Ivan the Terrible Archives

Secrets of the Crypt

by Carolyn Pouncy

Everyone loves to be proven right, but novelists don’t often expect it—especially five hundred years after the period where their books are set. After all, that’s half the fun of writing and reading fiction: filling in the gaps left by the historical record. So to have a set of novels that explore the relationship between Russians and Tatars in the sixteenth century twice intersect with contemporary developments is surprising.

The first conjunction, as I wrote on this blog last summer, involved the publication of my Winged Horse in the same month that Vladimir Putin decided to annex Crimea. That might be considered a historical accident. The second overlap is quite different: as I discovered not long ago, twenty-first-century science supports my imaginary past in a remarkable way.

First, a brief review of the history. After Grand Prince Vasily III died late in 1533, the situation in Russia deteriorated fast. The hand-picked council of guardians Vasily appointed was pushed aside within months by his widow, Elena Glinskaya. Despite threats from without and within, Elena maintained a shaky hold on power until her sudden death in April 1538 left the country under the nominal authority of her seven-year-old son, the future Ivan the Terrible. Several aristocratic clans, most notably the Shuisky and Belsky princely families, battled to control the young grand prince until 1547, when he married and was crowned as Russia’s first tsar.

Grand Prince Vasilii III of Moscow and Elena Glinskaia, 1526. Public domain (created before 1916) via Wikimedia Commons

Grand Prince Vasily III of Moscow and Elena Glinskaya, 1526 (via Wikimedia Commons)

Because Elena was no more than thirty when she died, the gossips had a field day speculating about the cause of her death. Even before that, Elena’s morals, or lack thereof, had attracted considerable attention, inside and outside Muscovy. Rumors included assertions that her chief adviser, Ivan Telepnev, had fathered her two sons during her husband’s lifetime, that he retained his status as her lover after Vasily’s demise, and that she had hired Sami shamans to ensure successful pregnancies with these children of questionable heritage.

Once Elena usurped a role normally reserved for men, the hostile whispers intensified. The campaign that she and Telepnev waged against her two brothers-in-law and her uncle Mikhail fed the flames, especially after the brothers-in-law and uncle died in captivity between August 1536 and December 1537. A mere four months passed between the death, reputedly by starvation, of the younger brother-in-law and Elena’s demise.

The favorite story about her death involved her having been poisoned by the Shuisky clan, whose leader Vasily promptly clapped Telepnev in irons and within three months had married a cousin of the young grand prince, a classic power move that indicated possible self-positioning for a grab at the throne. But there has never been concrete evidence that a murder took place. When a group of twentieth-century scientists excavated the bodies of Elena and other royal figures—including Ivan the Terrible’s first wife, Anastasia, also rumored to have died from poison—they found high levels of dangerous substances such as mercury and arsenic. But because mercury was used in medicines at the time and arsenic in cosmetics, the scientists refused to confirm the poisoning hypothesis.

As a historian, I hesitate to charge actual historical figures with a crime without clear proof of guilt, even in a novel and five centuries after the fact. Nevertheless, in the absence of evidence novelists do get to invent plausible explanations, so long as they confess their sins at the end. And nothing spices up a novel faster than romance and murder. So in The Shattered Drum (Legends of the Five Directions 5: Center) I invented an elaborate plot that played on all the rumors about Elena’s affair with Telepnev, her death, and the clan politics surrounding it, then assigned the implementation to a trio of fictional characters representing the opposing sides. The novel came out last summer, and I chalked it up as complete and moved on to the next, which incorporates another recent discovery: spy chambers in what was then the outermost wall surrounding Moscow.

<Image: Elena Glinskaya: Forensic facial reconstruction by S. Nikitin, 1999. By Shakko CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons>

Elena Glinskaya: Forensic facial reconstruction by S. Nikitin, 1999 (photo credit: Shakko CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons)

Then I learned that the story was not, in fact, over. A group of Kremlin Museum scientists has re-exhumed the bodies of the various grand princesses once buried in the Ascension Cathedral in the Kremlin. They published their results, almost all of which are fascinating when disentangled from the minutiae of archaeological recording—especially in reference to Elena Glinskaya.

