“UBIVETS” (“MURDERER”) AS AN EXAMPLE OF THE POLYSEMIOTIC INTERPRETATION OF DOSTOEVSKY’S NOVEL “CRIME AND PUNISHMENT”
DOI: 10.23951/2312-7899-2019-1-156-172
During the 20th century, the prose of F. M. Dostoevsky became more and more established as a “theatrical genre” on the Latvian stage. At the beginning of the century and during the years of the First Republic (1920–1940), Riga’s theatregoers were offered stage versions of almost all of Dostoevsky’s novels. This process was facilitated by the attentiveness of the Riga Russian Theater to the classical repertoire as a whole, as well as by the presence of a number of prominent Russian actors – Mikhail Chekhov, Gregory Khmara, Vasily Kachalov, etc – in Riga. At this time, the Riga theater of Russian drama made several productions based on original dramatizations of Riga directors Mikhail Muratov, Rudolf Ungern, Elena Roshina-Insarova. In the Soviet period, the search of theaters in Latvia focused on two polar tendencies – polyphonic or monologic Dostoevsky. The stage version of the novel “Crime and Punishment” was carried out in 1978 by a playwright and director Mark Rozovsky, a poet Yury Ryashentsev and a composer Eduard Artemiev. The play “Ubivets” (“Murderer”) is a polycode text, a deconstruction of the polyphonic nature of Dostoevsky’s novel “Crime and Punishment”. According to the author’s genre definition at the time of writing, the play should be understood as a literary and musical performance (a musical). Applying the concept of M. M. Bakhtin for the composition of the play, Rozovsky deconstructs the novel into elements of the future polyphony. The word of Dostoevsky becomes two-voiced due to the combination of prose and poetry texts, to the linking of musical and literary languages, as well as through the synthesis of a high individual voice and the lower, penny dreadful, poly-voiced element of the crowd-choir. The visually stage text unfolds through the semantics of carnival, farce performance, town square performances, through the visualization of signs of culture of blessed fools and street aesthetics.
Keywords: F. M. Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment, Mark Rozovsky, dramatization, M. Chekhov’s Riga Russian Theatre, Latvian theatre tradition, visual semiotics, polycode text
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Issue: 1, 2019
Series of issue: Issue 1
Rubric: ARTICLES
Pages: 156 — 172
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