Domenico Zeni’s decision

When, in 1916, Domenico Zeni decided to buy a new notebook in which to write his journal, it was an important event which he recorded at the opening of the text itself. ‘I have bought this book’ was how he opened his account of his life as a prisoner-of-war in Siberia. Zeni was a peasant from the Trentino and a soldier in the Austro-Hungarian army who was captured by the Russians. Zeni had started writing in a smaller notebook but found it insufficient. Too many things had occurred, he thought, which people would not believe unless he recorded them. Perhaps, he wrote, if God brings us peace one day, all the events he intended to write down would be remembered. Extraordinary happenings needed to be written down for posterity, but the writing task merited a more solid book than the one he had first used. The trauma of separation, the experience of combat, the pain of imprisonment all produced a multitude of memories which could not be retained without a written record. Peasants like Zeni who took the decision to write had the explicit objective of providing exceptional testimony, but they were doing much more than this. They re-ordered their memories, and in the process constituted themselves as authoritative sources. At the same time, they were engaged in an exercise of self-representation as, through the act of writing, they constructed a personal identity.

Once ordinary writers had decided to begin a journal, a diary or a memoir, they then faced other more difficult decisions. What style should they adopt? How should their account be structured? What title should they give their text, and should it be divided into chapters? To whom, if anyone, should their memoirs be addressed? These writing problems vexed many untutored writers who were venturing into unknown territory. In searching for a literary style, they often drew on the few literary models they knew. Sometimes they constructed sophisticated narrative texts, reworking several drafts into a retrospective account until they were satisfied. To classify their texts as ‘autobiography’, ‘diary’ or ‘war memoir’ is to evoke well-defined and familiar literary genres; but such labels are inadequate to embrace the mixed variety of forms which ordinary writings took. Ordinary writers wrote in unorthodox genres unrecognised by conventional literary tradition. A few also nurtured literary ambitions. They felt the lure of what Marie-Claude Penloup called, in the very different context of adolescent writing, ‘the literary temptation’.