Negativnye modeli florentijskogo poéta v "Razgovore o Dante" Osipa Mandel'štama [I modelli negativi del poeta fiorentino nella "Conversazione du Dante" di Osip Mandel'štam]

Osip Mandelstam’s “Conversation about Dante” (1933) is a unique text in Russian Dante Studies of the early 20th century. Indeed, not only does the essai challenge the image of Alighieri created by the pre-revolutionary Symbolist culture but it also falls short of the criteria of Soviet literary criticism. The most typical traits of the gure of Dante as conceived by the Symbolists, together with some elements of the successive elaboration it underwent in the Soviet period, form in Mandelstam’s essay two negative models used by the author as a starting point to o er what Mandestam considered to be the ‘real’ portrait of Dante. The purpose of this paper is to show some analogies between the two models rejected by the author of the essay, considering them in the light of Mandelstam’s ideas about the art of poetry. While for the Symbolists Dante is a mystic and visionary, the prototype of the ideal artist who blends religion and art, for the Soviet scholars of the thirties he is one of the international classics, whose poetry should be studied from the perspective of the Marxist literary theory. However, in both cases the personality and the works of the Florentine poet are analyzed through an interpretative code that suggests a set of clichés and deprives the reader of the possibility to re ect on the poetic structures of the Comedy and the true nature of Dante the artist.