A. N. Veselovsky: Dante and the Myth of the Italian Unification

Abstract

The period that Alexander Veselovsky spent in Italy (from 1864 to 1867) was very fruitful for his studies and allowed him, thanks to his access to Italian libraries and archives, to publish important scholarly works, including The Paradise of Alberti. His sojourn in Italy also enabled him to closely observe Italian society and politics after Italian unification. These observations gave rise to a series of articles published in the Sankt Peterburskie Vedomosti, which in their entirety constitute an important documentation of the history of Italy in those years, which historians have unfortunately neglected until now. It is a very precious documentation, which offers not only a detailed testimony of the political and social life of Italy during the 1860s, but also interpretations of rare intelligence, which would become part of the historiography on the Risorgimento only in the 20th century. The article focuses on Veselovsky’s reflections on a particular aspect of the history of Italy of those years, i.e. “the nationalization of the masses”, a concept that would become part of contemporary historiography only in the 1970s, and, specifically, on the article Dante and the Myth of Italian Unification.