In this study, Adaptation as a Symptom: The Russian Classic on the Post-Soviet Screen, Lioudmila Fedorova offers an original and productive approach to post-Soviet reworkings of classic literature into film. She interprets these adaptations as both symptoms of trauma and efforts to heal it, as directors repeatedly turn to nineteenth-century texts to work through the disintegration of the Soviet Union and other cataclysmic events. Her examination of adaptations through the prism of trauma illuminates significant patterns in these diverse films, as she outlines the various directors’ attempts to connect traumatic episodes within the literary works to broader social, cultural, and historical currents.
Fedorova clarifies particular traits of each author that have attracted the attention of recent filmmakers. Aleksandr Pushkin's life and works, she shows in the first chapter, contain a cluster of motifs, such as his relations to the tsar, his duel, the cult that followed his death, and the imposter figure in Boris Godunov and elsewhere that offered directors rich material. Many post-Soviet adaptations highlight the juxtapositions of Russian and European elements in Pushkin's works in order to define national identity, at times, as in Aleksei Sakharov's Baryshnia-krest΄ianka (1995), emphasizing the poet's patriotism and critique of the west while minimizing his irony in relation to Russia. Nikolai Gogol΄'s works, Fedorova notes, laid the foundation for blockbuster genres, such as the horror film (“Viy”), the Western (Taras Bulba), and the road movie (Dead Souls). However, she claims, Gogol΄'s cinematic qualities turn out to be elusive, as adaptations too often focus on one of his ideas, while his texts undermine such a unitary focus. In The Case of Dead Souls (2005), by contrast, Pavel Lungin and Yuri Arabov's creative departures from Gogol΄'s novel allow for a more productive dialogue, as they establish ironic parallels between Chichikov's roguery and post-Soviet capitalism.
As Fedorova demonstrates, Lev Tolstoi's “The Prisoner of the Caucasus” and Anna Karenina in particular provide directors with opportunities to reimagine the Other in contemporary Russia. Sergei Bodrov's The Prisoner of the Mountains (1996) and Aleksei Uchitel's The Captive (2008) reexamine the long-standing Caucasian prisoner myth, emphasizing the interdependence of Russia and the east, although neither director, she claims, successfully presents the Chechen perspective. Fedorova finds that post-Soviet directors of Anna Karenina films, in contrast to the sympathy of earlier filmmakers for the heroine, focus on the victims of Anna's affair and suicide—Vronsky, Karenin, and her two children—thereby shifting attention to traumatized characters. Some of these adaptations, such as Anna Karenina: Vronsky's Story (2017), in which Karen Shakhnazarov interweaves Vronsky's reminiscences of Anna with the Russo-Japanese War, juxtapose survivors’ suffering with historical trauma.
Fedorova astutely notes that the post-Soviet preference for straightforward adaptations of Fedor Dostoevskii's works has compelled directors to reduce the polyphonic complexity of his novels, as the novelist’s ideas are filtered through his non-fictional statements. Films such as Roman Kachanov's grotesque parody of The Idiot in Down House (2001) notwithstanding, most Dostoevskii adaptations emulate Vladimir Bortko's close transposition of his source text in The Idiot (2003), which inaugurated the popular televised serial genre. These purportedly objective presentations of Dostoevskii's texts, however, in fact propagate an official, patriotic ideology.
Directors of Anton Chekhov adaptations, for Fedorova, viewed the emerging capitalism of the 1990s in light of the writer's own portrayal of a disappearing old world, depicting the “new Lopakhins” as absurd, eccentric, or criminal. In the case of Three Sisters, adapted more often than any other Chekhov work in the past three decades, she focuses on the directors’ creative reenvisioning of the writer's center/periphery contrast. In Alexander Zeldovich and Vladimir Sorokin's setting of Chekhov's action in the hierarchical Stalinist capital in Moscow (2000), for example, Moscow—rather than an idealized location—becomes an empty center that gives the characters no sense of freedom.
Throughout Adaptation as a Symptom, Fedorova provides thorough, well-informed, and persuasive discussions of the films, fruitfully examining how each filmmaker interprets the given author, what aspects of the source text s/he highlights, and what other intertexts are involved. Her descriptions of the adaptations’ post-Soviet contexts at times do not fully detail the relevant political circumstances. More could be said, for instance, on the recent conflicts that, along with the Russo-Japanese War, may have indirectly shaped Shakhnazarov's Anna Karenina, and the specifics of the Boris El΄tsin and Vladimir Putin eras that have given Dostoevskii's The Devils, as she notes, such contemporary political relevance. These reservations notwithstanding, Fedorova has made an important contribution in this volume, and her research should be of great value to scholars of post-Soviet film, adaptation theory, and trauma studies.
