Word: novella
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...year. Whether from a lack of imagination and originality, or simply from a resurgent interest in adapting fiction and drama, original screenplays are becoming harder to find. The translation from another medium is often an awkward, difficult task. Lee Grant's screen adaptation of Tillie Olsen's classic 1961 novella about an aging Jewish immigrant couple facing the problems of elderly life haunted by the lasting effect of Nazi torture treats her subject with admirable restraint and sensitivity...
...problem here is a familiar one: reverence for a literary source, a delicate novella by Tillie Olsen, has rendered its adapters dumbstruck. Trying to remain faithful to her realistic surfaces and unable-except through uninformative flashbacks-to reveal the inner workings of Eva's sensibility, the film makers have avoided anything that might be melodramatic or even openly emotional. All the suffering in Tell Me a Riddle is thus stoic, all triumphs without joy. Movement is glacial, dialogue wooden, characterizations blurred. One has a feeling that this project-brought to fruition without the financial support of the film industry...
...Steel Bird, which was published last year in the U.S., marks Aksyonov's break with realism in favor of the grotesque. This novella features a ghastly humanoid with a metal carapace who blackmails the superintendent of an apartment house into letting him live in the elevator. Acting with Stalinist guile, the steel bird takes over the entire building and its tenants. The structure soon collapses; the creature is left to roost triumphantly atop the elevator shaft, surveying the debris...
...which were recently published in the U.S. by W.W. Norton under the title Kolyma Tales, have been in samizdat for 20 years. Currently the most prized samizdat work is Venedikt Yerofeyev's Moscow-Petushki. The account of a phantasmagoric drunken excursion on a suburban train, Yerofeyev's novella may be the most innovative piece of prose written in the U.S.S.R. for more than four decades. The Russian text has been published in France...
Georgi Vladimov, 49, is another exceptionally talented writer who has been cut down in mid-career and who is being hounded by the KGB. One reason for the persecution is his celebrated novella, Faithful Ruslan, which has circulated all over the country in samizdat; it was published in the U.S. last year by Simon & Schuster. Ruslan tells of a concentration-camp dog, pitilessly trained to guard convicts, that becomes a stray when most of the Stalinist camps are closed down in 1956. Ruslan, and other dogs of his kind, keep a vigil at the local railway station, hoping...