Mikhail Eisenstein

Origins and early life

Mikhail Eisenstein was born on 17 September 1867 at Bila Tserkva in the province of Kiev as Moisey Eisenstein, into a Jewish merchant family; the archival documents of his student file at the Institute of Civil Engineers in Saint Petersburg, published by Professor Roman Sokolov and Anna Sukhorukova in 2013, establish that birth.

Work and career

This fiche states plainly that he converted to Russian Orthodoxy in 1897, the year of his marriage to Yulia Konetskaya, of a well-off non-Jewish family, and took the name Mikhail; the conversion opened a career in the imperial civil service that was closed to Jews, and it did not stop his son, the film director Sergei Eisenstein, who has his own fiche on this site, from being described all his life as of Jewish origin.

He qualified as a civil engineer in 1893 and settled in Riga, then the third city of the Russian empire and in the middle of an industrial boom, where he rose to head the building department of the province of Livonia. Between 1899 and 1907 he designed some twenty apartment buildings, most of them along Alberta and Elizabetes streets, in an exuberant decorative Art Nouveau of his own: masks and sphinxes, colossal female faces, peacocks, lions and flame-shaped gables, applied to the flat street front like a screen.

Riga today has more Art Nouveau facades than any other city in Europe, and the UNESCO listing of its historic centre rests substantially on that ensemble, of which Eisenstein's are the most photographed. He separated from his wife in 1909, kept the son who would not forgive him, left Latvia after the revolution, and died in Berlin on 1 July 1920.