Robert Ricks and Professor Cinzia Noble, French and Italian
Trieste is a charming port city on the Adriatic Sea in the northeast corner of Italy, home to nearly 300,000 and capital of the Friuli-Venezia-Giulia region. Though Trieste has ancient roots as the Roman settlement Tergeste, it was not until the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when it became the most important port of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, that Trieste grew and flourished. Its advantageous location at the crossroads between Latin, Slavic, and German civilizations certainly favored its rise to greater regional importance and bred a peculiar cosmopolitan atmosphere that survives to this day.
The city’s good fortunes should have led to bourgeois complacency, but beneath that veneer lurked the frustration of Trieste’s Italian majority-frustration at being dominated by what they considered a foreign power. The irredentists preached a gospel of rebellion: Mazzini’s work must be completed by uniting the remaining “unredeemed” lands to Italy. The more radical of these revolutionaries were in the minority, but the general dissatisfaction was very much a part of the climate that provoked the unforeseeable literary explosion in the decades just before and after the Great War.
Aspiring Triestine writers in the first years of the twentieth century found themselves in a paradoxical position: they wrote in Italian, but from the periphery rather than the center of the Italian tradition. Though linguistically Italian, they were far away from the rich cultural patrimony of Tuscany and Rome. Scipio Slataper, a young Triestine writer and political activist who was killed in the Great War, once bemoaned the misfortune of being born in a city with no culture. If Trieste had culture, it was commercial culture: the art of trade and shipping, the music of profit and bottom lines. Ironically, the introduction to one of Slataper’s seminal works now declares that “in the history of contemporary literature, Trieste occupies, by unanimous recognition, a place of highest importance.”1 Thanks to Slataper and others, Trieste, while still a relative newcomer to the Italian literary tradition, has established a canon of its own.
Slataper’s brief but intense career highlights one of the striking facts of Triestine cultural history: a profound need to draw out and articulate the unique ethos of Trieste, its triestinità, seems ingrained in the souls of its thinkers and writers. For Slataper, Giani Stuparich, Umberto Saba, and others, Trieste never lost its enchantment, despite their ambivalence toward it in other ways. Certainly later essayists have regarded the heyday of these writers as the moment of greatest enchantment in the city’s cultural history. Alberto Spaini’s Autoritratto triestino (Triestine Self-Portrait) offers nostalgic reflection on the halcyon days of Joyce and Svevo, of the Stuparich brothers, of irredentism, patriotism, and outings on the carso.
The celebrated Irish novelist James Joyce undoubtedly left his imprint on the city’s ethos during the decade (1904-1915) he spent there teaching English at the Berlitz school, composing his novels and writing the occasional column for the local newspaper. Joyce became the tutor for a certain Ettore Schmitz, successful businessman and would-be novelist. Schmitz had published two novels under the name Italo Svevo but had been disheartened by the complete lack of critical or commercial success.
Joyce recognized their quality and reassured Schmitz (Svevo) of his literary talents. It is perhaps thanks to their fortunate friendship that Svevo’s greatest work, La Coscienza di Zeno, was conceived and executed. Trieste did not leave Joyce untouched either. Recent studies of Joyce’s Triestine sojourn argue that it deserves greater attention in the interpretation of his life and works.
The scope of the literature on Trieste is by now quite vast. My original proposal made clear that my aim was not to create “a comprehensive survey of the literature,” but rather a more focused appraisal of studies that suggest “the symbiotic relationship between the city and its literature.” I believe I have made good progress toward realizing this goal. In my research, I have tried to take advantage of the resources at my disposal. During winter semester I began with the sources I could find in the Lee Library and proceeded to cast a wider net, thanks to the Interlibrary Loan Office (whose resourcefulness has frankly exceeded expectations).
This work was preparatory to my research time in Trieste in the last week of May, during which time I discovered the joys and trials of working with the rather primitive Italian library system. The limited hours and restrictive borrowing policies notwithstanding, the Civic Library of Trieste did prove an excellent source of books on the history and literature of Trieste; the card catalog indexed by subject gave me many useful leads. I also discovered that the Civic Library had a working relationship with the Italo Svevo museum, which occupies the floor above the library in the same building. The museum maintains an extensive and updated collection of material published on Svevo’s life or works, including university theses that were quite readable and informative, as well as being unavailable in the United States. Once back at BYU, I again availed myself of the Interlibrary Loan services to further review sources I had come across while in Trieste.
I am somewhat more cautious, however, in my ambition that this bibliography might serve, as originally hoped, as “a springboard for further scholarly research.” To be a truly useful tool for other researchers, the bibliography would need to be much more exhaustive than I ever intended it to be. It could be useful, but only to those whose interests closely parallel mine. In its current form I see the bibliography as an inchoate idea that needs further articulation as a thesis. I intend to carry out this project as an Honor’s thesis, with the bibliography I have compiled appended at the end.
I would be pleased if my work might assist those curious in this fascinating corner of Italy that I have learned to appreciate even more while doing this project. I also humbly recognize that lists of books and summaries of sources cannot capture the ethos of a city. Only through the nuance and careful ambiguity of the language that distinguishes great literature can it be approximated. And it is to the literary imagination that this task most rightly belongs.
References
- Scipio Slataper, Il mio carso (Milano: Mondadori, 1958), v. My translation.