“The Soviet Abroad (That We Lost)”: The Fate of Vasilii Aksenov’s Cult Novel A Starry Ticket on Paper and on Screen

This chapter explores Aleksandr Zarkhi’s film adaptation of Vasilii Aksenov’s 1961 “youth novel” A Starry Ticket into My Younger Brother just a year later. Despite the relative liberalism of the Thaw period, ideological strictures had to be adhered to, and this necessitated correction of the novel’s “flaws,” namely Aksenov’s use of youth jargon, his focus on the generational divide in Soviet society, his undermining of the the myth of a big Soviet family, and the lack of positive development in the hero. The film simplifies and sanitizes the novel by removing the generational conflict and transform the novel’s ambiguous conclusion into a more optimistic vision of social progress and personal maturation.

Stealing the Scene: Crime as Confession in Robert Bresson’s Pickpocket

Noting the difficulty of interpreting Bresson’s use of Dostoevskii’s Crime and Punishment in The Pickpocket as an adaptation per se, this chapter argues that the director takes part in the generic tradition of confession. Pickpocketing becomes not just a crime but also, through Bresson’s disruption of the psychological cause and effect that the viewer expects, a repeated attempt at confession. Because of Bresson’s hero’s inability to explain the motivation for his crime, he resembles not only Dostoevskii’s hero Raskolnikov, but also Meursault of Camus’s The Stranger. By creating these gaps, Bresson forces viewers to negotiate the borders not only between genres but between disconnected acts.

Against Adaptation? The Strange Case of (Pod) Poruchik Kizhe

This chapter explores Iurii Tynianov’s 1934 film Lieutenant Kizhe, directed by Aleksandr Faintsimmer and based on Tynianov’s own novel, which concerns a hero created in official documents due to a clerk’s transcription error. Tynianov’s adaptation involves an unusual border crossing in that the novel was written after the screenplay. In the chapter, it is argued that the director failed to find successful devices for meeting the challenge to realist fiction proferred by Tynianov’s narrative of a non-existent hero. The chapter explores the mutual relationship between Tynianov’s novel and screenplay and his theoretical writings on adaptation.

Introduction: Filming Russian Classics—Challenges and Opportunities

This chapter presents an overview of the history and process of transposing classic Russian literature into film, surveying the progress recent scholars of adaptation studies have made in overcoming fidelity criticism. Borrowing Gerard Genette’s concept of “hypertextuality,” it offers an approach to studying films of Russian literature based on cross-cultural communication, in which literary texts undergo semantic shifts as they enter different temporal, spatial, social, and historical contexts when they are transformed into film.

Chasing the Wealth: The Americanization of Il’f and Petrov’s The Twelve Chairs

This chapter explores Mel Brooks’s transformation of Il’ia Il’f and Evgenii Petrov’s 1928 novel about three men chasing a stash of jewels hidden in a set of dining room chairs into the American “buddy film” genre. Brooks adapts the novel’s satire, grounded in the specific realia of the Soviet New Economic Policy period, into a film that dissolves national and temporal borders by combining US, Russian, Soviet, and Jewish motifs. The director thus reinvents of Russia for American audiences, focusing on the universal theme of friendship and cooperation triumphing over greed.

A Slap in the Face of American Taste: Transporting He Who Gets Slapped to American Audiences

This chapter discusses the impact of Leonid Andreev’s 1915 play He Who Gets Slapped on the U.S., where it was adapted into three genres: film, novel, and opera. Andreev’s play represents an example of his invented genre of panpsyche theater, in which the external action is driven by inner, psychological struggle, in this case of a clown who runs from a failed marriage and tries to find solace in the world of the circus. Victor Sjöström’s 1924 film of the play, the first MGM production, emphasized motifs of romance and revenge rather than Andreev’s focus on psychological development. Later, the play was adapted into a novel by George Carlin (1925) and a 1956 opera by Robert Ward and Bernard Stambler. The semiotic system of the circus allowed this play to be transported successfully to American audiences.

On Not Showing Dostoevskii’s Work: Robert Bresson’s Pickpocket

This chapter focuses on Robert Bresson’s engagement of Dostoevskii’s Crime and Punishment in his 1959 film The Pickpocket. It argues that although Bresson suppresses Dostoevskii’s emphasis on psychology in favor of his own ascetic cinematic style, he nevertheless locates important points of contact with the novelist’s existentialist questions and concern for alienation from others. Bresson’s replacement of the murder of a pawnbroker with the crime of pickpocketing recalls another Dostoevskian novel, The Gambler, in which the protagonist tests himself against fate through risky bets at the roulette wheel that, similarly to Raskolnikov and Bresson’s hero Michel, enslave him in a compulsion that erodes his selfhood.

Across the Russian Border

This chapter explores the concept of “border crossing” in American films about Russia and the Soviet Union. Such Hollywood productions reflected the cultural and political concerns of each particular period of Soviet-American relations. Filmmakers took the approaches of exoticism, universalism, defection, and seduction in their appropriation of Russian culture and Soviet politics. The author explores the different ideological approaches these films display, from pro-Soviet films during World War II to Red-baiting thrillers during the McCarthyite period, many of which curiously portrayed the “Red Menace” without actually mentioning the Soviet Union by name. Along with this survey of Cold War depictions of the USSR, the chapter explores several prominent adaptations of literary works, which – like many more politically-oriented films – celebrate the Russian cultural heritage in an effort to “colonize” the Soviet Union by presenting Russians in universalist terms.

“A Vicious Circle”: Karen Shakhnazarov’s Ward no. 6

This chapter explores Karen Shakhnazarov’s 2009 film of Chekhov’s “Ward no. 6,” which combines the story’s plot with “mockumentary” features, as the director includes interviews with patients from an actual mental institution. It is argued that the focus of these interviews on childhood trauma underscores the same theme in the story. This theme can be traced back to Dostoevskii’s depiction of suffering children in The Brothers Karamazov, and also reflects Chekhov’s knowledge of the degeneration theory circulating in the 1890s. Shakhnazarov’s depiction of the same tragic plot in contemporary times implies that the “hereditary taint,” with its violence and abuse from generation to generation, continues to affect Russian society today.

The Eye-deology of Trauma: Killing Anna Karenina Softly

This chapter focuses on depictions of the death of the heroine of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina in adaptations ranging from the silent film era to the present day. It argues that the various cinematic hypertexts have altered the way we view Anna’s suicide, the focal point of the novel for many readers, creating a new visual language to represent her death. Also discussed is a new cinematic hypertext, not present in the novel, but included by many of the filmmakers: Anna’s eye, which the author traces back to Dziga Vertov’s mechanized depiction of the human eye in Man with a Movie Camera. Such cinematic influences, along with the novel’s transportation to different times and countries in its adaptations, demonstrate that the novel has acquired a new vocabulary, in addition to that of Tolstoy’s novel.