Vasco Pratolini in two times: the flower and the nausea

Abstract

This paper aims to discuss how the fictional trajectory of the Florentine writer Vasco Pratolini (1913-1991) expresses his literary project, highlighted by the relations between Ethics and Aesthetics. The thematic and aesthetic course of his works, when read together, enlighten the intellectual crisis of the Left, which goes from the adherence to the project of the communist revolution – and the role of Literature in this context – to the perception of the impossibility to fulfill it. Therefore, the text focuses on Una trilogia italiana, because in the writing of the three novels that integrate this work (Metello, 1955; Lo scialo, 1960; Allegoria e derisione, 1966), it is possible to perceive the gradual loss of the revolutionary perspective and the rising of a melancholic state that overlaps the Utopia of Pratolini’s earlier texts.