“BETWEEN A DACHSHUND AND A YARD-DOG”: A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF ANTON P. CHEKHOV SHORT STORY KASHTANKA AND ITS FILMSTRIP ADAPTATION

Abstract

The article examines the main principles of textual adaptation in filmstrips. A comparative analysis of Anton P. Chekhov’s short story Kashtanka and its 1975 filmstrip adaptation demonstrates that the filmstrip, as a syncretic genre whose composition is based on the principle of frame montage, requires not only great reduction of the original text — primarily its descriptive passages, which are compensated for by images — but also editorial revision. The syntactic structure of the original text is edited as well through the reduction of some members of sentences, separated constructions and changing the aspect of verb forms (from incomplete to complete) which with the help of pictures depicted incomplete actions provide the dynamic and the continuity of the storyline, as saving the lines of direct speech allows making the story, its characters, talk. The inner point of view is mainly preserved in evidential and indefinite markers, despite the reduction of its diversity. At the same time, some evaluative lexemes used in the text of the filmstrip but not in the original one make the filmstrip more didactic and straightforward, than Chekhov’s story.