Eugenio CORTI
1921 – 2014
Eugenio Corti is a master of 20th-century Italian literature, and Acoma Books is his international publisher. Corti’s masterpiece, The Red Horse, first published in Italy in 1983 and now in its 36th reprint, has been translated into 9 languages.
His whole work is being freshly introduced by Acoma Book to the international public at book fairs around the world, attracting considerable interest for translation and rights. How many readers around the world are still waiting to get to know the Author’s profound humanity and literary brilliance!
Stay tuned! This page is constantly evolving; we will keep our readers updated on upcoming developments.
Acoma Book è l’editore internazionale di Eugenio Corti, maestro nel canone della letteratura italiana del 1900. Il suo capolavoro, il Cavallo Rosso, già tradotto in 9 lingue, sta suscitando l’interesse di molti editori internazionali. Quanti lettori aspettano di conoscere la sua umanità e genialità letteraria!
Scoprite Eugenio Corti attraverso i due siti a lui dedicati:
The recognized MASTER in the canon of Italian literature of 1900
One of the immense international writers of our time, one of the greatest, perhaps the greatest.
Anniversary:
2024: 10th year from his death
2023: 50th year from the publication of his masterpiece The Red Horse
THE RED HORSE
• first published in 1983
• 1080 pp
• 36th Italian edition so far
A great choral story and an unrepeatable literary case.
More than 1000 pages of heart-wrenching and riveting stories of fictional characters taken from real-life events and the author’s background and memories, from the 40s to the 70s, set in Northern Italy around and in Milan and on the Russian front of the II World War.
Translated into 9 languages, still in print in Italy, selling millions of copies so far.
• French: Noir sur Blanc, Paris, Lausanne – Age d’Homme.
• English for USA: University of Missouri Press, Ignatius Press.
• Spanish for Spain: Rialp Ediciones.
Translation rights available.
Synopsis
The protagonists are a young man coming to age and his Italian family, whose destinies merge with the most lacerating dramas of 1900. From the mid-1930s to the 1970s the story runs directly through the tragedy of World War II. From the Lombard territory around Milano to the frozen landscapes of the Russian Campaign, to the horrors of the Italian and European civil war, to the uncertainties of the first post-war period in Europe in 1946: with a great desire for redemption and reconstruction by the younger generations, up to the violence and ideologies of the 1970s in Italy and Europe. Captured by a dense plot, the Reader completes, from page to page, the extraordinary experience offered by great literature: he rejoices, suffers, laughs, cries, grows, together with the protagonists of the novel and, at the same time, realizes that he becomes more aware of himself, more aware of the mystery of life and the meaning of the world. The human person in front of destiny and history with dignity and awareness.
About the author
Eugenio CORTI (1921-2014) was born, lived and died in the industrialized and lively countryside north of Milano below the lake of Como, the Brianza region. Corti has always been a great literary master outside of any group or school. With the epic of “The Red Horse” he showed that Italian literature can boast the “long literary step” and the supreme depth and vast narrative of Russian literature, by a Tolstoy or a Dostoevsky.
Few Returned
diary
The Last Soldiers of the King
fiction | memoir
I will return
Letters from the Russian Front 1942-1943
letters
I WANT YOUR LOVE
Letters to Vanda (1947-1953)
letters
Everyone is driven by his own Providence
Diaries of war and peace (1940-1949)
diary
And memory becomes poetry
Excerpts from the Diaries (1940-1948)
diary with images
The land of the Gauranì
fiction | historical novel in scenes
Paradise Island
fiction | historical novel in scenes
Cato the Elder
fiction | historical novel in scenes
Stories from the Middle Ages
short stories
Trial and death of Stalin
tragedy
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 degrees 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.
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.
Published by the University of Missouri Press in November 2003
344 pages