Italian literature 20. Italian literature

Italian literature of the period under review was heavily affected by the gloomy situation of the fascist dictatorship. The influence of fascism manifested itself not only among its direct troubadours and apologists, but also among some writers who were opposed to fascism.

Gabriel D'Annunzio, one of the most significant Italian writers and poets, who became widely known at the end of the 19th century, acted as a champion of fascist ideas and an exponent of fascist literary policy.

After he became a fascist, his creativity became scarce. Every year he wrote less and worse. D'Annunzio's latest works are mostly pompous speeches and rattling journalistic speeches.

The evolution of another major Italian writer, the novelist and playwright Luigi Pirandello, was different. Having joined the so-called verismo (an Italian variety of naturalism) at an early stage of his work, from the early 20s he completely broke with this trend and began to develop the new style he created, called “humorism”.

Pirandello recognizes the naturalistic reproduction of reality as insufficient and believes that it cannot be known by direct, “ordinary” means. The world is not the same and the person is not the same as they appear to us; We are present at a tragicomic performance, the true meaning of which can only be understood by tearing off their usual masks from its participants.

Therefore, Pirandello gives his heroes a kind of double life: they live in the world of everyday life, gray and everyday, and in the world of imagination, ghostly and beautiful. The lines between the real and the irrational are blurred, everyday reality appears as something illogical and incomprehensible, and the world of dreams and fiction takes on very real outlines.

This theme of “faces and masks”, the real world and the imaginary world, was developed by the writer in a number of his works of various genres - in stories from the last volumes of the extensive series “Stories for the Year”, in the novel “One, None, a Hundred Thousand” and especially in drama. .

The paradoxical form in them served to reveal the true face of the character, and sometimes very acute social content, to expose bourgeois morality.

Subsequently, in the oppressive atmosphere of the fascist dictatorship, Pirandello’s work acquires the features of reconciliation with the surrounding reality. In his later plays ("New Colony", "The Legend of the Changeling Son") social issues almost completely disappear, and the characters turn into abstract symbols.

The anti-fascist camp was not as broad and monolithic in Italy as in the German literary community. The most significant anti-fascist writer Giovanni Germanetto, who emigrated from the country after Mussolini seized power, created a number of significant works.

The best of them (primarily his story “Notes of a Barber”) are dedicated to the Italian working class and its liberation struggle. Important in Germanetto’s work was the depiction of the ideological formation and growth of a revolutionary fighter.

A hidden protest against fascism was reflected in the works of Alberto Moravia, Francesco Iovine, Cesare Pavese and some other young writers. They were united by an interest in the fate of the intelligentsia in a capitalist society, in its ideological quest.

The impoverishment and squalor of the privileged class are depicted in Moravia’s novel “The Indifferent”; the baseness of the interests of the bourgeois environment - in Jovine’s book “The Fickle Man”; the dissatisfaction of the intelligentsia - in Pavese's book "Hard Work".

All these works were written with great skill in psychoanalysis and were met with very hostility by official criticism, because they tore off the mask from the imaginary prosperity that supposedly reigned in the fascist “generation of new Romans.”

However, in addition to the spirit of opposition, in the works of these writers there were also moods of pessimism and skepticism, uncertainty in the possibility of fighting evil.

Italian literature occupies an important place in the culture of Europe. This happened despite the fact that the Italian language itself acquired literary shape quite late, around the 1250s. This was due to the strong influence of Latin in Italy, where it was most widely used. The schools, which were predominantly secular in nature, taught Latin throughout. Only when it was possible to free ourselves from this influence did authentic literature begin to take shape.

Renaissance

The first famous works of Italian literature date back to the Renaissance. When the arts flourish throughout Italy, literature tries to keep up. Several world famous names belong to this period - Francesco Petrarca, Giovanni Boccaccio, Dante Alighieri. At that time, Italian and French literature of the Renaissance set the tone for all of Europe. And this is not surprising.

Dante is rightfully considered the founder of Italian literary language. He lived and worked at the turn of the XIII-XIV centuries. His most famous work was The Divine Comedy, which provided a comprehensive analysis of late medieval culture.

In Italian literature, Dante remained a poet and thinker who was constantly looking for something fundamentally new and different from everyday life. He had a muse that he worshiped named Beatrice. This love, in the end, received a mysterious and even some mystical meaning. After all, he filled each of his works with it. The idealized image of this woman is one of the key ones in Dante's works.

Fame came to him after the release of the story “New Life”, which told about love that renewed the main character, forcing him to look at everything around him differently. It was composed of canzonas, sonnets and prose stories.

