MITO E STORIA IN VITTORINI E PAVESE

Abstract

The essay aims to investigate the chronotope of escape and the nostos of returning to the native island in the context of Elio Vittorini’s literary production. The description of his Sicily, motherland with its atavistic values, immersed in a mythical and primordial atmosphere, together with the evocation of his carefree childhood, now lost and regretted in Conversazioni in Sicilia, rise to emblems of escape into “space” and in “time”. But the poignant desire to escape from the ugliness of history, from existential anguish, away from the alienating civilization of progress and from the industrial and postmodern reality that Italy experienced after the Second World War, is also an emerging theme in La luna e i falò by Cesare Pavese. In both the topic also rises to a paradigm of the pain of the world, of offended humanity and of the impossible dream of resurrecting the past of a romantic-decadent civilization now in its decline.