Early Career Research Network Seminars: Stay the flood: biography as record in the work of Jay Leyda

Freya Field-Donovan

This talk will present some preliminary research on the American avant-garde filmmaker and historian Jay Leyda. Leyda, who studied under Eisenstein in the Soviet Union in the early 1930s brought the only complete print of Battleship Potemkin (1925) to the United States on his return in 1936. He worked as an assistant film curator at the Museum of Modern Art until he was fired during the early years of the second Red Scare. A prolific translator of texts from Russian and chronicler of Chinese cinema, he also compiled two influential and understudied archival volumes: The Melville Log: A Documentary Life of Herman Melville, 1819–1891 (1950) and The Years and Hours of Emily Dickinson (1960). Both projects, which he referred to as ‘documentary biographies’ are fastidiously compiled archival volumes pertaining to each author's works and life. Leyda’s treatment of these historical figures “arrange a simple chronology of events recorded as well as dates of writing with no attempt to hide the gaps or to smooth contradictions” (Leyda, 1950). 

Leyda sought to give both writers “back to their world” by wrestling them away from the myth and sentimentality that prevented them from being understood as “citizens of their Nation and Community” (Leyda, 1960). Elaborating on his motivations for compiling such a volume in the introduction to The Years and Hours of Emily Dickinson, Leyda wrote the following: “To manipulate the larger scale of reference, the tinier scale of the immediate, the intimate, even the trivial offers itself as lubrication. Minutiae” he continued “can give movement to every sensible generalization about her life…” This talk will grapple with the relation between Leyda’s work on Soviet film and his documentary compendiums on Melville and Dickinson to turn over larger questions of biography, form and our access to history.