Zola, Alexander Dumas and Victor Hugo. Apart from his interest in contemporary architecture, Eisenstein enjoyed art and especially admired the paintings of Konstantin Makovsky. Due to "differences in temperament" and after Yulia had an affair with a general, the couple separated in 1909 and formally divorced in 1912. The couple had only one son, Sergei Eisenstein, who would become a well-known Soviet film director. Following the Russian Revolution, Eisenstein joined the "Whites" (anti-revolutionaries) as an engineer in 1918. His son chose to join the Bolsheviks, which ended their relationship. After the end of the Russian Civil War, Eisenstein settled in Berlin, where he died in 1920. He is buried at the Berlin-Tegel Russian Orthodox Cemetery. Architecture Eisenstein was active as an independent architect in Riga at a time of great economical expansion and consequent enlargement of the city, which coincided with the flourishing of Art Nouveau in the city. Even today, Riga has the highest concentration of Art Nouveau buildings anywhere in the world. Eisenstein designed some of the arguably most well-known of these Art Nouveau buildings, several of which are grouped together on Alberta iela (Albert Street) with other noteworthy buildings by Konstantīns Pēkšēns and Eižens Laube. Since almost no archival or biographical documents remain connected to the life of Eisenstein, his artistic development can only be sketched. It is known that he visited Paris and he may have attended to Exposition Universelle of 1900 and experienced the Art Nouveau architecture of Hector Guimard and Gustave Serrurier-Bovy as well as the L'Art Nouveau art gallery of S. Bing first-hand; he certainly brought home large numbers of French architectural reviews. Inspiration may also have come from the Vienna Secession and the architecture of Viennese architects Otto Wagner and Josef Hoffmann, which display some superficial similarities with that of Eisenstein. Contemporary Art Nouveau architecture in Saint Petersburg also clearly influenced Eisenstein. It has furthermore been noted that the decorative motifs employed by Eisenstein suggest a strong association with Symbolist ideas. In any case, the main corpus of buildings designed by Eisenstein share a number of characteristics. They are representatives of a highly, occasionally extremely, decorative form of Art Nouveau and display some innovative use of new materials such as cast iron but are conservative in their spatial layout. Although well known because they are so lavish, Eisenstein's buildings are not representative of Art Nouveau buildings in Riga more broadly. Buildings by