Most Read

Of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky

Zahir Raihan Film Society and Russian Cultural Centre present films adapted from classic Russian literature
11 November 2003, 18:00 PM
LIFESTYLE
By Sabbir Chowdhury
11 November 2003, 18:00 PM
From left Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860-1904), Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky (1821-1881) and Count Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy (1828-1910)
The reading habit is decreasing day by day. People no longer want to read voluminous books which are published regularly. They have no time and no patience for reading books. As a result, bookselling has got down alarmingly. It is even worse for the classics. As classics are usually excessively voluminous, people are phoebic about the classics. Imagine how much time a person needs in reading Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace, a novel about 1500 pages long. That is why, a lot of people rush to the film theatres when the film adaptations of a well-known classics are screened. We may not like the decrease of the readers but the fact remains that people are giving less time to reading. If we look into the history of the cinema, from all the films made so far about two-thirds are adaptations from other previously published sources. This gives an idea how convenient and popular film adaptations are. It also confirms that the screenplay-writers lack the original ideas which literary classics can provide them with.

It is known to all that the second half of the nineteenth-century Russia provided the greatest age of fiction in the history of world literature. It provided us writers like Alexander Pushkin, Nikolai Gogol, Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Ivan Turgenyev, and Anton Chekhov. Of them, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky are considered among the greatest novelists of all time.

Google News LinkFor all latest news, follow The Daily Star's Google News channel.

Zahir Raihan Film Society, the country's leading film club and the Russian Cultural Centre in Dhaka have come up with some fine film adaptations of great Russian classics. This is the fourth in the series of the on-going film sessions focusing on such adaptations. In this session, four critically acclaimed films will be screened at the auditorium of the Russian Cultural Centre at Road No. 7, Dhanmondi. The first two sessions concentrated on the Russian productions while the third and the fourth sessions are on the non-Russian productions - films made outside Russia. In this fourth session, films made in India, Britain and Hollywood will be projected. The session consists of film adaptations of some Russian masterpieces like Anna Karenina by Tolstoy, Crime and Punishment and The Idiot by Dostoyevsky and The Three Sisters by Chekhov.

Two films will be screened everyday (at 2:00 PM and at 4:30 PM). On Wednesday, 12th November: Aparichito(The Unknown), based on the novel The Idiot of Fyodor Dostoyevsky and made in Bengali by Salil Dutta (India) and Three Sisters, made by Laurence Olivier (UK), will be screened. Anna Karenina, made by Bernard Rose (USA) and Crime and Punishment, made by Joseph Sargent (USA), will be screened on Thursday, 13th November.

Dostoyevsky's The Idiot is concerned with the effect of saintly Prince Myshkin on wordly society in St. Petersburg. Myshkin's gently, childlike nature and his refusal to take offense at anything have earned him the nickname of 'the idiot'. This story has been adapted into Bengali by Indian filmmaker Salil Dutta. Titled Aparichito, it unites the acting talents of Uttam Kumar and Soumitra Chatterjee, a rare case in Bengali cinema. The plot of Three Sisters revolves round the members of a family in which certainties crumble as three sisters experience unsatisfactory love affairs, two of them with the same married man, and their brother makes an unhappy marriage. Bernard Rose's film version of Anna Karenina stars Sophie Marceau in the title role of Anna Karenina, the wife of a Russian aristocrat and Sean Bean as the gallant and infatuated cavalry officer with whom Anna begins a doomed affair. Joseph Sargent's Crime and Punishment is the story of the arrogant Raskolnikov who commits a murder and then battles it out both with his conscience and with the police officer.

Sabbir Chowdhury, a film activist, teaches in the department of English at Jahangirnagar University, Dhaka.