Russian and Soviet Film Adaptations of Literature, 1900-2001

Screening the Word

Stephen Hutchings, Anat Vernitskaia, Stephen Hutchings, Anat Vernitskaia

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• Print ISBN:
  9780415546126
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134400577
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Film & Video
• Index: History

Providing many interesting case studies and bringing together many leading authorities on the subject, this book examines the importance of film adaptations of literature in Russian cinema, especially during the Soviet period when the cinema was accorded a vital role in imposing the authority of the communist regime on the consciousness of the Soviet people.

Part I
Film adaptations from the start to Stalin

Manufacturing the myth

1
‘Crime without punishment’
Reworkings of nineteenth-century Russian literary sources in Evgenii Bauer’s Child of the Big City

Rachel Morley¹

As many commentators on early Russian cinema have noted, the use of nineteenth-century Russian literary classics as sources for film scenarios was a common strategy of pre-Revolutionary Russian directors, who often sought thereby to increase the cultural and social ‘respectability’ of their new art form (Zorkaia 1976:99–111; Tsiv’ian 1991:8; Youngblood 1999:15, 61–71, 115; McReynolds 2003:260–4).² In this respect, Evgenii Bauer (1867–1917) is an anomaly. While he adapted several works of Russian and European literature for the screen, Bauer chose none of the classic nineteenth-century Russian texts, preferring works by lesser-known writers or those not generally considered literary classics.³ The only extant Bauer film based on a work by one of the nineteenth-century Russian greats is After Death (Posle smerti, 1915), a modernized version of Ivan Turgenev’s 1882 story ‘Klara Milich’, not one of the author’s best-known works.⁴

Bauer’s relatively late entry into cinema, in 1912, may explain this peculiarity of his oeuvre.⁵ As Denise Youngblood notes: ‘By 1912, it had become apparent to studio heads that the works of “sensational” living writers… could attract even larger audiences than those for the classics’ (Youngblood 1999:9). Despite this shift towards popular literature, however, adaptations of the classics continued to be made. Moreover, Bauer did not entirely ignore the nineteenth-century Russian classics. In fact, in his many films that have original scenarios, he exploited a wide range of nineteenth-century literary sources, most notably works by Pushkin, Gogol’, Dostoevskii and Tolstoi, drawing on their stock protagonists, themes and images. Bauer did not merely replicate the commonplaces of this literary tradition, however. Instead, he frequently subverted, reversed and developed them in surprising ways. This makes the films Bauer based on original scenarios more complex and challenging intertextual works than those that are straightforward adaptations of single texts.

Bauer’s subversion of the staple protagonists, motifs and themes of this literary tradition is a recurrent characteristic of his directorial style and thus seems to be an intentional strategy. The aims of this chapter are therefore twofold: to give examples of Bauer’s appropriation of nineteenth-century Russian literary sources, and to consider why he preferred such intertextual play to direct adaptation of the Russian classics. In so doing, I shall focus on Bauer’s 1914 melodrama Child of the Big City (Ditia bol’shogo goroda), subtitled A Girl from the Street (Devushka s ulitsy), for its density and range of literary and cultural allusion are such that only a detailed reading can do it justice.⁶

Set in contemporary Moscow, Child of the Big City tells the story of a beautiful seamstress, who improves her lot by captivating a rich young man whom she ruins and then abandons. The film’s sententious title and subtitle both situate the viewer in the context of the realist literature of nineteenth-century Russia, and lead us to expect that Bauer, too, will focus on moral and social concerns. The opening sequence further encourages this assumption, for we witness the orphaning of Man’ka, the eponymous child: her mother, a laundress, dies of consumption in a dirty basement, surrounded by tearful, God-fearing women and watched by her distraught daughter. Having, during her lifetime, performed the prototypical work of nineteenth-century lower-class women—and not only of those in Russia—, Man’ka’s mother dies in one of the two conventional locations for such a scene, the other being a miserable garret. Furthermore, she dies what Susan Sontag has shown to be the quintessential death of nineteenth-century female protagonists. In Illness as Metaphor, Sontag demonstrates that in nineteenth-century works tuberculosis is repeatedly represented as ‘the prototypical passive death’ and ‘the disease of born victims’ (Sontag 1991:25–6); it was also seen as ‘a redemptive death for the fallen’ (ibid.: 42). Bauer’s use of this general nineteenth-century trope is not intended to continue this tradition; however, but rather to disrupt it. It is not his central female protagonist who suffers from consumption, but the peripheral character of her mother, and, moreover, Bauer ultimately dismisses the type of the passive and victimized consumptive heroine altogether; after the opening sequence, the action leaves the dirty basement and the nineteenth century and instead moves out and up into the high society of the modern city, focusing on the story of a twentieth-century woman’s self-creation. Although Man’ka’s story may begin like that of so many nineteenth-century heroines, we shall see that it does not progress in the same way.⁷

