Dictionary of Literary Influences

Stopes, Marie Charlotte Carmichael

honors in botany and geology. She did graduate work there until 1903 and then at the University of Munich, where she received her Ph.D. in paleobotany in June 1904. In October she became the first woman scientist on the faculty of the University of Manchester. In 1905 University College made her the youngest Briton of either gender to earn the D.Sc. She studied at the Imperial University of Tokyo from 1907 to 1908, then returned to Manchester in 1909. She married geneticist Reginald Ruggles Gates in 1911 but obtained an annulment in 1916. Inspired by meeting Margaret Sanger in 1915, she began crusading for sexual freedom and birth control. With her second husband, Humphrey Verdon Roe, she opened the first birth control clinic in Great Britain on March 17, 1921. By her own account she had three distinct careers: as a scientist until about 1914, as a social reformer until the late 1930s, and as a poet thereafter.

As a young girl she met many of her father’s friends in the British Association for the Advancement of Science, including Francis Galton, Thomas Henry Huxley, Norman McColl, and Charles Sayle. Through them came her interest in Charles Darwin. Her mother was a published scholar of William Shakespeare and Francis Bacon, a friend of Constance and Oscar Wilde, and would read aloud to preteens Marie and Winnie from a great variety of serious history and literature, expecting the girls to correlate the events with locations in the atlas. Marie wrote later that she developed a lifelong antipathy toward Jane Austen from this experience. As a teenager, she immersed herself in philosophy and spirituality, reading Immanuel Kant, Emanuel Swedenborg, and Henry David Thoreau. Her mentors at North London were headmistress and chemist Sophie Bryant and teacher Clothilde von Wyss; at University College, botanist Francis Wall Oliver, who in many ways was a father figure after her own father died in 1903; in Munich, Karl Goebel; and in Tokyo, Kenjiro Fujii, who became her first lover and introduced her to Chinese and Japanese poetry.

Archives

The largest part of Stopes’s vast estate of papers and correspondence is in the British Library Department of Manuscripts. Other significant collections are in the Wellcome Trust (London) Contemporary Medical Archives Centre and in the private holdings of her son, Harry Verdon Stopes-Roe.

Printed Sources

Begbie, Harold. Marie Stopes: Her Mission and Her Personality (London: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1927).

Briant, Keith Rutherford. Marie Stopes: A Biography (London: Hogarth, 1962); American edition: Passionate Paradox: The Life of Marie Stopes (New York: Norton, 1962).

Coldrick, Jack. Dr. Marie Stopes and Press Censorship of Birth-Control: The Story of the Catholic Campaign against Newspaper Advertising in Ireland and Britain (Belfast: Athol, 1992).

Eaton, Peter, and Marilyn Warnick. Marie Stopes: A Checklist of Her Writings (London: Croom Helm, 1977).

Hall, Ruth. Marie Stopes: A Biography (London: Andre Deutsch, 1977); American ed.: Passionate Crusader: The Life of Marie Stopes (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977).

Maude, Aylmer. The Authorized Life of Marie C. Stopes (London: Williams & Norgate, 1924).

———. Marie Stopes: Her Work and Play (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1933).

Reynolds, Moira Davison. Women Advocates of Reproductive Rights: Eleven Who Led the Struggle in the United States and Great Britain ( Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1994).

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Rose, June. Marie Stopes and the Sexual Revolution (London: Faber and Faber, 1992). Stopes-Roe, Harry Verdon. Marie Stopes and Birth Control (London: Priory, 1974).

Eric v.d. Luft

STOPPARD, TOM (1937– )

Born Thomas Straussler in Ziln, Czechoslovakia, Stoppard was five years old when his father died. His mother later married a British officer, from whom the boy received his surname. He was educated at various private schools in India and England and landed a job as a theater critic in 1954, working in that capacity until 1960. John Osborne’s plays and Kenneth Tynan’s reviews championing them inspired Stoppard to try his hand as a playwright. He scored his first big success with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (1966), a play about fate and free will involving two minor characters from Hamlet. The Real Inspector Hound (1968) solidified Stoppard’s reputation for mixing philosophical speculation and sharp wit, and invited justifiable comparisons with the works of George Bernard Shaw. In his most recent efforts, such as The Invention of Love (1997), Stoppard brings a thorough knowledge of history to bear on the issues that puzzle him, revealing himself to be a historian’s playwright as much as a philosopher’s.

