Sergio Rapetti

S. Rapetti. 

Sergio Rapetti (1941) is an academic specialising in Russian Literature and Culture.  He has translated dozens of works into Italian by dissenting authors from Soviet and post-Soviet Russia including, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Andrei Siniavskii and Varlam Shalamov; he currently continues to work as a translator and consultant.  He has collaborated with numerous associations such as
Russia cristiana (Christian Russia) (Milan), Kontinent (Paris) the Helsinki Groups (Moscow, Rome), Memorial Italia and Memorial International, promoting freedom of expression and culture in the USSR. As Rapetti himself said in an interview in March 2019, his interest in Russia is tied to his family (cf. Larocca, Pieralli); his mother and grandmother were Russian, and “in 1938 were forced to emigrate from the USSR [to Milan], without my grandfather who had been arrested during the Great Purge in the spring, in Kislovodsk, on the slopes of the Caucasus mountains where they lived. He had been transferred to a prison in Batumi, and he never came back” (ibid.). The editorial world of Milan, where the young Rapetti began his career, was open to making connections with Russian-Soviet culture, and Rapetti made contacts with editors such as Jaca Book, Arnoldo Mondadori, Vallecchi and Garzanti. His first publication, under the pseudonym Nicola Sorin, in collaboration with J. Ibsen (pseudonym of Giovanni Bensi), was Testi letterari e poesie da riviste clandestine dell’URSS (Literary texts and poetry from clandestine magazines in the USSR), which offered a new slant on the russkii andergraund in its focus on the vast array of alternative journals published unofficially.  The Libro bianco sul caso di Sinjavskij e Daniėl’ (White Book on the case of Siniavskii e Daniėl’) by Aleksandr Ginzburg (1967), again published under the pseudonym Nicola Sorin and in collaboration with Jaca Book,  sheds light on the trial of the two writers, about which news arrived in the West thanks to Ginzburg and the clandestine newspaper, Cronaca degli avvenimenti correnti (Chronicle of Current events).
Rapetti went on to publish other works for Jaca Book, including Il mestiere dello scrittore: tra autoritarismo e sfruttamento (The craft of the Writer: between Authoritarianism and Exploitation) by Solzhenitsyn (1979) and La ballata di Savva, Abitiamo la terra: due romanzi brevi (The Tale of Savva, We Work on the Land: Two Short Novels) and L’arca dei non chiamati (Ark for the Uninvited) by Vladimir Maksimov (1981 e 1982). He worked for Mondadori as an editor and translator, translating, among other works, Il fedele Ruslan (Faithful Ruslan) (1976) by Georgii Vladimov, Vita e straordinarie avventure del soldato Ivan Čonkin (The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Soldier Ivan Chonkin) by Vladimir Voinovich (1979, and Einaudi 1996) and Solzhenitsyn who asked personally that his work be entrusted to Rapetti after 1974. For Vallecchi he edited Indietro nell’acqua scura (Going Under) by Lidiia Chukovskaia (1979) and for Garzanti, who in the 1970s republished the classics of Russian Literature, he translated Siniavskii’s Nell’ombra di Gogol’ (In the Shadow of Gogol) (1980), using the pseudonym Abram Terz [Terts] and Buona notte! Romanzo (Good Night! A Novel) (1987).
During these years in Italy – as in the rest of Europe – there were widespread protests, particularly among the young who were critical of the Italian Communist Party’s acceptance of repressive acts perpetrated by the USSR, especially the invasion of Hungary and Prague. At this time, Rapetti maintained close contacts with emigrant intellectuals such as Vladimir Maksimov and the poet, writer and journalist Natal’ia Gorbanevskaia as well as with emigrant publishing houses, such as Posev in Frankfurt, the political-literary journal led by “Grani”, the YMCA Press, “Vestnik RKhD” (Messenger for the Russian Christian Movement) in Paris and “Kontinent”, which had become important channels for non-official Soviet culture outside the USSR (cf. ibid.).
Rapetti collaborated with “Kontinent” “from issue 10 (1976) […] to issue 70 (1992), the last issue to be published in Paris before the paper was transferred to Moscow” (ibid.) arranging for members of the editorial staff to participate in various events and organising important international conferences such as “Un continente per la cultura” (A Continent for Culture) promoted by the Konrad Adenauer Foundation (Milan, 21^st-22^nd May 1983) and “Una sindrome del post-totalitarismo. Il problema nazionale in URSS: rinnovamento o guerra civile” (A Syndrome of Post-Totalitarianism in the USSR: Renewal or Civil War) (Rome, 15^th-16^th October 1990). This latter was sponsored and supported by “Kontinent” in collaboration with the “Centro culturale Mondoperaio, (The Workers’ World Cultural Centre), the Italian Helsinki committee, newspapers and magazines from Moscow, writers such as Chingiz Aitmatov (who brought a message from Gorbachëv), Viktor Astaf ’ev and Valentin Rasputin and academics such as Dmitrii Lichachëv. In Rapetti’s words, “its round tables were packed with champions of dissent, illustrious journalists and Soviet experts from all over the world.” (ibid.).
