PINOCCHIO FROM FLORENCE IN RUSSIAN BERLIN

Abstract

The article deals with the story of Carlo Collodi’s “The Adventures of Pinocchio”, translated by Nina Petrovskaya and revised by Aleksey Tolstoy in Berlin at the time of their collaboration in the newspaper “Nakanune”.
Attention is drawn to the use of commedia dell’arte characters’ names in international political newspeak in connection with the press appearances
of A. Gramsci whose biography is closely linked with pro-Bolshevik circles in Berlin and Moscow. The interest in the translation of “The Adventures of Pinocchio” in the Russian press in the 1920s was most probably linked to the beginning of Soviet-Italian relations and the choice of future course facing Russian emigrants. The hypothesis of the different positions of Aleksey Tolstoy and Maksim Gorky concerning the question of return to Russia is put forward. The circumstances of the choice of the book for translation and the alignment of translation by Nina Petrovskaya and processing of the translation by Aleksey Tolstoy are described. Emphasis is placed on the anti-fascist movement, the centre of which was Florence, the city of Carlo Collodi. Petrovskaya’s anti-fascist views and Tolstoy’s pro-Soviet stance enable us to see the tale from the perspective of social struggle and personal choice. The roles of both Russian authors in the work on the book and their relationship to the Italian-Russian patronage family Signorelli are clarified. The re-addressing of the tale, which predetermined the further oblivion of the Berlin book, is explained: the new translation was addressed not so much to children as to adults, Russian émigrés.

Keywords: Soviet-Italian relations, Russian emigration, Maksim Gorky, Antonio Gramsci, Carlo Collodi, Anatoliy Lunacharsky, Benito Mussolini, Aleksey Tolstoy, Nina Petrovskaya, Olga Resnevich-Signorelli, folk puppet
theatre, author’s fairy tale, pamphlet, Pinocchio, Buratino