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Irina Arzamastseva
PINOCCHIO FROM FLORENCE IN RUSSIAN BERLIN
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
Irina Arzamastseva
Institute of Philology, Moscow State Pedagogical University, Russia
arzamas_i@mail.ru
DOI: 10.31860/2304-5817-2022-1-21-285-303
The scope of this article is limited mainly to the external circumstances of the appearance of Carlo Collodi's "The Adventures of Pinocchio", translated by Nina Petrovskaya and revised by Aleksey Tolstoy, which was published in 1924 in Berlin by the pro-Bolshevik publisher "Nakanune". The aim of the study is to provide a background to another book, published in Moscow in 1936, "Zolotoy klyuchik, ili priklyucheniya Buratino" (The Little Golden Key, or The Adventures of Buratino), Tolstoy's own tale.
The mystery of Berlin's Pinocchio is a kind of key to the mystery of Moscow's Buratino. And it is not only about family, literary and theatrical circumstances of Aleksey Tolstoy's biography, which are well researched [Petrovsky 2002; Tolstaya2008]. In the 1920s and 1930s, all these circumstances were due to the turbulent political process, which Tolstoy followed closely.
It is known that Russians' sincere love for Italy has long been supported not only by cultural contacts, but also by trade and economic interests. Thus, before the First World War Italy was one of the top five importers of Russian goods, primarily grain [Khormach 1993, 31]. Although Italy was at times part of anti-Russian alliances, the bridges between Italy and Russia were always extremely strong and were rebuilt after catastrophes with maximum rapidity. The national liberation and revolutionary movements of the nineteenth century, which produced the Russian Decembrists and the Italian Carbonari, made a tradition of rapprochement between the social circles of the two countries. Entire generations of Russian artists were formed in close communion with the Italians.
In the early 1920s, Soviet Russia sought rapprochement with the West in every way possible. From the spring of 1920, a Soviet-Italian public began to form in Moscow, linking the "red" intelligentsia with Italian diplomatic and party representatives, and in the summer the first official contacts between the two countries were established1. In the autumn of the following year, the Leninist government adopted a policy of commercial rapprochement with Germany and Italy. Lenin considered it necessary "to accelerate and push forward with all its might" [Khormach 1993,43]. It was equally important to expand and strengthen the political alliance, the Third International, so the Bolsheviks supported in every possible way the Italian Leftists (socialists, anarchists and communists). However, between the two paths—bourgeois and socialist—Mussolini laid out a third, previously unseen path — the fascist one. In 1922, after the "march on Rome", Mussolini declared the Bolsheviks enemies. The Leninist government tried to compensate for its loss of influence in Italy
by becoming as close as possible to the Italian Communist Party and its leader Antonio Gramsci. A journalist, Marxist philosopher, critic, philologist, teacher, theorist and practitioner of the ideological methods of the revolutionary movement, he was the first to expose fascism as an international evil and became a fierce opponent of Mussolini. Representing the Communist Party of Italy in the central bodies of the Comintern, Gramsci stopped in Berlin on his way to Moscow in May 1922, and from June to the end of November 1923 he lived in Serebryany Bor, a secluded holiday resort near Moscow. Here he was under the tutelage of the Soviet-Italian public and statesmen, including Anatoliy Lunacharsky. In October 1922 a large Italian delegation arrived in Moscow via Berlin (and thus thanks to contacts with pro-Soviet Berliners) to attend the Fourth Congress of the Communist International. And on 29 October Mussolini took over the Italian government, by decision of the King and against the will of the parliamentary majority. The delegates debated the event vigorously [Lombardo-Radice, Carbone 1953, 106]. Their party was faced with the task of restructuring and maintaining influence under the new conditions. Gramsci moved from Moscow to Vienna in the spring of 1923 and started to work on this from there. His work culminated in the founding of Unita (Unity), the central organ of the Italian Communist Party, on February 12, 1924, in Milan. In the same February Italy officially recognised the USSR.
Such is the heterogeneous historical and political background of the literary event of our interest.