Most notably, the plot point that I considered the most outrageous—that Elena not only had an affair with Telepnev but became pregnant with his child, a scandalous development for a woman whose husband had died four years before—turns out to be well within the realm of possibility. The contemporary scientists discovered that, as noted above, Elena’s bones contained high levels of mercury and arsenic. In addition, they found formations in her skull that suggested she had ingested poisonous mushrooms. But her bones also contained unusually low levels of iron, which the scientists attributed to her having suffered a massive hemorrhage not long before her death—probably in childbirth. Indeed, two infant bones were found in her sarcophagus: the tibia of a newborn or infant not more than two months old, and the other an upper jawbone of a six-month-old.

There were other strange objects in the sarcophagus: broken pottery and the bones of pigs and cattle. The scientists didn’t explain these, anymore than they explained the presence of bones from two infants. But they did conclude, quite emphatically, that Elena died of mercury poisoning and that not long before she died she bore a child—fathered, they assume, by Ivan Telepnev. They don’t identify the culprits in her murder, but if we apply the principle of cui bono (who benefits), it doesn’t look good for the Shuisky clan.

It’s a cliché to say that truth is stranger than fiction, but clichés become clichés for a reason. I like to think my solution is a little more elegant, although you’ll have to read the novel to find out what that is. But the astonishing part is to discover that something I’d written off as pure invention has a basis in truth after all.

And oh yes, the scientists think Anastasia died of mercury poisoning as well. Maybe I’ll write that novel, too, one day. But if I do, I’ll be very careful about what I make up.

Originally posted as “Person or Persons Unknown,” on the Blog of the NYU Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia (December 19, 2018).

Carolyn Pouncy, the managing editor of Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, writes fiction set in sixteenth-century Russia under the pen name C. P. Lesley.

Eisenstein’s “Ivan the Terrible” in Stalin’s Russia

By Joan Neuberger

At the beginning of 1941, Sergei Eisenstein was feeling defeated. Three years had passed since he had completed a film and, on January 2, the great Russian film maker confided to his diary that he felt like his broken-down car, lethargic and depressed. A few days earlier, tired of waiting for the film administration to approve his latest proposal, he had written directly to Joseph Stalin, requesting him to intercede. When the phone rang on January 11, it was Andrei Zhdanov, secretary of the Central Committee and member of the Politburo’s Committee on Cinema Affairs, calling to say that no one was interested in his most recent pitch, but that they should meet to discuss the film Stalin wanted him to make. We don’t know exactly what was said at that meeting, but immediately afterward Eisenstein began reading and thinking and jotting down ideas about Ivan the Terrible, the tsar who ruled Russia in the sixteenth century. By January 21, the possibilities for a film on Ivan had captured his imagination and would not let him go. Eventually, he would fill more than a hundred notebooks with ideas related to the film and finish two books of film theory and one 800-page memoir deeply imprinted by his experience of making it. He was writing about Ivan the Terrible when he died, at age fifty, only seven years later.

In commissioning a film about Ivan the Terrible, Stalin expected Eisenstein to celebrate Ivan as the first tsar, a progressive and visionary leader, and the founder of a unified, centralized, modern Russian state. What made it tricky is that Ivan the Terrible, like Stalin himself, was infamous for carrying out a ruthless campaign of terror against the people he ruled. Everyone expected Eisenstein to make a film that justified Ivan’s violence as necessary for defeating those who opposed him in founding and protecting the new state. Stalin, who didn’t like surprises, got much more than he bargained for. Eisenstein’s film ranged far from the official commission and was controversial even before it hit the screen. Ivan the Terrible was not only a shrewd critique of Stalin and Stalinism, it also raised profound questions about the nature of power, violence, and tyranny in contemporary politics, and in the history of state power more broadly. Eisenstein’s film used Ivan’s story to examine the psychology of political ambition, the history of absolute power and recurrent cycles of violence. It explores the inner struggles of the people who achieved power as well as their rivals and victims.

Eisenstein worked on Ivan the Terrible for five years, from January 1941 to February 1946, completing only two-thirds of a projected three-part film. Part I of the trilogy was completed in December 1944 and went into general release in early 1945; Part II was submitted in February 1946; it was banned in March and only released in 1958; Part III remained incomplete at Eisenstein’s death in February 1948, but the screenplay, some footage, and many of his notes have survived.

Ivan the Terrible took so long to make because production was repeatedly postponed by the second World War. A few months after receiving the commission, on June 22, 1941, Eisenstein’s work on the screenplay was interrupted when the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union. As Artistic Director of the Moscow Film Studio (Mosfilm), he was immediately put in charge of producing morale-lifting films and dealing with supply, personnel, and production problems brought on by the war and the nightly bombing raids that began in July. As German troops moved close enough to threaten Moscow, most of the population of the capital, including its entire film industry, was evacuated to Alma Ata (Almaty) in Kazakhstan. It took another year for negotiations over the screenplay and the casting to conclude, and filming itself didn’t begin until April 1943.

