MORAVIA, Alberto

Pseudonym for Alberto Pincherle. Nationality: Italian. Born: Rome, 28 November 1907. Education: Home; received high school equivalency diploma 1967. Family: Married 1) Elsa Morante in 1941 (divorced 1962; died 1985); 2) Dacia Maraini in 1963; 3) Carmen Llera in 1986. Career: Contracted tuberculosis in 1916 and spent much time in sanatoriums. Foreign correspondent, La Stampa, Milan, and Gazzetta del Popolo, Turin, in the 1930s; film critic, La Nuova Europa, 1944-46; editor, with Alberto Carocci, Nuovi Argomenti, Milan, from 1953; film critic, L'Espresso, Milan, from 1955; State Department lecturer in the United States, 1955. President, International P.E.N., 1959. Awards: Corriere Lombardo prize, 1945; Strega prize, 1952; Marzotto prize, 1954; Viareggio prize, 1961. Member: American Academy (honorary member); Chevalier, 1952, and Commander, 1984, Legion of Honor (France). Died: 26 September 1990.

Publications

Short Stories

L'epidemia: Racconti surrealistici e satirici. 1944.

L'amore coniugale e altri racconti. 1949; selection as Conjugal Love, 1951; in Five Novels, 1955.

Two Adolescents: The Stories of Agostino and Luca (includesAgostino and Disobedience). 1950.

I racconti. 1952; selections as Bitter Honeymoon and Other Stories, 1954; and The Wayward Wife and Other Stories, 1960.

Racconti romani. 1954; translated in part as Roman Tales, 1956.

Nuovi racconti romani. 1959; selection as More Roman Tales, 1963.

L'automa. 1963; as The Fetish and Other Stories, 1964.

Una cosa è una cosa. 1967; selection as Command and I Will Obey You, 1969.

Il paradiso. 1970; as Paradise and Other Stories, 1971; as Bought and Sold, 1973.

Io e lui. 1971; as Two: A Phallic Novel, 1972; as The Two of Us, 1972.

Un'altra vita. 1973; as Lady Godiva and Other Stories, 1975.

Boh! 1976; as The Voice of the Sea and Other Stories, 1978.

La cosa e altri racconti. 1983; as Erotic Tales, 1986.

La villa del venerdi; e altri racconti. 1990; as The Friday Villa, 1990.

Novels

Gli indifferenti. 1929; as The Indifferent Ones, 1932; as The Time of Indifference, 1953.

Le ambizioni sbagliate. 1935; as The Wheel of Fortune, 1937; asMistaken Ambitions, 1955.

La bella vita. 1935.

L'imbroglio. 1937.

I sogni del pigro. 1940.

La mascherata. 1941; as The Fancy Dress Party, 1947.

L'amante infelice. 1943.

Agostino. 1944; translated as Agostino, 1947.

Due cortigiane; Serata di Don Giovanni. 1945.

La romana. 1947; as The Woman of Rome, 1949.

La disubbidienza. 1948; as Disobedience, 1950.

Il conformista. 1951; as The Conformist, 195l.

Il disprezzo. 1954; as A Ghost at Noon, 1955.

Five Novels. 1955.

La ciociara. 1957; as Two Women, 1958.

La noia. 1960; as The Empty Canvas, 1961.

Cortigiana stanca. 1965.

L'attenzione. 1965; as The Lie, 1966.

La vita interiore. 1978; as Time of Desecration, 1980.

1934. 1982; translated as 1934, 1983.

Storie della preistoria Favole. 1983.

L'uomo che guarda. 1985; as The Voyuer, 1986.

Plays

Gli indifferenti, with Luigi Squarzini, from the novel by Moravia (produced 1948).In Sipario, 1948.

Il provino (produced 1955).

Non approfondire (produced 1957).

Teatro (includes Beatrice Cenci and La mascherata, from his own novel). 1958; Beatrice Cenci (in English), 1965.

Il mondo è quello che è (produced 1966). 1966.

Il dio Kurt (produced 1969). 1968.

La vita è gioco (produced 1970). 1969.

Screenplays:

Un colpo di pistola, 1941; Zazà, 1942; Ultimo incontro, 1951; Sensualità, 1951; Tempi nostri, 1952; La provinciale (The Wayward Wife), 1952; Villa Borghese, 1953; La donna del Fiume, 1954; La romana (The Woman of Rome), 1955; Racconti romani (Roman Tales), 1956; Racconti d'estate (Love on the Riviera), 1958; I delfini (The Dauphins), 1960; La giornata balorda (From a Roman Balcony), 1960; Una domenica d'es-tate, 1961; Agostino, 1962; Ieri oggi domani (Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow), 1963; Le ore nude, 1964; L'occhio selvaggio (The Wild Eye), 1967.

Other

La speranza: Ossia cristianesimo e comunismo. 1944.

Opere complete. 17 vols., 1952-67.

Un mese in U.R.S.S. 1958.

I moralisti moderni, with Elemire Zolla. 1960.

Women of Rome, photographs by Sam Waagenaar. 1960.

Un'idea dell'India. 1962.

Claudia Cardinale. 1963.

L'uomo come fine e altri saggi. 1964; as Man as an End: A Defence of Humanism, 1965.

La rivoluzione culturale in Cina ovvero il convitato di pietra. 1967; as The Red Book and the Great Wall: An Impression of Mao's China, 1968.

