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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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A Gloom Descends Upon the Ancient Steps, a novel by Alexander Chudakov (2000)
Rights sold: France - Christian Bourgois (2003), Macedonia - ANTOLOG, Poland - von Borowiecky, Spain - AUTOMATICA, Russia – Olma Press (2001), Vremya (2011), World English rights - Northwestern University Press
2001 RUSSIAN BOOKER Award nominee
2011 RUSSIAN BOOKER OF THE DECADE Awared winner
Set in Chebachinsk, a fictitious town in Northern Kazakhstan inhabited by political exiles, its panoramic narrative focuses on the relationship between Anton, a Moscow historian of the vital “1960s generation,” and his grandfather, a titan of physical and intellectual rigor from a hardy line of Vilnius clerics. The lucid and forthright prose style was described by critics as “clear, rich, glowing with good-natured humor, and free”. The novel’s overall effect is uplifting despite its unflinching presentation of the human toll of Stalinism. Chudakov told Radio Russia that his concern was to show that despite “all that,” Russia in this period actually continued to live a variegated and even positive national life.
In Chudakov’s novel, a series of discrete sketches, scattered reminiscences and barely interconnected episodes create a stunningly vivid image of the past. The novel’s structure is more “modular” than linear. Each chapter contains any number of chronological leaps from the Chebachinsk of about 1968 backward to Anton’s childhood and youth and forward to the present. Portraits of Anton’s family and other figures from various periods of his past are created along the way; many are given chronologically free-ranging chapters all to themselves.
In the novel’s opening, Anton returns to Chebachinsk in about 1968 as an established Moscow historian to visit his maternal grandfather, who is dying at age 93. As he contemplates Grandfather’s great physical vigor, evident even now in his sinewy arms, Anton’s thoughts plunge deep into the past. Grandfather is Leonid, a graduate of a Vilnius seminary, agronomist and director of a weather station. In scattered dialogues, we learn of Grandfather’s conservative, anti-Soviet and anti-statist views on political economy, religion and the arts, views which often bring him into conflict with his son-in-law Pyotr, Anton’s father. Although in many respects a naively loyal Soviet citizen, Pyotr nevertheless quite consciously saved his entire extended family from the repressions in Moscow by volunteering in the late 1930s for engineering work constructing a plant in Northern Kazakhstan. As Anton tours the Chebachinsk of the late 1960s, place after place triggers voluminous reflections on the previous decades. In the main, these reflections recreate the idyllic natural environment of Chebachinsk (“a Kazakh Switzerland”), the material hardships that his family of vigorous intellectuals must overcome there, Grandfather’s demanding program of home schooling for the precocious Anton, Anton’s overall development, and the social consequences of the family’s hard-won relative prosperity.
Chudakov’s novel is an example of both “prose of scholars” and the larger genre of the post-Soviet “memoiristic novel,” though, in contrast with much of the Soviet-period memoiristic literature already available in English, it is not predominantly the story of decent, flawed personalities perishing by the Communist system, but rather the story of decent, flawed personalities negotiating and surviving that system in its many “negative spaces,” its interstices and peripheries, its places of “silence, exile and cunning.”
What survives is not merely — and not always — individuals, but their cultural pattern and values. The novel is thus an extraordinarily concrete, first-hand witnessing of the limits and failure of the Soviet totalitarian project. Chudakov’s novel is a Bildungsroman of a boyhood and youth under totalitarian regime. It should appeal strongly not only to Russia specialists, for whom it will provide an artistic counterpoint to recent historiography of Soviet Russia, but to all readers interested in twentieth-century European history as lived experience.
The major discovery of 2000 for me was the novel by Aleksandr Chudakov, the preeminent literary scholar…. As a rule, the prose outings of famous scholars are indigestible: they are either lifeless philological exercises or flat, leaden chronicles. Chudakov’s book is a different story altogether: This is an authentic memoiristic novel, free of both impenetrably “meta-cerebral” passages and a dreary fixation on the everyday. The book has the sort of natural, human intonation that contemporary prose seemed to have lost long ago.
—Aleksandr Arkhangelsky, Izvestia, Dec. 28, 2000
The best book to come out in Olma-Press’s “Original” series to date. Imagine a small Kazakh town where members of the country’s various ethnic groups and socio-economic strata are forced to co-exist—all during the 1930s to 1950s, with additional elements of late 1950s Moscow university life, plus reflections on this experience from today’s perspective, all of it written in classic, intelligible Russian for a change. In short, plop down on the couch with it, and you’ll find it impossible to put down.
—Unsigned notice in Ex Libris, the literary supplement of
Nezavisimaya gazeta, Dec. 6, 2001
Now this “novelistic idyll” is one of the favorite contenders for the 2001 Booker Prize, with reviewers writing of a striking, authentic and unique type of positive hero.
—B. Kuzminsky, Vecherny klub, Aug. 31, 2001
“GRANDFATHER WAS VERY STRONG….” From the very first line, the novel sets its tone of indirect but uncompromising polemics with our clichéd image of traditional culture as a hothouse of exotic specimens always about to wilt or freeze, and with the image of men and women of traditional values as invariably weak, incapable of making their way in the world, doomed to be victims…. Chudakov’s novel is the story of a man of prodigious physical and moral strength who without lying or compromising manages to maintain his beliefs, his habits, his faith, his encyclopedic knowledge, his aesthetic tastes—to survive and help others survive as well, to his very last breath…. Grandfather’s house is an oasis of creation, common sense and the affirmation of life.
—Andrei Dmitriev, “Snatching Russia Back: A Prose Work That Was One of This Year’s Major Events,”Izvestia, Jan. 10, 2001
The resolving power of Chudakov’s memory is so great, the details of his past so astonishingly well preserved, that what we see here is not just one of his qualities as a writer, but a gift: the gift of long memory.
—Alla Marchenko, Novy mir (2001), № 5, p. 195
Aleksandr Chudakov’s A Gloom Descends… was in my view the major literary event of 2000. In it, a series of discrete sketches, scattered recollections and barely interconnected episodes create a stunningly vivid image of the past. And without editorializing digressions, global generalizations or great scientific discoveries by the main character. It turns out that all it really takes is good taste, an observant mind, attention to detail, a sense of comedy and tragedy, and the understanding that in literature, indirect characterization is far more powerful than direct authorial commentary—and black will emerge of itself as black, white as white, sanity as sanity, and madness as madness.
—Mikhail Edelshtein, Russkaya mysl
(La Pensée Russe) № 4389, Dec. 20, 2001
Chudakov … has defined his book in terms of genre as a novelistic idyll…. It could also be called a poem in the spirit of Hesiod’s Works and Days. Or, recalling Belinsky’s remark that Eugene Onegin was “an encyclopedia of Russian life,” it could be called an encyclopedia of Soviet life: how exiles survived during the Stalin period…. It is a book about the indestructibility of life itself.
—Boris Paramonov, “Russia in Life and in Art”
Broadcast on Radio Liberty, Jan. 1, 2003
Chudakov’s novel—indisputably one of the freest, most noble and most vitally necessary Russian books created since Russia’s liberation from communism—affirms the abiding significance of such simple and elusive values as family and ancestral tradition, labor and culture, mercy and responsibility, freedom and faith, and hope in our future—in our children and grandchildren.
—Andrei Nemzer, “In Memoriam. Aleksandr Chudakov”
Vremya novostei, Oct. 5, 2005
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