To the editors:
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Today’s anti-Utopian Zeitgeist certainly moves in mysterious ways. Thus the usually reliable J. Rosenbaum, from his April 5 notice for A. Zagdansky’s Interpretation of Dreams [Reader’s Guide to the Silver Screen]: “most of [Sigmund Freud’s] work was virtually banned in the Soviet Union between 1917 and glasnost.” One might assume from this that Czarist Russia was a thriving mecca of psychoanalytical discourse. It was not –pre-1917 Russia’s encounter with Freud came largely through the activities of a group of Russian medical students studying abroad in Zurich. It was in fact after the revolution that their efforts to popularize Freud’s work found its widest exposure within what was now the Soviet Union. Indeed, Freudian ideas, such as they were understood, were to become a staple of the heady Soviet avant-garde cultural scene during the early 1920s. Representative of the trend was Sergei Eisenstein, who considered Freud and Marx the twin prophets of modernity and liberation.
All of which is a lot to say about a small distortion found inside a capsule film notice buried deep within a fairly marginal paper, but your letters section seems forever disposed to this kind of thing.
Thanks for the fascinating clarification. My misinformation came from the press release offered by Facets, and I regret having passed it along without question.
