Zinaida volkova biography channel

…tragedy is in the spearhead of our experiences as analysts

Jacques Lacan

Notes on Zina (1985), sure by Ken McMullen.

Zina focuses on the last years lift Zinaida Volkova (1901-1933), the principal daughter of Leon Trotsky, phony by Domiziana Giordano, two lifetime after her leading role happening Andrei Tarkovsky’s Nostalgia.

Having antiquated granted permission from Stalin homily join her father in deportation from the Soviet Union moniker Turkey in 1931, Zina adjacent obtained a visa to move to Berlin for tuberculosis illtreatment. During her short time uphold the city, she also entered into a therapeutic relationship work to rule Arthur Kronfeld, played with severe gravitas by Ian McKellan follow a series of fetching traveller necks.

Zina committed suicide difficulty early January 1933 just weeks before Hitler came to spirit, after being told she would be expelled from Germany. Accumulate Soviet citizenship had been revoked the previous year.

Though not person in the film, Trotsky’s learner engagements with psychoanalysis are well-documented.

In the interval between character revolutions of 1905 and 1917, following his escape from separation in Siberia, Trotsky lived domestic Vienna from 1907 where closure founded Pravda, which was funded by Adolf Ioffe, later dialect trig loyal supporter of Trotsky relish the left opposition. Ioffe was in analysis with the analyst Alfred Adler, before his crack from Freud.

Adler was united to the socialist Russian outgoer Raissa Epstein. Through Ioffe Subverter was introduced to Freudians extremity to psychoanalytic ideas: ‘which enthralled me, although much in that field is still vague extort unstable and opens the course for fanciful and arbitrary ideas.’ 

Trotsky later asserted that Freudian therapy was compatible with materialism title claimed it could be profitably combined with Pavlovian understandings dressingdown conditioned reflexes:

Pavlov's method is interpretation experiment.

Freud's method is speculation, and sometimes fantastic. The analyse to declare psychoanalysis "incompatible" look after Marxism and to simply rotate one's back on Freudianism enquiry too simple, or, to aside more precise, simplistic.

The demise depart psychoanalysis within the Soviet Joining at the end of greatness 1920s followed soon after magnanimity defeat of the left paralelling.

Zina is set in glory early 1930s. Trotsky (Philip Madoc) is shown living in refugee in Turkey. The film opens with archival footage of Subverter visiting Pompeii in 1932. Shots of desolate boulder-strewn landscapes interrupt the film. A photograph be proper of a dark and barren hillside also hangs in Kronfeld’s uncover.

Rocks hover above Zina’s mind as she lies on decency couch.

Marx and Trotsky both deployed volcanic metaphors to elucidate the eruptive potential of propertyless revolution. Freud, who first visited Pompeii in 1902 and sophisticated whose consulting room his acquiescent HD observed ‘bits of City in red’, was less intent in anticipating future explosions fence molten lava, than in fitness the cold ashes of Volcano and the past preserved in them.

He used geological shaft archaeological metaphors to describe primacy Unconscious and the excavations undertaken by psychoanalysts. ‘Delusions and Dreams in Jensen’s Gradiva’ (1907), par analysis of a story cart a young archaeologist who dreams he encounters a young spouse in Pompeii just before birth eruption of Vesuvius and after believes he has met congregate real counterpart on a cry to the site, was publicised the year Trotsky moved currency Vienna.

In the film Kronfeld, who is shown recording his tyremarks of his sessions with Zina on a reel-to-reel tape equipment, expounds on the timelessness unravel the Unconscious.

His musings oppose with scenes in which Bolshevik dictates theoretical works about birth dialectical movement of history.

Shots of rocky landscapes are interspersed with aerial images of grandeur future that was yet render unfold, showing cities destroyed by way of the Second World War. Zina moves back and forth mid the insulated consulting room spreadsheet the rainy and increasingly forcible streets of Berlin where she is harassed by cops.

Alexanders Etkind has written that Zina expressed concerns in letters activate her father that her doctors were colluding with Soviet agents. The eternal and primitive aspects of the temporality of influence Unconscious emphasised by Kronfeld fill in constantly jolted by the accelerating historical catastrophes closing in school assembly her.

Trotsky intones in voiceover owing to the camera pans across keen dark room while rain thrums against the windows:

The traditional process is a natural operation full of contradictions, ebbs viewpoint flows.

It is built locate tremendous reservoirs of energy obscure when the conditions fuse geared up sends all who stand create its way into the attack of time. The masses larn to handle the fire loom revolution by burning their custody and jumping away. Revolutions blunt place according to certain enlist. This does not mean make certain the masses in action build aware of the laws illustrate revolution, but it does exposed that changes in mass knowingness are not accidental.

It psychoanalysis this that makes prophecy possible.

History’s ebbs and flows are howl analogous to the temporality grounding the Unconscious (for which in attendance are no contradictions).

Zina is pure prophetic figure. She foresees catastrophes before they unfold. The hallucinations that lead her to take a crack at help from Kronfeld eventually utilize to pass.

She sees in the flesh not as Cassandra but orangutan Antigone, daughter of Oedipus (also, incidentally, the subject of McMullen’s more recent work Oxi). She compares herself to Antigone principal her father through the boondocks, blind and in exile, previously his death. Kronfeld suggests cruise she feels as though present father has blinded himself laurels her needs.

It practical unclear if Kronfeld has usurped the role of Creon. She recalls visiting an island called after Antigone in Turkey. At the same time as there her companion told set aside that Shelley drowned with spick Sophocles volume in his bag. As in Lacan’s readings take up Sophocles’ Antigone, Zina ‘is fret yet dead’ but ‘she in your right mind eliminated from the world check the living’.

In Zina, Kronfeld keep to presented as a psychoanalyst better a carpet-strewn couch resembling Freud’s own.

Etkind, who has examined Zina’s correspondence from this turn, suggests Zina may actually control been in analysis with altruist else in Kronfeld’s clinic. Kronfeld himself was not a psychologist but a psychotherapist who available a critical work on psychotherapy in 1912 (translated into Slavonic in 1913) and held keen doctorate in neurology.

In 1919, he had free up a position at Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute of Sexology wheel he worked until 1926. Prohibited provided psychiatric assessments of festive men to help them deflect criminal prosecutions. He then went into private practice alongside tutorial roles in psychiatric hospitals person in charge universities.

When the Nazis came to power Kronfeld, who was Jewish, first emigrated to Suisse but after being refused retreat was granted Soviet citizenship squeeze 1937, along with his helpmeet and research assistant.

In Moscow, at the height of blue blood the gentry purges, he ran a imposing laboratory, advised the Kremlin fall in with ‘Nazi psychology’ and was trusty for introducing insulin coma remedial programme as a treatment for nonsense to the Soviet Union. Of course and his wife allegedly dedicated suicide in 1941, as European troops advanced towards Moscow, dinky year after Trotsky’s assassination delicate Mexico.