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The Ligurian writer Francesco Biamonti (1928-2001) is best known for his five novels published by Einaudi between 1983 and 2003. This essay investigates the period preceding the writer’s publishing debut, i.e. the long literary ‘apprenticeship’ that saw Biamonti, between the late 1950s and the end of the 1970s, working on various projects, all of which were destined to remain unfinished, but nonetheless interesting for understanding the genesis of themes and images characteristic of the novels of his maturity. More specifically, this study deals with the so-called ‘romanzo algerino’, an outline inspired by the events of the Algerian War, of which Biamonti composed several partial drafts. The different compositional phases of this draft, its links with other unfinished Biamonti works (Il testimone inumano and the Romanzo di Gregorio) and its possible literary ancestry are reconstructed here in the light of the manuscripts and typescripts conserved at the writer’s home-archive in San Biagio della Cima, in the Imperia province.

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The retranslation of Russian classics into Italian in the last thirty years is a topic of no little importance, for at least two reasons. On the one hand, this phenomenon mirrors a literary text translation activity that is still alive and in great evolution. On the other hand, an assessment that shows which works of Russian literature have appeared in new translations and which have remained ‘behind the scenes’ can be a useful orientation for the future, for the benefit of publishing houses, translators and scholars. The perspective of this report is therefore not to address specific translation problems, nor to give indications about editorial strategies about Russian literature. Instead, it is to review the main retranslated authors, also highlighting those who have not yet had new translations, and to draw conclusions that may be of use to the scholarly community and its relations with the publishing industry.

The retranslation of Russian classics into Italian in the last thirty years is a topic of no little importance, for at least two reasons. On the one hand, this phenomenon mirrors a literary text translation activity that is still alive and in great evolution. On the other hand, an assessment that shows which works of Russian literature have appeared in new translations and which have remained ‘behind the scenes’ can be a useful orientation for the future, for the benefit of publishing houses, translators and scholars. The perspective of this report is therefore not to address specific translation problems, nor to give indications about editorial strategies about Russian literature. Instead, it is to review the main retranslated authors, also highlighting those who have not yet had new translations, and to draw conclusions that may be of use to the scholarly community and its relations with the publishing industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are astonishingly numerous and profound influences of the Pre-Socratics – especially Herakleitos and Zenon – on Russian literature between realism and the avant-garde of the 1920s. The focus here is on the concepts of Herakleitos’ “panta rhei” and his pre-dialectical thinking in polarities. From there, a bridge can be built to Leo Tolstoy’s narrative technique of the “stream of consciousness” and his speculations on time and history in the context of his novel “War and Peace.” The Russian novelist was particularly fascinated by Zenon’s time paradox (Achilles and the Tortoise). Furthermore, this contribution is concerned with Herakleitos’ model of circulations and dualities in the mytho-poetics of Russian Symbolism around 1900 (Viacheslav Ivanov, Andrey Bely, Konstantin Balmont) and, above all, with Russian poetry of the absurd (Daniil Kharms, Aleksander Vvedenskii) and the concepts of nothingness, of infinity in the context on this side of the categories of space and time (“cisfinite poetry”), and with the spirit of the time paradox of Zenon.