VITTORIO VENETO/MOSCA - Alessio Gava, professore giramondo, vive in Russia. Il 51enne vittoriese insegna matematica e fisica presso il liceo linguistico italiano “Italo Calvino” di Mosca. Gli abbiamo chiesto di parlarci dell’aria che si respira nella capitale dopo l’inizio del conflitto tra Russia e Ucraina.

Alessio Gava racconta la sua esperienza

The author of this article identifies in a patriotic song composed by Danila Kashin in 1814, known as Likui, Moskva, v Parizhe Ross, the tune which Rossini borrowed for the “Russian anthem” sung by count Libenskof in Il viaggio a Reims...

My paper presents the staging of Bertolt Brecht’s Life of Galileo by Yuri Lyubimov, the artistic director of the Taganka Theatre. Lyubimov denies choosing this play for its Verfremdungseffect only, i.e. that epic theatre method specially created by the German playwright. Rather, Ljubimov is more interested in the play’s themes and potential expressive force. First of all, the theme of the scientist, forced to abjure by the authorities in order to survive peacefully, is interpreted by Lyubimov with a contemporary twist: the spectators immediately connect the play to the show trials of the years ’37-’38 and to those faced by the writers Sinyavsky and Daniel. Lyubimov’s theatre is all characterized by provocation, which is still confirmed by his choice of starring the controversial singer and poet Vladimir Vysotsky in the play. The director of the Taganka Theatre tries to ‘russify’ the Brechtian piece, inserting songs and melodies well known to the audience so as to make them empathize with the narrated events and create a link with their contemporary world. He also inserts two choirs, elements totally absent in the original play, thus giving a classical dimension to the performance. However, what makes this a unique representation is Lyubimov’s decision to stage three different endings, one after the other: the first two actually written by Bertolt Brecht in different moments of his life, the last one, instead, is Lyubimov’s own conclusion created to optimistically close the play.

This essay deals with the relations between Weber and a group of Russian intellectuals in Heidelberg (Kistjakovskij, Stepun, Hessen, Bubnov). But the article also remarks on German and weberian reception of Tolstoj and Dostoevskij. The second part of the essay analyzes weberian studies on the deep structure of Russian society: the agrarian and rural community, the tsarist autocracy, the orthodox church, the intelligencija and the constitutional revolution.

Vasari and the ‘ruina estrema’ of the Middle Ages: genesis and developments of an idea Barbara Forti In the Vite de più eccellenti architettori, pittori et scultori italiani by Giorgio Vasari, Medieval art finds its first real historical analysis, together with the codification of a set of elements which properly embody the idea of the artistic Middle Ages. After the spreading of the book in the Modern age, both the equivalence Medieval art = barbarians’art (not really by Vasari, actually) and the conception of the artistic Middle Ages as ‘ruina estrema’ (extreme ruin) get strenghtened; as a consequence, they deeply influenced the opinion about the period. Still nowadays, an old-fashioned tradition lies on the concept and the term itself of Middle Ages, swinging for centuries between two ends: the evaluation, not always positive indeed, by historiographers and the unquestionable fascination caused by that age, in spite of its negative features. The survey about the Middle Ages carried out by Vasari, as both a historiographer and an artist, is very cogent; nonetheless, the pars destruens of his speech is definetely the largest one and the most well-known. Vasari himself claims that the Renaissance artist tries to imitate nature, by selecting its best aspects and translating what is catched by the eye in reality exactly like it appears. On the other hand, the Medieval artist ‘seems’ to ignore some technical and formal devices of Antiquity, which allow to construct human figures precisely, for instance, or to depict space, and to prefer some other ones, undoubtedly far from the concept of art as mimesis. Vasari gets those elements, but he can not accept them aesthetically. According to the author, the Medieval artist comes down with a serious visual pathology. Vasari does not comprehend that his highest ambition is making visible what is not and, because of that, his way of representing space gets more and more rarefied, and figures together with decorations entirely fill surfaces, erasing any depth. The historiographer can not figure out the Medieval artist’s point of view perfectly matches with the beholder’s one, nor this last one does not expect to see the world depicted as it appears. Vasari portrays the Medieval artist just ex negativo, knowing what he is not and what he lacks with respect to the Modern one. Notwithstanding this, in that comparison the Modern artist, whom we would expect totally winner, gets redimensioned. As a matter of fact, the epilogue of the giuntina edition comes to an unexpected statement: the last consideration by Vasari about the Middle Ages equals to the acknowledgment of the importance of ‘old’ art and of ‘old’ makers regarding the phenomenon of rebirth. Modern artists are looked at like dwarfs on giants’shoulders who can glance far into the distance just because they are lifted up by the ones that came first, and without those ones they would have never reached the ‘sommo grado’ (the highest level). Finally, Vasari, generally regarded as one of the main responsible for the conception of the artistic Middle Ages as ‘ruina estrema’ and of the florentine Renaissance as the last millennium unique cultural expression, is also one of the first to understand there is a dependence relationship between Modern Art and previous, so vituperated actually, Medieval art.