The paths of Tolstoy and Gramsci were bound to cross in the editorship of "Nakanune" as well as later in Moscow. Pinocchio came to the aid of "Nakanune" as a fitting emblem for the beginning of cooperation between certain social and political circles in Italy and the USSR. At the same time, the international journalistic newspeak of the time was already using images (masks of popular theatre del'arte) similar to Pinocchio
This is what Gramsci did in his vigorous journalistic speeches. As early as 1914-1918, he characterised the Italian bourgeoisie by comparing it to the Florentine Stenerello mask [Gramsci 1991, 408], and compared the opportunism of small parties to the "kingdom of Pul-cinella". The "capital" of this realm has long been considered Naples, for there were many small and cheap Pulcinella theatres, always packed with people. Enchanting descriptions of such theatres were left by Anatoliy Lunacharsky, Pavel Muratov2 and Gorky3. There were also many street puppeteers giving performances very similar to the Russian folk theatre of Petrushka. Gorky referred directly to Pulcinella as Petrushka. He did
not seem to pay attention to the fact that Pulcinella was a folk-satirical ethnonym for Neapolitans, not all Italians. "Pulcinella's kingdom", or "Pulcinella's country" is the world of the Neapolitans. The mask of Pulcinella is a glutton, a sloth, a fool and a happy man at that. Pulcinella can be a masked actor or a puppet, the leader of the gloved burattini. His name comes from the Italian word pulcino for chicken. It is not without reason that Collodi inserted a micro-episode with a chicken in the chapter on Cricket, as if accidental and superfluous. Tolstoy kept it in the Berlin translation and in "Zolotoy klyuchik" (The Little Golden Key). In his own fairy tale, he even strengthened the Italian connotation: here, the chicken, when saying goodbye to the hungry Pinocchio, who broke an egg, instead of an at the same time polite and impudent greeting "to all yours", declares that Mama Hen is waiting for him. A seemingly minor fringe in the system of fairy-tale characters, the chicken is actually Pulcinella, the comic antagonist of Pinocchio (and Buratino), a representative of the Florentine "kingdom."
It is known that Carlo Collodi followed the national tradition, according to which writers depicted contemporaries of their own region only and necessarily transmitted the local dialect [Muratova 1971, 157]. Kseniya Muratova emphasised that the Italian critics of Gorky's "Fairy Tales about Italy" perceived them exactly as fairy tales, as the writer had not conveyed the regional types and dialects. The cycle was updated by the author and republished in 1923 by the Berlin publishing house "Kniga" in Gorky's collected works. The penultimate "fairy tale" about the boy Pepe (the hero's name recalls Guglielmo Pepe, leader of the Neapolitan revolution of 1820-1821) is written in such a way that the character and speech of the little caprice are revealed with perhaps the greatest realism in the entire cycle, with the story claiming that Pepe would become a poet or anarchist. The boy Pepe is far removed from the "Berliner" Pinocchio by his happy gift and anarchistic actions, but in the same time he resembles Buratino from Tolstoy's fairy tale, written more than a decade later.
In the Neapolitan Revolution, Pulcinella sang mutinous songs4. In the first Russian Revolution this character was described in detail by the Marxist Anatoliy Lunacharsky — in an article entitled "Neapoli-tanskiy teatr" (The Neapolitan Theatre) [Lunacharsky 1924]), which was included in his 1924 collection "Teatr i revolyutsiya" (Theatre and Revolution). Lunacharsky urged the use of Pulcinella's theatre for propaganda. He had seen performances by maskers and puppeteers in Naples, and on the island of Capri he interacted with Gorky, Alexander Bogdanov and Vladimir Lenin. Thus, Gramsci's use of images of Pul-
cinella or Stenerello in his later speeches was no longer a surprise for the Russian public, especially since in these and his other works, researchers have found striking similarities with Bogdanov and Lunacharsky's ideas on the meaning of the proletarian revolution, which consists in creating a "new man" (or "putting together a man", by Bogdanov, "forming a man", by Gramsci) [Andrianova 2009, 280-281]. Gramsci describes the "unformed man", a worker in an enterprise as follows:
He is intellectually lazy, unable and unwilling to see an inch beyond his nose, so he is devoid of any criterion in choosing his leaders and easily allows himself to be deceived with promises; he is inclined to believe that he can achieve his goal without much labour and without much mental effort [Gramsci 1983, 61].
