Richard Ayoade's film of Dostoevsky's novella The Double, starring Jesse Eisenberg, has just been released. Can the man from The IT Crowd measure up? Not to the Russian novelist, but to the illustrious directors who've previously had a stab at filming his work …
Raskolnikow (Robert Wiene, 1923)
Three years after his silent masterpiece The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, Wiene was among the first directors to rework Crime and Punishment, thanks to its detective story plot the most-adapted Dostoevsky novel.
Crime and Punishment (Josef von Sternberg, 1935)
Although boasting Peter Lorre as Raskolnikov, Von Sternberg disowned it as "no more related to the true text" than Sunset Boulevard was to the novel's St Petersburg.
The Idiot (Akira Kurosawa, 1951)
Between Rashomon (1950) and Ikiru (1952), Kurosawa turned Prince Myshkin into epileptic war criminal Kameda, returning to a snowbound Hokkaido after a spell in an asylum.
White Nights (Luchino Visconti, 1957)
Marcello Mastroianni stars in a version of a Dostoevsky short story that also underpins Bresson's Four Nights of a Dreamer, the Bollywood movie Saawariya and James Gray's recent Two Lovers (with Gwyneth Paltrow and Joaquin Phoenix).
The Brothers Karamazov (Richard Brooks, 1958)
MGM risked going highbrow – and Russian at the height of the cold war – with a cast including Yul Brynner, Lee J Cobb, William Shatner and Claire Bloom.
Au Hasard Balthazar (Robert Bresson, 1966)
A film inspired by The Idiot, it follows Marie and the donkey Balthazar as both advance through life, repeatedly abused by those they encounter.
La Chinoise (Jean-Luc Godard, 1967)
Foreshadowing the student revolt of May 1968, Godard turns The Possessed into a tale of young Parisian radicals as his own politics turned Maoist.
Crime and Punishment (Aki Kaurismaki, 1983)
For his debut feature, the Bresson-influenced Finn updated Bresson's favourite novelist to present-day Helsinki.
The Possessed (Andrzej Wajda, 1988)
Isabelle Huppert and Lambert Wilson lead the cast of this French version (set like the novel in 1870s Russia) by the Polish director, who later drew on The Idiot in Nastasja.
Match Point (Woody Allen, 2005)
Centred on a psychopathic tennis coach, loosely based (like Crimes and Misdemeanours) on Crime and Punishment, and perhaps signalling the start of Dostoevsky's comeback as a film source; though he's unlikely to recapture his status in "auteur" arthouse cinema's heyday, his IMDb page shows six further projects due for release in 2014.
Which other directors would you like to see directing which classic novels? Notes from Underground by Guillermo del Toro, perhaps, or Poor Folk by Ken Loach? You don't have to limit yourself to Dostoevsky.
