Books by Joan Neuberger
“Again, the question is the same one that Brian asks in his book. Here is an artist at the court of a dictator. As an artist he depends on that dictator, even more than Sholokhov does. To make a film you need funding, you need infrastructure, all sorts of things. Eisenstein is also an artist who is really married to the cause, with Battleship Potemkin and other films. He is a symbol of Soviet cinema, making films about the revolution, promoting it and legitimizing it. He really does a lot of things that Stalin likes. But he remains an artist. I interviewed Joan and I said, ‘It’s about subversion, maybe?’ and she said, ‘No, it’s more than that. Everyone talks about subversion.’ In the second part of Ivan the Terrible, more than in the previous part, he really struggles with issues of authority, power, corruption of power, and so on and so forth. And eventually the film is shelved. They don’t show it. From that point of view, it’s a trajectory different from Sholokhov’s. Sholokhov was never really shelved. It’s another trajectory of how a talent functions and tries to survive being dependent on the dictator, but also being in opposition to the dictator.” Read more...
The Best Russia Books: the 2020 Pushkin House Prize
Serhii Plokhy, Historian
Interviews where books by Joan Neuberger were recommended
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1
The Return of the Russian Leviathan
by Sergei Medvedev & Stephen Dalziel (translator) -
2
Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait
by Bathsheba Demuth -
3
Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future
by Kate Brown -
4
Stalin's Scribe: Literature, Ambition, and Survival, the Life of Mikhail Sholokhov
by Brian Boeck -
5
This Thing of Darkness: Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible in Stalin's Russia
by Joan Neuberger -
6
An Impeccable Spy: Richard Sorge, Stalin’s Master Agent
by Owen Matthews
The Best Russia Books: the 2020 Pushkin House Prize, recommended by Serhii Plokhy
The Best Russia Books: the 2020 Pushkin House Prize, recommended by Serhii Plokhy
Every year since 2013 the Russian Book Prize run by Pushkin House, a UK charity, has carried out the important task of drawing attention to books that “encourage public understanding and intelligent debate about the Russian-speaking world.” Here, Harvard historian Serhii Plokhy, chair of this year’s judging panel, talks us through the books that made the 2020 shortlist.