About the film “To Live”: A. Kurosawa’s dialogue with the Russian literature

Abstract

It is well known that Russian literature had a great influence on the creative work of the Japanese moviemaker Akira Kurosawa (1910–1998). The film director himself told about the passion he had when he was young for Russian literature, especially for the novels of Fyodor Dostoevsky. After the movie “Idiot” had been made (1951), Kurosawa began to work on the next film “To Live” (1952), based on the story provided by Leo Tolstoy’s “The Death of Ivan Ilyich” (1886). Both Tolstoy’s story and Kurosawa’s film represent the death of “an ordinary man” as well as the selfishness, indifference of surrounding people. However, there is a significant difference between the plots of Tolstoy’s story and Kurosawa’s film. In his story, Tolstoy insists that the world after physical death is much more important than the world of ordinary life. Kurosawa does not seem to have accepted this point of view. Therefore, in the first half of the film “To Live” he follows Tolstoy’s plot, but in the second half he departs from it. No wonder that many Japanese re­searchers when analyzing the image of Kuro­sawa’s protagonist underlined some existen­tial motifs borrowed from Dostoevsky. Drawing attention to Tolstoy’s article “On Life” (1886–1887), in which, using the concepts of “exis­tence” and “life”, Tolstoy wrote about “the birth of the true life in man”, the author ex­plores what elements of Tolstoy’s and Dos­toev­sky’s views on life and death were reflected in the artistic world of Kurosawa and how they were adapted. In conclusion, an analysis of the role played by the film “To Live” in the history of Japanese culture, especially after the Second World War, is presented.