Russian Literature in Italy

Abstract

This chapter aims to map Russian literary translation in Italy in the twentieth century and to reflect on how politics influenced publishers’ and translators’ choices. The increase of Russian literary translations into Italian is linked to the strong interest Italians had for Russia from the eighteenth century onwards, leading to a reception process unique among European literatures. After the October Revolution, many Russian exiles chose Italy as their second home and tried to propagate their culture there. The most important of these was the poet Viacheslav Ivanov. Thanks to his encouragement, the first rhymed Italian translation of Aleksandr Pushkin’s Evgenii Onegin appeared. After World War II, Russian literature in Italy was identified with the Soviet Union; texts chosen for translation were intended to underline their political-social character. Left-oriented publishing houses, such as Editori Riuniti and Einaudi, focused their interest on the literature of the “Thaw” period and of the Twenties. For Feltrinelli, a small Milanese publishing house specializing in political texts, Soviet literature was a key element of ‘editorial strategy’. Publicity surrounding the 1957 world première publication of Doctor Zhivago, followed by Pasternak’s 1958 Nobel Prize, brought Feltrinelli huge success. In the following two decades the polarization of cultural political issues subsumed discourse on Russian and Soviet literature into academia. From the mid-1980s onwards, Russian literature gradually lost its centrality to Italian translation publishing, overwhelmed by the collapse of the Soviet Union. Thirty years after the end of Communist ideological influence, the initiative to celebrate Dostoevsky’s bicentenary in 2021 (and the many new translations that have appeared to mark it), show how, without Russian literature, Italy’s literary heritage would be irredeemably impoverished.