马里奥-里戈尼-斯特恩意大利作家，其战时回忆录成为畅销书

马里奥-里戈尼-斯特恩

意大利作家，其战时回忆录成为畅销书

约翰-弗朗西斯-莱恩

Fri 22 Aug 2008 00.01 BST

Il sergente nella neve (1953), translated into English as The Sergeant in the Snow (1954)

Il bosco degli urogalli (1962)

Quota Albania (1971)

Ritorno sul Don (1973)

Storia di Tönle (1978), translated into English as The Story of Tonle (1998, 2012)

Uomini, boschi e api (1980)

L'anno della vittoria (1985)

Amore di confine (1986)

Arboreto salvatico (1991)

Le stagioni di Giacomo (1995)

Sentieri sotto la neve (1998)

Inverni lontani (1999)

Tra due guerre e altre storie (2000)

L'ultima partita a carte (2002)

Stagioni (2006)

意大利作家马里奥-里戈尼-斯特恩（Mario Rigoni Stern）与他的同胞普里莫-列维（Primo Levi）一样，都是备受推崇的畅销回忆录作者，他在回忆录中讲述了自己在第二次世界大战期间的悲惨经历。但两人的写作视角截然不同。列维是意大利犹太人，在奥斯威辛集中营幸存下来，他在《如果这是一个人》（1947 年）一书中讲述了自己在奥斯威辛集中营和艰辛回国期间的苦难经历。起初，里戈尼为法西斯国家服务。1942-43 年冬季战役期间，意大利人在苏联境内的顿河上战败和撤退，他当时是墨索里尼军队的一名中士，指挥着一个排。

他的回忆录《雪中中士》（1953 年）描述了他如何成功带领 70 名幸存者徒步从乌克兰进入白俄返回意大利。这部作品在出版后的第二年就为他赢得了维亚雷焦（Viareggio）最佳处女作奖，在随后的 60 年里，这部作品的销量超过 100 万册，并被翻译到世界各地；1954 年首次以英文出版。他说，写这本书并不是为了充当英雄，而是为了向他的战友和为他们提供庇护的普通俄罗斯人致敬。和列维一样，他觉得 "只有把它写成文字，才能使自己免于疯狂"。

里戈尼出生于意大利东北部维琴察市上方高原上的一个小镇--亚戈，1938 年成为奥斯塔高山军事学院的一名学员，随后进入高山军团，成为一名中士，被派往东部前线，他生动地记录了这段经历。1943 年 9 月意大利与盟军停战以及随后的内战结束后，他拒绝继续在墨索里尼的傀儡共和国萨洛的军队中服役，被关押在德国战俘营。战争结束后，他回到了亚戈，并在那里度过了余生。里戈尼从未想过要以作家为生，他接受了当地议会的工作，并一直工作到 1970 年。

1953 年，他将自己第一本书的手稿寄给了在埃诺迪出版社工作的作家埃利奥-维托里尼，书名是意大利语《Il Sergente Nella Neve》。维托里尼回复说"我们会出版你的书 虽然我不认为你有当作家的天分"事实证明他错了。除了处女作获得巨大成功外，里戈尼还出版了十几部长篇小说和短篇小说集，主题都是他最感兴趣的战争和大自然。

他的第二部作品是 1962 年由 Einaudi 出版的《野鸡之林》，与他后来的许多作品一样，这本书讲述的是他居住的山区的人和动物。其他作品的书名如《人、树林和蜜蜂》或《动物之书》，都体现了他对乡村的关注。他还写了许多其他战争回忆录，其中有他自己的经历，也有其他人的经历。

继《雪地里的中士》之后，他最令人钦佩的作品或许是《通勒的故事》（1978 年），这本书讲述的是 19 世纪末至第一次世界大战开始期间一位山区农民走私者的故事。Tonle 是一个普通的牧羊人，他无法避免地被卷入新世纪战争前的外部事件中。里戈尼生动地描述了这个世界，在这个世界里，没有人拥有独特的国籍，公民们不得不努力维护自己的身份。

里戈尼的邻居中就有电影导演埃尔马诺-奥尔米（Ermanno Olmi），他与里戈尼的初次见面是在 20 世纪 60 年代，当时奥尔米正在策划拍摄一部关于 "中士 "的电影。这部电影没有拍成，但奥尔米很快就放弃了米兰，在亚戈建起了自己的家。在那里，他与里戈尼和意大利电视顾问图利奥-凯齐奇（Tullio Kezich）共同创作了一部电视电影《I Recuperanti》（1969 年，《清道夫》），讲述的是一名参加过俄罗斯战役的年轻退伍军人在寻找工作时，发现了一份帮助一位半疯的 80 岁老人挖掘埋在山里的一战未爆炸炸弹的工作。

