Border Crossing

Alexander Burry is an Associate Professor at The Ohio State University. He is the author of Multi-Mediated Dostoevsky: Transposing Novels into Opera, Film, and Drama (2011). Frederick H. White is Professor in the Department of Languages and Cultures at Utah Valley University. He has published two books on the Russian writer Leonid Andreev; co-edited a selection of essays on the Russian avant-garde; and is the co-author of Marketing Literature and Posthumous Legacies: The Symbolic Capital of Leonid Andreev and Vladimir Nabokov (2013).

By closely analyzing the complex and multiple ways that classic works of Russian literature have been reimagined at different times and places, in different languages, cultures, genres, and media, the essays in Burry and White's Border Crossing: Russian Literature into Film make a significant contribution not just to Russian Studies but to adaptation studies as well. Focusing on adaptation as 'cross-cultural communication', Border Crossing opens up numerous exciting new avenues for future research by scholars of both literature and film.

• Introduction: Filming Russian Classics: Challenges and Opportunities, Alexander Burry; Passport Control: Across the Russian Border, Thomas Leitch; White Nights (1844): Dostoevsky’s White Nights: The Dreamer Goes Abroad, Ronald Meyer; Crime and Punishment (1866): On Not Showing Dostoevsky: Robert Bresson’s Pickpocket, Olga Hasty; Stealing the Scene: Crime as Confession in Robert Bresson’s Pickpocket, S. Ceilidh Orr; Anna Karenina (1878): The Eye-deology of Trauma: Killing Anna Karenina Softly, Yuri Leving; Ward No. 6 (1892): A Vicious Circle: Karen Shakhnazarov’s Ward no. 6, Alexander Burry; He Who Gets Slapped (1915): A Slap in the Face of American Taste: Transporting He Who Gets Slapped to American Audiences, Frederick H. White; Lieutenant Kijé (1928): Against Adaptation? The Strange Case of (Pod)Poruchik Kizhe, Alastair Renfrew; The Twelve Chairs (1928): Chasing the Wealth: The Americanization of Il’f and Petrov’s The Twelve Chairs, Robert Mulcahy; Despair (1936): Fassbinder’s Nabokov: From text to action!, Dennis Ioffe; Ticket to the Stars (1961): The Soviet Abroad (That We Lost), Otto Boele; Conclusion: Passport Control: Departing on a Cinematic Journey, Frederick H. White