Jozefina Piatkowska

Russian gestural lexemes in Russian and American cinema – the example of film adaptations of Leo Tolstoy’s novel Anna Karenina

The novel Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy has been adapted for the cinema by Russian (and Soviet), American and French directors. The aim of this paper is to analyze an inter-semiotic form of translation: to establish how gestural lexemes used by Tolstoy to describe his character’s behaviours were featured in Russian and American productions. To investigate whether the actors performed adequate body movements and facial expressions we will refer to the Dictionary of Russian Gestures (the scientific dictionary in the field of non-verbal semiotics, by G. Kreidlin, N. Grigorev and S. Grigoreva). The intercultural aspect of the study consists in observing whether Russian and Western actors performed gestural lexemes in the same way and if the gestures they performed carry the same meaning in Russian, American and French culture.

Keywords: gestural lexemes, gesture, film adaptation, inter-semiotic translation

Biography

Jozefina Piatkowska is an Assistant Professor in the Semiotics Department at the Institute of Applied Linguistics and Semiotics at the University of Warsaw, where she is also Coordinator of the Erasmus Program. She holds a PhD in Linguistics (2010), an MA in Translation (2006), and an MA in Political Science (2005). She has participated, both as an organizer and presenter, in numerous international conferences, including GLOBE (Warsaw 2008) and Political Linguistics (Warsaw 2007). Among her recent presentations are “Non-Salient Meaning of Zero Signs as a Source of Suggestiveness in Lyrics” (Lodz, 2012) and “Transformations of Gestural Phrasemes in Marina Tsvetaeva’s Poetry” (Paris, 2014).