The Tradition of Literary Classics and Twentieth Century Cinema: Dickens and Chaplin

The article deals with the dialogue between literature and cinema, namely the phenomenon of mutual reflection of the holistic artistic worlds of Chaplin and Dickens. Significant similarity of the facts of biography, artistic method, problems, the general direction of the evolution, certain images and techniques, the nature of the representation of the author’s origin allow us to view the work of film director as a kind of reincarnation of the writer. The aim of the article — to demonstrate the proximity of the artistic worlds of Dickens and Chaplin in their main qualitative characteristics — in the transformation of Dickensian literary images in Chaplin’s cinematic. This transformation is explored through the example of the pairs of analogues: Oliver Twist (1838) — The Kid (1921), Hard Times (1854) — New Times (1936), Cold House (1852) — Monsieur Verdoux (1947).

Both writer and director, who received worldwide fame during his lifetime, in his later works are deeply immersed in the awareness of the causes of world evil, hence the new and in the strategy of communication with the reader, and in the nature of the narrative.

In the later novels of Dickens (“Bleak House”, “Hard Times”, “Little Dorrit”, “Great Expectations”) the image of the hero loses its single identity, opening the way to the duplicity as an expression of the deformation of the human personality. The detective element strengthens as a quest to understand the mystery and origins of social evil. Chaplin’s films from the 1940s onwards are marked by an increasingly grim social diagnosis of modernity as the usual contours of good and evil become blurred. The image of the little vagabond is gone from Chaplin’s sound films: The Great Dictator (1940), Monsieur Verdoux (1947), Limelight (1952), The King in New York (1957). While clowning did not disappear, it was relegated to the periphery and ceased to be the principal means of grasping reality.

A comparative analysis of the work of the two geniuses leads to the conclusion that their art, humanistic in its orientation, contains an enormous charge of love for people all over the world, beyond national, religious and other boundaries.

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