden

(Dostoevsky knew that their grandmother, also named E. N. Heiden, understood the urgency o f his quest for the all-connecting idea.)

Contents

Preface

9 Part I

1

Demons behind the Screen

Prehistorical Shklovsky and Dostoevsky as Demons o f Darkness House o f the Dead: A Dossier

2 3

17 22 39

Roshal’s Socialist Realist Myth Shklovsky and Eisenstein on the N ew Myths

47 57

Erm ler’s Pure Art o f the Party Line Shklovsky and Eisenstein on Ermler

59 77

Subhistorical

Part II

79

Pow er and the Exorcism of Genius

4

Ideological Eisenstein’s Cinema o f Cruelty

5

Ivan Pyriev: Struggles o f a Journeyman

Part III

83 85 111

Restrained Polyphony

6

Voices Gambles with(in) Socialist Realism

7

Kulidzhanov’s Urbane Dangers

Kozintzev on the Inadequacies of the Ruling M odel

153 155 176 178

7

Contents

Part IV 8

The Space of Tragedy

Kozintsev: The Retrospective View Dem onological

Conclusion Appendix A

233 The Tragic Universe o f Eisenstein’s Ivan the

Terrible Appendix B

193 230

237 Eisenstein’s Notes fo r a "Chapter on Dostoevsky”

255

Bibliographical Note Film ography

265 268

Index

273

Illustrations Photos and Stills

8

131-150

Preface

Lenin said, “For us film is the most important of all arts,” and so So­ viet film was made with a mission. The filmmakers quickly discovered the pow er o f their art. For the revolutionary transformation o f their country they found dynamic images, while they gave the classical Rus­ sian authors new life on the screen. By the time sound film was devel­ oped, they were ready to measure their pow er against Dostoevsky, whose art was dangerous because he argued against certain old ideas that were now articles o f faith for Marxist-Leninist ideology, in particu­ lar, the belief that man could be perfected and the denial that God was a necessary underpinning o f morality. As the leading art of the new age, film faced a dual challenge in regard to Dostoevsky— not only ar­ tistic but also political. The film artists knew there was a multiplicity of visions to explore within Dostoevsky’s work. Whatever Dostoevsky’s later ideological stance, he had been a revolutionary in his youth and he was always a critic of his society. A place had to be found for some of his visions in Soviet culture. The controversy around the first Dostoevsky film, House o f the Dead, in 1932 showed that the possibilities for imaginative exploration were under constraint. The promulgation of Socialist Realism as a doctrine in 1934 further reduced these possibilities, though in the early years opportunities both artistic and political remained, as Grigori Roshal and Fridrikh Ermler found in their films. Socialist Realism was (is) a la­ bel applied to several artistic tendencies. The great and controversial Sergei Eisenstein thought that he could call himself a Socialist Realist. Perhaps the real issue was not Socialist Realism as such but rather

9

Preface w ho controlled the meanings of the term. The director Ivan Pyriev un­ derstood this, and as it happened, his battle for control o f these mean­ ings grew out of rivalry with Eisenstein and was fought on the ground o f Dostoevsky adaptations. In the process Pyriev institutionalized an essentially naturalistic treatment of the novels on the screen, striving to reproduce commonplace views of the Russia o f Nicholas I or Alex­ ander II at the expense o f the new, exceptional, fantastic, emerging re­ ality discerned by Dostoevsky. Pyriev and his followers reduced Dosto­ evsky’s subversiveness to criticism of the ills o f his time and place. Their Dostoevsky was a scissors-and-paste affair, marked by much avoidance and by some interesting tensions. That this major attempt to trim and appropriate Dostoevsky has been recognized as a failure is signaled in recent moves by filmmakers to reenter into imaginative d i­ alogue with him, The felt meanings and insufficiencies o f Socialist Realism are espe­ cially apparent in the filmmakers' encounters with Dostoevsky. Critics under Socialist Realism are more comfortable with the kinds o f realism and even the ideas o f Dostoevsky’s contemporaries and rivals Tolstoi and Turgenev. What Dostoevsky shows about Socialist Realism in film is the loose organizing principle of this study o f artistic encounters. Depending on the material, more particular topics, cinematic or liter­ ary or both, are taken up, including the “visionary" interpretations of Dostoevsky by major film artists, the evidence o f the shadowy screen life o f his controversial novel The Demons in years o f literary suppres­ sion, the film critics’ testimony to the vigorous life Dostoevsky led in his readers’ imaginations, cinematic applications of his models of Rus­ sian experience to interpretations o f the otherwise unimaginable pres­ ent, the pow er o f film to unpack Dostoevsky’s meanings, the pow er of Dostoevsky to suggest extensions o f film language. Film and Dostoev­ sky have served each other well and also serve us here, providing a p e­ culiar, inward, close-up view of Soviet culture. The material assembled for this probing o f the interface of Dostoev­ sky and Soviet film is interesting in its own right and for the questions it opens up. The Russian Formalists are well known as investigators of artistic devices, but it is often overlooked that in their practice they were concomitantly intrigued by “material" and its many uses in art and in criticism for the renewal of perception and understanding. Ma­ terial challenged the organizing principles of art; it could also chal­ lenge the rigidities and blindnesses o f conventions, methodologies,

