Elio Vittorini

Elio Vittorini (born July 23, 1908 in Syracuse ; † February 12, 1966 in Milan ) was an Italian writer , publicist and translator , one of the most important representatives of literary neorealism .

Life

Born in 1908 in Syracuse, Sicily, Elio Vittorini followed his father in his childhood, who traveled all over Sicily as a railroad worker . After elementary school he attended a trade school without showing any interest in it, until he finally left Sicily in 1924 after trying to break away. For a while he worked as an accountant in a construction company in Friuli Venezia Giulia . In 1930 he moved to Florence , where he found a job as a proofreader for the newspaper La Nazione .

Meanwhile he began to write articles and short stories that he sent to Curzio Malaparte and with his help published in the journal Conquista dello Stato . In June 1927 he succeeded in publishing Ritratto di re Gianpiero , his first important narrative poem, in La fiera letteraria . On September 10, 1927 he married Rosa Quasimodo, a sister of the poet Salvatore Quasimodo , with whom he had two sons (Giusto, 1928–1955, and Demetrio, * 1934). In 1929 he began working on the magazine Solaria ; and in L'Italia letteraria , in his article Scarico di coscienza , he lamented the provincialism of Italian literature .

In 1931, in the editions of Solaria, his first book, a collection of short stories entitled Piccola borghesia , came out, which was reprinted by Mondadori in 1953 . From 1933 to 1934 - also in Solaria - his novel Il garofano rosso was published in continuation , which, due to the fascist censorship, could only be published in full and as a monograph by Mondadori in 1948.

Due to lead poisoning , Vittorini had to give up his job as a proofreader in 1934 and from then on lived exclusively from his literary translations from English ( William Faulkner , Edgar Allan Poe , David Herbert Lawrence and others) and from his journalistic activities.

When the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936 , he interrupted work on his novel Erica ei suoi fratelli and, with his friends Romano Bilenchi and Vasco Pratolini , planned to participate in the war in support of the Republican opponents of Franco . In an article in Bargello magazine , for which he had been writing since 1932, he, as a member of the left-wing intellectual wing of the Italian fascists, openly urged his party to support the republican forces, which led to his exclusion from the PNF ( Partito Nazionale Fascista ) .

In the same year he published with Parenti Nei Morlacchi. Viaggio in Sardegna , which had won the prize advertised by Infanzia magazine and which was re-published by Mondadori in 1952 under the title Sardegna come un'infanzia . Between 1938 and 1939, Letteratura published his novel Conversazione in Sicilia , which was published as a volume in 1941, first by Parenti and then by Bompiani .

In 1939 he was commissioned by the Milan Bompiani publishing house to direct the “La Corona” series and, in collaboration with Cesare Pavese, to publish an anthology of American writers entitled Americana . This could only appear in 1942 because of the fascist censorship; complete, d. H. in fact, it was not published until 1968, with all of the editor's withheld comments. Vittorini also moved to Milan in 1939 for personal reasons , as he separated from his wife Rosa at the same time and began a life together with Ginetta, his second partner.

As a left-fascist author, Joseph Goebbels invited him to take part in the " European poets ' meeting" organized by the Nazi German cultural propaganda , in which he took part in Weimar in 1941 and again in October 1942 . The posthumous depictions of life nevertheless state that he had already participated in the Resistancea in 1942 and that he had already joined the Communist Party ( PCI ) underground at that time . In 1945 he officially appeared as a party member and for a time headed the Milan edition of the party organ L'Unità . He also founded and directed Il Politecnico , a magazine that until 1947 dealt with contemporary culture and the mutual relationships between literature and politics. In 1945 he also published his resistance novel Uomini e no with Bompiani . In 1947 the same publisher published Il Sempione strizza l'occhio al Fréjus and in 1949 Le donne di Messina , two further novels. The latter appeared in a fundamental revision by the author in 1964. The short novel La garibaldina came out in 1950 in installments in the Florentine magazine Il Ponte .

