FILMING THE CRIMINAL MIND: JOSEF VON STERNBERG'S AND LEV KULIDZHANOV'S ADAPTATIONS OF DOSTOEVSKY'S CRIME AND PUNISHMENT.

As a psychological detective drama, Dostoevsky's novel Crime and Punishment crafts a careful construction of Rodion Raskolnikov's interiority. The novel's heavy emphasis on the exploration of the internal world of a criminal's psyche, however, presents distinct challenges to anyone wishing to adapt it for the screen. How do you translate in cinematic terms the many interior monologues that give us a glimpse of the tortured workings of Raskolnikov's mind? And what does a director's answer to this question reveal about the act of film adaptation? To probe these questions, this article explores Lev Kulidzhanov's and Josef von Sternberg's film adaptations of Dostoevsky's novel in dialogue with other cinematic treatments of the text. I argue that how a film reproduces the main protagonist's interiority and whether it is to be "shown" on the screen inevitably reveals the director's cultural and ideological position on Raskolnikov himself. My discussion argues that domestically produced adaptations of Crime and Punishment tend to emphasize psychological naturalism as a way to prove fidelity to the hypotext and assert its cultural significance, whereas the further a film is from the land of Raskolnikov's fictional birth, the question of interiority transforms into a thematic vehicle for tracing the contours of aesthetic, political, or philosophical discourses that may be quite remote from those that guided Dostoevsky's own writing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]