Un arco teso tra Oriente e Occidente. Vsemirnaja literatura nel contesto del paradigma culturale gorkiano

The Vsemirnaya Literatura (World Literature) publishing house was founded by Maxim Gorky in September 1918, e.g. shortly after the October Revolution. In accordance with the cultural-pedagogical plans of the new regime, its purpose was to translate a huge amount of European, American, and Asian poetry and prose. Many famous pre-revolutionary Russian writers, such as Nikolay Gumilev, Alexandr Blok, Yevgeny Zamyatin and others collaborated with Vsemirnaya Literatura and tried to develop a methodical way of translating and editing foreign literary texts. Such plans belong in the larger framework of Gorky’s idea of culture. As we can read in his most famous essays, the Untimely Thoughts, which were published in periodicals during the First World War, Gorky was persuaded that culture in a broad sense (literature, art and music as well as science) would be able to unite the whole mankind under the sign of peace and harmony. Within the framework of this new form of humanism, the intellectuals’ duty was to unite their forces and create a net of associations whose purpose should have been the conservation and the promotion of culture, in spite of and beyond all national divisions. In this paper I illustrate the main features of Gorky’s concept of culture, with a special focus on its concrete embodiment in the publishing house’s activities, which were meant to create a sort of bridge between East and West through Russia The last part is devoted to the debates about an apocalyptic “end of humanism”, which were influenced by Spengler’s The Decline of the West and opposed Gorky to Blok within the cultural operations of Vsemirnaya Literatura.