Guerra e nazionalismo nel futurismo italiano e nel futurismo russo

War and nationalism in Italian and Russian Futurism The year 2014 marked the centenary of the beginning of the First World War. For a long time a picture of Russian Futurists as fiercely opposed to this war was dominant in the critical works of Soviet and foreign scholars. In this paper, I try to show that this was not always the case. I illustrate the general historical background against which Marinetti’s natonalism and his notorious motto “War as the World’s only Hygiene” were set, with a special focus on the Italian 1911 campaign in Lybia. I then analyse Mayakovsky’s articles published in Autumn 1914, where he expresses his inital enthusiastic reaction to war as an opportunity for Futurist art. I also illustrate the natonalistc and Pan-Slavic revival of the years 1905-1914 that swept Russia with fierce anti-Germanic feeling, which Velimir Khlebnikov shared in the first years of his literary actvity. I go on to examine Khlebnikov’s gradual passage from this Pan-Slavic and belligerent vision to his utopian project for a world without wars.