Bastien Loukia’s “Crime and Punishment” as an example of a graphic novel adaptation

This article analyses the graphic novel adaptation “Crime and Punishment” (2019) written by a French writer and artist Bastien Loukia. This analysis has been conducted for the first time in Russian literary studies. The aim of the work is to identify the main features of modern graphic adaptation based on the book by B. Loukia. The relevance of our work lies in the study of one of the most currently popular genres – the genre of the graphic novel. It is also relevant to consider Loukia’s work as the most common subgenre of the graphic novel - a graphic novel adaptation. The study uses comparative and structural methods. We analyze the system of characters and compare them with the characters of Dostoevsky. We have come to the conclusion that in Loukia’s book the crime, committed by Raskolnikov, is connected with the dominance of violence in his reality. For this reason, the central character commits murder. The analysis of the spatial and temporal organization of the work proves that the events of Dostoevsky’s novel are being projected to B. Loukia’s contemporary reality. The article concludes that by referring to a famous work, the authors of graphic novel adaptations, in their books, comprehend philosophical and socio-psychological problems of their own time. We identify the following features among the main characteristics of the graphic novel adaptations of the last decade: remaking of the plot, character system and the chronotope of the precedent text in order to represent themes and problems relevant to the author of the 20 th century and complicating the graphic component. The analysis of the graphic component allows presenting several possible interpretations of the graphic novel and its problematics.