A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W Y Z
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Life and Works: Italo Calvino (October 15, 1923 – September 19, 1985), was an Italian journalist and writer of short stories and novels, an experimental writer whose imaginative fabulations made him one of the most important Italian fiction writers of the 20th century. He blended fantasy, fable, and comedy in an effort to illuminate modern life, and in the process redefined the literary forms. His best known works include the Our Ancestors trilogy (1952-1959), the Cosmicomics collection of short stories (1965), and the novels Invisible Cities (1972) and If on a winter's night a traveler (1979). Although loneliness is an essential condition in his writings, he imbues his stories with passion and celebrates the human capacity for love and imagination. During the 1940s, he was associated with Italian neo-realist writers, such as Elio Vittorini, Cesare Pavese, and Natalia Levi Ginzburg. During the 1950s, however, Calvino turned to fantasy and allegory. His style defies easy classification; much of his writing has an air of light fantasy reminiscent of fairy tales (Our Ancestors, Cosmicomics), but sometimes his writing is more "realistic" and in the scenic mode of observation (Difficult Loves, for example). Some of his writing has been called "postmodern", reflecting on literature and the act of reading, while some has been labeled "magical realist", others fables, others simply "modern". Italo Calvino was born in Cuba in 1923. His father, Mario, a botanist, was 48 when Calvino was born; his mother, formerly Eva Mameli, also a botanist, was 37. Shortly after his birth, his family returned to their native Italy. They raised Calvino on their farm in San Remo, and Mario autorbusght at the nearby University of Turin. The lush vegetation of the San Remo area and his extensive knowledge of local flora are reflected in many of Calvino's writings. He stayed in Sanremo, on the Italian Riviera, and became a member of the Avanguardisti (a fascist youth organisation of which membership was practically compulsory) with whom he took part in the occupation of the French Riviera. He suffered some religious troubles, his relatives being openly atheist in a largely Catholic country, and was sent to attend a Waldensian private school. He met Eugenio Scalfari (later a politician and the founder of the major Italian newspaper La Repubblica), with whom he would remain a close friend. After preparatory school, Calvino enrolled in the Faculty of Science at the University of Turin. However, soon after his matriculation, Calvino received orders to join the Italian Army. He promptly fled to the hills and joined the resistance. During the two years that Germany occupied Italy (1943-1945) Calvino lived as a partisan in the woods of the Alpi Maritime region fighting both German and Italian fascists. At the war's end in 1945, Calvino joined the Communist Party. He also returned to the university; however, this time he enrolled in the Faculty of Letters. Calvino graduated from Turin's university in 1947 with a thesis on Joseph Conrad and started working with the official Communist paper L'Unità; he also had a short relationship with the Einaudi publishing house, which put him in contact with Norberto Bobbio, Natalia Ginzburg, Cesare Pavese and Elio Vittorini. With Vittorini he wrote for the weekly Il Politecnico (a cultural magazine associated with the university). He then left Einaudi to work mainly with L'Unità and the newborn communist weekly political magazine Rinascita. Following in the footsteps of Cesare Pavese, Calvino signed up with the Turin-based publishers Einaudi. Calvino's first novel, The Path to the Nest of Spiders (1947) depicted resistance movement, seen through the eyes of a young boy and in Neorealistic manner. In 1951, presumably in order to advance in the communist party, he visited the Soviet Union. The reports and correspondence he produced from this visit were later collected and earned him literary prizes. In The Cloven Viscount (1952) Calvino depicts a soldier halved by a cannonball during a crusade. His two halves return to play opposing roles in his native village. The Nonexistent Knight (1959) details the adventures of a suit of armor occupied by the will of a knight who is otherwise incorporeal. And The Baron in the Trees (1957) in which an 18th-century baron's son, rebelling against the authority of his father, climbs a tree and ends up spending his life in various treetops.. All three works, set in remote times, rely on fantasy, fable, and comedy to illuminate modern life. By the middle of the 1950s Calvino spent most of his time in Rome, the literary as well as political hub of Italian life. He resigned from the Communist Party, tired of writing tracts for Communist periodicals and disillusioned by the spread of dogmatic Stalinism and the savage crushing of the Hungarian revolt of 