While it would be erroneous, as we have suggested, to consider Tynianov’s the-oretical writing on cinema in isolation from his practical activities as writer and administrator, there is a clear and important sense in which the “theory” is in fact distinct from the “practice.” The two broad elements we have described—
writing and administration—are necessarily inadequate to define Tynianov’s day-to-day life in the studios, with its shifting and seamless pattern of creative discussions, writing and rewriting, processing and commissioning new scripts;
against adaPtation? 181 the task of the theoretical essay, on the other hand, is to establish some kind of order and clarity among entities that are at once disparate and intimately related. In the present case, as we indicated at the outset, these are nothing less than the fundamental modes of art, the comparative differentiation of which silently motivates Tynianov’s turn to the cinema. Tynianov-film-theorist comes to the cinema in terms of the same central aesthetic questions that have driven the rise of literary Formalism, the comparability and non-comparability of the specific technical and formal resources that are available to any given art form and which therefore distinguish it from all others. It is only in the context of this move from a “general aesthetics” to a series of “specifying” aesthetics of different art forms that certain of Tynianov’s more unexpected—to modern ears, at least—statements of principle can be understood, for example his pronounced and consistent resistance to sound cinema. Tynianov’s rousing objection to the contemporary dismissal of cinema as “the great mute” (velikii nemoi)—“no-one calls poetry ‘the great blind’”60—is somewhat undermined by his insistence on equating sound as an innovation with color and even stereoscopic cinema, all of which “excite us very little.”61 Sound cinema is even characterized on one occasion as “the mongrel offspring of theatre and cinema—a pitiful compromise.”62 More important in the present context, however, is the fact that this broad drive toward a “specifying” aesthetics also conditions Tynianov’s discourse on adaptation.
Tynianov dwells on this specific problem at greatest length in the otherwise brief 1926 article “On the Screenplay,” which establishes the broader aesthetic context before turning to the practicalities of actually producing work for the screen:
The cinema has been slow in freeing itself from the captivity of the neighboring arts—from theatre and painting. Now it must free itself from literature. Three-quarters of cinema is still like the painting of the Travelers [Peredvizhniki]—it is literary. […] Until the question of the relationship between cinema and literature is re-examined, the best kind of screenplay will be halfway between a spoiled novel and an unfin-ished drama. And the best kind of screenwriter will be halfway between an unsuccessful dramatist and a belletrist who has tired of belles lettres.63 The slightly later essay “The Fundamentals of Cinema” is an attempt at such
“re-examination” of the relationship between cinema and literature, and can be characterized as marking the transition from an aesthetics of specificity as such to what will later become the basis for a thoroughgoing semiotic approach to cinema, an approach which in fact aims to reconcile the demands of specific-ity and difference in a total theory of variously constructed signifying material.
Just as the verbal sign carries within it a referent—objectified material—which
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is transformed into “an element of art” through the function it is required to perform in the literary text,64 so too, to cite Roman Jakobson’s later develop-ment of Tynianov’s postulates, is the optical “thing” (i.e., the object of visual representation) transformed into a sign: “every phenomenon of the external world is transformed on the screen into a sign.”65 It is in this precise connec-tion, as a proto-semiotician of cinema, that Tynianov begins to be assimilated into Russian theoretical discourses around film in the late 1970s and early 1980s: “adaptation” is a present but secondary element in that process, little more than a convenient means by which to pursue theoretical (semiotic) ends.
In something of a blind parallel, Western critical discourse on adaptation began to develop into a thoroughgoing aesthetic theory at roughly the same time, based on Western appropriations and reorientations of the core “formal-ist” principle that had fueled the rise of Opoiaz in the 1910s and early 1920s, now transformed into an all-pervasive structuralist semiotic. Adaptation theory sought to critique inherited assumptions about the relative cultural value of film and literary texts and, perhaps more significantly, about the basis (or lack) of their “formal” relations. The identified and/or resultant bifurcation in studies of adaptation can be summarized in the words of Dudley Andrew, who characterizes adaptation as both “the most narrow and provincial area of film theory” and at the same time “potentially as far-reaching as you like.”66 The second part of this evokes the formalist/semiotic projection of a new kind of comparative aesthetics, in which specificity and generality are inseparably and even organically interrelated, and for which individual adaptations provide ideal “laboratory” conditions.67 Andrew’s implication is that, in the hands of the trained (formalist) aesthetic specialist, adaptation might reach as “far as you like” beyond the inconsequential straw men of such concepts as “fidelity”
or the “precursor text” toward the theoretical vistas of both cinema as a spe-cific art form and of art “in general.” The obverse of this implication, however, given especially that the institutional rise of adaptation is intimately connected with the English Department’s (and, more recently, the Modern Language Department’s) need or desire to protect and/or extend its teaching base, is that the study of adaptation will pathologically break its “provincial and narrow”
teeth on precisely these same (non-)problems of fidelity and anteriority.
