Russia in Italo Calvino’s and Alberto Moravia's travel notes
The paper describes the context of Italo Calvino’s “The Diary of a Journey to the
Soviet Union” and Alberto Moravia’s “A Month in the USSR”, originally published,
respectively, in 1953 and 1956 in the Italian newspapers L’Unitá and Corriere della
Sera. For Italian intellectuals, a journey to the USSR had a pronounced cultural and
political motivation, and was fueled by the desire to see with their own eyes a country
in which, according to Andre Gide, “utopia was becoming reality”. Representatives of