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Introduction
Over the course of Russian cinematic history, four directors have worked on three separate screen adaptations of Nikolai Gogol's short story "The Overcoat." The Overcoat: A Film-Pky in the Manner of Gogol [ShineT. Kino-p'esa ? manere Gogolia], directed by Grigorii Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg, was released by Leningradkino Studio in 1926. The Overcoat [Shinel], directed by Aleksei Batalov, was released by Lenfilm Studio in 1959. Yurii Norshtein's The Overcoat [Shinel] is an unfinished animated film upon which the director started work in 1981. Since the final film version is still in production, this article offers a comparative study of the first two films.
Rather than an "illustration" of the story, each of these adaptations is a dialogue with Gogol's story in two important eras of cultural production in Soviet Russia: the 1920s and the post-Thaw 1950s. Since I intend to compare how the story has been adapted from a diachronic perspective and to study intertextuality within and between the films, I will defer to Robert Stam's proposal in "Beyond Fidelity: The Dialogics of Adaptation" (Naremore 54-76) and Linda Hutcheon's more recent ideas comparing adaptation to biology, in which she has argued that "adaptation is how stories evolve and mutate to fit new times and different places" (177). To establish a perspective it seems useful to highlight the double framework within which these dialogues originated: on one hand, the tradition of the Russian literary screen adaptation (Ekranizatsiia) and, on the other, literary theory and scholarly approaches to Gogol in the Soviet context.
First, adaptation (Ekranizatsiia) emerged as a genre in the early years of Russian cinema and comprises a rich tradition exerting powerful influence in political and aesthetic contexts, a tradition that regards cinema as being an art in its own right. During the early years of die Soviet Union, directors had to devise their adaptations of nineteenth-century literary works in line with the reigning ideology. According to David Gillespie, two films setting a pattern that would be widely emulated were Vsevolod Pudovkin's Mother, based on Maksim Gorki's novel, and Kozintsev and Trauberg's version of Gogol's "The Overcoat" (15).
The other backdrop against which these films may be viewed is the critical reading of Gogol or, more specifically, interpretations of "The Overcoat" advanced since its...