Ivan with Anastasia's corpse in her bedroom surrounded by icons and tapestries. drawing by SM Eisenstein for Ivan the Terrible

“Ivan decides to completely annihilate the feudal landlords” Drawing by S. M.Eisenstein

During the long months of waiting, Eisenstein read hundreds of books, filled dozens of notebooks with ideas, and made thousands of drawings. In addition to the story-boards, he drew his memories of other times and places, illustrations of the books he was reading, caricatures of his colleagues and friends, and sexually explicit fantasies and satires. Despite the often inhuman forms represented in his story boards, Eisenstein insisted that his actors reproduce the poses he envisioned and hold those poses for hours at a time. He was famous for his ability to use pranks and jokes to defuse tension on the set, but not all the actors loved the demanding physical workout Eisenstein required.

Camera operator Andrei Moskvin and Sergei Eisenstein on the set of Ivan the Terrible

Once underway, Eisenstein took his time, as meticulous as he wanted to be and determined to make the film he wanted to make. He worked closely with his brilliant cameraman, Andrei Moskvin, his lead actor, Nikolai Cherkasov, and the renowned composer, Sergei Prokofiev, who wrote the score, all of whom shared his willingness to risk making the transgressive film Eisenstein had in mind.

For many viewers, the result was alienating and difficult to understand. American critic Pauline Kael famously wrote that Ivan the Terrible was “so lacking in human dimensions that you may stare at it in a kind of outrage. True, every frame in it looks great – it’s a brilliant collection of stills – but as a movie, it’s static, grandiose, and frequently ludicrous.” That’s not really what Eisenstein was going for. The Russian critic Sergei Yutkevich came closer; he saw Ivan as “a symphonic film [that] puts all his tremendous culture of cinematographic expression into the service of his theme and, as in no other film of his, he achieves a unity of the different expressive means available to the cinematic art. This is not only a brilliant duel of remarks and glances but a passionate battle of sound and silence, light and dark. Brightness and shadow, color and textures—all influence one’s mind and feelings.”

Ivan’s rivals: Bishop Pimen (L) Efrosinia and Vladimir Staritsky (R)

The strange look and feel, and the difficult narrative were intentional. Not only did Eisenstein have to evade the censor and the wrath of the ruler, but the complexities of Ivan’s biography paralleled his ideas about cinematic method, about how to make a film that would have the greatest emotional and intellectual impact. Eisenstein was the first film theorist to systematically explore the ways films are constructed and the ways viewers perceive what they see on screen. He was also one of the first modern thinkers to explore the ways feeling were as important as thinking in both the production and reception of art. Studying biography and history for the first time when making Ivan the Terrible also convinced him that feelings were as important as ideas in shaping the decisions that historical and political figures make.

The Golden Hall and the Angel of the Apocalypse

To tell the story of Ivan the Terrible, Eisenstein wanted not just show but make us feel Ivan’s hunger for power and the ensuing conflicts that resulted. To draw viewers in and engage our deepest feelings and most complex thinking, Eisenstein devised two parallel strategies. First he believed that viewers respond consciously and unconsciously to even the tiniest of details that we see and hear when watching a film. So he broke down every element of the film image to its constitutive parts, what he called its “essential bone structure,” for the audience to gradually reconstruct for themselves into something meaningful and moving. This is why Eisenstein had his actors hold such inhuman poses: so that viewers would see every single minute gesture that went into conventional movements. This is why the production design exaggerated and distorted familiar images – from religious icons and rituals, for example. And this is why we see a hodge-podge of visual styles juxtaposed — melodrama, tragedy, gothic, grotesque, satire, and comedy. All of these design choices were meant not just to challenge conventional meanings but to let the viewer see from Ivan’s point of view, by compelling us to engage in the same process of making sense of fragmented, contradictory cues.

Ivan at his coronation, deciding to continue executing his enemies, deciding to be “Terrible.”

