Verga e Rebreanu, “voci” della memoria collettiva delle sommosse contadine
Verga e Rebreanu, Voices of the Collective Memory of Peasant Uprisings

Summary/Abstract: istory books mention terrible moments that marked people’s existence. History, however, records precise facts and details; it does not spur emotions and cannot fix the events into the collective memory of feelings that only literature is able to do. Literature also has the function to universalize individual experiences, to award them the status of example and to make them significant for humanity as a whole. Starting from this assumption, our research will follow the image of the uprising as reflected in two exceptional narratives: the short-story “Libertà” (“Freedom”) by the Sicilian writer Giovanni Verga and the novel “Răscoala” (“The Uprising”) by the Romanian prose-writer Liviu Rebreanu. Both texts are inspired of events that really took place, namely the massacre of Bronte in 1860 and the peasant rebellion of 1907. However, both texts focus on purely fictional stories, though perfectly fitting into the reality of the events they are inspired by. We will therefore comment upon the resemblances and the differences that characterize the modalities in which the two authors understand the causes of the movements, the accumulation of tension within the mass of the peasants, the violent and insane manifestation of the wild crowd, and the terrible repression implemented by the state. We will insist upon the elements that give particular depth to the narration and underline its profound brutality, characteristic for naturalism / “verismo”. In conclusion, we will note that Verga’s and Rebreanu’s expressive ability not only makes plausible their plots, but fixes them indelibly in the memory of posterity, more alive and more real than history itself.

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