Speaking about the artistic form of Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein’s film “Ivan the Terrible”, it is important to note some important moments in preparation for filming. All actions related to the visual form of the film were carried out strictly according to the instructions of the director himself: Eisenstein personally chose the scenery and filming locations on location, as well as coordinated the work of the actors and editing. However, the development of the initial scientific and historical stage of the film – the formation of its historical exposition – was in the hands of Stalin, while the director tried to give it justification with the help of artistic interpretation. In this context, Eisenstein’s similar approach to history greatly influenced the symbolic fullness of the film as a whole and made it possible to highlight the features of the main aesthetic trends underlying it – Stalinism and carnivalization – in particular.
Stalin insisted on a truthful portrayal of the image of Ivan the Terrible as a historical representative who had made a progressive turn. This desire was quite justified, because the tradition of false representation of the largest figure of the XVI century was started by noble historians. Quoting the words of A. A. Zhdanov, Stalin claimed that “… the death of Ivan the Terrible did not allow him to finish the plan he had set, and that if he had managed to finish his program, then the period of almost 200 years of turmoil that was between the reign of the Terrible and Peter the Great would not have taken place and after the reign of the Terrible we moved I would like to go to a higher phase of state development” (RGALI. F. 1923. Op. 1. D. 1304. L. 28-29). That is why the historically correct analysis of this image and its embodiment in cinematography was set one of the most important tasks.
Nevertheless, ironically, Eisenstein had to go for a gross falsification of historical events in the second part of the film in an attempt to remake it in connection with the negative review of the Central Committee of the CPSU, which accused the film of its “anti-historicity”. Contrary to reality, in which Grozny lost in the Livonian War, and the country remained devastated, which led to intervention with the civil war, the director wrote in an appeal to Stalin that he was ready to bring the film to “the victorious Livonian war, completing the historical work of Ivan” (RGALI. F. 1923. Op. 1. D. 657. L. 1-2). From the above it seems clear how much influence Stalinism had on Russian culture. The dissatisfaction of the authorities with the second series of the tape fit into the bloody sinister image of the Terrible in it, which was strikingly different from him in the first, where the Russian tsar appeared resolute and progressive – as Stalin wanted him to be. However, during the conversation of the leader, Molotov and Zhdanov with Eisenstein and Cherkasov, at which the fate of the second series was decided and the transcript of which has been preserved, the irritation of the former is clearly felt, since Stalin did not need an antagonist as the main character. “The second series is very squeezed by vaults, basements, there is no fresh air, there is no breadth of Moscow, there is no showing of the people,” Molotov says. – You can show conspiracies, you can show repression, but not only that” (History of Russian cinema 2011. p. 402.).
The negativization of the image of Ivan the Terrible in the second part occurs primarily due to intertextuality. Eisenstein was thinking about the theme of the lonely tsar against the background of his absolute power when he planned the film adaptation of Pushkin’s Boris Godunov. In the end, these motives were reflected in “Ivan the Terrible”. The director chose Pushkin’s high style when writing both the replica and the remarque parts of the script, written in rhythmic prose. From the direct plot parallels, it can be distinguished that both heroes – Boris and Ivan – go to unlimited power “over their heads”, while the conflict, according to a similar scheme, is revealed at three levels: foreign policy, domestic policy and internal. Both in Boris Godunov and Ivan the Terrible, both characters are defeated when faced with the Western threat – Poland and Lithuania, both are at enmity with the ancestral nobility and are experiencing an internal struggle with themselves.
The second intersex reference that can be distinguished in “Grozny” is to Stalin himself. In this sense, it will be important to refer to the ring composition of the film, which is expressed in two weddings for the kingdom – Ivan at the very beginning and a parody with Vladimir at the end. Such a “reversal” of the film’s structure has an obvious symbolic function, where the first series of the tape with a real wedding is perceived as a real ode to Stalin, given his still warm attitude to Eisenstein at that moment.
