1909-2009 : a hundred years of Gogol adaptations in Russian and Soviet cinema

International audienceFrom the birth of Russian cinema in 1908-1909 up to the present day, the works of Gogol have generated more than thirty adaptations in Russia / the USSR. In a country where paying literary tribute to the classics was an inherent cultural practice over the 20th century, such an interest of filmmakers in one of the pillars of the national literary heritage seems self-explanatory. Yet an analysis of these adaptations shows that the choice of Gogol has often come in response to various external cultural factors: the popularity of literary cinema in the pre-revolutionary period; experiments with cinematic techniques over the 1920s (the issue of the transferability of the Gogolian skaz and other aspects of the writer's prose is central in several important theoretical works of the time (Tynianov, Eisenstein)); the attempt to promote classics under Zhdanov. These contexts have naturally influenced the aesthetics of the films. During the Thaw, while literary topics allowed filmmakers to bypass censorship, the works of Gogol were reinvested by the Soviet filmmakers in an allegorical way (I. Iliienko). Since 1991, in the context of the contemporary trend of repeated references to national cultural values, filmmakers have had a double-edged relationship with Gogol's works. On the one hand, Gogolian satire still encourages them to draw thematic parallels between the two eras, and on the other, the level of interest in Gogol today often stems from purely commercial considerations