Parma, fine anni Novanta. Learco Ferrari, laureato in letteratura russa, suona la tromba e lavora part time come magazziniere. Tra una traduzione, una consegna e una prova con la band, cerca anche di scrivere libri. E soprattutto rimpiange i tempi in cui Bassotuba stava con lui, ora che se n’è andata… Nel racconto in prima persona delle minuscole vicende di Learco scorre un vero romanzo picaresco, una piccola epopea del quotidiano cantata con uno stile inconfondibile, diretto, divagante come la vita.

L’entusiasmo davanti al tabellone delle partenze alla stazione di Porta Nuova. Le fragole con panna ma senza fragole. Le barzellette sugli zombie. La scuola. I pomeriggi al parco. Paolo Nori rievoca episodi e momenti dell’infanzia di sua figlia (è lei la “piccola Battaglia”): teneri, esilaranti e pieni di saggezza come quelli che solo i bambini sanno regalare. Il flusso della memoria si dispiega ininterrotto in una serie di quadri scolpiti con l’inconfondibile stile di Nori, tra flusso di coscienza e humour, in questa edizione completamente rivista e aggiornata.

In March 2022, just days after the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Paolo Nori had a series of lectures on Dostoevsky cancelled at a university in Milan. The case quickly gained international attention, and Nori suddenly found himself in the spotlight, with invitations to give lectures multiplying. A Russian film director even approached him with the idea of making a documentary about him. In declining the offer, Nori wrote: “This ridiculous affair confirms something you Russians know very well: that literature, when it is powerful, as in Dostoevsky’s case, is stronger than any censorship and any dictatorship.” The Russian invasion has since turned into a war dragging on for years, during which Nori has published more books, not only in Italy but also in Russia, where some of his works have been translated for the first time—though also censored. Russian law prohibits the publication of books that fail to call the war in Ukraine a “special operation,” and as a result his Russian publisher was forced to cut passages from the original texts in order to bring them out. The outcome—perhaps not without its irony—is that Nori is now a censored writer both in Italy and in Russia. In this new book, the self-declared “pro-Russian criminal” Paolo Nori reflects on the instinct—common not only to authoritarian governments or blind bureaucracies—to give in to simplifications that equate politics with literature, war with poetry; to feel so certain of being right as to claim the right to silence and erase dissenting opinions; to ignore, stubbornly, that, as Gogol wrote, “It is not the mirror’s fault if faces are crooked.” And it is precisely this mirror of literature that Nori, through the stories of his beloved Russian authors and through his unmistakable, unique style, holds up to his readers: so that each may exercise their own ability to think—and to feel—without being imprisoned by the mental cages that confuse people with their governments, books written in a language with proclamations and war orders issued in that same language, the defense of freedom with censorship.

«Io, tutte le volte che vado in Russia, una delle prime cose che faccio è guardare il cielo e mi vien sempre in mente una breve poesia di Velimir Chlebnikov: “Poco, mi serve./ Una crosta di pane,/ Un ditale di latte,/ E questo cielo/ E queste nuvole”. E quando penso alle due donne della mia vita, mia figlia e sua mamma, mi vien sempre in mente un’altra poesia di Chlebnikov che inizia dicendo: “Le ragazze, quelle che camminano,/ Con stivali di occhi neri/ Sui fiori del mio cuore”. E quando sto male, ma male, mi viene in mente quella poesia di Pasternak che finisce dicendo: “Vivere una vita non è attraversare un campo”. Oppure quella di Mandel’štam che comincia dicendo: “Ho imparato la scienza degli addii, nel piangere notturno a testa nuda”. E allora, quando Crocetti mi ha proposto di scegliere e di commentare un certo numero di poesie russe che mi piacciono, io gli ho risposto di sì, che lo facevo. E adesso bisogna farlo. E lo facciamo. Cominciamo pure.» (Paolo Nori)

