Guido Piovene. Articoli dall’Unione Sovietica (1960)

In the twenty-nine articles that constitute the result of the 1960s travel experience in the Soviet Union, which have so far appeared only on the third page of La Stampa, the cultural-literary operation of Guido Piovene is outlined, perfectly reflecting the programmatic intention to conduct a wide-ranging investigation into Soviet society in the early 1960s, providing a useful comparison with the condition of the western world and overcoming the appearance and conventionality of preconceived ideas (by the visitor) and prepackaged information (from part of the Soviet administrative system). In his reportage Piovene is able to activate the dynamic functions that constitute the main lines of his literary writing: the inclusion of the landscape in the narrative context and the deep internal investigation conducted on the characters, in a balance between inside and outside, between observation and analysis, between reality and dream. The result is a corpus of articles that constitute an important cultural document of that historical period but at the same time another great literary reportage by one of the most refined journalist-writers of the Italian twentieth century.