Ricerc@Sapienza

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
the Italian cultural elite went to large Russian cities – Moscow, Leningrad, Stalingrad,
travelled as part of official delegations, at the invitation of government agencies or the
Union of Soviet Writers. They wanted to compare Russian reality with its imageexisting in their minds, and to meet Russian writers and poets. Texts written during
these journeys became a genre variety of the canonical travelogue, and found their
natural place on the pages of the Italian Communist Party’s official newspaper
L’Unitá. However, their content was not only political, but also cultural, these testimonies
and reports were also of interest for large national periodicals La Stampa and
Corriere della Sera.
The texts of Calvino and Moravia reveal some common features, but also their
great uniqueness; The latter is explained primarily by the fact that they made their
journeys in 1951 and 1956, respectively, so the journeys were separated by the death
of Stalin and the beginning of the Thaw. The travellers were of different age: Calvino
was a young twenty-eight-year-old author of only one successful novel The Path to
the Nest of Spiders, while Moravia came to Russia as a fifty-year-old well-known intellectual
and a laureate of many literary awards.
As a result, Calvino’s travelogue became a kind of evidence of his role in Italian
culture, and an opportunity to find a real proof for what he believed in in the country
that made this faith reality. Unlike Calvino, Moravia does not seek to offer the reader
a consistently chronologically sustained diary of his journey; rather, his goal is to
create a picture of the Russian world, sometimes very critical. In his narrative, Moravia
adheres to the neutral style of the narrator, who wants to objectively fix his impressions
and observations, avoids emotionality, and does not strive to evoke empathy
in the reader.