On «Pretty Young Lady», Dos Passos and the Textology of «Art»

The presented text is a publication of archival materials from the Eisensteins Fund in the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art (RGALI). The author of the publication reconstructed and commented some episodes from creative and personal biography of S.M. Eisenstein in the beginning of the 1930's. In particular, some fragments from private correspondence of Eisenstein and Esther Shub сut when published in the 1970s have been restored; the reasons for the reaction of the director to the of Shubs suggestion to make a film based on the novel Manhattan by John Dos Passos have been elucidated. The details and features of the artistic life of Russia in the 1930s are reflected in the epistolary genre of Eisenstein's work. The text presented also dwells on some cases of selective approach towards publishing books in the Soviet era. The author, using comparative historical and textual analysis, restores the true picture of Eisenstein's relationship to the work of a number of representatives of Russian and foreign cinema and literature, and also explains the reasons for some important events in the creative life of the director.