Small sheets of pink and beige paper are inserted between the pages of Axel’s Castle. A Study in the Imaginative Literature of 1870-1930 (1931) by the American essayist Edmund Wilson, one of the books kept in the library of Eisenstein. Densely written by the director in 1931, these autographed notes often mention Joyce and Proust, whose literary works are the subject of two essays collected in "Axel’s Castle". In a mixture of Russian, English and French, Eisenstein explicitly puts the two writers in direct comparison, making a reference to the Surrealist movement in three short notes. After locating them in the broader context of the director’s annotations to Wilson’s book, my paper attempts to interpret these notes, which are likely to contain seminal ideas more extensively developed by Eisenstein in a 1934 text, Regress-Progress, one of the preparatory drafts for Metod.
Piccoli fogli di carta rosa e beige sono inseriti tra le pagine di "Axel's Castle. A Study in the Imaginative Literature of 1870-1930" (1931) del saggista americano Edmund Wilson, uno dei libri conservati nella biblioteca di Ėjzenštejn. Vergati fittamente dal regista nel 1931, i fogli contengono appunti autografi in cui vengono spesso citati Joyce e Proust, le cui opere sono oggetto di due saggi raccolti nel "Castello di Axel". Combinando russo, inglese e francese, Ėjzenštejn mette esplicitamente a confronto i due romanzieri, facendo riferimento al movimento surrealista in tre brevi note. Dopo averli collocati nel contesto più ampio delle annotazioni del regista al libro di Wilson, il mio articolo cerca di interpretare questi tre appunti, che contengono idee seminali sviluppate più ampiamente da Ėjzenštejn in un testo del 1934, "Regress-Progress", bozze preparatoria per l'opera "Metod".
Aletto, I. (2021). Regress-Progress in Proust, Surrealism and Joyce. In Ian Christie, Julia Vasilieva (a cura di), The Eisenstein Universe (pp. 61-72). London-New York : Bloomsbury [10.5040/9781350142121.ch-004].
Regress-Progress in Proust, Surrealism and Joyce
Ilaria Aletto
2021-01-01
Abstract
Small sheets of pink and beige paper are inserted between the pages of Axel’s Castle. A Study in the Imaginative Literature of 1870-1930 (1931) by the American essayist Edmund Wilson, one of the books kept in the library of Eisenstein. Densely written by the director in 1931, these autographed notes often mention Joyce and Proust, whose literary works are the subject of two essays collected in "Axel’s Castle". In a mixture of Russian, English and French, Eisenstein explicitly puts the two writers in direct comparison, making a reference to the Surrealist movement in three short notes. After locating them in the broader context of the director’s annotations to Wilson’s book, my paper attempts to interpret these notes, which are likely to contain seminal ideas more extensively developed by Eisenstein in a 1934 text, Regress-Progress, one of the preparatory drafts for Metod.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