10

Preface and disciplines. The material I have drawn on and use here includes film adaptations o f Dostoevsky works, two films about Dostoevsky, editing scripts, some literary scripts, a shooting script, film projects, adaptation exercises, theoretical and critical writings, and many auto­ biographical reminiscences. (I have screened all the Dostoevsky films at least once, under excellent conditions, although I regret not hav­ ing had access to an analyst projector, particularly for the study of Ermler’s The Great Citizen and Alexander Alov and Vladimir Naumov’s N a s t y Story.) This materiell merits a catholic approach by readers pri­ marily concerned with film studies, if only because some o f the im por­ tant struggles in Soviet film were fought in cinematically unimportant works and because much o f the story of Dostoevsky in Soviet film un­ folds offscreen. Those whose interest is literary criticism will find some o f the extradisciplinaiy transgressions redeem ed because of the evidence they give o f Dostoevsky’s profound gift o f visualization and also o f his pow er to evade the rulings of censors and the prescriptions of critics. In any event, the material allows some significant artists and critics— Viktor Shklovsky, Sergei Eisenstein, and Grigori Kozintsev— to speak here in their own voices on the subject o f Dostoevsky. Respect for the material does not mean imprisonment by it. One of the tasks o f this book is to uncover that about which the film texts and film project texts are silent. These texts are formed out o f many other texts: Dostoevsky’s works, other literary works, official versions o f preand postrevolutionary history, the daily news, political anecdotes, un­ written biographies, psychosemiotic explorations o f identity. The intertextuality of the film texts and film project texts is a challenge to viewers and readers to draw on experiences o f silence, absence, or contradiction associated with the texts. Often the biggest absence in the film adaptations is in fact Dostoevsky. The awareness of his ab­ sence from Soviet film was one o f the driving forces in Eisenstein’s and Kozintsev’s last projects. The individual filmmakers are considered in roughly chronological sequence according to the date of their first significant involvement with Dostoevsky. Enough background is provided for the more im por­ tant ones to suggest what led them to Dostoevsky and what the conse­ quence o f the encounter was. I do not claim to give a complete view of them or that Dostoevsky was the only literary influence to act on them. Eccentric vision does, however, give insights leading to a shift, and so a renewal, o f understanding.

11

Preface My greatest debt is to Jay Leyda, who ever since w e met when he was teaching at York University has given generously of his time, ideas, books, and friends. His name was a password securing good will and assistance in Moscow, Leningrad, N ew York, and London. My other great debt is to the Soviet scholars and officials who guided me to the necessaiy material and trusted me to use it with respect for the facts, even if my interpretations might be unorthodox. My Soviet friends w ere generous, too, with their ideas and insights. These scholarly and personal debts cannot find adequate acknowledgment in the foot­ notes. I have been fortunate in the institutional support I have received, from York University, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Union of Cinematographers o f the USSR, and the Institute of U.S. and Canadian Studies of the Academy o f Sciences o f the USSR. The Am eri­ can Council of Learned Societies awarded me a grant when my project was still a fishing trip, with no mock-scientific framework to prop it up. The Faculty o f Arts of York University gave me one Minor Research Grant at the start of my work and another toward the end. The Mas­ ter and Members o f Calumet College at York provided significant sup­ port for an exchange with a Soviet scholar, which unfortunately remains only half realized. The Union o f Cinematographers offered much friendly help when I first visited the USSR for research and even more help on a subsequent visit to M oscow as a guest of the union. A third trip to the USSR proved necessary, and William Found, Academic Vice-President, York University, used his good offices in securing an in­ vitation for me from the Institute o f U.S. and Canadian Studies. The in­ stitute and the union did everything possible to make this visit a suc­ cess. Richard Pope, Zbigniew Folejewski, and Stephen Scobie read indi­ vidual chapters and offered many helpful criticisms. Jay Leyda read the text in parts and as a whole; my discussions with him w ere al­ ways a source o f new stimulus. Diana, Tanya, and Anna gave me time, space, and encouragement to think. A year in Victoria, British Colum­ bia, proved unexpectedly profitable, thanks to the work of Howard Bayley, the bibliographer of Russian publications at the University o f Victoria Library, and thanks to the assistance provided by Tracey Czop. The efficient and tolerant Secretarial Services of York University typed m y various final drafts. Sidney Monas put the manuscript into the hands o f the best o f editors. David M iller helped me in the prepa­

