BORDER CROSSING Russian Literature Into Film
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BORDER CROSSING Russian Literature into Film Edited by Alexander Burry and Frederick H. White Border Crossing This book is dedicated to our children: Elliott, Jacob, and Leopold Burry & Ruth Beatrice “Ruby” White Border Crossing Russian Literature into Film Edited by Alexander Burry and Frederick H. White Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting- edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: www.edinburghuniversitypress.com © editorial matter and organization Alexander Burry and Frederick H. White, 2016 © the chapters their several authors, 2016 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun—Holyrood Road 12 (2f) Jackson’s Entry Edinburgh EH8 8PJ Typeset in 11/13pt Ehrhardt MT Pro by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 4744 1142 4 (hardback) ISBN 978 1 4744 1143 1 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 1144 8 (epub) The right of the contributors to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498) Acknowledgments Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following sources for permission to reproduce material previously published elsewhere. Every effort has been made to trace the copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked, the publisher will be pleased to make the necessary arrangements at the first opportunity. Alastair Renfrew’s chapter in this volume is reproduced with the permission of the Modern Humanities Research Association. The original appeared in 2007 in Modern Language Review 102(1): 157–76. Yuri Leving’s chapter in this collection is a variation on a Russian language version originally published in the New Literary Observer. This version can be found as “Ideologiia travmirovannogo glaza, ili kak ubit’ Annu Kareninu nezhno.” Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 125(1) (2014): 75–102. Contents List of Figures vii Notes on the Contributors ix Introduction: Filming Russian Classics—Challenges and Opportunities 1 Alexander Burry 1 Across the Russian Border 17 Thomas Leitch 2 Dostoevskii’s “White Nights”: The Dreamer Goes Abroad 40 Ronald Meyer 3 On Not Showing Dostoevskii’s Work: Robert Bresson’s Pickpocket 64 Olga Peters Hasty 4 Stealing the Scene: Crime as Confession in Robert Bresson’s 85 Pickpocket S. Ceilidh Orr 5 The Eye-deology of Trauma: Killing Anna Karenina Softly 102 Yuri Leving 6 “A Vicious Circle”: Karen Shakhnazarov’s Ward no. 6 121 Alexander Burry 7 A Slap in the Face of American Taste: Transporting He Who Gets Slapped to American Audiences 140 Frederick H. White 8 Against Adaptation? The Strange Case of (Pod) Poruchik Kizhe 165 Alastair Renfrew vi contents 9 Chasing the Wealth: The Americanization of Il’f and Petrov’s The Twelve Chairs 188 Robert Mulcahy 10 Fassbinder’s Nabokov—From Text to Action: Repressed Homosexuality, Provocative Jewishness, and Anti-German 202 Sentiment Dennis Ioffe 11 “The Soviet Abroad (That We Lost)”: The Fate of Vasilii Aksenov’s Cult Novel A Starry Ticket on Paper and on Screen 223 Otto Boele Conclusion: Passport Control—Departing on a Cinematic Journey 239 Frederick H. White Bibliography 265 Filmography 281 Index 288 Figures I.1 A movie poster for Robert Bresson’s Pickpocket 11 I.2 A movie poster for Luchino Visconti’s 1957 film based on Fedor Dostoevskii’s hypotext 14 2.1 The neon illumination in Le notti bianche 45 2.2 The neon signs in Saawariya 55 2.3 Reflections in windows and mirrors comment on the Dreamer’s vision throughout En la ciudad de Sylvia 59 5.1 Anna Karenina (1914), production still 106 5.2 Frame from Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera juxtaposed with a screenshot from Anna Karenina (1997) 111 5.3 Frame from Luis Buñuel’s An Andalusian Dog 112 5.4 and 5.5 The cutting motif from Buñuel’s An Andalusian Dog is juxtaposed with corresponding images from Anna Karenina (2012) 113 5.6 In Wright’s version Anna almost touches her own face with the paper knife’s edge 117 6.1 Vladimir Kozlov, an actual patient interviewed in Ward no. 6 127 6.2 The real and fictional patients of the ward at the New Year’s party 134 7.1 Postcard of the Art Theater’s 1915 production of He Who Gets Slapped 144 7.2 Postcard of Illarion Pevtsov as He 147 7.3 Production still of Lon Chaney as He in Sjöström’s He Who Gets Slapped (1924) 151 7.4 Production still of Consuelo (Norma Shearer), Bezano (John Gilbert), and He (Lon Chaney) 154 10.1 Hermann parts sexual ways with Lydia 206 10.2 Hermann and the naked Felix, taking a bath 208 10.3 Hieronymus Bosch, a Fragment from The Garden of Earthly Delights 212 viii figures 10.4 Hermann and Felix 214 10.5 The scene of the murder. Hermann kills Felix, his imaginary double 