Tiziano Terzani in Unione Sovietica. L'alterità sistematica di un paese lontano

Tiziano Terzani’s Buonanotte, Signor Lenin represents one of the highest manifestations of travel literature and journalistic writing, in so far as it ‘reads’ Soviet countries through different degrees of ‘distance’ and otherness. On the one hand, the travelling narrator perceives the foreign countries he visits as obviously unfamiliar; on the other hand, these forcibly monocultural systems reveal internal contradictions, frictions, and oppositions generated by the coexistence of different traditions and nationalisms, letting an array of subaltern identities live on within themselves. Terzani exhaustively captures the complexity of these cultural realities, effectively placing journalistic efficacy within the sphere of literature.