Mussolineide: poema antifascista e di rivendicazione sociale [The Mussoliniad: An antifacist Poem of Social Demands]. [n.p.]: [n.p.], [n.d.]

Mussolineide: poema antifascista e di rivendicazione sociale [The Mussoliniad: An antifacist Poem of Social Demands]. [n.p.]: [n.p.], [n.d.]

This anonymous work, an elegantly written and substantial (nearly 300 pages) mock-epic in terza rima of sixteen cantos, is of course about the life and work of Mussolini. It bears signs of perhaps more communist than either socialist or anarchist views of the anonymous author. Its citation to the evil deeds of the Americans, Rockefeller and Ford, as capitalist devils — in effect, as collaborators of Mussolini — matches a communist point of view of the international capitalist conspiracy, but does not mark the work necessarily as an American one.

This work is something of a bibliographic mystery; the only other copy is in the Biblioteca della Fondazione Anna Kuliscioff - Milano - MI MI 1196, LO 11C; its description there says "stampato probabilmente negli Stati Uniti" (probably printed in the U.S.). But that seems incorrect to me: there would be little need to publish anonymously in the U.S. a "Poema in 16 canti in terzine di autore ignoto stampato in luogo ignoto," that is, correctly noting that it is a poem of an unknown author, printed in an unknown place.

That's the reason I think it was not published in the U.S.: Borghi, after all, published his scathing Mussolini in camicia in 1927 in the U.S., q.v., under his already famous name as author in that work, without apparent fear of reprisal, at a time when that would have been impossible in Italy due to the anti-press laws in effect under Mussolini.

[Anon.]

[n.p.]

[n.d.]

19 x 13cm; 297 p.

Italian