Džanni Rodari i Samuil Maršak. Dialog vo vremeni i prostranstve

In the historical context of the post-war years, the visits made by Italian delegations to the Soviet Union seemed as much a journey through time as through space, insofar as the USSR represented not just a different culture, but a new civilisation, the civilisation of the future. Among the individuals who made up the Italian delegations, Soviet journalism paid particular attention to the children’s writer Gianni Rodari, whose success in the Soviet Union contributed greatly to his popularity back home in Italy. Soviet readers had first been introduced to the works of this Italian writer thanks to the translations of Samuil Marshak. However, the real-life meeting of these two titans of children’s literature took place in a highly mythologised context, full of rhetoric and ideological clichés. In order to obtain a more authentic picture, one should therefore distinguish the fruitful creative relations of the two authors from the ostentatious narration of their acquaintance that was so characteristic of the articles and notices regularly published in contemporary Soviet journals and newspapers.