CALVINO, Italo

Nationality: Italian (originally Cuban: immigrated to Italy, 1925). Born: Santiago de las Vegas, 15 October 1923. Education: Studied agronomy, 1941, and literature, 1945-47, University of Turin, graduated 1947. Military Service: Conscripted into Young Facists, 1940; Italian Resistance, 1943-45. Family: Married Esther Judith "Chichita" Singer in 1964; one daughter. Career: Member of editorial staff, Einaudi, Turin, 1947-48, and again beginning 1950; member of staff, L'Unita, 1948-50; co-editor, Il Menabó, Milan, 1959-66. Awards: Riccione prize, 1947; Premio de l'Unita prize, 1947; Saint-Vincent prize, 1952; Viareggio prize, 1957; Bagutta prize, 1959; Veillon prize, 1963; Feltrinelli prize, 1972; Austrian state prize for European literature, 1976; Nice Festival prize, 1982. Member: American Academy (honorary), 1975. Died: 20 September 1985.

Publications

Collection

Romanzi e Racconti, edited by Claudio Milanini. 1992.

Novels

Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno. 1947; as The Path to Nest of Spiders, 1956; printed with preface by author, 1964.

I nostri antenati (trilogy). 1960; as Our Ancestors, 1980.

Il visconte dimezzato. 1952; as The Cloven Viscount, published with The Non-Existent Knight, 1962.

Il barone rampante. 1957; as The Baron in the Trees, 1959.

Il cavaliere inesistente. 1959; as The Non-Existent Knight, published with The Cloven Viscount, 1962.

La giornata d'uno scrutatore. 1963.

Short Stories

Ultimo viene il corvo. 1949; as Adam, One Afternoon, and Other Stories, 1957.

Fiabe italiane: Raccolte della tradizione popolare durante gli ultimi centro anni e transcritte in lingua dai vari dialette. 1956; as Italian Fables, 1959; as Italian Folk Tales, 1975; as Italian Folktales, 1980.

I racconti. 1958.

Marcovaldo; ovvero, Le stagioni in cittá. 1963; as Marcovaldo; or, The Seasons in the City, 1983.

La nuvola di smog e La formica argentina. 1965.

Le cosmicomiche. 1965; as Cosmicomics, 1968.

Ti con zero. 1967; as T Zero, 1969; as Time and the Hunter,

1970.

Gli amori difficili. 1970; as Difficult Loves, 1984.

The Watcher and Other Stories. 1971.

Le cittá invisibili. 1972; as Invisible Cities, 1974.

Il castello dei destini incrociati. 1974; as The Castle of Crossed Destinies, 1977.

Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore. 1979; as If on a Winter's Night a Traveler, 1981.

Palomar. 1983; as Mr. Palomar, 1985.

Sotto il sole giaguaro. 1986; as Under the Jaguar Tree, 1988.

La Strada di San Giovanni. 1990; as The Road to San Giovanni, 1993.

Also author of The Crow Comes Last and L'entrata in guerra [The Entry into War].

Play

Un re in ascolto [The King Listens] (opera libretto), music by Luciano Berio. 1984.

Other

Una pietra sopra: Discorsi di letteratura e societá. 1980.

Collezione di sabbia: Emblemi bizzarri e inquietanti del nostro passato e del nostro futuro gli oggetti raccontano il mondo. 1984.

The Uses of Literature. 1985.

The Literature Machine. 1987.

Six Memos for the Next Millennium (lectures). 1988.

Perché leggere i classici (essays). 1992.

Editor, Poesie edite e inedite, by Cesare Pavese. 1962.

Editor, Vittorini: Progettazione e letteratura. 1968.

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Critical Studies:

Calvino: A Reappraisal and an Appreciation of the Trilogy by J. R. Woodhouse, 1968; Calvino, Writer and Critic by JoAnn Cannon, 1981; "Calvino" by Richard Andrews, in Writers and Society in Contemporary Italy, edited by Michael Caesar and Peter Hainsworth, 1984; Italo Calvino issue of The Review of Contemporary Fiction, 6(2), Summer 1986; Italo Calvino, edited by Harold Bloom, 1988; Calvino and the Age of Neorealism: Fables of Estrangement by Lucia Re, 1990; Calvino: A San Remo by Piero Ferrara, 1991; Understanding Italo Calvino by Beno Weiss, 1993; Italo Calvino: Eros and Language by Tommasina Gabriele, 1994; Italo Calvino by Martin McLaughlin, 1997; Italo Calvino: AJourney Toward Postmodernism by Constance Markey, 1999; Italo Calvino and the Landscape of Childhood by Claudia Nocentini, 2000; Painting with Words, Writing with Pictures: Word and Image in the Work of Italo Calvino by Franco Ricci, 2001.

