“Maria Giuseppa” by Tommaso Landolfi — a paraphrase of Notes from Underground

Abstract

The article presents a comparative analysis of a novel by F. M. Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground, and Tommaso Landolfi's short story “Maria Giuseppa”: the results demonstrate one of the main principles of Landolfi's poetics — the creation of intertextual connections with literary predecessors and between his own works. Landolfi, an expert and translator of Russian literature into Italian, often paraphrased and played with some of its texts in his own literary works. Usually, works of writers who had a significant influence on Landolfi underwent such a recasting. Among them was Dostoevsky. Landolfi translated Notes from Underground into Italian. It can be assumed that this novel had a significant impact on the Italian author, since it contains several motives that are usual for his texts — the writer's reflection, loneliness, mental imbalance, abnormal sexual relations. The article discusses the images of the two main characters of Landolfi`s short story: the protagonist contains many features of the “underground man”, and Maria Giuseppa combines the traits of three characters in Notes from Underground: the old servant, the servant Apollo, and the prostitute Lisa. Landolfi's main technique in creating a paraphrase of Notes is ironic hyperbolization.