“A very long, unpredictable, and illogical route.” The Cosmogonical Mash-Up of Primo Levi’s The Truce

The article aims at pointing out and analyzing the cosmogonical and mythical motifs in Primo Levi’s The Reawakening. It underlines how myths contribute to the narration and reveal the chemist-writer’s attempt to polymerize his cultures – creating a temporal concept ‘figure’, he fuses different mythologies and epitomizes the epochal shift between pre- and post- Auschwitz, between Poland and Belarus, through the mythological stories he knew which will appear also in his further works. The intertextual dialogues are held with Bible, literature and science and are based on six motifs: the devastating «counter-creation» set up by Nazis, opposed to holy creation (either by God or Nature, through the combination of the elements); the cosmic and divine void left by the «black hole of Auschwitz», which swallows men or pulls them to regain their humanity, willing to live free; the Great Flood, which erases the scoria of Auschwitz and gives new life to people and to the nation; the Jewsih rùakh, both inside of men and on the surface of the Earth after the catastrophic nothingness; the mud, primeval substance already there in the Lager of If this is a man, out of which life came out and man was created; and finally, in the painful closing, the chaos, all-pervading ultimate tyrant. Each one of these concurs to create a significant and highly symbolic set for Levi’s picaresque adventures during his return to Turin, signing his first attempt to combine reality with literature, myth and fiction.