Rather than simply suggest, however, that Tynianov, as theorist or as writer and “adapter” of Lieutenant Kizhe, offers a rebuke to this latter tendency—
which would be to substitute a straw man with a vaporous figure akin almost to Kizhe himself—I want to locate Tynianov’s continuing utility in what is a quite different “rebuke” to the former. Despite (or perhaps in another sense because of) their later association with a structuralist semiotic in the Soviet Union, Tynianov’s essays on the cinema are not entirely consistent with the direction in which his Formalist colleagues, and later Tynianov himself, were developing and in some ways transforming their earlier focus on art and
against adaPtation? 183 literature in narrow or even exclusive terms of formal specificity. Eikhenbaum, Shklovskii, and Brik were all increasingly concerned in the second half of the 1920s with the extra-literary and even sociological basis for literature,68 and this only partly as a pragmatic response to external pressures from increasingly belligerent Marxist opponents. Tynianov would take this development to new and quite distinct heights in his 1927 essay “On Literary Evolution,” which represents a high-water mark for attempts to synthesize formal and socio-historical literary methodologies.69 Tynianov’s essays on the cinema remained, in other words, more “formalist” than the approaches to literature latterly pro-pounded by himself and his “Formalist” colleagues. The brief “sociological turn” in late Formalism and Tynianov’s subsequent synthesis were prompted by an awareness of the limitations not only of the immanent study of the work of art in itself, be it literary or cinematic, but also of the limitations of processes in which such immanent study might be opened out through comparison with other forms of art, and other specific artifacts: the “extra-literary” did not primarily refer to other “artistic series” such as film, but rather to the mate-rial, experiential, objectified world beyond artistic series as such. The sum implication for adaptation theory of Tynianov’s work as a screenwriter and as a theorist of cinema and literature is that the “laboratory conditions” in which the respective cinematic and literary texts are to be examined must be understood as facilitating not simply the identification of a higher theoretical generalization about the forms and functions of film and literature themselves, but also an integrated understanding of how each, inseparably from their rela-tions to one another, articulates with the environment in which it has been produced and with the historical evolution of the mode to which it belongs.
This is another way of saying that theory and history, rather than the combat-ants in the battle for the humanities they are often characterized as being, in fact depend on one another for the realization of their respective projects; or, at one further level of “specification,” that the justifiable demand that adapta-tion theory work harder in developing a sociological aspect need not—in fact cannot—imply the need to sacrifice its “purely” formal dimension.
notes
1. Tynianov, “O stsenarii,” 323.
2. Tynianov, “Kino—slovo—muzyka,” 322.
3. Accounts of the development of Formalism have understandably varied as material relating to the period has gradually become more accessible. See in particular Erlich, Russian Formalism and Steiner, Russian Formalism.
4. See Tsiv’ian and Toddes, “‘Ne kinogramota, a kinokul’tura,’” 90, 93. Eikhenbaum’s most significant theoretical work on the cinema, probably closely related to the theory course at GIII, is the essay “Problems of Cine-Stylistics.”
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5. Brik’s personal stock reaches its nadir in 1933 during the abortive production of his and his former deputy at Mezhrabpom Oleg Leonidov’s script “On Personal Responsibility”;
like Storm Over Asia, the film was to be directed by Pudovkin, but the production was halted by the studio manager (and sometime actor) Iakov Zaitsev, who described the script as “hack-work” and expressed the view that Anatolii Golovnia, Pudovkin’s
cinematographer, could only have accepted it because of a “temporary loss of judgment.”
Zaitsev would later write threatening legal action and referring to Brik’s “script” in devastating inverted commas. Russian State Archive of Literature and Art (RGALI), f. 2852, op. 1, d. 335, ll. 1–7; d. 332, l. 7.
6. Witness Shklovskii’s withering accusation in 1932, partly motivated by the personal enmity that had played a significant role in the dissolution of Lef, that Brik and his wife Lilia were
“boiling [Maiakovskii] down for glue.” Chukovskii, “Iz dnevnika 1932–1969,” 136.
7. Shklovskii also contributed to the Poetics of Cinema collection, in the form of a characteristically brief and provocative sketch on the relations between “prose” and
“poetry” and, respectively, plot and “plotlessness” in the cinema. It is tempting to attribute Shklovskii’s participation, and the brevity of his contribution, to the emphasis in Eikhenbaum’s invitation on an advance of 50 rubles: see Tsiv’ian and Toddes, “‘Ne kinogramota, a kinokul’tura,’” 92. Shklovskii, “Poetry and Prose in the Cinema,” 87–9.
See also Shklovskii, Za sorok let.
