Original scientific paper
The Adaptation of Joseph Brodsky's Life and Autobiographical Essay
Sara Štivčević
Abstract
The movie Room and a Half (Полторы комнаты, или Сентиментальное путешествие на родину), directed by Andrei Khrzhanovsky, is based on the eponymous essay (Room and a Half), but also on the biography and poetry of Joseph Brodsky – one of the most famous Russian poets and one of the representative Russian emigrants of the second half of the 20th century. Although Brodsky was primarily a poet, while in the United States of America he wrote prose as well, particularly essays that contained substantial autobiographical elements. In one of these essays, Room and a Half (Полторы комнаты), Brodsky remembers his parents, his childhood, and his city. In the essay and in the movie of the same title appear the key motifs of Brodsky's creativity, such as freedom, remembrance, life, and death. The director Khrzhanovsky first revived the above-mentioned motifs in the scenes of his animated movie A Cat and a Half. This enabled him to create his own poetry, i.e., the poetic language of a movie. Further analysis of the film adaptation brings up the question of Khrzhanovsky's type of film adaptation. Starting from Jakobson's intersemiotic translation, this essay points out the complexity of non-traditional film adaptation by Khrzhanovsky which can be defined as a specific mosaic of an essay, a biography, and Brodsky’s literary style.
Keywords
Joseph Brodsky; Andrei Khrzhanovsky; Room and a Half; translation; film adaptation; USSR
Hrčak ID:
311844
URI
Publication date:
20.12.2023.
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