We are pleased to announce the publication of Lo Svitato e altri racconti, a bilingual Russian-Italian edition of five short stories by Vasily Shukshin (1929–1974), published by Linea Edizioni in its Classici series. The volume was translated and co-curated by Andrea Zoller, a graduate student in Italian Studies at Brown University, in collaboration with Alessandro Farsetti, Professor of Russian Literature at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice.

The collection brings together five stories written in the 1960s and 1970s, presented here in Italian translation for the first time. At their center is the figure of the chudik (“lo svitato”), an eccentric, unconventional character through whom Shukshin explores the contradictions and transformations of postwar Soviet society.

The volume features an extensive introduction by Alessandro Farsetti, which situates Shukshin and his work within the broader literary and cultural landscape of the Soviet Union in the 1960s and 1970s. It also includes an essay by Andrea Zoller examining the particular challenges of translating Shukshin’s distinctive prose into Italian.

Lo Svitato e altri racconti offers readers a more nuanced perspective on postwar Russian and Soviet literature. In the West, this literature has often been understood through a binary distinction between “dissident” and “official” writing. Shukshin’s work complicates that framework, revealing the artistic vitality of writers whose work resists such clear-cut categories.

At the same time, Shukshin’s stories resonate well beyond their original Russian-Soviet context. They explore social mobility, education, cultural displacement, and changing values during a period of profound social transformation—themes that continue to speak to readers in contemporary Italy.