This thesis is an exploration of the ways in which a number of important Russian writers and filmmakers of the 1910s and 1920s appropriated domestic interiors as structural, visual and literary metaphors. My focus is on the artistic articulation of the closed space of the Russian domestic interior, in particular as it surfaced in the narratives of the modernist literature and cinema of the time and became an essential metaphor of its age. In my discussion I take issue with two standard ways of understanding domestic space in existing literature. I argue that representations of home spaces in early twentiethcentury Russian culture mount a challenge to the conventional view of the home as a place of safety and stability. I also argue that, at this point, the traditional approach to the room and the domestic space as a fixed closed structure is assailed by representations that see domestic space as kinetic. The importance of the 'room in motion' means that I address cinematic as well as literary representations of domestic space, and show that even literary representation borrow cinematic techniques. My different chapters constitute case studies of various separate, but complementary, aspects of the representation of home space. The first chapter shows how domestic space in reflected in the poetical language of Anna Akhmatova. The second chapter focuses on the parallel exploration of rooms and a child's consciousness in Kotik Letaev by Andrei Belyi. The third chapter discovers the philosophy of a room built by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovskii in his short stories of the 1920s. The next three chapters focus on interiors of three different cinematic genres. The fourth chapter looks closely at films created by Evgenii Bauer, showing the director's innovative techniques of framing and set-design. The fifth chapter explores the film Tret'ia Meshchanskaia by Abram Room, focusing on the director's employment of the room as a structural device of the film. The last chapter analyses two lyrical comedies by Boris Barnet to show the comic effect produced by the empty room and domestic objects in his films, and also focuses on the image of staircase. In conclusion, I speculate that the representation of interior spaces in the period in question goes beyond genre, medium, and narrative structure and becomes an important and culturally dynamic motif of the time.

The transfer of an artistic work from the literary medium to the filmic medium presents technical, personal, social and political factors for consideration which are capable of revealing important information about the times in which both the literary work and the film work were created. In a Russian context, where both literature and film have played roles of central cultural importance, the study of this interaction can be particularly fruitful. The first chapter of this dissertation considers the theoretical aspects of adaptation, namely fidelity to the original work and questions of metaphor and narrative structure. After examining these issues in a general context, Chapter 1 then views them in the light of specific stages of Russian cinematic history. The remaining chapters of this dissertation consider selected post-revolutionary Soviet and Russian filmic adaptations of the works of Nikolai Gogol', Fedor Dostoevskii and Anton Chekhov in chronological order. Analysis of both text and film is undertaken in order to demonstrate the complexity of literary and extra-literary factors involved in adaptation. The works of Gogol' have provided film makers with the challenge of finding "adequate" filmic equivalents to this writer's narrative devices, particularly his use of skaz [oral folk narration]. Dostoevskii's works have proven to be a stumbling block for film makers, both in terms of their ideological acceptability, and their exploration of complex psychological and religious issues. The adaptations of Chekhov's works have provided cinema with diverse subject matter that reflects the various stages and developments of Russian cinematic history, from pure fabula borrowing to an emphasis on mood and atmosphere. The interdisciplinary approach of this dissertation strives to show both the on-going relevancy of nineteenth-century Russian literature to modern culture, and the cinema's ability to present vastly differing interpretive possibilities of the literary cano

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