Kurosawa’s The Lower Depths (1957) is an adaptation of a play by the renowned Russian writer Maxim Gorky. Published in 1902, Gorky's original work is a hallmark of socialist realism, and has been adapted into numerous films by directors such as Jean Renoir and Chetan Anand.

According to Assistant Professor Olga Solovieva, Kurosawa's film has been seen exclusively as a literal adaptation of Maxim Gorky’s drama with no content on its own and therefore as a merely formalist exercise in transforming a theatre play into a film. After a screening of the film, her talk will contextualise The Lower Depths within the 1953 Japanese debate on ‘beggar photography’ and photographic realism. Morphing the iconography of post-war misery together with the iconography of the Tokugawa period, Kurosawa’s cinematic rendition of Gorky’s play not only countered the ideological tendency of post-occupation Japan to avoid realistic representation of its war-inflicted destitution but also linked this representation to its causes in the nationalist and militarist past.

Olga Solovieva teaches in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Chicago. She received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and Film Studies from Yale University. Her current book projects, The Russian Kurosawa and Thomas Mann’s Russia, examine the political, philosophical and mediating function of the reception of Russian literature in East and West.

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