Raffaello Baldini is a great poet and yet very few people know who he is, and of those very few have recognized his voice. Is that beacause he writes in the beautiful dialect of Sant'Arcangelo di Romagna? But no. Paolo Nori reminds us that he is a huge poet even in the beautiful Italian with which the poet has always translated his verses at the foot of the page. And how many stories those verses drag along, how many images they elicit, how many characters, how much universe there is in that seemingly small world. As is his wont, Paolo Nori traverses Baldini's poetic adventure almost as if there were nothing else around, of himself making the filter of a beauty that comes up as if from a fountain and is frightening because it leaves us estranged. Here it is that-not unlike what happened with Dostoevskji and Achmatova-Baldini's imagination melts inside Nori's, made as it is of characters and seemingly minimal happenings: the dead who “say nothing and know everything,” the men who instead of dropping their years grow them, the standing there of a woman in front of the ring road to watch “the world go by.” Between thrusts and counterthrusts, between the “let's begin as well” and “let's continue as well” that recur to beat the rhythm, we learn that, more and more, Nori's writing is the progressive focusing of a character, his own: his being “asshole,” his being “bastiancontrary,” his being “mad as a Russian,” his being in love with a poet like Raffaello Baldini, his magisterial standing in front of the Nori's house as if it were a button box, his standing to see life as it goes on with each unforeseen unfolding of being in the world.

Learco Ferrari is a writer, but he does a lot of other things too. He has a girlfriend named Francesca, translates from Russian, worries about gaining weight, plays FreeCell (and feels ashamed about it), travels around Italy presenting his books, and tries to conserve energy by limiting his daily movements to a small metropolitan area. Most of all, he’s writing a novel. Actually, two. The only problem is that most of what he writes ends up being stuff to throw away.

Having survived the serious accident that left him hospitalized for months in the Burns Unit, Learco Ferrari has managed to become a writer. But above all, he is a convalescent—navigating fleeting thoughts, special suits made only in Ireland, translations of Russian manuals, the tales of Mulla Nasruddin, Sufi philosophy books, that friend of his from Bologna named Francesca, and much more—while trying to return to a normal life. Even though, in the end, not being entirely "normal" might just be a blessing.

The character who narrates and says I has turned 40. The age of maturity? Perhaps. The only real certainties are his daughter, his writing, the city where he lives, Russian literature and the exemplary episodes that memory (whether private or public) never ceases to modify and counterfeit - the story of the author's mother running over a pig with her bicycle, the scene of Pasternàk coming out of his dacha to go receive Stalin's famous phone call.
Fra il microcosmo emotivo del rapporto padre-figlia e il macrocosmo parmigiano (dove la campagna elettorale per il sindaco allude a un’Italia nevrotica, incompetente e vittima della propria politica), si insinua il tema cruciale della responsabilità e delle scelte individuali.

Dramatis personæ: Calisto Tanzi, Stalin, barbisino D’Alema, Boris Pasternàk, il triangolista di Parma, Leonardo Sciascia, Orietta Berti, Silvio Berlusconi, Arturo Toscanini.

What makes a man a poet? And what is a poet? What about a child? A provocateur? A madman? A prophet? A jerk? We are in Petersburg in 1912: we walk down Nevsky Prospect with Sasa and Pasa and feel that everything is moving, changing. Not only that: we eat bread and poetry, and the watchword is Vanguard, throwing the past out of the steam Modernity. Sasa and Pasa come from the province and want to study mathematics, but there is no time: the book that will revolutionize the fate of Russian poetry must be published. The hangovers and encounters at the Goat tavern go hand in hand with the hangovers and encounters of the spirit. Running parallel to the comic vicissitudes of Sasa and Pasa are the dramatic ones of Velimir Chlebnikov, the poet par excellence.

«I started going to Russia in 1991, more than thirty years ago and, in those years, I think I have been to Petersburg about twenty times. In those twenty trips I have been maybe three times to what, in the West, is the most famous of the Russian museums, the Hermitage, and more than twenty times, twenty-three, I think, to the Russian Museum. Not that I mind, the Hermitage, it's just that, at the Hermitage, there is Western art, at the Russian Museum there is the world's largest collection of Russian art. And, from the very first time, walking through the halls of the Russian Museum felt like I was reading a history book. When people ask me what Dostoevsky's novels tell us about life in Russia in the nineteenth century, it occurs to me that it is true, they tell us a lot, about life in Russia in the nineteenth century, but much more, it seems to me, they tell us about us, about our life now, about our courage and our fear.»

