Mondadori

Courtesy of Fondazione Arnoldo e Alberto Mondadori. Mondadori Historical Library – Il Saggiatore.

Dates: 1907–present

Place: Segrate (Milano)

Series: Saggi, Scrittori italiani e stranieri, Le scie

Description:
Founded by Arnoldo Mondadori in 1907, Mondadori publishing house became interested in Russian literature in the 1920s, in particular in works by classic authors of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. At the beginning of the 1960s, the publishers began to search for new works among contemporary Soviet authors as the rhetoric of socialist realism was increasingly viewed with suspicion and works linked to the “Thaw generation” were welcomed as part of the emerging movement of dissent.
In 1960, Mondadori published The Thaw by Il’ia Erenburg (CSAM 1985). At the time, Western publishers were finding it difficult to access sources that were not aligned with the Soviet regime, a problem that was compounded by the lack of copyright regulations due to the fact that the USSR had not signed the Universal Convention stipulated in Geneva in 1952. To side step this issue, Alberto Mondadori entered into a contract with Viktor Nekrasov—an author known for his originality during the Khrushchev Thaw who was forced to emigrate in 1974.  Of Nekrasov’s works, Mondadori published La seconda notte (The Second Night) (1962), Nella città natale (Hometown) (1962), Nelle trincee di Stalingrado (In the Trenches of Stalingrad) (1964), for which Nekrasov won the Stalin Prize in 1947, and Di qua e di là dall’oceano (Both sides of the Ocean) (1965). In 1967, Mondadori published the very first edition of Evgeniia Ginzburg’s Krutoi Marshrut in Russian, which surprised the author herself since the autobiographical novel focused on Stalinist purges and could not be published in the USSR, although it did circulate through samizdat channels. Mikhail Bulgakov’s Vita del Signor Molière (The Life of Monsieur de Molière) was also included in Mondadori’s catalogue in 1969. In 1970, Mondadori released Nadezhda Mandel’shtam’s memoirs, L’epoca e i lupi (Hope against hope), a forceful and evocative account of her husband Osip’s years in confinement and prison.
The history of the publication of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s works is complex.  In 1962,  Odin den’ Ivana Denisovicha was published in “Novyi Mir”, the writer’s first literary work to be officially published in the USSR, recounting the experience of a fictional prisoner in a Soviet gulag. It was published in Italy by Garzanti and Einaudi, but Mondadori maintained an interest in the author and, in 1968, obtained exclusive rights to the Italian version of In the First Circle (V kruge pervom), a novel inspired by autobiographical memories which is set in the sharashka of Marfino, a detention camp on the outskirts of Moscow where scientists and technicians worked on state projects (V kruge pervom, 1968). Rakovyi korpus (Cancer ward) (1968), was published for the very first time in Russian by Il Saggiatore, the publishing house founded by Alberto Mondadori. Following intense controversy that also involved the intervention of the author himself, the title page contained the words “novel by an anonymous Soviet author” (Divisione cancro, Il Saggiatore 1968). A few months later Einaudi released an edition with the author’s name on the cover (A. Solženicyn, Rakovyj korpus, 1968; Reparto C, Einaudi, Turin 1969; Reparto C, Mondadori-DeAgostini, Novara 1987).
This was followed in the early 1970s by Mondadori paperback editions of Solzhenitsyn’s Per il bene della causa (For the Good of the Cause) (1971), and Agosto 1914. Nodo primo (August 1914. Knot 1) (1972). In addition, Solzhenitsyn’s monumental work in 3 volumes Arcipelago Gulag 1918-1956: saggio di inchiesta narrativa (The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956, An Experiment in Literary Investigation), translated by M.  Olsufieva was published between 1974 and 1978.  Mondadori continued publishing translations of Solzhenitsyn’s work with Vivere senza menzogna (Live not by Lies) appearing in 1974, La quercia e il vitello: saggi di vita letteraria (The Oak and the Calf: Sketches of Literary Life) in 1975, Discorsi americani (American Discourses) in 1976, Lenin a Zurigo: capitoli (Lenin in Zurich: Chapters) in 1976 and Voci da sotto le macerie (Voices from Beneath the Rubble), a collection of writings by various dissenting authors including Solzhenitsyn, edited by S. Rapetti in 1981.
Mondadori clearly showed a strong interest in Russian authors associated with the culture of dissent, in particular in literary texts that were testimonies of life in the gulags. The publishing house also deserves credit for introducing the Italian public to Vasilii Grossman’s work Tutto scorre (Everything Flows), in which the theme of the gulag returns. The protagonist is a former inmate who, in reliving the encounters and memories of his imprisonment, reflects on Russian history and the role of Lenin, who he identifies as a promoter of totalitarianism and the liberticidal Soviet regime (1971).
During the 1970s, Mondadori published a range of titles and authors ascribable to the culture of dissent, starting with Andrei Platonov’s novel Chevengur with the title Il villaggio della nuova vita (The Village of a New Life) (1972), based on the censored version. 1976 saw the publication of Il fedele Ruslan: storia di un cane nel lager (The faithful Ruslan: The Story of a Guard Dog) (1976) by Georgii Vladimov, an author already known to the Italian public after La grande vena (The Great Ore) had been published by Einaudi in 1962. In 1978 Mondadori published Il carnevale della storia (The Carnival of History) by Leonid Pliushch’, a mathematician and left-wing dissident of Ukrainian origin who was released from psychiatric hospital thanks to an international campaign, after which he emigrated. The following year, the publisher released Vladimir Voinovich’s Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin (1979), a satire of Soviet bureaucracy and the military whose imminent publication in “Novyi Mir” had been announced as early as 1963, but which had only circulated via the samizdat in the USSR and the tamizdat in the West (Paris 1975).
Several works by dissenting authors were published in the series, Saggi, including Solzhenitsyn, the Nobel laureate Andrei Sakharov (Parla Sacharov; Sakharov Speaking, 1974), Zhores Medvedev (Dieci anni dopo Ivan Denisovič; Ten Years After Ivan Denisovich, 1974), and Roi Medvedev (Krusciov. Gli anni del potere; Khrushchev. His Years in Power, 1977 and L’unione sovietica alle soglie del 2000; The Soviet Union in the Eve of 2000, 1980). In 1979, Mondadori’s poetry series, Lo Specchio, published Fermata nel deserto (A Stop in A Desert), edited by G. Buttafava, a collection of poems by Iosif Brodskii, who was already known in the West because of the persecutions he had suffered in his homeland before being forced to emigrate in 1972. In the 1980s, Mondadori confirmed its interest in writers who did not adhere to Soviet ideology by publishing the first ever edition of L’ustione. Romanzo in tre libri: tardi anni sessanta-primi anni settanta (The Burn. A Novel in three volumes: the late 1960s to the early 1970s) (1980), written by Evgeniia Ginzburg’s son, Vasilii Aksënov; this work marked the author’s definitive detachment from official Soviet literature which led to his subsequent exile to the United States. Later, in 1988, L’isola di Crimea (The Island of Crimea) was published, translated by Patrizia Deotto’s.
In 1983, Mondadori published La casa sul lungofiume (The House on the Embankment) by Iurii Trifonov, an author whose work was in opposition to official literature of the 1970s, and whose prose revealed the fate of intellectuals under Stalin. The Mondadori catalogue also included the work of Boris Pasternak; a collection of Pasternak’s prose: L’infanzia di Ženja Ljuvers e altri racconti (The Adolescence of Zhenia Luvers) was published in 1988 (cf. CSAM 1985). In the 1990s, under perestroika, several of Solzhenitsyn’s works were re-released, in particular The Gulag Archipelago, which was published in a new complete edition in 2001 (edited by M. Calusio and I Meridiani). The main works of Mikhail Bulgakov were also published starting with The Master and Margarita (1991).

