The Revolutionist

In the story a Magyar communist revolutionist travels by train through Italy visiting art galleries. He admires Giotto, Masaccio, and Piero della Francesca, but not Mantegna. He buys reproductions of the pieces he likes, which he wraps and stows carefully. When he reports to a second character, who acts as the story's narrator, the two take a train to Romagna. The narrator then sends the young man on to Milan from where he is to cross to safety across the Alps into Switzerland via Aosta. The narrator provides him with addresses for contacts in Milan and tells him about the Montegnas to be seen there—which the young Communist again explains he dislikes. The story ends with the narrator saying: "The last I heard of him the Swiss had him in a jail near Sion." ==Publication history and background==

in Milan, 1918 The piece was probably written in 1923 or 1924, when Hemingway lived in Paris with his first wife Hadley Richardson. A year earlier all of his manuscripts were lost when Hadley packed them in a suitcase that was stolen. Acting on Ezra Pound's advice that he had lost no more than the time it took to write the pieces, Hemingway either recreated them or wrote new vignettes and stories. "The Revolutionist" was included as a vignette (Chapter 11) in the 1924 Paris edition of in our time published by Bill Bird's Three Mountain's Press. Of the 18 vignettes contained in the volume, only two were rewritten as short stories for the American edition, published in 1925 by Boni & Liveright. "The Revolutionist" was one; the other was "A Very Short Story". It has autobiographical allusions to Milan. In 1918, at age 19 Hemingway recuperated for six months at a hospital in Milan after suffering a mortar hit on the Italian front. There, Hemingway met and fell in love with Red Cross nurse Agnes von Kurowsky. However, after Hemingway went home, he was devastated when Kurowsky broke off the romance in a letter, telling him of her engagement to an Italian officer. The background of "The Revolutionist" is based on the 1919 Hungarian White Terror, caused when Communist iconoclasm resulted in a bloody and violent backlash leading to a period of severe repression, from which the young Magyar revolutionist flees. ==Style and themes==

At barely over a page long, (no more than 400 words The story has attracted little attention from literary critics and much of that examines the allusions to Renaissance painters. Early biographers such as Carlos Baker dismissed the piece as a miniature, or a sketch. Aldous Huxley caused a minor literary dispute when he made derisive remarks about Hemingway's allusion to the "bitter nail holes" of Mantegna's Dead Christ in A Farewell to Arms; Hemingway shot back by saying that the characters the writer makes must genuinely be interested in the art, clearly explaining, "A writer who appreciates the seriousness of writing so little that he is anxious to make the reader see he is formally educated, cultured and well-bred is merely a pop-in-jay." Mentioning Mantegna twice in such a very short story signals it is an important point; critics think Hemingway almost certainly meant Mantegna's c. 1501 Dead Christ, which deviates greatly from Giotto and Masaccio and della Francesco in its use of perspective and realism. The picture depicts Christ in death as a very human figure with a robust physiognomy in the days before resurrection and ascension. Critic Kenneth Johnston says that for a Renaissance viewer the painting would have a much different effect than for a young man of the lost generation "who would see ... an acute reminder that life if painful and painfully short." Johnston disagrees. He believes the young man is a Hemingway archetype, a character whose idealism has been shattered, who has experienced the horrors of war, and who copes by ignoring or avoiding images and situations that remind him of his past. He has entered a state of "non-thinking". Hunt finds it significant that the young man keeps the reproductions of artists rejected by the Communist party well-wrapped in Avanti!, the Italian socialist newspaper. Hunt, furthermore, points out Milan is significant because in that city, where he was hospitalized after his wounding, Hemingway experienced his first romantic disappointment from Agnes von Kurowsky. ==References==