FASCISM AND LITERATURE: ‘IL CASO SALGARI’

Abstract‘Nella revisione dei valori effettuata dal Fascismo non poteva essere dimenticato l'uomo marino che inizio a quel vivere pericolosamente il quale costituisce la piu suggestiva voce dell'Idea Fascista: il Salgari’. Ugo Cuesta, in an article published in the Fascist periodical Augustea in August 1927, makes explicit the political inspiration of a new generation of interpreters of that most popular of Italian writers for the young. The work of Emilio Salgari, who had committed suicide in 1911, had been briefly eclipsed by the shock of his tragedy and that of the First World War. Interest began to revive in the early Twenties. By the end of the decade his work had been revalued (inaccurately) as that of a herald of Fascism and was being republished for the edification of Fascist youth. The climax of the process was a campaign of ‘rivendicazione’, resulting in scandal, conducted in the first half of 1928 by the weekly paper Il Raduno; the ‘caso Salgari’ and the life of the paper proved to be co-termino...