The idea of a beautiful death in Italian literature of the Great War

Carlo Moll

doi:10.1017/mit.2021.50

Abstract

AbstractThrough the comparative reading of Italian literature of the Great War (letteratura di guerra) published between 1915 and 1940, it will be shown that both among veterans of the conflict and civilian writers there existed a standardised image of falling ‘beautifully’ in combat that entailed specific components relating to location, time, final gestures and last invocations, and which aimed to make death in battle more militarily and culturally palatable for Italian audiences. At the same time, the letteratura di guerra presented naturalistic descriptions of the anonymous mass death of peasant soldiers and, thereby, created a pathos of beauty and suffering that made the Italian literature of the Great War prototypical for a new kind of spiritual realism that became one of the mainstreams of cultural expression in Fascist Italy.

Highlights

Death in battle, and the commemoration of the fallen by the living, has been a topic of consistent interest to historians of the Great War and scholars of war literature, such as Paul Fussell (2000), Jay Winter (1998) or George Mosse (1990)
As Oliver Janz (2009, 93) has lucidly argued in his analysis of private commemorative booklets published by grieving Italian families during and after the Great War, in the memory of their fallen loved sons, brothers and fathers, the inviolacy of the soldier’s body and the subsequent ‘beauty’ of the corpse were of primary psychological and religious importance to the bereaved – a concern that is frequently reflected in the images of la bella morte presented in the genre products of letteratura di guerra
Before the outbreak of the Great War, the myth of beautiful death in battle had been intensely cultivated in the nationalist intellectual milieu that became the vanguard of the interventionist camp between August 1914 and May 1915 (Ventrone 2003)

Summary

Introduction

The commemoration of the fallen by the living, has been a topic of consistent interest to historians of the Great War and scholars of war literature, such as Paul Fussell (2000), Jay Winter (1998) or George Mosse (1990).

Results

Conclusion