217 C.1 Movie poster for Iakov Protazanov’s The Forty-First 242 C.2 Movie poster for The Eagle 247 C.3 American movie poster for the Dino De Laurentiis production of La tempesta 260 Notes on the Contributors Otto Boele is an Associate Professor of Russian literature at the University of Leiden (Netherlands). He is the author of The North in Russian Romantic Literature (1996) and Erotic Nihilism in Late Imperial Russia. The Case of Mikhail Artsybashev’s Sanin (2009). Currently he is working on the reception of Thaw literature and film, as well as on the cultural memory of the 1990s in contemporary poetry and prose. Alexander Burry is an Associate Professor of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures at The Ohio State University. He is the author of Multi-Mediated Dostoevsky (2011), and the co-translator, with Tatiana Tulchinsky, of Anna Politkovskaya’s A Small Corner of Hell: Dispatches from Chechnya (2003, 2007). He has published articles on Dostoevskii, Tolstoi, Chekhov, Erofeev, Prokofiev, Meierkhol’d, and other writers and artists in the Slavic and East European Journal, The Russian Review, Literature/Film Quarterly, and other journals and collections. Olga Peters Hasty is a Professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Princeton University, where she teaches courses on Russian poetry, drama, film theory, and ornamentalist prose. She is the co-author of America Through Russian Eyes (1988) and author of Tseveteva’s Orphic Journeys in the Worlds of the Word (1996), Pushkin’s Tatiana (1999), as well as numer- ous articles devoted to Russian poetry, women’s writing, film adaptation, and Vladimir Nabokov. Dennis Ioffe is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Languages and Cultures at Ghent University (Belgium). Ioffe has held teaching and research appointments at the University of Edinburgh (United Kingdom), Memorial University (Canada), University of Amsterdam (Netherlands), x notes on the contributors and the University of Haifa (Israel). He has authored more than eighty scholarly articles and edited/co-edited a number of academic collections. His publications have appeared in Studies in Slavic Cultures, Neohelicon, The Journal of European Studies, Russian Literature, Slavic & East European Journal, Acta Semiotica Fennica, Kritika i Semiotika, New Zealand Slavonic Journal, Cultura. International Journal of Philosophy of Culture and Axiology, Philologica, Tijdschrift voor Slavische Literatuur, Slavica Occitania, and others. Thomas Leitch is Professor of English at the University of Delaware. His most recent books are A Companion to Hitchcock Studies (co-edited with Leland Poague; 2011), Wikipedia U: Knowledge, Authority, and Liberal Education in the Digital Age (2014), and The Oxford Handbook of Adaptation Studies (forthcom- ing). He is currently working on The History of American Literature on Film. Yuri Leving is Professor of Russian Literature and Film in the Department of Russian Studies, Dalhousie University, Canada. In 2013–14, he was an Alexander von Humboldt Senior Research Fellow at Heidelberg University, Germany, and a Visiting Professor at the American Academy in Rome (2015). Leving is the author of four monographs: Marketing Literature and Posthumous Legacies: The Symbolic Capital of Leonid Andreev and Vladimir Nabokov (co- authored with Frederick H. White; 2013); Keys to The Gift. A Guide to V. Nabokov’s Novel (2011); Upbringing by Optics: Book Illustration, Animation, and Text (2010); and Train Station—Garage—Hangar. Vladimir Nabokov and the Poetics of Russian Urbanism (2004; short-listed for Andrey Bely Prize). He has also edited and co-edited six volumes of articles, most recently: Shades of Laura. Vladimir Nabokov’s Last Novel The Original of Laura (2013); Lolita: The Story of a Cover Girl—Vladimir Nabokov’s Novel in Art and Design (2013; reviews in The New Yorker, The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, and The Huffington Post); and Anatomy of a Short Story (2012, with an afterword by John Banville). Leving has published over a hundred scholarly articles on various aspects of Russian and comparative literature. He served as a commen- tator on the first authorized Russian edition of The Collected Works of Vladimir Nabokov in five volumes (1999–2001), and was the curator for the exhibition “Nabokov’s Lolita: 1955–2005” in Washington, DC, which celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Lolita. Leving is the founding editor of the Nabokov Online Journal (since 2007). He is currently finishing a book- length project, The Artist Joseph Brodsky. Ronald Meyer teaches the seminar in Russian literary translation at Columbia University. He is the translator of Anna Akhmatova, My Half-Century.