Vittorio Strada

Milan, 1929 – Venice, 2018

V. Strada, C. Strada and E. Evtuschenko. Moscow 1959. Source: http://www.independent-academy.net/

Vittorio Strada (1929-2018) was a world-renowned literary critic and scholar of Russian culture who became a pillar of Italian and international Slavism. Under his influence, generations of authoritative scholars and intellectuals were formed as well as a general readership open to Russian literature and culture.
Strada was one of the most important figures for disseminating dissenting Soviet works in Italy. In 1954 he became editorial consultant in Russian-Soviet literature for Einaudi, a role he held until the end of the 1960s, when, for ideological reasons related to the adherence of some Einaudian editors to the cultural revolution of Mao, he resigned, returning to collaborate with the publishing house in later years.
During his intellectual and editorial career he wrote for several newspapers such as “l’Avanti!”, “L’Unità”, “Corriere della Sera”, and “la Repubblica”, as well as the Italian magazines “Il Contemporaneo”, “Rinascita”, “L’Europa Letteraria”, “Rossiia/Russia” (which he founded in 1974), and in the Russian-Soviet sphere, “Kontinent”, “Russkaia mysl’” and “Strana i mir”.
His numerous contributions to periodicals focus not only on literary discourse but also on socio-political and ideological questions, highlighting the importance of Russian culture in Italy and in the wider European context.
As a literary critic, Strada traced a literary canon that visited Dostoevskii, Chekhov, Gorkii, Maiakovskii and Pasternak, (cf. the volume Le veglie della ragione (Vigils of Reason) (1986), but which also incorporated authors who were little known in Italy and often unpublished in the USSR such as, Ėduard Bagritskii, Evgenii Shvarts, Nikolai Ėrdman, and Vladimir Tendriakov. He reconstructed the literary and cultural context of Russia’s revolutionary era and the ideological and aesthetic questions connected with it. In his theoretical reflections Leninism occupies a prominent place. His analyses of Lenin’s leadership and legacy, which he compares, not only with Stalinism but also with heterodox currents within Marxist thought, changed over the years in the light of developments within the Soviet Union.
In his Autoritratto autocritico (A self-critical, self-portrait), Strada describes the political-ideological trajectory of his life as he moved from “critical Marxism” to “Marxist criticism”.