Stoppard’s criticism exhibited an appreciation for the realist masters Henrik Ibsen and Bertolt Brecht, and in terms of technique, many authors have seen the traces of Robert Bolt’s style of language in Stoppard’s earliest stage works (Billington 1987, 17; Fleming 2001, 12). Even so, it is the absurdist influence that is most evident in Stoppard’s early plays, particularly Rosencrantz and Inspector Hound, in which the characters are trapped by outside forces, and the logical distinctions between real and unreal, on-stage and off, prove unreliable. Stoppard has expressed admiration for the plays of Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter, even hinting that those authors’ works possess a more timeless quality than his own (Gussow 1995, 6). However, among absurdists, Stoppard is probably most similar to Eugene Ionesco, whose plays take a more explicitly humorous approach to existential dilemmas. In terms of his humor and his belief that the aesthetics of plays are more important than their political or social value, Stoppard follows Oscar Wilde, another author that he specifically mentions as an influence.

Archives

Archives have not been established.

Printed Sources

Billington, Michael. Stoppard: The Playwright (London: Methuen, 1987).

Fleming, John. Stoppard’s Theatre: Finding Order amid Chaos (Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, 2001).

Gussow, Mel. Conversations with Tom Stoppard (London: Nick Hern Books, 1995). Stoppard, Tom. Plays, 5 vol. (London: Faber and Faber, 1996–99).

Christopher Pepus

STRACHEY, LYTTON (1880–1932)

Giles Lytton Strachey was born in London on March 1, 1880, to a family with strong connections to Indian administration. His father, Sir Richard Strachey, had

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an important career as an engineer, a scientist, and a man of letters in India. His mother Jane (née Grant) had, in fact, been born on a boat bound for India. Strachey’s elder brothers also had prominent careers in Indian affairs. After school at Abbotsholme and Leamington, he went to what was then called Liverpool University College, where his kinsman Walter Raleigh was King Alfred Professor of English Literature. Then he went up to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he moved in that circle of intellectuals known as the Apostles ( John Maynard Keynes, E. M. Forster, and Leonard Woolf ) who would form the core of Bloomsbury. Strachey sat for both parts of the History Tripos but did not take a distinguished degree. He sought a Trinity fellowship with a dissertation on Warren Hastings, but was defeated in two tries. Thence he went down to London where he served as a critic for his cousin’s (St. Loe Strachey) Spectator.

Strachey’s first published works were collections of verse: Prolusiones Academicae (1902) and Euphrosyne (1905). His major works followed: Landmarks in French Literature (1912), Eminent Victorians (1918), Queen Victoria (1921), Books and Characters, French and English (1922), The Son of Heaven, a Play (1925), Elizabeth and Essex, A Tragic History (1928), Portraits and Miniatures, Critical Essays (1931). Characters and Commentaries came out the year after he died. Strachey is famous for the revolution he produced in the writing of biography. With his slashing style, Strachey, as he put it in the preface to Eminent Victorians, imposed nothing, proposed nothing, he only exposed. Rescuing biography from Victorian reticence, Strachey directed attention to questions of time, memory, and character, examining the dynamics of the inner lives of his subjects. He led the way for generations of experimenters to liberate biographical writing from sterile forms and illusions.

Strachey’s intellectual and literary background included modest amounts of the usual classical and mathematical training. However, the force of his mental preparation was in modern English and French literature. His family was a literary hothouse. Some of this was the result of his family’s experience in India with its exotic and sensually immediate impulses. From an early age, however, Strachey’s mother exposed him to the ideas and forms of French letters. His influence in things French was further promoted by Marie Souvestre, who conducted a famous school for girls at Fontainebleau and who later taught his sisters at her school in Wimbledon, and by his own travels in France. Jane Strachey raised Lytton and his siblings on French songs and verses. She introduced them to the fables of La Fontaine and read to them from Racine every evening. Elinor, Lytton’s eldest sister, recalled that once, when she and her mother arrived in Paris by rail, Jane Strachey rose to her full height in the carriage and saluted the city. When André Gide visited England, Jane Strachey tutored him. Lytton’s sister, Dorothy, fell in love with Gide and translated his work into English. Dorothy married the French artist Simon Bussy and wrote on Eugene Delacroix and Charles Baudelaire. Pernel Strachey, another sister who became principal of Newnham College, Cambridge, wrote and taught the writings of Honoré de Balzac and Marcel Proust. At Cambridge, G. E. Moore’s Principia Ethica (1903) was the most important literary and philosophical influence upon Strachey. Its pursuit of the true and the good followed Strachey all of his life. One cannot dismiss the importance of his family, the Apostles, and his friends in Bloomsbury, all of whom acted as kinds of knowledge communities and continued to stimulate Strachey’s mental formation.

