Authors

Discussion

The paper will discuss the portrayal of Odintsova in Avdotya Smirnova's adaptation of Turgenev's novel "Fathers and Sons". It argues that Smirnova's highly favourable representation of Odintsova as a modern woman reimagines Turgenev's character as a Victorian-era female whose beliefs and behaviour are tied closely to commoditization. By presenting Odintsova as a product of “the era of spectacle” (Thomas Richards) and by drawing attention to Odintsova's fashionable clothes and jewellery which signify her class and her gender identity, Smirnova makes Turgenev's character more accessible to a post-Soviet audience. The paper suggests that Smirnova's portrayal of Odintsova as a person wearing culturally symbolic jewellery reflects the changing relationship  between subject and object in a post-Soviet Russia where urban culture is turned into an arena of spectacle shaped by the  mass media’s promotion  of glamour.  Such a trend indicates that the nouveaux riche define their new class status with spectacular jewels and clothes. Smirnova’s adaptation of Turgenev's novel reflects the impact of the post-Soviet consumerist revolution on the formation of new identities and probes character-object relations in a new way.