LEA - Lingue e Letterature d'Oriente e d'Occidente, Vol 6 (2017)

The following text is a report upon the Congress organized by two scholars of the University of Udine, in order to present new and original contributions in studies related to 1917’s Russian Revolution. The main aim of the promoters was to invite best of the Italian experts in Russian and Slavic studies to discuss together in Udine. Thanks to its geographic position and historic heritage Udine seems to be the ideal place to connect Western...

With his latest publication, Christian Genetelli focuses again on Giacomo Leopardi’s correspondence. Looking for a new method to ascertain one of the collateral sources, which traditionally contributes to historical, biographical and aesthetical research, this book revolves around a sort of editorial cold case, i.e. the earliest collections of Leopardi’s epistles. At the same time, it may also represent a beginning for other editions, based a philological premise that could lead to a new critical edition...

Some events of our history hurt us deeply, as rational and moral beings, without time or recurrence of (in)direct experiences being able to create addiction. But, how can we ensure this collective memory over time? How can we preserve it from ambiguous manipulations, in a world that is constantly attracted by indifference and banalization? Gli intellettuali/scrittori ebrei e il dovere della testimonianza wants to answer these questions by setting up an interdisciplinary and intercultural dialogue....

This review of the new (2017) Italian translation by Giorgio Ziffer of Paul Maas’ famous Textkritik focuses mainly on three aspects: the first concerns the translator’s decision to translate the German text as literally as possible. The second concerns how this choice is related to the particular importance bestowed on style, vocabulary and syntax in Paul Maas’ scholarly discourse. Finally, the third concerns the topicality of Paul Maas’ ecdotic thought, illustrated by some examples of...

The Cambridge Companion to the Postcolonial Novel is a useful collection of essays by the leading scholars in the field. It provides an essential compendium of the different perspectives and achievements in the domain of  postcolonial studies focusing primarily on the novel as an aesthetic form tied up with social and political issues. The main aim of this article is not to summarize each essay, but to foreground the conceptual density of the volume and...

This is a review of the second volume of L’Ermetismo e Firenze, Atti del convegno internazionale di studi Firenze, 27-31 ottobre 2014, Luzi, Bigongiari, Parronchi, Bodini, Sereni, vol. II, a cura di Anna Dolfi. It provides a brief description of the fifty-five papers published in the conference proceedings.

This article aims to reflect upon the problematic relationships between Turkey and the European Union. The long lasting difficulties facing Turkey’s entrance in the European family have many explanations and the obstacles are situated on both sides. Whilst the European Community is basically concerned with Turkey’s religious and cultural difference, Turkey’s difficulties derive from the historical formation of its democracy, and of the relations between state and society.

This article aims to expand the reflection upon the ways of Muslim women's participation in politics through a close examination of the Turkish context. Therefore as peculiarities of the Turkish case, it investigates the changes generated by the modernization initiated by the Ottoman élite in the first decades of the 19th century and carried on by the nationalists after the foundation of the Turkish Republic in 1923. Focused on the power dynamics underlying the relation...

The study of the North Germanic and Finnish conceptions of the Other World from a comparative-contrastive point of view highlights several differences, but at the same time allows us to suggest explanations about complicated Germanic concepts, such as that of the soul. According to the Finns, the soul could be a living or shattered soul, while it seems the Germans knew only the former. Thanks to the Finnish concept of haltia, we may assume that...

Kato is the Hungarian name of Katia Bleier, Luigi Meneghello’s wife. The Bertoliana Library, in Vicenza, holds over forty letters from Luigi Meneghello to Kato, written during two very important lifespans: the autumn of 1948, when Meneghello was waiting for the arrival in England of his newly wedded wife, and the spring-summer of 1954, when Kato was hospitalised in Reading for a severe illness. These letters are a document of considerable emotional intensity, but they...

What is the relationship between nonhuman animals and children’s literature? And if animals survive in stories (as images, metaphors or myths), how does this happen? In this article, we aim to offer an overview of recent studies about this, focusing on the role of the animal as an element of transformation: a key to an ecological view for the child, as shown by the two case-studies presented.

The beginning of the 20th century was a period of linguistic and literary renewal in Estonia, where Italian literature became a reference point for the young generation of local modernists. This article analyses the influence of Italian writers on Estonian culture between 1905 and 1918, focusing on the activities of the literary movement “Young Estonia”. Its predilection for decadent aestheticism is compared with the impressions that direct contact with Italy made on the Estonian intellectuals...

The Knight of the Burning Pestle is a colourful and lively burlesque comedy by Francis Beaumont, performed at the Blackfriars Theatre in 1607. It was not a success; the play, rejected by the Jacobean audience, is now considered the most important item in the Beaumont- and-Fletcher canon. This Jacobean drama is characterized by sharp and original social satire conveyed through a multilayered message and a meta-fictional structure as the elements of this extraordinary, indeed emblematic...

The main aim of this article is to challenge the interpretation of Karen Blixen’s Out of Africa as a sample of autobiographical or memorialistic writing, and to highlight its connections to ethnography and epic. By means of a contrastive analysis of the literary work based on Blixen’s experience as a European farmer in Kenya and the private epistolary written during her seventeen-year-long stay in Africa, the present study investigates the writer’s stylistic choice of depersonalization...

In 1852 János Arany articulated his experience of Dante in an ode written to him (“Dante”). Based on the lines of Inferno, I, 79-80 (“Art thou that Virgil, then, that fountain-head / which poureth forth so broad a stream of speech?”), Dante’s oeuvre is presented as deep and vast waters. The Biblical language building up the complex image of the waters makes it possible to associate the scene of the ode with that of the...

The aim of this article is to analyse the multifaceted identity of the city of Florence at the beginning of the 20th Century, under the perspective of the German artists and intellectuals, who chose the “reachable Arcadia” of the Renaissance as their home. The Florentine diaries of Aby Warburg, who is the protagonist of Florenz 1900. Die Suche nach Arkadien, written by the Swiss historian Bernd Roeck (2001), guide us through the analysis.