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Archives

A large collection of Strachey papers, including the correspondence of his brother James, is found in the British Library (Add. Mss. 60706–60712), along with letters to and from his cousin Duncan Grant (Add. Mss. 57932–57933). An important collection of family letters and papers are in the India Office Library (Mss., Eur. F. 127). Strachey’s correspondence with Maynard Keynes, letters essential to understanding both men’s lives and careers, is located in King’s College, Cambridge. Strachey’s letters to G. E. Moore are located in the University of Cambridge Library and his letters to R. C. Trevelyan are in Trinity College, Cambridge. The Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas holds an extensive collection of Strachey family correspondence as well as Strachey’s letters to and from Lady Ottoline Morrell and Leonard Woolf. The Berg Collection in the New York Public Library holds a small but very interesting series of letters between Strachey and Keynes. The Taylor Collection at Princeton University contains the holographs of Strachey’s dissertation on Warren Hastings and correspondence with his sister, Dorothy Bussy, and Vanessa Bell.

Printed Sources

Holroyd, Michael (ed.). Lytton Strachey By Himself: A Self-Portrait (London: Heinemann, 1971).

Strachey, James (ed.). Spectatorial Essays (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1964).

Strachey, Lytton. The Shorter Strachey, Michael Holroyd and Paul Levy (ed. and intro.), (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980).

Woolf, L., and J. Strachey (eds.). Virginia Woolf and Lytton Strachey: Letters (London: Hogarth Press, 1956).

W. C. Lubenow

STRAVINSKY, IGOR (1882–1971)

Igor Stravinsky was born at Oranienbaum, near St. Petersburg, into a family with pronounced intellectual and musical interests. His father, Fyodor Ignatievich, a prominent bass-baritone at the Maryinsky Imperial Theatre, provided the young Stravinsky with a strong musical education. Stravinsky found pleasure in reading opera scores from his father’s library. While attaining his law degree from the University of St. Petersburg (1905), he studied composition with Nikolai RimskyKorsakov. Beginning with L’Oiseau de Feu in 1910 (Alexander Golovin, Michel Fokine), Stravinsky collaborated with Serge Diaghilev and his circle of avant-garde artists on numerous projects for the Ballets Russes, which won him international recognition: Petrouchka in 1911 (Alexandre Benois, Vaslav Nijinsky); Le Sacre du Printemps in 1913 (Nikolai Roerich, Nijinsky); Pulcinella in 1920 (Pablo Picasso, Tamara Karsavina, Leonide Massine); Le Chant du Rossignal in 1920 (Henri Matisse, Massine, Karsavina); Le Renard in 1922 (Michel Larionov, Bronislava Nijinska); Les Noces in 1923 (Natalia Gontcharova, Nijinska); Apollon Musagete in 1928 (George Balanchine, Coco Chanel). Le Sacre, Stravinsky’s revolutionary masterpiece, changed the face of music with its block harmonies, primitive rhythms, and complex innovations. Its debut created both a riot in the audience and a myth of the birth of modern music. Le Sacre is regarded as a manifesto of modern music, the touchstone of modernity. Its impact and iconoclastic status remain unprecedented in the music world. Stravinsky turned from the Bacchanalianism of Le Sacre

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to neoclassical forms, then he continued experimenting with different styles, conventions, and aesthetics in opera, symphonies, sacral music, and serial works. After the Russian Revolution, he became a French citizen, but during World War II he immigrated to the United States, where he obtained American citizenship and composed his final block of work. In 1939–40, Stravinsky delivered the Charles Eliot Norton Lecture Series at Harvard University, in which he pointed out the key to his diverse creations: music is about music, and its essence is the expression of sound.