12

Preface ration of the manuscript for submission to Cornell University Press and in the reading o f proofs. Judith Bailey gave my text a sensitive final editing. All translations are my own unless otherwise indicated, For access to and use of documents and stills, I am indebted to the Union of Cinematographers o f the USSR, VGIK (the State Institute o f Cinematog­ raphy), TsGALI (the State Archives o f Literature and Art), and the Eisen­ stein Kabinet, in Moscow; the Museum o f Modern Art Film Stills Ar­ chive, in N ew York (which supplied those numbered V -V II, X, and XIV-XX); and the National Film Archive and Zed., Ltd., in London. N ik it a

M. Lary

Toronto

13

PART I

Dem ons behind the Screen Now a large herd of swine was feeding there on the hillside; and they begged him to let them enter these. So he gave them leave. Then the demons came out of the man and entered the swine, and the herd rushed down the steep bank into the lake and were drowned. When the herdsmen saw what had happened, they fled, and told it in the city and in the country. Then people came out to see what had happened, and they came to Jesus, and found the man from whom the demons had gone, sitting at the feet of Jesus, clothed and in his right mind; and they were afraid. And those who had seen it told them how he who had been possessed with demons was healed. Luke 8:32-36

Prehistorical

The story of Dostoevsky in Soviet film begins offscreen, at the Moscow Art Theater, with the dramatizations of The Brothers Karamazov in 1910 and The Demons in 1913, and in the press, with Maxim Gorky's attacks on these productions in the articles "On Karamazovery” and “More on Karamazovery,” published in September and October 1913. In the stage productions Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko tapped the strongest tradition of the Moscow Art Theater— its psychological realism, in distinction to mere naturalism of setting and action— and continued the theater's attack on old and new stage conventions. An act was as long as it had to be; the performance of The Brothers Karamazov stretched over two evenings. In the scene between Ivan and the Devil, the actor Kachalov took on both parts at once; a narrator was introduced as a character. The sets by Dobuzhinsky for The Demons renounced naturalistic detail in favor of suggestive symbolism. The productions obviously could not sat­ isfy all critics; Dostoevsky’s elaborate parallels of structure and doublings of characters disappeared, for example. Nonetheless, the plays demon­ strated how powerful a realist Dostoevsky was in an ordinary if not a "higher" sense.1 Gorky had been particularly struck by the power of The Brothers Kar­ amazov on stage; his articles attacking Karamazovery were an attempt to stop Nemirovich-Danchenko’s work on Nikolai Stavrogin, the play adapted from The Demons. Gorky saw most of Dostoevsky’s characters as reflections of Fedor Karamazov, “an indubitably Russian soul, formless 1.

Concerning the dramatizations and Gorky's attacks, see Vladimir Seduro, Dostoev­

sky in Russian and World Theatre (North Quincy, Mass.: Christopher Publishing House, 1977), pp. 161-86, and Dostoyevski in Russian Literary Criticism, 1846-1956 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1957), pp. 83-93.

