Russian literature has inspired film directors at home and abroad for over a century, and continues to do so today. American, British, French, German, and Italian cinema all have important film classics that were drawn directly from Russian literature. Some, such as French filmmaker Robert Bresson or Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa, turned to Russian writers more than once in creating their own distinctive cinematic style. Kurosawa reimagined Fedor Dostoevskii's The Idiot (Hakuchi, 1951); Maksim Gor'kii's Lower Depths (Donzoko, 1957); incorporated elements of Dostoevskii's The Insulted and Injured in his film Akahige (1965); and animated Vladimir Arsen'ev's autobiographical work Dersu Uzala (1972), which won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, for Mosfilm. Throughout the years, Russian directors have expressed their own admiration for the literary works of Dostoevskii, Anton Chekhov, Mikhail Bulgakov, Aleksandr Pushkin, Lev Tolstoi, Mikhail Sholokhov, and many, many others.

The topic of this collection of essays has been the cultural border crossings that occur when the text is transported to another country, another time, or both. Each one of these migrations involves a new semantic language. The metaphor of crossing from one temporal or spatial territory into another in which language, customs, cultural identity, social attitudes, and political systems are often different is applied in this case as Russian texts are transposed in order to suit new cinematic environments. Thomas Leitch borrows from Cristina Della Coletta in positing the idea of a cinematic border crossing as a process that enables viewers to gain a greater perspective on the world in which they live. This collection of essays confronts many of the matters involved in transporting a narrative into a narration, making the cinematic out of the theatrical, or expanding the short story into a full-length feature. Border Crossing: Russian Literature into Film explores the question of what makes Russian texts adaptable for such diverse audiences with dissimilar cultural sensibilities.

In 1915, the author and playwright Leonid Andreev debuted his play He Who Gets Slapped at the Moscow Art Theater. In the following years, this dramatic work about a vanquished intellectual-turned-circus-clown, more than any of his twenty other plays, achieved spectacular success among American audiences, first as a play in English translation, then when adapted for the silver screen, then as a novel and, finally, as an opera. Andreev had argued in his “Letters on the Theater” that cinema would become the place for action and spectacle, diminishing the popularity of the realist theater. Not surprisingly then, a love affair, betrayal, and humiliation are all vividly on display at the outset of Victor Sjöström's He Who Gets Slapped (1924). At the end of Sjöström's cinematic adaptation, the villains are devoured by a ferocious lion, just the type of spectacle that Andreev had predicted would be possible in the medium of film. Yet, Andreev could not have anticipated a novel adaptation by George A. Carlin (1925), which would attempt to capitalize on the play's cinematic success, or an operatic adaptation by Robert Ward and Bernard Stambler (1956), that would focus on the clown's failed search for love. In retrospect, Andreev's play was astonishingly generative and was easily transported across both temporal and spatial borders, entertaining American audiences as a play, film, novel, and opera.

Of particular interest is how Andreev's panpsyche drama—a type of theater that focused on the psychological development of characters rather than on external action—could be successfully transported for American audiences in so many different forms. Most certainly, a partial answer may be found in the rich cultural tradition of the circus. As the French semiotician Paul Bouissac has written, the circus “is a kind of mirror in which the culture is reflected, condensed and at the same time transcended; perhaps the circus seems to stand outside culture only because it is at its very center.”