From that time on, Shostakovich's biography is essentially a catalog of his works. He was left to pursue his creative career largely unhampered by official interference. He did, however, experience some difficulty over the texts (Baby Yar) by the poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko (Yevtushenko, Yevgeny) on which he based his Symphony No. 13 (1962), and the work was suppressed after its first performance. Yet he was undeterred by this, and his deeply impressive Symphony No. 14 (1969), cast as a cycle of 11 songs on the subject of death, was not the sort of work to appeal to official circles. The composer had visited the United States in 1949, and in 1958 he made an extended tour of western Europe, including Italy (where already he had been elected an honorary member of the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, Rome) and Great Britain, where he received an honorary doctorate of music at the University of Oxford. In 1966 he was awarded the Royal Philharmonic Society's Gold Medal.
Despite the brooding typical of so much of his music, which might suggest an introverted personality, Shostakovich was noted for his gregariousness. After Prokofiev's death in 1953, he was the undisputed head of Russian music. Since his own death his music has been the subject of furious contention between those upholding the Soviet view of the composer as a sincere Communist, and those who view him as a closet dissident.
David Brown Richard Taruskin
Additional Reading
Dmitriĭ Shostakovich, Testimony, trans. from Russian, ed. by Solomon Volkov (1979, reissued 1999), is the memoirs of Shostakovich, of uncertain authenticity. A useful study of the music is contained in Norman Kay, Shostakovich (1971). Alexander Werth, Musical Uproar in Moscow (1949, reprinted 1973), is an account of the upheaval surrounding the Zhdanov conference of 1948 and yields valuable insight into the pressures under which Shostakovich had to work. Elizabeth Wilson, Shostakovich: A Life Remembered (1994), is an invaluable compilation of interviews. The most factually reliable short biography in any language is Laurel E. Fay, Shostakovich: A Life (2000). Ian MacDonald, The New Shostakovich (1990), and Allan B. Ho and Dmitry Feofanov (eds.), Shostakovich Reconsidered (1998), are tendentious political interpretations.Richard Taruskin
Eisenstein, Sergey Mikhaylovich
▪ Soviet film director
Introduction
born Jan. 23, 1898, Riga, Latvia, Russian Empire
died Feb. 11, 1948, Moscow, Russia, U.S.S.R.
Russian film director and theorist whose work includes the three film classics Potemkin (1925), Alexander Nevsky (1938), and Ivan the Terrible (released in two parts, 1944 and 1958). In his concept of film montage, images, perhaps independent of the “main” action, are presented for maximum psychological impact.
Eisenstein, who was of Jewish descent through his paternal grandparents, lived in Riga, where his father, Mikhail, a civil engineer, worked in shipbuilding until 1910, when the family moved to St. Petersburg. After studying in 1916–18 at the Institute of Civil Engineering, Eisenstein decided on a career in the plastic arts and entered the School of Fine Arts.
With the outbreak of the Russian Revolution of 1917, he enlisted in the Red Army and helped to organize and construct defenses and to produce entertainment for the troops. Having now found his vocation, he entered, in 1920, the Proletkult Theatre (Theatre of the People) in Moscow as an assistant decorator. He rapidly became the principal decorator and then the codirector. As such, he designed the costumes and the scenery for several notable productions. At the same time, he developed a strong interest in the Kabuki theatre of Japan, which was to influence his ideas on film. For his production of The Wise Man, an adaptation of Aleksandr Ostrovsky's play, he made a short film, “Glumov's Diary,” which was shown as part of the performance in 1923. Soon afterward the cinema engaged his full attention, and he produced his first film, Strike, in 1924, after having published his first article on theories of editing in the review Lef, edited by the great poet Vladimir Mayakovsky. He said there that in place of the static reflection of an event, expressed by a logical unfolding of the action, he proposed a new form: the “montage of attractions”—in which arbitrarily chosen images, independent of the action, would be presented not in chronological sequence but in whatever way would create the maximum psychological impact. Thus, the filmmaker should aim to establish in the consciousness of the spectators the elements that would lead them to the idea he wants to communicate; he should attempt to place them in the spiritual state or the psychological situation that would give birth to that idea.
These principles guided Eisenstein's entire career. In the realistic films that he undertook, however, such a technique is effective only when it utilizes the concrete elements implicit in the action; it loses validity when its symbols are imposed upon reality instead of being implied by it. Thus, in Strike (1924), which recounts the repression of a strike by the soldiers of the tsar, Eisenstein juxtaposed shots of workers being mowed down by machine guns with shots of cattle being butchered in a slaughterhouse. The effect was striking, but the objective reality was falsified.
Possessed by his theory, Eisenstein was bound to succumb often to this failing. Potemkin, also called The Battleship Potemkin, happily escaped it. Ordered by the Central Executive Committee of the U.S.S.R. to commemorate the Revolution of 1905, the film, made in the port and the city of Odessa in 1925, had a momentous impact and still remains among the masterpieces of the world cinema. (In 1958 it was voted the best film ever made, by an international poll of critics.) Its greatness lies not merely in the depth of humanity with which the subject is treated, nor in its social significance, nor in the formal perfection of its rhythm and editing; but rather, it is each of these magnified and multiplied by the others.
Having by this accomplishment earned recognition as the epic poet of the Soviet cinema, Eisenstein next made a film entitled October, or Ten Days That Shook the World, which in the space of two hours dealt with the shifts of power in the government after the 1917 Revolution, the entrance on the scene of Lenin, and the struggle between the Bolsheviks and their political and military foes. If the film was sometimes inspired, it was also disparate, chaotic, and often confused.
Also uneven, but better balanced, was Old and New (originally titled The General Line), filmed in 1929 to illustrate the collectivization of the rural countryside. Eisenstein made of it a lyric poem, as calm and as expansive as Potemkin had been violent and compact.
In 1929, putting to profit a visit to Paris, he filmed Romance sentimentale (Sentimental Melody), an essay in counterpoint of images and music. Engaged by Paramount studios in 1930, he left for Hollywood, where he worked on adaptations of the novels L'Or (“Sutter's Gold”), by Blaise Cendrars, and An American Tragedy, by Theodore Dreiser. Refusing to modify his scripts to meet studio demands, however, he broke the contract and went to Mexico in 1932 to direct Que viva Mexico!, with capital collected by the novelist Upton Sinclair.
The film never was completed. After disagreements between Eisenstein and Sinclair, some of the negatives were sold and released as the films Thunder over Mexico, Eisenstein in Mexico, and Death Day (1933–34). In 1939 a fourth film, entitled Time in the Sun, was made from the footage. None of these films bears more than a distant resemblance to the original conception.