Born on 11 November 1821, Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote about guilt, faith, obsession and the fractured self, and filmmakers around the world have kept coming back to him. Here are seven adaptations, from Hollywood noir to Bollywood romance, to mark the day.
Josef von Sternberg’s Hollywood take on Dostoevsky’s most famous novel features Peter Lorre as the tormented student Raskolnikov, with Edward Arnold as the investigator circling him. It trims the sprawling book into a tight, shadowy psychological thriller, and it’s a good first stop if you want to see how Hollywood first handled Dostoevsky.
Akira Kurosawa moved Dostoevsky’s story of a saintly, guileless man from Russian high society to postwar Hokkaido, and the translation works remarkably well. Masayuki Mori, Toshiro Mifune and Setsuko Hara lead the cast. The studio cut the film down heavily, and Kurosawa was famously unhappy about it, but the intensity survives. This is often named among the best Dostoevsky adaptations ever made.
Richard Brooks’s big MGM production stars Yul Brynner, Maria Schell, Claire Bloom, Lee J. Cobb and Richard Basehart. A young William Shatner plays Alyosha, long before Star Trek. It can’t hold all of Dostoevsky’s final novel, but it’s a handsome, star-driven way into the story of a father and his three very different sons.
Robert Bresson adapted the short story White Nights, setting it on the streets and bridges of modern Paris. A lonely young painter meets a woman waiting for a lover who may never return. It’s quiet, melancholy and beautifully restrained, and at under 90 minutes it’s an easy late-night watch.
Sanjay Leela Bhansali also drew on White Nights, reimagining it as a lavish, dreamlike musical in a stylised blue-lit town. It marked the debut of both Ranbir Kapoor and Sonam Kapoor. It had a mixed reception on release, but it has since built a devoted following for its romance and its striking look.
Richard Ayoade’s dark comedy adapts Dostoevsky’s novella about a timid office worker whose confident lookalike arrives and starts taking over his life. Jesse Eisenberg plays both roles, with Mia Wasikowska as the colleague he’s besotted with. The retro-futuristic, claustrophobic world recalls Kafka and Terry Gilliam, and it proves Dostoevsky works as absurdist comedy too.
Sergei Loznitsa’s Cannes-competition drama is based on the short story A Meek One. A woman travels to a remote Russian town to find out why a parcel she sent to her imprisoned husband came back. What follows is a bleak, unsettling journey through a bureaucratic nightmare. It’s the toughest watch on this list, and also one of the most haunting.