While the opening sequence of Child of the Big City draws on these commonplaces of nineteenth-century art, it is also Bauer’s first direct reference to a specific nineteenth-century Russian text, Fedor Dostoevskii’s 1867 novel Crime and Punishment (Prestuplenie i nakazanie). In many of its details this sequence recalls the scene from Part 5, chapter 5 when Katerina Ivanovna Marmeladova—Sonia’s stepmother—dies from consumption in Sonia’s garret room, surrounded by her weeping children and other onlookers (Dostoevskii 1973b:332–4). Although Katerina Ivanovna is not a laundress by trade, her obsessive concern with remaining awake to wash her family’s clothes at night, detailed especially in Part 2, Chapter 7 (ibid.: 140), further links Man’ka’s mother to her. Bauer thus encourages the viewer to identify his young heroine not only with Sonia’s stepsister Polen’ka, but also with the twice-orphaned Sonia herself, for, throughout his novel, Dostoevskii presents Polen’ka less as a character in her own right and more as a young version of Sonia, for whom Raskol’nikov repeatedly predicts the same fate of prostitution.

The film’s action then jumps forward nine years, however, and immediately weakens the connection between Man’ka and Sonia. Bauer’s heroine, who has blossomed into the beautiful Mania, has not fallen into prostitution, but instead works in a sewing workshop as a seamstress, another prototypical profession of nineteenth-century Russian literary heroines, and a type, moreover, whom, according to Nikolai Gogol’, one may often see as she ‘runs across Nevskii Prospect with a hatbox in her hands’ (‘perebezhit chrez Nevskii prospekt s korobkoi v rukakh’) (Gogol’ 1994:11).⁸

At this point in the narrative, Bauer introduces his central male protagonist, Viktor Kravtsov, a wealthy, idealistic but unhappy young man. An intertitle informs us of his romantic disillusionment, revealing that he is searching for ‘an unspoilt young creature, unlike the “cultured” women who surrounded him’ (‘naivnoe molodoe sushchestvo, nepokhozhee na okruzhavshikh ego <kul’turnykh> zhenshchin’). Viktor is thus immediately cast as a twentieth-century Moscow version of the nineteenth-century literary type of the naive and intense ‘Petersburg dreamer’. In this, Bauer’s filmic hero joins a long line of nineteenth-century literary heroes, including Piskarev, the timid Petersburg artist of Gogol”s 1835 story ‘Nevskii Prospect’ (‘Nevskii prospekt’), the Underground Man of Dostoevskii’s Notes from Underground (Zapiski iz podpol’ia, 1864), his Raskol’nikov in Crime and Punishment, and others. Viktor’s fantasies of finding the love of an ‘unspoilt’ woman perhaps also link him, albeit less directly, to Pushkin’s Byronic hero Aleko in The Gypsies (Tsygany, 1824).

These allusions to general nineteenth-century literary types again narrow into a direct reference to a specific nineteenth-century text, this time Gogol”s ‘Nevskii Prospect’. In both text and film the central male protagonist is further characterized by his relationship with a friend whose personality is diametrically opposed to his own. In the same way that Gogol’ contrasts the idealism of the naive Piskarev with the pragmatism of his worldly promenading companion, Lieutenant Pirogov, so Bauer creates a down-to-earth foil for the romantic Viktor in his friend Kramskoi. Moreover, this surname cannot have been chosen by chance: through it Bauer alludes to the nineteenth-century Russian realist artist, Ivan Kramskoi, whose most famous work is his 1883 portrait of a knowing and challenging ‘Unknown Woman’ (‘Neizvestnaia’). By thus linking Viktor’s friend with this realist artist, Bauer highlights Kramskoi’s matter-of-fact approach to women. He also subtly underlines Viktor’s naive idealism, both by contrasting him with Kramskoi and by identifying him with Gogol”s Piskarev, for Viktor is thus associated with an art and an outlook of a very different kind from Kramskoi’s worldly realism, one that is rooted in a sentimental romanticism that has little to do with everyday reality. Gogol’ describes his artist hero as belonging to a class of people that ‘has as little in common with the citizens of Saint Petersburg as a person who appears before us in a dream has with the real world’ (‘stol’ko zhe prinadlezhit k grazhdanam Peterburga, skol’ko litso, iavliaiushcheesia nam v snovidenii, prinadlezhit k sushchestvennomu miru’) (Gogol’ 1994:13).

As Piskarev and Pirogov did before them in Saint Petersburg, Viktor and Kramskoi go out into the Moscow streets to continue their ‘search’ for a suitable woman. There they encounter Mania, hatbox in hand, and, as in ‘Nevskii Prospect’, the chase is on. Viktor and Kramskoi first notice Bauer’s heroine as she stands, transfixed, before a flower shop; for them, she is as much an object to be bought or possessed as the luxury goods she admires (see Figure 1.1). With Kramskoi leading the way, the two men follow her and watch as she gazes into a jewellery shop and bursts into tears of frustrated longing. Viktor hangs back as Kramskoi invites Mania to dine, then the three of them repair to the private room of a restaurant, where Kramskoi plies Mania with wine, laughs indulgently at her lack of savoir-faire and makes an attempt to seduce her that is as clumsy and aggressive as Pirogov’s attempted seduction of Schiller’s blonde wife in Gogol”s story. It is also as ineffective; Viktor, ostensibly more gallant than his businesslike friend, ‘protects’ Mania, but, when Kramskoi leaves, he seduces her himself. Encountering no resistance, yet believing he has at last found his ‘unspoilt young creature’, Viktor sets Mania up as his mistress.

Figure 1.1 Viktor (Mikhail Salarov, on the left) and Kramskoi (Arsenii Bibikov, on the right) encounter Mania (Elena Smirnova) in the Moscow streets.
Source: Courtesy of Gosfil’mofond Rossii, Moscow

The unsophisticated Mania is thus presented by Bauer as Viktor’s equivalent of Aleko’s nineteenth-century feminine ideal, embodied by the uncivilized Zemfira. However, as with both Pushkin’s Aleko and Gogol’’s Piskarev, Viktor’s assessment of Mania’s character proves to be misguided, for she is neither as ‘unspoilt’ nor as ‘naive’ as he believes. From the outset Bauer stresses that Mania, like Zemfira, who is entranced by Aleko’s account of his life in the civilized world (Pushkin 1978a:155), is attracted by the trappings of the high society to which Viktor belongs. The street scene, described above, unequivocally links Mania with the innately materialistic habituée of Nevskii Prospect who, Gogol’ notes ironically, turns ‘her little head to the sparkling shop windows, as a sunflower turns to the sun’ (‘svoiu golovku k blestiashchim oknam magazina, kak podsolnechnik k solntsu’) (Gogol’ 1994:8). Bauer also draws attention to Mania’s longing for luxury in the earlier workshop sequence. Here Mania is framed in medium close-up, sitting pensively by the window. The window seat was the favoured position of the dreaming heroines of sentimental literature, and also of Pushkin’s Tat’iana in Evgenii Onegin (1823–31, published in full in 1833). Mania is transfixed not by dreams of love, however, but ‘was carried away by dreams of a make-believe life, full of luxury and wealth’ (‘unosilas’ mechtami k nesbytochnoi zhizni, polnoi roskoshi i bogatstva’). Moreover, as she looks out at the Moscow cityscape, far from being horrified by the ugliness of the view and scared by its unfamiliarity, as Tat’iana is when she visits Moscow in Chapter 7, Stanza 43 of Evgenii Onegin (Pushkin 1978b:136–7), Mania longs to be part of that exciting world. Mania’s more pragmatic aspirations link her with Pushkin’s Lizaveta in The Queen of Spades (Pikovaia dama, 1833), who also sits by the window dreaming of finding a man to help her improve her social standing (Pushkin 1978c:218).

