Review article
Grytzko Mascioni: The World of Ancient Greece as Intimal Landmark and Mirror of Our Epoch
Katarina Dalmatin
orcid.org/0000-0002-3486-9578
; Odsjek za talijanski jezik i književnost, Filozofski fakultet, Sveučilište u Splitu, Hrvatska
Abstract
Grytzko Mascioni (1936−2003) Italian-Swiss poet, novelist, essayist and eminent journalist wrote a significant part of his literary opus inspired by myths and historical figures of ancient Greece as well as by ideological, cultural and social context that had created them. His Grecian opus consists of five books, three novels-essays: Apollo's Night, Socrates' Skin and Sappho from Lesbos and two synthesis The Greek Mirror and Sea of Immortals. As an antidogmatic he shunned the so called strong subject, seeing the exit from totalizing ideological systems and superficial political rhetoric that flooded Europe in 1968 in the return to the roots of European thought and existentialist vision of literary expression. In Apollo's Night the complex and paradoxical Apollo's figure whose literary reconstruction is established in autobiographical context on thematic and formal level, manifests a marked antisystemic disposition on the scent of hermeneutic and fragmentaristic philosophy of Horkheimer and Adorno. The Dialectics of Enlightenment has considerably determined the thematic and ideological horizon of The Greek Mirror, but its echoes can be found in Mascioni’s most important novel Puck, whose action takes place predominantly in Croatia, caught by the war. The strong feeling of eradication and lack of belonging to a state, people, social class or political option in Mascioni’s opus has been substituted by lonely and uncompromising search for common European cultural and civilizational roots. Mascioni does not look for his intimal homeland on the map of today’s Europe, but in her collective memory that leads him to Ancient Greece and her free polises as the cultural ideal.
Keywords
Grytzko Mascioni; Ancient Greece; Apollo's Night; Greek Mirror; Puck; Dubrovnik
Hrčak ID:
82316
URI
Publication date:
29.3.2012.
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