Movies: Russian literature

The first film of a four-part adaptation of Leo Tolstoy’s 1869 novel. In St. Petersburg of 1805, Pierre Bezukhov, the illegitimate son of a rich nobleman, is introduced to high society. His friend, Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, joins the Imperial Russian ...

Kameda, who has been in an asylum on Okinawa, travels to Hokkaido. There he becomes involved with two women, Taeko and Ayako. Taeko comes to love Kameda, but is loved in turn by Akama. When Akama realizes that he will never have Taeko, his thoughts t...

In the end of 1809, Natasha attends her first ball. Andrei falls in love with her and intends to marry her, but her father demands they wait. The prince travels abroad, and Natasha desperately longs for him. But she then meets Anatol Kuragin and forg...

Ryevsk, Russia, 1870. Tensions abound in the Karamazov family. Fyodor is a wealthy libertine who holds his purse strings tightly. His four grown sons include Dmitri, the eldest, an elegant officer, always broke and at odds with his father, betrothed ...

Stefan and Dolly Oblonsky have had a spat and Stefan has asked his sister, Anna Karenina, to come down to Moscow to help mend the rift. Anna's companion on the train from St. Petersburg is Countess Vronsky who is met at the Moscow station by her son....

As Moscow is set ablaze by the retreating Russians, the Rostovs flee their estate, taking wounded soldiers with them, and unbeknownst to them, also Andrei. Pierre, dressed as a peasant, tries to assassinate Napoleon but is taken prisoner. As the Fren...

In 1812, Napoleon's Army invades Russia. Kutuzov asks Bolkonsky to join him as a staff officer, yet the prince requests a command in the field. Pierre sets out to watch the upcoming confrontation between the armies. During the Battle of Borodino, he ...

Evgeniy Onegin lives in grand style: balls, receptions, theater premieres and other frivolities the capital can offer a young man. But social life has long tired him, so he perceives the news of the illness of his uncle living in the village as an op...

Hedda Gabler has just come back from her honeymoon, married to boring but reliable academic George Tesman. Refusing to tie herself down in life and name, Hedda is banking on George being appointed a professorship to secure a better life for the young...

The film is a Bolshoi Ballet version of Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina with choreography by Maya Plisetskaya who also took on the titular role. Anna Karenina is a young wife of an older husband. She has an affair with the handsome Count Vronsky. By foll...

The story of Russian writer and Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008) and his masterpiece, The Gulag Archipelago, published in Paris in 1973, which forever shook the very foundations of communist ideology....

The convoluted and moving story of Russian writer Vassili Grossman (1905-64) and his novel Life and Fate (1980), a literary masterpiece, a monumental and epic account of life under Stalin's regime of terror, a defiant cry that the KGB tried to suffoc...

When Tom loses his job at an advertising agency, he enlists a youthful con-man to help save his career....

1837. The grueling Caucasian War. The young officer Grigory Pechorin was sent into exile in the active army in the Caucasus for participating in a duel. Pechorin will have to become an unwitting participant in rapidly unfolding events — a battle with...

A documentary, originally produced for Dutch television, on the life and works of Osip Mandelstam (1891-1938), the groundbreaking Soviet poet and dissident....

Based on Turgenev's novel...

A doctor from provincial town in Tsardom of Russia meets his former student in Ward 6, where the story takes place. Impressed by his rebellious spirit and clever remarks, he tends to spend more time with him while also indulging in meditation, only t...

Dr. Zhivago is one of the best-known love stories of the 20th century, but the setting of the book also made it famous. It is a tale of passion and fear, set against a backdrop of revolution and violence. The film is what most people remember, but th...

The film is a cinematic interpretation of the travel book “Armenia” by Russian poet Andrei Bely....

An absurd man, feeling hopeless, decides to end his life. The night before, he dreams of a perfect world with no pain. In this dream, he sees how good people can be and how he can change. When he wakes up, he understands he must choose between giving...