1. From the fifties to the second half of the sixties (Giuseppina Larocca)

The fifties saw Strada debut as a translator, with the publication of his translation of Nella città natale by Viktor Nekrasov (In the Home Town) published by Einaudi in 1955 (and later by Mondadori in 1962). Strada worked with Einaudi for more than a decade. During this time, he also wrote a series of essays about the Thaw which were published mainly in “Il Contemporaneo” and  “L’Europa letteraria”. These essays attracted the attention not only of Italian but also of Soviet readers, especially among the ruling class; as a result, because of the criticisms Strada made of Soviet ideology, he was denied access to the doctorate programme at Moscow State University (he never formally finished his doctorate due to accusations of “revisionism” and anti-Leninist thought) (cf. Vittorio. Biograficheskaia spravka 2005: 9-10).
Despite the friction between Strada and the Soviet authorities, he managed to travel to the Soviet Union and gain access to the country’s intellectual circles. He met many of the protagonists of Soviet dissent and witnessed what he described as “a renewal and […] a purification of stale Soviet dogmas” (Strada 1956: 7). He immediately understood the enormous artistic and scientific scope of the literature of the Thaw and the importance of the literary theories formulated during this period and was especially interested in the unofficial literature of the Stalin era. He worked to bring the works of Soviet writers to the Italian public despite the difficulties inherent in such a project.
During the 1960s, while Strada continued to work on translations, he engaged in profound reflections about the USSR and its history, concluding that there was a need for a “socialist humanism” (Strada 1967: LXXIII): During this time he translated Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Nikolai Zabolotskii, Evgenii Shvarts, Ėduard Bagritskii, and Iurii Davydov, whose texts were sometimes also translated by others such as Clara Coïsson, Pietro Zveteremich and Raffaello Uboldi.
He also wrote a series of introductions to new translations including Lettere agli amici georgiani (Letters to Georgian Friends) (Einaudi 1967) by Pasternak and a series of articles in “Il Contemporaneo”, “Rinascita” and “L’Europa letteraria” on subjects including: the position of “Novyi mir” and its editor Aleksandr Tvardovskyii after Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was published in the magazine (No. 11, 1962); the Pasternak case; the protest of Esenin-Vol’pin, the Siniavskii-Daniėl’ trial; and the persecution of Iosif Brodskii. He also drew attention to writers ousted from the official canon such as Andreii Platonov, defined as the last representative of the “Russian anti-utopians” (cit. in De Michelis 1990: 226). Strada’s hermeneutic studies focused at this time on the post-Stalin literary canon which he investigated in Letteratura sovietica 1953-1963 (Soviet Literature 1953-1963) (Editori Riuniti 1964) and previous literary production especially from 1934 onwards which is the subject of his introduction to Rivoluzione e letteratura (Revolution and Literature) (1967) translated by Giorgio Kraiski.
A growing desire to understand the dynamics of Russian-Soviet literature, and especially non-official literature, led Strada to study the tools and methodologies of literary criticism and theory. He was one of the first to espouse “formalist and neo-formalist criticism” and the theories of Mikhail Bakhtin in Italy. Largely thanks to Strada, in 1964, the magazine “Questo e altro” published translations of works by young writers from the Moscow-Tartu school, such as Boris Uspenskii, Viacheslav Vs. Ivanov, Aleksandr Zholkovskii and Iurii Shcheglov; Strada wrote the introduction, Formalismo e neoformalismo (Formalism and Neoformalism). In this period Strada’s translations included Strumenti critici (Critical Tools) by Iurii Tynianov and Iurii Lotman, and Roman Iakobson’s presentation in the collection edited by Tzvetan Todorov, I formalisti russi (Russian Formalists) (Einaudi 1968). Again, thanks to Strada, in 1968, Einaudi published in translation Dostoevskij. Poetica e stilistica (Dostoevskii. Poetics and Stylistics) by Mikhail Bakhtin, followed in the seventies by Bachtiniane (Works by Bakhtin) and Problemi di teoria del romanzo (Problems in the Theory of the Novel) (Einaudi 1976).
By the end of the 1960s, Strada had acquired a deep understanding of Soviet culture and society and had embarked on a path that led him to stigmatize Soviet self-consciousness, which he believed incapable of “fully Marxising ” (Strada 1966: 11). He sought to give a voice to the unofficial literature which had spread during the early years of Stalin and unearth the contemporary writers whose work was coming to the surface as a result of the Thaw. He also promoted the new literary science of Bakhtinian “formalism” which was received according to the then dominant theories of structuralism and nascent semiotics.

