Above Such an astonishing photograph. Taken in the 1920s in Japan, this is a detail of a photograph of a larger group of those associated with Russian Constructivism. Here are writer Boris Pasternak, filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein, socialite Lilya Brik (wife of Osip Brik), and poet Vladimir Mayakovsky. Such intense personalities, at an especially mournful time in modern history.
Eisenstein and others in Japan
•••
Marie Seton, Sergei M. Eisenstein: a biography. NY: Grove Press, 1960, p. 146—
One day he [Sergei Eisenstein] sat for many hours in the small unpretentious Lyons’ teashop next to the Holborn Underground [in Central London] with Paul Rotha. He drank several cups of coffee and “smoked like hell.” Normally he never smoked. But he had been with Rotha to the museum of the Royal College of Surgeons [aka Hunterian Museum]. He talked about the Russian Revolution and drew incessantly upon the marble table-top to illustrate the camouflage ideas used by the Red Army during the Civil War. [According to Seton, Eisenstein had “painted camouflage and propaganda on the sides of cattle-trucks and trains.”] From the museum of the Royal College of Surgeons to the Russian Civil War…There was a psychological thread linking the sights he has seen at the front and the sights in the museum. As he had once tried to conceal his innocence from his Red Army comrades by Rabelasian talk, so now Sergei Mikhailovich camouflaged his frustrations by speaking of psychoanalysis and smoking endless cigarettes.