CARF Foundation

8 June, 20

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Between war and peace

Eugenio Corti: The epic of a writer, of a man, of a Christian through his words

Epic is Greek word (ἐποποΐα, from ἔπος (v. epos) and ποιέω "to make"). It indicates the poetic narration of heroic deeds, such as epic poems, or cycles of poems that compile legendary stories into an organic unity. And the life of Eugenio Corti, great Italian writer, is indeed an epic.

The author's childhood

Corti was born near Milan in 1921, the first of a long family of ten siblings, family of solid Christian convictions. His father was a textile industrialist who, from a poor apprentice, had become the owner of the factory where he worked. In fact, after buying it, he managed to expand it and open new branches.

Although he showed a great inclination towards the world of literature from an early age, his father wanted him to study law, so he enrolled at the Catholic University of Milan, where he studied only the first year of law before being called up as a second lieutenant in the artillery. He himself asked to be assigned to the fighting on the Russian front, where Italy, together with Germany, was conducting a campaign of conquest.

The war

Corti wanted "to have an idea of the results of the gigantic attempt to build a new world, completely free of God, in fact, against God, operated by the communists. I absolutely wanted to know the reality of communism. For this reason, I prayed to God not to let me miss that experience."

The days in Russia were the most dramatic days of his life: the troops The Soviet forces forced the Italians to make a dramatic retreat that cost the Italian Army in Russia (ARMIR), which had 229,000 men, 74,800 dead. In addition, out of 55,000 soldiers captured by the Russians, only 10,000 returned home, many of them after years of torture in concentration camps. This retreat, where Eugenio Corti was among the few survivors, was narrated by himself in his first work, I più non ritornano (Most do not return).  

On Christmas Eve 1942, nearly freezing to death at around -35 degrees, made a vow to the VirginHe had an idea of the results of the gigantic attempt to build a new world, completely free of God, in fact, against God, operated by the communists. I absolutely wanted to know the reality of communism. For this reason, I prayed to God not to let me miss that experience.

"If I had been saved, I would have spent my whole life according to that verse in the Lord's Prayer where it says: Thy Kingdom come."

Italy

Upon return to ItalyIn 1943, he joined the allied troops to liberate Italy from the Nazi occupation. His work Gli ultimi soldati del re (The last soldiers of the king) tells of this period. Corti writes: "Homeland should not be confused with the monuments of our country or with a history book: it is the legacy left to us by our parents, our fathers. It is the people like us: our relatives, friends, neighbors, those who think like us; it is the house we live in, to which we are always thinking of when we are far away; it is the beautiful things we have around us. Homeland is our way of life, different from that of all other peoples."

BETWEEN WAR AND PEACE 1

Eugenio Corti passed away on February 4, 2014 at his birthplace, leaving an incredible legacy, in a human, Christian and literary sense. His life and his works summarize the role of an artist and of a writer in particular, which is not at all, as one might think today, to be a seller of best sellers.

After the war

Upon completion of the World War IIEugenio Corti reluctantly returned to his law studies at the Catholic University of Milan. He managed to graduate, but the horror of the war had forever changed his perspective on reality. He was a veteran, still young, and no longer recognized himself in the problems of young people his age. He wanted to write, to tell everyone what had happened to him.and not only to himself: he wanted to be faithful to his vow to the Virgin and to the memory of his colleagues deceased.

Thus, after publishing I più non ritornano, he continued to study the processes socialHe describes them as "very individualistic, instinctively disorganized and subject to rebellion against authority: the way Italian soldiers acted in the war perfectly represents their way of living in their homeland. The good heart of our soldiers is evident. However, equally evident is the difficulty of working together, of uniting for the sake of the common good."

Communism

In those years, Corti devoted himself to a very deep theoretical and historical study of communism: combined with his personal experience on Soviet soil, these studies made him understand not only what was going on in Russia, but also the reasons for the failure of the ideology. communist. From the same period is the play Processo e morte di Stalin (Stalin's trial and death), in which Stalin himself is the victim of a trial for his crimes that he himself justifies as a natural and logical consequence of the application of Marxist doctrine.

