Symbolic Imagology of Southern Italy in Soviet Literature

Abstract

The article does not pretend to cover the topic in full. It focuses on little-known or forgotten works by Soviet-era writers, representatives of the pre-revolutionary Narodniki intelligentsia, and the so-called travelling companions, who were accepted by the Soviet authorities and created politically engaged foreign essays. The rigorism of the class campaign demanded the rejection of the cultural heritage of the past, but Italy persisted in the topoi and vocabulary of Soviet literature, inheriting and renewing the system of reception of its southern loci formed by the pre-revolutionary democratic discourse. The meta-symbol of the border, associated with the image of the Simplon tunnel, which took shape in Gorky’s Tales of Italy, served as a mechanism for further semiosis. Soviet travelogues and memoirs, as well as pre-revolutionary ones, contain in their plots the motif of crossing the border which appears as a fulfilment of the rite of initiation, burial and birth of planetary humanity. The Soviet Italiana, for all its ideological engagement, cannot and will not ignore the technical perfection of the ruined ancient monuments of southern Italy, nor the aesthetic heights reached by the art of the Italian Renaissance. The creative genius of Italy appears to the Soviet writer in the frame of the perfect natural world. And although the name of the Creator of this world is “forgotten”, the diversity of manifestations of the creative spirit that permeates every stone in Italy becomes the model of the cosmogonic myth that forms the basis of the “Italian text” of Soviet literature.