Dante also devoted a lot of time to political treatises. But his main work is still “The Divine Comedy”. This is an afterlife vision, a very popular genre in Italian literature at that time. The poem is an allegorical building in which the dense forest, where the main character is lost, represents human sins and errors, and the strongest passions are pride, voluptuousness and greed.

Character " Divine Comedy"Together with a guide, he goes on a journey through Hell, Purgatory and Heaven.

The most complete picture of the writers and works of this country can be obtained from the Mokulsky encyclopedia. Based on this study, Italian literature appears in all its glory.

One of the most famous lyric poets in Italy is Francesco Petrarca. He lived in the 14th century and was a prominent representative of the generation of humanists. It is interesting that he wrote not only in Italian, but also in Latin. Moreover world fame he acquired it precisely thanks to Italian poetry, which during his lifetime he treated with a certain degree of disdain.

In these works, he regularly addresses his lover named Laura. The reader learns from Petrarch's sonnets that they first met in church in 1327, and exactly 21 years later she died. Even after this, Petrarch continued to sing her praises for ten years.

In addition to poems dedicated to love for Laura, these Italian cycles contain works of a religious and political nature. Italian literature of the Renaissance is perceived by many precisely through the prism of Petrarch's poetry.

Another bright representative of the period Italian Renaissance in literature - Giovanni Boccaccio. He had a significant influence on the development of all European culture with his works. Boccaccio wrote a large number of poems on subjects from ancient mythology, and actively used the genre of psychological stories in his work.

His main work was the collection of short stories "The Decameron", one of the most striking works of Italian literature of the Renaissance. The short stories in this book, as critics note, are imbued with humanistic ideas, the spirit of freethinking, humor and cheerfulness, reflecting the full palette of Italian society contemporary to the author.

The Decameron is a collection of one hundred stories told to each other by seven ladies and 13 men. They flee during the plague that has swept the country to a remote estate in the village, where they hope to wait out the epidemic.

All stories are presented in an easy and elegant language, the narrative breathes diversity and life truth. Boccaccio uses a large number of artistic techniques in these short stories, depicting people of all kinds of characters, ages and conditions.

The love that Boccaccio paints is radically different from the idea of romantic relationships in Petrarch and Dante. For Giovanni, this is a burning passion, bordering on eroticism, rejecting established family values. The literature of the Italian Renaissance is largely based on the Decameron.

Writers from other countries also played a great influence. Italian and French literature of the Renaissance developed very quickly and dynamically, also represented by such names as Pierre de Ronsard and many others.

17th century

The next important stage is the development of Italian literature of the 17th century. At that time, there were two schools in the country - Pindarists and Marine painters. The Marinists are led by Giambattista Marino. His most famous work is the poem "Adonis".

The second school of literature in Italian was founded by Gabriello Chiabrera. He was a very prolific author, from whose pen a large number of pastoral plays, epic poems and odes came out. In this regard, it is necessary to mention the poet Vincenzo Filicaya.

I wonder what fundamental difference between these schools consists of technical tricks and issues related to the form of the work.

Around the same time, a circle appeared in Naples, from which emerged the Arcadian Academy, to which many famous poets and satirists of that period belonged.

In the 18th century, after a period of certain stagnation, a bright representative of Italian classical literature appeared. He was a playwright and librettist. He has more than 250 plays to his credit.

Goldoni's comedy "The Servant of Two Masters" brought world fame, which is still included in the repertoire of many theaters around the world. The events of this work take place in Venice. The main character is Truffaldino, a rogue and deceiver who managed to escape from the poor town of Bergamo to the rich and successful Venice. There he is hired as a servant to Signor Rasponi, who in reality is Beatrice's girlfriend in disguise. Under the guise of her deceased brother, she seeks to find her lover, who, by mistake and due to injustice, is accused of murder and forced to flee Venice.

Truffaldino, who wants to earn as much as possible, serves two masters at the same time and at first he succeeds in this.

Giacomo Leopardi

In the 19th century, Italian fiction continued to develop, but such big names as Dante or Goldoni were not found. We can mention the romantic poet Giacomo Leopardi.

His poems were very lyrical, although he left behind very little - several dozen poems. They were first published in 1831 under the single title “Songs”. These poems were completely imbued with pessimism, which colored the entire life of the author himself.

Leopardi has not only poetic, but also prosaic works. For example, "Moral Essays". This is the name of his philosophical essay, and he also formulates his worldview in the “Diary of Reflections.”

