La ricezione di Italo Calvino in URSS (1948-1991): per una microstoria della diffusione della letteratura straniera in epoca sovietica.

My research focused on a study of the history of literature in its main functions ‒ namely the production, communication and consumption ‒ understood as a sociological discipline that investigates mainly the activities and the institutions in charge of cultural production, and, secondarily, the individuals involved in the process of cultural consumption (Barthes, 1992; Dobrenko,1997). The aim of my research was to investigate the dynamics of reception in the Soviet Russia of foreign literature works in order to understand to what extent the historical, political and social Soviet context has influenced and determined the spread of such texts. With this aim we have chosen as a case study the reception in the USSR of Italo Calvino's work. Partisan, anti-fascist and member of the ICP (until 1956), he was the prototype of the progressive foreign writer whose works could be published in the land of the Soviets. Calvino was a writer with a (almost) flawless political reputation: a fervent supporter of the communist ideals and a tireless bard of the Italian Resistance, since the end of the Forties his neo-realist tales began to be published on Soviet magazines and newspapers, building his literary fortune in the USSR. The analysis of the Russian translations of his works and of their critical reception was aimed at the comprehension of that process defined by Dobrenko “the formation of the reader” (formovka sovetskogo chitatelya) – namely, the cultural, social and ideological creation of the Soviet mass reader (1997). In order to give an overview of the mechanisms of Soviet cultural production − through the analysis of a corpus of paratexts and archival documents that allowed us to reconstruct the micro-history (Ginzburg, 2006) of Calvino's reception − were examined both the editorial processes that have affected the Soviet publication of his works and their critical interpretation. Starting from the study of editorial, critical and translation strategies employed for the diffusion of Calvino’s works, we focused our research on the general dynamics of cultural production with the final goal of illustrating how this complex system worked in the USSR. Thus, through the study of the role played by institutions charged with the production (state publishing houses, literary magazines, Union of Soviet Writers) and the control (Glavlit, Ideologicheskaya komissiya CK KPSS, Inostrannaya komissiya SSP SSSR) of foreign literary works, this analysis was intended to determine in which way these processes were aimed at the creation of the Soviet mass reader.