Tsar Saltan: adapting Pushkin’s tale to opera and animated film

My paper aims at investigating how Pushkin’s tale in verse Tsar Saltan (1831) was adapted in three different semiotic codes, namely Rimsky-Korsakov’s opera (1899), the illustrations by Bilibin (1928), and the animated films by Basmanova, В. Brumberg, and Z. Brumberg (1943) and by Militsin and Ivanov-Vano (1984). In writing Tsar Saltan, Pushkin created a pseudo-folkloric tale, by introducing elements typical of the Russian oral folk tradition, such as epithets, syntactic inversions, pleonastic repetition of prepositions, and popular varieties of some words. However, the Russian folklore is not the primary source of Tsar Saltan, in that Pushkin put together a variety of heterogeneous materials, such as themes from the Arabian Nights, Italian tales, and autobiographical elements. The Tale of Tsar Saltan (1899) is one of the last operas created by Rimsky-Korsakov. It is his last “serene” opera before he began to introduce satirical elements against the tsarist power (see, for instance, his adaptation of Pushkin’s Golden Cockerel). The opera includes the well-known piece Flight of the Bumblebee. The Soviet animated film The Tale of Tsar Saltan (1943) quotes only Pushkin’s text, whereas the 1984 version is in line with Rimsky-Korsakov’s version, not only because of its large use of the opera as a soundtrack, but also in its childish and enchanted atmosphere. Its quest for fidelity is shown by direct quotations from Pushkin, adherence to Rimsky-Korsakov’s motifs, and a drawing style which overtly quotes Bilibin.