Rapetti was one of the most active figures in disseminating unofficial Soviet culture in Italy, convinced that the conflictual decades of the 1960s and 1970s produced works and writers worthy of being published and included in global canons. From his viewpoint, the phenomenon of Soviet dissent has two sides, one reflecting its original nature and the other its representation in an Italian cultural context. Dissent “in its various components has hardly ever presented ideological platforms or political programmes as alternatives to the regime, from which it simply asks respect for elementary human rights which are guaranteed by the Soviet Constitution, but which have been replaced by persecution and condemnation” (ibid.).
While it is true that there are elements which “see in ‘Euro-communism’, which is critical of certain policies of the USSR, an ideal […] support and defense”, this debate is above all limited to the Helsinki Groups who seek a response from correspondents to Italian and French Communist newspapers in Moscow and are “surprised to find that they are ‘scared to death’ by the prospect of publishing their appeals (which in Italy and France would find voice in papers of a different point of view)” (ibid.). In Italy, the phenomenon of dissent has been interpreted politically; both emigrants and those who stay to defend their ideas in their homeland are required to produce “proof of eligibility” [which is] however never deemed satisfactory” (ibid.). What is evidentially lacking is a “reckoning” with the past and “the authentic nature of Bolshevism-Communism in the Soviet Union” – a repressive nature – that dissent can shed light on (cf. ibid.) and that a large section of Italian culture, especially Communist culture has decided to ignore. This lasting and at times definitive error in the Italian reception of Soviet dissent, is, according to Rapetti, due to a lack of will to understand a cultural phenomenon frequently based not on political objectives as much as a desire to freely express an independent cultural and literary identity and to be understood both at home and abroad.
Rapetti’s sensitive analysis of Soviet dissent led him to meet many key protagonists of the USSR’s Second Culture with whom he shared a commitment to the defence of human rights, including the above mentioned Solzhenitsyn, Siniavskii, Vladimov and Maksimov, but also Andrei Sakharov and his wife Elena Bonnėr, Aleksandr Ginzburg and his wife Arina, Iurii Orlov, Sergei Kovalev, Father Gleb Iakunin and Iurii Mal’tsev (one of the few dissidents to live in Italy).
His involvement in disseminating the Soviet Union’s alternative culture meant that Rapetti was a target of surveillance for the KGB. After a trip to Moscow in November 1977, during which he met Sakharov and two writers not aligned to the regime he was watched 24 hours a day and was threatened and searched. On his return to Italy, he received unpleasant telephone calls and visits at his office in Milan and was refused a visa for future visits to the USSR. He was refused entry into the USSR until May 1991, when, invited by Sakharov’s wife, he was permitted to attend a Congress in Moscow in memory of the dissident (cf. ibid.).
Rapetti has remained active in the 1990s and 2000s in translating banned Russian literature of the past as well as post-Soviet literature, finally free of censorship. In 1999 he translated for Einaudi the first complete edition of 145 Racconti di Kolyma (145 Tales of Kolyma) by Varlam Shalamov and in 2012 Ego by Solzhenitsyn, which presents two of the eight “stories in two parts” that the Nobel prize winner wrote between 1993 and 1998 (the other six were published in translation by Jaca Book). Other authors to be translated by Rapetti in recent years include Vladimir Makanin, Andrei Volos and the Nobel prize winner Svetlana Aleksievich. In 2017 he edited the ebook Dalla censura e dal samizdat alla libertà di stampa. URSS 1917-1990. Catalogo della mostra a cura di Boris Belenkin ed Elena Strukova con altri saggi (From censorship and the Samizdat to Press Freedom. USSR 1917-1990). Catalogue of the exhibition curated by Boris Belenkin and Elena Strukova with other essays (goWare, Memorial) and in 2019, Ritorno in Russia. 1994-2008. Saggi, discorsi e interviste (Return to Russia. 1994-2008. Essays, speeches and interviews) by Solzhenitsyn, with an introduction by Ermolai Solzhenitsyn (Marsilio Editori, Venice 2019).

