Dostoevsky’s works have inspired a vast range of literary, staged and cinematic responses. The plenitude of dramatic story lines, striking characters and vivid settings opens a vast perspective on the human condition and offers bounteous material with which artists working in other media can connect. Continuous creative engagements with Dostoevsky’s writings at different times, in diverse cultures and in various media attest to the universality of the existential themes the author explores and open ever new perspectives on the concerns themselves and on the works that grow out of them. As the author himself insists and Alexander Burry examines in his far-reaching study, Multi-Mediated Dostoevsky, transmediation cannot – nor is it intended to – coincide fully with the Russian author’s vision or capture any given work in its entirety. The very richness of design that draws creative artists to engage with Dostoevsky’s writings makes this as impossible as it is undesirable. As various artists respond to Dostoevsky in their own media, they tease out individual strands of his densely woven, multi-layered works, charting their own course through his fictional worlds and moving beyond them.

Hailed as ‘one of the early directors of cinéma d’auteur – most often quoted by the following generation of directors for his originality’, the French film-maker Robert Bresson (1901–1999) is known for the distinctive approach to film adaptation that grew out of his cinematographic principles. In an interview with Paul Schrader, Bresson provides a succinct description of how he relates to literature in his films: