M. Kalatozov’s Film The Cranes Are Flying: The Creation of the Cinematic Narrative and Its Later Reception (From Valentin Rozov’s Play to Sergei Solovyov’s Film Ke-dy)

This article examines M. K. Kalatozov’s cult film The Cranes Are Flying (1957) in the context of several works directly related to it, i.e. V. S. Rozov’s play Life Eternal (1943–1956), which served as the literary source for the film script, and then the film by S. A. Solovyov KE-DY (Eng. Sneakers) (2016) based on the story by contemporary writer A. V. Gelasimov, Paradise Found (2015). During the analysis, the semiotic mechanisms of cinematic interpretation of a dramatic work become apparent, as well as the background for transposing a well-known plot from one cultural and historical era to another. Particular attention is paid to analysing the process of transposing the plot and characters of Rozov’s play into the plot and characters of the film The Cranes Are Flying, as well as the plot of Gelasimov’s story into the plot of Solovyov’s film and the discovery of the conceptual dependence of KE-DY on the film The Cranes Are Flying, which found its symbolic expression in multiple film quotations. It has been determined that the two films and two literary works separated from each other by a significant period are currently perceived within a unified historical and cultural paradigm of national identity. The relationships and images, which have undergone substantial distortion over a period of more than 70 years, are interpreted as archetypal. Contemporary society shares the same concerns as the characters in Rozov’s play and Kalatozov’s film: youth, love, civic duty, the formation of female and male identities, and the trials of war and separation. The intricate web of intertextual connections in cinema and literature plays a crucial role in the process of renewing national cultural memory.