(Re)defining a Literary Genre: How Italo Calvino's Postmodern (Hyper)Novels became "Philosophical Allegories" in the USSR

During the Soviet Era, literary critics were employed as a tool of cultural and ideological domestication of the literary process through the control exerted on the sphere of cultural production and consumption. The purpose of this study is to demonstrate the dynamics by which Soviet criticism subjected the Western literary canon to the dogma of Socialist Realism, adapting and confining, among others, postmodern texts within the limits of its cultural policy. We will examine the critical reception in the USSR of Italo Calvino's postmodern works (Cosmicomics, 1965; The Invisible Cities, 1972; The Castle of Crossed Destinies, 1969-73; and If on a Winter's Night a Traveler, 1979; Palomar, 1983) because this interesting case of cultural and ideological domestication is helpful to understand how the Soviet system of cultural production worked.