'Sette volte bosco, sette volte prato': An interview with Mario Rigoni Stern

Abstract

the Altipiano dei Sette Comuni and surrounding mountains, apart from being a formative aspect of his childhood, is a feature which pervades his works, manifesting itself as the documentation of a cultural and ecological system, a way of life which derives from a profound interaction between plants, animals and humans. This aspect of his writing is perhaps most evident in his collections of stories: II bosco degli urogalli (1962); Uomini, boschi e api (1980); II libro degli animali (1990) and Arboreto salvatico (1991). In these works, Nature, more than a setting, more than the focus of interest, assumes the role of major protagonist. Rigoni Stern is also renowned as the author of II sergente nella neve (1953) which, standing as one of the great personal accounts of combat on the Russian front in the Second World War, is widely studied in Italian schools. While the brutal subject matter of the author's writings on war, which include Quota Albania (1971) and Ritorno sul Don (1973) might seem, in the first analysis, to sit uneasily with his sensitivity to a culture of gentle ways in harmony with Nature, closer examination reveals that it is from the very profundity of those values that Rigoni Stern's depiction of war derives its force.