{"id":4307,"date":"2021-04-05T08:30:49","date_gmt":"2021-04-05T08:30:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vocilibereurss.fupress.net\/la-ricezione-italiana-del-dottor-zivago\/"},"modified":"2021-12-28T13:48:05","modified_gmt":"2021-12-28T13:48:05","slug":"the-italian-reception-of-doktor-zhivago","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vocilibereurss.fupress.net\/en\/the-italian-reception-of-doktor-zhivago\/","title":{"rendered":"The Italian reception of “Doktor Zhivago”"},"content":{"rendered":"[vc_row type=”in_container” full_screen_row_position=”middle” column_margin=”default” column_direction=”default” column_direction_tablet=”default” column_direction_phone=”default” scene_position=”center” text_color=”dark” text_align=”left” row_border_radius=”none” row_border_radius_applies=”bg” overlay_strength=”0.3″ gradient_direction=”left_to_right” shape_divider_position=”bottom” bg_image_animation=”none”][vc_column column_padding=”no-extra-padding” column_padding_tablet=”inherit” column_padding_phone=”inherit” column_padding_position=”all” background_color_opacity=”1″ background_hover_color_opacity=”1″ column_shadow=”none” column_border_radius=”none” column_link_target=”_self” gradient_direction=”left_to_right” overlay_strength=”0.3″ width=”1\/1″ tablet_width_inherit=”default” tablet_text_alignment=”default” phone_text_alignment=”default” column_border_width=”none” column_border_style=”solid” bg_image_animation=”none”][vc_column_text]\n
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Source: picture submitted by the author.<\/em><\/p><\/div>\n

Title:<\/em><\/strong>
\n<\/strong>Doktor Zhivago [Doctor Zhivago]\n

Author: <\/em><\/strong>Boris Pasternak (1890-1960)<\/p>\n

Years:<\/em><\/strong> 1957-1958<\/p>\n

Description:
\n<\/em><\/strong>In November 1957, the novel Doktor Zhivago<\/em><\/a> by Boris Pasternak was published by Giangiacomo Feltrinelli for the first time anywhere in the world, becoming a bestseller in the emerging Italian publishing industry. Sergio D\u2019Angelo, an Italian journalist for Radio Mosca was engaged by Feltrinelli to search for new works in the USSR and in 1957 brought Pasternak’s manuscript, which had not been officially published in the Soviet Union, to Italy.
\nPublication had been blocked in the USSR for political reasons, and, although the Italian left was divided over how to receive dissent from within the Soviet Union, Feltrinelli, at the time a member of the Italian Communist Party (the PCI), chose to publish the book despite Soviet disapproval and anger expressed by Italian communists. Khrushchev himself intervened, asking Togliatti to prevent the novel’s publication, with the result that Feltrinelli left the PCI. In the following two months, 30 editions of the novel were published.
\nThe royalties were huge; the book was translated into several languages and adapted for a film, which was also a major success. Reviews of the work and debates in magazines and daily papers made Pasternak a well known name. However, behind the stereotypical images of the USSR and Cold War rhetoric, Italian politics and culture was influenced in deep and subtle ways by the publication of this novel from behind the iron curtain. Amidst reports about Soviet censorship and persecutions, editorial espionages stories, and accounts of smuggled transcripts and translations, the “Zhivago-Revolution”, besides making Feltrinelli significant profits, sparked a lively political and ideological debate in Italy.
\nThe editors of \u201cNovyi Mir\u201d, condemned the publication by Feltrinelli and accused the author of anti-Sovietism, due to the \u201ccounter-revolutionary\u201d contents of the novel.
\nMario Alicata, who chaired the cultural Committee of the PCI, supported the Soviet position, judging the novel \u201cinappropriate\u201d after the 20th Congress and accused it of being \u201copenly political”, and “frankly counter-revolutionary” in its tone (Alicata 1958: 4).\u00a0 He believed the work’s publication was part of a “political and ideological campaign” promoted by the capitalistic world, \u201cto transform the self-criticism of specific mistakes made at the 20th Congress into an attack against the socialist revolution and socialism as system\u201d (i<\/em>bid.<\/em>: 7).
\nConversely Gianni Toti, journalist and trades unionist, who had broken with the Communist Party following the Soviet invasion of Budapest, recommended the novel to all communist workers. \u201cThe Pasternak Case\u201d certainly contributed to accentuating the divisions on the Left which had emerged after the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956.
\nCarlo Muscetta, Italo Calvino and Cesare Cases,\u00a0 three \u201cEinaudian\u201d communists, who had left the PCI between 1956 and 1959, in protest against events in Hungary criticized the novel for various mainly aesthetic reasons, considering it incomplete and marooned between the great narratives of the nineteenth-century and the deconstruction of the novel in European twentieth-century prose fiction. They did not deny, however, the value of the work, the significance of its critical stance towards Marxist ideology and aesthetics, and its rereading of the events of the revolution and developments in Soviet society.\u00a0Alberto Moravia identified the \u201cunbalanced\u201d relation between man and history as a central component of the plot, concluding that the novel described lives that had been stunted and overwhelmed by a superior and hostile force.
\nFranco Fortini<\/a>, considered the novel in the light of the complex problems of Soviet society, which, since a general realisation of Stalin’s crimes, had had the difficult task of reevaluating the meaning and importance of the revolution. Pasternak indicated a way forward: doubts about communism were legitimate, given the oppressive reality of Soviet society, and necessitated a rereading of Russia’s revolutionary history from the point of view of the present.
\nIn liberal circles, debate centred on two questions: the first regarded Marxist reception of the work, which was accused of masking political and ideological arguments as aesthetic considerations, while the second concerned the anti-Soviet purpose of the novel.\u00a0 Lionel Abel declared that although he didn’t much appreciate the novel, he considered it essential for its anti-Soviet point of view.
\nFor Father Floris in \u201cCivilt\u00e0 Cattolica\u201d, the anticommunism of the work was directly connected to a spiritual message.
\nNicola Chiaromonte\u2019s interpretation was more interesting and complex. An antifascist exiled in the USA, he challenged both those who supported an outright anti-Soviet position and intellectuals who claimed to offer \u201cneutral\u201d interpretations based on philological and literary principles alone such as Tommaso Landolfi, Guido Piovene and Pietro Citati who tried to separate aesthetic analyses from ideological questions. The “Pasternak case” is illustrative of the influence of dissenting works on historical and cultural events in Italy, at a time in which the reception of Soviet writers was framed by a nascent publishing industry.<\/p>\n

Alessandra Reccia
\n<\/em><\/strong>[30th\u00a0June 2021]\n

Translation by Diletta Bacci<\/p>\n

Bibliography<\/em><\/strong>\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Magazines and daily articles<\/strong><\/p>\n