hrvatski

Istarski i riječki autori o odlasku i ostanku : književnost ili memorijalistika?

It is a widely known fact that after the end of the World War II, the eastern Italian border was re-delineated. Subsequent political agreements, the pressure of public opinion in Italy and the fear from the new authorities in Istria, Kvarner Bay and Dalmatia, caused mass exodus of the Italian population. While this recent historical episode (that Italians usually denominate as “esodo”, exodus, referring to its Biblical meaning) has been present in Italian literature from 1960, when Fulvio Tomizza published a neo-verist novel Materada, it appeared in Croatian narrative many years later: Milan Rakovac, The Comrades are Coming (Riva i druxi), and Nedjeljko Fabrio, Practicing Life (Vježbanje života), tackled the topic in their novels only in the 80’s. Authors from the Italian Community in Istria and Rijeka as well as Italians from Istria living in Italy, started writing extensively on exodus after 1991, when a vast production of autobiographies and memoirs appeared. Selected literary corpus analyzed in this article consists of border narratives on “migrate or stay” dilemma, and it encompasses different literary works regardless of authors’ language or nationality, literary genre, or “high” and “low” literature distinction. It is a compact corpus of narratives in both languages present in Croatian and Italian culture. Comparative analysis of selected fragments from literary works dealing with the most dramatic moments within a particular plot, focuses on the lexical component, noun syntagms consisting of qualitative adjectives and nouns, and adverbs of manner used as replacements for sentences - so called “concentrates”. Some authors deliberately avoided autobiographical discourse, constructing their narratives on individual life stories from the geographical area where the migrations occurred, while others embraced the so called testimonial discourse. Although this paper outlines literary genre distinction between memoirs and literature, its aim is not to underestimate memoirs’ documentary value. The “concentrates” in the prose of the selected authors demonstrate potential distancing from the memoir genre and resemblance to the literary prose. Although a relatively small number of works is analyzed, it is obvious that more elaborated prose works, whose authors avoided a plain testimonial discourse on exodus, have more similarities with the high literary genre.

migracija; egzodus; književnost; memorijalistika

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