VISUALIZING ANNA KARENINA by Irina Makoveeva Master degree, Moscow Lomonosov State ...

224 Pages·2007·2.9 MB·English

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VISUALIZING ANNA KARENINA

by
Irina Makoveeva
Master degree, Moscow Lomonosov State University, 1987

Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of
Arts and Sciences in partial fulfillment
of the requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy

University of Pittsburgh

2007
UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH
ARTS AND SCIENCES

This dissertation was presented

by

Irina Makoveeva

It was defended on
April 30, 2007
and approved by
Lucy Fischer, Professor, Department of English
John B. Lyon, Assistant Professor, Germanic Languages and Literatures
Philip Watts, Associate Professor, French and Italian Languages and Literatures
Dissertation Advisor: Helena Goscilo, Professor, Slavic Languages and Literatures

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Copyright © by Irina Makoveeva
2007
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VISUALIZING ANNA KARENINA
Irina Makoveeva, PhD
University of Pittsburgh, 2007

Incorporated into contemporary culture through high-, middle-, and lowbrow manifestations,
Tolstoi’s Anna Karenina repeatedly demonstrates its ubiquity. The novel’s 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 cinema’s
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 Tolstoi’s novel, cinema—as a medium aiming at a mass audience—also
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 screen—
tendencies they share independently of their production date, country of production, and film format.
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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 novel’s
recasting as a comic book. Unlike screen adaptations, this postmodernist revision of the novel was
undertaken with the hope of undermining the novel’s elevated status as well as the fame of its
creator, thus signaling a successful completion of its long journey into the mass unconscious.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS
PREFACE.................................................................................................................................VIII
1.0 OVERTURE.................................................................................................................1
2.0 ANNA KARENINA AS THE DOMINANT NARRATIVE OF ADULTERY......18
3.0 CINEMATIC ADAPTATIONS OF ANNA KARENINA .......................................33
3.1 ANNA KARENINA (1914).................................................................................33
3.2 ANNA KARENINA (1918).................................................................................37
3.3 LOVE (1927).......................................................................................................45
3.4 ANNA KARENINA (1935).................................................................................52
3.5 ANNA KARENINA (1947).................................................................................62
3.6 ANNA KARENINA (1967).................................................................................75
3.7 LEO TOLSTOY’S ANNA KARENINA (1997)..................................................91
3.8 ANNA KARENINA (2001)...............................................................................108
3.9 COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS.......................................................................125
3.9.1 The lovers’ first encounter.......................................................................127
3.9.2 The consummation of adultery................................................................131
3.9.3 The horse race...........................................................................................136
3.9.4 Anna’s labor..............................................................................................142
3.9.5 Anna’s visit to her son..............................................................................147
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3.9.6 Anna’s suicide...........................................................................................153
3.9.7 Love letters................................................................................................157
4.0 NOVEL AS COMICS: АННА КАРЕНИНА BY LEO TOLSTOY (2000)...........162
5.0 CODA........................................................................................................................180
APPENDIX: ILLUSTRATIONS.............................................................................................189
BIBLIOGRAPHY.....................................................................................................................205
FILMOGRAPHY......................................................................................................................215
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PREFACE

I wish to thank Helena Goscilo, who has inspired, encouraged, and supported me throughout
my seven years at Pitt. I am also grateful to my committee members—Lucy Fischer, John Lyon, and
Phil Watts—for their valuable comments and suggestions. Finally, my gratitude goes to my friends
in this country and in Moscow for their support, loyalty, and humor and to my father, Efim Kreinin,
and my son, Filipp Makoveev, for their unfailing love and care. Needless to say, I am in great debt to
Lev Tolstoi for creating Anna Karenina—a magnificent novel that has become the book in my life.

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1.0 OVERTURE
The very title of my dissertation, “Visualizing Anna Karenina,” indicates my bifocal interest in
the metamorphoses of Lev Tolstoi’s novel Anna Karenina (1875-77) through a process of
appropriation in visual media and, specifically, its cinematic adaptations as a cultural force that
elevates the literary source to the level of myth. This study examines eight cinematic adaptations
that appeared in Europe and the United States over the span of almost a century: three silent
versions, by Vladimir Gardin (1914), Márton Garas (1918), and Edmund Goulding (1927); four
feature-length films, by Clarence Brown (1935), Julien Duvivier (1947), Aleksandr Zarkhi
(1967), and Bernard Rose (1997); and a television series by David Blair (2001).1 As agents and
simultaneously witnesses of the novel’s transfiguration into the master narrative or myth of
adulterous love, these films represent the equally significant side of the Anna Karenina cultural
construct—their disparate aesthetic values notwithstanding.
Though my principal emphasis falls on screen adaptations, I also analyze the novel’s
recasting as a comic book, Katia Metelitsa’s Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy (2000). This visual-
cum-verbal revision of the novel signals a successful completion of its long journey into the
mass unconscious. Reassembled as an intrinsic component of today’s popular culture, the Anna
Karenina comic book serves as a vehicle for the developing myth of the New Russians and thus

1 My selection of films was determined by the films’ availability as well as their relevance to the specific
angle of my research.
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validates its own potency as myth. More important, the inclusion of Metelitsa’s book aims, on
the one hand, to broaden the focus of adaptation studies from an exclusive concern with celluloid
versions of literary sources and, on the other hand, to go beyond traditional discussions of the
novel-film relationship, thus engaging the “originary word” in a multilevel and dynamic cultural
dialogue.

First Look into the Past (Novels versus Films)
Although canonical literary works have attracted filmmakers from the very first days of
cinema, the relationship between the two arts has always remained ambiguous. Whereas fiction
provides the obvious initial source for cinematic adaptations, in its use of literature cinema
frequently attempts to eclipse its precursor. This double function of the verbal text in the process
of its transformation into the visual narratives encourages Neia Zorkaia to define literature as
postoiannyi sputnik (constant companion) of cinema and meshaiushchii chuzhak (disabling
stranger, [“Russkaia” 106]). Undeniably, a film can hardly exhaust its verbal counterpart, but it
would be misleading to attribute this “disability” of cinema to the inferiority of film as a
medium—an a priori assumption that has governed adaptation studies since it was first
introduced in George Bluestone’s Novels into Films (1957).
However, as early as 1926 Iurii Tynianov insisted on reconsidering the hierarchical
relation between literature and cinema, hoping that an unbiased understanding of the two arts
would stimulate the appearance of scripts that would be more than merely hybrids of “a damaged
novel and an unfinished play” (324). And although a novel is “damaged” to some extent by
being filmed, not every screen adaptation is a damaged film. Yet a cinematic “surrogate” is
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