It is generally accepted that of all the Italian masks Stenterello is the one closest to Pinocchio, the hero of Collodi's tale. However, Tolstoy in the Berlin fairy tale ignored, as did Gorky, the differences between the masks — the differences that are essential to the Italians. For these Russian writers all the masks were petrushkas, the universal was being more important than the regional, and by universal they meant class-political content. As a result, the character of Pinocchio, whose name had already become a household name in Italy and beyond, lost its traditional regional semantics in the Russian book, but retained a set of universal features.
At the turn of 1923-1924 Aleksey Tolstoy was faced with his most important, indeed momentous, choice of returning to Russia. In the tale of Pinocchio, familiar since his youth in Camilla Danini's translation5, the ideas of Carlo Collodi, a left-wing journalist and participant in the Italian unification movement, were seen through the simple didacticism for children.
The Bolshevik-funded newspaper "Nakanune", published in Berlin, constantly covered the situation in Germany and Italy as news of the utmost importance. Until July 1923 Tolstoy led there "Literaturnoe prilozhenie" (Literary Supplement), also he was the head of the artistic and literary department of the same publishing house.
The writer worked in the midst of political news and ideological struggles — his position obliged him to stick to the newspaper's course, which he sometimes strayed from, however. He also had plans to promote his own works in the Italian market and to prepare for the publication in the USSR a multi-volume anthology of modern Italian literature. In the difficult circumstances of 1923 — the financial collapse and the abolition of Bolshevik subsidies for publishing houses
in Berlin — Tolstoy stepped up his Italian projects, making use of the connections of a freelance journalist Nina Ivanovna Petrovskaya, who had lived in Italy for many years. The publishing house "Nakanune"6 had already been practically closed when the book "The Adventures of Pinocchio" was published there, translated by Petrovskaya and processed by Tolstoy, in the series "Detskaya biblioteka 'Nakanune'" (Nakanune Children's Library).
Tolstoy and his family eventually had returned to their homeland. Petrovskaya, to whom he had given an insistent advice — an invitation — to follow him, nevertheless ended up in Paris and soon died there in poverty and illness. We should stress that their joint book came out in time for the beginning of official inter-state relations, as did another translated children's book from 1924, which suited Tolstoy's taste and the course of the liberals in the "Smena vekh" (Change of Milestones) group, namely Giovanni Verga's story, "Rosso Malpelo" (The Branded Redhead), about the lives of working-class teenagers [Verga 1924]. Overall, the tale of Pinocchio proved to be one of the symbols of the crisis between Russia, Italy and Germany in 1923-1924. Of particular significance here were the great changes in Russia: the Leninist regime was replaced by the Stalinist-Trotskyist bloc, in which a fierce struggle was brewing.
It seems to us that Tolstoy, seized by politics, reworked the most famous Italian fairy tale in the genre of pamphlet, addressing its satirical hints and lessons to those emigrants who, while not being open enemies of Bolshevism, were in no hurry to return to Russia — primarily to Gorky and his entourage. In this work Tolstoy paid little attention to the needs of children and teachers, and the translator was even less interested in these; not surprisingly, no reprints followed, the Berlin book was long forgotten even by scholars of the Soviet classic writer's work7.
In the history of the creation of Berlin's "The Adventures of Pinoc-chio" the contacts of Russian émigré writers with the Roman salon of Olga Ivanovna Resnevich-Signorelli are important. She was a patron of Nina Petrovskaya and in all probability it was she who suggested that Collodi's tale be translated — it is well known that Petrovskaya asked her to select two books for translation: one pedagogical book and another one for children. To "Nakanune" Pinocchio came in handy as a convenient symbol of collaboration that had begun between certain social and political circles in Italy and the USSR.
The popular version that Tolstoy simply helped Petrovskaya in working on the fairy tale because of her plight (poverty, severe chronic illness, homelessness) is insufficient, to say the least, because it does not cover
the full range of material and does not touch those problems that concerned the newspaper editor, who fulfilled the party-state order.
Nina Petrovskaya's biography has now been sufficiently reconstructed [Bogomolov 1997; Lavrov 1999; Garetto 2012]. She was a professional writer, so fluent in Italian that she wrote an essay on dialects for "Literaturnoe Prilozhenie" (Literary Supplement). She was in dire need of commissions and royalties, but did not need the help of a literary dresser at all. Moreover, in the dramatic atmosphere of 1924, Tolstoy's scandalous name might have compromised her in the émigré milieu, which in part it did. Despite her confession of dislike for children's literature, she began to understand it little by little, and wrote for "Nakanune" several reviews of children's books, in particular of a collection of poems by Natal'ya Krandievskaya, Tolstoy's wife.