Mania’s desire for a ‘better’ life thus explains Viktor’s appeal for her. Through him she goes up in the world, a fact Bauer conveys visually in a lengthy shot of the huge flight of stairs leading to the glamorous café-concert to which Viktor introduces her. Mania quickly settles into her new way of life. She abandons her Russian name in favour of its Western equivalent, Mary (Meri), and enjoys the soirées, the life of leisure, the glamorous clothes and the tasteless knick-knacks that Viktor’s money buys her. Like Zemfira again, however, Mary values her ‘freedom’ and is not prepared to commit herself to one man. She flirts with Viktor’s valet and basks in the attention of male guests at the café-concert. It therefore comes as no surprise when Mary, like Zemfira, eventually transfers her attention and her affection to another man.

Like Gogol’, who dismisses Piskarev as ‘completely ridiculous’ (‘chrezvychaino smeshon’) (Gogol’ 1994:17), Bauer does not sympathize with his suffering hero; instead he mocks Viktor’s delusions and romantic aspirations by linking him increasingly closely with the hapless Piskarev. Indeed, the two men share so many traits that Viktor at times appears to be Piskarev’s double. Both Piskarev and Viktor are shown to aestheticize women. Piskarev describes his beloved as ‘the very image of Perugino’s Bianca’ (‘sovershenno Perudzhinova Bianka’) (ibid.: 12) and fantasizes that, had she not existed in reality, but instead been ‘the creation of an inspired artist’ (‘sozdanie vdokhnovennogo khudozhnika’), he would have been able to worship her as he chose (ibid.: 24). Typically, Bauer uses details of mise-en-scène to reveal Viktor’s similar tendency towards the aestheticization of his beloved. This would-be Pygmalion is surrounded with artistic representations of his feminine ideal: in his study neo-classical statuettes of women abound and even the base of his desk lamp has the form of a scantily-clad woman (see Figure 1.2). Moreover, after Mary has left him, Viktor seeks refuge from the truth about her by venerating her photograph.⁹

Both men also idealize the objects of their infatuation. Piskarev considers the prostitute a divine being, with ‘divine features’ (‘bozhestvennye cherty’), who ‘has flown down from heaven directly on to Nevskii Prospect’ (‘sletelo s neba priamo na Nevskii prospekt’) (ibid.: 13–14). As Piskarev loses himself in dreams and opium-induced visions, so Viktor sits daydreaming at his desk. They both construct fantasy images of the women they love that have little to do with reality, and again coincide to a remarkable degree. In his favourite dream, Piskarev casts the prostitute as his faithful wife and pictures her devotedly watching him at work before ‘she leant her delightful little head on his chest…’ (‘ona sklonila k nemu na grud’ prelestnuiu svoiu golovku…’) (ibid.: 24). Viktor similarly constructs a passive, compliant and faithful lover, who is content to adore and be adored, as she rests her head on his shoulder. Gogol’ states outright that these images are false, noting that in Piskarev’s dreams the prostitute always appears ‘in a guise completely contrary to reality’ (‘v polozhenii protivopolozhnom deistvitel’nosti’) (ibid.: 24); Bauer underlines the dive...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of plates
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: the ekranizatsiia in Russian culture
• Part I Film adaptations from the start to Stalin: manufacturing the myth
• Part II Literature and film in the post-Stalin period: the myth in retreat
• Part III Re-viewing Russia: myth and nation
• Part IV From text to screen, Soviet to post-Soviet: re-interpreting the myth
• Bibliography
• Index