Fyodor Dostoyevsky – { feuilleton }

More from the Polish animator, and a stunning, wordless adaptation of Dostoevsky’s novel. Crime and Punishment dates from 2000, and utilises the same technique as Dumala’s earlier films—images scratched into a plaster ground—only this time there’s a muted colour palette and considerable depth achieved through cast shadows and blurred objects layered over the drawings. Yuri Norstein achieved a similar sense of depth in Hedgehog in the Fog (1975) and Tale of Tales (1979), and Dumala’s film also shares the latter’s umber tones and sombre lighting. The story is pared to its bones, as it would be with a running time of 30 minutes, but it’s still a marvellous adaptation. There’s even a nod to Walls when an omnipresent fly disappears for a moment into a hole in the wallpaper.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Walls, a film by Piotr Dumala
• Academy Leader Variations
• Yuri Norstein animations
• Screening Kafka

The Wilde Years (2000), a poster by Jonathan Barnbrook for an exhibition at the Barbican Centre, London.

Continuing an occasional series. Recent (and not-so-recent) Wildean links.

• Sander Bink writes that Beardsley-esque artist Carel de Nerée tot Babberich was in Paris in the summer of 1900, the summer of the Exposition Universelle which has been a subject of many posts here. Did he meet Oscar Wilde? It’s a possibility.

• “Was Oscar Wilde’s outlandish personality more influential than his writing?” asks George Woodcock.

These were the years when Zola was at the height of his international fame but Wilde pans the fashionable Naturalist school by contrasting it with another phenomenon that was then sweeping through Europe: Russian fiction. One of the small gems of these volumes is a cluster of very interesting and little-known articles on modern Russian novels. Wilde rated Turgenev, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky far above “the obscene brood of pseudo-realists which roosts in the Cloaca maxima of France” and welcomed their influence on modern literature. He was certainly among the first critics to review the English translations of Crime and Punishment and Injury and Insult, praising Dostoevsky’s command of detail and ability to probe into “the most hidden springs of life”.

Stefano Evangelista on Wilde’s world of journalism

• “An idea that is not dangerous is not worthy of being called an idea at all.” A print by ObviousState.

• Robert McCrum looks at The Picture of Dorian Gray for the Guardian‘s 100 Best Novels.

• Oscar Wilde provides the Pinterest legions with a thousand and one quotes.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Oscar Wilde archive

Tag: Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Crime and Punishment, a film by Piotr Dumala

Wildeana 12