In our understanding, what mattered in the story of the translation and remaking of the fairy tale was not so much friendly charity as the commonality between Tolstoy and Petrovskaya in their assessment of Italian fascism and Russian emigration, which was partly living with the illusion of "Skazok ob Italii" (The Fairy Tales about Italy) and partly ready to support the fascists in their struggle against the Bolsheviks. Tolstoy never expressed a negative attitude towards Italy, on the contrary, he sought writerly cooperation, but anti-fascist, anti-bourgeois course of his newspaper held firmly. Petrovskaya wrote articles and essays on Italy for "Literaturnoe Prilozhenie"; in one of them she expressed deep, scathing scepticism about Mussolini and his Blackshirt boys. Her denial of Fascism was entirely sincere and not at all a tribute to the political agenda of the newspaper, for she had observed the first Fascists with her own eyes.
There is an important nuance to be considered here: the Roman patroness Olga Resnevich-Signorelli, who sent the tale for translation, had her Russian salon in Rome, as well as the solid "Russia" magazine, funded by her husband, the prosperous Dr. Angelo Signorelli, a great admirer of Mussolini.
It was with regret that Petrovskaya refused to help her benefactress with the publication of Signorelli's big article in "Nakanune". From her letter of 2 August 1923:
A third thing: I can't publish Sre Angelo's article in "Nakanune". Nor is it good for him to be published there. He is in love with Mussolini, and I am calling him bad words there... I will pass it on to Zaitsev or Osorgin for "Dni", I will translate it "surreptitioisly", and they will publish it under their name. <...> and explain to Sra Angelo that it's not my "reluctance" at all, but political considerations. He's an Italian! He can't understand our
Russian affairs! Only, for God's sake, don't let him be offended. You do understand all this, don't you? It's still a matter of "nuances". Yesterday the Sov[iet] Rep[ublic], embodied in one of its ardent representatives, told me: "Welcome to us!" On leaving, Tolstoy on the train's footstep said to me: "Nina, if you don't want to die, come back soon!" And he was right. You can't live in Berlin. Hunger sets in, 'paying with a hangover for the feasting of others' begins (italics by the author. — I.A.) [Garetto 2012, 204-205].
Translated and reworked in a certain ideological spirit, the Berlin fairy tale contributed to the rupture of Resnevich-Signorelli's relations with Petrovskaya in the first place and then with Tolstoy. Although the main blow to relations was dealt by the unfortunate project of an "Italian anthology", which Tolstoy undertook with Petrovskaya and Resnevich-Signorelli, but abandoned the project, driving a wedge between two friends, and also disrupting, to put it mildly, mutual understanding in the Russian-Italian family. Dr. Signorelli could hardly have liked the book published by a "red" publisher, even leaving aside the ideological direction of Tolstoy's adaptation and Malakhovsky's drawings.
It should also be taken into account that Petrovskaya did not at all share the enthusiasm of Russian artists for Italy8, she even had the idea of compiling a book from her scathing Italian sketches. "Just don't tell Italians! It's just a newspaper grotesque. That's the spirit that 'Nakanune' likes. When I write like this, I hide my name", from a letter dated 3 February 1923 [Garetto 2012, 187].
In the light of "Nakanune" stance on the Italian question and these letters and essays by Petrovskaya (including three articles on Mussolini and young fascism), it is impossible to imagine the two authors working together on the fairy tale as merely a random mark in the margins of their biographies. For Petrovskaya, it was a side note in her work, the last successful work she had done to make a living. She carefully distanced herself from the Bolsheviks, rejected their most tempting offers, but trusted Tolstoy. For Tolstoy, however, her translation and anti-Italian scepticism were of entirely different interest.
Not surprisingly, the publisher particularly praised Petrovskaya for her "choice" of this tale (the letter of 16 February 1923) [Garetto 2012, 188], and not surprisingly, Tolstoy, to the translator's astonished delight, changed his habits on this occasion and personally undertook the revision and reworking of the text for the first time. The purpose of this revision was most likely to reduce the pathos of Catholic edification inherent in the original, and to strengthen ideologically relevant features in the image of Pinocchio, anarchism and vitality above all. Why these?
