"Non solo lei, Stirlitz, soffre di nostalgia": La nostalgia dell'est dell'agente infiltrato e la nostalgia dell'ovest del lettore nel romanzo di spionaggio di Julian Semenov

Abstract

In Iulian Semenov's 1969 Seventteen Moments of Spring the hero's (a Soviet undercover agent in Nazi Germany) nostalgia for the motherland is so strongly underscored thtat it becomes ridiculous. Such a stress on nostalgia was, as it appears, necessary in order to compensate the envy the reader would fatally feel for the comfort of his "European" life among the enemy. The double agent became, in fact, an allegory of the "double life" of the soviet citizen in the Seventies, regardless of the fact that the novel was sponsored by the KGB. Or was this an intentional projection of Iurii Andropov's self-constructed image?