Abstract

The essay is aimed at describing how and according to which intentions the Soviet director Ivan A. Pyr'ev, one of the very first exponents of the Socialist realism in the field of cinema, adapted a meaningful portion of Dostoevsky's narrative to filmic text. The essay analizes film transpositions of the tale Belye nochi (White nights, 1848) and the two novels Idiot (The Idiot, 1869) and Brat'ia Karamazov (The Brothers Karamazov, 1878-80), which Pyr'ev directed between 1958 and 1968. The paper proposes a text analysis on the treatment that the director applied to Dostoevsky' characters. It analyzes these characters against the heroic paradigm of the socialist realism that remained very well alive until Brezhnev 's era.