The first teacher: A case of intersemiotic translation

When Chingiz Aitmatov’s short story becomes Andrei Konchalovsky’s film

Abstract

Our article is devoted to the semiotic analysis of the short story The First Teacher by the Kyrgyz writer, public figure and diplomat Chingiz Aitmatov. The history of a rural school teacher in the twenties of the last century is both a love story and a history of culture and traditions of one of the republics of Central Asia, Kyrgyzstan.
Written in 1961, the story became widely known after a cinematic adaptation by Russian director Andrei Mikhalkov-Konchalovsky in 1965. Konchalovsky's diploma work at the VGIK Institute of Cinematography in Moscow received awards at numerous international film festivals. According to the director, in the process of filming he was inspired by the mise-en-scenes of feature films by Japanese director Akira Kurosawa: “the idea was to imagine how Kurosawa could make The First Teacher, to make such a polyphonic overlay of two director's visions” (Konchalovsky, 2021).
The purpose of our analysis is to show how the process of intersemiotic translation of a written text into a visual image takes place through special montage techniques, tropes and symbols. Can we consider Konchalovsky's film as “Happy Babel”, in the words of Paolo Fabbri, where the rejection of the original verbal basis turns into a creative and unpredictable transformation of meaning (Lotman, 1992)?
In the course of the analysis, we rely on the work of Yuri Lotman in the field of semiotics of culture as well as on the research of contemporary European semioticians. The analysis also uses fragments of interviews with Andrei Konchalovsky and Chingiz Aitmatov from a documentary film by Marina Merkoulova and Alexei Kolesnikov Andrei Konchalovsky. I consider myself promising (2007).