A. Kurosawa’s in the intermedial and cross-cultural transcoding of “Idiot” novel by F. M. Dostoevsky: motives, images, symbols, philosophical content

The article reveals the idea of the essential proximity of two artistic worlds: F. M. Dostoevsky and Akira Kurosawa. The authors disagree with the interpretation of the film as an post-apocalyptic one, offering to read the film adaptation, relying on the concept of the chronotope of Dostoevsky’s threshold. The complex symbolic language of the film, the use of various contexts: musical, mythopoetic, cultural-historical, etc., requires a comprehensive analysis of the most important structure-forming motives. The work is based on structural-semiotic, comparative- historical (comparative studies), and culturological methods. When analyzing the film, special attention is paid to music as the organizing beginning of film narration, mythological motives accompanying the image of the protagonist – the Japanese prince Myshkin, the nature of the transitional era in understanding the director projecting Dostoevsky’s ideas in the 1950s. Kurosawa turns to the archaic layers of mythological consciousness revealing the image of a “positively beautiful person” in a language clear to the Japanese, while simultaneously expanding the boundaries of the national proper, forming a culturological view of modernity.