The article is dedicated to the analysis of the reception and transformation of psychoanalytic ideas in the Italian novel of the 20th–21st centuries. The study is based on a comparative analysis of two significant novels that mark different literary eras: the modernist novel "Zeno's Conscience" (La coscienza di Zeno) by Italo Svevo and the postmodernist novel "The Prague Cemetery" (Il cimitero di Praga) by Umberto Eco. The subject of this research includes psychoanalytic techniques and principles of text organization (a specific type of discourse; reference to Freud's structure of personality, the realm of the unconscious; narrative strategies) in the aforementioned novels by Svevo and Eco. The aim of the research is to reveal the specifics and evolution of the psychoanalytic paradigm in the Italian novel over the century: from a tool of self-analysis in the modernist novel (Svevo) to a method of deconstructing cultural codes and historical myths in the postmodernist novel (Eco). The methodological foundation of the research is based on key principles developed by the psychoanalytic direction of literary studies grounded in the works of Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Jacques Lacan, Erich Fromm, as well as the theoretical and journalistic writings of Umberto Eco in the fields of interpretation theory, semiotics, and literary studies. The research methods include comparative, narrative, and hermeneutic methods. As a result of the analysis, types of psychoanalytic tools used by the authors were identified; it has been established that the appeal to psychoanalysis is evolutionary, reflecting a qualitatively new dimension of the novel in the 20th-21st centuries: from an individually discursive method postulating self-analysis through writing to the projection of subjective mechanisms onto mass consciousness, followed by their transformation into dominant cultural codes and normative constructs. In Svevo's novel, writing functions as a false therapy, revealing the impossibility of genuine self-analysis, while in Eco's novel, self-analysis is reinterpreted in the context of the scholar and writer's semiotic, cultural, and interpretive theories, demonstrating the mechanism of projection and exposing the reasons and methods for creating the archetype of the enemy. The scientific novelty of the study lies in the identification of the psychoanalytic component in Eco's novel "The Prague Cemetery." The results obtained may be useful in research on the history of foreign literature, the poetics of modern psychological and postmodern novels. The conclusions indicate that psychoanalysis in Italian literature evolves from a method of understanding personality to a tool for interpreting historical and cultural experience.
Anzhelika Sergeevna Alborova (Sun,) studied this question.