 

"The writer is required to take into account the whole reality of his time. For this reason, he is the only professional who does not have the right to have a single specialization. However, he cannot know everything: he must have an authentic competence at least in the most important sectors. For my part, I chose to delve into communism (the greatest danger for humanity in this century) and the actuality of the Catholic Church, because I see the greatest hope in it.." Eugenio Conti

 

Your personal struggle

However, from this moment on, Eugenio Corti, due to his reasoned anti-communism, was systematically hindered by the Italian press and the world of culture, already highly ideologized.

Strong-willed and ironic, Corti is not a surrendered and continued to carry out his well-documented analyses, particularly on the horrors and massacres committed by the communists before and after World War II (60 million victims in Russia; 150 million in China; very many also in Southeast Asia, especially in Cambodia; about 40 thousand were the victims of the partisans in Italy, not to mention the enormous tragedy of the eastern border part of the country, what today is the Istria of Croatia and Slovenia: at least 10 thousand Italians dead and 300 thousand exiled). Its aim was to let the West know the situation of the world dominated by Marxism, and that long before, in 1994, Alexander Solgenitzin, in a speech before the Duma (Russian parliament), recalled the sixty million deaths caused by communism.

"Right now, once the phase of mass murders is over, the phase of lies has arrived: the major newspapers, radio and television continue, especially with the system of half-truths, to make the ordinary people not have a clear idea of the past and present reality. That is why we must strive to seek and make the truth known. The most important front today is that of culture. Communism, then, has not ended. Its Leninist phase did end, the phase in which the dictatorship of the proletariat was exercised with the physical elimination of opponents. Today, however, in Italy we are confronted with Gramscian communism [of its ideologue Antono Gramsci], in which the dictatorship of intellectuals "organic to communism" [the expression is Gramsci's own] is exercised through the systematic marginalization, that is to say the civil death of opponents."

In Corti we can also observe the reprobation towards a good part of the Italian Catholic world, due to its uncritical adherence to the ideas of Jacques Maritain contained in his book Integral Humanism, which opened the doors of Catholicism, in Italy and in the world, to the modernist currents, both in the political (the so-called "historical commitment") and in the theological sphere, where authors such as Karl Rahner emerged.

The work that stands out most among all of Eugenio Corti's writings is undoubtedly El caballo rojo (The Red Horse). Corti spent eleven years writing it. The book was published in 1983 by a small publishing house, Ares (whose director, Cesare Cavalleri, of Opus Dei, was a very good friend of the author).

The work, a true epic covering 40 years of history, is inspired by the horses of the Apocalypse and is divided into three volumes:

"For the first volume I chose the "red horse", which in that text is the symbol of war. Then there is the "green horse," a symbol of hunger (the Russian concentration camps) and hatred (civil strife). Finally, the "tree of life," which indicates the rebirth of life after tragedy."

The author's legacy

The unfolding of the novel, as well as its epilogue, reflect Corti's idea that Christian art cannot abandon realism:

It is the philosophy of the cross: we are not in this world to be happy, but to be tested. [Moreover, any relationship down here ends at the end of life.

Eugenio Corti knows very well that, in the events of life and history, good cannot always win, as the publisher Cesare Cavalleri also expresses it, speaking of the book as "...".an epic of losers, because truth can also know eclipses and defeats and remain the truth intact and true.". However, every apparent defeat of good is only a half-truth: the story is completed in heaven, which we are not yet allowed to see here, and that, in Corti's narrative, becomes the "epic of heaven", where human miseries converge.

Despite the ostracism of the contemporary cultural world, The Red Horse had and continues to have great success around the world, being translated into fifteen languages.

In the last years of his life, Eugenio Corti decided to dedicate himself to a new series of writings that he called "stories by images", which, in his vision, were to serve as scripts for television, among which L'isola del paradiso (The Island of Paradise), La terra dell'indio (The Land of the Indian) and Catone l'antico (Cato the Ancient) stand out, as well as to the study of the historical period he loved the most: Il Medioevo e altri racconti (The Middle Ages and Other Stories) appeared in 2008.

Only a few years before his death Eugene received unusual attention from institutions. In addition to the various prizes awarded to him, a committee was also created to propose his candidacy for the Nobel Prize for literature.

