Nikolai Shpanov and the Evolution of the Soviet Spy Thriller

It is a common opinion that Stalinist literature knew no explicitly popular genres, and that, consequently, its whole body can be regarded as popular culture. The case of Nikolai Shpanov is one of the most evident arguments against such an interpretation. From the late Thirties to the early Fifties, Shpanov's works, centered around the fight with fiendish spies, had huge print runs and conspicuous success among the readers; yet, Soviet critics nearly ignored them. The publishing channels were not those of the officially endorsed "classics" of Socialist Realism, but rather what can be regarded as a Soviet equivalent of a separated mass publishing. Shpanov's books are, thus, the living proof …

Dal Virgilio russo al Tolstoj rosso, e ritorno: Epopea, nazione e senso del tempo nella teoria letteraria sovietica.

Nella teoria letteraria sovietica sono continui gli appelli alla creazione di un epos: negli anni Venti, però, la richiesta è di una nuova forma epica, mentre a stalinismo affermato si intende che il modello sia il "Romanzo epico" sul modello tolstoiano. Questo cambio di accento può essere collegato con il passaggio ideologico dall'internazionalismo rivoluzionario al nazionalismo granderusso.

L’identità della spia: classe e nazione nello spy-thriller sovietico

I territori di confine annessi dall'Unione Sovietica negli anni di guerra costituivano un doppio problema per le autorità: l'eredità del sistema capitalista era ancora viva, e l'identità nazionale dei loro abitanti poco chiara. Questi territori, d'altro canto, erano l'ambientazione ideale per i romanzi di spionaggio, ed alcuni tra questi, come ad esempio Sul Tibisco (1954) di Aleksandr Avdeenko, che si svolge nell'Ucraina transcarpatica, una terra dall'appartenenza a lungo contestata, o L'apprendista stregone (1956) di Nikolaj Španov, ambientato in Lettonia, ottennero un buon successo. L'identità è la questione chiave nella narrativa di spionaggio; l'ossessione per l'identità, e per i doppi…

Anastasija Verbickaja, o il decadentismo per le masse

1910 is remembered in Russian culture as the year when symbolism declares its crisis, when the post-symbolist movements move their first steps. But a look at the publishing figures is enough to understand that this process passed unnoticed by the majority of the reading public. In early XX-th century, popular literature was already an important and complex phenomenon. The readers of dime novels had no notion of the highbrow movements; the “people's intelligentsia”, on the other hand, opposed them as enemies to their values of social commitment. Anastasia Verbickaia, one of the leaders of the market in the first two decades of the century, although her career had started in the same field, i…

Agente 007: Oltre la cortina di ferro. Note per una storia del racconto di spionaggio sovietico.

Nel discorso ufficiale sovietico la letteratura di massa è considerata un fenomeno unicamente occidentale, mentre si nega fermamente la sua stessa possibilità nella società priva di classi. La tendenza prevalente nella storiografia odierna accetta, infondo, questa lettura, postulando la non esistenza di una letteratura di massa separata nel periodo sovietico. Una serie di romanzi di spionaggio di epoca stalinista, però, costituiscono un argomento contro una simile interpretazione. La contraddizione può essere spiegata attraverso un'analisi della ricezione sovietica di James Bond. Sebbene per tutto il periodo sovietico i romanzi di Ian Fleming non siano mai stati tradotti, e i film di Terenc…

L’intreccio, il dettaglio e le cose: un apologo sulla fortuna sovietica di un termine dei formalisti

The term siuzhetnaia proza, or ‘plot-based prose’, is recurrent in Soviet literary debate. Its roots lie in the basic Formalist opposition: if plot is the main device of prose, everything which is not plot must be regarded as motivation. This opposition involves psychology, but also details, i.e. objects (bourgeoisie idols). The term survived in Soviet debate as a euphemism for mass literature, called ‘plot-based literature’ by critics from a range of backgrounds. But is it possible to measure the space that plot occupies in a given work? And what about science fiction, a mass genre where the invention and the depiction of a world is fundamental?

Gianni Rodari and Tamara Lisitsian: Western Communist Parties as Vehicles of Cultural Encounter

Abstract. The case of Gianni Rodari, an Italian communist children's writer whose books were received by the Soviet public with exceptional favour, proves how relations with western communist parties happened to be instrumental in opening up the Soviet cultural system to the world. Rodari became, in fact, well-known in the Soviet Union before attaining fame in his homeland; from the Sixties on, however, things became to change, and from this point on, it may be argued, children from different sides of the iron curtain were brought up reading the same books. Rodari's works were the expression of the point of view of a western communist – in many cases, more western than communist – and they …

Invece del metro: Del perché Anna Achmatova è tradotta amle in italiano, e di cosa ne consegue

Nelle traduzioni italiane di poesia russa, generalmente traduzioni in verso libero di testi in versi regolari, si rintraccia una quantità enorme di enjambements aggiunti; enjambements che, in una cultura che non consce più la metrica, paiono spesso essere intesi come unica marca del verso.

