Elsa Morante’s «History: A Novel» and Svetlana Alexievich’s «The Unwomanly Face of War». Traumatic realism, Archives du Mal and Female Pathos

History. A novel (1974) and The Unwomanly Face of War (U vojny ne ženskoe lico 1985) are two distinctive historical and emotional narratives that develop around certain traumatic cores directly and indirectly related to the Second World War, as well as articulating themselves through a female universe and its pathos. Elsa Morante places at the centre of her novel History the years between 1941 and 1947. The text is divided into eight parts, preceded by a historical focus and a final addition, both of them endowing the novel with a paratextual structure organically connected to the main narrative (JOSI: 2020). The polyphonic plot of the novel develops in a fictional fashion some crucial historical nuclei of the war that are specifically related to the city of Rome, a topic on which Morante had carefully researched (LUCAMANTE: 2014, ZANARDO: 2015). At the heart of the plot stands out the story of elementary school teacher Ida Ramundo and her family, particularly her son Useppe. The Unwomanly Face of War by Svetlana Alexievich was published in the Soviet Union in 1985 – the same year of Morante’s death, and eleven years after the publication of History. It this literary reportage, Belo-Russian novelist Alexievich – who would eventually win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2015 – selects the oral testimonies of 500 women among former partisans and, in most part, Soviet veterans who enlisted in the armed forces as volunteers between 1941 and 1945. Thematically structured in 16 chapters, the testimonies benefit from an extremely well pondered montage, that is constantly accompanied by a narrating voice. In this essay I will adopt Derridean categories such as «spectrality», «archive fever» and «archives du mal» (cfr. Introduction, I.1.3-I.1.5); my goal is to show that, despite belonging to different genres, the works by these two writers feature a similar traumatic philosophy of history, and implement comparable ethical and aesthetic choices aimed at formulating experimental and up-to-date forms of narrative realism.