The Russian Kurosawa Transnational Cinema, or the Art of Speaking Differently

The Russian Kurosawa offers a new historical perspective on the work of the renowned Japanese film director Akira Kurosawa. It uncovers Kurosawa's debt to the intellectual tradition of Japanese-Russian democratic dissent, reflected in the affinity for Kurosawa's worldview expressed by such Russian directors as Grigory Kozintsev and Andrei Tarkovsky. Through a detailed discussion of the Russian subtext of Kurosawa's cinema, most clearly manifested in the director's films based on Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Gorky, and Arseniev, the book shows that Kurosawa used Russian intertexts to deal with the most politically sensitive topics of postwar Japan. Locating the director in the cultural tradition of Russian-inflected Japanese anarchism, the book challenges prevalent views of Akira Kurosawa as an apolitical art house director or a conformist studio filmmaker of muddled ideological alliances by offering a philosophically consistent picture of the director's participation in postwar debates on cultural and political reconstruction.

Olga V. Solovieva, Assistant Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, University of Chicago

Olga V. Solovieva studied at the Moscow State University, Freie Universität Berlin, and Yale and currently teaches Comparative Literature at the University of Chicago. She is the author of Christ's Subversive Body: Practices of Religious Rhetoric in Culture and Politics (Northwestern University Press, 2018) and co-editor of Japan's Russia: Challenging the East-West Paradigm (Cambria University Press, 2021).

Introduction
1. "Some Nice Music": The Russian Subtext of Kurosawa's Films
2. "Toad in a Box": Self-Restoration as People's History
3. The Idiot: Where the East Meets the West
4. "To live! To live how?": Tolstoyan Religion in Ikiru
5. The Lower Depths: Beggar Cinema, or Resistance to National Narcissism
6. The Erased Grave of Dersu Uzala: A Nonwar Cinema of Memory and Mourning