‘The Paradox of the Russian Spirit’ by Piero Gobetti

Abstract

During his short life, the Italian anti-fascist intellectual Piero Gobetti (1901–1926) was able to accomplish the incredible. He was the founder, editor and author of three magazines (Energie nove, 1918; La rivoluzione liberale, 1922; Il Baretti, 1924); he managed his own publishing house (Piero Gobetti edizioni), in which 114 volumes were published in 4 years; wrote books, articles, was a translator from russian. In Italy, they recognize his importance as one of the main distributors of Russian culture in Turin in the 1920s. In Russia, they are almost unfamiliar with the publications of P. Gobetti, even with his repeatedly reprinted work entitled «The Paradox of the Russian Spirit» (1926). In this article we try to consider the general cultural aspects and paradoxes of the time and place of this study's appearance in the context of the change of epochs, intellectual movements of those years and in the Italian national context. Looking ahead, we can say that the book, conceived as an analysis of the revolutionary ideology's movement in Russia, or at least it is completed chapters, turned out to be a text about Russian culture, or even, according to Vittorio Strada, about the specific role of the russian «intelligentsia». For a better understanding of the views of P. Gobetti, this issue also provides a translation of his essay «Dostoevsky as a classic and mystic of Russian literature», published in 1921.