Even now, if I happen to narrate in public my experiences as a journalist and speak about the renowned colleagues I have met, one question is inevitable: what was Dino Buzzati like? Thirty years have passed since he died, so why is interest in this writer so long-lasting? There can only be one answer I think, quite apart from the numerous books written by Buzzati: because he is the author of “The Tartar Steppe”.The first thing to recall is a date. “The Tartar Steppe” first appeared in the late spring of 1940, while Buzzati was in East Africa as a special correspondent of the “Corriere della Sera”.
Italy’s entering the war was by then simply a question of days. The book would have come out a couple of months earlier if it had not been for a last-minute problem: the Fascist regime had forbidden the use of the third person singular while the dialogue of the “Steppe” made abundant use of it. One of Buzzati’s dearest friends, professor Arturo Brambilla, made all the changes from third singular to second plural, but this naturally caused a certain amount of delay. Those of my age group were then finishing junior high school and taking their first steps in the college.
Out of school reading was fairly rare. After overcoming the excitement of Salgari, Sandokan defeated by Homer’s poems, we would read, almost secretly, Cronin, Kormendi, Wieckert, Fallada, or perhaps the books of Lucio d’Ambra and Luciano Zuccoli on our mother’s side table. Well, imagine putting Buzzati’s novel into the hands of a student like this. I bought it in Verona, a few weeks after the war had started. I had not read any reviews, I was simply attracted by the title, by that combination of two words, “steppe” and “tartar”, both so fatally exotic.
On returning to my small home town, I read the book in a couple of evenings. There was a curfew, my father had been called up into the army, my mother spoke of food rationing, one night we heard bombs falling in the distance.
The “The Tartar Steppe” caused a big fracture in my world as a boy. And these are the years, the months I wish to focus on here. I want to recover in my memory the feelings of those evenings, the mental notes of that impact with a world so extraordinarily different to that so far offered to me by books. An immobile world, of low lights, a world of stones rather than the white marble of the classics, a world of ramparts and not camp-sites, of dark rooms and not Olympias and Heavens. A world where the only blaring was that of the trumpets, so piercing and lost in the hour of sunset, in the face of increasingly darker valleys, of mountains increasingly more surrounded by darkness. It was the victory of prose over poetry. Or it was the victory of poetry over the notions that kept it chained to excessively solemn modules. I shall stick to that period, as I said. A period when, to name just one, authors like Kafka were not in circulation. A book could obtain the effects I have tried to describe if nothing else but because, in a small provincial town, like the one I lived in, ideas arrived late and sometimes, for the really great books, it took years.
The “Steppe” was a signal. Literature could take other roads, adapt to a not strictly heroic human condition. Years ago, at a conference on Buzzati staged in Venice, I listened to various interpretations of the “Steppe”. The most appropriate seemed to me to that which saw in the officers and soldiers of the Fortezza Bastiani a confraternity intent on military rituals. And this is explained by the fact that, what inspired this confraternity was the editorial staff of the “Corriere” in the Thirties, - no one dared raise their voice and the only noises allowed were the rustling of paper and pens. My generation was not aware of this however.
For the college kids of that period, the “Steppe” was above all the lesson of a life, that of the leading character, lieutenant Giovanni Drogo: a silent, immobile, senseless life, in contrast with the dynamic and exasperated models of daily existence. The “Steppe” was the discovery that the life of a character can also be reduced to staring at an endless land with on the horizon volcanoes that continuously bellow out smoke, black marks that could be forests or cities or remote caravans.
Finally a different feeling. We were deeply excited by the theme of escaping time, that sixth chapter of the novel where man moves ahead and behind him gates close that will never open again. Youth is naturally inclined towards gloominess. In those days American films were forbidden, dancing was forbidden, cigarettes had a terrible taste, the food was bad, in the evening you could not go out: and so it was not so strange for every home to become a small Fortezza Bastiani and for so many youngsters to have the thoughts and sad dreams of lieutenant Drogo.
I should like to end on a personal note. It was the year 1969 and I had to write an article on the forthcoming appearance of the “Poema a fumetti”. I was in Buzzati’s house and he was sat underneath a large poster of Fantomas. He said a lot of very nice and serious things, with a voice that seemed sharp but which deep down maintained a vague Venetian sing-song rhythm.
He referred to the subject of death, which dominates all his works including the ”Poema a fumetti”. He almost dictated a thought to me: “I do not wish to appear an heretic, but in my opinion God exists because death exists”. In those days rumours were going around about a film based on the “The Tartar Steppe”.
This film was in fact made in 1976, directed by Valerio Zurlini, with an exceptional cast of actors including Jacques Perrin, in the leading role, Vittorio Gassman, Giuliano Gemma, Philippe Noiret, Jean-Louis Trintignant, Max von Sidow, Laurent Terzieff, Fernando Rey and Francisco Rabal.
Buzzati had an idea: “If I were the director – he said to me – for the soldiers of the Fortezza Bastiani I would not choose a single uniform, but all the most beautiful uniforms in history, as long as they were slightly worn, rather like old flags. I am thinking of the uniforms of the dragoons, the hussars, he musketeers encountered in the pages of Dumas, the Bengal Lancers, like the ones used in a film with Gary Cooper…Of course, together with the uniforms, also different helmets, caps and badges. In other words, a regiment that has never existed but which is universal”.
The question I asked Buzzati was: “Which uniform would you have lieutenant Drogo wear?”.
The answer came without hesitation, “I should dress him up like a Hapsburg officer because Drogo’s life is pointless, but full of pride”. (trad.Interpres-Giussano)