Transposition as Interpretation

"This dissertation investigates how Fyodor Dostoevsky's works have been transposed into other artistic media during the twentieth century. In my introduction, I assert that the various playwrights, filmmakers, and opera composers who have created works based on Dostoevsky's prose constitute a group of commentators uncovering previously unseen meanings in the texts they transpose. In view of these artists' strong tendency to depart in particuIarIy imaginative ways from Dostoevsky, I have organized my discussions around Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of creative potentials as applied to the life of a literary work in succeeding eras and different cultures. In Chapters Two and Three, I investigate this phenomenon with two operatic transpositions of Dostoevsky's works. In 'The Gambler, ' Prokofiev juxtaposes an explosive, sharply dissonant musical idiom onto the novella that illuminates the proto-expressionist possibilities inherent in Dostoevsky's prose, thus underscoring the novelist's importance for that modernist style. In the case of Janacek. it is the folk elements in 'Notes from the House of the Dead' that are the focus, as the composer views the fictional memoir through the prism of both his newly formed Czechoslovakian state and the young Soviet regime. Janacek's opera emphasizes the folk qualities of Dostoevsky's novel by foregrounding the narrative voices of the lower-class convicts and submerging Goryanchikov's distant, aristocratic perspective. In Chapter Four, I explore the question of Dostoevsky and film, analyzing Akira Kurosawa' s 1951 cinematic transposition of 'The Idiot.' In my exploration of how Kurosawa searches for ways to portray Myshkin's goodness via the screen. I interpret him as uncovering proto-cinematic elements implicit in the novel. Kurosawa's adjustment of the novel's premises recasts Dostoevsky' s Christ figure in a secularized, Japanese, post-World War n environment. The final chapter focuses on Andrzej Wajda's dramatic transposition of 'The Devils' through Albert Camus's own earlier play of the novel. Wajda' s adaptation selects elements from each in such a way as to carry on a fruitful dialogue with both Dostoevsky and Camus; at the same time his innovative staging procedures enable him to make the novel relevant for his specific Polish context"--Leaves iii-iv.