Trilingual (Russian, French, and English), Stravinsky wrote half a dozen books of memoirs and commentaries, displaying a prodigious mastery of world literature. As a young man, he was caught up in the intellectual ideas of Diaghilev’s journal, Mir iskusstva (1898–1904). He admired Alexander Pushkin because he united the most characteristically Russian elements with Western style, and based Mavra (1922), on Pushkin’s The Little House of Kolomna. Sharing the neonationalist fascination of Diaghilev’s circle with Russia’s mythic past and pre-Petrine culture, he studied Alexander Afanasyev’s Russian Folktales and Peter Kireevsky’s collection of folk songs. Les Noces, Renard Suite, Pribaoutki (1914), and numerous choral works had their origins in Russian folklore, as did Le Sacre, which was textured by Kireevsky’s ethnographic research on ceremonial and ritual music and Lithuanian folk songs compiled by Anton Juszkiewicz. Stravinsky translated some of his favorite Russian fairy tales into French.

Stravinsky’s Three Japanese Lyrics (1913) were inspired by his extensive reading of Japanese poetry; his Scherzo fantastique (1909) by Maurice Maeterlinck’s La Vie des abeilles, which he read in 1907. In 1910, he created Two Poems of Verlaine, songs based on Paul Verlaine’s poems, La lune blanche and Un grand sommeil noir. Versed in Western classics as well as in Russian literature (he preferred Fyodor Dostoyevsky to Pushkin), he was influenced by modern writers such as Jean-Paul Sartre, T. S. Eliot, Wystan Auden, Vladimir Mayakovsky, and Dylan Thomas. He revered Eliot, creating a requiem mass for him, Introitus T. S. Eliot in Memoriam (1966). Auden, a close friend, wrote the libretto for his opera, The Rake’s Progress (1951), and Stravinsky constructed Eleg y for J. F. K. (1964) around Auden’s poem on that subject. In 1953, he was commissioned to write an opera with Thomas, but the project ended with the untimely death of the poet. Stravinsky wrote a dirge, In memoriam Dylan Thomas (1954), using Thomas’s poetry for the song lyrics. Stravinsky was familiar with the writings of the Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset citing Castles in Castile as reading material in 1955. Stravinsky’s dictum that form is everything in music correlates with Gasset’s thinking on the structure of aesthetic principles. The literary collaboration between Robert Craft and Stravinsky, published in many volumes, provides the richest sources on the composer’s thoughts on music and literature.

Archives

Central State Historical Archives, St. Petersburg.

Maryinsky Theatre Collection, State Museum of Theatre and Music, St. Petersburg.

Serge Diaghilev Correspondence, Dance Collection, Lincoln Center, New York Public Library, New York.

Printed Sources

Stravinsky, Igor. Chronicle of My Life (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1936).

———. The Poetics of Music (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1947).

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———.Selected Correspondence, 3 vols., Robert Craft (ed.), (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985).

———.Themes and Conclusions (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982).

Stravinsky, Igor, and Robert Craft. Conversations with Igor Stravinsky (Garden City: Doubleday, 1959).

———. Memories and Commentaries (New York: Doubleday, 1960).

Taruskin, Richard. Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions: A Biography of the Works Through Marva, 2 vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996).

Van den Toorn, Peter C. Stravinsky and the Rite of Spring: The Beginnings of a Musical Language (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987).

Ulle V. Holt

STRESEMANN, GUSTAV (1878–1929)

