S. M. Eisenstein's Screenplay: Ivan The Terrible
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: Chipped and worn with some minor damage
Pages: Yellowed
Markings: Previous owner
Few artistic visions have captured the brutal grandeur of Russian history as powerfully as Sergei Eisenstein's monumental two-part film epic, and this published screenplay for Ivan the Terrible allows readers to experience that genius on the page. The script chronicles the life of Ivan IV of Russia — the sixteenth-century Tsar who unified a fractured nation through iron will and savage cruelty — charting his rise to absolute power, his paranoid isolation, and his relentless campaign against the boyar nobility who threatened his reign. Written with the precise visual grammar of a master filmmaker, the text reads as both dramatic literature and a detailed cinematic blueprint, replete with Eisenstein's sweeping staging directions that conjure images of Byzantine grandeur and political terror. Beyond its value as a historical document, this screenplay stands as a landmark of 20th-century artistic expression, composed during Stalin's Soviet Union in circumstances laden with political peril — Eisenstein himself faced censure over the film's unflattering parallels to contemporary power. The work illuminates the intersection of art and autocracy, presenting a portrait of tyranny that is simultaneously a meditation on loneliness and the corrupting weight of absolute authority. Scholars of film history, Russian culture, and political drama will find it an indispensable text — and those encountering it for the first time may be surprised by how urgently its themes resonate today.
Author: S. M. Eisenstein
Format: Hardback
Published: 1963, Secker & Warburg
Genre: Plays
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: Chipped and worn with some minor damage
Pages: Yellowed
Markings: Previous owner
Few artistic visions have captured the brutal grandeur of Russian history as powerfully as Sergei Eisenstein's monumental two-part film epic, and this published screenplay for Ivan the Terrible allows readers to experience that genius on the page. The script chronicles the life of Ivan IV of Russia — the sixteenth-century Tsar who unified a fractured nation through iron will and savage cruelty — charting his rise to absolute power, his paranoid isolation, and his relentless campaign against the boyar nobility who threatened his reign. Written with the precise visual grammar of a master filmmaker, the text reads as both dramatic literature and a detailed cinematic blueprint, replete with Eisenstein's sweeping staging directions that conjure images of Byzantine grandeur and political terror. Beyond its value as a historical document, this screenplay stands as a landmark of 20th-century artistic expression, composed during Stalin's Soviet Union in circumstances laden with political peril — Eisenstein himself faced censure over the film's unflattering parallels to contemporary power. The work illuminates the intersection of art and autocracy, presenting a portrait of tyranny that is simultaneously a meditation on loneliness and the corrupting weight of absolute authority. Scholars of film history, Russian culture, and political drama will find it an indispensable text — and those encountering it for the first time may be surprised by how urgently its themes resonate today.