Sergei Eisenstein’s “Confusion of Feelings”: Overcoming Apprenticeship Though the Biography of the Teacher

The article examines the relationship between two innovators of 20th-century theatre and cinema — Vsevolod Meyerhold and Sergei Eisenstein — and more specifically, how this re- lationship is refracted through Eisenstein’s texts (and imagination). Meyerhold, as Eisenstein’s mentor, serves as a key element in Eisenstein’s model of understanding his own development and identity as a creator. However, this understanding is not direct but is conveyed through a series of reflections, refractions, and metaphors: Saturn devouring his children; Freud push- ing away his students; Anatole France and his biographer Jean-Jacques Brousson; and the heroes of Stefan Zweig’s novella Confusion of Feelings (Verwirrung der Gefühle, published in English as Confusion). Eisenstein employs the model of “a student rejected by the teacher surpasses him” to describe the relationships between Meyerhold and Stanislavsky, as well as between himself and Meyerhold, thereby placing himself in a direct line of creative heritage. The article also explores the theme of a student writing a teacher's biography as a form of acquiring mastery, and Eisenstein’s transition, in his own understanding, from the role of a biographer to that of a subject of biography (and autobiography). Meyerhold’s biography provides Eisenstein with keys to narrativizing the pivotal moments of his own life and career. Notably, the figure of Eisenstein’s father, Mikhail Osipovich, appears and disappears in various “plots” of the film director’s biography, depending on what the biographer chooses to emphasize. Ultimately, in Eisenstein’s own memoirs, his father finds a place within the narrative model derived from Meyerhold’s biography, written by Nikolai Volkov, who has nearly Eisenstein’s biographer.