Mikhail Zoshchenko is one of the most famous Russian humourists and writers of the first half of 20th century. His texts, and in particular the short stories written in 1920s–1930s, are true masterpieces and had an extraordinary success in Russia, echoed in an immediate reception abroad. The aim of this contribution is to analyse some samples from the ten Italian translations of one of his most iconic short stories, Aristokratka (1924). Particular attention will be given to the way the translators dealt with the different aspects of the language used by Zoshchenko, a perfect specimen of a modern realisation of the skaz.

The article aims to prove that the narrative structure of The Stormy Life of Lasik Roitschwantz by Ilya Ehrenburg can be viewed as a starting point for understanding the overriding idea of the novel. In the material for interpretation among other things analysed what follows: the similarity between the narrative of the fi rst few chapters and the skaz narrative (Russian oral form of narrative) based on the defi nition of formal mimesis, the introduction to a “foreign word” narrative (the protagonist using reported speech and free indirect speech), the restriction of the storyteller’s role (which is the overriding element of the skaz narrative) and simultaneously putting the protagonist at the forefront, the language markers used in order to mask the convergence between the storyteller’s and the protagonist’s points of view. As a result, the article implies that the presence of a skaz storyteller allows analysing the fi gure of Lasik Roitschwantz not as a character from a book or of a certain type, but rather as a human being in a universal sense.