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Adaptations of national literary heritage have been an inseparable part of Russian and Soviet film production up to the present. Although rather neglected elsewhere, because of the apparent centrality of literature in Russian culture, the film adaptation has been a specific genre of Russian cinema (Hutchings and Vernitski 1-24). This tradition goes back through the Soviet years to the dawn of Russian film history, beginning from what is considered the first attempt at a Russian fiction film, an unsuccessful adaptation of Pushkin's Boris Godunov made by Aleksandr Drankov in 1907 (Tsivian, "Le premier" 27-31). In the decade preceding the Soviet nationalization of the film industry, 1908-19, most major classics of Russian literature received their first film versions.
Leo Tolstoy has been one of the most adapted authors since Russian cinema took its first steps during the first decade of the twentieth century. He was not the most filmed Russian author: According to Veniamin Vishnevski's filmography of prerevolutionary fiction films, a few more films were made of Pushkin's, Gogol's and Chekhov's works. But Tolstoy's position was somewhat special; more than was the case in other classics, the specter of Tolstoy the person loomed over the adaptations made of his works. When Russian film history began, Count Tolstoy was still alive. The last survivor of the great Russian realists also became one of the first screen celebrities in Russia. Ever since the first newsreels showing Tolstoy were produced for his eightieth birthday in 1908, film crews were constant-and apparently most welcome-guests at Yasnaya Polyana.
Tolstoy had an ambivalent attitude towards cinema. Although he was far from happy with the films of his time, he was exceptionally interested in the medium itself. Apparently Tolstoy, unlike most, immediately recognized cinema as an independent art form and included it in his program of "art for the people." After his death, such remarks were used as evidence that cinema had the imprimatur of the most eminent cultural figure of the nation (?opκa? 85-89; Leyda 41-46).
After the October revolution early Russian cinema was quickly forgotten. Throughout the Soviet years the tsarist period remained a largely unwritten chapter in Russian film history. For a long time it was customary to begin discussion of Tolstoy adaptations, and...