The Annexation of History: Eisenstein and the Ivan Grozny Cult of the 1940s

Abstract

With the appearance of his study about the historical novel in the journal Literaturnyi kritik in 1937,¹ George Lukács demonstrated a near prophetic talent and a distinct feeling for the processes of totalitarian development of power, which were just concluding in the Soviet Union. In addition to the primary level of interpretation of the sociological description of the phenomenon of the historical novel, Lukács outlined a second interpretation in his work which was clearly adapted to the Soviet reality of the period. Lukács outlined a number of rather pathological circumstances in the historical novel, which became evident not only in the past of the bourgeois nineteenth century, but also in the works of progressive authors termed as ‘anti-fascist human’ by Lukács.² On the one hand, Lukács determined the cult of the exceptional individual as being one variant misunderstood within the formulation of historical narration, which, as in Flaubert’s Salammbo,³ misused the historical folio, in order to expose the colourful exotic and excentric psychopathology. On the other hand, contemporary literature makes use of the genre of the historical novel, in order to conduct a basic discussion in a tone of ‘intellectual generalisation’ on the enduring virulent problems of human existence, a concern which Lukács sees in Lion Feuchtwanger’s Jud Süss.⁴