Enrico Morovich
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Biographical notes
He was born in Sussak, a suburb of Rijeka, in 1906, when the city was still part of the Kingdom of Hungary. He graduated in accounting in 1924, subsequently working first at the Bank of Italy, then at the General Warehouses.
In 1929 he met Alberto Carocci, director and publisher of magazines, who opened the doors of Solaria and La Fiera Letteraria, with whom he started a collaboration. His first, significant, literary creation dates back to 1936, "L'osteria sul torrente", which was published by Solaria, followed by "Daily Miracles" (1938), "Portraits in the woods" (1939), "Peasants on the mountains" (1942) and "The green dress" (1942). In those years he also published essays and short stories in "Il Selvaggio" and "Oggi".
The last years of the war and the first years of the post-war period, particularly bloody for Fiume and for the whole of Venezia Giulia, led him to interrupt his literary activity for a few years, which he resumed only in 1962, with Racconti e Fantasie.
In 1950 he decided to abandon his homeland, which in the meantime had passed to Yugoslavia, and emigrate to Italy. After living for a few years in various Italian cities, in Naples, Lugo, Viareggio, Busalla and Pisa, he settled in Genoa in 1958, where he resided for over thirty years.
In Genoa he returned to publish, after thirteen years of silence, novels and short stories, including: "The abyss" (1964), "The invisible elevators" (1981), "The marine giants" (1984), "Little lovers" (1990). In 1990 he moved to the Chiavari-Lavagna area, where he later died at the age of eighty-seven.
Critical notes
Morovich's debut stories, written between 1930 and 1935 and collected in the volume "L'osteria sul torrente", do not allow us to identify exactly the future identity of Morovich's fiction. If the first passages of the collection, mostly set among woods and streams, present a calm and meticulous vision of a reality populated by mediocre and sometimes cynical men, the subsequent passages, placed in city environments, reveal the writer's intention to free himself from the minute descriptivism of the previous pages to introduce some surreal accents.
Subsequently, he moves away from realism altogether, choosing an ironic and disenchanted narrative line, fairytale and imaginative, surreal and yet capable of creating the illusion of telling truths, to reveal only in the surprise ending its actual quality of dreamlike tale. From the spring of 1937 his literary commitment turned almost exclusively to fantastic prose, fairy tales, and surreal stories, with writings directly inspired by Morovich's own dreams. These stories were published in newspapers and periodicals, and in a short time he became one of the most sought-after third-page narrators, appearing assiduously in various newspapers ("L'ambrosiano" in Milan, "Il Messaggero" in Rome, "Il Piccolo della Sera" in Trieste, the "Corriere di Alessandria") and in popular weekly news magazines (such as "Oggi") as well as in the usual cultural magazines (such as "Il Convegno", "The Literary Reform", and "Revolution").
He also tried his hand at novels, with more relaxed narrative schemes and attentive to the psychological implications of the characters, but at the same time confirming the dreamlike elements, as in "The Green Dress" (1949), in which real and living characters alternate with ghosts throughout the story.
A year before his death, in 1993 he published "Un italiano di Fiume", a collection of prose that constitutes a moving evocation of his city of origin and his vicissitudes on Italian soil.
Critical notes inspired by "Enrico Morovich: the dreamlike reality" by Francesco de Nicola in "La Battana" n.97-98, 1990.
Bibliography
- The tavern on the stream, Florence, Solaria, 1936
- Daily miracles, Florence, Parenti, 1938
- Portraits in the woods, Florence, Parenti, 1939
- Peasants in the mountains, Florence, Vallecchi, 1942
- The green dress, Rome, Lettere d'oggi, Rome 1949
- The abyss, Padova, Rebellato, 1964 (republished by: Torino, Einaudi 1990)
- Invisible elevators, Genoa, Unimedia, 1981
- The nostalgia of the sea, Genoa, Unimedia, 1981
- The caricature, Genova, Lanterna, 1983 (republished by: Milano, Rusconi Editore, 1994)
- The sea giants, Genoa, Unimedia, 1984 (republished by: Palermo, Sellerio, 1990)
- Nights with the moon, Genoa, Unimedia, 1986
- Miracoli quotidiani (This is not the same text published in 1938, but an anthology of short stories extracted from: L'osteria sul torrente, Miracoli quotidiani, I ritratti nel bosco), Palermo, Sellerio, 1988
- Little lovers, Milan, Rusconi Editore, 1990
- An Italian from Rijeka, Milan, Rusconi Editore, 1993
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