Text on the Culturological Border: the Cinemanovel “The Red. Without a Front Line” by A. Kokotiukha

Abstract

The article under studies reveals the terminological polymodality of the concept of “cinemanovel” as a screened novel; film genre; an original narrative work that tends to a screenplay; literary text written on the basis of the film and the screenplay to it (film “novelization”). An overview of modern theoretical and practical discourse of the cinemanovel genre is presented in the paper. It has been emphasized that some researchers try to find out the origins of this genre by analyzing the samples in a comparative and intermediate way, while others focus on clarifying the specifics of individual novels, concluding on the synthetic and hybrid nature of this genre. In particular, in this aspect, the cinemanovel-prequel by A. Kokotiukha “The Red. Without a Front Line” (2019) has been analyzed. This text, based on a film screenplay, appears to be a rather complex construct that acquires a double coding – cinematic and literary – hence the genre of the novel (as a product of the synthesis of two arts) contains the key features of both. On the one hand, we have to deal with the preservation of the cinematic codes that pass from the screenplay: fragmentation, word visualization, documentalism, eventfulness, editing, alternation of angles and plans, time reduction, dialogues, character formation in action, characterization through speech, conciseness of phrases in certain scenes to create the effect of maximum tension, image condensation, accumulation of internal tension in the episode. On the other hand (as a result of the so-called “novelization”), the text acquires genre features of the novel. These are: the scale of the narration (although fragmented and condensed), the description of characters’ lives is presented in line with historical events, with the disclosure of their psychology and inner world. Finally, the work is also marked with specifically architectonic, i.e. the author connects his cinemanovels together by means of a plot, the main character and a general artistic idea.