The Captain's Daughter

Yuri Tarich's 1928 Sovkino silent, scripted by Formalist critic Viktor Shklovsky from Pushkin's 1836 novella, is less an adaptation than a political rewrite. Shklovsky corrected what he called historical errors: the nobleman Grinyov becomes a coward and informer; Shvabrin, Pushkin's villain, is recast as a democratic Pugachev partisan. A document of late-NEP Soviet cinema: Formalist screenwriting colliding with the national poet, and the Pugachev Rebellion recast as class struggle on the eve of the First Five-Year Plan.