Sara Mazzucchelli
[30th June 2021]

Bibliography

• CSAM – Catalogo storico Arnoldo Mondadori editore 1984-1994: cronologia, autori, titoli, collane, Fondazione Arnoldo e Alberto Mondadori, Milano 1996.
• Ferretti G. C., Storia dell’editoria in Italia 1945-2003, Einaudi, Torino 2004.
• Garetto E. – Mazzucchelli S., Le prime edizioni italiane di Solženicyn nei documenti degli archivi editoriali, in Calusio M. – Noseda V. (eds.), Aspetti della fortuna di Aleksandr Solženicyn in Occidente, in fascicolo speciale de “L’Analisi Linguistica e Letteraria”, 3 (2019): 191-232.
• Moggi Rebulla P., Zerbini M. (eds.),Catalogo storico Arnoldo Mondadori editore 1912-1983, Fondazione Arnoldo e Alberto Mondadori, Milano 1985.
• Sabbatini M., Viktor Nekrasov e l’Italia. Uno scrittore sovietico nel dibattito culturale degli anni Cinquanta, Universitas Studiorum, Mantova 2018.
• Tarabbia A., Il Novecento russo e Mondadori, in S. Mazzucchelli (ed.),Percorsi russi a Milano, Fondazione Arnoldo e Alberto Mondadori, Milano 2013: 31-47.