Alberto Savinio

Alberto Savinio , actually Andrea Di Chirico or in another spelling Andrea de Chirico (born August 25, 1891 in Athens , † May 5, 1952 in Rome ), was an Italian writer , painter and composer.

Life

Savinio was the son of Emma Cervetto and Baron Evaristo Di Chirico and the brother of the painter Giorgio Di Chirico (1888–1978).

He initially received training as a pianist at the conservatory in his hometown .

After the father's death in 1905, the family moved to Munich , where they probably arrived in 1906 after stays in Venice and Milan . There he studied for a short time with Max Reger , and also studied the writings of the philosophers Otto Weininger , Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche . After failure with his compositions , he went to Paris in 1910 , where he became acquainted with the avant-gardists of the time: Pablo Picasso , Blaise Cendrars , Francis Picabia , Jean Cocteau , Max Jacob and Apollinaire . For the surrealist part of his literary work, represented for example in human vegetables for dessert (German 1980), these encounters may have been significant.

In early 1914 he appeared under the pseudonym "Alberto Savinio"; the publication of Les chants de la mi-mort in issue 3 (July / August 1914) of the magazine Les Soirées de Paris took place under this name.

In 1915 he returned to Italy with his brother Giorgio. First they stayed in Florence and had been in Ferrara since 1916 , where they had contact with the local group of artists around Filippo De Pisis and Carlo Carrà . After he had volunteered for the army in 1915 and initially served in a sanatorium, he was sent to the front in Thessaloniki in 1917 . After the end of the war he went to Rome, where he mainly published theoretical and narrative texts in magazines, including La Ronda . Savinio was one of the founders of the Teatro d'Arte in 1924 . In 1926 he married Maria Morino. From the marriage the daughter Angelica was born in 1928 and the son Ruggero in 1934.

In the year of their wedding they moved to Paris, where Savinio devoted himself more to painting . In 1933 he published in Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution , edition 5, Achille énamouré mêlé à l'Evergète . This text was first published in Italian translation under the title Achille innamorato in Florence in 1938 in the anthology of the same name . In 1933 Savinio returned to Italy for good, where he had mainly worked for La Stampa since 1934 . From 1935 he lived in Rome. In 1936 his mother died. In 1943 he went into hiding.

After the war he mainly worked for the Corriere della sera and the Corriere d'informazione . He worked as a dramaturge and opera director , he also wrote operas and dramas .

Works (selection)

• Dico a te, Clio (1940)
• L'infanzia di Nivasio Dolcemare (1941), German childhood of Nivasio Dolcemare (Frankfurt a. M. 1996)
• Narrate, uomini, la vostra storia (1942)
• Casa "la vita" (1943)
• Ascolto il tuo cuore, città (1944), German city, I listen to your heart (Frankfurt a. M. 1993)
• Variety dell'Europa (1945)
• Tutta la vita (1945), German The Whole Life (Frankfurt a. M. 1991)
• Orto di ortaggi umani , German human vegetables for dessert (Munich 1980)
• Nuova enciclopedia (1977), German New Encyclopedia (Frankfurt a. M. 1983), Mein private Lexikon , Frankfurt am Main: Eichborn 2005, Die Andere Bibliothek series , ISBN 978-3-8218-4551-7 .

In the new edition from 1948, Tutta la vita is supplemented by the Racconti inediti collection and the story La famiglia Mastinu (ovvero Morte ammazza Noia) . The 1969 edition also contains the Achille innamorato collection (Gradus ad Parnassum) and the story L'angolino .

literature

• Andrea Grewe: Melancholie der Moderne, studies on the poetics of Alberto Savinio , Frankfurt am Main (Klostermann), 2001 (= Analecta Romanica, vol. 64; also habilitation thesis University of Münster 1996).
• Grewe, Andrea (Ed.): Savinio European , Erich Schmidt Verlag, Berlin 2005, ISBN 978-3-503-07937-7
• Davide Bellini: Le porte socchiuse dell'inconscio. Su una fonte freudiana di Savinio , "Strumenti Critici", XXVII, 2, maggio 2012, pp. 263-280. ISBN 978-88-15-23517-6

Web links

• Literature by and about Alberto Savinio in the catalog of the German National Library