Guest: Joan Neuberger is a professor of Russian history at the University of Texas at Austin. She’s the author of numerous books and articles on Russian social and cultural history and is the editor of the public history website, Not Even Past and co-host of the history podcast series, 15 Minute History. Her most recent book is This Thing of Darkness: Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible in Stalin’s Russia published by Cornell University Press. Music: Broke for Free, “Night Owl,” Directionless. If you like these transcripts and want to read more, then support them by becoming a patron of the SRB Podcast. This abridged version of the interview has been edited for clarity. The title of your new book, This Thing of Darkness, Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible in Stalin’s Russia, is taken from Shakespeare’s The Tempest. What is the significance of this title, This Thing of Darkness, for Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible. There’s a lot of Shakespeare in Eisenstein, although he’s actually famous for saying that he preferred Ben Johnson and some of the other contemporaries. But he writes about Shakespeare, Shakespeare’s ideas are in all of his films, and there’s a lot of Shakespeare in Ivan the Terrible. Also, when I was trying to figure out which stories I wanted to tell in this book, The Tempest was everywhere. This was the height of postcolonial reinterpretations of the play, so people were doing really interesting things with it, and I kept running into it. I ran into it at Shakespeare festivals in small towns I was passing through. There was a Helen Mirren film with a female Prospero. I started listening to Emma Smith’s amazing Shakespeare podcast and ran across Stephen Greenblatt’s great essay on power in Shakespeare. Connections with Shakespeare, but particularly The Tempest, were everywhere. Why? Because The Tempest asks us to think about power, about losing power, about using magic to retain power, and about the magic of books, which Eisenstein absolutely shared. In The Tempest, Prospero’s exiled to this island after his brother Antonio usurped his power and sent him off to sea in a little boat. And when he gets there, he takes over this island and he starts shaping everything he can to his will. All this really helped me think about how great artists, who aren’t always the most articulate political theorists, think about and represent power. Specifically, in Eisenstein’s case, Ivan is ambivalent about ruling and he’s especially ambivalent about the violence that he thinks he needs to rule, about what it means to rule, especially to rule over others. On the island, Prospero tries to educate a creature, the only native of the island that we see, the so-called monster, Caliban. But Caliban is really ambivalent about the education. He’s not as grateful as Prospero thinks he should be and he thinks that he’s the islands ruler. This island that Prospero’s taken away from him. And so he plots with two other men to kill Prospero. Something that’s always represented as a farce. So my title, the line “this thing of darkness,” is Prospero talking to the other men in this plot, the other men’s lord, after they’ve foiled the murder plot. And he says, “Well, those two are yours, you know them, but this thing of darkness, I acknowledge mine.” And it seems a little bit like a throwaway line. You know, they’re yours,