Natasha's Dance полностью

you have to show why he had to be cruel. One of Ivan the Terrible's mistakes was to stop short of cutting up the five key feudal clans. Had he destroyed these five clans, there would have been no Time of Troubles. And when Ivan the Terrible had someone executed, he would spend a long time in repentance and prayer. God was a hindrance to him in this respect. He should have been more decisive.¹⁶²

Part Two of Ivan was banned by Stalin, but Eisenstein was permitted to resume production on Part Three on the understanding that he incorporate approved material from the previous film in it. On Stalin's instructions, he even promised to shorten Ivan's beard. At a screening of Part Two at the State Institute of Cinema, Eisenstein gave a speech in which he criticized himself for the 'formalistic deviations' of his film. But he told his friends that he would not change his film. 'What re-shooting?' he said to one director. 'Don't you realize that I'd die at the first shot?'¹⁶³ Eisenstein, who had never lacked bravura, was evidently preparing an artistic rebellion, culminating in the confession scene of the film's third and final part, a terrifying commentary on Stalin's madness and his sins:

Tsar Ivan bangs his forehead against the flagstones in a rapid sequence of genuflections. His eyes swim with blood. The blood blinds him. The blood enters his ears and deafens him. He sees nothing.¹⁶⁴

When they shot the scene the actor Mikhail Kuznetsov asked Eisenstein what was going on. 'Look, 1,200 boyars have been killed. The Tsar is "Terrible"! So why on earth is he repenting?' Eisenstein replied: 'Stalin has killed more people and he does not repent. Let him see this and then he will repent.'¹⁶⁵

Eisenstein took inspiration from Pushkin, whose own great drama Boris Godunov had served as a warning against tyranny in the wake of the suppression of the Decembrist revolt by Tsar Nicholas I. But there is a deeper sense in which his brave defiance as an artist was rooted in the whole of the Russian humanist tradition of the nineteenth century. As he explained to a fellow director, who had pointed out the connection to Boris Godunov:

'Lord, can you really see it? I'm so happy, so happy! Of course it is Boris Godunov: "Five years I have governed in peace, but my soul is troubled…" I could not make a film like that without the Russian tradition - without that great tradition of conscience. Violence can be explained, it can be legalized, but it can't be justified. If you are a human being, it has to be atoned. One man may destroy another - but as a human being I must find this painful, because man is the highest value… This, in my opinion, is the inspiring tradition of our people, our nation, and our literature.¹⁶⁶

Eisenstein did not have enough strength to complete his film. The heart attack had crippled him. He died in 1948.

The Leningrad to which Akhmatova returned in 1944 was a shadow of its former self. For her it was a 'vast cemetery, the graveyard of her friends', Isaiah Berlin wrote: 'it was like the aftermath of a forest fire - the few charred trees made the desolation still more desolate'.¹⁶⁷ Before the war she had been in love with a married man, Vladimir Garshin, a medical professor from a famous nineteenth-century literary family. He had helped her through her son's arrest and her first heart attack in 1940. On Akhmatova's return to Leningrad she was expecting to be with him again. But when he met her at the station there was something wrong. During the siege Garshin had become the chief coroner of Leningrad, and the daily horror which he experienced in the starving city, where cannibalism became rife, stripped away his sanity. In October 1942 his wife had collapsed from hunger on the street and died. He had recognized her body in the morgue.¹⁶⁸ When Garshin met Akhmatova at the station, it was only to tell her that their love affair was over. Akhmatova returned to the Fountain House. The palace had been half-destroyed by a German bomb. Her old apartment had large cracks in the walls, the windows were all smashed, and there was no running water or electricity. In November 1945, her son Lev came to live with her, having been released from the labour camp to fight in the war, and he resumed his studies at the university.

During that same month Akhmatova received an English visitor. In