A NOVELETTE A MAN FROM THE RESTAURANT BY I. S. SHMELEV AND THE EPONYMOUS FILM BY YA. A. PROTAZANOV: THE POETICS OF VISUALITY AND THE PROBLEM OF FILM ADAPTATION
The article studies the visualizing strategies as the modes of vision embodying the peculiar characteristics of the image visuality, its visual aspects and understanding of the meaning as well as the peculiarities of realizing the visualizing strategies in cinema and literature. The research is based on a novelette A Man from the Restaurant by I. S. Shmelev (1911) and its eponymous film version by Ya. A. Protazanov (1927). A novelette A Man from the Restaurant by I. S. Shmelev has several types of visualization being intercon- nected with each other and complementary to each other explored. The main visualizing strategies selected and analyzed include a fragmented self-portrait representation of the narrator; a strategy of mirror vision; a panoramic projection of a realistic vision as the insight into historical time. Montage, changing fields of views, music and acting techniques are analyzed as visual cinema strategies. The ironic focus of film character perception stipulates a fundamental transformation of the novelette plot while writing a film script turning into a vaudeville and melodramatic form of film narration. A comparative analysis of literary and cinematographic works in the context of the poetics of visuality allows the conclusion that unlike the visual aspects of literary narration aimed at “showing” the inner events of the character's spiritual world, the cinematic visuality actualizes the external events determined by the author's intention to reconsider the Russian classical traditions and to emphasize the other aesthetic constants of the Soviet art, which were formed and established much faster in cinema than in literature. The fundamental transformation of the meaning of Shmelev's literary work being adapted for the screen indicates that new Soviet aesthetics was formed in cinema faster than in literature, which at the time of the film creation preserved the strong ties with the Russian classical literary tradition along with the aesthetics of modernism.