Italo Calvino |
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Collection title
Effetto ieri
First broadcast date
04/22/2009
Abstract
In the company of journalist Stefano Fratini, the program hosts talk about the personality of great italian writer Italo Calvino (1923-1985). They tell some anecdotes about his life, talking in particular about the origin of his family. They evoke his contribution to the war, as a member of partisan resistance. His writtings are also reminded, among which his early works of literature and songs written for the cultural circle "Cantacronache", founded by a group of intellectuals from Turin at the end of the 1950s.
B/W photographs related to the life and the career of Italo Calvino.
Broadcaster
RAI - RAI Due
Audiovisual form
Magazine
Primary theme
Art, Culture and Knowledge
Credits / Cast
- Pafumi Leyla - Journalist
- Graziano Luca Nino - Journalist
Original language
Italian
Additional information
B/W stock photos of Italo Calvino.
Context
Italo Calvino
Stéphane Mourlane
Italo Calvino is one of the most powerful and most original authors in Italian literature, a key member in the post-Fascist period of creativity. Born in Cuba in 1923, he grew up in San Remo on the Ligurian coast where his had parents moved in 1925. His agronomy studies were interrupted by the war. In 1943, when Mussolini created the Italian Social Republic in northern Italy, Calvino joined the Resistance. He wore the red scarf as part of the Garibaldi brigade, linked to the Communist Party. This experience fed into his first books (The Path to the Nest of Spiders 1947 and The Crow Comes Last 1949) written in a neo-realist style zhich did not, however, lose sight of the imaginary dimension which he developed later in his career. At the same time he began studying literature at the University of Turin, where he wrote a thesis on Joseph Conrad. Through his membership of the Communist Party, the second largest political party in post-war Italy after the Christian Democrats, he met Cesare Pavese, who became a major influence on him.
It was with another great literary figure of the Italian Communist left, Elio Vittorini, that he worked on the magazine Il Politecnico, edited by Einaudi. With Pavese, Calvino became which he was, with Pavese, an influential contributor. The leaders of the Communist Party however considered the magazine was rebellious and had it stopped. Calvino, who was in the Soviet Union like many of his fellow travellers, does not lessen his collaboration with the Communist press by publishing articles in the daily L'Unità and the weekly Rinascita. Following the invasion of Budapest by the Soviet army in 1956 he left the Communist Party like many intellectuals in Western Europe. In 1959 he founded the literary review Il Menabo with Elio Vittorini.
His work then has a double face: on the one hand focussed on everyday reality ((Macovaldo et La journée d’un scrutateur en 1963) and on the other hand exploring the fable where, as in the trilogy Our Ancestors (Le Vicomte pourfendu en 1952, Le Baron perché en 1957 et le Chevalier inexistant en 1959), the irnoy reflects the author's social pre-occupations. In 1967 he moved to Paris where he mixed with members of the Oulipo around Raymond Queneau, gave a new tonality to his writing. He was influenced by this group who, influenced by postmodernism, made of formalism a demand to the rule of thumb power. Calvino relied on combinatorial analysis and techniques of permutation in the writing of several books (Les villes invisibles en 1972, Le château des destins croisés en 1973 ou encore Si par un mois d’hiver un voyageur en 1979).
At the same time as this career as a succesful writer, Calvino pursued a critical reflection on literature through articles published in many magazines or through essays (notably La machine litterature in 1984). He died suddenly at Sienna of a brain hemorrage in September 1987, leaving behind a body of work as significant as it was varied.
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Bibliography:
Baranelli Luca, Bibliografia di Italo Calvino, Pisa, Scuola normale superiore, 2008, 294 p.
Ferroni Giulio, Letteratura italiana contemporanea. 1945-2007, Milano, Mondadori Università, 2007, 376 p.
Livi François, La littérature italienne contemporaine, Paris, PUF, 1995, 127 p.
Perrella Silvio, Calvino, Roma, Laterza, 1999, 235 p.
Ribatti Domenico, Italo Calvino e l’Einaudi, Bari, Stilo, 128 p.
