Some recent articles (early nineties, ed.), some even very recent, have re-proposed the question of the literature of the exodus. Some have done so by limiting themselves to describing the phenomenon, trying to define its dimensions, listing writers by genres and generations. Others, on the other hand, have charged the concept and the phenomenon with a homogeneity that would make it on the one hand a historiographical or critical category; on the other hand, a sort of spiritual condition revealed through a whole literature; on the other hand, a set of facts, works and authors organically linked to a common spirit.

The question poses some problems: for example, the use that can be made of such a concept, the phenomena to which it can be referred, the articulations and distinctions necessary so that it does not become too general and therefore generic a label.

There are other "categories" and "concepts" elaborated by literary criticism and historiography that must be treated with similar caution. Firstly, the one that refers to "regional" and "local" conditions. For example, "Ligurian" or "Ligurian", "Lombard", "Southern", "Sicilian", "Trieste", "Julian" literature. These are fairly large containers, large chapters in which a vast phenomenology of presences that represent a situation, a territory can find a place. Naturally, the intelligence of the historian must be such as to consider phenomena in their diversity and development, in synchrony and diachrony. Of course, then there are the catalogers of episodes and fragments that take place in a given space and proceed to catalogs without aiming at historical distinctions, at history. But this is another matter, another work plan: useful for starting, not for understanding. Just as the telephone directory can also be a useful starting point for understanding what a city looks like. But only this.

These containers, of which we have spoken, have the same function as other larger and in some cases even much more complex ones, such as those of the great literatures corresponding to the great nation states which, as is well known, have not always (and not all) had the same physiognomy as today, have changed borders, have been formed by successive additions or vice versa by splits and divisions of larger territories. Here too, therefore, we must proceed with caution and intelligence, as Dionisotti taught us in his essay on Geography and History of Italian Literature, a classic of contemporary literary historiographical methodology.

The discourse changes and becomes more difficult when dealing with other categories that would like to represent the particular spirit, the genius loci of a given cultural situation (e.g. "Sicilianity", "Friulianity", "Ligusticity", "Triestinity" etc.). In this case, it can be said that there is truth and falsehood in such categories. Of the truth, in the sense that undoubtedly a certain context (political, historical, cultural, etc.). it gives rise to common problems and can stimulate similar attitudes. But not always. Behaviors and responses to the same context can also be different, sometimes very different (for reasons of culture, taste, subjective interests, religious choices, political choices, family traditions, etc.). Not only that. The context itself is subject to variations that can also be rapid and that can produce changes in collective and individual attitudes and behaviors, even sensible, so that even the so-called genius loci should be seen in its updates.

Even breast milk, thank God, does not develop children that are the same, made with the mold. And, then, even children are born years later and live different experiences in contact with environments, people and problems that are not always the same.

For this reason, while we must look carefully at all efforts to grasp common denominators, we must however be cautious in the face of generic categories that risk being straitjackets that prevent a more complex way of understanding a situation in its identities, varieties, changes, transformations, differences.

Something similar can also be said about other containers and labels – equally general and indicative – that refer to particular conditions or situations or to historical events around which a given literature has been organized. For example, "war literature" (with the distinctions: of the first, of the second), "concentration camp literature", "resistance literature", "industrial literature", etc.

In literary histories, these paragraphs can occupy a place of greater or lesser importance in the treatment of a period, an age. Their name does not indicate choices of style, poetics or particular literary qualities of the works that are included in them but only the content, the subject, the context, the facts from which or around which a work has been organized. Therefore, even if the facts of which these works speak are dramatic, or have connotations defined as tragic of another kind, the label that refers to one of these experiences is and remains only an indicator, a fact that is still "neutral": something that defines neither the perspective and perspective in which the experience was lived nor the quality of the discourse.

Literature is not made with content alone, just as – it has been said – literature is not made with intentions and feelings, even if they are good: a work on war and resistance does not become a literary text because it talks about these themes (which, in and of themselves, are not to be considered privileged over others in producing literature, perhaps more compelling or dramatic from the point of view of human emotions: but it is not the same thing); nor does it become a literary text simply because an author has decided to give them the guise of a lyric or a novel. It becomes so because, on those themes and in the language chosen, the author has chosen original perspectives of discourse, because – using that language – he has managed to open up new perspectives for reading a phenomenon, because – again – he has used the language of a tradition in new and unprecedented forms.

From this point of view, the literary work can also have a testimonial weight, sometimes even greater than the pages of a memoir or a history text. And this in two senses: first of all because the exploration into the folds of the human universe in its concreteness, in its everyday life, in the facts and events common in the sensitivity of the protagonists, can offer a first-rate testimony on aspects that official historiography often ignores (on this problem one should carefully reread the splendid essay by Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Literature as historiography (in «Il Menabò», 10, Torino, Einaudi, 1966). Not only that. Even language, formal choices (understood in the broadest sense: not only language, style understood as an external fact, but the organization of discourse, images, etc.) are a testimony, they constitute a reading of the facts.

