Italo Calvino
In 1950, Italo Calvino had already written The Path to the Spider's Nest and The Last To Come the Crow, but he didn't seem to want much to be a writer. Even though his first novel sold 6,000 copies and had a big impact, he was willing to work as an editor at Aegna Uddi Publishing House, and he didn't even concentrate on writing novels. His later work also proved this, after writing a not-so-long novel in 1951, "The Viscount in Half" and several short stories, Calvino devoted most of his thoughts and energies to collecting, sorting out, and studying materials about the Italian Fairy Tales, and it took two years to compile the book, before "immersing himself" in creation.
Founded in 1933 by Giulio Einaudi, Aegnauddi Publishing House is still one of the most authoritative publishing companies in Italy, publishing many worldwide classics around literature, history, art and religion in the past 90 years. The publishing house, which had a strong anti-fascist tendency from the day of its birth, attracted the participation of many leftists in the cultural circles of the time, including the likes of Réonne Ginsburg and Massimo Mira, and soon became an important center of Italian culture, philosophy, historical research and publication. By the end of the war, the Aegna Uddi Publishing House was active in Italy, especially in many cities in northern Italy, when the editorial office in Milan was entrusted to the famous Italian writer Elio Vitorini, while the editorial offices in Rome and Turin were under the sole responsibility of Cesare Pavese.
Cesare Pavese
Who Pavisé was seemed to be no longer a question. Born in 1908 in a village in the province of Cuneo in the Piedmont region, the eminent representative of Italian neorealist literature died at the age of 6 and his mother began to live with little of his life, and Pavese had to live with his sister and felt the inherent loneliness. Even so, he still loved his hometown, and later when he went to university in Turin, he would return to the countryside every summer to experience the country life, which he thought was his real "roots". After graduating from university in 1932, Pavese began to work as an editor of the magazine "Culture" and has been engaged in translation, translating the works of literary artists including Defoe, Dickens, Melville, Joyce, Faulkner, Hemingway and Steinbeck, which not only made many Italians read English literary classics for the first time, but also invisibly promoted Italy's reference to world literature and the development of national literature. In 1935, when authorities seized Culture, pavesé's correspondence with the Communist underground organization was discovered, and he was imprisoned, and three years later he was exiled to the Blanca Leone Laoga prison in the southernmost part of the Apennines, where Pavesé spent 10 months writing poems that were later included in his first collection of poems, Hard Work. After his release from prison, Pavisé first enlisted in the army, but spent six months in a military hospital due to an asthma attack, and then joined the guerrillas because of the Italian armistice with Britain and the United States, and joined the resistance movement in the German-occupied area near Turin until the end of the war. The war led him to become increasingly politically convinced of the Italian Communist Party and joined the Communist Party after the war.
It was also at this time that he became acquainted with Calvino, who was also a member of the Communist Party, and became a friend of mob. Calvino joined the Communist Party as early as 1944 and lived in Turin after the war after studying at the University of Turin. In 1947 Calvino came to work for the Einaudi publishing house, responsible for the press office and advertising work, and the following year he switched to the Turin branch of the newspaper "Unity", because he was not satisfied with the job, so he returned to the Eina Uddi publishing house in 1949 and maintained extremely close contact with it in all the years that followed. During this time, Calvino received a lot of pavesé's selfless care. With Pavese's help, Calvino published the novel "The Suffering of the Barracks" in Aredusha, and with his encouragement, completed his debut novel "The Path to the Spider's Nest" in only 20 days, and although he was eliminated by Jansero Ferrata during a competition for young writers in Mondoli, he was recommended by Pavese to Einaudi Publishing House, included in the "Coral" series, and won the Riccione Prize.
Of course, Pavese's most important help to Calvino was to invite him back to the Aina Uddi publishing house and stay there. In 1950, Calvino's main job was to compile the literary volume of the "Scientific Literature Series" after his return to Eina Uddi, which had a great influence on his later literary creation. At that time, the "series" was divided into the "red series" and the "gray series", the former involving science, society, art and other fields, such as the publication of biographies of scientists such as Darwin, Einstein and Newton, and the "Church and State in Italy", "Lenin and the Russian Revolution", "The Social History of Art" and other works; the latter was concentrated in the field of literature, and Calvino personally screened the scope and subject matter of publication, including both Shakespeare's classic plays and Pushkin's "Queen of Spades" in the early 19th century. Evgeny Onegin and Dickens's Hard Times, as well as Kipling's The Brave Captain and Conrad's The Golden Arrow. Although the newsroom was not the domain of Calvino alone, as a special director, the bibliography can at least be seen as the result of Calvino's personal preferences and the publishing ideology of the time, which was compromised but not compromised. More importantly, in post-war Italy in 1950, almost all of these world literary classics published through the Aina Uddi Publishing House were read for the first time by Italian readers, including Calvino, for which the "Grey Series" was both a publishing job and a literary sustenance, and many of these works had an influence on his later creations.
