Einaudi

Detail of the cover of the Einaudi edition of the book ‘The Tales of Kolyma’ by Varlam Shalamov.

Dates: 1933-present

Place: Turin

Series: I coralli, I nuovi coralli, Supercoralli, Gli struzzi

Description:
The Giulio Einaudi Publishing house, founded in 1933 by Giulio Einaudi in Turin, included Russian authors in its catalogues from the 1930s (cf. Le edizioni Einaudi negli anni 1933-2003: 2013). In the second half of the 20th century, Einaudi published translations by contemporary Russian authors who worked within the confines of official socialist realism (i.e. those accepted by the regime) as well as those who distanced themselves from official Soviet culture, such as the writers from the Thaw generation. The emblematic text of this period, Il’ia Ėrenburg’s The Thaw (Moscow 1954), was published by the Turin publisher in 1955 and the same year, Vittorio Strada translated the novel Nella città natale (Hometown) (Moscow 1955; Turin 1955) by Viktor Nekrasov, an independent voice in the Soviet Union during those years, for Einaudi. In the race to publish Nekrasov’s work, Einaudi was beaten by a couple of weeks by Feltrinelli, who had published Pietro Zveteremich’s translation with the title Nella sua città (1955); this was followed in 1961 by a second novel by the same writer called Kira Georgievna, which touched on the theme of Stalinist Gulag survivors (Moscow 1962; translated into Italian by C. Masetti, Turin 1961). The rush to publish and the phenomenon of works being published simultaneously by different Italian publishers was the result of the fact that the Soviet Union did not adhere to the Universal Copyright Convention. Over the years, this situation significantly influenced editorial decisions regarding Soviet authors; a sensational example was the simultaneous publication by Garzanti and Einaudi of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
In the 1960s, Einaudi’s catalogue began to include narrative works by authors closer to the culture of dissent such as Vasilii Aksënov, the son of Evgeniia Ginzburg, whose short novel Il biglietto stellato (A ticket to the stars) (translated by C. Masetti, 1961), although not openly subversive, was violently attacked in his homeland because of the themes dealt with and the colloquial language the author chose to use, which represented a decisive distancing from the rigid and impersonal literary language of socialist realism. A famous case involved the publication of the debut novel by a then unknown author: the aforementioned Solzhenitsyn. In 1963, Einaudi published the first Italian edition of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, the first text officially published in the Soviet Union to offer a description of the gulag. Its publication in “Novyi mir” in 1962 caught the attention of publishers all over the world and sparked a competition for its publication in Italy between Garzanti and Einaudi. Thanks to Raffaello Uboldi, the work was offered to Einaudi (Una giornata di Ivan Denisovič, transl. it. R. Uboldi, 1963); reissues followed in the first year of publication (Una giornata di Ivan Denisovič. La casa di Matrjona. Alla stazione translated by R. Uboldi, C. Coïsson, V. Strada, Einaudi, 1963), testifying to its great success.
Following the book’s success, Solzhenitsyn’s works were highly sought after by Italian publishers, and a few years later Einaudi published another of the author’s masterpieces: the partly autobiographical Rakovyi korpus (Cancer ward) in both Russian and Italian. The novel, a testimony of what life was like in a Soviet cancer ward, had reached Italy despite the KGB’s seizure of Solzhenitsyn’s archives. Although the author had not authorised any other editions, in February 1968 the publishing house Il Saggiatore, founded by Alberto Mondadori, published the first part of the work in Russian (Rakovyi korpus, 1968), thus obtaining worldwide publishing rights; this was followed in April by an Italian translation entitled Divisione cancro (transl. it. M. Olsufieva, Il Saggiatore, 1968). Il Saggiatore chose not to reveal the identity of the author since the manuscript Alberto Mondadori had purchased was not signed (cf. Mondadori 1996: 941): this editorial choice was not shared by Giulio Einaudi and Einaudi printed the novel under the author’s real name (A. Solženicyn, Rakovyj korpus, 1968; Reparto C, trans. it. G. Dacosta, 1969) (cf. Garetto – Mazzucchelli 2019).
Einaudi continued to publish officially recognised Soviet authors, including the Stalin Prize winners Veniamin Kaverin (1966) and Nikita Khrushchëv (1964), as well as publications by dissident writers. Thanks to the work of prominent collaborators, it was possible to introduce the Italian public to a broad and diversified cross-section of contemporary official Soviet literature as well as authors whose works were not acceptable to the Soviet regime. Iurii Trifonov, a writer unaligned with the regime whose subdued prose revealed the fate of intellectuals during Stalinism, was presented to the Italian public for the first time in 1977 when Editori Riuniti published La casa sul lungofiume (House on the Embankment), a novel that indirectly criticised the regime and alluded in its subtext to the tragedy of those sent to lagers.  In the same year Einaudi published a collection of Trifonov’s prose entitled Lo scambio. Conclusioni provvisorie. Lungo addio (The Exchange, Provisional Conclusions, The Long Goodbye) (translated by C. Coïsson, L. Negarville).
The sylloge Dissent and Socialism, a Marxist Voice in the Soviet Samizdat presented essays by intellectuals belonging to socialist and Marxist currents of dissent, starting with the historian Roi Medvedev. The essays revealed the complexity  of the phenomenon of dissent in the Soviet Union on the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of the historic CPSU Congress (edited by V. Strada, transl. it. C. Strada Janovic, M. Boffito, F. Caselli, 1977; introductory essay by V. Strada). Iurii Dombrovskii, a dissident writer, was arrested several times and was also the victim of severe persecution; he died a few months after the publication of The Faculty of Useless Things (published through tamizdat channels) in Paris in 1978 and translated into Italian by Einaudi the following year; the theme of the novel is the uselessness of the values upheld during the Stalinist era and is based on the author’s autobiographical experience of arrest and imprisonment in the Kolyma Gulag.
Einaudi also published the historical work Rasputin. Il «Monaco nero» e la corte dell’ultimo zar (Rasputin. The “Black monk” and the court of the last Tsar) (translated by V. Drisdo, 1984) by another dissident author named Andrei Amal’rik, who was the victim of harassment, arrest, and was later expelled altogether from the USSR. In the 1990s with the advent of perestroika Einaudi published the dissenting writer Vladimir Voinovich (Il colbacco, (The Fur Hat) 1995; Vita e straordinarie avventure del soldato Ivan Čonkin (The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin) 1996) and further accounts of life in the Gulag by Varlam Shalamov collected in the masterpiece Kolyma Tales which Einaudi published for the first time in full outside Russia (ed. I.P. Sirotinskaia, transl. it. S. Rapetti, P. Sinatti, 1999).

Sara Mazzucchelli
[30th June 2021]

Bibliography

• Mondadori A., Lettere di una vita: 1922-1975, Mondadori, Milano 1996: 940-941.
• Le edizioni Einaudi negli anni 1933-2003, Einaudi, Torino 2013.
• Garetto E., Mazzucchelli S., Le prime edizioni italiane di Solženicyn nei documenti degli archivi editoriali, in M. Calusio, V. Noseda (eds.), Aspetti della fortuna di Aleksandr Solženicyn in Occidente, fascicolo speciale de “L’Analisi Linguistica e Letteraria”, 3 (2019): 191-232.