SOURCE: “Calvino's ‘Ultimo Viene il Corvo’: Riflery as Realistic and Fantastic,” in Italian Quarterly, Vol. 22, No. 84, Spring, 1981, pp. 61–7.

In the following essay, Carter asserts that realistic and fantastic elements interrelate and act as reinforcing literary modes in “Ultimo Viene il Corvo.”

Critics have often approached Italo Calvino's early writing as a mixture of fantasy and realism that would soon split apart into two distinct modes of narrative. “Ultimo viene il corvo,”¹ one of his best known stories, for example, has been discussed as an historical representation of the partisan struggle, with, however, lyric and poetic overlays.² Carlo Annoni, in his “Italo Calvino: la Resistenza tra realtà e favola,”³ suggests that the partisan stories represent two directions in Calvino's work, the neorealistic and the fabulous; “Ultimo viene il corvo” represents the latter. Teresa de Lauretis, however, has argued against a division of Calvino's corpus into neorealism and fantasy, as...