In addition to Calvino, Vittorini and Pavese also attached great importance to the series, and together they designed folding sheets and cards for the cover of the series. Calvino took pleasure in this, saying himself, "I have devoted most of my life to editing, compiling other people's books, not writing my own books." I am satisfied with this because the publishing industry is so important in Italy and the publishing house where I work sets an example for other publishing peers in Italy, which is no small matter. While Calvino was looking forward to collaborating with Pavisé on more famous books, his friend died of an overdose of sleeping pills in a hotel in Turin, and as the most influential poet and intellectual of the 20th century in Italy, Pavisé's life was forever fixed on August 27, 1950.
In Pavisé's suicide note, the poet wrote, "I forgive everyone, and I ask everyone to forgive me, yes, please don't talk too much about me," but although no one really knows the reason for Pavisé's suicide, this poetic song did not stop people from talking about it. Public opinion generally believes that it was the rupture of his love affair with American actress Constance Dowing that directly accelerated his choice, because Dow spirit's identity, this matter continued to ferment, bringing unbearable pressure to Pavisé and choosing to die. In fact, rather than saying that the failure of the relationship directly contributed to Pavese's suicide, it is better to say that the breakup as an "event" was just a "flashpoint" of his half-life loneliness. Without a father at a very young age, and lacking enough maternal love, Pabiesé was full of sentimental temperament in his youth, and although he gained a lot in literature, he experienced a hard life because of his words, forced exile, illness, and jungle fighting. In a letter to Calvino a few days before his suicide, Pavese said, "The memories and nostalgia for the peaceful life of the past that you find in my book were bought at the expense of my miserable life, for which today I fainted on the ground. It seems that in Pavese, Calvino did not fully understand his "pure suffering". So loneliness leads to autism, melancholy eventually becomes depression, life comes to an end, as his own poem says, "This man returns home and can only sigh alone in a sleepless sleep."
For Pavese's death, Calvino was rather saddened. In a letter to Issa dated September 3, 1950, he said affectionately, "Pavesy is not only one of my favorite writers and best friends, my colleague for many years, the person I talk to every day, but also the most important person in my life." The reason why I am now is because of him, he is very important to me to become a writer, he has always guided, encouraged and affirmed my work, it is he who has influenced my way of thinking and taste, and even affected my living habits and attitudes. Also in this letter, Calvino answered the question "Why did he commit suicide?" that loneliness, despair, and dissatisfaction with life were all reasons Calvino could think of, but he still believed in Pavisé's firmness. Even years later, Calvino was shocked that Pavese had suddenly left, "In all the years I met him, he had never had any suicidal thoughts, but his other old friends knew he had had them before." So my impression of him was skewed. I think he is a determined, tenacious, passionate and reliable man. After Pavese's death, through his suicide and his cries of love and despair in his diary, I discovered the other side of him. Their sorrows and joys are not connected, but they do not prevent Calvino from admiring Pavese's literature and personality with a grateful heart. For a long time after Pavese's death, Calvino tirelessly mentioned his best friend on various occasions and articles, such as in a series of articles and interviews such as "The Bone Marrow of the Lion", "The Three Schools of Italian Fiction today", "The Stranger in Turin", "The Communist Party Member Divided in Half" and "The Path to the Spider's Nest" Preface to the 1964 Edition.
Among them, "Pavese: Existence and Creation" can be regarded as a collection of masters. In 1960, the Milan House of Culture hosted the Pavesé Decency Memorial, and Calvino wrote this article in memory of his mentor who died for a decade. At the beginning of the article, the author devotes a great deal of space to Pavesé's life based on the dual dimensions of morality and creation, and later people gradually see the symbols of loneliness and pain in the poet's works, but Calvino still firmly believes that Pavese is diligent, accurate, and tenacious, "His morality, his 'style', for him is not an external armor against pain, but a hard shell inside, capable of containing fire-like pain." Calvino then compares Pavese to Gide's sense of life, arguing that Gide immerses the individual in a fluid life, while Pavese transfers consumed life to works and history, and that in an era when survival is not required to be combined with historical morality, Pavisé's literary influence is becoming less and less, and can only rely on the rediscovery and understanding of him at some point in the future to confirm his literary and historical status. Calvino also reminds the reader to pay attention to Pavese's work itself rather than to the periphery of the work, especially the novel, because "Pavese's nine shorter novels constitute the most intense and dramatic and consistent series in Italy today", and novels such as "The Mountain Hut", "The Devil on the Mountain", and "Only among Women" present meaningful "internal reasons" and are "unique values in today's world literature".