The taste and the sense of the order for the selection of contemporary works for translation is described by Petrovskaya in a letter to Resnevich-Signorelli of 21 February 1923 (this was after the translation had been sent to the publisher, but before the book was published): for his Italian anthology Tolstoy wants to select such writers "whose soul wells up with the healthy anarchic spirit of life and art":
The domestic-village ones are very desirable, also good, juicy and infused with the juices of Italy. Look, for example, how old, but how unfadingly beautiful Verga is!..! In a word, send something with juice and with pure Italian. So it would be Italian, inherent, perceptible at a glance. Especially not desirable are "decadents" howling and barking at the moon (italics by the author. —I.A.) [Garetto 2012, 192].
So, for Tolstoy, Collodi's tale, though uncontemporary, from the 1880s, turned out to be both anarchic and with "the juice of Italy".
The 1924 book lacks the original subtitle ('Le avventure di Pinocchio. Storia d'un burattino') but has a commentary replacing the subtitle:
Translated from Italian by N. Petrovskaya Revised and reworked by Aleksei Tolstoy Cover and drawings by Lev Malakhovsky
In these captions, combined with the name "Nakanune", printed in catchy type at the bottom, next to the year, the provocation is hidden. The publishing house closed in June, because of the disaster of the whole Berlin emigrant colony in the face of German hyperinflation and the end of Bolshevik support. The children's book teased the émigrés with the very name of Aleksey Tolstoy in the subtitle commentary. "The Red Count" became the hero of a grand scandal: in violation of ethics, he published a private letter by Korney Chukovsky with poisonous assessments of the emigrants. Tolstoy became a pariah and was expelled from everywhere.
The book may have also been a taunt to Gorky, who had previously expressed extreme scepticism about "Nakanune", resorting in derision to a "childish" vocabulary9, and soon preferred Mussolini's Italy to Bolshevik Russia. Tolstoy's gesture in handling Petrovsky's translation appears to us to be a scathing response to the leader of proletarian literature.
In our opinion, Lev Malakhovsky's drawings also contain provocation. They follow the most famous drawings by Carlo Chiostri, but at the same time they are far from them. The image of Pinocchio is extremely laconic, almost to the point of being a sign; it is reduced to
a light construction made of thin slats and screws. The impression is that Malakhovsky based his drawing of Pinocchio on Gorky's son, exaggerating to the point of caricature his lean, tall figure and early bald head. At the time Maxim Peshkov was fascinated by the trendy ideology of Italian youth and Marinetti's manifestos, he even drew closer to young fascists, but has done so in his typical manner- superficially and temporarily. He was a grown up, but behaved like a careless boy. His father's letters to various addressees allow us to judge in this way. Maxim Peshkov knew Italian and wrote some letters on behalf of Gorky (jumping ahead, we note the impertinent letter to Mussolini — in connection with the search in 1925 in the office of Mariya Zakrevskaya-Budberg). His father was concerned about his son's frivolity, his risky adventures (an episode with a fight with the police is known)10, all of which might have led to a comparison with Pinocchio, especially since it was customary in Gorky's "family" to make fun of everyone and give nicknames11.
Admittedly, Gorky himself might have given Tolstoy an excuse to use the fairy tale of Pinocchio as a parody, as well as to argue about Italy and the European perspective associated with Italian events: the writer would sometimes pose for the photographer's camera and the artist's canvas as a puppet, a puppet on a screen, "petroushka".
The year 1924 brought Tolstoy and Gorky sharply apart. Tolstoy had no choice but to leave Germany, and according to the direction of his newspaper, he went to Russia. Tolstoy trusted in the spiritual health of the Russian nation, which would somehow survive radical Bolshevism. Gorky, on the other hand, who arrived in Naples on 6 April, expressed faith in the spiritual health of Italians, who would outlive Mussolini and his Blackshirts as a temporary phenomenon. Gorky's choice was not so much due to a loudly expressed love for Italy as to a quiet and sober assessment of the end of the Leninist regime12. Misconceptions about Mussolini swept some Russian émigrés at the time. Tolstoy was also mistaken about Russia's prospects after Lenin's death.