“UTILE E NECESSARIO PAREVA E PARE IL ROMANZO”: LA RICERCA DI UNA NUOVA PROSA NELLA RUSSIA DEGLI ANNI VENTI

An introduction to a collection of articles on the Soviet novel of the Twenties, outlining the situation of prose writing at the time, caught between the heritage of the avant-garde and the requirements of the authorities.

Len’ka Panteleev and the traditions of Van’ka Kain: Criminal Biography in XXth Century Russia

The Fighter against the myth, or the memoirist who considers himself a Hercules (Anton Pavlovich Chekhov: an attempt at a characterization by N.M. Ezhov). The vast corpus about the 1920s Petrograd bandit Len’ka Panteleev, comprised of different texts – such as newspaper articles, fiction, film and song, with a complex and often ambiguous interplay between factual accounts and fictional adaptation – seems untypical for the era. A useful term of comparison is the similar corpus concerning the 18th century Moscow rogue Van’ka Kain. The latter shows all the typical features of 18th century criminal biographies, which at the time were popular throughout Europe. According to Michel Foucault, this…

La pulce ferrata non ballava: il nazionalismo russo come problema di rappresentazione

The war propaganda prints pubed as objects of representation; in the Segodniashnii lubok period, the same artists apparently attempted to use the language of folk art directly in order to speak to the common folk. The discussion aroundlished by Segodniashnii lubok in the fall of 1914 have often been analyzed as the logical development of their authors' – such champions of the avant-garde as Maiakovskii, Malevich, and Larionov – interest for primitive art. It should, however, be reminded that, in Russia, primitivists used national rather than exotic models – the Russian people was for them just as exotic as Tahitians were for Gauguin. Folk modes were thus treat Nikolai Leskov's tales, howeve…

"Non solo lei, Stirlitz, soffre di nostalgia": La nostalgia dell'est dell'agente infiltrato e la nostalgia dell'ovest del lettore nel romanzo di spionaggio di Julian Semenov

In Iulian Semenov's 1969 Seventteen Moments of Spring the hero's (a Soviet undercover agent in Nazi Germany) nostalgia for the motherland is so strongly underscored thtat it becomes ridiculous. Such a stress on nostalgia was, as it appears, necessary in order to compensate the envy the reader would fatally feel for the comfort of his "European" life among the enemy. The double agent became, in fact, an allegory of the "double life" of the soviet citizen in the Seventies, regardless of the fact that the novel was sponsored by the KGB. Or was this an intentional projection of Iurii Andropov's self-constructed image?

I nomi dei militi ignoti. Letteratura di guerra sovietica e giornalismo, o verisimiglianza e verità: due casi

Vasilij Subbotin’s "We Stormed the Reichstag" is a typical specimen of the wave of non-fiction prose about World War II which sprang up in the wake of the 20th Congress. The search for the unjustly forgotten war hero, one of the major themes of this kind of literature, is represented here by the story of Pëtr Pjatnickij, a soldier who fell on the steps of the Reichstag entrance with a red flag in his hand and was then forgotten. If, hypothetically, this story was false, it would echo the (probably false) story of the 28 ‘panfilovcy’ who purportedly fell at Dubosekovo during the battle for Moscow. In that case, Subbotin’s text would embody a characteristically literary device: giving a name …

Tolstoj, Sklovskij e i soprammobili

Discussione della possibile influenza tolstoiana sull'elaborazione del concetto di straniamento da parte di Sklovskij.

The Soviet Spy Thriller. Writers, Power, and the Masses, 1938-2002

It is commonly held among scholars that in the Stalin years no specific mass literature existed in the Soviet Union; what do we do, then, with Lev Ovalov’s Major Pronin or with Lev Sheinin’s stories, which began to appear since the mid-Thirties? What about Nikolai Shpanov’s post-war million-sellers? The Soviet authorities did not like to admit that they published low-quality literature aimed at the uncultured masses; they valued, however, its propa- ganda potential, hence this contradictory situation. Spy narratives, moreover, connected as they are with conspiracy theories, were of course welcomed in the atmosphere of the great purges. These works are no continuation of the “Red Pinkerton” …

Due generazioni di portinai e di guardiani notturni: marginali sovietici e nostalgici dell'Unione

In the USSR, marginality was the unavoidable fate of writers, artists and musicians not willing to obey the regime's requirements, on the esthetic as well as on the political level. When (at different times) they accepted this fate, and began to regard as compromising any attempt at official recognizing, marginality attained the thematic level, too – as can be seen in the works of the “Lianozovo group” members, such as painter Oksar Rabin or poet Igor Kholin. As Benedikt Erofeev's famous novel “Moskva-Petushki” shows, the whole Soviet society was, at one time, perceived as composed of outskirts, with no real center left. With the fall of the USSR, the situation changed radically – and not m…

Andrej Belyj v Sicilii: imaginativnaja geografija i orientalizirujuscij vzgljad - kogo i na cto?