In order to explain the so-called "internal causes", Calvino later wrote an article entitled "Parvese and the Sacrifice of Man", around which he discussed the "hidden themes" of Pavesé's novels around "The Moon and the Bonfire", arguing that this seemingly taciturn and understated novel was actually full of metaphors and symbols about ethnography, mythology, and fatalism, and it was these metaphors and symbols that gave the novelist a richness that was not easily perceived and excavated. "Pavese and the Sacrifice of Man" is only a short article, but it is of great significance, because it was later included in Calvino's famous work "Why Read the Classics", and Pavese, together with 30 writers such as Borges, Hemingway, Flaubert, Balzac and Voltaire, became the eternal classic writer in Calvino's mind. In the relatively short "historical time" from the writer, Calvino placed Pavessé in the same classical literary circle as Dickens and Tolstoy, which cannot help but raise the question: Is Calvino's high opinion of Pavese so highly is out of his affection for this mentor and friend, or out of instinctive insight as a literary critic?
To be clear, even without Calvino, Pavese played an important role in the history of 20th-century Italian literature. As a translator, his English and American literary translations injected new vitality into the lifeless Italian literary scene of the 1920s and 1930s, and the translation of Melville's Moby Dick is still the preferred translation for Italian readers, not to mention the influence of these works on the young creators of the time; as a poet, he published "Hard Work", "Poem of Dissatisfaction" and "The Last Sorrow" before and after him, and loneliness, women, childhood, politics, and sadness became the theme keywords of his poetry, from which his pain can be seen. His rebellion against pain can also be seen; as a novelist, he began to write a series of short stories from the early 1940s, such as "Your Hometown", "Beach", "Comrades", "Before the Chickens", etc., in addition, he also wrote the novel "The Moon and the Bonfire" for which he won the Strega Literary Prize, the highest honor of Italian literature; as a literary critic, he wrote literary criticism on translations while translating books in the early 1930s, which were later collected into American Literature, Essays and Reviews. Completed the earliest translation and dissemination of American literature in Italy. Pavese's identities and identity-centered contributions could have put him at the forefront of Italian literature of the 20th century, especially the first half of the 20th century, not to mention Calvino's admiration for him. In other words, Pavese's literary historical status comes from his own literary creation and its value and influence on the one hand, and on the other hand, it is inseparable from Calvino's "promotion" of him.
Similarly, Pavese "promoted" Calvino, without Which Calvino would not even have become the later Calvino. Why? First, Pavese has been Calvino's guide in literature. He not only encouraged Calvino's novels, but was always Calvino's first reader; he recommended not only Calvino's novels to publishers, but also to Calvino, the most important italian philosophers and historians of the time. More importantly, Pavese saw Calvino's literary preferences with a unique vision, and Calvino later recalled, "It was Pavese who first spoke to me about the fairy tale tone of my work, which I had not realized until then, and since then I have begun to pay attention to and try to confirm its significance." My literary path began to appear, and now I find that all the elements are contained in that initial beginning. From later literary history, Papaise inadvertently "prescribed" Calvino's creative line. Secondly, there is reason to believe that Calvino's coming to work at the Einaudi Publishing House is more or less related to Pavese, and that Pavese, who was the head of the publishing house in the late 1940s, at least guaranteed the stability of Calvino's work, and it was here that Calvino was first exposed to the frontier topics of science and literature in the world, to understand the "contemporary" appearance of the world and literature, and also to Giulio Pauladi, Paolo Borriceli, Danière Penchellori and other modern Italian intellectuals. The group of talents is complete, and the little is salty. These insights enabled Calvino to grow rapidly and accumulate extremely valuable literary reading experience. Again, Calvino emphasized more than once that Pavese influenced his morality, taste, habits, and attitudes, and that at first glance they appear to be entirely two types of writers, one full of decadence and the other like a children's writer, and Calvino had no way of understanding the bitterness and bitterness of Pavese's suicide notes and diaries, but the diligence, accuracy, wisdom, and clarity in Calvino's bones, at least in part, came from Pavese and his personality, which was more important.
In 1950, at the age of 27, Calvino bid farewell to Pavisé, 42. It's hard to imagine two people who are only five years apart at the age of 15 and can maintain such a pure, sincere, intimate friendship, but that's the way it is. Leaving Pavisé apart, 1950 was a very ordinary year for Calvino, who devoted himself to working at the Einaudi publishing house, reading Maupassant, Thomas Mann and Hemingway in his spare time, occasionally writing for Culture and Reality, but not continuing to write novels. None of these future-related accumulations seem to have anything to do with Pavisé, but they are inseparable from Pavisé's influence. Perhaps it was a year of sorrow for Calvino, and in any case, Pavese's death changed him profoundly, and in a letter to Issa he vowed to rediscover life and find interest in it, and history proved his bravery. But even Calvino himself in 1950 did not know what he would bring to Italy and the world afterwards, and with those ideals that were plausible and later confirmed, Calvino came to his 1951.