| Abstract [eng] |
This master’s thesis examines the graphic novel “Siberian Haiku” by Jurga Vilė and Lina Itagaki, along with two of its stage adaptations: Augustas Gornatkevičius’s production at the Lithuanian National Drama Theatre and Valters Sīlis’s staging at the Latvian Puppet Theatre. The study investigates how the graphic novel is adapted for the stage, analyses the intermedial dialogue generated in the process, and explores its impact on the work’s meaning and the viewer’s emotional experience. The research is grounded in adaptation studies, drawing on Gérard Genette’s concept of transtextuality and Lars Elleström’s approach to intermediality, understood through intermodality. The first chapter outlines key theoretical approaches in adaptation studies, with particular attention to media transformation and the role of textual relationships in the interaction between literature and theatre. In this context, adaptation is understood as a multilayered process in which diverse modes of expression and cultural codes interact to produce new layers of meaning. The second chapter considers the graphic novel as the hypotext for the stage productions, focusing on its multimediality, multimodality, and the architextual tension between the genres of haiku and memoir. Central to the analysis is the haiku principle, which emerges not through formal genre features but through a structure of immediate experience that allows the reader to engage with historical events as affectively present. The third chapter analyses the two stage adaptations and their interpretive divergences. In the Lithuanian National Drama Theatre production, the narrative departs significantly from the book: the experience of deportation is conveyed in abstract terms, through the perspective of a contemporary child and the metaphor of a journey through bad and good days. This approach frames deportation as a metamorphic process, emphasizing the importance of togetherness and the possibility of creating meaning through suffering. In contrast, the Latvian Puppet Theatre production preserves the book’s narrative structure but distinguishes itself through form: using paper puppet theatre and the live creation of visual and sonic elements, it becomes a sensorially immediate performance unfolding before the audience. Here, memory is experienced as a collective act, and the haiku principle is rendered through fleeting, fragile moments of emotional intensity. Both productions function as hypertexts, using theatrical means to reinterpret the graphic novel and to actualize the haiku principle as a structure for experiencing historical trauma in the immediacy of performance. In this regard, the analysis of the “Siberian Haiku” adaptations affirms the thesis’s theoretical premise: adaptation is neither a secondary work nor a test of fidelity, but an autonomous form of creation in which the convergence of media and the shifts in modality generate new layers of meaning. Each adaptation offers a renewed perspective on the hypotext, highlighting its openness to varied artistic interpretations and recontextualizing historical experience in the present. |
