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Leaning from the steep slope
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in If on a winter’s night a traveler, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
The Act of Reading
Academia and Publishing
Censorship and Government Oppression
Love, Lust, and Anxiety
Summary
Analysis
You have been listening to Uzzi-Tuzii read aloud and feel that it’s a very different experience from reading what’s on the page. As Uzzi-Tuzii goes on, he seems to become more and more fluent in the book’s language but also interrupts himself to explain aspects of it. As you’re getting lost in the story, you suddenly happen to notice Ludmilla in the room and wonder how long she’s been there.
This passage illustrates how, while books can contain knowledge, getting too bogged down in technicalities can actually hinder the experience of reading, making it impossible to follow a story. Ludmilla represents the opposite viewpoint of Uzzi Tuzii—of valuing stories more than academic details.
Themes
At one point, Uzzi-Tuzii pauses for a while, so Ludmilla asks, “And then?” The narrator tells you that at this point in the novel, the author, Ukko Ahti, sank into writer’s block and depression and eventually killed himself. What Uzzi-Tuzii has just read is a fragment published posthumously. Uzzi-Tuzii warns you and Ludmilla not to look for the rest of the book, since Cimmerian novels are at the threshold, speaking “the wordless language of the dead.” For this reason, they’re all unfinished.
Yet again the novel questions the linear flow of time, framing death not as silence but as a “wordless language.” Indeed, many authors continue to “say” things long after their deaths as people continue to read them, with some books even taking on different meanings or significance after the author is dead.
Themes
As Uzzi-Tuzii and Ludmilla debate their own philosophies about reading, you feel out of your depth. Ludmilla mentions how in spite of everything, she’d like to finish the novel she’s in the middle of. Just then, Lotaria appears, saying she has a novel that she recently studied in a feminist seminar that she thinks is exactly the one Ludmilla is looking for.
Ludmilla asks if Lotaria has Leaning from the steep slope, but it turns out that she actually has a different novel called Without fear of wind or vertigo. Uzzi-Tuzii says he has it on good authority that Lotaria’s book isn’t an authentic Cimmerian text but a forgery. Just then, a pale bearded man named Professor Galligani enters and contradicts Uzzi-Tuzii, saying that recent discoveries have proven that text of Without fear of wind or vertigo is authentic Cimmerian.
While the professors in this passage argue about the authenticity of a text, in fact Without fear of wind or vertigo and the country of Cimmeria are both inventions of Calvino. It is impossible to know whether Uzzi-Tuzii or Galligani is correct, since Calvino never reveals an answer, perhaps suggesting that some searches for the truth are doomed to be futile.
Themes
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Ludmilla isn’t interested in the debate between Uzzi-Tuzii and Galligani—she just wants to continue reading. Lotaria invites Ludmilla and you to her study group. You go to a classroom, where Galligani gives a lecture on some of the historical context for Without fear of wind or vertigo, such as how it was translated into German to reach a broader international audience. But as soon as Lotaria begins to read from this new novel, you know it has no connection to any of the previous ones you’ve read.
Each of the book’s embedded story fragments have supposedly been in a different language so far. On the one hand, this is false, since Calvino wrote them all in Italian. On the other hand, there is an element of truth to this false premise, since this book did indeed get translated into languages like Polish and German. In some ways, the fact that Cimmerian is a fake language refutes the idea that translations are less authentic than the original, since even Calvino’s original Italian could never faithfully translate a fake language.
Themes
