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358 | YugoslaVia Eligio (ligio) Zanini (1927–1993) A native of Rovigno d’Istria (Rovinj, Croatia, after 1947), Zanini was a poet who wrote primarily in the Italian dialect of Rovigno. He trained to be a teacher at the Istituto Magistrale di Pola (Pula) and while still a young man fought with Italian Partisans during World War II. The transfer of Rovigno to Yugoslavia in 1947 had dire consequences for Zanini. The expulsion of Yugoslavia from the Cominform led to his arrest and subsequent imprisonment in January 1949 on charges of pro-Soviet sympathies, effectively ending his budding career as a teacher and school official under the Italian government. He was among the earliest detainees assigned to Goli otok, remaining there until his release in 1952. Unable to resume his academic career, he was constrained to work as a watchman in a Pula shipyard until 1956 when, with the aid of friends in Pula, he found employment as an accountant in a business firm in the same city. It was to be another three years before he was allowed to return to academic life in the northwest Istrian coastal town of Savudrija (Italian Salvore), Croatia. He remained there for five years, taking an active role in the dissemination of Italian culture as the founder of the Circolo Italiano di Cultura. Back again in Rovinj, he took employment as an accountant in order to pay for university studies leading to a degree in education . He also became a teacher in the tiny town of Bale, a short distance from Pula. After his retirement, Zanini moved back to Rovinj where he pursued his two greatest passions, writing poetry and fishing. Between 1965 and 1993, the year of his death, he published seven volumes of poetry, all in the Italian Istrian dialect. His one book of prose, Martin Muma, is based on his internment on Goli otok from 1949 to 1952. It was first published in 1990 in the Rijeka (Fiume) literary journal La battana, which is devoted to advancing the cause of Italian-language culture in Istria. A member of the Association of Writers of Croatia, Zanini quit the organization in 1990—three years before his death—when it changed its name to the Association of Croatian Writers, which Zanini regarded as an indication of growing Croatian nationalism. The story of a young Italian from Rovigno/Rovinj who grows up in the 1930s and 1940s experiencing first Italian fascism under Mussolini and then Yugoslav socialism under Tito, Martin Muma is certainly the story of Zanini himself. Martin ’s idealistic enthusiasm for socialism carries with it also a reverence for Stalin that, to his misfortune, lingers past Yugoslavia’s expulsion from the Cominform. It is for this reason that he, like many other Istrian Italian Socialists who chose to remain in Istria after much of it passed under Yugoslav control, is taken into custody and sent to Goli otok. “The paradise of the Socialist world guided, in practice, by Comrade Stalin, the sole guarantor of international respect” soon YugoslaVia | 359 became something quite different for Martin (or Martino as he is often referred to), as it did indeed for Ligio Zanini whose novel assumes the quality of a political bildungsroman.7 Simply narrated but rich in irony and wry observation, Martin Muma remains the principal literary text depicting the Italian-Yugoslav Communist brotherhood of the early postwar years and its frightful demise. The following excerpts are from Martin Muma as the text appears in La battana: Rivista trimestrale di cultura (Rijeka-Fiume) 27, nos. 95–96 (1990): 199–200, 205– 6, 214–15, and have been translated from Italian by Harold B. Segel. from Martin Muma One night in July, still in ’49, the pregnant silence of the sighs of the prison became brusquely interrupted. Martino was awakened by the sound of many steps in the corridors before the door of his cell was flung open. He was thrown in handcuffs onto a truck before realizing what was happening. He fell in among the heap of Cominformists comprising the majority of the old Istrian Communists on whom he had once pinned his hopes, among this tight fearful tangle, like a pack of beaten dogs, under the threat of the submachine guns of the agents of the OZNA. In the morning they all found themselves, to their great relief, without handcuffs, in a large room of the Rijeka prison. After greetings and embraces, there was one who now wouldn’t stop showing off, saying that...

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