Gustav Stresemann was the youngest of eight children of the Berlin publican and beer wholesaler Ernst August Stresemann and his wife, Mathilde. The ideals and virtues of the Protestant Prussian middle classes, such as devotion to duty, hard work, patriotism, and loyalty toward state and monarch, were imprinted upon him even before he began to attend school. The lessons at the Andreas-Realgymnasium in Berlin, where Stresemann spent all of his twelve and a half years at school (1884–97), intensified those values. He studied literature, history, and national economy at the universities of Berlin and Leipzig, attending lectures on national economy held by Gustav Schmoller and Karl Theodor Reinhold, among others, and graduated in 1901 with a Ph.D. on the beer trade in Berlin. The Prussian ethos of work affected his later career as spokesman or, in modern terms, public relations manager of an association of industrialists and as politician and statesman most strongly, since he was to tax himself often beyond the limits of his physical strength. Though Stresemann started out on his political career as a member of the National Liberal Party in the German Reichstag in 1907, it was as chancellor for only 103 days in 1923 and foreign secretary of the Weimar Republic from 1923 to 1929 that he influenced the course of German politics most markedly. In the position of chancellor he took the then-unpopular decision to end passive resistance in the Ruhr area against French and Belgian occupation, thus paving the way to a political consolidation of the Weimar Republic. Even more momentous was his impact on German foreign policy and on international relations in the second half of the 1920s in general. Not aggression, but negotiations aiming at reconciliation were his instrument in the attempt to pave the way to peaceful relations and international exchange and to reestablish Germany as a great power. Together with his French counterpart, Aristide Briand, he successfully worked for a rapprochement between Germany and France, which ushered in a new phase of international stability after World War I. The consummation of this policy was reached with the Locarno Treaty of 1925. For this outstanding feat of diplomacy, Stresemann and Briand were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1926.

With two parents working in the family business, Stresemann was left alone quite often as a child. He filled much of his time with reading, preferably with literary texts and books on history and geography. Early in his life, Adalbert vom Berge’s Napoleons Leben instilled in him a lifelong interest in Napoleon and other great personalities in history, an interest which led him to read Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, whose ideas and writings accompanied him throughout his life. Publi-

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cations of speeches held at the time of the revolution of 1848–49 attracted him in his youth. Being rhetorically talented himself, he upheld an appreciation of powerful rhetoric, such as the one found in Thomas Babington Macaulay’s writings or in the parliamentary debates on the Education Bill in England in 1870. Quotations from Goethe and other high-ranking German poets had their place in his own speeches, as did ideas voiced by the people in the street. While at university, Stresemann kept a detailed record of his readings, among them Werner Sombart’s

Sozialismus und soziale Bewegung; Ernest Renan’s Leben Jesu, which impressed Stresemann, a freemason from the mid-1890s to 1923, very much; Macaulay’s Machiavelli as well as fictional writings from Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler; Adalbert Stifter’s Studien; Theodor Fontane’s Irrungen und Wirrungen; and works popular at the time, such as Friedrich Spielhagen’s novels, among them Angela, and Lewis Wallace’s Ben Hur.

After a second stroke, Stresemann died in October 1929, at the time trying to rally his fellow party members to vote for a ratification of the Young Plan. He left a wife, Käte, née Kleefeld, and two sons.

Archives

Stresemann-Nachlaß, Politisches Archiv des Auswärtigen Amtes, Bonn (most of the documents are available on microfilm in the National Archives of the United States).

Printed Sources

Bernhard, Henry (ed.). Gustav Stresemann. Vermächtnis. Der Nachlaß in drei Bänden (Berlin: Ullstein, 1932–33).

Harttung, Arnold (ed.). Gustav Stresemann. Schriften. Mit einem Vorwort von Willy Brandt

(Berlin: Berlin Verlag, 1976).

Koszyk, Kurt. Gustav Stresemann. Der kaisertreue Demokrat. Eine Biographie (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1989).

Stresemann, Gustav. Reden und Schriften. Politik—Geschichte—Literatur. 1897–1929, 2 vols. (Dresden: Reissner, 1926).

Stresemann, Wolfgang. Mein Vater Gustav Stresemann (Munich: Herbig, 1979).

Turner, Henry Ashby Jr. Stresemann and the Politics of the Weimar Republic (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1963).

Angela Schwarz

SUNDAY, WILLIAM ASHLEY (1862–1935)

Billy Sunday was a Presbyterian minister, reformer, and athlete who helped establish the forms of modern fundamentalist evangelism. After a childhood characterized by a broken family and scattered education, Sunday was hired to play outfield for the Chicago White Stockings in 1883 but experienced a religious conversion in Chicago’s Pacific Garden Mission in Chicago in 1886. He left his lucrative professional baseball career playing for teams in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia to pursue his religious calling in 1891. He first worked for the YMCA in Chicago and then for other evangelists but began his own revival campaigns in 1896 and was ordained as a Presbyterian minister in 1903.

