Mariia Olsuf’eva

The Iron Curtain was extremely permeable to cultural objects, as demonstrated by the birth and development in the late Fifties of tamizdat, a transnational publishing practice that managed to overcome these boundaries. Following the publication of the first Italian tamizdat in 1957––Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago––a stream of uncensored Soviet literary texts began to flow unstoppably and clandestinely from the USSR into the catalogues of Italian publishing houses.

This essay aims to outline translators’ role in the dissemination of unofficial Soviet literature in Italy, and in the creation of a network of transnational cultural exchanges. As an illustration of how translators functioned as cultural actors in transmitting these texts, I will discuss the contribution by Mariia Olsuf’eva (1907-1988) to the diffusion of unofficial Soviet literature in Italy. Moreover, through in-depth sociological analysis of the documents of her personal archives as well as those of selected Italian publishing houses (Mondadori, Il Saggiatore), my reconstruction of Olsuf’eva’s microhistory will allow us to assess the translator’s contribution to the transnational socialization of these texts, in this case by creating a transnational community of cultural and social actors.