“It rains in my village”: From Literature to the History of Private Life

This paper discusses Aleksandar Saša Petrović's film “It rains in my village” (1969), from a dual perspective: as a constructed narrative world shaped by the literary work referenced by the author (and thus, a potential adaptation) and as a valuable source of anthropological and historical material. In the opening credits, the author invokes the weight of authority embedded in the name of the Russian genius, inviting the viewers to embark on a quest for Dostoevsky (or to follow Dostoevsky’s footsteps). Although there are no direct quotations from Dostoevsky in the film’s surface, we have detected numerous similarities hidden beneath it. The ideological similarities Petrović alludes to operate on the edge of typological analogies and often cannot be definitively explained or directly linked to Dostoevsky’s novel The Demons. In the film It rains in my village there is something inherently Dostoevskian, yet it is difficult to precisely delineate where these associative connections are justified and where the author’s free and independent articulation begins. In It Rains in My Village, the author develops the story with considerable freedom, playing with the referenced text while creating a new narrative world where layers of the proto-world he points to can be seen. At the same time, numerous sources and proto-worlds emerge, branching out, diverging, or converging toward the film. It turns out that the film also resonates with numerous possible traces of intertextual debates, drawing our attention to one significant and valuable layer – a newspaper report embedded in the film's foundation, even though Petrović does not explicitly reference it in the credits. Memory, blurred recollections, and reminiscence have led to the displacement and creation of a fundamentally altered version of the proto-world. Within the context of the narrative world as a central concept in transmedia storytelling, this paper addresses the modification and transposition of the narrative world of The Demons. This is complemented by allofilmic quotations (from painting, literature, and music), interverbal quotations from documentary material (a newspaper article), and the inscription of contemporaneity and the present moment through depictions of private life, customs, anecdotes, leisure activities, and romantic troubles of the inhabitants of a Vojvodina village in 1968.