At the same time, Eisenstein structured the narrative around a set of questions. How does an innocent, vulnerable child become a sadistic, bloody tyrant? To what extent is Ivan like the people around him and, by extension, like us? When is killing justifiable? Do Russian rulers and, by implication, all Russians differ from their contemporaries in the West? When are we responsible for our own actions, and when can we blame circumstances? Each scene raises these questions in some form, so the audience is constantly being invited to wonder, compare, evaluate, and judge. And underlying these moral-political issues is a set of related questions concerning human emotions. In general, Ivan the Terrible asks us to consider what role emotions play—in relation to reason and logic—in motivating us to act. More specifically, Eisenstein asks what happens when love, affection, sexual attraction, grief, loneliness, hate, distrust, and the desire for revenge enter into politics. How are political affections and rivalries gendered? What happens when we are asked to love a ruler like a father? What role does affection play in a political brotherhood?

These are not the typical structuring devices of the Stalinist biopic. Soviet film biographies of this period were supposed to provide clear-cut models of behavior. Individuals in film biographies, whether cult figures or ordinary people, were to undergo some transitional improvement, make a heroic contribution to their community, and offer moments of inspiration and motivation. Eisenstein’s interrogative mode challenged viewers to make up their own minds. The ambiguities of the interrogative deny viewers a neutral vantage point and challenge us to reclaim our authority to make meaning from observation and experience.

Part I of Ivan the Terrible gives us a young and determined ruler, committed to defeating Russia’s external enemies, and the obsolete aristocracy, who opposed his efforts to centralize Russian power and establish The Great Russian State. And apparently the portrait of Ivan was just monumental and triumphalist enough for Part I to win the Stalin Prize and cause American critics to see it as pure Soviet propaganda. But this view of the film required ignoring the paranoia, violence, trauma, vengeance, treason, and betrayal that permeate its story, its characterizations, and its bizarre and murky visual setting. Ivan himself is beset by inner conflicts over his mission and constantly asks if he is on the right path. He repeatedly beseeches himself, his friends and his enemies, God, and the audience, “Am I right in what I am doing?” His own uncertainty cues us to ask if the opposition to the centralization of power is, perhaps, in some ways justified, a question that is, in fact, at the heart of Eisenstein’s conception of the film. In Part II, the questions become darker, revolving insistently around cycles of murder and revenge. Ivan still asks for reassurance but God is silent and no one else gives him the answers he wants, spurring him on to greater, more vicious acts of violence.

Ivan declaring that he is free to act against the country’s enemies (L) Stalin in a widely reproduced photograph by Ivan Shagin (R)

All Eisenstein’s questions had obvious analogues in Stalinist society. But the film maker was after something more than simple critique. He wanted to explain how Ivan became the bloody, manipulative, demagogic tyrant he became. Eisenstein had stated from the beginning that he did not intend to “whitewash” the medieval ruler or justify his violent reign, but rather to explain, as he put it, “the most atrocious things.” The interrogative mode that he used in Ivan the Terrible established a set of standards for judging any ruler. That’s how you make a film about a bloody tyrant for a bloody tyrant.

If Stalin was instrumental in bestowing Part I with the Stalin Prize, he hated Part II and had it immediately banned.

Ivan the Terrible is a difficult film because it continually presents us with contradictions and questions, it forces us to respond to unfamiliar, difficult, and ambiguous cues, and it denies us a hero to identify with or a villain to hate. It is a great film because it creates a portrait of power that resists simplification and provokes us to engage with hard questions, precisely the hard questions the Stalinist artist was supposed to suppress.

This Thing of Darkness: Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible in Stalin’s Russia
Cornell University Press, 2019

For more on Eisenstein and early Soviet filmmaking, you might like these:

The Eisenstein Reader, edited by Richard Taylor, translated by Richard Taylor and William Powell (1998)

A good selection of Eisenstein’s writing, translated into English.

Maria Belodubrovskaya, Not According to Plan: Filmmaking Under Stalin (2017)

A history of Soviet filmmaking that focuses on film institutions rather than political leadership.

David Bordwell, The Cinema of Eisenstein (2nd edition, 2005)

A comprehensive and insightful survey of Eisenstein’s films by one of the leading film historians in the US.

Lilya Kaganovsky, The Voice of Technology: Soviet Cinema’s Transition to Sound (2018)

Analyzes the unique ways sound shaped cinema in the the Soviet Union. Kaganovsky shows that sound films made the voice of state power audible, reaching viewers directly for the first time.

Anne Nesbet, Savage Junctures: Sergei Eisenstein and the Shape of Thinking (2003)

A study of each of Eisenstein’s films in the context of the director’s unpublished writing, that shows the importance of contradiction, fracture, and wildly imaginative and beguiling strangeness in all his work.

Yuri Tsivian, Ivan the Terrible (2001)

An intertextual study of Ivan the Terrible that provides sharp insights into Eisenstein’s thinking in images.

Emma Widdis, Socialist Senses: Film, Feeling, and the Soviet Subject, 1917-1940 (2018)

With a focus on the depiction of the senses in an extraordinary range of early Soviet films, this book shows how the new Soviet subjectivity was shaped first by a revitalized engagement with the material and natural world and later by an enriched inner emotional world.

Notes From the Field: Trinity College, Cambridge and the Accidents of Research

You never know. You might be out jogging when your best idea slips into your head. Or one of those random archival documents that you don’t even remember copying turns out to have a key piece of evidence scribbled nearly illegibly along a crumpled margin. Renowned historian Eric Foner just published a book based on a happenstance comment from a student about a rare document she saw in the Columbia University archive.

I was reminded of the accidents of research recently as I was dining at High Table in Trinity College, University of Cambridge. I am fortunate to have a visiting scholarship here this semester to finish a book on the great Russian cinema pioneer, Sergei Eisenstein, and his film about the sixteenth-century tsar, Ivan the Terrible.

Eisenstein's working script for "Ivan the Terrible," with production notes in his hand. — Eisenstein’s working script for “Ivan the Terrible,” with production notes in his hand.

And yes, the Trinity dining hall looks just like the one at Hogwarts, with long tables and benches for students running the length of the hall and a more formal High Table along the width. It does, however, have only an ordinary, though impossibly high, ceiling made of wooden beams rather than one that reflects the weather, and while there are plenty of candles, they don’t float in the air. And then there’s Henry VIII. A large copy of Hans Holbein’s famous portrait of Henry, who founded Trinity, watches over diners, as imperious as ever, from above High Table at the end of the hall.

Henry VIII, by Hans Eworth, after Hans Holbein, the Younger

What’s the connection between the accidents of research, a Soviet film about a bloody tyrant of the past –- a film that was commissioned by Joseph Stalin, bloody tyrant of the then-present — and Trinity High Table?

In 1947, when Eisenstein was reflecting back on Ivan the Terrible, which he had recently finished, analyzing the way he tried to convey ideas by triggering all the viewer’s senses, he chose to talk about an unforgettable scene, in which Ivan is mourning his murdered wife, Anastasia, and questioning his own political ambitions. Eisenstein emphasizes Ivan’s doubts and despair by placing him in a dark, shadowy chamber lighted by tall black candles and by using disorienting camera movements and jarring editing. He further conveys Ivan’s inner divisions with sound. From one corner, a priest reads a psalm about isolation, doubt, and loss of faith, while from the other, Ivan’s deputy reads a list of the royal servitors who have abandoned or betrayed the tsar. After listening for a while to this gloomy polyphony and slumping in various anguished positions all around his wife’s casket, Ivan suddenly leaps up. With his energy and determination returning, he reasserts his commitment to seize absolute power and found the modern Russian state: magnificent and ominous at the same time. It’s a powerful scene, where the resolution of Ivan’s inner conflict is made that much more impressive by the wracking pain of the divisions that preceded it.

Writing later about the sensory impact of the scene, Eisenstein suddenly recalled this:

“It was Cambridge.
In 1930.
In Trinity College.
In the huge Tudor dining hall….
On that memorable evening of the late dinner in Cambridge, the voice of the rector [reading a prayer in Latin before the meal] was repeated in response by the voice of the vice-rector.
Candles. Vaults. Two old men’s voices resounding in the boundlessness of the dark hall.
The strange text of the prayer.
The gray heads of the two old men.
The black university gowns. Night all around.
I thought about all this least of all when I was writing the scene of Ivan over the coffin of Anastasia in the screenplay of Ivan.
But now I think this episode of the film is definitely connected with the vivid impressions of that evening long ago in prewar England.”

I had a much more convivial and probably less dramatic dinner than Eisenstein seems to have had.

But you never know.

With thanks to my colleagues, Dominic Lieven and Emma Widdis.

The quoted passage is from Sergei Eisenstein, Nonindifferent Nature. Translated by Herbert Marshall (Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 311.

You can watch the scene from Ivan the Terrible here: Ivan Grozny (1:19:39)

Photo of the script is from Ivan the Terrible: A Screenplay by Sergei M. Eisenstein, transl. Ivor Montagu and Herbert Marshall (New York, 1962), p. 308.

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