R.L. Stevenson's "Treasure Island" in Soviet Film Adaptations

This graduation paper is devoted to the Soviet adaptations of the novel by Robert Louis Stevenson Treasure Island (1883). Films by Vladimir Vainshtok (1937), Evgeny Fridman (1971), Vladimir Vorobyov (1982), David Cherkassky (1986-1998) are considered as a special form of reception of Stevenson’s text and corelate with a broad historical, cultural and receptive context. A comparative analysis of the film adaptations with their literary source helped to formulate four distinctive images of reading Treasure Island, reflected in Soviet cinema. Correlation of these images with critical and literary ideas about the novel revealed general tendencies of reception of Treasure Island in the Soviet Union. Thus, a peculiar line of relations between Stevenson’s text and its interpretation in Soviet culture was described in this study.