Casts, Quotes, Parodies: the Italian Reception of Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky's Work

Abstract

This article aims to provide a preliminary picture on the complex phenomenon of the reception of the work of F. M Dostoevsky in Italy starting from the diffusion of the first translations of the novels. Dostoevsky was not well received by the first critics and writers who criticized its style, excess morbidity and “drama”. He was considered a writer excessively related to the disturbances of the human soul, and in this regard the label of “psychologism”was used. Beyond this apparent negativity, the writers who were influenced and who admitted openly to consider Dostoevsky's not only a teacher of writing, but also an inexhaustible source of ideas and suggestions to delineate the characters of the novels were so many of them and go through all the panorama of the literature of the last twenty years of the Nineteenth century and throughout the Twentieth century: D'annunzio, Oriani, Moravia, Gadda, Tozzi, Sciascia, Landolfi, Piovene. Each of them declines a particular aspect of Dostoevskij’s poetics, using quotes, casts, parodies or real rewrites of the Dostoevsky text.