SANGUINA ANCORA
Teatro Festival Parma 22

PAOLO NORI

SANGUINA ANCORA

L’incredibile vita di Fedor M. Dostoevskij

ARENA SHAKESPEARE
June 13th, 21:15

A lectio by Paolo Nori

Crime and Punishment was the first Russian book I read, I was 15. The first reaction I had, when I understood what Dostoevskij was talking about in Crime and Punishment, when Raskol’nikov, the protagonist, asks himself «But me, how much am I worth? Am I like an insect, or am I like Napoleon?», well, I asked that question to my fifteen year old self: «But I» I asked myself, «am I like an insect or am I like Napoleon?». And I had the feeling that that book, that was published a hundred and twelve years earlier and three thousand kilometers away, had opened a wound in me that would not stop bleeding anytime soon. I was right. It still bleeds. Why?
Sanguina Ancora, the novel I wrote, is the story of the incredible life of Fyodor Michajlovič Dostoevskij, – an engineer without vocation, a translator humiliated by his publishers, a precocious genius of Russian literature, the new Gogol’, better than Gogol’, an aspiring revolutionary who is miserably discovered and sentenced to death, then pardoned, sent for ten years to Siberia to serve his sentence, readmitted to the capital, St Petersburg, whose myth, with his works, he will help to build  “the most abstract and premeditated city in the globe “, an incapable and desperate player, a penniless writer victim of bad publishers, a husband who is very much in love with a stenographer twenty-five years his junior, an incredulous father who writes to a friend: “Have children! There is no greater happiness in the world”, a blessed madman who writes down the questions that we all ask ourselves and that we dare not confess to anyone, a man with an insignificant appearance, clumsy, bald, slightly hunchbacked, old since when he was young, sick, confused, contradictory, desperate, ridiculous, so similar to us, that he manages to die in the moment of his greatest success, by telling this story of a fictional life, this book that believes to be a novel, simply tries to answer the question: why?
Why is it still bleeding?

Paolo Nori

Sanguina ancora Paolo Nori

⇒ Paolo Nori (Parma 1963), has a degree in Russian literature, he has published novels and essays, including Bassotuba non c’è (1999), Si chiama Francesca, questo romanzo (2002), Noi la farem vendetta (2006), I malcontenti (2010), I russi sono matti (2019), Che dispiacere (2020) e con Mondadori nel 2021 Sanguina ancora. L’incredibile vita di Fedor M. Dostoevskij. He has translated and edited works by Russian authors, including Puškin, Gogol’, Turgenev, Tolstòj, Cechov, Dostoevskij.