Neorealism and the village motif in italian and croatian writers

Abstract

The effect of the sterile art nursed by fascism began to recede at the brink of WWII to wholly disappear under the pressure of documentary coloured realism as soon as peace was established. The voice of inner conscience urged the Italian writer to save literature tormented by twenty years of mystification and lies, to heal it from the enthusiasm and mediocrity quaintly wrapped in a hollow aesthetism or in patriotic parchment. The generation of authors that came of age between the two wars chose a new neorealistic conception of the creative act and sought new sources of inspiration, attending to social motifs aboundantly present in the rural enviroment. In a number of decades neorealism took root which was reflected in numerous books conveying new, humane messages. A large number of them was translated into Serbocroatian as soon as the 1950ies. The investigation of this article is directed at the discovery of connecting threads between neorealistic works concentrated on the village and a number of novels by Dalmatian authors — Vladan Desnica and Mirko Božić for example — who found among the peasantry a sublime sense of storytelling. Comparing Fontamara by I. Silone, Krist se zaustavio u Eboliju (Christ sloped in Eboli) C. Levija, Zimsko ljetovanje (Winter Vacation) V. Desnica and The Kurlanes by M. Božić, the author concludes that these authors headed for the village with similar impulses, that they transgressed the confines of classical representation and set themselves the aim of disclosing the truth about a mode of human existence mystified by time. Ten years later they were joined by Fulvio Tomizza with his first novel Materada (I960). The above works evince a desire to present through history the fate of this forsaken world »existing on the brink of the abyss« whose spirit has conjoined with the earth, to make the literary word subservient to this man who 1st the greatest victim of the process of civilization. Village motifs found a worthy position in a literature for which neorealism had paved a way and whose voice reached Dalmatian writers.