“Eugene Onegin” from the point of view of the Other:
British Interpretation in Film and Opera Production

Abstract: One of the main problems of contemporary social sciences and humanities is self-identification of culture, determining the place of one's own culture in the multicultural globalized world. Looking at one’s own culture from the point of view of the Other is very important for understanding many of its problems and for positioning one’s culture in the world context. The article considers the mechanisms of forming the ideas about Russian culture outside of our country, based mainly on representations in different cultural texts and art forms ranging from popular mass media to classical, meant for sophisticated consumer. A classical text of Russian culture - Pushkin's "Eugene Onegin" and the opera by Tchaikovsky based on it - has been taken as an example. The representations of this masterpiece of Russian culture in Britain, in the form of a film and an opera production have been analyzed in order to understand the attraction of "Onegin" for cultural producers who are distanced from the original work both chronologically and culturally. It is also important to see how the authors of new interpretations of texts of Russian culture are trying to understand deep universal meanings of a work which has crossed the boundaries of one's own culture and has become a part of world heritage.

Keywords: Culture, text, classics, interpretation, idea, representation, Other, stereotype, deconstruction, postculture.

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[6] A very popular interpretation is the ballet "Onegin" put to music by Tchaikovsky by J. Cranko, who is known as both English and German choreographer, but we will not consider the ballet in this article because its non-verbal, abstract way of representation requires a different semantic approach. Semantic code of body language, which is used in ballet, is the most common one, shared by Western culture as a whole.
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[13] Currently R. Fines is starring in V. Glagoleva’s picture "A Month in the Country" based on a play by Turgenev. Actor "... is in love with Russian literature, acted most of Chekhov’s plays, took part in a production of "Fathers and Sons' "(Generosity is almost gone // Ogonek. N 32b, 19 August 2013). This confirms once again our idea about overcoming the "otherness" in modern interpretations of classics.
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