The protagonist of this cheerful and despairing book is Learco Ferrari, a no longer aspiring writer as well as the author's alter ego, now in the fifth chapter of his saga. A victim of a car accident, he finds himself hospitalized in the Burn Recovery Unit of Parma Hospital, where he must relearn the gestures of everyday life.
A very sui generis medical novel, full of paradoxical situations that portrays, through a crowd of voices and faces, the total nonsense of reality.

In the year of grace 1999 Learco Ferrari, already the main character of three novels, received a luciferous visit and became Satan's emissary. He wanted to be a translator, perhaps even a writer, and instead here he is, turned devil. His task will be to sow trouble and scandal in his sleepy provincial Emilian town, which suddenly becomes the stage for an enthralling saraband with a syncopated rhythm, a two-three, a two-three, between tics and rituals, phone calls and literature, cats, anarchists and dictionaries. Without any restraint, the devil Learco divides, disrupts, slanders, and cheats anyone who comes within his reach, bringing chaos and merriment everywhere.

Much to Grandma Carmela's satisfaction, Learco Ferrari has graduated from college - Russian literature - and now dreams of publishing an autobiographical novel, The Last Rounds of Learco Ferrari. Since the road between dreams and the need to make a living is a long one, the aspiring writer works as a freelance language consultant for an import-export company, two to three days a week. It's a job he doesn't like; he'd rather play trumpet in the unlikely Bogoncelli band, musicians and storytellers. And to be with his girlfriend, Bassotuba, although she may be better off with the cat Paolo.... Original, irreverent, at once bittersweet and hilarious, Le cose non sono le cose shamelessly tells a story of human endurance in which the everyday becomes surreal.

"Noi la farem vendetta" is a book that reconstructs what happened in the theater square of Reggio Emilia on July 7, 1960. It’s a book about state violence, but it’s also a book about raising children, about things that disappear, about memory and how it is preserved in certain isolated communities—communities we should be grateful for. It’s about how losing a brother at seventeen is, in a way, like having a child. And it’s also a book about Emilia. And all things considered, now that I think about it, in a way—if the phrase weren’t so overused—you could even call it a love story."

«We want to tell», says Nori, «the story of Anna Achmatova, a Russian poetess who was born near Odessa in 1889 and died in Moscow in 1966. Although Anna Achmatova wanted to be called a poet, not a poetess, and her name was not, in fact, Achmatova,
«We want to tell», says Nori, «the story of Anna Achmatova, a Russian poetess who was born near Odessa in 1889 and died in Moscow in 1966. Although Anna Achmatova wanted to be called a poet, not a poetess, and her name was not, in fact, Achmatova, her name was Gorenko; when her father, a Russian naval officer, learned that his daughter was writing poetry, he told her, ‘Don’t mix our surname with these dishonorable affairs.’ So she, instead of stopping writing verse, thought better of changing her last name. And she took the surname of one of her ancestors on her mother’s side, a Tatar princess: Achmatova». 
Anna was a strong woman, a woman who, «with just the tilt of her head», as Iosif Brodsky, her friend and future Nobel laureate, said, «transformed you into homo sapiens». “Nun and prostitute” to Soviet critics, excluded from the Writers’ Union, deprived of loved ones, became, during World War II, Russia’s most popular voice under Nazi siege, then banned, guarded, without means. She lavished obstinacy and steadfastness. She suffered as souls suffer who, even when they yield, do not yield. She did not stop writing, even when her poetry could only be passed from mouth to mouth. He was able, at the end of his life, to be what he wanted to be: the greatest poet, indeed, the greatest Russian poet of his time.
After entering Dostoevsky’s, Nori enters another incredible life, but this time we realize that, in approaching Anna to us as we have become, and us to Russia as she has become, we are confronted with a cruel urgency, a figure who looks at us, concerns us, and touches us more strongly where we are still human creatures.

There are times when you feel like buying a slicer, a ham, sixteen packages of bread loaf and eight tubes of mayonnaise, coming home, eating, going to bed, waking up, eating, going to bed.
«And when things were bad, and things were pretty bad, I would get a tenderness, for me, for my senseless life, that I couldn't tell whether it was good, bad, or nothing».
And in those days you often get to ask yourself: but is everything going well or everything going bad? What does it mean to affect reality? And above all: what are cats for?
Between loneliness and bewilderment (in the kitchen at home as well as on vacation in Amsterdam), self-mockery and tenderness, a funny and somewhat bitter text about the moments of "nothingness" we all experience.