Traditore di nome e di fatto: il personaggio di Iuduška nel romanzo "I signori Golovlëv" di Mihail Saltykov-Ŝedrin

The character of Juduška, the main protagonist of the novel The Golovlyov Family (1880) by the Russian writer Saltykov Ŝedrin, is an interesting example of renaming. Juduška is not, in fact, a simple nickname (made up of the name Juda, Judah, and the term duška, ;pleasant, gentle person),marked by duplicity, deception and betrayal, but it almost immediately becomes the name designating his identity. Juduška therefore conceals the original Porfirij, a solemn and royal pre- name, an allusion to th&e purple colour, an alienating name, and is completed by a second epithet, krovopivuška, leech. This paper aims to investigate the functional relations between Porfirij-Juduška’names, his actions and his own destiny in the microcosm he represents.