“Un’altra volta lo sognai”

Dream, Exile and Identity in Enrico Morovich

Abstract

The figure of Enrico Morovich (Pecine, 1906 – Lavagna, 1994) occupies an isolated place in Italian literature of the late twentieth century, moving between memorial realism and a dreamlike writing style rooted in surrealism. Born in a border city and marked by the experience of the Julian-Dalmatian exodus, in two emblematic works – Racconti di Fiume e altre cose (1985) and Un italiano a Fiume (1993) – Morovich develops a reflection on the complexity of a multi-layered identity through an interplay of fable, dream, and autobiography. In the first volume, memory is translated into a symbolic and dreamlike psychic landscape, constructed through a language of metamorphosis and visions that anticipate the later autobiographical internalization. In Un italiano a Fiume, on the other hand, the autobiographical component intensifies, and recollection becomes a practice of self-analysis: Fiume is not only a lost place, but a sentimental interlocutor, an inner projection in which the subject seeks to heal the fracture of exile. Read in dialogue, the two volumes trace a unified path of reflection on the relationship between memory, identity, and writing. Morovich works through the wound of his diasporic condition by transforming it into a creative act, constructing a “geography of the soul” in which the real and the imaginary overlap. From this perspective, Morovich’s narrative asserts itself as both testimony and an exercise in poetic resistance against oblivion: an act of regeneration of memory through language.