Open Access

In a 1949 letter, Cesare Pavese describes with great zeal the genesis of a new work - one he compares, albeit with a certain amount of irony, to Dante's Commedia. [...] This embryonic project would quickly become the novel "La luna e i falò", completed in less than two months and published shortly before Pavese's suicide in 1950. On the surface, there would seem little reason to take seriously the analogy drawn by the author between "La luna" and the "Commedia", for the novel in question contains no explicit references to the medieval poet. Tristan Kay argues in this essay, however, that the presence of Dante in "La luna" is both more pervasive and more significant than has previously been suggested. While critics have noted in passing several narrative and structural parallels between the two texts, which Kay details in Section II, no attempt has been made to consider their wider significance in our understanding of Pavese's novel. What follows is a reading of "La luna" which shows that the "Commedia" functions not simply as a formal model for Pavese, but, more importantly, as an ideological anti-model, in dialogue with which the author articulates his deeply pessimistic understanding of the human condition.