17

Demons behind the Screen and motley, simultaneously cowardly and insolent, and above all patho­ logically evil.” Fedor Karamazov was another Ivan the Terrible. Dostoevsky, an “evil genius" and a “cruel talent," was a master at portraying “the sa­ distic cruelty of the completely disillusioned nihilist and its obverse, the masochism of the crushed, frightened creature who maliciously displays his own suffering to everyone and to himself." Dostoevsky preached con­ templation, savagery, barbarism, and social pessimism at a time when man needed to know the way to "democracy, the people, the social consti­ tution, and science,” Readers of the novels were relatively safe since they retained their critical faculties. On stage, however, characters like Stavrogin from The Demons could have an inspirational or hypnotic effect; they could “take possession” of the audience.23Gorky’s attack and the resulting controversy over the production at the Moscow Art Theater stamped Dos­ toevsky, first and foremost, as the author of The Demons. Special prominence was given to the work of the Moscow Art Theater and the writings of Gorky in the Socialist Realist models of Societ art that emerged in the 1930s after the years of revolutionary experiment. In film adaptations the realistic tradition deriving from the theater came to domi­ nate, frequently degenerating into external naturalism but rising on occa­ sion to a successful treatment of psychology. The original force of the tra­ dition could sometimes be felt. The intention of Gorky's pronouncements was to direct adapters away from The Demons; their actual effect was to make this novel the great, if only half-acknowledged, influence on Soviet filmmakers when they turned their attention to Dostoevsky in the 1930s. Interest was further fueled by Gorky’s continuing ambivalent judgments; in 1928 he called The Demons "the most talented and the most evil of all the countless attempts to defame the revolutionary movement of the 1870s.’’J The history of Dostoevsky in Soviet film has origins before the Revolu­ tion, but with the exception of one extremely condensed version of The Idiot (twenty-five minutes long), the artifacts have all disappeared. The big prerevolutionary film merchants were greedy for plots and eager to capi­ talize on the big literary names. Between them the firms of Khanzhonkov, Gaumont, Drankov, Kharitonov, and Ermoliev drew on a wide range of Dostoevsky’s writings: The Landlady, The Insulted and Injured, Crime and Punishment (several times), “The Meek One,” and The Brothers Kara­ 2. The quotations are taken from Gorky's articles as printed in A. A. Belkina, ed„ F. M. Dostoevskii v russkoi kritike (Moscow, 1956), pp. 386-98. 3. “H ow I Learned to Write,” quoted in V. Seduro, Dostoyevski in Russian Literary Criti­ cism, p. 89.

18

Prehistorical mazov. A comparable range of works would again be tackled in film only after Stalin's death (and sometimes for motives like the old one— to cash in on a name). Undoubtedly, some of the old films would be curiosities: a couple of films of Pavel Orlenov in scenes from Crime and Punishment (in­ cluding a 1914-1915 one of Raskolnikov’s confession, with an accompa­ nying gramophone recording). Chardynin's Idiot, the oldest located film adaptation of a Dostoevsky work, conveys a sense of the decadence of Im­ perial Russia. It is doubtful, however, that much of great value was lost; Iosif Soifer in Paris in 1976 was much more concerned to discuss his cur­ rent plans than to try to remember the significance of his seven-reel film The Insulted and Injured from 1915. The one likely exception to this gener­ alization, the one possibly significant film was Iakov Protazanov's Nikolai Stavrogin, with Ivan Mozhukhin in the title role, made in 1915. Nikolai Stavrogin was only one of eleven long and medium-length films turned out by Protazanov in the same year. Nonetheless, he had already given abun­ dant evidence of his talent in these conditions of production, and this was one of his first films with Mozhukhin.4 The important Queen o f Spades (1916) and Father Sergius (1918) still lay ahead. Nemirovich-Danchenko’s stage adaptation was apparently the inspira­ tion for Protazanov's film.5 Neither man attempted to convey the real complexity of The Demons, with its interlocking plots centering on Nikolai Stavrogin, a potential leader and truth seeker. The realist stage could not encompass the dramatic space of the novel: the attempts of Peter Verkhovensky to bind the members of a revolutionary cell through conspiracy and crime; the philosophical discussions between Shatov and Kirilov on the necessity of God versus the sufficiency of an ideology based on man; the psychological exploration of Stavrogin's search for the limits of free­ dom and for an escape from meaninglessness; the whole background of unrest and disintegration, culminating in the industrial strike, the scan­ dalous literary fête and ball, the great fire, and the series of deaths by mur­ der and suicide, The play concentrated on Stavrogin’s story.6It began dramatically with the scene from the book when Stavrogin's secret wife, the half-crazed cripple Maria Lebiadkina, comes up to her mother-in-law at the end of a church service and mysteriously bows down to her. The play hinted at

4 .1. S., "Nikolai Stavrogin i prokuror,” Kinogazeta (Moscow), no. 10 (1918): 51, sees this as one of Mozhukhin's best achievements. 5. According to M. Aleinikov, Iakov Protazanov (Moscow, 1961), p. 70. 6. The following account of the play is based on Seduro, Dostoevsky in Russian and World Theatre, pp. 177-86.

