Raffaella Vassena is Assistant Professor of Russian Language and  Literature at the University of Milan. Her research activity focuses on sociological aspects of the nineteenth-century Russian literature and culture, and on the post-revolutionary Russian diaspora. She is the author of Reawakening National Identity. Dostoevsky’s Diary of a Writer and its Impact on Russian Society (Peter Lang, 2007). Her most recent publications include articles on Russian culture of the 1860s and 1870s, as well as on the twentieth-century Russian diaspora to Italy.