The role of the word in totalitarian regimes is crucial, as governments use it to control the masses and to create their own truth and reality. What lies behind this is complete void, which becomes the ground for the Conceptualist movement focusing on the relationship between subject and language. D.A. Prigov is one of the most prominent representatives of conceptualism. His Stikhogrammy, published for the first time in 1985, can be positioned at the junction of verbal and visual art and, combining word and image, they reveal the truth behind the discourse made by Soviet power, by classical literature and the mainstream. The purpose of this article is to show, on the basis of several selected stikhogrammy, the attitude of D.A. Prigov towards the loss of values and how this loss becomes the basis of the project to create a Gesamtkunstwerk.

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Learning foreign languages and professional communication at intermediate to advanced levels present some peculiar aspects and difficulties. They are mostly related to the fact that there is an initial stumbling block due to a certain prejudice on the part of the learners themselves, who perceive the professional communication language as something foreign, 'other' and extremely complex compared to the language they have learned up to that point. This leads them, as naturally as unconsciously, to raise an additional emotional filter that further complicates the learning process and the acquisition of new terms and phrases. For this reason, students often learn by heart, and with no connection (or with a very limited connection) with the real context of use and application the vocabulary and expressions related to professional communication field. This purely mnemonic approach in learning a foreign language has long been shown to be inadequate, and although it is generally considered outdated, it tends to persist when dealing with specialised languages. In order to overcome this, teachers today have three instruments at their disposal that seem particularly relevant to us: literary texts, TV series and podcasts. The aim of this article is to investigate how to deal with them so to reach the best educational outcome.

Despite being one of the lesser known Serapion Brothers, Nikolai Nikitin had a brilliant early career. He was acclaimed by M. Gorky and the critic A. Voronsky as a very promising writer, able to convey the spirit of the post-revolutionary period, also in light of his personal experience as a volunteer in the Red Army. The first phase of his literary production dates from 1922 to 1924. In the texts of this period the thematic focus is mainly on the experience of the revolution, while, stylistically, they are characterized by a highly evocative and musical language that reveals the influence of A. Bely’s Simfonii. The article focuses on the long story (povest’) Noch’, edited and redacted three times during 1923, more than any of Nikitin’s novels. Being the most redacted and revised piece of Nikitin’s long fiction, the povest’ offers the possibility to investigate the relationship between the author and Voronsky who, more than anyone else, had a great impact on the young writer. The povest’ focuses on the battle between two trains, one white (called “L.G. Kornilov”) and one red (the “N. 14-7, Béla Kun”). In the first edition, the result of the battle is not conveyed to the reader; the only outcome is destruction and pain, and this caused a very negative and passionate reaction from critics and readers. The comparison of the three redactions of the povest’ shows the direction of the revisions, which started from a merely stylistic point of view and then moved to a more ideological layer, clarifying the result of the battle (now undoubtedly assigned to the Red Army) and highlighting the stichijnyj but deeply legitimate character of the Revolution itself. Starting from 1924, Nikitin will no longer participate in the meetings of the Serapion Brothers, and his poetics and chosen topics will change as well, moving in the stylistic and ideological direction that will be formalized in 1934 under the name of Socialist Realism.

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