However, in the conscience of this author, the expectation of death, or rather of true life, was deepening every day: "I have already written enough. Now I would just like to go to heaven and embrace my parents, my brothers and sisters, all those whom I have loved on earth. I have committed myself to the pen to transmit the truth. Whether I have achieved my goal, well, I don't know. But the most important thing is divine mercy: no doubt I have made many mistakes, but when I present myself to God I believe he will still consider me one of his own.

Bern hard

In the ancient Germanic tribes, the storyteller was called "bern hard", that is, brave with bears (hence the name Bernardo) because he chased the bears and kept the material and spiritual dangers away from the village. He was the shaman of the tribe, the repository of the magical arts and the collective spirit of the community, i.e. the guardian of humanity (with all that this term means), of the people he had the task of protecting and encouraging and to whom he was required to give hope. Kierkegaard said it well: "There are men whose fate must be sacrificed for others, in one way or another, in order to express an idea".

A shaman, the paradigm of the human. The writer is a knight, a brave man armed with a pen (today, perhaps, with a computer keyboard) who, with great sacrifice, fights against the greatest enemy of human beings, a terrible monster that devours men and above all steals their memories, dreams, their very identity: death. But it is a death that means not only a physical cessation of earthly existence, but the annihilation of spiritual existence, ergo nihilism, ugliness, boredom, lies, idleness and, above all, oblivion.

The writer, and Corti played this role perfectly, is the vanguard of mankind and chooses, as Jesus going to the cross, sacrifice his life going into battle. Having a contemplative gift more remarkable than that of other men (very often an open and bleeding wound, an existential melancholy excellently described by Romano Guardini in his work Portrait of Melancholy), he confronts those monsters, those "bears", that is to say, death. After fighting against oblivion, using that beauty and that truth that he has the gift of contemplating, he returns among his fellow men, wounded, tired and disappointed to see that on this earth the absolute, the beauty and the goodness of the world, the beauty and the goodness of the world, the beauty and the goodness of the world, the beauty and the goodness of the world, the beauty and the goodness of the world. eternal are not sovereign (and that is precisely the realism of the Christian artist).

One could even compare the life of a true writer to the mission of the first marathon runner (Pheidippides, who is called the hemerodrome). The writer, then, is himself also a hemerodrome, perhaps even more a biodrome, that is to say, someone who is maneuvered throughout his life between the relative and the absolute, between death and life, the satisfaction of being able to contemplate beauty and truth more than others, and the regret and unhappiness of not being able to see them realized on this earth.

I know it, I saw it, I saw it! I beheld it: I know who you are, man, I know who you were and for whom you were created. You may not know it and you may not remember it or you may not believe it, but I shout it to you, I tell it to you through stories of times and people that may seem distant, but they are your story. Gods or heroes: each one of them is you; you are precious, important, beautiful, eternal, you are a hero whose story is worthy of being remembered and passed on forever.

Conclusions

I would like to end this account of the life, or rather, of the epic of a great artist with his own words about the need for a great virtue, patience, related to the awareness of his own mission:

It is not enough to know how to write: arguments are necessary. And these are given to us by life and long experience. Only at the age of forty is a man mature enough to write. Until that age, one is like children, and those who wrote too much when they were young are ruined forever. I see that there are writers who are already old at forty: they have harvested wheat in the grass. Horace also gave this advice: wait. The budding wheat is not necessary: the ears are necessary.

I have always believed that the providence has special designs for me. Sometimes I tremble at the thought of my unworthiness and think in fear that Providence has grown weary of my miseries, my littleness, my ingratitude, and has therefore abandoned me to use another person to achieve the purpose for which I was destined. However, then I pray and agitate, and invoke Heaven, until a clear help from Providence itself assures me that His hand always directs me along the same path: then I am happy. I do not want my assertion that Providence has a special design upon me to be interpreted as an act of pride. I humble myself, I proclaim my misery, but I must say that it is so; to deny it for me would be like denying the existence of a material thing that is before my very eyes.

Gerardo Ferrara
BA in History and Political Science, specializing in the Middle East.
Responsible for the student body
University of the Holy Cross in Rome

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