Opening the boundaries of a literary text: Anton Chekhov’s novel “Kashtanka” and its film adaptation in teaching Russian as a foreign language

Abstract

The article describes the work with a literary text and its adaptation in the classroom of Russian as a foreign language. In particular, we focus on the ways of understanding a literary text by including a film adaptation into classroom activities. Special attention is paid to the characteristics of the intersemiotic translation and its basic concepts: adaptation, film adaptation and interpretation. For the methodology of teaching Russian as a foreign language, this distinction is conditional and is of great interest from the point of view of understanding the idea and content of the literary text and the peculiarities of its interpretation. When working with international students, the use of screen versions of Russian literature texts helps, on the one hand, to simplify the process of understanding their meaning and key points by visualizing verbal and nonverbal components of the text, on the other hand, to complicate this work - to increase the amount of information provided. The present paper presents the algorithm of working on the text of the short story “Kashtanka” by Anton Chekhov and its film adaptations and formulates sample tasks for classroom and independent work.