The Berlin publication of "The Adventures of Pinocchio" is perceived as an argument for the colony of emigrants in the choice of a country in which to live and work. This was Tolstoy's final attempt to reason with Gorky: by countering the republished in 1923 "Fairy Tales of Italy" and its embellished, romanticised Italians with the original Italian tale, full of an entirely different spirit, which brings out the basic national types. Indeed, the romantic boy Pepe is a contrast to Pinocchio, a satirical hero. Moreover, Pepe is a Southerner, a Capri, and Pinocchio is a Florentine with a Tuscan name, and this is a big difference.
Florence, the city of Carlo Collodi, was also the birthplace of Fascism as an international political force. At the same time, of all the Italian cities, Florence resisted the nascent fascism most fiercely and repeatedly13. In this struggle, the Florentines were allied with Bolshevik Russia, and the strong metonymy of Moscow-Florence [Lekmanov 2014], existing in Russian culture and literature up to I.A. Bunin, could have had significance in the translation and reworking of the tale of Pinocchio.
When Gorky and Tolstoy later would settle in Moscow, nearby, on Malaya Nikitskaya Street, they will be able to evaluate their decisions of ten years ago and return to the fairytale plot. It is not without reason that "Zolotoy klyuchik" (The Little Golden Key) was first read by the author at in Gorky at Gorky's. The second chapter ends with a comic fight between the two old men and a touching suggestion to Pope Carlo: "Let's make up, shall we..." [Tolstoy 2007, 297].
Gorky's Moscow life turned out to be a farcical parody of his Italian existence. The luxurious mansion, given to him by Stalin, was built and decorated like a seaside villa: there was a copy of Da Vinci's Madonna Litta by Aleksandr Korin, and there was, hanging above Gorky's desk, "Panorama of Sorrento" by Pavel Korin — "Landscape with Vesuvius" (an oil painting on glued sheets of paper). Let us note that this was the view from the windows of Gorky's study in his last Italian home14. This real paper Vesuvius in "Zolotoy klyuchik" (The Little Golden Key) is an ironic counterpart to the allegory from Collodi's tale: a hearth with a cauldron is drawn on a piece of old canvas.
Tolstoy, in his fairy tale, treated Collodi's allegory with liberty: the wooden boy pokes his nose through a canvas and discovers a door behind it, which is to be opened with a little golden key — this plot-forming "trifle", an invention of Tolstoy, will become a primary structure in the new fairy tale. The canvas with the picture, the door covered in cobweb — all this is also in Collodi's tale. But for the Italian reader the picture-poster is the commonplace, from the national traditions of the interior, and the fireplace is also commonplace. With Collodi the mystery lies in the drawing, which the Italian, who has studied the Risorgimento era, reads as a historical-political allegory. "Burning coal" is the most important ritual of the "coal miners", or Carbonari. It is one of those allegories used to decorate by hand the diplomas issued to members of the "venta", the primary cell of the secret organisation15.
"Poor Pinocchio rushed to the fireplace, where a kettle seemed to be smoking. He wanted to see what was brewing there, but the pot and the smoke were only painted" — translation by C. Danini [Collodi 2007,
35]. Petrovskaya and Tolstoy probably did not decipher this allegory, although technically they could have done so [Tarle 1901; Dito 1905; Sidorenko 1913]. They combined the fireplace with the cauldron and omitted the most important details — the hearth and the smoke: "He was hungry terribly and went to the fireplace, over which the cauldron was boiling merrily. He poked his nose in to see if there was any food in the pot. But both the fireplace and the kettle were fake, painted" [Collodi 2007a, 195].
And in "Zolotoy klyuchik" (The Little Golden Key), Tolstoy had put the key details back into place: "He ran to the hearth and stuck his nose into the boiling kettle. But Buratino's long nose pierced the pot because, as we know, the hearth, the fire, the smoke and the pot were all drawn by poor Carlo on a piece of old canvas" (italics mine — I.A.) [Tolstoy 2007, 303-304]. Nothing here suggests that Tolstoy finally learned something authentic about Collodi's allegories; rather, he put new meaning into the microsystem of motifs in this fragment. Tolstoy's attributed authorship of the hoax picture contains an ironic allusion to the creative method promoted by Gorky, already called socialist realism, which consisted in depicting reality not as it is, but as it could and should be. The author will need a golden key — an allegory from a completely different series of characters.
