Over the last few years, Russian audiences have gotten a chance to watch TV adaptations of several major books by domestic 19th and 20th century literary giants. With an adaptation of Fyodor Dostoyevsky's novel Crime and Punishment about to premiere next month, the trend seems to be far from subsiding.
The producers of the TV series based on Crime and Punishment say they are going to surprise the audience with an "unexpected version," which, however, does not contradict Dostoyevsky's text as it could be figured out from the novel's epilogue.
In Soviet times, even after the spread of TV sets in the late 1960s led to the arrival of domestic TV series, classical novels seldom became a basis for a TV adaptation. One possible explanation was that there had already been theatrical versions of some classical novels, such as Sergei Bondarchuk's 4-part War and Peace, Sergei Gerasimov's 3-part And Quiet Flows the Don or Lev Kulidzhanov's Crime and Punishment. Also, classics were considered worthier of a more "serious" treatment than that of a TV adaptation. Meanwhile, among the most successful domestic TV series of that time were primarily telenovellas and crime/spy stuff.
However, the situation changed dramatically in the late 1990s and early 2000s when, with the number of available TV channels growing and the format of TV series proving its viability, producers needed new material. And classical literature was one of the possible sources of such material.
Over the last four years, the TV adaptation of Dostoyevsky's The Idiot, Mikhail Bulgakov's Master and Margarita, Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago and Nikolai Gogol's Dead Souls have arrived, among others. The last two were written by Yuri Arabov, an established screenwriter and a long-time collaborator of director Alexander Sokurov, which suggests a pretty high quality interpretation.
But whether the idea of TV adaptations of literary classics is right, we should address a more general issue of the status of Russian classical literature today. How has this status changed over the last fifteen years or so that have passed since the collapse of the Soviet Union? Publishers would tell you that putting out 19th and 20th century classics is quite a safe bet and print runs of such literature are stable and high because those books are part of the secondary school curriculum.
It is debatable that many secondary school students in today's Russia are keen on reading, say, Dostoyevsky or Tolstoy. There are a number of reasons why, from the general trend among teenagers to read less to the availability of "plot summaries" that allow a student to comply with the curriculum without actually reading required books in their entirety.
One argument that producers brought forward when defending TV adaptation of classics a few years ago, when the trend had just started, was that teenagers who would have never read a book would at least watch a TV series based on it and get acquainted with literature classics in this way. And that argument seems to be valid. The rationale of those who argue that contemporary TV adaptations of classical novels are vulgar and simplistic may be right to a certain degree. But they are definitely missing one important point: literary classics have become part of pop culture and should be viewed in that way, not like something sacred.