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Italo Calvino rarely grappled with the Holocaust directly in his writings, but he was nevertheless deeply marked by the events of World War II and by his own anti-Nazi activities. He was conscripted by the army of the fascist puppet state the Republic of Salo but fled the draft. Instead, he joined the Italian Resistance movement, even though his parents were taken hostage by the Nazis and imprisoned as a gesture of retaliation. Calvino's experiences as a Garibaldi partisan from 1944 to 1945 were crucial to the development of his political and moral beliefs. They also formed the basis for his first novel, The Path to the Nest of Spiders, considered a ground-breaking example of neo-realist literature in Italian and a strong voice in the country's post-war attempts at coming to terms with the war and Benito Mussolini's term in power.

This novel belongs to the earliest cycle in Calvino's output, a period from 1945 to 1949 in which he wrote highly realistic, concretely imagined stories set during the war and influenced by the staccato style of Ernest Hemingway's Hills Like White Elephants , which made a strong impression on him as a young man. Calvino was already well known when he published it; he was first brought to the public eye by the short story collection The Crow Comes Last, which won the Premio de l'Unita prize in 1947. These stories, as well as the semi-autobiographical L'entrata in guerra ("The Entry into War"), contain numerous elements that Calvino would later rework in his acclaimed The Path to the Nest of Spiders. Many of the characters are the same—the small boy as narrator, the pedantic Marxist partisan cook, the sadistic young men fascinated more by weapons than by a cause. Both are set in the poverty-stricken towns of northern Italy, where the mostly Communist partisans compete with the black shirt brigades for supporters, and the general populace often seems confused about the difference between the two sides. Calvino portrays men at a stage before they have reached the full political consciousness necessary for commitment to an abstract cause. Although Calvino is certainly on the side of the partisans in this novel, he differs from other wartime novelists such as Elio Vittorini and Marcello Venturi in that he realizes that the struggle is more complex than a Manichean battle between good and evil. By recognizing the flaws of the partisans as well as their heroism and enthusiasm, he arrives at a portrait that is at once more interesting and more real.

The Holocaust is absent from most of Calvino's fiction, particularly the immediate post-war works. His portrayals of Nazi officers and conscripted German sailors emphasize their alienness to local characters and local politics. They are ignored or exploited, fought against or used as allies, but their ideology appears absurd, and despite their authority they are turned into pawns of local power struggles. Calvino came to grips privately with the horror of the Holocaust and the anti-Semitism that existed in Italian as well as German society. He was a great friend and admirer of Primo Levi, the Italian writer interned in Auschwitz, and wrote several prefaces to Levi's work.

The main importance of the writing from Calvino's early period is the key role it played in the development of the neo-realist novel in contemporary European literature. Like the films of Rossellini and de Sica, the early stories presented a new realism of content (in contrast to the realism of nineteenth-century novels or the censured fiction under fascism), a new realism of style (implying a more authentic representation of popular Italian, including dialect and regionalisms), and a socio-political message influenced by Marxism. Calvino's lengthy and witty 1964 preface to The Path to the Nest of Spiders is perhaps the best introduction to his wartime writings and to his place in the neo-realist movement, which he calls "the anonymous voice of the age," even though the preface is written from the perspective of a much older man looking back critically at his youth. By 1964 Calvino had already turned away from neo-realism in order to write fantastical, playful, and decidedly postmodern fictions such as Invisible Cities, Cosmicomics, and If on a Winter's Night a Traveler, the works for which he is justly most famous. Whatever technical fireworks his early post-war fiction may lack, however, they are skilled and seamless evocations, simultaneously the most historical and the most personal stories of Calvino's career.

—Christina Svendsen

See the essay on The Path to the Nest of Spiders.