Andrei Belyi did not see Sicily (many factual mistakes can be pointed at): it was shielded by constantly open books. The author appears, in his travelogue, as a typical Orientalist. Characteristically enough, besides, he sought the Orient in a place a thousand kilometers west of Moscow. It would be pointless to criticize him from the point of view of a “native in an English hat”; what is interesting is that his Orientalist gaze at Sicily is astonishingly similar to the Orientalist gaze at Russia itself typical of Russian intellectuals. Alexander Etkind wrote about the “Internal Colonization” of Russia; in Italy a debate has begun about the “Internal Orientalism” of Northern Italians concern…

Il realismo socialista e il GULag: estetica normativa e censura

La censura sovietica (come dimostrato dall'analisi delle due versioni del Secondo giorno di Erenburg) temeva i nomi più che i concetti. Allo stesso modo, la sorte del volume sul Belomorkanal dimostra che a imporre l'estetica del realismo socialista contro le avanguardie possono essere state ragioni censorie.

Carrying the Red Man's Burden: Pavel Luknitskii, or Kipling in the Soviet Pamir

Kipling’s work in the Soviet Union was heavily criticized as an expression of imperialism; yet, it was widely read and translated – it was clearly more acceptable than that of Nikolai Gumilev, “the Kipling from Tsarskoe Selo”, a purported counter-revolutionary whose name itself was forbidden. This explains the apparent contradictions in the image of Pavel Luknitskii – from one side, a scholar of Gumilev, from the other, an official Soviet writer. His novel Nisso (1946), based on his travels in the Pamir, is a classic of Soviet literature about the Asian republics. The novel’s plot is built around a classic Colonial triangle, mixed with a typical Soviet collectivization story. The setting pu…

Can Paintings Talk? An Ekphrastic Polemic in Post-Stalin Russia

Il “romanzo-pamphlet” di Ivan Ševcov Tlja (“Il pidocchio” o “L’afide”, 1964) è noto come la “pasquinata” (A. Sinjavskij) di un reazionario nostalgico dello stalinismo che si scaglia contro le timide aperture culturali del disgelo Chruščeviano. La diagnosi è indiscutibile; un motivo di interesse risiede però nell’uso peculiare dell’ékphrasis (il romanzo, ambientato nel mondo degli artisti figurativi, può essere letto come una grande galleria di dipinti immaginari) e, per di più, nel fatto che oggetto del contendere è la possibilità stessa dell’ékphrasis, la capacità dei dipinti di essere portatori di un contenuto esprimibile a parole – questo è l’oggetto ultimo della polemica sotterranea che…

Which Language Does the Subaltern Speak? Leskov, Verga, and Internal Orientalism

During the last few years, Edward Said’s conceptual frame has been used in peculiar ways in relation to both Italy and Russia. The differences are self-evident, but a look at the similarities can be useful as well: if in the Italian case, from a political point of view, a discussion of internal colonisation would be meaningless, from a cultural one the situation changes: the picture of an essentially backwards, ‘Oriental’ South is mainly the product of Southern intellectuals working in exile in Northern Italy after the failed revolution of 1848. The parallel is thus a working one for what concerns the ‘Westernisers’ party; it could be useful to extend it to the ‘Slavophile’ (in the broadest…

V. Chlebnikov, 47 poesie facili e una difficile, a cura di P. Nori, Macerata, Quodlibet, 2009, 96 pp.

Recensione di D. Franzoni, La prosa sovietica nel contesto socio-culturale dell’epoca brežneviana, fup, Firenze 2020, pp. 170

Friederike Kind-Kovács. Written Here, Published There: How Underground Literature Crossed the Iron Curtain. Budapest: Central European Universtity Press, 2014. 520 pp. ISBN 978-963-386-022-9

В коммунистических режимах свободное слово было под запретом. Однако некоторые любящие правду писатели (впрочем, не только они, но и вообще люди интеллигентского круга), не боясь преследований, распространяли свои произведения в самиздате и отправляли их за «железный занавес», где другие такие же свободолюбивые люди печатали их, передавали их содержание по радио. Иногда даже удавалось отправлять несколько напечатанных экземпляров назад на родину автора. Таким образом возникло международное сообщество рыцарей справедливости. Какими плохими дядьками, однако, были эти коммунисты! С такой формулировкой, пусть и наивной по форме, вероятно, мог бы согласится каждый. В этой связи непонятно, для че…

Scrittori, in fabbrica! Una lettura del romanzo industriale sovietico

La storia del romanzo industriale sovietico permette di ricostruire, al di là delle esigenze politiche, le richieste tencniche rivolte dal potere agli scrittori e di seguire i loro sforzi di trovare una forma adeguata.