In May 1925, the Second International Book Fair was held in Florence, and a Soviet pavilion was there too. This is how Pinocchio, who was speaking modern Russian and was referred to in the book by the Russian name Petrushka, found himself in his hometown, famous for its anti-fascist spirit.
Translated by Yana Timkova
Notes
1 In April 1920, Odoardo Campa arrived in Moscow, having set up the Society
of Friends of Russia in Italy. He set up the Italian Studio in the library of the Rumyantsev Museum; from May he gave lectures on the history of Italian culture and art, with the support of Anatoliy Lunacharsky. Together with Campa, the professional diplomat G. Amadori appeared in Moscow on a private visit, both of them gaining an extensive circle of acquaintances [Khormach 1993, 43].
2 "In Naples there are several dozen theatres; among them is the famous San
Carlo Opera. But for an understanding of the local mores, the small theatres scattered in the people's quarters are much more interesting. In the evening they are all crowded. <...> Under the changed conditions of life, manners,
notions Pulcinella remained an unchanged and necessary participant of the comedy of life" [Muratov 1994, 146].
3 In June 1910 Gorky wrote to Leopol'd Sulerzhitsky about the Neapolitan theatre: "My friend — what a magnificent theatre it is! There is a comic actor Edoardo Scarpetta, he is also the director of the theatre 'Mercadente' and the author of all the plays that are produced in this theatre. He and his comrade Della Rossa are marvellous artists! Scarpetta comes from Polichinelle — from our Petrushka — but how! <...> Theatres are good here, and theatre life is amazingly lively. I mean mainly dialect theatres. Did you know that Italy has the greatest number of theatres? There are 3557! <...> And I watched in Scarpetta, how hungry Neapolitans dream — what and how to eat — I watched and — cried. And our whole barbaric Russian lodge — cried. In a farce? In the farce, my dear, yes! They cried not from pity, — don't think it! — but from pleasure. From the joy that a man can laugh at his grief, anguish, humiliation — and laugh splendidly" [Gorky 2001, 92-93].
4 After the defeat at Rieti, a mock poem became widespread in the kingdom,
a poem about the fate of Pulcinella, a hero who represented a generalised type of Neapolitan people:
The discontented Pulcinella,
Deserted from his regiment,
Wrote to his mother in Benevento
Of the sad fate of the homeland.
Rebellion and Parliament,
Oaths and repentances,
The preparation for war and the ordeals.
From fear and treachery.
We fled at the speed of the wind.
I repent of what I have done.
Sweet mother,
Pray for Pulcinella!
[Kowalska 1971, 67].
5 The works of the writer's mother, Aleksandra Turgeneva-Bostrom, had been
published in the 1906 "Zadushevnoe Slovo" magazine alongside chapters of "Priklyucheniy derevyannogo mal'chika" (The Adventures of the Wooden Boy), translated and reworked by K. Danini.
6 In 1922, in the newspaper "Nakanune" had been organized a publishing department: the literary and artistic department was headed by Aleksey Tolstoy, the foreign department—by the translator and literary critic Zinaida Vengerova. The publishing house published a series entitled "Nakanune Children's Library", which included Tolstoy's book.
7 Let's note that the publishing house and newspaper "Nakanune" were established to publish the works by émigré authors and also by the authors from Soviet Russia. The publishing house was supported by funding from
Russia and the newspaper was accessible to Soviet readers, unlike many other émigré newspapers and magazines.
8 Extremely harsh assessments of Italy and the Italians are contained in letters
from Nina Petrovskaya to Vladislav Khodasevich from Rome of 19 July 1922, and to Olga Resnevich-Signorelli of 13 October 1922. Elda Garetto, noting this non-admiration, reports: "At the beginning of her life in Berlin, Petrovskaya even conceived of publishing a separate book consisting of essays and feuilletons from life and daily routine in contemporary Italy, with her 'images of Italy' probably intended to appear in an ironic refraction and written in a denunciatory spirit" [Garetto 2012, 156].
9 From a letter by Gorky to Yuriy Zhelyabuzhsky in March 1923: "Read the
leftist-communist and falsely-optimistic newspaper 'Na-ka, nunya' [Here, take it, sniveller]! I by no means consider myself a sniveller, but I recommend this little newsie to all people younger than me, even if only three days younger, as it is good for the stomach" [Gorky 2001, 309].
