Eugenio CORTI

Few returned

Twenty-eight Days on the Russian Front, Winter 1942-1943

SUMMARY

After World War II, more than one hundred books appeared that dealt with the experience of the Italian army in Russia, and particularly the terrible winter retreat of 1942-1943.  Few Returned (I più non ritornano) is the only one of these that is still regularly reissued in Italy.

Eugenio Corti, who was a twenty-one-year-old second lieutenant at the time, found himself, together with 30,000 Italians and a smaller contingent of Germans, encircled on the banks of the River Don by enemy forces who far outnumbered them. To break out of this encirclement, these men undertook a desperate march across the snow, with constant engagements and in temperatures ranging from -20° to -30° Fahrenheit. Whereas supplies were air-dropped to the Germans, the predicament of the Italians was far more difficult: lacking gasoline, they were compelled to abandon their vehicles and proceed without heavy arms, equipment, ammunition, or provisions. Even the wounded had to be abandoned, though it was well known that the soldiers of the Red Army “enraged by the brutality of the German invasion” killed all the enemy wounded who fell into their hands. After twenty-eight days of encirclement, only 4,000 of the 30,000 Italians made it out of the pocket.

Why is it that Corti’s book, which was first published in 1947, continues after fifty years to be reprinted in Italy? Because, as Mario Apollonio of the University of Milan said, when the book first appeared: “It is a chronicle… but it is much more than that: behind the physical reality, there is the truth” about man at his most tragic hour. Apollonio adds: “The power of the writing immediately transforms the document into drama”; the result is a “novel-poem-drama-history”. The philosopher Benedetto Croce found in Corti’s book “the not infrequent gleam of human goodness and nobility”. Few Returned is a classic of war literature that succeeds in bringing home the full hatefulness of war.

Eugenio Corti began writing his diary at a military hospital immediately after being repatriated from the Russian front. When in September 1943 Italy found itself cut in two by the Armistice, Corti, loyal to his officer’s oath, joined up with what remained of the Italian army in the south and with those few troops participated in driving the Germans off Italian soil, fighting at the side of the British Eighth and the American Fifth Armies.

First published by the University of Missouri Press in May 1997

272 pages

The last soldiers of the King

Life in Wartime Italy, 1943-1945

SUMMARY

In the sequel to the highly acclaimed Few Returned, Eugenio Corti, one of Italy’s most distinguished postwar writers, continues his poignant account of his experiences as an Italian soldier in the Second World War. In the earlier book, Corti, a twenty-one-year-old lieutenant of artillery, recounts the horrifying experience of the soldiers who were sent to Russia to fight alongside their German ally. On the River Don, the Red Army surrounded Corti and the other members of the Italian force. Of the 30,000 men in the Thirty-fifth Corps, Corti was one of only an estimated 4,000 soldiers to survive the ordeal. Mussolini’s dreams of empire were shattered, and his ill-fated Eighth Army no longer existed.

In 1943, after recurrent military defeats, the Italian government and its king, Victor Emmanuel III, forced Mussolini to resign. Italy then signed an armistice with the Allies and ended its alliance with Germany. The Germans immediately occupied northern Italy, which the Axis still held, and reinstated Mussolini in the north. Some Italians remained loyal to fascism; many others aligned themselves with the Allies, who were now advancing in southern Italy. Corti’s sympathies were with the Allies, and after a harrowing escape from the German-occupied north, he rejoined the Italian Army fighting on the side of the king. The Last Soldiers of the King is Corti’s account of the Italian Army’s experiences fighting the Germans during the remainder of the war.

In this unforgettable narrative, Corti depicts the war from the perspective of the average Italian soldier, capturing its boredom and absurdity along with brief periods of savagery, terror, and death. Painting vivid pictures of the sights, sounds, and smells of war, he shows how these men fought alongside the Allies against the Germans. They fought without hatred, driven by a sense of duty and love for their country and a desire to quickly put an end to a war that was destroying so many lives. Corti superbly relates the wandering of the remnant of Italian officers and men as they sought to reestablish themselves as Italian soldiers. The Last Soldiers of the King tells the story of a proud people forced to endure death, poverty, and the virtual destruction of their nation.

First published by the University of Missouri Press in November 2003

344 pages

I will return

Letters from the Russian Front—The Birth of a Writer

SUMMARY

An extraordinary testimony to learn about the adventures of the future writer Eugenio Corti during the war and his early endeavors as a writer. The letters from the Russian front written by Eugenio Corti during the Second World War describe a fundamental experience for the writer. A sort of epistolary diary made up of letters, postcards, images, and notes that show the certainty of a good destiny and the positivity of an existence based on faith.

On 9th June 1942, Eugenio Corti volunteered for the Russian campaign, the decisive experience of his life, in which he developed his vocation as a writer. The images he saw, the stories he encountered, and the freezing ordeal of the retreat would later be poured into the pages of his masterpieces, I più non ritornano (Most don’t return) and the great saga of The Red Horse. Now, thanks to these precious letters, published here for the first time, we can learn previously unknown details of that tragic adventure and of the remote construction site of a storyteller thirsty for truth and beauty.

