Sacchetti Franco. Novellas, 1962. In Russian

Саккетти Франко.
Новеллы.
Серия: Литературные памятники.
Перевод с итальянского и заключительная статья В.Ф. Шишмарёва.
Москва-Ленинград: Изд-во Академии наук СССР, 1962.
392 с.; суперобложка, твердый переплет, увеличенный формат.
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Sacchetti Franco.
Novellas.
Series: Literary Monuments.
Translation from Italian and concluding article by V.F. Shishmarev.
Moscow-Leningrad: Publishing House of the USSR Academy of Sciences, 1962.
392 pp.; dust jacket, hardcover, enlarged format.

Franco Sacchetti (c. 1335–1400), one of the most vivid representatives of late 14th-century Italian literature, was a Florentine merchant, poet, storyteller, and civic official. His “Novelle” (around 300 surviving tales) form a colorful, realistic panorama of Trecento Italian society — merchants, artisans, clergy, nobles, peasants, rogues, and courtesans — full of sharp wit, satire, erotic humor, moral lessons, and everyday human follies. Written in lively vernacular Tuscan, the novellas continue the tradition of Boccaccio’s Decameron but are more down-to-earth, anecdotal, and often autobiographical.
This 1962 edition in the prestigious “Literary Monuments” series of the USSR Academy of Sciences is the most complete and scholarly Russian translation of Sacchetti’s novellas to date. The translation and extensive concluding article were prepared by Viktor Fedorovich Shishmarev (1877–1952, posthumously published), a leading Soviet Romance philologist, medievalist, and academician, known for his deep studies of Italian literature and Dante. Shishmarev’s commentary provides historical and literary context, analyzes Sacchetti’s language, sources, and place in the transition from medieval to Renaissance storytelling.
The volume, with its elegant dust jacket and enlarged format, represents the high standards of Soviet academic publishing in the early 1960s, making rare Italian classics accessible to Russian readers while offering rigorous scholarly apparatus.