Sunday’s revivals were highly organized, publicized campaigns directed toward a mass audience. Stressing the importance of personal conversion, Sunday’s sermons were characterized by a fiery rhetorical style characterized by colloquial language

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and rousing music. As a result, he was widely criticized by both liberal critics and members of the clergy but gained widespread popularity. A leading proponent of the Prohibition movement, his famed “Booze” sermon, entitled “Get on the Water Wagon,” was a revival mainstay. Sunday also vigorously supported American involvement in World War I and spoke at the U.S. House of Representatives in 1918. His activity was not limited to public preaching; he published Love Stories of the Bible in 1917 and other articles and sermons throughout his life and was involved with the Winona Bible Conference in Indiana. In 1935 Sunday received an honorary Doctor of Divinity degree from Bob Jones College.

Sunday lacked a formal education and disdained the academic intellectualism practiced by many of his contemporaries. He rejected modern theological doctrines such as the Social Gospel and scientific theories such as evolution, declaring “I want to say that I believe the word of the Bible is the word of God from cover to cover” (Bruns 1992, 127). Sunday therefore was most influenced by the Bible, from which he drew both spiritual inspiration and possibly the practice of using parables and literary allusions in his sermons. However, he also drew literary inspiration from past revivalists and Christian workers, including Charles Grandison Finney, “Uncle” John Vassar, and Dwight L. Moody. Receive Ye the Holy Ghost (1894) by the evangelist John Wilbur Chapman, a disciple of Moody and Sunday’s one-time employer, also strongly influenced Sunday’s fundamentalism.

Archives

Papers of William Ashley “Billy” Sunday and Helen Amelia (Thompson) Sunday, Grace College and Theological Seminary, Winona Lake, Indiana.

Printed Sources

Bruns, Roger A. Preacher: Billy Sunday and Big Time American Evangelism (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1992).

Dorset, Lyle W. Billy Sunday and the Redemption of Urban America (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans, 1991).

Gullen, Karen. Billy Sunday Speaks (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1970).

Marsden, George. Fundamentalism and American Culture: The Shaping of Twentieth Century Evangelicalism, 1870–1925 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982).

Jill Silos

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TARKOVSKY, ANDREI (1932–1986)

Soviet filmmaker Andrei Arsen’evic Tarkovsky was born in Zavroje, near the Volga River, not far from Ivanovo, Russia (U.S.S.R.), on April 4, 1932. His father, Arseny (or Arseniy, Arsenii) Aleksandrovich Tarkovsky was a poet of merit. Andrei Tarkovsky spent his childhood in Peredelkino (not far from Moscow), receiving a religious education from his mother. He went to art schools and studied music, fine arts, and sculpting. He found a job as a geologist and worked for a time in Siberia. From 1956 to 1961, Tarkovsky studied with Mikhail Romm at the official film school in Moscow, the V.G.I.K. His films feature long shots, minimal editing, slow movements, and no reaction shots. Most of Tarkovsky’s feature films won important prizes in film festivals: in 1962 at the Venice Festival, with his first feature film titled My Name is Ivan (Ivan’s Childhood), and later at the Festival de Cannes, when Solaris (1972), Nostalgia (1983), and The Sacrifice (1986) got the highest awards. In 1984, Tarkovsky defected, emigrating to Italy, where he lived for two years. He died of cancer in Paris in 1986, the same year his masterpiece, The Sacrifice (Offret), was released in Sweden.

In a 1985 interview with Swedish journalist Boleslaw Edelhajt, Tarkovsky named his main literary influences, the Russian authors Alexandr Pushkin, Nikolai Gogol, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Lev Tolstoy. Curiously, Tarkovsky admitted he was more influenced by nineteenth-century Russian poets than by any filmmaker. His favorite directors were mainly European: Ingmar Bergman, Michelangelo Antonioni, Robert Bresson, Federico Fellini, Akira Kurosawa, and above all Luis Bunuel. He didn’t like Sergei Eisenstein’s aesthetics, though he mentions his films and writings in his book, Sculpting in Time (1986). Elsewhere in Sculpting in Time, Tarkovsky mentions as his favorite directors Charles Chaplin, Alexander Dovjenko, and Kenji Mizoguchi. Tarkovsky considered American films “garbage” (Tarkovsky 1986, 83). While he was still at the V.G.I.K. film school, Andrei Tarkovsky adapted Ernest Hemingway’s novel The Killers. Although made in

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