1956. As the years passed, Calvino became increasingly skeptical of politics. From 1955 to 1958 he had an affair with the actress Elsa de' Giorgi, an older and married woman. Calvino wrote hundreds of love letters to her, and excerpts were published by Corriere della Sera in 2004, causing some controversy. Publication of Italian Folktales in 1956 did much to ensure Calvino's reputation as a major literary figure. Calvino compiled a complete and authoritative collection of 200 folk tales from all regions and dialects of Italy. In 1957, disillusioned by the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary, Calvino left the Italian Communist party, and his letter of resignation (soon famous) was published in L'Unità. He found new outlets for his periodic writings in the magazines Passato e Presente and Italia Domani. Together with Vittorini he became a co-editor of Il Menabò di letteratura, a position that he held for many years. Calvino visited New York first time in 1959 and came to regard it as "my city". His American Diary 1959-60 consisted of letters written to colleagues. Calvino was amazed of the size of the fridges and how ignorant Americans were of Italian writing. In the early 1960s he moved to Paris. Calvino met the Argentinian translator Esther Judith Singer (Chichita) in 1962 and married her in 1964 in Havana, during a trip in which he visited his birthplace and met Ernesto Che Guevara. Back in Italy, and once again working for Einaudi, he started publishing some of his Cosmicomics in Il Caffè, a literary magazine. The Watcher, a collection of three short stories, was published in 1963. In Marcovaldo (1963), a collection of fables, Calvino satirized the modern, destructive urban way of living. Marcovaldo is a Chaplinisque character, an ordinary working man and a father, who desperately longs for beauty and sinks in his daydreams whenever he can. When everybody leaves the city in August, he enjoys the empty streets. His peace is interrupted by a television group - it wants to interview the only person who is not on holiday. In his writing Calvino continued to "search for new forms to suit realities ignored by most writers." In the comic strip he found the inspiration for both t-zero (1967) and Cosmicomics (1968). In these pieces, which resemble science fiction, a blob-like being named Qfwfq narrates the astronomical origins of the cosmos as well as the development of the species over millenia. The 1970s saw the publication of Invisible Cities (1972), a surreal fantasy in which Marco Polo invents dream-cities to amuse Kubla Khan - a city on stilts, a city made of waterpipes, a spiderweb city, a city that cannot be forgotten and so on; The Castle of Crossed Destinies (1973), in which Calvino found his source of inspiration in two ancient packs of tarot cards and written in a form of open text that allows for a similar variety of possible readings; and If on a winter's night a traveler (1979). In this last work consists the story alternates the opening chapters of 10 different novels, and opens with a man discovering that the copy of the novel he has recently purchased is defective, a Polish novel having been bound within its pages. When he returns to the bookshop he meets a young woman, and they find out that their texts are 10 exerpts that parody the genres of conteporary fiction. The book includes instalments of a discourse on the experience of reading. Responsible for the 10 opening chapters might be a literary translator, whose intrigues the fantastical narrative concerns. Calvino seems to consider reading over writing. Calvino returned to Rome in 1980. He and his family also enjoyed a country house at Pinetta Rocca Mare near the Riviera. In 1983 Mr. Palomar was completed. Calvino turned this novel into a dramatization of a mathematical formula categorizing the actions of the title character, named for the famous observatory, at a seaside resort. The book is at once a highly comic and abstract allegory. During these years Calvino visited the United States again. In 1975 he became an honorary member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters; in 1980 Italian Folktales was included on the American Library Association's Notable Booklist; in 1981 he was awarded the prestigious French Légion d'Honneur and in 1984 he was awarded an honorary degree by Mount Holyoke College. During the summer of 1985, Calvino prepared some notes for a series of lectures to be delivered at Harvard University in the fall. However, on 6 September, he was admitted to the ancient hospital of Santa Maria della Scala in Siena, where he died during the night between the 18 and 19 September of a cerebral hemorrhage. His lecture notes were published posthumously as Six Memos for the Next Millennium in 1988. See his autobiographical essays in The Road to San Giovanni (tr. 1993), and other autobiographical writings in Hermit in Paris (tr. 2003). |
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