Alberto Moravia in the USSR (Documents from Russian State Archive of Literature and Art)

This publication presents some documents from the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art (RGALI) regarding two trips to the USSR made by Alberto Moravia, one of thegreatest Italian writers of the 20th century, and his relationship with Georgij Breitburd, translator andconsultant on Italian literature at the Foreign Commission of the Union of Soviet Writers, one of thecrucial figures in Soviet-Italian cultural relations. Moravia, as an influential left-wing intellectual, was widely known and frequently published in the Soviet Union and was considered one of the “friends” of the USSR. The documents presented here are related to two of Moravia’s trips to the USSR in 1956 and 1972. These are reports on both trips written by Breitburd, who accompanied Moravia as an interpreter; a stenographic transcript of a lecture on contemporary Italian literature given by Moravia at Maxim Gorky Literature Institute in Moscow; and Moravia’s correspondence with Mikhail Apletin and Georgij Breitburd after the trip of 1956. These documents give us valuable information about the programs of Moravia’s visits and the issues discussed at formal events and informal meetings. They also tell us a lot about Soviet “hospitality techniques” and demonstrate how the work with Western intellectuals was organized. The documents published here are accompanied by a detailed commentary and an introduction, briefly summarizing the history of relations between Alberto Moravia and the USSR.