Garzanti

Covers. Source: Culture del dissenso.

Dates: 1936-

Place: Milan

Series: I Garzanti, Memoria e documenti, Romanzi moderni, Saggi blu, Sapere tutto

Description:
In 1936 Arnoldo Garzanti took over the historic publishing house of the Fratelli Treves, which until the first decade of the twentieth century had published classical Russian literature in Italy (mostly translated from French editions), and founded Garzanti Editore SpA. The new publishing house was both a continuation of its predecessor and a departure. In the years between 1963 and 1990, Garzanti continued to publish classic Russian writers such as Pushkin, Turgenev, Dostoevskii, Tolstoi and Chekhov, this time translated from the Russian originals, but also released a series of works, mostly in translation, by dissenting Soviet authors.
Except for La letteratura russa (Russian Literarture) by Erhard Marcelle in 1954 and Dopo la lunga notte (After the Long Night) in 1962 by Galina Nikolaeva (maiden name Volianskaia), winner of the Stalin Prize in 1951, the first non-official work published by Garzanti was Una giornata di Ivan Denissovic: romanzo (One day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, A Novel) by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in 1963, which came out at the same time as the Einaudi edition. The publication of the seminal work in the magazine “Novyi mir” in 1962 was a sign of destalinisation under Khrushchëv. The translator of the Garzanti edition was Giorgio Kraiski who, due to the lack of copyright on Russian literature, was under pressure to translate the work quickly. The USSR had not signed the international convention on authors’ rights and when Solzhenitsyn ’s novel was published in the Soviet Union, Garzanti and Einaudi raced to be the first to publish an Italian translation (cf. Saltamacchia 2015: 289-390).
Both editions were enormously successful. The Garzanti edition was printed twice in 1963 and reprinted in 1970, 1971 and 1974. The first three editions were part of the foreign writers series, “Romanzi moderni” (Modern Novels), published from 1954 to 1972, while the fourth edition was included in the “I bianchi” (White Books) series, which also included works by Giuseppe Fenoglio, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Louis-Ferdinand Céline.
1963 also saw the publication by Garzanti of work by Michail Zoshchenko, a major writer in the 1920s, 30s and 40s. Zoshchenko was part of the “Brothers of Serapione” group, defined by Trotskii as poputchiki (travelling companions) and in 1946, together with Anna Akhmatova, was subjected to a campaign of defamation orchestrated by Andrei Zhdanov. Garzanti published a selection of Zoshchenko’s short stories edited by Zveteremich entitled Imballaggio difettoso (Defective Packaging). Later, in 1979 Un giorno disgraziato (A Wretched Day) was included in the collection Teatro satirico russo: 1925-1934 (Russian Satirical Theatre: 1925-1934), edited by Milli Martinelli. After Zoshchenko, Garzanti published several prose texts by dissenting writers. The works, some already translated into Italian, published by Garzanti included: Boris Pil’niak’s Storia della luna che non fu spenta e altri racconti (The Unextinguished Moon and other stories), translated into Italian by P. Zveteremich, Romanzi moderni, 1965 and L’anno nudo (The Naked Year), translated into Italian by P. Zveteremich, I Garzanti, 1976; Isaak Babel’s  Il sangue e l’inchiostro: racconti e altri scritti inediti (Blood and Ink: short stories and other unpublished writing) edited by Costantino di Paola, 1980; and Evgenii Zamiatin’s dystopian Noi (We) translated by Ettore Lo Gatto, I Garzanti, 1972, which had been published in 1955 in Bergamo by Minerva Italica and reprinted several times by Feltrinelli.
In 1966, the publication of Placido Don and Terre vergini: romanzo (The Quiet Don and Virgin Soil: A Novel) by the Nobel prize winner Michail Sholokhov (both translated by Natalia Bavastro) earned Garzanti significant prestige and confirmed the publisher’s commitment to bringing Russian literature to the West. In 1969 La fossa (Jama) (The Pit) by Aleksandr Kuprin was published, translated by Giorgio Kraiski. Since its original publication, the novel had stoked controversy due to its description of life in a brothel. Since 1921 an incomplete version had circulated in Italy, translated by Lo Gatto and published by Vitigliano, and since 1930, a complete version by the same translator had been available from the Milanese publishers, Monanni.