In the texts published in this volume of essays (La Battana, 1992, ed.), there is someone who shows that he doubts the reliability of the testimonies that come from literary texts: "I believe," writes this author, "that artistic interpretation, no matter how hard it tries to faithfully reproduce the climate of time and space, that is, of the event it tries to transpose on a literary level, it still remains an interpretation, a sui generis elaboration that can be as interesting as it is unreliable".

A literature of particular relevance

With Enzensberger, I believe that literature cannot be denied a particular testimonial charge, indeed – I would say – of particular importance, of a weight of no less importance than that of historiography. Of course, the discourse does not concern all those who write literary works but only those of level, original. The author cited is right, however, when he says that these are interpretations. But isn't historiography also made up of interpretations, of readings of facts? And literature, certain literature of today (think of the case of Sciascia, for example). does it not sometimes live and is it not also nourished – like Manzoni's History of the Infamous Column – by documents, by readings of archival texts, by reconnaissance, even micrological, of finds and testimonies of all kinds often ignored or underestimated by official history? Except that literature uses – then – other tools, another language, approaches or chooses its subjects with other techniques.

It must also be remembered that the literary text, as well as an essay on historiography on a single aspect of a general question, must not be mistaken for a manual or an overall picture of an age. I happened to read recently, precisely in one of the profiles of the literature of the exodus, a singular statement: Tomizza's work, although praised for its literary "skill", is considered as representative not of the "world of the majority of exiles", not of the world of coastal towns, but of that of the rural, peasant interior. In addition to that. The writer is reproached for having expressed political judgments not shared by the "Italian exile". I do not want to go into the merits of these arguments here, which I personally do not share. What I want to say is simply that the novel, here, is asked to be like a manual: it is not understood that the author can also choose – to tell the story – a glimpse, a particular environment, a perspective of a complex phenomenon. Secondly, in the same profile the writer is shared and absolved, or instead criticized, only on the basis of the perspective and political judges that seem to have been expressed in the pages of his books. Without understanding, for example, the background of pain, pity, bitterness, the desire to understand something more than those entanglements, which comes out of the pages of this writer and his overall operation (even the attempt to understand by leaving Istria or going back in the centuries).

One thing, in any case, must be reiterated: and that is that the adoption – in a book – of a content has no consequence in terms of value, it tells us nothing about the quality of the book.

AsCella teaches

And here I agree with Sergio Cella who, in one of his recent essays (The literature of the exodusin A walk among the Muses, in "L'Arena di Pola", supplement summer 1989, Gorizia), underlined – alongside sincerity – the "anti-literariness" (in the sense of the absence of literaryness) of so much literature of the exodus; and who also noted how the testimonial effort has often been an obstacle "to the free expression of art"; and who warned about the need to consider the value of a literature in which reflection, meditation, memory, a greater complexity of vision of facts and characters would instead find space.

Cella's essay also has the merit of having indicated the need to identify – within the literature of the exodus – generational articulations and developments of perspectives in the use of literary tools more suitable for addressing the problem in a non-reductive way.

In any case, the "literature of the exodus" as a historiographical indication remains a problem that needs further preliminary clarification.

1. First of all, this expression indicates the presence – in a body of work – of a theme, of a problematic of strong drama. It is a question of establishing the size of the corpus: only the works directly linked to the years of the exodus? Generally, the criterion adopted is broader: the corpus includes all works, even those produced today that have the exodus as their subject.

• Therefore, works written by the same protagonists of those events in the years in which they occurred, works written "in the heat of the moment", but also works written by them at a distance. But, also, works by younger protagonists who lived directly (in their childhood years) or indirectly (that is, born later to families who had undergone that traumatic experience).

• Even works by external witnesses, i.e. non-Istrians, who nevertheless live those facts, participate sentimentally and write about them. In some cases, sharing can give rise not to pages about the exodus but to memories of Istria as it was, of one's own travel experiences and of one's Istrian friendships. However, care must be taken, in this case, not to unduly mix texts that have Istria as their subject – regardless of the historical circumstances of the exodus – and pages in which, instead, the discourse on Istria is stimulated directly by (or placed in the context of) a representation of the events or the period and circumstances of the exodus.

• The reflections of an event or an experience in literature can be found – in a work or in a writer's activity – not only directly (e.g. in the contents of a text) but also indirectly: for example, in the sensitivity of a writer, in his anxieties, in the problematic of his texts which can also be composed of images with symbolic or metaphorical value, in the same style and organization of images that can reflect this sensitivity and therefore – at a distance – lived experiences.

