“‘Degenerates in Power’: Sexuality and Regress in Eisenstein’s ‚Ivan the Terrible’”, talk by Evgenii Bershtein

The paper investigates the intellectual roots and political contexts of the most famous and controversial scene in Sergei Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible (Part II)—the oprichniki’s “orgy”—and its reception. In Eisenstein’s creative and theoretical thinking, how is sexuality—and specifically queer sexuality—related to power and violence? How does the notion of “regress” underlie Eisenstein’s sexualized vision of both political and creative action? And how did Eisenstein’s visits to Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld’s Berlin Institute for Sexual Science influence the Soviet film director’s thinking about sexuality and power?

Evgenii Bershtein is Professor and Chair of Russian department at Reed College. His PhD is from UC Berkeley. He has held research fellowships at Columbia University (2001-02), Helsinki University (2004, 2005), and University of Cambridge (2014). Evgenii Bershtein has published on eighteenth–century Russian poetry, the cultural and intellectual history of Russian modernism, and on Russian film (you can read some of his work here). He has edited the English translation of Yuri Lotman’s Non-Memoirs (Dalkey Archive Press, 2014) and authored the a chapter entitled „Queerness“  in the New Cambridge History of Russian Literature (2024).

The talk takes place at the Forum Transregional Studies and in the context of the EUTIM colloquium.