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Multi-Mediated Dostoevsky

NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Acknowledgments........................................................................................viiIntroduction: Dostoevsky and Transposition.............................................................3Chapter One Transposition as Criticism.................................................................16Chapter Two The Artist as Gambler: Prokofiev and Dostoevsky............................................37Chapter Three Voices of the Folk: Janácek's From the House of the Dead............................70Chapter Four Secularizing Dostoevsky's "Positively Good Man": Kurosawa's The Idiot.....................107Chapter Five Restaging Two Sources: Wajda's The Devils.................................................139Afterword..............................................................................................174Appendix A: Musical Examples from Prokofiev, The Gambler...............................................177Appendix B: Musical Examples from Janácek, From the House of the Dead.............................189Notes..................................................................................................199Works Cited............................................................................................225Index..................................................................................................237

Chapter One

THE NOTION OF MULTIMEDIA transposition as a form of literary criticism is hardly surprising. After all, as Wilde reminds us, artists have always played as major a role as critics in providing insights into each other's art. Novels such as James Joyce's Ulysses and Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus, which indicate source texts in their very titles, function not only as rewritings of The Odyssey and Faust, respectively, but also as critiques that illuminate their relevance for future ages and cultural contexts. Various commentators have viewed art as a continual process of criticism in itself, with artists reflecting upon each other's creations. "The genetic components of a work of art," writes Guy Davenport, "are responses, both of agreement and modification" (77).

Dostoevsky's fiction in particular has inspired many such reworkings in the twentieth century and beyond. Literary works by Evgeny Zamyatin, Joseph Conrad, André Gide, Ralph Ellison, and many other writers have played an enormous role in both retelling and critiquing Dostoevsky's prose. As Gary Adelman and Inna Tigountsova have shown in recent years, these critiques can take diverse forms. Adelman examines various Russian and non-Russian literary responses to Dostoevsky in the twentieth century. The Soviet novelist Leonid Leonov's The Thief (1927), for instance, parodies scenes from Crime and Punishment and other Dostoevsky texts by substituting faith in Bolshevism for Christianity. Bernard Malamud's 1957 novel The Assistant, by contrast, extends the implications of Crime and Punishment by exploring criminality, guilt, and isolation in light of anti-Semitism. In thus shifting Dostoevsky's narratives into new cultural, social, and political contexts, such writers act as critics by altering the premises of their source texts, adding new emphases, and in some cases reversing or implicitly arguing against Dostoevsky's anti-Semitism, Russian messianism, and other controversial ideologies. Tigountsova, exploring Dostoevsky's impact on contemporary Russian literature, finds his poetics of ugliness (bezobrazie) to be a shaping factor in works of Yuri Mamleev, Tatyana Tolstaya, and Lyudmila Petrushevskaya. While Dostoevsky opposes the ideal of beauty to the disorder of everyday life that he depicts, Tigountsova shows, these postmodern writers foreground the ugly, substituting it for beauty as the center of their works. In doing so, they implicitly question Dostoevsky's utopian, Christian solution to disharmony and alienation.

Many critics have seen similar possibilities in reworkings into other media as well. For Caryl Emerson, the loftiest goal of transposition "might in fact be the most vigorous commentary possible on another's work of art" (1986: 8). Neil Sinyard, in the same vein, points out that "the best film adaptations provide a critical gloss on the novels [they transpose]" (117). Moreover, criticism and transpositions can play complementary roles in interpreting literary works. Brian McFarlane remarks that the English critic Q. D. Leavis's essay on Charles Dickens's Great Expectations should serve as a model for how to transpose the novel into film (119). The situation can easily be reversed, however: operas, films, and dramas based on novels often impart insights that change the way critics view the source texts. This chapter will focus on the question of how transpositions of literary works into other media accomplish this type of critique. How does a film, opera, play, or work in another medium go about making such a statement about the text that it transposes? What does this criticism involve, and how can we understand it as such, given the indirect form it takes in transpositions, compared to straightforward interpretive discourse?

Transpositions function quite differently from the types of literary reworkings mentioned above. In some respects, their potential is even greater: films, dramas, and operas do not merely retell narratives with variations, but also superimpose new media onto their source texts. At the same time, however, they bear certain burdens that literary reworkings do not. The primary (and sometimes sole) expectation of multimedia transpositions of literature is to convey the same narrative in a different format; any critical functions—what Gerard Genette refers to in Palimpsests as "metatextual," or the critical relation between two texts—tend to be seen as secondary. And because of this prioritizing of the replicating function, transpositions into new media are given less latitude than literary transpositions, which tend to develop selected plot situations and motifs rather than reproduce the narrative as a whole. Many transpositional processes in a film or opera that would seem to comment on a novel by altering a plot event, character, or other element, or by putting it in a radically new context, as literary reworkings do, are vulnerable to attacks for departing from the "original." This is particularly true since transpositions so often keep the title of the source text. Many times, this can indicate a parodic relationship; however, all four of the artists I will be analyzing in depth use the same title straightforwardly, openly acknowledging their sources, although their ambitions are far greater than simply reproducing Dostoevsky's narratives.

FIDELITY CRITICISM

Critiquing transpositions based on how closely they adapt their source texts, of course, has long dominated discourse on the subject. Numerous attempts have been made, particularly in recent decades, to establish new ways of evaluating such artworks. Nevertheless, this approach, widely known as "fidelity criticism," has pervaded all levels of response to transpositions, coming as it does from critics, writers, transposers, and audiences alike. Writing in reaction to this trend in 2000, James Naremore calls adaptation studies...