Conclusion: Passport Control—Departing on a Cinematic Journey

Summary

Russian literature has inspired film directors at home and abroad for over a century, and continues to do so today. American, British, French, German, and Italian cinema all have important film classics that were drawn directly from Russian literature. Some, such as French filmmaker Robert Bresson or Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa, turned to Russian writers more than once in creating their own distinctive cinematic style. Kurosawa reimagined Fedor Dostoevskii's The Idiot (Hakuchi, 1951); Maksim Gor'kii's Lower Depths (Donzoko, 1957); incorporated elements of Dostoevskii's The Insulted and Injured in his film Akahige (1965); and animated Vladimir Arsen'ev's autobiographical work Dersu Uzala (1972), which won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, for Mosfilm. Throughout the years, Russian directors have expressed their own admiration for the literary works of Dostoevskii, Anton Chekhov, Mikhail Bulgakov, Aleksandr Pushkin, Lev Tolstoi, Mikhail Sholokhov, and many, many others.

The topic of this collection of essays has been the cultural border crossings that occur when the text is transported to another country, another time, or both. Each one of these migrations involves a new semantic language. The metaphor of crossing from one temporal or spatial territory into another in which language, customs, cultural identity, social attitudes, and political systems are often different is applied in this case as Russian texts are transposed in order to suit new cinematic environments. Thomas Leitch borrows from Cristina Della Coletta in positing the idea of a cinematic border crossing as a process that enables viewers to gain a greater perspective on the world in which they live. This collection of essays confronts many of the matters involved in transporting a narrative into a narration, making the cinematic out of the theatrical, or expanding the short story into a full-length feature. Border Crossing: Russian Literature into Film explores the question of what makes Russian texts adaptable for such diverse audiences with dissimilar cultural sensibilities.