Enzo Bettiza e la sua natura «bifida»: tra identità e senso di alterità erratica

[Autom. eng. transl.] The paper intends to analyze some aspects of the autobiographical novel by Enzo Bettiza, entitled Esilio (1996), which delves into the phenomenon of exodus, lived on its own skin by the Split author, and allows us to understand the so-called 'exile syndrome', the meaning of eradication experienced by many refugees. The essay focuses in particular on the oxymoronic elements that emerge in the novel, from the pages dedicated to the adolescent years (the Consuelo chapter is emblematic), when the author begins to feel in himself the split between the Slavic and the Italian component of his family and its formation (the "bifid and bilingual nature") and therefore confesses that it feels like an exile everywhere. A dense web of contradictions, existential and historical, personal and family, real and symbolic, punctuate this novel written in a highly polished, rich, enveloping and captivating prose; these dissonances are revealing of a struggle within the author between a sense of belonging and a sense of otherness. In fact, Bettiza recognizes in himself a "double personality, vacillating under the blows of exile" and looking lucidly "in all its depth, the abyss never completely removed that broke my person and my existence in two parts irreconcilable: life lost and disappeared on one side, another life sought and never found on the other ».