Giuseppina Larocca
[30^th June 2021]

Translastion by Tammy Corkish

Bibliography

• Larocca G., Pieralli C. (eds.), La Russia attuale continua a rimanere quell’’altra faccia della Luna’. Intervista a Sergio Rapetti, 11.03.2019, https://www.culturedeldissenso.com/sergio-rapetti/, online (last accessed: 30/06/2021).

S. Rapetti. 

Sergio Rapetti (1941) is an academic specialising in Russian Literature and Culture.  He has translated dozens of works into Italian by dissenting authors from Soviet and post-Soviet Russia including, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Andrei Siniavskii and Varlam Shalamov; he currently continues to work as a translator and consultant.  He has collaborated with numerous associations such as
Russia cristiana (Christian Russia) (Milan), Kontinent (Paris) the Helsinki Groups (Moscow, Rome), Memorial Italia and Memorial International, promoting freedom of expression and culture in the USSR. As Rapetti himself said in an interview in March 2019, his interest in Russia is tied to his family (cf. Larocca, Pieralli); his mother and grandmother were Russian, and “in 1938 were forced to emigrate from the USSR [to Milan], without my grandfather who had been arrested during the Great Purge in the spring, in Kislovodsk, on the slopes of the Caucasus mountains where they lived. He had been transferred to a prison in Batumi, and he never came back” (ibid.). The editorial world of Milan, where the young Rapetti began his career, was open to making connections with Russian-Soviet culture, and Rapetti made contacts with editors such as Jaca Book, Arnoldo Mondadori, Vallecchi and Garzanti. His first publication, under the pseudonym Nicola Sorin, in collaboration with J. Ibsen (pseudonym of Giovanni Bensi), was Testi letterari e poesie da riviste clandestine dell’URSS (Literary texts and poetry from clandestine magazines in the USSR), which offered a new slant on the russkii andergraund in its focus on the vast array of alternative journals published unofficially.  The Libro bianco sul caso di Sinjavskij e Daniėl’ (White Book on the case of Siniavskii e Daniėl’) by Aleksandr Ginzburg (1967), again published under the pseudonym Nicola Sorin and in collaboration with Jaca Book,  sheds light on the trial of the two writers, about which news arrived in the West thanks to Ginzburg and the clandestine newspaper, Cronaca degli avvenimenti correnti (Chronicle of Current events).
Rapetti went on to publish other works for Jaca Book, including Il mestiere dello scrittore: tra autoritarismo e sfruttamento (The craft of the Writer: between Authoritarianism and Exploitation) by Solzhenitsyn (1979) and La ballata di Savva, Abitiamo la terra: due romanzi brevi (The Tale of Savva, We Work on the Land: Two Short Novels) and L’arca dei non chiamati (Ark for the Uninvited) by Vladimir Maksimov (1981 e 1982). He worked for Mondadori as an editor and translator, translating, among other works, Il fedele Ruslan (Faithful Ruslan) (1976) by Georgii Vladimov, Vita e straordinarie avventure del soldato Ivan Čonkin (The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Soldier Ivan Chonkin) by Vladimir Voinovich (1979, and Einaudi 1996) and Solzhenitsyn who asked personally that his work be entrusted to Rapetti after 1974. For Vallecchi he edited Indietro nell’acqua scura (Going Under) by Lidiia Chukovskaia (1979) and for Garzanti, who in the 1970s republished the classics of Russian Literature, he translated Siniavskii’s Nell’ombra di Gogol’ (In the Shadow of Gogol) (1980), using the pseudonym Abram Terz [Terts] and Buona notte! Romanzo (Good Night! A Novel) (1987).
During these years in Italy – as in the rest of Europe – there were widespread protests, particularly among the young who were critical of the Italian Communist Party’s acceptance of repressive acts perpetrated by the USSR, especially the invasion of Hungary and Prague. At this time, Rapetti maintained close contacts with emigrant intellectuals such as Vladimir Maksimov and the poet, writer and journalist Natal’ia Gorbanevskaia as well as with emigrant publishing houses, such as Posev in Frankfurt, the political-literary journal led by “Grani”, the YMCA Press, “Vestnik RKhD” (Messenger for the Russian Christian Movement) in Paris and “Kontinent”, which had become important channels for non-official Soviet culture outside the USSR (cf. ibid.).
Rapetti collaborated with “Kontinent” “from issue 10 (1976) […] to issue 70 (1992), the last issue to be published in Paris before the paper was transferred to Moscow” (ibid.) arranging for members of the editorial staff to participate in various events and organising important international conferences such as “Un continente per la cultura” (A Continent for Culture) promoted by the Konrad Adenauer Foundation (Milan, 21^st-22^nd May 1983) and “Una sindrome del post-totalitarismo. Il problema nazionale in URSS: rinnovamento o guerra civile” (A Syndrome of Post-Totalitarianism in the USSR: Renewal or Civil War) (Rome, 15^th-16^th October 1990). This latter was sponsored and supported by “Kontinent” in collaboration with the “Centro culturale Mondoperaio, (The Workers’ World Cultural Centre), the Italian Helsinki committee, newspapers and magazines from Moscow, writers such as Chingiz Aitmatov (who brought a message from Gorbachëv), Viktor Astaf ’ev and Valentin Rasputin and academics such as Dmitrii Lichachëv. In Rapetti’s words, “its round tables were packed with champions of dissent, illustrious journalists and Soviet experts from all over the world.” (ibid.).
