Department of Humanistic Studies (Dipartimento di studi umanistici)

“Life has got out of its rails, everybody has forgotten his insignificant business, everything became confused and was seized by just one goal, by one idea, the idea of war”, so Ivan Kliun described his first impressions as the 1914 war broke out. Still, Russian avant-garde artists and poets treated the new subject not only according to their personal aesthetical attitude (which would not be surprising), but, what is more significant, saw in the Great War a confirmation of their own creative strategies. On the one hand, Futurists claimed that their assault on philistine decency anticipated the military conflict, undermining the predominant conventions of beauty and measure (“Even before the war Futurists lived out of war and at war” the manifesto of the last Futurist exhibition “0.10” affirmed). On the other hand, pacifist writers such as the Symbolist poet Maximilian Voloshin perceived the outbreak of World War I as a tragic fulfillment of their apocaliptycal fears. Drawing on a number of examples, I will argue that the literary response to the Great War in Russian avant-garde circles was largely affected by the crisis that in 1914 both Futurists and Symbolists were confronted with; consequently, the war period, rather than being an opportunity for further evolution, represented a short phase of self-reassessment before the radical changes brought by the October Revolution.

Paper published in: M. C. Pesenti and R. Marti (eds.), Libro manoscritto e libro a stampa nel mondo slavo (XV-XX sec.), Slavica Ambrosiana, 5, Biblioteca Ambrosiana. Milano- Roma, Bulzoni Editore, 2015, pp. 151-165.

Anachronism or Media Innovation? Typoscript and its
ambiguous Status in Samizdat ‘Writing Scene’
It is common knowledge that the invention of the typewriter changed
writing habits and their perception by introducing elements of mechanization,
iterability and uniformity in the mise en page of the authorial
text. This technological shift led to an almost total obliteration of the
distance between manuscript and printed text, as Hermann Hesse remarked
in 1908. Such implications are crucial to the samizdat practice
that flourished in the USSR after Stalin’s death. Drawing on a number of
examples (N. Glazkov’s samsebjaizdat, B. Tajgin’s editions Be-Ta, Marina
Cvetaeva’s reprints made by Valentin Cvetkov), the article shows how
paratextual elements played a fundamental role in turning the typescript
from what would otherwise have been a private draft into an edited, selfpublished
artifact.

Una riflessione sul lavoro del giovane regista e drammaturgo Stefano Massini, ripartita secondo tre principali direttrici di indagine tematica e formale: l'impegno sociale, espresso nella forma dell'informazione obiettiva e veicolato dalla quasi totalità delle opere; la musicalità innata alla scrittura di Massini; l'uso ricorrente di determinati termini e, con essi, di specifici concetti. In coda, ancora connessa al terzo aspetto, un'analisi della figura del divino così come fa capolino nell'opera dell'autore.

____________________________

An analysis concerning the work of young theatre director and playwright Stefano Massini, with its focus split in three main lines of inquiry, both formal and thematic: the commitment to a social cause, conveyed through objective information and nearly omnipresent in Massini's work; the innate musicality of his writing; the recurring usage of specific words and the concepts related to them. Ending the essay, and yet related to the third aspect, an analysis of the Divine as it is portrayed in Massini's plays.

The purpose of the present essay is to highlight the dramaturgical influences underlying Pure Research: a peculiar, process-led Canadian project supported by Nightswimming Theatre (Toronto), which caters to different theatre professionals and leaves them free to experiment without any productive concern.

Through careful analysis of Pure Research’s online archive (cross-checked with specialized bibliography), the essay tries to draw attention to the various dramaturgical tasks performed during the course of several workshops, as well as to identify the most recurring ‘types’ of dramaturgs active on Pure Research.

A case study on a specific project, found to be of particular dramaturgical interest, is offered in the last section.