Meteleva-Kudalina Anna Alekseevna – Junior Researcher of the Department of Literary Studies, Institute of Scientific Information for Social Sciences of the Russian Academy of Sciences; ORCID: 0009–0002–0952–3396
This article compares the way the psychology of characters and family relationships are modeled in Leo Tolstoy’s novel Family Happiness (1859) and in S. Tolstoy’s film Family Happiness (2025). In the film, the characters’ personalities and the nuances of their interactions, as described by Leo Tolstoy, are significantly transformed and ideologically marked: the novel’s central male character emerges as a figure of power, while the female character is a victim, oppressed in a patriarchal marriage. In the novel, the characters are presented in a completely different way: they experience periods of happiness and crisis, develop spiritually, and their internal changes become the main subject of depiction and artistic reflection. S. Tolstaya uses motifs and images from other works by Leo Tolstoy, as well as episodes from the writer’s biography, in the film, allowing the director to transform the plot of Family Happiness in the spirit of contemporary notions of inequality and power and to alter the perspective of the statement on family relationships established by Leo Tolstoy.
L.N. Tolstoy; film adaptation; novel