The fame of Italian writer Eugenio Corti hinges on two works: I piu non ritornano: Diario di ventotto giorni in una sacca sul fronte russo, inverno 1942-43 (Most Do Not Return: Diary of Twenty Days in a Pocket on the Russian Front, Winter 1942-43) first published in 1947, and his great 1,280-page novel Il Cavallo Rosso (The Red Horse), published in 1983.

In print continuously in Italy and with sales measured in tens of thousands of copies, I piu non ritornano has for its epigraph the sentence of the Evangelist Mark: “Pray that it not arrive in winter.” In fact, the catastrophe that brought agony and death to 80,000 Italian soldiers occurred in the hardest winter of World War II, in the bend of the Don River in Russia. Corti’s account, based on his diaries written on slips of paper during the retreat from December l942 to January 1943, constitutes an Odyssey of the Italian soldiers, fighting men transformed into “poor Christs” [in English we say “poor devils”—a significant difference?].

The strength of Corti’s writing revealed in these diaries was an indication of his future literary fortunes. They offer, even to today’s reader, vital matter for meditation; as is always the ease, when humble people are sucked into the vortex of total war, the truth emerges with greater clarity—as clear as it is terrifying in the description of horrors, of mutilated piety, of inflexible evil, but also of charity unvanquished and of hope that dwells in “the secret waters of the heart.”

The events are narrated with such careful regard for truth that the writer can vouch for the content of every single sentence. The story of the 35th Corps of the Italian army on the Russian front is generally known to historians of World War II, but the heart of this book (and it strikes us today with even greater force than in the period immediately after the war) is the vastness of the destruction, the unutterable violence and suffering.

In the telling it is not the war that is so terrifying as the unchained hatred of the Nazis and Soviets, the ruthlessness of the massacres, the routine killings that the Russians and the Germans perform as if the conflict were between demons. In the midst of such horror, the sole remaining consolation was faith, invoked in the evening with the recitation of the holy rosary and in prayers to the Virgin, amid the delirium of the wounded and the cries of men freezing to death.

The narrative is realistic, day after day, hour after hour, along the calvary of the long human column walking westward. “The European Civil War,” in Ernst Nolte’s apt description, which from 1914 to 1945 tore Europe to pieces, unfolds one of its chapters in these pages: it was a result unforeseen by the Italians who were trapped in the vise of an incomprehensible collision that had not been included in any war plan. Eire, snow, and ice, primordial elements which instead of discharging their natural and beneficial functions were in revolt to torture the flesh, to cut down, with fear, young lives that were transformed step-by-step into dark frozen specters.

Thus appears the Valley of Death, on Christmas night of that year, around the Russian village of Arbusov:

In this way we leave the Valley of Death: the village was half destroyed, many huts burned, and many civilians—old men, women, children, killed in the battle or by the Germans out of hatred. We left behind a wall of corpses, spread everywhere: dead Germans, apathetic, Russians shot down at some point in regular files of ten, and our men, by far the most numerous, killed by enemy bombardment or fallen in waves of bayonette assaults, dead from starvation, dead from cold. . . . Most agonizing of all was the thought of the thousands of the dead, the hundreds upon hundreds of wounded men abandoned on the snow, on a little straw. . . . You who read these pages, do you know what it means?”

This question, hurled from the depths of tragedy, will haunt the writer’s entire literary life. Passing by other books of which we shall speak later, Eugenio Corti spent years preparing himself for his great work, the historical novel of our age, Il Cavallo Rosso, whose composition occupied 11 uninterrupted years of his intellectual life. Corti and his novel are rooted deep in the earth of his fathers, in the green and hilly land of the Brianza, which from Monza (ancient capital of the Longobards) extends up to Lecco and to the gates of Como (an area that is the setting of the 19th-century classic I Promessi Sposi).

Two generations of Italians, from 1940 to 1974, populate II Cavallo Rosso (now in its ninth edition in Italy, published last year in Spanish by Rialp Publishing in Madrid, with French, English, Japanese, Lithuanian, and Romanian translations and an international televised version in 12 installments in progress). In the passage of time the characters are engaged, in war and in peace, in bearing witness to the Christian idea in every situation. But the surprising quality of this work is the result of the author’s refusal to ally himself with any 20th-century school of Italian literature. Rather, as an historical novel, the only real analogies are such works as Hugo’s Les Miserables, Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Solzhenitsyn’s August 1914, and Manzoni’s I Promessi Sposi.

Corti is not an author to submit to intellectual compromises in order to reach the ninnies of the avant garde. As an iron man of the Brianza, he does not bow at the summons of the ideological and political Utopias that design gulags and cemeteries for Europe and the world by the perversions of reason that pass for modern rationality. His line of departure is a land both severe and joyful; among his green hills and in the places made famous by Manzoni he garners a moral tradition from the living flesh of men and transfuses it into his characters who are directly experiencing the human condition of good Christians and, therefore, of good men. Ambrogio, Michele, Stefano, Pierello, Gerardo, Giustina, Alma, Marietta and so many others are three-dimensional beings, protagonists in a plot that leads them to bear witness to the ways marked out by Providence.

One must learn, see, reflect upon the atheist ideology that was implanted in Central and Eastern Europe in order to appreciate the clash between Nazi neopaganism and its Communist opposite number. Corti’s observations on this convey a reality captured in blood, a metallic rationality of ideology that annihilates men in obedience to a perverse dream of regeneration. His characters find themselves in the vortex of destruction, and it is only the daily practice of prayer to Cod and to the guardian angels that saves them from dehumanization.

Corti is a master at illustrating such behavior without rhetoric and without obvious design. Conscious of man’s fallen nature, he measures the responsibilities according to the idea and the practice of the good. He does not judge, but condemns only the irrationality of sin that has imbibed the distorted ideas of atheist humanism.

Like concentric circles in a pool of water, the chapters of this novel revolve around a fixed axis, in an order of persons and communities that must be preserved from destruction. The Brianza of fifty years ago from which his characters set out for war, is the model of a Christian society whose integrity is threatened by the atheist culture. It is not a question of words or of explicit expressions of faith so much as a reality that surmounts historical events and confirms the possibility of living as “integral men,” in the presence of a transcendence that is light for beings and for things. It would be too long to trace the plot of this novel, which despite its simplicity, sums up all the recent history of Italy and even of Europe. Even if its characters appear today to be the losers, there remains the expression of a message and of a memory that passes from literature to life.

On the last page of his great book, Corti quotes significantly these verses from Eliot’s “Little Gidding”:

See, now they vanish

The faces and places, with the self

which, as it could, loved them

To become renewed, transfigured,

in another pattern.

Truly, it is so, and the pattern is that of our life. I look around me, I force myself to remember; I see no other Italian author in this century capable of writing a novel of this intensity. Between his debut with Il piu non ritornano and his epic novel, Eugenio Corti inlaid his literary activity with other major works: I poveri cristi, Il Communismo ‘realizzato’, L’epoca di Paolo VI, S. Giorgio declassato e altri racconti, and the long tragedy Processo e morte di Stalin (Stalin’s Trial and Death), produced in Rome in 1962. Two years later, the work was translated into Russian and, in 1969, into Polish by dissident exiles from both nations. The Russian text was circulated in the Soviet Union by samizdat, and the Polish version earned him the title of Cavalier of Poland, given by the democratic government in exile.

The Lombard writer (born in 1921) continues his work, traveling throughout Italy week after week, speaking to packed audiences of young people and the not-so-young. Meanwhile other books (Gli ultimi soldati del Re will come out this year) are stored in his mind for the years that will accompany his old age and wisdom.