Battelli, diligenze, postali e l’europeizzazione delle letterature nazionali tra la fine dell’Ottocento e il primo Novecento

The topic of Isola-Mondo is developed through a comparison of Sardinia and Russia via the nodal point that is the Sardinian-European question. Grazia Deledda’s European vocation is placed in the context of the times in which writers from smaller and minority nations adjusted themselves to create a bridge, or dia-system, between the linguistic and literary system of their origin and that high and noble system arriving from the great European literatures. The textual and contextual connection between Deledda and Tolstoy is resurrected here in the implicit setting of twentieth century Italian Slavistic study. The relationship between the two systems (compared within a common mythological and anthropological setting) is briefly made evident, often via personal recollections traversing Gramsci and the nineteenth century, to indicate two systems conceived from their outset as autonomous.
The idea of dia-system, linguistic and literary, is used to account for the deleddian experience in reformulating both her existence and anthropological universe from Sardinian into the post-unitarian Italian literary language. The account starts from the complex and ethnically tinged situation that was Sardinia at the end of the nineteenth and into the twentieth century and finds correspondence in the similar needs of other great European writers.