Eugenio Corti, the war against communism and "The Red Horse".The life of Eugenio Corti, author of "The Red Horse" (I)Following the success of The red horseEugenio Corti, faced with the "unstoppable advance of the civilization of images", decided to dedicate himself to a new series of writings that he called "stories for images". "These are sketches, elaborated according to particular criteria, which should serve as scripts for the television of the future, and even more so for other communication tools, perhaps computerized, which science is preparing."
The first of these works dates from 1970 and is entitled "L'isola del paradiso" (the story is that of the mutiny on the Bounty); the second is "La terra dell'Indio" (the subject is the Jesuit reductions in South America); the third is "Catone l'antico" (the story of Cato the Elder).
At the end of his literary career, Eugenio Corti was finally able to dedicate himself to the historical period he loved the most and in 2008 published "The Middle Ages and other accounts".
In the last years of his life, Eugenio Corti received unusual attention from institutions: in 2007, the "Ambrogino d'oro" of the city of Milan; in 2009, the "Isimbardi" Award of the province of Milan; in 2010, the "La Lombardia del Lavoro" Award of the Lombardy region; in 2011, the "Beato Talamoni" Award (province of Monza and Brianza); and finally, in 2013, the President of the Italian Republic awarded Eugenio Corti the Gold Medal for merit in culture and art.
In 2011 a committee was formed to nominate Eugenio Corti for the Nobel Prize in Literature; the province of Monza and Brianza and the region of Lombardy in Italy passed motions in support of the initiative; François Livi, professor of Italian language and literature at the Sorbonne in Paris, is his enthusiastic academic supporter.
Eugenio Corti remains very realistic about his chances of being awarded the Nobel Prize: "I am very grateful, but for a Catholic today it is very difficult to receive this prize. There is great difficulty in accepting Christian culture. The Nobel Prize is a prestigious institution, but in recent years it has also awarded prizes to those who have little to do with culture... It is enough for me that my works are known and that perhaps The Red Horse is read in schools. So I always think that if they didn't give the Nobel Prize to Tolstoy, I can rest assured'.
His thoughts on the afterlife are very serene; in the same interview mentioned a few lines ago, he is asked if he still sees himself as a writer after death: "No... I think I've written enough. In heaven I would only like to embrace my parents, my siblings, all those I loved on earth. I committed myself with my pen to transmit the truth. But to what extent I have succeeded is an unknown. For me the most important thing is divine mercy. I have made many mistakes, but when I stand before God, I believe that he will continue to consider me one of his own".
Eugenio Corti passed away on February 4, 2014 in Besana Brianza.
A master of life and writing
Vanda Corti, after a life at her husband's side and having shared their successes and defeats, said: "The reality of a writer is that of many sacrifices... Sacrifices in the sense that the life of a writer is a life of study, a heavy life: no one realizes it. It is a life of solitude: you have to know how to accept it, because it demands silence, concentration, respect".
The life and work of Eugenio Corti are for me a continuous source of inspiration and hope, of peace, of patience.
Mrs. Vanda, with whom I had the honor and pleasure of speaking on the phone and to whom I gave my books, edited in 2017 a book that collects her husband's diaries from 1941 to 1948, "Il ricordo diventa poesia" ("Memory becomes poetry").. In the diaries, I was struck by a phrase that Eugenio Corti quoted from "Bacche d'agrifoglio", by Carlo Pastorino: "But even for the short story and the novel it is not enough to know how to write, you need themes. And these are given to us by life and long experience. Only at the age of forty is one mature enough for such matters. Until that age, one is like a child, and he who has written too much in his youth is ruined forever... I observe that there are writers who at forty are already old: they have reaped the wheat in the grass. Horace also gave this advice: wait. The budding grain is not necessary: the ears are necessary".
Necessary for the writer, and for the artist in general, is therefore patience, an antidote to the ardor of those who feel called to an extraordinarily lofty mission, a vocation to which they often feel incapable and unworthy of responding: "Providence has special designs on me. Sometimes I tremble at the thought of my unworthiness even to be only a means in the Lord's hands. Sometimes I think with fear that Providence has grown weary of my misery, of my scarcity, of my ingratitude, and has then left me to make use of another to attain the end for which I was destined; and then I pray and act, and invoke Heaven, until, lo and behold, a clear help from Providence in any given case, makes me sure that His hand always directs me along the same path: then I am happy. I do not want my affirmation that Providence has a special plan for me to be interpreted as an act of pride. I humble myself, I proclaim my nameless misery, but I have to say that it is so, to deny it for me would be like denying the existence of a material thing that is before me."
