Since the end of the 1980s, the literary works of the Italian writer, journalist, and film director Curzio Malaparte (1898-1957) gradually become available to the Russian reader. The last significant literary text by Malaparte translated into Russian was the novel "The Kremlin Ball". This novel, work on which began in the spring of 1947, was never completed by Malaparte and was not published until 1971 (to a certain extent it can be considered the result of a reconstruction based on the study of the writer's surviving manuscripts). The story revolves around a visit by Malaparte to Moscow in May 1929. During this visit, Malaparte had the opportunity to communicate with representatives of the higher party elite of the USSR, such as A.V. Lunacharsky, and with the leading Soviet writers of the time - Demian Bedny, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Mikhail Bulgakov, and many others. These meetings and observations allowed him to create a large-scale picture of the life and manners of the party and literary nobility, presented in "The Kremlin Ball". Since Malaparte's novel has an extremely large documentary component, the presence of a detailed real commentary on it is of particular importance. Such a commentary was made by M.P. Odessky and N.A. Gromova in the course of preparation of the Russian edition of The Kremlin Ball, published in 2019. However, some episodes, events, and fragments of the novel still need historical and philological explanations. Several such explanations are offered in this article. They concern the establishment of prototypes of several characters in the novel, the fictitiousness or reality of the artistic texts mentioned in it, as well as the influence of folklore and mythological representations on the creative method of Malaparte.
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