When, as the second wedding scene, bearing the death of Vladimir Staritsky, it is presented as a debunking of the tsar, in which something personal is already being read. It is curious that in this scene, already essentially symbolic, the director refers to another source – “Rigoletto” by Giuseppe Verdi. The way Euphrosyne, not knowing that she is sending her own son to death, preparing a coup d’etat, about which Vladimir blurts out at a feast in the Alexandrovskaya Sloboda, reminds how in Verdi’s opera Rigoletto hires the duke’s murderer, and unknowingly prepares the death of his own daughter.
The ironic manner in which the Terrible dresses up Staritsky in royal attire, handing him a scepter, barmas and putting a Monomakh hat on his head, opens up the possibility of interpreting the hero’s parody wedding as his election to the kings “for fun.” Such a carnival tradition was especially popular during feasts in medieval times, as M. M. Bakhtin wrote in his monograph “The work of Francois Rabelais and the folk culture of the Middle Ages and Renaissance”. Thus, Eisenstein connects the laughing culture with the bloody theme: the feast of the oprichniks goes on to eliminate Vladimir and the threat in the face of the boyars as a whole: revealing a conspiracy to murder, Ivan turns it against the authors themselves. The terrible grotesquely pretends to humiliate himself in front of the new “tsar”, deliberately leading to the subsequent murder of the temporary imaginary tsar instead of the real one.
If it’s a carnival, then it’s different from the others. A real king never gives up his power, remaining real, sober and vigilant. Vladimir’s march to his death to the Assumption Cathedral is realized in what is known in Sovietization as a “voluntary-compulsory method”: the victim is squeezed from all sides by the oprichniks and pushed in a predetermined direction. Here the detail that Molotov did not like is manifested: both the feast and the murder take place in a closed space, and not in a public square to the laughter of the crowd, according to Bakhtin. The cathedral setting makes Vladimir’s death an even more planned sacrifice. Perversely ruthless, but “fair” stabbing is committed against the background of the frescoes of the Last Judgment, which directly connect Ivan with God. Finally, the “imaginary king” is sacrificed without any prospect of a possible resurrection.
The second part of “The Terrible” was released for public display in 1958, and seven years later Bakhtin published his monograph on Rabelais. However, Russia is certainly not the starting point of the study of carnivalization, although several hints of Russian elements in Bakhtin’s criticism of Renaissance culture justify their application to the Soviet Union. One such example is Bakhtin’s allusion to how the despotic ruler – Ivan the Terrible – usurped carnival rituals for his own worldly purposes. Ivan took the carnival version of the world literally and put it into practice. Carnival ridicule and profanation of the sacred became a reality under Ivan, which is perfectly reflected in the debunking scene. Eisenstein also consciously practices carnivalization with the help of Fyodor Basmanov’s dance disguised as a woman. The entertainment of this action corresponds to the system of artistic genres created by the avant–garde after the revolution – theater, circus, street festivals. Stalin’s culture turned into organized mass demonstrations: Soviet-style elections, political show trials, the Stakhanov movement and “carnival” campaigns to change roles (for example, trips to harvest, when intellectuals do manual work under the guidance of workers).
The combination of such Stalinist and carnival features in the film fits into the Bakhtin concept of a totalitarian carnival, the most important feature of which is its centralized organization of power, which only pretends to be chaotic and natural. The context of Stalin here is confirmed by the fact that both the polyphonic text (and “Ivan the Terrible” with its variable interpretation is it) and the carnival act, although supposedly born in the minds of people, are still directed by a certain “superauthor” – in Bakhtin it is Dostoevsky and Rabelais, in Eisenstein it is Stalin who directed the film follows the historical trajectory he needs.
In this way, the drama of totalitarian Stalinism inherent in the sinister, supposedly unpredictable, but in fact carefully organized and controlled performance turns out to be the key to many artistic constructions in Ivan the Terrible.
Author of the article: Varvara Kartushina
