Un finale per Terre dissodate: (ri)scritture sceniche del romanzo kolchoziano

Authors

  • Emilio Mari

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.13133/2239-1983/18074

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to analyze the practices of theatrical adaptation of Mikhail Sho- lokhov’s Virgin Soil Upturned in the context of the rapidly changing Soviet politics and aesthetics of the early 1930s. Despite being acclaimed by the government as a model of the new Party-oriented peasant literature produced by professional writers, the novel perhaps scored its biggest success in peripherical amateur and spontaneous theaters, whose distan- ce from Moscow could still grant them a certain level of autonomy from the emerging canon of Socialist Realism. Especially if considered in the framework of the theoretical debates of literary journals, these plays show how, even after the Great Turn of 1929, So- viet theatres continued to be a social laboratory where propaganda discourse and popular taste, high and low genres mixed heterogeneously, before the totalitarian art paradigm would eventually prevail.

Author Biography

Emilio Mari

Emilio Mari is Assistant Professor of Russian Language and Literature at Sapienza – Univer- sity of Rome, where he graduated with honors in 2012 and 2013. In 2017 he received his PhD in Literary, Linguistic and Comparative Studies from the University of Naples ‘L’Orientale’ and in 2019-2021 worked as a Research Fellow at the University of International Studies of Rome – UNINT. His areas of research include the semiotics of space and the relationshipsbetween Russian literature, architecture and landscape (urban, rural, provincial), Russian popular culture, folklore and mass culture, microhistory of the USSR, politics and practices of everyday life (leisure studies, material culture and consumer studies), Russian theatre and performing studies. He is a co-editor of eSamizdat. Journal of Slavic Cultures and the author of the book Between the Rural and the Urban: Landscape and Popular Culture in Petersburg, 1830-1917, which gain him the 2019 International Pushkin Award.

Published

2022-06-28 — Updated on 2022-06-28

Versions

How to Cite

Mari, E. (2022). Un finale per Terre dissodate: (ri)scritture sceniche del romanzo kolchoziano. Status Quaestionis, (22). https://doi.org/10.13133/2239-1983/18074