Rapetti was one of the most active figures in disseminating unofficial Soviet culture in Italy, convinced that the conflictual decades of the 1960s and 1970s produced works and writers worthy of being published and included in global canons. From his viewpoint, the phenomenon of Soviet dissent has two sides, one reflecting its original nature and the other its representation in an Italian cultural context. Dissent “in its various components has hardly ever presented ideological platforms or political programmes as alternatives to the regime, from which it simply asks respect for elementary human rights which are guaranteed by the Soviet Constitution, but which have been replaced by persecution and condemnation” (ibid.).
While it is true that there are elements which “see in ‘Euro-communism’, which is critical of certain policies of the USSR, an ideal […] support and defense”, this debate is above all limited to the Helsinki Groups who seek a response from correspondents to Italian and French Communist newspapers in Moscow and are “surprised to find that they are ‘scared to death’ by the prospect of publishing their appeals (which in Italy and France would find voice in papers of a different point of view)” (ibid.). In Italy, the phenomenon of dissent has been interpreted politically; both emigrants and those who stay to defend their ideas in their homeland are required to produce “proof of eligibility” [which is] however never deemed satisfactory” (ibid.). What is evidentially lacking is a “reckoning” with the past and “the authentic nature of Bolshevism-Communism in the Soviet Union” – a repressive nature – that dissent can shed light on (cf. ibid.) and that a large section of Italian culture, especially Communist culture has decided to ignore. This lasting and at times definitive error in the Italian reception of Soviet dissent, is, according to Rapetti, due to a lack of will to understand a cultural phenomenon frequently based not on political objectives as much as a desire to freely express an independent cultural and literary identity and to be understood both at home and abroad.
Rapetti’s sensitive analysis of Soviet dissent led him to meet many key protagonists of the USSR’s Second Culture with whom he shared a commitment to the defence of human rights, including the above mentioned Solzhenitsyn, Siniavskii, Vladimov and Maksimov, but also Andrei Sakharov and his wife Elena Bonnėr, Aleksandr Ginzburg and his wife Arina, Iurii Orlov, Sergei Kovalev, Father Gleb Iakunin and Iurii Mal’tsev (one of the few dissidents to live in Italy).
His involvement in disseminating the Soviet Union’s alternative culture meant that Rapetti was a target of surveillance for the KGB. After a trip to Moscow in November 1977, during which he met Sakharov and two writers not aligned to the regime he was watched 24 hours a day and was threatened and searched. On his return to Italy, he received unpleasant telephone calls and visits at his office in Milan and was refused a visa for future visits to the USSR. He was refused entry into the USSR until May 1991, when, invited by Sakharov’s wife, he was permitted to attend a Congress in Moscow in memory of the dissident (cf. ibid.).
Rapetti has remained active in the 1990s and 2000s in translating banned Russian literature of the past as well as post-Soviet literature, finally free of censorship. In 1999 he translated for Einaudi the first complete edition of 145 Racconti di Kolyma (145 Tales of Kolyma) by Varlam Shalamov and in 2012 Ego by Solzhenitsyn, which presents two of the eight “stories in two parts” that the Nobel prize winner wrote between 1993 and 1998 (the other six were published in translation by Jaca Book). Other authors to be translated by Rapetti in recent years include Vladimir Makanin, Andrei Volos and the Nobel prize winner Svetlana Aleksievich. In 2017 he edited the ebook Dalla censura e dal samizdat alla libertà di stampa. URSS 1917-1990. Catalogo della mostra a cura di Boris Belenkin ed Elena Strukova con altri saggi (From censorship and the Samizdat to Press Freedom. USSR 1917-1990). Catalogue of the exhibition curated by Boris Belenkin and Elena Strukova with other essays (goWare, Memorial) and in 2019, Ritorno in Russia. 1994-2008. Saggi, discorsi e interviste (Return to Russia. 1994-2008. Essays, speeches and interviews) by Solzhenitsyn, with an introduction by Ermolai Solzhenitsyn (Marsilio Editori, Venice 2019).

Giuseppina Larocca
[30^th June 2021]

Translastion by Tammy Corkish

Bibliography

• Larocca G., Pieralli C. (eds.), La Russia attuale continua a rimanere quell’’altra faccia della Luna’. Intervista a Sergio Rapetti, 11.03.2019, https://www.culturedeldissenso.com/sergio-rapetti/, online (last accessed: 30/06/2021).