Throughout the 1970s, Garzanti continued to publish unofficial and experimental Soviet works, together with more ‘classical’ texts of the sort published by Treves.
From the 1970s to the 1990s, the number of works published by writers considered part of the vast and diversified culture of dissent in the Soviet Union increased, although the publishers continued to reprint nineteenth century classics. Among the works published were: Nell’ombra di Gogol’ (In Gogol’s Shadow) by Andrei Siniavskii translated and edited by Sergio Rapetti, 1980, Saggi blu; Buona notte! romanzo, (Good night! A Novel) also by Siniavskii and translated by Sergio Rapetti Narratori moderni, 1987; Strane coincidenze (Strange Coincidences) by Evgenii Popov, one of the MetrOpol’ authors, translated by Gian Piero Piretto, Narratori moderni, 1990; Il povero Avrosimov (Poor Avrosimov) by Bulat Okudzhava, translated by Maria Olsufieva, I Garzanti, 1975; Divisione cancro (Cancer Ward) by the already well known ‘Gulag writer’ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, edited by Olsufieva, I grandi libri Garzanti, 1974; Soli insieme (Alone together) by Elena Bonnėr, wife of the Nobel Prize winner Andrei Sakharov, translated by Barbara Besi Ellena, I libri del Quadrifoglio, 1986 and the tamizdat magazine Kontinent 1. La rivista del dissenso: gli intellettuali e il potere sovietico (Kontinent, The Magazine of Dissent: Intellectuals and Soviet Power), Memoria e documenti, 1975.
From the beginning of the 1970s, Garzanti published several works by Bulgakov which had been censored in the USSR. In 1973, following an edition by the Di Donato Publishing House in Bari, an incomplete version of Maestro e Margherita (Maestro e Margherita. Cristo, Pilato, Giuda, Satana, Mosca anni trenta) (The Master and Margarita. Christ, Pilate, Judas, Satan. Moscow in the Nineteen Thirties) translated by Olsufieva was reprinted, I grandi libri Garzanti. Further works by Bulgakov, Uova fatali. Cuore di cane (Fatal Eggs, Heart of a Dog), translated by Emanuela Guercetti, I grandi libri Garzanti, came out in 1990. In the same period, works by other authors unfavoured by Soviet authorities were published, such as Osip Mandel’shtam’s Poesie (Poetry) translated by Serena Vitale, 1972) and his wife’s, Nadezhda Iakovlevna’s Le mie memorie con poesie e altri scritti di Osip Mandel’štam (My memories of Osip Mandel’shtam: poetry and other writing) also translated by Vitale, Saggi, 1972. Boris Pasternak’s correspondence with his cousin, Ol’ga Freidenberg, Le barriere dell’anima: corrispondenza con Ol’ga Frejdenberg, 1910-1954 (The Barriers of the Soul; correspondence with Ol’ga Freidenberg, 1910-1954) translated by Vitale was published in 1987, Saggi blu. Garzanti also began to publish a series of books on the history of Russian literature, seeking to provide Italian readers with the contexts and critical tools necessary to analyse Russian and Soviet writing. After the fall of the USSR, Garzanti began to promote texts by artists such as the director Andrej Tarkovskii, marginalised by the regime because of his non-conformist films, who died in Paris in 1986. In 1992, Garzanti published Tarkovskii’s Andrei Rublëv, translated by Cristina Moroni (Narratori moderni), and in 1994, Racconti cinematografici (Cinematographic Tales), translated by Moroni and Norman Mozzato, (Narratori moderni).

Giuseppina Larocca
[30^th June 2021]

Translation by Tammy Corkish

Download the Garzanti catalogue on Dissent (1954-1990)

Bibliography

• Discacciati O. , La ferita Denisovič, in Id., A. Solzhenitsyn, Una giornata di Ivan Denisovič. La casa di Matrëna, Accadde alla stazione di Kočetkova, new complete translationa by O. Discacciati, Einaudi, Turin 2017: V-XXXVI.
• Ferretti G., Storia dell’editoria letteraria in Italia. 1945-2003, Einaudi, Turin 2004: 192.
• I grandi libri Garzanti, Garzanti, Milano 1993.
• Saltamacchia F., L’incontro di Italo Calvino e Aleksandr Solženicyn ne ‘La giornata d’uno scrutatore’, “Lettere italiane”, LXVII.2 (2015): 385-414.