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Eisen, a novel by Guzel Yakhina (2025)
Rights sold: Azerbaijan - QANUN, Croatia - HENA, Czech Republic - PROSTOR, Estonia – TANAPAEV, France - NOIR SUR BLANC, Germany - KANON VERLAG, Hungary - HELICON, Italy - E/O, Netherlands - QUERIDO, Poland - NOIR SUR BLANC, Romania - HUMANITAS, Russia - AST, Serbia - LAGUNA, Spain - ACANTILADO, Turkey - ALFA, World English - EUROPA EDITIONS UK/USA, World Arabic - RASHM
Sergei Eisenstein remains among the most famous and revered figures in the history of world cinema. His masterpieces Battleship Potemkin, October, ¡Que viva México!, Ivan the Terrible, and the destroyed Bezhin Meadow, have been vigorously studied and became – along with most of Eisenstein’s theoretical writings – an integral part of the programs of all film schools. Naturally, anyone who pretends being a cinema connoisseur has at least once seen one or two of Eisenstein’s movies.
Eisenstein, who was a famous movie director and theorist, wrote a lot about the art of cinema, about himself and his contemporaries, and left after himself a huge archive of drawings and diaries, thus reliably fixing his place in history. However, Sergei Eisenstein has never been a main hero of any work of literary fiction. Guzel Yakhina's novel is the first literary biography of the legendary director whom his closest friends nicknamed Eisen.
Yakhina tells Eisenstein's personal story through the process of making films, from the first to the last; the movements of his artistic soul, the conflicts and other circumstances that shaped Eisen's personality are examined through the prism of the his main passion, and masterfully woven into a vivid fabric of artistic text.
Eisenstein's creative process is the nerve of her narrative covering his entire life against the backdrop of wars and revolutions that shook the world in the first half of the 20 century. The people surrounding Eisen – his family, colleagues, women, bosses, actors, – are all involved in his mono-performance. Yakhina’s protagonist seeks and finds ways to always remain in the center of attention, to evoke strong feelings he so desperately needs; he manipulates the emotions of both his loved ones, and of the audience.
A literary biography created by Yakhina not only explores the nature of Eisenstein’s personality and genius. By bravely expanding the boundaries of her narrative, she analyzes the nature of art in a totalitarian state. Eisenstein reaches the pinnacle of self-expression by subjugating History, which is exactly what the young Soviet state demanded: to give the masses a new History that would replace the old, outdated one. Having once discovered the main secret of cinema and other visual arts, – “people believe what we show on the screen, so what we show eventually converts into the truth”, – Eisen develops and perfections his own artistic method consisting in triggering a strong emotional response in his viewers, and ingeniously realizes the concept of art under totalitarianism, replacing critical perception of reality by an invented, cinematic reality. According to Yakhina, the price paid by Sergei Eisenstein for this secret knowledge, for the power he gained over the audience, and for resulting world fame is quite similar to that of Dr. Faustus's.
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The Underground, or a Hero of Our Time, a novel by Vladimir Makanin (1998)
Rights sold: France - Gallimard, Germany - Luchterhand, Greece - Kastaniotis, Italy - Jaca Book, the Netherlands - De Arbeiderspers, Norway - Cappelen Damm, Romania - POLIROM, Russia - Vagrius, Slovenia - Cankarjeva založba, Turkey - Everest
Underground chronicles, in first-person narrative, a homeless 50-something nonwriting writer’s wanderings through mental and physical corridors that he compares to life itself. Petrovich apartment-sits for residents of a dormitory-like building, drinks quite a bit, and twice commits murder. The first half of this 550-page book felt like baggy, linked, almost stream-of-consciousness stories, but the second half read like a suspenseful and emotional novel, in chapters. I got so caught up in the end that I had a strange, dazed feeling when I finished.
Makanin builds much of Underground around references to Russian literature, which Petrovich claims as a key value, though I don’t seem to recall him reading much. The title refers to Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground plus Lermontov’s Hero of Our Time. Petrovich certainly is an underground, intelligentsia, superfluous poster guy for the perestroika era, someone with a lot of “I” but no set home, job, or apparent value to society. Makanin opens the book with an epigraph from Lermontov, the famous line saying that his character’s portrait is a composite.
Petrovich likens himself and an old friend – a writer-double who is successful in the West – to a fable about a wolf with its freedom and a well-fed dog wearing a collar. Petrovich, of course, is the free wolf, and a proud Undergrounder, too. According to Petrovich, “The Underground is society’s subconscious.” Petrovich traces the Underground and his own intellectual heritage to Russia’s hermit monks, émigrés, and dissidents. Makanin also used an underground theme in Escape Hatch: a man crawls through a hole between above- and below-ground worlds.
Petrovich’s preference for the Underground fits with Mikhail Bakhtin’s discussion of Dostoevsky’s Underground Man in Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, where he writes that the dominant aspect of the Underground Man is self-consciousness. Petrovich’s goal, even in killing, is always to preserve his “I”, which he also calls his "living place".
The combination of gritty, naturalistic details and literariness makes the book feel hyperreal and symbolic or allegorical. Petrovich’s breakdown in a homeless shelter is particularly scary in both real and symbolic ways, with its monosyllabic shrieks, Vietnamese neighbors jumping on him, and extreme existential distress.
Petrovich ends up in the same hospital as his brother Venya, another double of sorts. Venya is an artist who represents the brothers’ childhood; he has spent most of his adult life in the hospital and reverts to childhood behaviors when he has a day out. More allusions? The name Venya reminded me of Venedikt Erofeev’s Moscow to the End of the Line, with its introspection and drinking, and it may be unintentional, but one of the hospital episodes churned up distant memories of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Another: the chapter on Venya’s day of freedom refers to the title One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.
Lisa Hyden,
read full review here: http://lizoksbooks.blogspot.com/2009/09/wandering-lifes-corridors-in-makanins.html
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