2. From the late 1960s to the early 1990s (Alessandra Reccia)

The second phase began in the late 1960s and continued for over a decade. During this period, Strada focused on spreading knowledge of Russian-Soviet culture, especially in its non-institutional and unorthodox manifestations, and its theoretical presuppositions. Events in Prague in 1968 were a watershed for Strada who saw the Soviet invasion as “the beginning of the end” for any hope of reform. 1968 was also the year in which his relations with Soviet institutions were interrupted, following his arrest, together with his family, by the Soviet authorities, for having attempted to bring to Italy a letter from Solzhenitsyn, addressed to “L’Unità”. However, Strada continued to take interest in the progressive forces within Soviet cultural and hoped for an effective emancipation of the Italian Communist Party (PCI), of which he carried a card until 1980, from the conditioning of the CPSU.
In 1969 Strada oversaw the publication of works by Solzhenitsyn such as, Reparto C (Cancer Ward), for which he wrote the introduction, and in 1971, together with Clara Coïsson and Pietro Zveteremich he translated Per il bene della causa (For the Good of the Cause) for Mondadori. He also contributed to Einaudi’s catalogue of contemporary writers by overseeing the publication of works that were censored or could not be published in the USSR, such as Maestro e Margherita (The Master and Margarita) by Bulgakov in 1967 (that came out at the same time as the edition by Di Donato), as well as works that are less well known, such as the novel and stories Invidia e I tre grassoni (Envy and the Three Fat Men) (1969) by Iurii Olesha or the utopian novel Viaggio di mio fratello Aleksej nel paese dell’utopia contadina (Journey of my Brother, Alexei, to the Land of Peasant Utopia) by Aleksandr Chaianov (1979) and La facoltà delle cose inutili (The Faculty of Useless Knowledge) (1979) by Iurii Dombrovskii.
Strada also edited an Italian edition of Iakobson’s essay, written after the suicide of Maiakovskii, Una generazione che a dissipato i suoi poeti (A Generation that squandered its poets) (1975).
In this period Strada began to consider the connections between Lenin and Stalinism. In his introduction to the translation of Lenin’s Che fare? (What is to be Done?), he engages in a systematic critique of the theoretical framework of Soviet communism which he continues in his introductions to Trotskii’s Letteratura e rivoluzione (Literature and Revolution) (1973) and Iulii Martov’s Bolscevismo mondiale: la prima critica marxista del leninismo al potere (World Bolshevism: the first Marxist critique of Leninism in Power) (1980). The idea that heterodox revolutionary theories ought to be taken into consideration and compared with dominant Leninist interpretations is also present in Strada’s decision to edit Gobetti’s classic Il paradosso dello spirito russo (The Paradox of the Russian Spirit) (1969), while his desire to reassess the Russian intellectual climate of the revolutionary era and the nineteenth century is evident in Tradizione e rivoluzione nella letteratura russa (Tradition and Revolution in Russian Literature) (Strada 1969 and then 1980), and his translation of A un vecchio compagno (To an Old Friend) by Aleksandr Herzen (1977). On a similar theme, Strada also edited an Italian edition of the work by the Polish contemporary historian Andrzej Walicki on Russian Slavophilia, Un’utopia conservatrice (A Conservative Utopia) (1973).
Throughout this period, Strada remained committed to a Marxism, seeking to place the phenomenon of dissent within a Marxist critique of the Soviet system.
In 1977, again for Einaudi, he edited the anthology Dissenso e socialismo (Dissent and Socialism), a collection of works by Soviet dissidents which had appeared in the almanac samizdat Dvadtsatyi Vek. Obshchestvenno-politicheskii i literaturnyj al’manakh (The twentieth century. Socio-political and literary almanac, 1975-1976), a mouthpiece for Marxist currents of Soviet dissent, published in London and edited by Roi Medvedev and Raisa Lert.
In the same year Strada caused considerable controversy by refusing to take part in the Venice Biennale of Dissent, organized by Carlo Ripa di Meana, after the event was boycotted by the PCI, which had initially been in favour of the initiative. He was attacked by intellectuals close to the Italian Socialist Party (PSI) as well as by liberal-democratic intellectuals, and by Brodskii himself. Strada defended himself against accusations of ideological obtuseness, intellectual cowardice and flattering the PSI, from the pages of “La Repubblica”, insisting that he rejected positions of uncritical, biased and politically orientated  anti-Sovietism and anti-communism (cf. Guagnelli 2010-2011: 325).
His commitment to Soviet dissent was confirmed in 1974, when he founded the international magazine “Rossiia/Russia”, which published articles by numerous Soviet intellectuals in exile, with the aim of overcoming the cultural barriers between East and West. At this time, he renounced his collaboration with both “L’Unità” and “Rinascita” and, after entering academia, severed his working relationship with Einaudi.
In 1980 Strada finally left the PCI and began a radical review of his previous political-ideological position, reflecting on the historical and cultural expressions of dissent under Russian totalitarianism, which together with Nazism and Fascism, were viewed as expressions of new faiths born in the twentieth century, at the centre of which, it was unavoidable to acknowledge, were the Lager and Gulag concentration camps. This period of reassessment opens with the essay Marxismo e postmarxismo (Marxism and Post Marxism) and continues with the third person autobiographical narrative L’autoritratto autocritico (A self-critical self-portrait) in which Strada re-examines his individual intellectual story in relation to “a past full of questions”.
This phase is characterized by the publication of a series of important essays exploring futurism and Russian symbolism (Strada 1988) and the promotion, together with George Nivat and Ilia Serman, of the Einaudian Storia della letteratura russa (A History of Russian Literature) (1989-1991). A full acknowledgement that the system of Soviet oppression was the most violent among those of the twentieth century was presented in Strada’s 2004 essay dedicated to the figure of Vasilii Grossman, Completezza della memoria e coscienza storica (Completeness in Historical Memory and Conscience) (Strada 2004).

