‘Про здоровых и больных’, или Морфiй как метатекст (одной) русской души

Both in the stories of the cycle A Young Doctor’s Notebook and in Morphine, Bulgakov’s personal experience and medical practice are reworked. In 2008 these stories become the basis for a film directed by Alexei Balabanov and scripted by Sergei Bodrov Jr. This article is an attempt to analyze a cinematic reading of a literary text as a synthetic operation of translation from a culturological point of view. Screenwriter S. Bodrov Jr. and director A. Balabanov ‘translate’ Bulgakov’s text into an experience of genre “transgression” (Plakhov), where Morphine becomes not so much a structural axis of the narrative as a ‘background noise’ hypnotizing the reader. The seemingly monolithic nature of Balabanov’s narrative is undone by the skilful use of “texts in texts” (Lotman), which create a dense network of “intextual” (Torop) and intertextual references. This is a text that, as if freed from historical definitions, can serve as a kind of metatext for Balabanov’s work. Our is an attempt to analyse the ‘rewriting’ (Lefevere) of a literary text as enactment of the “poetics of difference” (Verč), where Morphine becomes a pre-text for reflections on the relationship between aesthetics and ethics.