Ejzen

In her new novel, Guzel Yakhina captures the life of the legendary director Sergei Eisenstein (1898–1948), who became world-famous primarily for Battleship Potemkin, a full-length silent film from 1925. The author presents readers with a captivating story of a filmmaker full of ups, downs and personal tragedies, while also convincingly depicting the workings of an artist in a totalitarian regime. She gradually reveals how Eisenstein was marked by his parents' divorce, how, despite being doted on by his mother, he never stopped feeling that she didn't love him enough, and how he was torn by fears for his own sanity and insecurities that his work would be surpassed by that of his rivals. Thanks to her extraordinarily powerful historical and psychological imagination, the author is able to suggestively convey everything that goes on inside Eisenstein's mind: his creative obsession, his torturous internal conflicts, and the complete subordination of his life to film.

However, this monumental novel is above all a testimony to the relationship between art and totalitarian power. In it, Guzel Yakhina shows how, with the rise of Stalinism, free creation is transformed into a tool of propaganda, how censorship and the manipulation of history work, and how artists constantly face the fear of political repression. Yakhina examines the price of genius in an authoritarian world and the impossible demand placed on creators: to serve an ideology without losing themselves.