• The "literature of the exodus" includes not only works of the so-called "creative literature" (fiction, poetry, etc.) but also non-fiction, journalistic texts, as well as – of course – memoirs, diaristics, epistolography.

• Under this heading can be understood not only the production of writers whose direct and indirect experience of the phenomenon took place beyond the border crossed in the exodus but also who lived that experience on this side of that border: the "remainers", that is, or their younger successors who witnessed in various ways or wanted to talk about those events.

These are indications that have been used for the preparation of this issue but which – undoubtedly – could also be useful for broader and more asauring undertakings: for example, that great anthology on the subject that someone has hoped for: an anthology and – I would add – history that will require very careful care and investigation (and therefore long times), also because most of the texts of this literature (and not only the occasional ones) can be read in magazines, periodicals, single issues, etc.

That of this issue is a reconnaissance of phenomena and texts that has also proceeded a little by samples, without wanting to be a complete catalog and a systematic illustration. And, however, the choice turns out – in the end – to be representative of lines and trends: both in the non-fiction sector (scholars on both sides of the border, of different generations, of different backgrounds and political-cultural orientations). Texts of different genre quality, structure, by authors who have a different history, an experience behind them. There are writers who focus their testimony on their own experiences and bitterness, and others who broaden the discourse from them to more general problematic motives. There are well-known writers and others emerging or less known, at least according to the criterion of official recognition of the publishing houses that have published their works and of the newspapers, magazines, critics who have talked or written about them. In general, readers of publishing houses and critics have identified the levels and peaks well, but the fact remains – in any case – that there are writers who have been little talked about and who should be better known and by a wider audience (it is a discourse that has been made for some time and that is also taken up here in an article by Franco Juri).

In any case, the pages of this volume also document quite completely the variety of forms, languages and registers, as well as perspectives, that have characterized this literature. This variety must be considered, of course, not only in relation to the "constitutional" differences between the different writers, to the diversity of their experiences, but also to the period and position in which the individual writing experiences are placed.

After the exodus, those forms of narrative?

As for the genres practiced in prevalence, short stories, lyrics, memoirs perhaps transformed into short stories, many pages between non-fiction and autobiography and – in terms of critical interventions – still pages of narrative non-fiction, articles with the cut of the pamphlet with polemical implications, reviews of writers, small monographs, cards. Of course, in this case, the variety is determined by the desire to address both certain critical and polemical underlying knots, and to give some basic information on the activity of individual writers with interventions whose breadth is variable in relation to the greater or lesser notoriety of the character (more extensive interventions have been planned, on emerging authors or on less studied aspects of major authors; in some cases, therefore, we have limited ourselves to the card keeping in mind also the illustration that will result in the anthological part). It should also be noted that, starting from a survey of the literature of the exodus, we wanted to extend the discourse on the literature of the Istrians after the exodus in some cases to verify in what ways, regardless of the pages where this theme was directly addressed, the writing practices of direct protagonists and younger writers who come out of families who have lived this experience have developed.

As for the ways and registers of the literary production to which reference is made, they range from the pain of memory, anguish for the future, nostalgia for things lost or never achieved, invective, calm polemic, lyricism, reflection. Registers as attitudes, as an expression of human, affective, sentimental, cultural, political attitudes, etc. These registers also correspond to a writing that can take on different configurations: more or less emphatic; lyricizing performance; in some cases (not always, and not necessarily) rhetoric in the face of the impact with the traumas caused by the most painful moments of the experience; broader and more reflective, meditative (as Cella also pointed out) when time and other experiences have put a distance between those facts and the author; more complexly analytical, with existential – or sometimes ironic – resonances is the writing of texts closer to us in time. Some works of this literature reveal the tenacious desire to reassert oneself, to bear witness to the spasm of the relationship with one's roots and one's consistency; Other works turn out to be even more painful, more subtly painful in proceeding not only to a reconnaissance of oneself and one's own experiences but also in attempting an anamnesis of the history that produced them and perhaps in proceeding to merciless and lucid explorations of the politics of yesterday and today, on both sides of history and borders. I would say that, today, it is above all this kind of attitude that prevails both in some exponents of the older generations and especially in younger writers. The expressions of mere nostalgia, the lyrical re-enactments of the lost world increasingly give way to more articulated reports that also touch on the relationships between personal experiences and broader events, general problems of history and civilization. It is mainly writers of the younger generations who move along these lines. Or on that of a literature that, while not dealing with specific themes of the exodus, reflect (I am thinking of the texts of Zandel or Klobas) – in the writing and organization of the text, or through metaphors – a restlessness that can also be connected, perhaps (or without perhaps), to the traumatic and anguished experiences, lived in the first person or by the family, which have indelibly marked the lives of protagonists and witnesses.

From La battana, magazine of the Edit of Rijeka (1992) dedicated to the Literature of the Exodus - Introduction