Overall, although critics agree that this novel is particularly challenging to adapt, their remarks also suggest that this challenge may be precisely what makes the novel so alluring for filmmakers. Adaptations of Anna Karenina can always reveal new details about the novel, helping unmask our own critical preconceptions about characters, or adding new layers to the story through the cinematic medium. The adaptation in these accounts emerges, to use another of Hutcheon’s phrases, as it own “palimpsestic thing” that can simultaneously preserve, transform, and recast the original, all the while breathing new life into it. More often, it was the irreverently imaginative filmmakers that produced the most compelling films. “If you want Anna Karenina, read it again (and again),” writes Carol Apollonio. Many more or less agreed that adaptations do not and cannot give us Anna Karenina. With the novel as a starting point, many scholars we polled evaluated the faithfulness of adaptations, but often went beyond “fidelity criticism” (Linda Hutcheon) to explore adaptations for their own artistic merit.Īs you will notice, many scholars used the film’s deviations from the original as a point of departure for a host of questions about adaptations. We expected colleagues to have particularly strong feelings about adaptations that visualized Tolstoy’s plotlines and characters. Responses from colleagues are attached below. In a special issue of the Tolstoy Studies Journal: Anna Karenina for the Twenty-First Century (edited by myself, Emma Lieber, and Michael Denner), we consider the Joe Wright 2012 adaptation of the novel, as well as other contemporary adaptations in an effort to address the broader question: how does Anna Karenina speak beyond its time, and how does it address contemporary problems? We relate the novel to contemporary questions of sexuality and desire, performativity and authenticity, and even “The Kardashians”! In conjunction with this project, we initiated a dialogue on social media among about Anna Karenina film adaptations. Ani Kokobobo is an Assistant Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Kansas
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