Abstract
This chapter examines several scandalous cinematic and theatrical revivals of Lev Tolstoi’s novel Anna Karenina. To make the central diegetic scandal of Anna’s infidelity intriguing for their contemporaries, adapters recast it by reimagining the adulteress, placing it in contemporary settings, and violating media boundaries. Anna Karenina reworkings demonstrate that adaptations adulterate the literary narrative, while their succès de scandale justifies their unfaithfulness. Greta Garbo’s divinity sanctioned crude deviations in Edmund Goulding’s rendition, Keira Knightley’s popularity transformed Joe Wright’s version into a cultural event, and John Neumeier’s reputation guaranteed an enthusiastic reaction to his ballet adaptation. Doubly scandalous are interpretations that challenge the inevitability of Anna’s demise, like Radda Novikova’s abbreviated rendition, in which Tolstoi’s heroine becomes a nemesis retaliating against men.
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Notes
- 1.
The declining trajectory of Anna’s affair derives from a real-life scandal involving Anna Pirogova, a housekeeper of the writer’s neighboring landowner, who ended her life under a train to punish her paramour for marrying another woman. Tolstoi even went to look at the suicide scene and was powerfully affected by the victim’s disfigured body—a reaction echoed in Vronskii’s closing complaint that the view of his lover’s body at a train station eclipsed all his memories of her glamorous appearance while alive.
- 2.
One of the most scandalous adaptations of Anna Karenina was a graphic novel by Katia Metelitsa (2000), which not only transposed Tolstoi’s plot to post-Soviet Russia with its emerging class of New Russians but also employed a medium previously banned from publication in Soviet Russia—a combination that certainly doubled its transgressive effect (Makoveeva 42).
- 3.
Of course, a body of filmgoers is hardly a homogeneous cohort taking the same approach to adaptations. However, at the risk of simplification, I suggest an all-embracing view of the 1920–1930s spectatorship, since obviously long before adaptation scholars voiced their concerns about the criterion of integrity, the public included people with varied tolerance of adapters’ inventiveness. Thomas Leitch, in this volume’s introduction, distinguishes three possible positions in the adaptability-integrity debate that adaptation scholars might do well to recognize and choose among (5–7).
- 4.
As evident from a hand-written copy of a play by S.F. Rassokhin’s Company, with a censor’s permission to stage it in public theaters across Russia, the first theatrical adaptation of Anna Karenina can be dated to 1882. However, the letters to Tolstoi from his novel’s enthusiastic admirers either asking for his permission to rework it as a play or describing their endeavors to him show that the very first renditions were undertaken by non-professionals in the 1870s (Gornaia 83).
- 5.
One of the most shocking innovations in his adaptation, which was not mentioned in any reviews I read, is that one of the officers, Makhotin, declares his love for Anna and even demands sexual favors from her at a train station right before her suicide (Guiraud 154–58).
- 6.
One such testimonial examines an “irresponsible” adaptation by the Saratov theater that presents “Anna’s fate as a banal family drama” and shows her suicide as a result of her lover’s breaking up with her rather than a consequence of “the old society moral trampling a human personality,” as demonstrated in the Moscow Art Theater interpretation (Sappak).
- 7.
Curiously, in 1914 a reviewer criticized the Korsh Theater’s version of Anna Karenina because of scenes that flashed at the theatergoers like a kaleidoscope and therefore were reminiscent of the cinematic experience, which that critic seemed to dislike (Pasmurov). Without a doubt, a century of making and watching films radically changed viewers.
- 8.
Wright’s adaptation offers an overwhelmingly idealized portrayal of the cuckolded husband in the Tolstoian love triangle—a post-millennial trend of shifting the focus from a suffering adulteress to her suffering husband. It should be noted that it was the British screen that established and maintained a tradition of sympathetic treatment of Karenin, starting with Julien Duvivier’s Anna Karenina (1948), with Ralph Richardson as Karenin.
- 9.
Most cinematic adapters gratify viewers with Anna and Vronskii intimately waltzing, oblivious to the other ball attendees. Their choice has required re-interpretation of the novel’s mazurka—a regulated dance by contrast with the waltz, once forbidden in the ballroom as a reprehensible “form of erotic temptation” (Sandler 256). Not necessarily aware of the nineteenth-century perception of the waltz as a “passionate, insane and close to nature” dance (Lotman 526), adapters employ a visually effective and suitable metaphor for a whirlwind romance alongside the speeding train and the snowstorm essential to Anna’s story.
- 10.
Rejection of the Tolstoian paradigm of a woman committing suicide under a train’s wheels creates a niche for further challenging the creator’s authority and censoring his vision of the events’ inevitability. Indeed, whether reproduced or rejected by adapters, the culmination of Anna’s romance does constitute a provocation. One can only speculate how many troubled minds, fictional or real, were served by Anna’s tragic finale. The writer’s own wife, Sofia Tolstaia, was among the first victims attempting to replay the last stunt of her husband’s creation. Her diary entry on July 21, 1891 describes a conjugal quarrel resulting in her decision to take her life “like Anna Karenina” (Basinskii 422). Luckily, on her way to the train station she was met by her brother-in-law, who escorted her back home.
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Makoveeva, I. (2023). Succès de Scandale: From Adultery to Adulteration. In: Leitch, T. (eds) The Scandal of Adaptation. Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-14153-9_2
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