8. Among countless examples of the demand for Shklovskii’s services are his retention as a
“script consultant” by Brik during the latter’s tenure as Head of the Script Department at Mezhrabpom, on terms that not only guaranteed him additional fees for any original script material he himself submitted, but which also did not prevent him developing scripts for other studios, and all for a salary not much short of Brik’s, who was effectively locked into an exclusive contract. RGALI, f. 2852, op. 1, d. 324, ll. 1, 2, 2ob. Other notable examples, both of which have resonance for later discussion, are Shklovskii’s engagement in 1928 to write a screenplay based on Tynianov’s initial treatment of his own novel, The Death of Vazir-Mukhtar (RGALI, f. 2224, op. 1, d. 191, l. 5) and his replacement of Tynianov on Esfir Shub’s unrealized documentary project on Pushkin in 1936 (RGALI, f. 2224, op. 1, d. 191, l. 7). See also Tsiv’ian and Toddes, “‘Ne kinogramota, a kinokul’tura,’” 94–6.
A total of five feature films with scripts written or co-written by Shklovskii were completed and released in the 1930s: two silents for Goskinprom in Georgia—The American Girl (Esakiia, 1930) and It’s Very Simple (Lomidze, 1930); two early sound pictures for Mezhrabpom—Horizon (Kuleshov, 1932) and The House of the Dead (Fedorov, 1932); and, after a period of politically enforced reticence, Mosfilm’s patriotic historical epic Minin and Pozharskii (Pudovkin, 1939).
9. See, for example, Shklovskii, Za sorok let, and Shklovskii, Tret’ia fabrika.
10. Tynianov, “The Fundamentals of Cinema”; Tynianov, “O siuzhete i fabule v kino”;
Tynianov, “O stsenarii.” Tynianov also published “Ne kinogramota, a kinokul’tura” and
“O feksakh.”
11. This contemporaneity might also serve as a ready-made and highly desirable safety mechanism, preventing us from falling into a trap that has claimed even illustrious commentators such as Iurii Tsiv’ian and Mikhail Iampol’skii, namely the temptation to read Tynianov’s films through his earlier, and to some extent canonized literary theory.
This, I want to suggest, is merely a different way of falling into the same broad category of error as we will later see in relation to adaptation; it is, moreover, an error that Tynianov himself consistently—if not always successfully—endeavored to avoid. See Iampol’skii, “‘Poruchik Kizhe’ kak teoreticheskii fil’m” and Tsiv’ian, “Paleogrammy v fil’me ‘Shinel’.”
against adaPtation? 185
12. It is, moreover, an adaptation of a writer on whom Tynianov—along with at least one other of his Formalist cohorts—was regarded as something of an academic authority; compare the vastly different outcome of Shklovskii’s later treatment of Dostoevskii’s House of the Dead, the above-noted House of the Dead (Fedorov, 1932), which is less an adaptation than a cinematic polemic on its author’s place in Russian cultural and literary history.
13. Shubin, Iurii Tynianov, 31.
14. To pronounce negative judgment on Semen Timoshenko’s film Napoleon-Gaz, a verdict which appeared in published form in Rabochii i teatr (Worker and Theatre), 50 (1925), 23;
cited from Tsiv’ian and Toddes, “‘Ne kinogramota, a kinokul’tura,’” 90–1.
15. RGALI, f. 2224, op. 1, d. 191, ll. 1, 1ob.
16. Grigorii Kozintsev describes Tynianov as being utterly consumed in the cinematic process, without in any sense compartmentalizing his literary and cinematic undertakings: indeed, Tynianov acknowledged the common genesis of the film “scenario” and the short story in the situational miniature or anecdote, one of which, involving a sentry “guarding an empty space,” is a clear precursor to “Lieutenant Kizhe.” Kozintsev paints an appealing, if perhaps somewhat romanticized, picture of Tynianov’s involvement with his FEKS (Factory of the Eccentric Actor), in which Tynianov would squeeze readings of his literary and theoretical works in between lessons on clowning and boxing. Kozintsev also recalls Tynianov writing in the editing room, on the back of editing lists, and it is tantalizing to imagine that this was not restricted to his writing for the cinema: Kozintsev, [No Title], in Iurii Tynianov.
17. Toddes, Chudakov, and Chudakova suggest that Tynianov was in fact Head of the Script Department, until replaced in February 1927 by Adrian Piotrovskii. Tynianov, Poetika, 550.
18. Shubin, Iurii Tynianov, 34; Tynianov, “Arkhaisty i Pushkin.”
19. Shubin, Iurii Tynianov, 34.
20. Ibid., 35–6, 39–40.
21. Tynianov, “Podporuchik Kizhe.” All citations of the text are from “Podporuchik Kizhe,”
in Tynianov, Voskovaia persona, 339–70.
