Vol. 17 No. I (2025)
Scrittura / Lettura / Ascolto

Cassola e il comunismo: la storia di Baba

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  • Michela Rossi Sebastiano
Michela Rossi Sebastiano
Fondazione Camillo Caetani, Roma, Italia
DOI: https://doi.org/10.36253/oi-18030

Published 2025-06-25

Keywords

  • Carlo Cassola,
  • fiction on the Resistenza,
  • Italian novel of the 1950s,
  • intellectual character,
  • popular figure

How to Cite

Rossi Sebastiano, M. (2025). Cassola e il comunismo: la storia di Baba. L’ospite Ingrato, 17(I), 259–282. https://doi.org/10.36253/oi-18030

Copyright (c) 2025 Michela Rossi Sebastiano

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Abstract

The essay examines Cassola’s fiction on the Italian Resistenza, focusing on the short story Baba (1946), the novel Fausto e Anna (1952), and the short novel I vecchi compagni (1953). In these works, Cassola constructs a narrative opposition between the bourgeois intellectual (Fausto) and the communist worker (Baba). Within a narrative space that reconfigures relational dynamics by centering the communist character, the author portrays the failure of intellectual leadership. The essay further explores how this opposition shapes narrative construction – affecting plot structure, character development, and the role of the narrator – as well as its influence on defining Cassola’s distinctive form of populism.

PDF (italian)