Re-writing Dante after Freud and the Shoah: Giorgio Pressburger's Nel regno oscuro

In Giorgio Pressburger’s novel Nel regno oscuro (‘In/to the dark realm’), Dante’s descent to hell metamorphoses into a phantasmagoric voyage to the most intimate and obscure dimensions of the human psyche as well as a journey through the tragic events of history in the twentieth century – and the Shoah in particular. The combination of the personal, the collective, and even the universal is one of the most interesting aspects Pressburger takes from Dante’s poem. This chapter is interested in exploring how both Dante’s Divine Comedy and Pressburger’s Nel regno oscuro place personal and collective suffering at the centre of their own narratives and stage writing as a political, ethical, and possibly ‘salvific’ way to deal with this dual suffering, even as they differ in their concepts of identity and selfhood on the one hand and in their models of history on the other.