Zakhar Prilepin’s work of art “The Figure-of-Eight” in film version of Aleksei Uchitel. Plot variation or super text unity?

Zakhar Prilepin’s work of art “The Figure-of-Eight” with Aleksei Uchitel’s film of the same name made on the basis of Aleksander Mindadze’s screen version are compared and the peculiarities of plot interpretation in film adaptation and screening are pointed out. As a result, it has been concluded that both the writer and the director as well as the scriptwriter got into the inside of the main problem of our time, revealing its sources and reasons, recreating the Eltzin epoch of the USSR break-up in the end of the 1990s showing “the epoch section” in the fate of four riot squad officers, former “Afghan war participants”. The most significant reviews and comments about the film “The Figure-of-Eight” pinpointing lack of true comprehension of the problems set in the story and its screen adaptation are analyzed. Based on the film criticism and comparing the story “The Figure-of-Eight” and its film version, it is proved that both artists have created not a “blockbuster or melodrama” and not Z. Prilepin’s “passion” but by means of different artistic devices they have asserted one and the same ideas: human personality lost value in the society; unprecedented cruelty became normal; true moral guidelines and purport of human life were lost as a result of the spiritual crisis of the 20th century (revolutions, civil wars, Stalin’s repressions and the country’s break-up in 1991). The contemporary man feels deep loneliness and a sense of being forgotten by God having lost traditional ideas of family values and genuine love.

screen version, interpretation, plot version, dialogue feature, colour and sound symbolism, graphic symbols, film looking, cyclicity, super-text unity, culture code