The Political Prisoner

Cesare Pavese

Translated from the Italian by W.J. Strachan

With a new foreword by Nick Johnstone

The Political Prisoner has its autobiographical roots in Pavese's own arrest and imprisonment in Calabria for his writings in the anti-fascist magazine La Cultura. This story describes the day to day life of Stefano, an anti-fascist who has served a prison sentence and is banished to a remote southern Italian seaside resort where he awaits an official pardon. Pavese describes the monotony, the grimness and the sensuality of life in the village through the eyes of a man who realises his habits have been broken. When the summer ends Stefano can no longer kill the days by swimming and lying on the seashore. His life is empty, relationships seem pointless and he begins to take refuge in his dreams.The second novella, The Beautiful Summer, is a tale of corruption and maturity based a colony of inferior artists and their models in Turin. When a fourteen-year-old Ginia falls in love with one of the artists from this group she gradually comes to comprehend not the glamour but the futility and callousness of so-called bohemian 'freedom.

‘He (Pavese) brings to each scene of natural beauty the strain of the fresh eye of a person who sees these things as for the last time and to say goodbye . . . The flavour of anarchy this author distils in each setting is quite remarkable.’ – Stevie Smith, Observer

‘Typical in its uneasy searching for a standard of personal values, of the doubts of those Italian writers who at first opposed Fascism and then effected an unhappy compromise with it . . . there is never any doubt of Pavese's talent.’ – Times

‘Pavese writes with a vivid quietude that is always engaging.’ – Guardian

 

CESARE PAVESE was born in the Piedmont in 1908. Now considered one of Italy's most distinctive writers, he was unable to publish his creative writing during the fascist era and instead channelled his energies into translating the work of English-language writers into Italian. He was imprisoned by the government in 1935 – inspiring his novel The Political Prisoner – and lived with the partisans between 1943 and 1945. The bulk of his work – stories, poems and novels – appeared between 1945 and his suicide in 1951.