Valerian Bogdanov-Berezovsky told me of a conversation with the sixty-two-year-old Eikhenbaum in 1948, after the music of Prokofiev and Shostakovich had been denounced for formalism. Strolling outside of town, Eikhenbaum drew Bogdanov-Berezovsky’s attention to a complicated cobweb. “Here is the symbol of a composer’s work! What fantastic mastery, what subtle calculation! What painstaking, exhausting work! But all it takes is a hostile storm, and there won’t be a trace left. That is the composer’s lot.”
Eikhenbaum’s pessimism was understandable: many of the works by Prokofiev and Shostakovich had been banned, and it seemed that the ban would endure. With far-reaching limitations on many areas of cultural and spiritual life, the atmosphere seemed unbearable, and the old Petersburgers were certain that they would not live to see better days.
When Eikhenbaum was fired from his post as dean at Leningrad University, he wrote in his diary, “I’m through, thank God, with the department. I should finish up with life, too, really. Enough, I’m weary. Only curiosity is left: what else will history come up with and how will it laugh at me?”9 Lydia Ginzburg confirmed that the general feeling among the Leningrad elite in that period of total repression (1946-1953) was one of doom: “It came from the repetition (no one expected a repetition), from the horror of recognition of a model that had therefore not changed. As someone put it then, ‘It used to be a lottery, now it’s a queue.’”10
The head of that queue was eventually reached by the pride of Leningrad’s culture, the world-famous Lenfilm studios. In the early 1950s Lenfilm was practically shut down on Stalin’s orders. For the studio’s workers this was doubly shocking and unfair, since it had seemed that if there was anything at all that Stalin did like in Leningrad’s culture, it was Lenfilm.
“Of all the arts the most important for us is film.” This was said by Lenin, but it was Stalin who made Soviet film a powerful and effective political weapon. In the cultural sphere—according to writer Konstantin Simonov, who knew the leader’s tastes well—Stalin “did not program anything as consistently and thoroughly as future films, and this program was tied to contemporary political goals.” Stalin often met with leading Soviet filmmakers, proposing ideas for films (which, naturally, were instantly made), attentively read and edited screenplays, actively participated in the discussion of completed works, and generously rewarded their authors if he felt they deserved it. In this sense Stalin was like a Hollywood mogul, but with the fundamental difference that a mogul could only cut off an actor’s salary, while Stalin could take off his head as well.
The all-powerful Kremlin producer watched the work of Lenfilm with avid interest. Before the revolution 90 percent of the Russian industry had been concentrated in Moscow. Filmmaking in Petrograd was created—almost from scratch—by the efforts of immensely gifted outsiders: the Jews Grigory Kozintsev, Leonid Trauberg, and Fridrikh Ermler and the Karaite Sergei Yutkevich. Through them, Lenfilm developed a style that was eccentric and daring despite a tendency to stylistic excess; but the studio also had an opportunistic bent and willingly acceded, though admittedly under increasing pressure, to every whim of the Party and of Stalin.
Lenfilm’s first headquarters were in the former Aquarium, a popular
For all that, the atmosphere at Lenfilm, especially in the early years, was rather heady. The studio worked as a single group, a “collective of committed individualists,” as it was sometimes called. Their first important models were American serials and German expressionist films. The complex system of training silent-film actors developed at the Factory of the Eccentric Actor (FEKS), founded by Kozintsev and Trauberg, was put to use by them in the film
As Trauberg recalled, “We didn’t know how to do anything, we didn’t know anything, but we dealt cruelly and joyfully with the city of Blok.”12 The authors insisted that