10 From a letter from Gorky to his wife Ekaterina Peshkova of 25 December
1922, Saarov: Maxim, "revealing ingenious abilities, composes crazy pictures in the style of Bosch. But — to study seriously and persistently — [he] is not capable [of]. Here he would go to Mars, and also he is willing to sink to the bottom of the sea to study the politics of deep-sea frogs. Healthy and cheerful. Strange gentleman: everybody likes him, he easily attracts people's sympathy, but he still has no definite attitude to himself' [Gorky 2009, 112].
11 Mariya Budberg-Zakrevskaya, in a letter to Gorky of 28 January 1922, resorts
to a delicate and ironic alogism: "Maksimka is vey skinny, but a very decent young man" [Gorky Archive 2001, 59].
12 On March 24,1923, in a letter to ElMadani, a Spanish publicist and translator,
Gorky reported confidential information: "Lenin's health is very poor; the general belief is that he is permanently incapable of work, so the German medics report from Moscow. I earnestly ask you not to hurry with your departure for Russia. First get your health situation in order and, if possible, make yourself familiar with situation here, so as not to be disappointed. Of course, it is not as bad as the emigrant newspapers say, but it is not as great as 'Nakanune' says" [Gorky 2009, 167].
13 The Italian Fascists vowed to apply "all their forces to the collapse of Bol-
shevism" [Mussloni 2013, 204], which encouraged the enemies of the Bolshevik regime among the Russian emigration. F. Marinetti and G. D'Annunzio acted as Fascists' allies. Gorky wanted to publish a collection of D'Annunzio's works in World Literature.
14 "The artist worked in liquid oil on five glued together album sheets of paper.
The painting was given to the writer on his birthday, March 28, 1932. Gorky spent long hours at his desk, and every time he raised his head from the manuscript, he had the happy opportunity to rest his gaze on his favourite images and remember Italy" [Demkina 2013, 11].
15 "On joining the Carbonari organisation, each Carbonari was given a diploma — a membership card, handwritten, signed by all the officials and sealed with the Venta seal. The three colours of the Carbonari ribbon — blue, red and black — associated with the most important ritual (burning coal in the hearth) and signifying smoke, flame and coal, symbolized hope (blue), virtue (red) and faith (black)" [Kowalska 1971, 43]. The image of Vesuvius symbolised the "revolutionary hearth" and the Neapolitan revolution.
Bibliography Sources
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Ирина Арзамасцева
Московский городской педагогический университет; ORCID: 0000-0002-1564-9385
ПИНОККИО ИЗ ФЛОРЕНЦИИ В РУССКОМ БЕРЛИНЕ
В статье излагается история сказки «Приключения Пиноккио» Карло Коллоди, которую перевела Нина Петровская и обработал Алексей Толстой в Берлине, в пору их сотрудничества в газете «Накануне». Обращено внимание на использование имен масок commedia dell'arte в международном политическом новоязе благодаря выступлениям в печати А. Грамши, биография которого тесно связана с пробольшевист-скими кругами в Берлине, и Москвой. Актуализация данной сказки в русской печати первой половины 1920-х гг. была задана началом советско-итальянских отношений и выбором дальнейшего курса, стоявшим перед русскими эмигрантами. Выдвигается гипотеза об отражении в переводе-обработке различных позиций А. Н. Толстого и М. Горького в отношении вопроса о возвращении в Россию. Описываются обстоятельства выбора книги для перевода и направление перевода Н. Петровской и обработки перевода А. Н. Толстым. Акцент сделан на антифашистском движении, центром которого была Флоренция — город Карло Коллоди. Антифашистские взгляды Петровской и просоветская позиция Толстого позволяют увидеть сказку в актуальном ракурсе общественной борьбы и личного выбора. Уточняются роли обоих русских авторов в работе над книгой и их отношения с итало-русской семьей меценатов Синьорелли. Объясняется переадресация сказки, предопределившая дальнейшее забвение берлинской книги: новый перевод был адресован не столько детям, сколько взрослым русским эмигрантам.
Keywords: советско-итальянские отношения, русская эмиграция, М. Горький, А. Грамши, Карло Коллоди, А. В. Луначарский, Б. Муссолини, А. Н. Толстой, Н. И. Петровская, О. И. Ресневич-Синьорелли, народный театр кукол, авторская сказка, памфлет, Пиноккио, Буратино
