Relatives From Lithuania: Adaptation Is Born Out of the Spirit of Togetherness

Tadeusz Lubelski

Abstract

To Tadeusz Konwicki, the relationship between the author of a literary text and the author of a film based on the text consists in the ”Platonic community of interests”. ”Here the adaptor uses a classic text not because he has to or has received a commission to adapt it but because it’s the text he feels particularly attached to and because in it he finds the elements of what he himself would like to put into the original.” Lubelski analyses Konwicki’s creative activity from the point of view of the latter’s love affair with adaptation, and focuses primarily on The Issa Valley, based on Czesław Miłosz’s novel, and Lava, based on Adam Mickiewicz’s The Forefathers’ Eve. Spiritual affinity between Konwicki, Mickiewicz and Miłosz is the key to understanding of his adaptation strategy. The three had roots in the culture of eastern borderland while the Vilnius region was their point of reference. When translating the language of poets into a cinematic medium, Konwicki wanted to share his own ”testimony of reading” which was very private, intimate and offered by the fellow artist. The ”comradeship” appeared to derive from the metaphorical understanding of Lithuanian kinship that is becoming a state of mind, of memory and identity.