直到 80 多岁，里戈尼才有幸看到《雪地中士》在舞台和电视上重现，而这一切都要归功于富有进取心的演员兼作家马尔科-保利尼，他是一位专门从事辛辣社会题材独角戏演出的专家。这部作品最初在米兰的 Piccolo 剧院上演，2007 年在维琴察附近的一个废弃采石场为广大观众进行了精彩的拍摄。

在意大利仅存的全国性独立电视频道 TV7 上播放了两小时的节目，中间没有任何插播广告，赢得了超过 500 万的观众。

里戈尼的妻子安娜和三个儿子健在。

- 马里奥-里戈诺-斯特恩，军人、作家，生于 1921 年 12 月 23 日，卒于 2008 年 6 月 16 日

......不支持《卫报》是有充分理由的。

Mario Rigoni Stern

Italian author whose wartime memoir was a bestseller

John Francis Lane

Fri 22 Aug 2008 00.01 BST

Like his compatriot Primo Levi, the Italian writer Mario Rigoni Stern, who has died aged 86, was the author of a much-admired bestselling memoir about his grim experiences during the second world war. But the two men wrote from utterly contrasting perspectives. Levi, an Italian Jew, survived Auschwitz, recounting his sufferings there and on his arduous return home in If This Is a Man (1947). At first, Rigoni served the fascist state. He was a sergeant commanding a platoon in Mussolini's army on the river Don in the Soviet Union during the last catastrophic period of defeat and retreat of the Italians during the winter campaign of 1942-43.

His memoir of those dramatic last days, The Sergeant in the Snow (1953), described how he succeeded in leading 70 survivors on foot from the Ukraine into white Russia and back to Italy. Over the following 60 years, this work, which was to win him the Viareggio prize for best debut the year after its publication, would sell more than a million copies and be translated round the world; it was first published in English in 1954. It was not written, he said, to claim a role as a hero, but as a tribute to his fellow soldiers and the ordinary Russians who gave them shelter. Like Levi he felt that "only by putting it down in print can I save myself from madness".

Born in Asiago, a town on the plateau above the city of Vicenza in north-east Italy, Rigoni became a cadet at the military alpine academy at Aosta in 1938, then enrolled in the alpine corps, with whom he became a sergeant posted to the eastern front, the episode he documented so vividly. After the Italian armistice with the allies of September 1943 and the subsequent civil war, he refused to continue serving in the army of Mussolini's puppet-republic of Salò and was interned in a German prison camp. At the end of the war, he returned to Asiago, where he would live for the rest of his life. Rigoni never expected to make a living as a writer, and accepted a job with his local council, where he continued to work until 1970.

In 1953 he had sent the manuscript of his first book, called, in Italian, Il Sergente Nella Neve, to the writer Elio Vittorini, who worked for the Einaudi publishing house. Vittorini replied: "We'll publish your book, though I don't think you have a vocation as a writer." He was proved wrong. In addition to the enormous success of his debut, Rigoni was to publish a dozen novels and collections of short stories on the themes which most interested him - war and nature - and he went on to win many more of Italy's leading literary prizes.

His second book, published by Einaudi in 1962, was The Wood of Wild Cockerels which, like many of his subsequent works, was about the people and animals in the mountains where he lived. Other books had titles like Men, Woods and Bees or Book of Animals, which give a flavour of their rural concerns. He also wrote many other war memoirs, of his own experiences and those of others.

Perhaps his most admired book after The Sergeant in the Snow was The Story of Tonle (1978), about a peasant-smuggler of the mountains, who lived between the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the first world war. Tonle was a simple shepherd who couldn't avoid getting caught up in the outside events of the new century leading up to the war. Rigoni described vividly this world where no one had a distinctive nationality and citizens were obliged to struggle to preserve their identity.

Among Rigoni's neighbours was film director Ermanno Olmi, who first met him in the 1960s when nursing a project to make a film of The Sergeant. The film was never made, but Olmi was soon to abandon Milan and build his own home in Asiago where, with Rigoni and Italian television consultant Tullio Kezich, he would later write a film for television, I Recuperanti (1969, The Scavengers) about a young veteran of the Russian campaign looking for a job who finds one helping a half-crazy 80-year-old to dig up unexploded first world war bombs buried in the mountains.

Only in his 80s was Rigoni to enjoy the satisfaction of seeing The Sergeant in the Snow recreated on both stage and television by the enterprising actor-author Marco Paolini, a specialist in one-man shows dedicated to pungent social subjects. The production, first staged at Milan's Piccolo theatre, was filmed spectacularly in 2007 before a vast audience in a disused quarry near Vicenza, from which Palladio had once extracted the materials to build his villas.

The resulting two-hour transmission was shown on the only remaining nationwide independent Italian television channel, TV7, without any commercial breaks, winning an audience which exceeded 5 million.

Rigoni is survived by his wife Anna and their three sons.

· Mario Rigono Stern, soldier and writer, born December 23 1921; died June 16 2008

… there is a good reason why not to support the Guardian.