Film adaptation of Serhii Zhadan’s novel “Voroshylovhrad”

Semiosis of postmodern Ukrainian literature text

Abstract

The intersection of literature and film, particularly through film adaptation, is critical to understanding cultural narratives and identities. This study examines the growing importance of examining how literary works are transformed into film, reflecting social changes and collective memory. The object is the screen adaptation of Serhii Zhadan’s novel Voroshylovhrad in the film Wild Field directed by Yaroslav Lodygin. The study explores the challenges and limitations inherent in adapting complex literary texts to film, including how key narrative elements can be simplified or changed, affecting original themes and character depth. The article’s goal is to find out whether the essential components of S. Zhadan’s narrative have been preserved in the cinematic version.

The study uses a combination of semiotic, comparative, and structural analyses explore the transformation of narrative elements between the novel and the film. These techniques allow for a careful examination of how visual storytelling devices affect the depiction of themes and characters.

The obtained results indicate that Wild Field quite successfully reflects the main motifs of the narrative of the literary base, but simplifies important elements, in particular, the motif of the road and the interweaving of memory and reality. The timeline of the film is moved to 2010, which leads to a significant change in the thematic emphasis. This led to a reduction in the number of key characters and a simplification of the plot, which somewhat reduces the depth of the original narrative.

This study contributes to the field of adaptation studies by providing a nuanced understanding of the semiotic transformations that occur when literary texts are adapted into films, and emphasizes how Wild Field reinterprets the literary text of the novel Voroshylovhrad, offering an understanding of the cinematic representation of Ukrainian identity and memory. The study opens up opportunities for further studies of adaptation processes in Ukrainian cinema and literature, encouraging future research into other screen adaptations and the broader implications of such transformations for national identity narratives. In addition, it is proposed to study the audience’s perception of adaptations better to understand these cinematic interpretations' impact on cultural memory.