Incorporated into contemporary culture through high-, middle-, and lowbrow manifestations, Tolstois Anna Karenina repeatedly demonstrates its ubiquity. The novels reincarnations in various cultural forms consistently privilege the Anna-Vronskii story line over the parallel narrative of Kitty and Levin, thus liberating the adultery myth from its novelistic shackles. This remarkable diffusion and myth-oriented interpretation of Anna Karenina largely stems from the cinemas fascination with the novel.
The freedom with which filmmakers handle the allegedly well-known novel reveals the discrepancy between the literary text and its idea in the collective unconscious. This freedom also indicates that in popular awareness visual embodiments of Anna Karenina have become more authoritative than the novel itself. While shedding light on dramatic changes that have occurred in the collective idea of Tolstois novel, cinemaas a medium aiming at a mass audiencealso manifests its essential connection with a myth of love that is stronger than death.
The filmmakers constant maneuvering between myth and novel defies the latter as an unequivocal source of adaptation and thus justifies the approach I advocate in my dissertation: namely, bypassing the rigid binary opposition the literary source versus its screen version. Interpreted as vehicles for recycling an old story of adulterous love, films of Anna Karenina reveal two overarching tendencies in their attempts to transpose the nineteenth-century text to the screentendencies they share independently of their production date, country of production, and film format. The first strengthens the underlying myth of adultery by stripping the literary text of everything irrelevant to the mythical skeleton. The second disguises that skeleton by reproducing the accompanying subplots from the literary source. Yet even versions deeply rooted in the literary source are influenced by a myth-oriented perspective.
Though my principal emphasis falls on screen adaptations, I also analyze the novels recasting as a comic book. Unlike screen adaptations, this postmodernist revision of the novel was undertaken with the hope of undermining the novels elevated status as well as the fame of its creator, thus signaling a successful completion of its long journey into the mass unconscious.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:PITT/oai:PITTETD:etd-07192007-134523 |
| Date | 19 September 2007 |
| Creators | Makoveeva, Irina |
| Contributors | Lucy Fischer, Professor, Department of English, John B. Lyon, Assistant Professor, Germanic Languages and Literatures, Helena Goscilo, Professor, Slavic Languages and Literatures, Philip Watts, Associate Professor, French and Italian Languages and Literatures |
| Publisher | University of Pittsburgh |
| Source Sets | University of Pittsburgh |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://etd.library.pitt.edu/ETD/available/etd-07192007-134523/ |
| Rights | unrestricted, I hereby certify that, if appropriate, I have obtained and attached hereto a written permission statement from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis, dissertation, or project report, allowing distribution as specified below. I certify that the version I submitted is the same as that approved by my advisory committee. I hereby grant to University of Pittsburgh or its agents the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible, under the conditions specified below, my thesis, dissertation, or project report in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. I retain all other ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis, dissertation or project report. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis, dissertation, or project report. |
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