Abstract

In the war novellas that De Roberto published in various magazines between 1919 and 1923, whether of tragic or comic tone, in direct speech he makes use of dialects - in apparent contradiction with all the linguistic and stylistic ideas he had expressed until then - showing not only a new expressionistic will still to be examined, but also an extraordinary mimetic sensitivity in the literary reproduction of a complex sociolinguistic reality, from the extreme one of the contact between the different languages and cultures of the soldiers at the front to the one that witnesses the birth of the so called popular Italian and the consolidation of regional Italians. The compact and tenaciously elaborated linguistic in-betweenness, sought since his narrative debut, is shattered in the multifaceted expressionism of the dialects, which results as stylistically functional either to a comic plot (in novellas such as "La retata" and "Il trofeo") or to a disillusioned and tragic representation of reality ("La paura", "Il rifugio").