Mowgli dans les Dolomites. Représentations paysagère et ethnographique du front italien par Rudyard Kipling en 1917

Abstract

The British writer Rudyard Kipling left an extremely striking testimony of his visit to the Italian-Austrian front in May 1917. In the form of five articles of propaganda, published in English and American newspapers, the famous writer described the conditions of life and battle of Italian soldiers waging a ‘vertical’ war in the mountains. Indeed the writer-reporter, immersed in this strange mountainous landscape far away from his Indian homeland, combines the power of realistic writing, elements of natural history and zoological metaphors to describe the different protagonists in this war (the visual land scape), its smells (olfactory landscape) and its sounds (soundscape). Kipling also took the opportunity to build a history of representations of a fictitious Italianity.