Studia Litterarum (Mar 2024)
Georgij Breitburd and Soviet Reception of Italian Neo-Avant-Garde
Abstract
The article analyzes the Soviet reception of Italian Neo-Avant-Garde (Group 63), including the contribution by Georgij Breitburd, translator, consultant on Italian literature at the Foreign Commission of the Union of Soviet Writers, one of the key figures in Soviet-Italian cultural relations. The study focuses on the focal episode of Neo-Avant-Garde polemics, that is, on Breitburd’s article in “Novy Mir” (March 1967) dedicated to Group 63 and on Italian discussion around it, which took place mainly in left-wing periodicals, like newspaper “Unità,” magazines “Rinascita” and “Quindici,” but also in moderate and center-right newspapers “Il Messaggero” and “La Discussione.” The article proves that Breitburd played a crucial role in the Soviet reception of Italian Neo-Avant-Garde. It was his article in “Novy Mir” that made possible profound and academically correct discussions around this movement in “Inostrannaya Literatura” and “Voprosy Literatury.” Breitburd’s ideological fight against Group 63 in the late 1960s and early 1970s paradoxically increased the popularity of the movement in the USSR. After Breitburd died and the fight stopped, Italian Neo-Avant-Garde literature was nearly forgotten by Soviet critics and researchers and now, in modern Russia, is known only to a narrow circle of specialists. Most of Neo-Avant-Garde fiction was not translated and published either in Soviet or in post-Soviet times and still remains practically unavailable to Russian-speaking readers.
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