In 1951 Einaudi-Verlag transferred the management of the "I Gettoni" series to him, in which he mainly included the works of young authors ( Italo Calvino , Beppe Fenoglio and others), while Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's Il Gattopardo was an outdated historical novel without socio-critical relevance disqualified and rejected him for this reason. In the same year, in an article in the daily La Stampa , he justified his growing dissent with the PCI , which he shared with numerous intellectuals during these years ( Le vie degli ex comunisti ).

Between 1952 and 1955 he completed Erica e si suoi fratelli , which Bompiani published in 1956. He also worked on his last novel Le città del mondo , which he no longer completed because he found it too expressive and aesthetic, which did not correspond to his idiosyncratic understanding of modern literature. The discarded work was only published by Einaudi after his death in 1969. Another expression of his poetological self - image, which is in crisis, is his attempt to deal with the bloodily suppressed uprising in Hungary (1956) in an unpublished drama. Since he was no longer able to live up to his own postulate of a literature that was always innovative and more committed to truth than to aesthetics, he gave up literary writing entirely in the last years of his life.

In 1957 he published a collection of his time-critical writings as Diario in pubblico . In 1959 he founded the Einaudi magazine Il Menabò , which he directed together with Italo Calvino. In 1960 he took over the “La Medusa” series (later “Nuovi scrittori stranieri”) at Mondadori Verlag. In the same year he wrote a declaration of protest against war and torture in Algeria and ran for the Sicilian regional elections on the List of Socialists ( PSI ). From 1962, Vittorini and Francesco Leonetti tried in vain to found an international intellectual magazine under the name Gulliver . At the party congress of the Partito Radicale in 1963, Vittorini became presidente , d. H. protocol party chairman, elected.

Seriously ill since 1963, Vittorini was most recently editor of the “Nuovo Politecnico” series for Einaudi and died on February 12, 1966 in his apartment in Milan. His reflections and thoughts on literature were compiled by D. Isella in the posthumously published volume Le due tensioni (1967).

Works

• Ritratto di re Gianpiero (1927)
• Piccola borghesia (1931)
• Il garofano rosso (1933/1934; Eng . The red carnation , 1951)
• Nei Morlacchi. Viaggio in Sardegna (1936; new as Sardegna come un'infanzia , 1952; German Sardinia , 1964; Sardinia, a country of childhood , 1986)
• Conversazione in Sicilia (1938/1939; German tears in wine , 1943; Conversation in Sicily , 1948)
• Americana (1941/1942, anthology; new 1968)
• Uomini e no (1945; Eng. The man N2 , 1946; Still people , 1963; The dead know answer , 1973)
• Il Sempione strizza l'occhio al Frejus (1947; In the shadow of the elephant , 1949)
• Le donne di Messina (1949; new 1964; German The women of Messina , 1965)
• La garibaldina (1950; German The Garibaldina , 1960)
• Erica ei suoi fratelli (1956; Eng.Erica and her siblings , 1984)
• Diario in pubblico (1957; German open diary 1929 to 1959 , 1959)
• Le due tensioni (1967)
• Le città del mondo (1969)

Film adaptations (selection)

• 1963: The Corsican son ( Jusqu'au bout du monde )
• 1999: Sicilia!
• 2000: workers, farmers ( Operai, contadini )

Web links

• Literature by and about Elio Vittorini in the catalog of the German National Library
• Elio Vittorini in the Internet Movie Database (English)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Bruno Vespa: Italiani Volta Gabbana. Dalla prima guerra mondiale alla Terza Repubblica semper sul carro dei vincitori. Mondadori (TV history series RaiEri ), Rome 2014, ISBN 978-8-804-64589-4 , p. 64.
2. ↑ Lorenza Ponzone: Il Partito radicale nella politica italiana, 1962–1989. Schena, Fasano (Brindisi) 1993, p. 43.