Studia Litterarum Studia Litterarum 2500-4247 IWL RAS https://doi.org/10.22455/2500-4247-2026-11-3-58-79 Research Article Articles The Comic and the Absurd in Achille Campanile’s Novel In August I Don’t Want to Know My Wife Gurenkova Yulia V. red@studlit.ru September 25, 2026 2026 August 28, 2024 Achille Campanile is an Italian comic writer whose work has not been sufficiently studied in Russian and foreign literary criticism. Campanile is a multifaceted intellectual who made a great contribution to the formation of the Italian humorous consciousness, an amazing inventor of absurd and funny situations based on paradox, ambiguity, and wordplay. The writer was truly highly praised by critics for the combination of the comic and the absurd in his works. The comic in Campanile’s work In August I don’t want to know my wife, like many classics of this genre, is based on contradiction (non-compliance with the norm or ideal), violation of cause-and-effect relationships, reversal of situations, the effect of opposition and the effect of surprise. Sometimes the author seeks to confuse and puzzle the reader by inventing something like a puzzle — semantic or linguistic. Puns and paradoxes are the main components of Campanile’s humor. The characters often make stupid mistakes, are absent-minded and inconsistent in their actions. The novel is full of absurd statements, meaningless dialogues, paradoxes and alogicalities. Paradoxicality is often brought to the point of absurdity. In Campanile’s work, a picture of the apotheosis of all-conquering absurdity is created from a web of absurdities built on the denial of rational and logical laws. The novel reflects echoes of the avant-garde ideas of the Futurists, whom Campanile imitated at the beginning of his creative activity — the rejection of the dictates of logic and linear discourse, the rupture of connections (at the level of words and meaning), the invention of words, the abolition of poetic sorrow and boredom, onomatopoeic description, puns. Achille Campanile comic techniques absurdity Italian literature of the 20th century Copyright © 2026, IWL RAS 2026 1 Borbot’ko, L.A. “Absurd v teatre, teatr absurda, absurd zhizni” [“Absurd in Theatre, Theatre of the Absurd, Absurd of Life”]. Nekanonicheskaia estetika. Vyp. V: Vse nelepitsy mira: absurd v literature i iskusstve: sbornik statei [Non-Canonical Aesthetics. Issue V: All the Nonsense of the World: Absurdity in Literature and Art: Collection of Articles]. St. Petersburg, Tver’, Izdatel’stvo Mariny Batasovoi Publ., 2019, pp. 19–26. 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