TIME GAMES WITH WRITERS IN MOVIES
Modern cinema has accumulated many lms that include such a plot move as time travel. As a rule, it is ctional characters who travel, but there are lms in which we can see characters based on real personalities as time travelers, including famous writers (there are more such lms in Russian cinema). Foreign cinema refers primarily to the writer who invented the time machine, G. Wells (“Time After Time”, USA, 1979 lm and 2017 TV series), suggesting that he invented the time travel vehicle not only on paper, but also tested for a journey into the future, in the year of the release of the lm product. Or the accidential travel appears, sending a modern writer to the 1920s for “professional” communication with young F. S. Fitzgerald, E. Hemingway and the approval of the manuscript by G. Stein herself (“Midnight in Paris”, 2011, dir. V. Allen). Domestic cinema chooses the classics of Russian literature as time travelers: A.S. Pushkin (“Save Pushkin”, 2017), F. M. Dostoevsky (“Alibi”, series, 2021) and some others. Here the classic writers nd themselves, voluntarily or involuntarily, falling into another temporary reality, and begin to act in it in accordance with the circumstances. Such a movement of writers “from the school curriculum” is associated with the accepted semiotics of their images, mass and well-known to everyone, and at the same time, with the desire to bring them closer to today’s reality, modernize, make them live and interact with subsequent generations (“Direct Heiress”, 1982, directed by S. Solovyov, episodes 9, 179, 249, 274 of Yeralash), and sometimes even turn them into superheroes saving the world (“Dostoevsky enters the entrance”, animated clip by V. Butusov, 2020). Another way of time playing with the classics on the screen is to imagine that they did not go to another world in the year indicated by encyclopedias and textbooks, but continued to live and create a little longer than the facts accepted in the history of culture. Arthouse lm “Duel. Pushkin-Lermontov” (2014) presents Pushkin, Lermontov, Griboyedov and others in 1857 and makes one wonder how the classics of Russian literature, fanned by fame and nancial well-being, experienced aging, creative crisis and were burdened by everyday routine. The analysis of such temporary movie games with images of famous writers correlates with such topical art themes as accidental travel, alternative history and historical memory, helps to identify and generalize cultural meanings associated with the mythologization of real personalities of the past (especially writers, who in Russia, as you know, are more than writers), their existence in the mass consciousness and our understanding of the variable course of history. The semiotic representation of a writer known to everyone since childhood, entrenched in popular culture, when transferred to our time on the movie screen, makes him recognizable in everything, from visual appearance to hypothetical replicas and actions, understandable and quite modern - a kind of monument to himself, an erased metaphor, cliché, anecdote, meme.