Giuseppina Larocca, Alessandra Reccia
[30th June 2021]

Translation by Chiara Gianferotti

Selected publications [in chronological order]

• Strada V., La letteratura sovietica e il XXII Congresso del PCUS, “Il Contemporaneo”, 43 (1961): 3-29.
• Strada V., È in atto il ‘disgelo’ della critica sovietica, “L’Europa letteraria”, 3, 18, December 1962: 7-13.
• Strada V., Problemi del rapporto direzione-libertà nella cultura dell’URSS, “Il Contemporaneo”, 62, 1963: 4-29.
• Strada V., I vinti sono vincitori nel libro di Solzenicyn, “Rinascita”, 20, 27, Saturday 6th July 1963: 24-25.
• Strada V., Nota, in A. Afinogenov, Pagine inedite di diario su Pasternak, “L’Europa letteraria”, 26, January-February 1964: 32-36.
• Strada V., Opere e scrittori oggi nell’URSS, “Rinascita”, 22, 5th June 1965: 25-27.
• Strada V., Prefazione, in Ju.N. Davydov, Il lavoro e la libertà. Una teoria della società comunista, italian translation by V. Strada, Einaudi, Torino 1966: 7-11.
• Strada V., Libri e scrittori nell’Unione Sovietica, “Rinascita”, 23, 8, Saturday 19 February 1966: 7-10.
• Strada V., Introduzione, in V. Lenin, Che fare?, translation and edition by C. e V. Strada, Einaudi, Torino 1971: VII-XCIV.
• Strada V., Introduzione, in R. Jakobson, Una generazione che ha dissipato i suoi poeti, edition by V. Strada, Einaudi, Torino 1975: VI- XVIII.
• Strada V., Dissenso e socialismo, in Dissenso e socialismo, una voce marxista del samizdat sovietico, Einaudi, Torino 1977: VI-XXIX.
• Strada V., Signori, il dissenso non deve essere un bene di consumo, “La Repubblica”, 17th November 1977: 14.
• Strada V., Consenso/Dissenso, in Enciclopedia Einaudi, vol. III, Einaudi, Torino 1978: 806-817.
• Strada V., Marxismo e postmarxismo, in Storia del marxismo, vol. IV. Il marxismo oggi, Einaudi, Torino 1982: 88-113.
• Strada V., Le veglie della ragione. Miti e figure della letteratura russa da Dostoevskij a Pasternak, Einaudi, Torino 1986.
• Strada V., La mia Russia einaudiana, “La Stampa. Società e Cultura”, 6th May 1990: 2.
• Strada V., Incontro con Pasternak, Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, Napoli 1990.
• Strada V., Autoritratto autocritico. Archeologia della Rivoluzione d’ottobre, Liberal, Roma 2004.

Selected translations [in chronological order]