A quale tribù appartieni? 1972; as Which Tribe Do You Belong To?, 1974.

Al cinema: Centoquarantotto film d'autore. 1975.

La mutazione femminile: Conversazione con Moravia sulla donna, by Carla Ravaiola. 1975.

Intervista sullo scrittore scomodo, edited by Nello Ajello. 1978.

Quando Ba Lena era tanto piccola. 1978.

Cosma e i briganti. 1980.

Impegno controvoglia: Saggi, articoli, interviste, edited by RenzoParis. 1980.

Lettere del Sahara. 1981.

La tempesta. 1984.

L'angelo dell'informazione e altri testi teatrali. 1986.

L'inverno nucleare, edited by Renzo Paris. 1986.

Opere, 1927-1947, edited by Geno Pampaloni. 1986.

Passeggiate africane (autobiography). 1987.

Il viaggio a Roma. 1988.

Opere, 1948-1968, edited by Enzo Siciliano. 1989.

La donna leopardo. 1991.

Editor, with Elemire Zolla, Saggi italiani. 1960.

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Bibliography:

An Annotated Bibliography of Moravia Criticism in Italy and in the English-Speaking World (1929-1975) by Ferdinando Alfonsi, 1976.

Critical Studies:

Moravia by Giuliano Dego, 1966; Three Italian Novelists by Donald W. Heiney, 1968; The Existentialism ofMoravia by Joan Ross and D. Freed, 1972; Moravia by Jane E. Cottrell, 1974; Women as Object: Language and Gender in the Work of Moravia by Sharon Wood, 1990; Alberto Moravia by Thomas E. Peterson, 1996.

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The life and career of Alberto Moravia spanned some of the most turbulent years and events of recent Italian history. Novelist, short story writer, essayist, journalist, and cultural observer, Moravia constantly engaged with the social, cultural, and political life of his country. While the experimentation in literature of the late twentieth century makes Moravia's more gritty realism look a little dated, his best works offer an acute analytical insight into a society, and a class, in moral decay.

Moravia burst upon the literary scene in 1929, when he was barely 20 years old, with Gli indifferenti, a novel immediately perceived, if not consciously intended, as a violent social polemic against a decadent Italian bourgeoisie that provided fascism with its most fertile soil. The novel's attack on the bankrupt morality of the bourgeoisie, for whom sex and money had displaced any higher value, had inevitable political implications that went to the heart of the fledgling fascist state.

Moravia's writing continued to be dominated by the social and moral impact of fascism on the class he knew best, the bourgeoisie. After a brief period of experimentation with surrealism and political satire (I sogni del pigro and La mascherata) he began writing in a realist, moralist mode in short stories such as "Inverno di malato" (1935), which drew on his own youth spent in a tuberculosis sanatorium; "L'amante infelice" (1943); and Agostino, a masterly short novel describing vividly an adolescent's emergence from innocence, the discovery of his mother's femininity, and his initiation into sexuality by a group of urchins he meets at the seaside resort where he is on vacation. La romana (The Woman of Rome) is about the life of Adriana told from her own perspective, that of a working-class girl drawn into prostitution; her character is in stark contrast to the morality of her middle-class clients. This perspective on the impotent middle classes is maintained in La ciociara. Based on Moravia's own experience when he was forced to flee Rome in 1943, when the city was taken over by the Nazis after the fall of Mussolini, the novel deals powerfully with the experience of war and the loss of innocence symbolized by a brutal rape. Compassion and the wisdom of experience are the only way out of the moral quagmire of war and the selfishness and greed it generates. In Il conformista (The Conformist) Moravia addressed himself less to the drastic effects than to the psychosexual underpinning of allegiance to a specific ideology: Marcello, the protagonist, identifies himself with fascism in a desperate attempt to appear normal, only gradually realizing that so-called normality consists precisely of perversion and aberration.

While writing these last novels, Moravia was also writing a large number of short stories, the Racconti romani, considered by some to be his best work, first published in 1954. The stories have been compared to the work of the Milanese Belli with their sense of historical and psychological authenticity and their mixture of standard language and dialect. Here Moravia is not writing to demonstrate a thesis or a philosophical point, as he increasingly appeared to do in his later work, and the stories retain both freshness and spontaneity in their evocation of a lower middle-class Rome in the postwar years. Three later volumes of short stories, Il paradiso (Paradise and Other Stories), Un'altra vita (Lady Godiva and Other Stories), and Boh! (The Voice of the Sea and Other Stories), were collected from stories published in the Corriere della Sera in the 1950s and 1960s. These stories are all linked by their use of a first-person female narrator; if his dramatic characters are women, he has declared, it is because women live most dramatically the tensions and contradictions of the modern world. Many of the stories portray family life and marriage, which is seen as collective violence by society on the woman or as a systematic means of exploitation. The role of mother is seen to be inconsistent with an autonomous female identity, and the other side of bourgeois marriage is prostitution. Women are constantly denied subjectivity and autonomy by the world of men and work. In search of their identity, they lose it.

Moravia's achievement was to probe and reveal the relationship between the economic, the erotic, and the political. While his narratives owed much intellectually to Freud and Marx, it is the dramatic events of twentieth-century Italy, and the artist's response to the spiritual and material conflicts of the modern world, that form the heart of his work.

—Sharon Wood

See the essay on "Conjugal Love."