22. This is one of the most compelling reasons that Iampol’skii, as already mentioned, could not resist entering the vortex of the relationship between oral and/or everyday speech, poetry and, finally, cinema: Iampol’skii, “‘Poruchik Kizhe’ kak teoreticheskii fil’m.”
23. Tynianov, “Podporuchik Kizhe,” 370.
24. It should at least be noted, however, that this term has a pronounced retrospective character in relation to Tynianov (and to Gogol). Two useful treatments of the fantastic, both of which perhaps not incidentally reference Gogol, are Todorov, Introduction à la littérature fantastique and Cornwell, The Literary Fantastic. A useful introduction to the extensive secondary literature on Gogol is Maguire, Exploring Gogol.
25. Belinkov, Iurii Tynianov, 402.
26. Gogol, “The Overcoat,” 103 (translation modified).
27. Tynianov, “O stsenarii.”
28. Tynianov, “Libretto kinofil’ma «Shinel’»,” 78. This is also an echo of Gogol’s own characterization of his stories as being “in the manner of Hoffmann.”
29. This is made explicit in the “prologue” to the story in the original Krasnaia nov’
publication, which was removed in later redactions. Tynianov, “Podporuchik Kizhe,”
Krasnaia nov’, 97. See also Belinkov, Iurii Tynianov, 399–400. For a fuller account of the range of historical and literary sources upon which Tynianov may have drawn, see Toddes,
“Posleslovie.”
30. RGALI, f. 2224, op. 1, d. 191, ll. 2–4.
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31. Faintsimmer worked as assistant director on Vsevolod Pudovkin’s The End of St Petersburg (1927) and Iulii Raizman’s Penal Servitude (1928), before going on to be Belgoskino’s
“house director” throughout the 1930s.
32. Gosfilmofond—National Film Foundation of the Russian Federation (GFF), f. 2, op. 1, d.
1897, l. 67. Toddes claims that Tynianov completed the script in May, but this would seem highly unlikely in view of the fact that the supposition is based on a remark by Tynianov that envisages Iutkevich continuing to work on the script. See Toddes, “Posleslovie,” 164.
33. Iutkevich, “Dokladnaia zapiska ob izmeneniakh v stsenarii ‘Podporuchik Kizhe’”: GFF, f. 2, op. 1, d. 1897, l. 69.
34. GFF, f. 2, op. 1, d. 1897, l. 1.
35. GFF, f. 2, op. 1, d. 1897, l. 70.
36. Eikhenbaum tells Shklovskii in a letter of April 9, 1927 that “Iurii insists on working in the cinema.” Cited from Tynianov, Poetika, 550. He had also submitted another libretto to Sovkino in March, once again co-authored with Oksman, based on Turgenev’s “Asia”;
the film would be completed in 1928, directed by Aleksandr Ivanovskii, but without any further participation by Tynianov. Ibid., 550.
37. RGALI, f. 2224, op. 1, d. 224, l. 1.
38. Shubin, Iurii Tynianov, 37.
39. Cited from Toddes, “Posleslovie,” 188 (my italics).
40. Cited from Tynianov, Poetika, 550.
41. The studio made a number of further attempts to persuade Glavrepertkom to allow the film’s production, including an unsuccessful attempt by Arsen Aravskii to invest it with the required “social and historical significance,” an unrealized attempt to persuade Shklovskii to rewrite, and, finally, a complete reorientation of the project by the director Aleksandr Razumnyi and the screenwriter Viktor Turkin. Tynianov signed a new contract with Belgoskino on August 8, 1932, over five years after abandoning the original project.
RGALI, f. 2224, op. 1, d. 191, ll. 6, 6ob. A version of the script for the 1934 film has been preserved only in the inaccessible personal archive of Veniamin Kaverin (see Iampol’skii,
“‘Poruchik Kizhe’ kak teoreticheskii fil’m,” 29), so we are obliged, just as with the 1927 script, to base our analysis on the shooting script.
42. Sepman, “Tynianov—stsenarist,” 75.
43. “Podporuchik Kizhe,” Director’s Script, 2nd version, sc. 309–89: GFF, f. 2, op. 1, d. 1897, ll. 64–8. Henceforth Tynianov/Iutkevich, “1927 script.”
44. Tynianov/Iutkevich, “1927 script,” sc. 371.
45. Ibid., sc. 385–6. All reference to the broader historical dimension of the Napoleonic wars is absent from the 1934 film.
53. Iutkevich, “Dokladnaia zapiska”: GFF, f. 2, op. 1, d. 1897, l. 69.
54. Tynianov, “Podporuchik Kizhe,” 353.
55. Ibid., 355.
56. Ibid., 357.
57. Ibid., 358.
58. Ibid., 361.