Information about the author:
Anastasia V. Golubtsova
Anastasia V. Golubtsova, PhD in Philology, Senior Researcher, А.M. Gorky Institute of World Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Povarskaya 25 а, 121069 Moscow, Russia.
ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1286-7707
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Abstract:
The article focuses on the war reports from the Eastern Front of World War II written by Italian author Curzio Malaparte for “Corriere della Sera”. In 1943 those reports were printed as a book under the title “The Volga Rises in Europe”. The book is divided into two parts: the first one describes the German offensive in Bessarabia and Ukraine, the second one is dedicated to the siege of Leningrad. The texts are considered in the perspective of the so-called “Russian myth”, a complex of Western notions and stereotypes about Russia, dating back to the 19th century. This mythological paradigm represents Russia (and the USSR) as a barbaric Asian country opposed to the European civilization. Malaparte rejects the traditional topoi of Russian myth, suggesting his own interpretation of the relations between USSR and Europe. According to him, USSR is “another Europe”; consequently, the war between USSR and Germany is not a conflict of East and West, as it was often represented by propaganda: it is “the West meeting itself”. Malaparte regards the war conflict between USSR and Germany not from a civilizational, but from a social, “class” perspective, as a clash of two different types of “workers’ morality”. According to this idea, the traditional elements of Russian myth (like a stereotypical image of “Russian soul”, including such traits as fatalism, spontaneous anarchism and a particular proneness to suffering, which are often considered characteristic of Russian people) acquire a new “social” sense and are now interpreted as a product of “workers’ morality” and Marxist ideology. In the article we advance a hypothesis, that this reinterpretation of the elements of Russian myth is connected with the influence of another mythological paradigm, the so-called “Soviet myth”, which spreads over most of Europe in the 1930s, while in Italy it reaches the peak of its influence only after the collapse of the Fascist regime.
Keywords: Curzio Malaparte, frontline reports, World War II, USSR, Russian myth, Soviet myth.
