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 ii Copyright © by Irina Makoveeva 2007 iii 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. iv 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. v 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 vi 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 vii 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. viii 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. 1 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 2