Passeggiando fra le patrie. Visioni in transito nella cultura russa contemporanea

Walking amid Homelands. Transitional Visions in Contemporary Russian Culture The main goal of the essay is to investigate the representation of the mother-country offered in the prose of some major authors from the "space Russia" (Bykov, Erofeev Vik., Pelevin, Prigov, Sergeev, Shishkin, Sorokin, Stogov, Tolstaya, Ulitskaya). The essay unveils the search for an illusory “ancestral” homeland as a dominant feature capable of assembling the various facets that the native soils of past and present show to contemporary women and men. In the novels, characters act as exiles in their own country, which at the same time takes on the appearance of a foreign and hostile territory, and the features of a maternal shelter. The word seems to be a common trait that enables one to assign meaning to the human essence and to find the hope for a time to come. A word capable of breaking the defensive boundaries, that a bewildered contemporary life raises against the truth of the present.