ABSTRACT
In the nearly forty years of his literary career, Elio Vittorini worked on about eighteen novels; however, only seven of them were completed, the other eleven being either abandoned or published in their unfinished state. The urgency to turn new ideas into literary practice is also suggested by the habit of publishing his novels in instalments while the writing process was still in its initial stages. Vittorini's enthusiastic urge to put new ideas into his work was therefore a major factor in his tendency to leave work unfinished. Some attention should also be paid to Vittorini's technique of composition. According to Giovanna Gronda, the unfinished nature of Vittorini's postwar work can be related to that of other major twentieth-century European authors such as Kafka, Musil and Broch, who all developed an aversion towards well-structured, 'closed' narratives. However favourable this view, the inclusion of Vittorini within a momentous trend of modern European literature, does not fully explain the peculiarity of his situation.