19

Demons behind the Screen Stavrogin's potential revolutionaiy role in a scene between him and Peter Verkhovensky, where the latter acted out some of Stavrogin’s fantasies for him. It showed Shatov's great religious quest and his desperate need for Stavrogin's help in another scene. But the play highlighted Stavrogin’s fragmentary, chaotic relationships and his growing sense of emptiness leading to suicide. (Stavrogin's attempted confession to Father Tikhon could have made a powerful contribution, but the chapter in which it ap­ pears had been suppressed and was not available in 1913.) Drama of this sort lent itself fairly well to the silent screen, as Protazanov subsequently proved in his presentation of a perhaps more tormented character, Tol­ stoi’s Father Sergius. A detailed description of Protazanov’s Nikolai Stavrogin in one contem­ porary review7suggests that it began somewhat more conventionally than the play, with a view of Stavrogin's strange, antecedent life in St. Peters­ burg. As we might expect in a silent film, Shatov's ideas were reduced to what could be shown— his insistence on truthfulness. It is unclear whether Peter Verkhovensky’s revolutionary aspirations were indicated; a scene between him and Stavrogin is mentioned, and in it Protazanov pos­ sibly availed himself of his techniques for showing dreams and fantasies. Both Nemirovich-Danchenko and Protazanov appear to have used the re­ sources of the stage and the silent screen to good effect, while leaving aside the key image of the demons possessing society and the disturbing questions raised by the title and the epigraph: Who is the sick man from whom the demons are expelled: Stavrogin or his mentor, the old liberal Stepan Verkhovensky? The whole Russian people? The Russian land? And who are the demons: Shatov and Kirilov? The revolutionaries? Every­ one? (Alternatively, what are the demons? Are they the ideas possessing men?) And who are the swine into whom the demons enter and who drown in the lake? Protazanov’s film apparently had no direct consequences in Soviet cin­ ema, although the stage production that inspired him made The Demons a continuing influence. The loss of his film is unfortunate, for through its concentration on Stavrogin, it touched on an aspect of Dostoevsky's work that is imperfectly reflected on the Soviet screen: the experience of evil. So­ viet filmmakers in the 1930s drew on other significant aspects of the novel. The image of possession was put to use by the producers and distributors of the belated Formalist film inspired by Dostoevsky's House o f the Dead; they insisted that the film be changed so that Dostoevsky appeared as a man possessed by the dark forces of reaction, branded as the author of 7. Sine-Fono, no, 21-22 (1915): 103.

20

Prehistorical The Demons. An early model Socialist Realist film, Petersburg Night, har­ nessed the utopian dreams of the young Dostoevsky to the vision of revo­ lutionary change he had foreseen in The Demons (but had desperately at­ tempted to counter). In the later Socialist Realist film The Great Citizen, Parts 1 and 2, some modem counterrevolutionaries imitated the con­ spirators in Dostoevsky’s novel. But as will emerge, these and subsequent attempts of filmmakers to contain reality and Dostoevsky in a Socialist Realist dynamic were inadequate; both reality and Dostoevsky were more powerfully subversive, more demonic, than the filmmakers imagined. Only in recent times did a director, the survivor Kozintsev, finally rise to the demonic and tragic vision of Dostoevsky and make of it a space in which his imagination could move.

21

CHAPTER 1

Shklovsky and Dostoevsky as Demons of Darkness

I looked for ways of showing Dostoevsky as a demon of darkness Imrakobesj. . . , His speech at the Pushkin jubilee offered a way. ... By using it together with his friendship for Pobedonostsev, I thought that there was enough material in the existing script to explain Dostoevsky's ba­ sic character. Vasili Fedorov After being squeezed out of literature, Viktor Shklovsky shifted over to the film factory and went jiggling along the road of the demon of dark­ ness of Formalism (formalisticheskogo mrakobesa). His most recent work, which is now being screened in sound-film theaters, shows that our rider is not the least bit weary. S. Marvich The introduction of sound in 1930 posed a particular threat to Soviet film, which had becom e a flexible and individually inflected art. M on­ tage, the basis of silent film, was marked by shifts in camera distance, angle, and object in the shots forming an editing sequence. Powerful effects o f rhythm were achieved from variations in the length o f the film bits when they were spliced together, but speech might subject film to its own distinctive rhythms, and the primitive and cumber­ some recording techniques might demand a return to the static cam­ era. By the time the authorities decided that the challenge o f the “talk­ ies” could no longer be ignored, the opportunity to work out a use of sound that w ould build on the cinema of the past had already been curtailed. In 1928 Sergei Eisenstein, Vsevolod Pudovkin, and Grigori

