Frontiere di culture, frontiere dell’aldilà: Aleksandr N. Veselovskij, la Commedia e la letteratura folclorica

This paper deals with the topic of border literature viewing it as an exchange of ‘narrative cores’ between cultures, genres, different registers (from popular to high literature, from forms of orality to writing). Special attention will be paid, in particular, to the ‘dogane’ or heavenly spheres in medieval folk tales and poems (the Byzantine "Life of Basil the Younger", fairy tales, fabliaux, legends of French, German, Slavic folklore), seen in connection with the distribution of souls in Dante’s "Divine Comedy".