A regular feature of ‘International Literature’ were short autobiographies written by artists of various fields. Below is Eisenstein’s marvelous contribution.

‘Autobiography’ by Sergei Eisenstein from International Literature. No. 4. 1933.

The October revolution is 15 years old.

My artistic career dates back 12 years.

Family traditions, upbringing and education intended me for a totally different career.

I was studying engineering. But a subconscious and unformulated inclination to work in the field of art induced me to pick a course within engineering that led, not to mechanical, technological fields but to one closely allied to art—to architecture.

The revolutionary tempest, however, freed me from the inertia of the course I had marked out, and let me develop inclinations which by themselves did not have the strength to free themselves.

This is the first thing I owe the revolution.

It took the shattering of the foundations of the country and two years of technical engineering work on the red fronts in the north and west to make the timid student break the chains of the career marked out for him by solicitous parents from early youth, abandon an almost completed education and assured future, and plunge into the unknown future of an artistic career.

From the front I return not to Petrograd to complete studies begun, but to Moscow to start something entirely new.

And although all about me the thunder of the coming revolutionary art is rolling and scattering I, having broken through to art generally, am totally immersed in art “in general.”

During my first steps the connection with the revolution is purely superficial.

However, armed with technical-engineering method, I eagerly delve deeper and deeper into the fundamentals of creative art, instinctively seeking the same sphere of exact knowledge that had succeeded in captivating me during my short experience in engineering.

With the help of Pavlov, Freud, a season with Meyerhold, I get a disordered but hectic hold of some of the mysteries of this new field. Very much reading and first independent steps in decorative and stage work at the Proletcult theatre mark this single handed struggle against the windmills of mysticism erected by the solicitous hands of servile sycophants around the approaches to art methods against those who want to penetrate the secrets of art by common sense.

The undertaking proves less Quixotical than at first appears. The wings of the windmills break off and one perceives the same dialectics in this mysterious region that are at the basis of all phenomena and all processes.

At this time I had been a materialist for a long time by inner disposition.

And now at this stage I unexpectedly discover the relation between the things I came across in my analytical work and what was going on around me.

My pupils in art, to my great surprise, suddenly point out to me that in the field of art I am following the same method that in the adjoining room is being followed by the instructor in political science on social questions,

This is enough to put on my work table the works of materialist-dialectitians instead of those on esthetics.

The decisive year 1922—a decade ago.

The essay in personal research in a particular branch of human activity is merged in philosophical research of social phenomena as taught by the founders of Marxism.

But I do not stop there. And the revolution, by means of the works of those geniuses enters my work in a totally different fashion.

My connection with the revolution becomes a matter of blood and bones and innermost conviction.

In my creative work this is marked by a transition from the rationalistic but almost abstract eccentric The Sage (a circus spectacle made over from Ostrovsky’s comedy A Good Deal of Simplicity to Every Sage), through the propagandistic-agitational theatrical poster-play Hear Moscow and Gas Masks, to the revolutionary screen work Potemkin.

The tendency to closer contact with the revolution calls for ever deeper instilling of the basic principles of militant materialism into art.

The succeeding films, together with the social requirements carry on the practical experimental work of developing a ‘‘means” for creative film expression, to convey a maximum of positive activization of revolutionary art and arm pedagogically the generation of young bolsheviks who are to take the place of the cinema masters of the first Five Year Plans of the revolution.

The center of gravity of the later work (Ten Days, Old and New) lies in the experimental and research fields.

Personal work is intimately bound up with planned scientific and pedagogic practice, (The State Institute of Cinematography.)

Theoretical works are written on the basic principles of cinema art.

The philosophy of life seems formed. The revolution accepted. All activity turned completely to its interests,

The question remains, to what extent consciously and with unbending will.

At this stage comes the trip to other countries.

Foreign countries—the ultimate test which one’s biography can put to a Soviet citizen grown inseparably with the growth of October. The test of a free choice.

Foreign countries—the ultimate test for the “masters of culture’’ to consciously verify “with whom and against whom,”

Foreign countries—the ultimate test for the creative worker can he create at all outside the revolution and continue to exist outside it.

Before the gold mountains of Hollywood the test arose and was withstood with no heroic pose of renunciation from earthly charms and goods but a modest organic impossibility of the creative building powers to work under other social conditions and in the interest of another class.

And in this impossibility to work creatively beyond the class line of demarcation the full strength and power of the revolutionary pressure came out, the pressure of the proletarian revolution that sweeps from its path like a storm all that is inimical to it and like even a more powerful storm draws in and holds all those that once chose to go in step with it.

That is how every one in the galaxy of Soviet workers in art act, and think.

Many of us that came to art by revolution. All of us that call to revolution by our art.

Literature of the World Revolution/International Literature was the journal of the International Union of Revolutionary Writers, founded in 1927, that began publishing in the aftermath of 1931’s international conference of revolutionary writers held in Kharkov, Ukraine. Produced in Moscow in Russian, German, English, and French, the name changed to International Literature in 1932. In 1935 and the Popular Front, the Writers for the Defense of Culture became the sponsoring organization. It published until 1945 and hosted the most important Communist writers and critics of the time.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/subject/art/literature/international-literature/1933-n04-IL.pdf