• Poeti sovietici d’oggi (O. Bergol’c, V. Evtuschenko, L. Martynov, B. Pasternak, B. Slutskii, N. Zabolotskii), traslation by M. Socrate, P. Zveteremich, V. Strada, G. Crino, Rassegna sovietica, VII, 5, September-October 1956: 126-139.
• Nekrasov V., Nella città natale, italian translation by V. Strada, Einaudi, Torino 1955.
• Solzhenitsyn A., Una giornata di Ivan Denisovič. La casa di Matrjona. Alla stazione di Krecetkova, translation by R. Uboldi, C. Coisson, V. Strada (unique translation authorized by the author), Einaudi, Torino 1961.
• Evtuschenko E., Non sono nato tardi!, italian translation by V. Strada, L’Europa letteraria, 8, April 1961: 52.
• Shvarts E., Il drago, preface and translation by V. Strada, Einaudi, Torino 1962.
• Tendriakov V., Tre, sette, asso e altri racconti, italian translation by V. Strada e C. Coïsson, Einaudi, Torino 1962.
• Zabolotskii N., Colonne di piombo, italian translation by V. Strada, Editori Riuniti, Torino 1962.
• Bagritskii E., L’ultima notte, introduction and italian translation by V. Strada, Einaudi, Torino 1965.
• Davydov Iu., Il lavoro e la libertà. Una teoria della società comunista, italian translation by V. Strada, Einaudi, Torino 1966.
• Tynianov Iu., “Sulla composizione dell’‘Evgenij Onegin’”, italian translation by V. Strada, “Strumenti critici”, 2 (1967): 163-183.
• Solzhenitsyn A., Per il bene della causa, italian translation by C. Coïsson, V. Strada, P. Zveteremich, Mondadori, Milano 1971.

 Bibliography

• Le edizioni Einaudi negli anni 1933-2003, Einaudi, Torino 2003.
• Vittorio. Biograficheskaia spravka, in S. Bokharov, A. Parnis (eds.), Vittorio. Mezhdunarodnyi nauchnyi sbornik, pozviashchënnij 75-letiiu Vittorio Strady, Tri kvadrata, Moskva 2005: 9-14.
• D’Ambrosi C., La civiltà letteraria negli anni 1960-1965 in URSS attraverso le riviste ‘Tempo presente’ and ‘L’Europa letteraria’, Master Degree Thesis, University of Florence, Academic Year 2016/2017.
• De Michelis C.G., Letteratura russa del Novecento, in G. Brogi Bercoff, G. Dell’Agata, P. Marchesani, R. Picchio (eds.), La slavistica in Italia. Cinquant’anni di studi (1940-1990), Istituto Poligrafico e della Zecca dello Stato, Roma 1994: 209-246.
• Fabiano S. (ed.), Gli autori russi in ‘Rassegna sovietica’ dal 1949 al 1980, “Rassegna sovietica”, 6, November-Dicember 1980: 113-208.
• Fabiano S. (ed.), Gli autori russi e sovietici nei periodici italiani, “Rassegna sovietica”, 6, November-Dicember 1980: 157-166.
• Guagnelli S., Rane, elefanti e cavalli. Vittorio Strada e la Biennale del 1977, “eSamizdat”, 2010-2011 (VIII): 317-329.
• Malcovati F. (ed.), Letteratura russa e altre letterature slave, Garzanti, Milano 1989.
• Mancosu P., Živago nella tempesta. Le avventure editoriali del capolavoro di Pasternak, Italian translation by F. Peri, Feltrinelli, Milano 2014.
• Reccia A., L’Italia nelle relazioni culturali sovietiche, tra pratiche d’apparato e politiche del disgelo, “eSamizdat”, 2012-2013 (IX): 23-42.
• Reccia A., Il lavoro dello slavista: Ripellino, Zveteremich e Strada tra progetti culturali e politiche editoriali, “L’ospite ingrato”, 12th April 2015. https://www.ospiteingrato.unisi.it/il-lavoro-dello-slavistaripellino-zveteriemich-e-strada-tra-progetti-culturali-e-politiche-editoriali/, online (last accessed: 30/06/2021).
• Ripa di Meana C., Mecucci G., L’ordine di Mosca. Fermate la Biennale del Dissenso, Liberal, Roma 2007.
• Sedakova O., Nash drug Vittorio Strada. Predislovie k knige Vittorio Strada “Rossiia kak sud’ba. Sbornik statei”, in V. Strada, Rossiia kak sud’ba. Sbornik statej, Tri kvadrata, Moskva 2013: 7-9.
• Šestakova N., Bibliografia della letteratura sovietica tradotta in Italia dal 1945 a oggi, “Rassegna sovietica”, 2, March-April 1987: 59-112.
• Vittorio Strada (1953-1980), Corrispondenza con collaboratori italiani, Torino, Archivio Einaudi, faldone 204, fascicolo 28/1.