248 pages

I want your love

Letters to Vanda (1947 – 1951)

SUMMARY

“You will be able to read what I am in a book I published in these days… I would give it to you if I could see you again…” Thus began, on the evening of 14 July 1947, the intense correspondence between Eugenio Corti and the young literature student Vanda di Marsciano, with whom he would marry four years later in Assisi, Italy. It is a correspondence that lays bare the souls of two young people scarred by the Second World War, with the chiaroscuros of a bond that initially suffered but later became stainless. Anyone who has lived through an experience of love will find themselves in these pages, pages that restore intact Eugenio’s great narrative capacity and surprise with the liveliness of Vanda’s stories: a reading that attracts and involves, with the force of a great family novel.

Each one is hounded by his own providence

The unpublished diaries of Eugenio Corti

SUMMARY

100 years after his birth, the unpublished diaries of Eugenio Corti are being released. Diaries of War and Peace, 1940-1949. Corti, author of the monumental novel The Red Horse (34 editions, translated into 8 languages – including Lithuanian and Japanese – and over 400 thousand copies sold), is one of the most important authors of 20th-century Italian literature. These diaries, interesting both from a literary and a historical point of view, together with Few returned (I più non ritornano) and The last soldiers of the King (Gli ultimi soldati del re), represent Corti’s debut as a war reporter and narrator and reveal the genesis of many events in The Red Horse. Thanks to the publication of these Diaries, which correspond to 17 previously unpublished notebooks, we can now learn all the details of the author’s human and spiritual journey: the dreams of a twenty-year-old who is just starting out in life, his direct experience of war, and his first writing workshop. But we also get to know a surprising side to him: his fears, his fiery and unyielding character when faced with injustice, and his crystal-clear faith.

664 pages

When memory becomes poetry

The vocation to writing and the search for truth

SUMMARY

“I’m reading Stendhal; I must read Proust… These last readings are necessary if I am to return to my beloved Homer-Virgil-Dante through the absorption and surpassing of later culture… Soon, therefore, I will set to work, and in the meantime I’m already thinking that, once the new book is out, I will begin a new period of life more mixed with common life, less isolated. Of course, then, I’ll go back to writing. The environment is not very favorable to me…”.

Eugenio Corti very early felt the vocation to write as well as to search for truth and beauty: these unpublished pages of his diaries are an extraordinary testimony of this, and from them we learn about his literary education, his love of nature, his crystal-clear faith, as well as the dramatic events of his war years, which would be the inspiration for his writing.

176 pages

The island of Paradise

A novel in pictures

SUMMARY

Eugenio Corti tackles a modern myth: the handful of rebellious sailors from the English ship Bounty who, in 1789, wanted to create a paradise on earth, living in absolute freedom on a tropical island. Corti stages this utopian and tragic story, representing the mutineers and the plot of their behaviour through dialogue and descriptions. A compelling story in a ‘tale in pictures’ that invents a narrative style to accompany the contemporary reader through the territory of the gaze. We are moved by the hopes, passions, and mistakes of men like Christian, Young, Smith and Minari, and by the grace, courage, and common sense of women like Susanna, Sara, Maimiti and Balhadi. Pitcairn, the “island of paradise”, is revealed to the reader as a complete microcosm of humanity, where sin and redemption fight their eternal daily battle.

336 pages

Cato the Elder

Historical novel in pictures

SUMMARY

The story of a man, Marcus Porcius Cato (Cato Maior; 234-149 BC), an emblem of Roman civilisation at a time of momentous change, which in some surprising ways is reminiscent of our own. Throughout his life, Cato was a farmer, as well as a soldier, consul, censor, orator, historian, and versifier in the archaic Saturnian meter. Around him were the Roman people, who were also culturally still farmers and who, almost without wanting to, dragged along by history, in the space of just fifty years, ended up subjugating the entire known world. In his various roles, Cato faced the major dangers threatening Rome with great determination: among them corruption (which the great Greek culture brought with it when it entered the young Roman world), the Carthaginian economy (based on slavery taken to the highest degree), and the excessive popularity of the emerging Roman generals themselves. Through the power of great literature, they return in the novel to live before our eyes as the men of the time: commoners, nobles, slaves, legionnaires, sordid businessmen (whom Cato the Elder banishes from his province), the severe Roman women, the free barbarians of Spain, the reckless Illyrian pirates, and the proud Greeks, but by now, incapable of independence.

440 pages

Process and Death of Stalin

A drama

SUMMARY

The tragedy Process and Death of Stalin – whose first draft dates back to 1960-1961 – was performed for the first time in Rome on 3 April 1962 at the Teatro della Cometa by the Compagnia Stabile di Diego Fabbri. Two years later, in 1964, the opera was translated into Russian, and in 1969, into Polish by dissident exiles from those countries. The Russian text had the rare fortune of circulating in the Soviet Union through samizdat (or clandestine self-publishing), while the Polish one earned the author the honour of ‘Knight of Poland’ from the democratic Polish government, which in those years was still surviving in exile in London. Meanwhile, the pro-Marxist approach had become increasingly established in Italian culture – to the point of achieving a sort of hegemony. This led to the isolation and marginalisation of this work. Much later, forced by the revelations of the Russian leaders, the Italian communists and progressives had to recognise as true all the facts that constitute the subject of this work, and they publicly condemned them. In any case, the fact remains that in these pages the author not only identified the inevitable failure of communism decades in advance and with extraordinary clarity but also indicated the reasons for it with a clarity that neither Russian theorists nor Western scholars have subsequently achieved.

128 pages