22

Shklovsky and Dostoevsky Alexandrov had subscribed to the principle that “the first experimental work with sound must be directed along the lines of its distinct non­ synchronization with the visual images."1In that same year, however, the diverse and relatively free experimentation that prevailed during the N ew Economic Policy came to an end. The first Five-Year Plan for the economy (to be fulfilled in four years) was introduced in 1929, and with it came new ideological pressures. The m odernization of the country had to appear in the light of “scientific” necessity; the course of Russian history had to be “rightly" interpreted, directed, and pre­ sented, as did the canon o f acknowledged literature and art. Viktor Shklovsky's script for The House o f the Dead, on which he began work in 1930, was one of several attempts by Soviet filmmakers to extend the traditions of silent film in the newly transformed medium. In the new conditions o f work and production these experiments could not suc­ ceed. The pattern of political and cultural struggle was still unclear in 1930. In society at large suspicion o f non-Bolshevik Communists and other socialists was intensified by internecine Party struggles. In lit­ erature responsibility for conformity was entrusted to RAPP (the Rus­ sian Association of Proletarian Writers), which in 1929 mounted a cam­ paign of criticism against the Formalists, among them Shklovsky, and silenced them as a school. The following year the RAPP critics attacked Dostoevsky and the critics and scholars o f his work; the campaign peaked during the period o f work on House o f the Dead. But all along, as it turned out, RAPP had been but a stalking-horse; in 1932 the Party dissolved it and announced the formation o f the Union of Writers. Film work was directly affected by the literary campaigns as w ell as by the growing Party control over the film industry. Direct interventions by Stalin were having an effect too; an early example o f his interference was his insistence that Eisenstein reshoot the ending of Old and New. Obviously the new uncertainties could be exploited in any organiza­ tion by persons eager to secure positions of power.1 2 Shklovsky— the Futurist theoretician, Formalist critic, factographer, 1. See their "Statement” in Eisenstein, Film Form, ed. Jay Leyda (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1949). 2. See Victor Erlich, Russian Formalism (The Hague: Mouton, 1965); Vladimir Seduro, Dostoyevski in Russian Literary Criticism, 1846-1956 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1957); Richard Taylor, The Politics o f Soviet Cinema (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni­ versity Press, 1979); Yon Barna, Eisenstein (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973).

23

Demons behind the Screen and writer o f experimental autobiographies— occupied a position of considerable influence in the film world. He found ready application for his Formalist ideas in film, particularly his concern to break down habitual motivation, automatic response, and mere recognition and to restore perception and self-consciousness. Film was the new art of the Revolution, and Shklovsky played an acknowledged role in the de­ velopm ent of Soviet film. In books, articles, letters, and conversations he offered useful, generous, sharp critical appreciations and advice to the outstanding young filmmakers, Eisenstein and Grigori Kozintsev among them. He worked on the script for Lev Kuleshov’s important film By the Law (1926), making maximum use of econom y (in both senses) and expressiveness of means. Long before Eisenstein turned to Ivan the Terrible, Shklovsky gave a distinctive conception of this char­ acter in his script for Wings o f a S e rf (1926), filmed by Iuri Tarich, one o f the old school of directors. He readily took on journeyman’s work in these lean years, editing or reediting the films of other men. One film he salvaged was Ivan Pyriev’s Government Official (released in 1930), thus preserving a fine comic performance by Maxim Straukh. All in all, Shklovsky’s work in the cinema displays the same range, scope, and curiosity, as his literary work and the same underlying unity of critical and creative inquiry. It is clear that the idea for House o f the Dead, one of the first Soviet sound films, was Shklovsky’s. Unfortunately, the studio entrusted the shooting of it to a director o f mean talent, Vasili Fedorov. The