Amid Journalists, Communists, and a Russian Countess: Viktor Shklovsky's Italian Journey (1964–1969)

Abstract This article focuses on the reception of Viktor Shklovsky in Italy in the 1960s. Relying on archival sources and semistructured interviews, the author reconstructs the ways the Communist journal Rassegna sovietica and the small publisher De Donato Editore operated and contributed to the appearance of a surprising amount of Italian translations from this author. Beyond the reconstruction of the historical context, the author pays particular attention to the strategies of emplotment that Rassegna sovietica and De Donato Editore used to present Shklovsky to their public. Drawing from André Lefevere, Hayden White, and on the OPOYAZ members themselves, the author shows how De Donato and Rassegna sovietica deployed two diametrically opposite strategies; while the former borrowed a well-defined plot to talk about Soviet writers from Italian newspapers, the latter privileged an exploratory approach to the material that did not entail any definite judgment on the topic.