Harmont, Magnitogorsk, Lianozovo: le macerie dell’industria sovietica

It is commonplace for film critics: Andrey Tarkovsky's Stalker is based on Arkady and Boris Strugatsky's Roadside Picnic, but the great director built a masterpiece out of an ordinary middlebrow book. Tarkovsky's work is clearly one of reduction: in Stalker the science-fiction decor has almost disappeared, and the viewer is left with what resembles a moral parable in an out-of-time setting. But in Roadside Picnic the setting is in itself highly significant. The science-fiction side is relatively modest compared to the subtly disturbing realistic one. The place where the action takes place is not well-defined, but under the generic Western attire it is not hard to recognize the Soviet Union …

Quando il dottor Zhivago si imbatté in Stanislao Moulinsky: Fatalità e forme narrative.

Il confronto tra romanzi diversi, da Fantomas a Guerra e pace e al Dottor Zivago, è finalizzato a mettere in discussione le definizioni correnti di letteratura di massa e la teoria che vuole l'intera produzione realsocialista appartenere a questa categoria.

Dove appendi un'allegoria? Cosa (non) era il realismo socialista.

I due quadri con cui Michail Chmel'ko vinse il premio Stalin si basano entrambi su modelli chiaramente riconoscibili, ma appartenenti a periodi e correnti assolutamente diversi: Jacques-Louis David e Il'ja Repin. Le coordinate stilistiche del Realismo Socialista erano dunque costruite a partire dal recupero di elementi spuri e spesso non dichiarati. L'analisi dei rapporti così ricostruiti offre l'opportunità di ridiscutere gli assunti base del realismo socialista insieme alle interpretazioni critiche correnti. Mikhail Khmelko's two Stalin-prize winning paintings are both patterned on clearly recognizable models, such different as Jacques-Louis David and Ilia Repin. The stylistic coordinates…

Nikolaj Lilin: ital'janskij jazyk russkogo pisatelja

Nicolai Lilin's “Siberian Education”, a shocking tale of the author's youth among the Siberian bandits occupying a separate neighborhood in the Transnistria town of Bendery, was a huge success on the Italian book market and was translated in most European languages. Substantial doubts were raised, however, about the truthfulness of the account. The book is written in Italian, but numerous passages show traces of a mediocre translation from the Russian, while others are impeccable. The text, thus, must have been polished by the editors, but only to a certain extent. It may be argued that this was a deliberate choice: the “rough”, strange language serves as proof of the author's origins, and …

Geopolitical aspects of prudery, or Stalin as the breeches maker: political censorship and puritan censorship in the USSR

Due leggi recentemente discusse al parlamento russo, tese a punire le oscenità anche nelle opere letterarie e l'uso “ingiustificato” di parole straniere, sono un'occasione per indagare il rapporto tra censura politica e censura moralistica, di cui è ben nota l'importanza nel periodo stalinista e poststalinista, ma il cui legame è stato raramente considerato.Se per quanto riguarda la censura politica non resta molto da scoprire, lo straordinario moralismo del regime sovietico a partire dagli anni Trenta contiene elementi di contraddizione tanto con tensioni verso la liberazione dei costumi presenti nel discorso bolscevico del periodo precedente quanto con la retorica dell'”uomo nuovo” che si…

L'ingegner Zamjatin e la rivolta della fantasia

Evgenii Zamiatin worked as an engineer while pursuing his literary career; in the eyes of his contemporaries, this was one relevant trait of his image. His masterpiece, the novel “We”, however, depicts a deeply pessimistic picture of an over-rational future society. This depiction contains, moreover, a number of attributes that can be traced back to Zamiatin's satirical picture of England in his novella “The Islanders”. Was this meant to be a warning against the dangers of technology, or against the developments of the bolshevik westernizing ideology? Was this engineer an enemy of rational thinking? The language of mathematics plays a relevant role in the novel's figural system; maybe, part…

Ma chi sono i russi? (Kustodiev, Zamjatin, Leskov)