Research Unit 1: Università di Bologna
Principal Investigator
Kristina Landa
Kristina Landa is a fixed-term researcher (RTDb) in Slavic Studies at the Department of Interpreting and Translation at the University of Bologna (Forlì campus). In 2018, she obtained her PhD in Translation, Interpreting and Intercultural Studies (Slavic Studies) from the University of Bologna. Landa’s research focuses on the history of Russian translation, the censorship of literary translation in Tsarist Russia and the Soviet Union, and the reception of Italian authors in Russia between the 19th and 21st centuries. Landa’s studies are dedicated, in particular, to Italian influences in Russian symbolism and Acmeism. Landa is the author of two monographs (in Russian): 1. Bozhestvennaya Komediya v zerkalakh russkikh perevodov. K istorii retseptsii dantovskogo tvorchestva v Rossii (The Divine Comedy in the Mirrors of Russian Translations. More on the history of the reception of Dante’s work in Russia, St Petersburg, Russkaya Khristianskaya Gumanitarnaya Akademiya, 2020) and 2. Poetika radosti v Komedii Dante. Originalniy tekst i kanonicheskiy perevod (The poetics of joy in Dante’s Comedy. Source text and canonical translation, Saint Petersburg, Aletheia, 2021). She has also published a series of articles in international journals and participated in various conferences on Slavic studies, Italian studies, medieval studies and translation studies in Italy and abroad. Within the PRIN, she deals with the critical reception of Italian writers in the Stalinist USSR.
Team member
Svetlana Slavkova
Svetlana Slavkova (PhD) is Full Professor of Slavic Studies at the Department of Interpreting and Translation at the University of Bologna (Forlì campus). She specialises in Russian linguistics. Her research mainly concerns morphosyntax, particularly the aspect, semantics and pragmatics of Slavic verbs, with a focus on Russian and Bulgarian, also in contrast with Italian. She has participated and continues to participate in research projects (concerning morphosyntax and linguistic pragmatics) and numerous international and national scientific conferences. She is the author of many articles in national and international journals, essays in miscellanies, edited volumes and monographs. The latter two are dedicated to the verbal aspect in Slavic languages, namely Sintagmaticheskoye vzaimodeystviye grammaticheskikh kategoryj aspektualnosti glagola i opredelennosti imeni v russkom, bolgarskom i italyanskom jazykakh, Moskva: MGUL, 2004 and Semantika i pragmatika vida i vremeni glagola v vyskazyvanii, Burgas, Libra Skorp, 2020. She has participated in the organisation of scientific conferences and in the promotion of international academic cooperation. Within the PRIN, she is responsible for the linguistic analysis of xenophobic discourse in the magazine ‘Internatsionalnaya literatura’.
Research Unit 2: Università degli Studi Roma Tre
Ilaria Aletto
Ilaria Aletto is a fixed-term researcher (RTD-A) in Russian Language at Roma Tre University. She holds a PhD in Comparative Culture and Literature with a thesis on Sergei Eisenstein’s reading of James Joyce, which she later developed into the monograph Lo sguardo della coscienza. La ricezione di Joyce nell’estetica di Ėjzenštejn (The Gaze of Consciousness. The Reception of Joyce in Eisenstein’s Aesthetics) (Roma TrE-Press, 2025, open access).
Her research focuses on 19th- and 20th-century Russian and Soviet literature, with particular attention to formalism, the intersection between literature and cinema, and processes of transnational reception, often investigated through the prism of paratext in its semiotic implications and its relationship with translations. She has published essays on Lermontov, Dostoevsky, Khlebnikov, Shklovsky, Il’f and Petrov, and Kharms, and has spoken at national and international conferences. She has conducted research at academic and cultural institutions in Moscow and St Petersburg (MGU, IMLI RAN, IRLI RAN, RGALI) and as a visiting researcher at Humboldt University in Berlin.
She is head of the Roma Tre Research Unit in the PRIN 2022 PNRR Rewriting European Literatures in Stalin’s Russia project, in which she collaborates with Maria Zavyalova. The Unit’s research focuses on the reception of English writers in the Stalinist USSR, analysed through a paratextual apparatus and editorial and ideological adaptation strategies.
Team member
Maria Zavyalova
Maria Zavyalova is a senior researcher at the Department of Typology and Comparative Linguistics of the Institute of Slavic Studies at the Russian Academy of Sciences. She holds a PhD in Philology (Slavic Languages) with a thesis on the Balto-Slavic spell text and world view (Balto-slavyanskiy zagovorniy tekst: Lingvisticheskiy analiz i kartina mira; na materiale litovskikh i belorusskikh lechebnykh zagovorov, Institute of Slavic Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences, 1999).
Her research interests include issues of intertextuality and text semiotics, the analysis of linguistic material from the perspective of the opposition between ‘ours’ and ‘others’, and the study of textual structure from an ideological perspective. She is the author of three monographs and over eighty articles published in Russian and European journals and has participated in and organised more than 80 conferences.
Zavyalova is currently a research fellow at the Roma Tre Unit for the PRIN 2022 PNRR Rewriting European Literatures in Stalin’s Russia project, where she collaborates with Ilaria Aletto.
Research Unit 3: Università degli Studi di Siena
Alessandra Carbone
Alessandra Carbone is an associate professor at the University of Siena. She mainly deals with 19th and 20th century Russian literature; she is the author of several publications on M. Yu. Lermontov, and has published a monograph on his work in relation to French libertine literature (Lermontov e la nostalgia libertina, Pisa University Press – 2017); From 2019 to 2021, she studied the reception of Vasari’s Lives in 19th-century Russia, publishing a volume entitled Vasari in Russia. Le prime traduzioni russe delle “Vite dei più eccellenti pittori, scultori e architetti”(Vasari in Russia. The first Russian translations of the Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects, WriteUp Books, Rome 2021, Masterskaja20 Russian studies series). She has also worked on the reception and translation of Vasari’s Lives as part of the activities of the Soviet publishing house Academia (1933), with particular regard to the figures of translators and intellectuals Aleksey K. Dzhivelegov and Abram Efros. Since 2023, she has been studying the reception of French literature in Soviet culture and literature during the Stalinist years and is head of the research unit within the PRIN PNRR ‘Rewriting European Literatures in Stalin’s Russia: Defence of European Culture or Mediation of the Regime’s Ideology?’ for the analysis of paratexts to works of French literature in Russian translation from those years. She has participated as a speaker at numerous national and international conferences, and is co-organiser, together with Kristina Landa, of the PRIN Forlì-Arezzo International Conference on 15-17 October 2025.
