Education by the word : Gianni Rodari in the texts and contexts of Italian and soviet children's literature

This contribution is the result of the joint research of two scholars of the history of Soviet children's literature and its purpose is to reconstruct the circulation of Gianni Rodari's work in the Soviet Union. The first part analyzes the originality of Gianni Rodari's poetics. With his nursery rhymes, poems and fairy tales, he interpreted an original poetics with respect to the contents of fascist children's literature. The second part presents the translation of Rodari’s poems and nursery rhymes into Russian by the poet and writer for children Samuil Maršak, who is to be considered one of the main Soviet poets for children and who discovered in Rodari's poetics many elements in common with his own style of the 1920s. The third part analyzes the translation of Le avventure di Cipollino (The adventures of Little Onion) and the extraordinary success that this fairy tale had in the decades following its translation, multiple adaptations for theater and animation cinema.