The problem of consistency in the literary works written by Ignazio Silone has been present for years in both Italian and international literary criticism. Silone himself wrote about it in some of his critical and theoretical papers. The ostensible consistency comes to the surface In almost all works written by Silone, (e.g. Abruzzo, his peasants, his heroes preoccupied with deep existential problems, and an omnipresent strong social commitment in surmounting all forms of political, social and racial discrimination. There is no doubt, however, that the great moral crisis present in the minds of a number of Italian intellectuals and aroused between the two wars as a consequence of the fall of the social myths which had been subdued by the greatest political and moral catastrophe of the modern epoch, affected Silone as well, both the man and writer. His optimism, based on the Faith in human virtues, especially in the progresive function of the deprived in making history, gradually gave way to an ever-growing scepticism which gave birth to his mystical fall, first bestowing his confidence upon the saint-revolutinonary and, finally, upon a desperate paleochristian messianship. Closly analyzing Silone’s literary and theoretical works the author arrives at the conslusion that such an ideological and literary turn in Silone comes as a result of consistency of his artistic vision of the world, with its origin in the mystical basic element, present both in his persistent confidence, almost religious, in the innate human virtues and in the distrust in the possibility of regeneration of society without superhuman acts. Such a basic element, characteristic for Silone’s whole output, represent an invisible but omnipresent fluid connecting Silone inseparably, like umbilical cord, with his peasants from the South, i.e. those that, along the picture of Karl Marx carried also that of St. Rosalia, and with those on whose flag was written »Republic and the King- dom of God«, and who, like Franz the carpenter, connected Karl Marx with fesus Christ in order to establish such a society on the earth in which poverty and justice will be integrated and Marxism and Christianity reconciled,
