Eisenstein in Fergana: from avant-garde to national form

Abstract

ABSTRACT Sergei Eisenstein’s work on The Great Fergana Canal in 1939 and his subsequent wartime evacuation to Kazakhstan gave him the opportunity to reflect on Stalin’s famous definition of proletarian culture as ‘national in form, socialist in content’. The modernist cult of difficult forms endured a radical reformulation through the 1930s. The insistence on clarity and accessibility, fuelled by the emergence of the Socialist Realist style, made aesthetic intricacy unacceptable and dramatically reshaped acceptable practices of perception and expression. But the ‘strangeness’ of the Orient allowed the modernist valorisation of defamiliarized forms to continue its existence in new ways. The ‘national in form, socialist in content’ formula provided a context in which formal strangeness could re-emerge as a sanctioned entity. Formal experimentation was possible only in the national context, and only if singular socialist content predominated. As such, national form was the last sanctuary of modernist strangeness. By utilising this formula, the late modernist Eisenstein concerned himself with creating national building blocks for the socialist edifice, which was, in turn, intended to evolve into a supranational construct.