A century since the March on Rome, the “return” of Italy’s fascist past has never seemed closer. This month, the Senate elected as its new president Ignazio La Russa, cofounder of the post-fascist Fratelli d’Italia party, just weeks after he declared that “we are all heirs of the Duce.”

In such a context, bringing out a novel about Benito Mussolini — as Antonio Scurati has with his M. trilogy — is a huge responsibility. More than any historical writing, Scurati’s work has become a bestseller, translated into several languages. The responsibility is even greater because Scurati seeks to “bring fascism down to earth, giving real knowledge of it as only literature knows how, when it delves into the details of material life.” M. is thus a “documentary novel”; it deliberately plays on the blurred boundary between history and fiction, on the “intertwining” of the two genres in an era which, Scurati tells us, invites “cooperation between the rigor of historical scholarship and the art of fictional storytelling.”

Does historical writing not imitate fiction, when it fills in the blanks with intelligent narrative, with imagination, with sympathy? Does grasping the past “as it really was” not demand the historian’s ability to immerse himself in other worlds, to make them his own and pass them on to others? Professional historians often prove incapable of speaking to a wider audience, and clumsy when trying to use literary art, which is even more needed with biography or collective biography. From this point of view, Scurati’s three M. books are a masterpiece.