Who, then, is the writer, the narrator, the storyteller?
In the ancient Germanic tribes, the storyteller was called "bern hard", brave with the bears (hence the name Bernard) because he drove the bears away and kept 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, in practice the custodian of the humanity (with all that this term means) of the people, whom he was charged with protecting and encouraging, whose hope he was obliged to give and whose traditions he was charged with passing on. Kierkegaard said it well: "There are men whose destiny must be sacrificed for others, in one way or another, to express an idea, and I, with my particular cross, was one of them".
A shaman, the paradigm of man. The writer is a knight, a brave man armed with a pen (today, perhaps a computer keyboard) and a lot of abnegation, who fights against the greatest enemy of the human being, a terrible monster, of horrible aspect and fierce temperament, that devours men and, above all, swallows their memories, their dreams, their own identity: death. A death, therefore, understood not only as the physical cessation of earthly existence, but as the annihilation of the inner and spiritual, ergo nihilism, ugliness, boredom, lies, laziness, habit and above all, I would say, oblivion, forgetfulness, forgetfulness.
The writer is the vanguard of humanity and chooses spontaneously, by virtue of a contemplative gift superior to that of other men (very often an open and bleeding wound, an existential melancholy excellently described by Romano Guardini in "Portrait of Melancholy"), to go down to battle, to face the monsters, the "bears", death and to fight against oblivion, using that beauty and that truth that he contemplates; And then he returns, among his fellow men, wounded, tired and disappointed to see that here below does not reign the absolute, the beauty and the eternal goodness (precisely the realism of the Christian artist). To his fellows he will report, a bit like the first marathon runner (Philipides, known as a "heterodrome": also the writer could be a "heterodrome", perhaps even more a "biodrome", someone who runs a lifetime back and forth between the relative and the absolute, 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): "Οἶδα" ! I know it, O men! I have seen it! I have beheld it: I know who you are, I know who you were and who you were created to be. You, perhaps, no longer know it, you do not remember it, you do not believe it, but I cry it out to you, I tell it to you through stories of times and people that may seem distant to you, but it is about you: you are gods, each one of you is; you are precious, important, beautiful, eternal, you are heroes whose story is worthy of being remembered and passed on forever.
I would like to end with a few lines from "I più non ritornano", in which Eugenio Corti remembers his friend Zoilo Zorzi, a brave soldier who died during the retreat to Russia:
"The platoons prepared to go to the line. Already my bestial side - which had the upper hand at the time - was rejoicing at having saved me and my friends, when Zorzi unexpectedly stepped forward and asked the colonel in a resigned voice to add him to a platoon.
He had on his rustic Venetian face the frank look, as always, and modest.
As when, as I remember, he put up with colleagues in Italy who would scold him because he, from Catholic Action, did not rush into certain speeches.
The colonel agreed to his request. The platoons left immediately for Arbusov.
Bellini and I watched in silence as Zorzi walked away; we would never see him again.
I would like these few inadequate words of mine to be a hymn in memory of him, the best of all the men I knew during the hard war years.
He was simple-minded, deep-thinking and much loved by his soldiers. And also very brave, as befits a true man.
For a long time I held out hope that you were alive, and still your voice echoed in some small part of those boundless lands; and in silence I waited for you.
In the meantime, the snow will have melted, your clothes will have lost the stiffness of ice and you will have been lying in the mud in the sweet spring days. And submerged in mud and rot your forehead and your eyes, which were always turned upwards.
I had made a vow for you to come back. We would have dissolved it together.
But you have not returned. I shall still find myself, I think, talking to you at many moments in this poor life. So thin is the veil that separates this life from yours! We will still walk together, as we walked side by side along the steppe paths in the summer days.
It hung in the sun, remember? Endlessly the ever-changing song of the quail, the voice of that taste of the unknown that surrounds us.
Perhaps your white bones mixed with earth and grass will still hear that rustic song, then so evocative, and it will sound like a cry."
