МЫСЛЬ ВНЕ ВРЕМЕНИ И ГРАНИЦ

9 Anna Karenina – a novel about a young, beautiful, aristocratic lady, who is caught between her heart and the norms of Russian noble society prevailing in the second half of the 19th century – shows the power of storytelling. A voluminous work of realistic fiction, it comprises eight parts and 239 chapters spread over 800 pages. In narrating the story of the titular character – Anna, to her passionate lover and mother, to a child named Seryozha – Tolstoy brilliantly conveys the disturbing emotional conflict that creates a complex wave of suffering and ends in tragedy. The immense popularity of Anna Karenina confirmed by its numerous adaptations. It has been adapted for the stage by Helen Edmundson (1992). Films made on the novel include Love , the 1927 American silent movie directed by Edmund Goulding which starred Greta Garbo. One of the most famous and critically acclaimed versions, Anna Karénina (1935), directed by Clarence Brown also stars Garbo with Fredric March as Vronsky. In 1948, the brilliant Vivien Leigh was seen in the role of Anna. It may be interesting to know that a Tamil-language adaptation titled Panakkaari, directed by K. S. Gopalakrishnan, was released in 1953. In 1960, Ezzel Dine Zulficar directed the Egyptian adaptation, titled Nahar al-Hob (The River of Love). It was followed by several film versions of the novel in various countries across the world, the most recent being the British adaptation by Joe Wright, starring Keira Knightley. From 1961 to date, a BBC series, Channel 4 adaptation and Filipino drama series, among other productions have found their way onto the TV screen. Several musicals were produced concurrently. Over the last 100 years, operas by Hungarian composer Jeno˝ Hubay, Ukrainian composer Yuly Meytus, Scottish composer Iain Hamilton on his own libretto, and an American adaptation with music by David Carlson on a libretto by Colin Graham have drawn the attention of connoisseurs and critics. But Anna Karenina stands out as a ballet. The art form, as we see it today, has evolved over the centuries in Italy, France, Denmark and, above all, Russia, especially in St. Petersburg and Moscow. Among the earlier adaptations, the Bolshoi Ballet’s 1972 version was composed especially for Maya Plisetskaya by Rodion Shchedrin who drew from themes of Tchaikovsky’s instrumental works. The production was choreographed by the prima ballerina herself. Boris Eifman’s version, which premiered in St. Petersburg in 2005, also featured music by Tchaikovsky, this time an amalgam of excerpts from Symphony No. 2 in C minor, ‘Little Russian’, Manfred Symphony in B minor, Hamlet overture-fantasy, and a number of others. An overwhelming number of ballets produced over the last 50 years tower over the traditional musical canon. Most versions of Anna Karenina, from Russia to Germany to Switzerland, to the U.S., Canada and Australia give the heroine a voice of her own through masterly choreography (in some versions she dances in the popular Polish folk dance style mazurka) and powerful music (from Tchaikovsky to Shostakovich to Demutsky). As the ballet progresses onstage, it becomes clear that it is a story wrapped in temptation and passion, steeped in moral conflicts, a constant parallel between life in the city and the countryside, between old societal values and evolving modern tendencies of manwoman relationship, as also a tale of treachery, vulnerability to greed and desire for wealth, dreams chased and shattered, and the ultimate punishment for getting swept off one’s feet by love. The depiction of this very