All his life he was in search and was always disappointed. He claimed that he needed love, desire, fire and life, but in all respects he was a wreck. For most of his life, the poet was disabled, so he could not fully cooperate with foreign universities, although they regularly offered this. He was also depressed by the idea that Christianity was just an illusion. And since Leopardi was mystical by nature, he often found himself faced with a painful emptiness.

In his poems, he portrayed a sense of true and natural beauty, being an adherent of the ideas of Rousseau.

Leopardi has often been called the incarnate poet of world sorrow.

Raffaello Giovagnoli

The classics of Italian literature begin to take shape towards the end of the 19th century. The Italian historian and novelist writes about the gladiator of the same name, who leads a slave revolt that took place in Ancient Rome. It is noteworthy that this character is very real.

In addition, Giovagnoli’s narrative itself, in addition to historical truth and facts, interweaves lyrical plots that did not actually exist. For example, in the Italian writer Spartak falls in love with the patrician Valeria, who treats him favorably.

At the same time, a courtesan from Greece, Euthybides, falls in love with Spartacus himself, whose love the protagonist categorically rejects. As a result, it is the offended Euthybides who plays one of the decisive roles in the defeat of Spartacus’s army and in his further death.

The ending is very plausible. The slave revolt was indeed brutally suppressed, and Spartacus was killed.

Writers from the south of the country made a great contribution to the development of Italian children's literature. For example, journalist Carlo Collodi writes famous fairy tale"The Adventures of Pinocchio. The Story of a Wooden Doll." In Russia, of course, it is better known in the interpretation of Alexei Nikolaevich Tolstoy, who wrote “The Golden Key, or the Adventures of Pinocchio.”

Collodi himself, originally from Florence, volunteered to fight in the Tuscan army when the War of Independence was fought in Italy (1848 and 1860).

In Italian literature of the 20th century, he stands out clearly from the rest. This is the Italian playwright and writer, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1934. Modern Italian literature, represented by Pirandello, represents a fascinating and inventive narrative, with the help of which the author simultaneously revives the art of stage and drama.

The absurd has a great influence on the author. This production demonstrates the contradictions that arise between everyday life and art; this example demonstrates the social tragedy of people who are powerless to resist the masks imposed on them by society. They themselves only demand from the author that he write a play for them.

The play is divided into real and fantastic planes. In the first, the characters of a play that has not yet been written act, and in the second, the viewer learns about the tragedy that befalls them.

Pirandello entered into literary activity as the author of the popular collection “Joyful Pain” in 1889. Many of his early poems combine the desire to demonstrate to others his inner world, as well as spiritual rebellion that opposes the hopelessness of life around him. In 1894, the writer published a collection of short stories, “Love Without Love,” and then a collection of “Short Stories for a Year,” in which he sought to combine a demonstration of the inner world of a little man with his spiritual inner rebellion against a hopeless life. Some of the works eventually became the basis for several of Pirandello's plays.

The writer entered literature as an author who talks about the life of small towns and villages in Sicily, depicting the social strata of the people living there. For example, in the famous short stories “Blessing” and “The Fortunate,” he ridicules representatives of the clergy who hide their greed behind ostentatious mercy.

In some of his works he deliberately departs from Italian traditionalism. Thus, in the short story “The Black Shawl”, it focuses on the psychological portrait and actions of the main character, who is an old maid who decided to arrange her life, regardless of the condemnation of others. At the same time, the author, at times, harshly criticizes social order, when people are ready to do anything for the sake of profit. Public institutions are subjected to such criticism in the short story “Tight Tailcoat,” in which a professor is invited to his student’s wedding. He witnesses how the girl's future personal life is almost destroyed due to social prejudices.

A similar riot is described in the work “The Train Whistle.” At the center of the story is an accountant who feels dissatisfaction with his life under the influence of a momentary impulse. Dreaming of travel and wanderings, he realizes how unimportant the life around him is; he is carried away into an illusory world in which he finally loses his mind.

Political motives also appear in Pirandello’s work. Thus, the short stories “The Fool” and “His Majesty” demonstrate subtle political intrigues, while showing how petty they often are.

Social contradictions often become the object of criticism. In the short story "The Fan" the main character is a poor peasant woman who was abandoned by her loved one and simply robbed by her mistress. She thinks that suicide is the only way to solve all her problems.

At the same time, Pirandello remains a humanist, giving the main place in his work to the reality of human feelings. The short story “Everything is like decent people” tells how the hero conquers his beloved with his selfless love, forgiving even the betrayal she committed.

Pirandello himself often prefers to delve into the psychology of his heroes, criticizing social reality and using such a technique as the grotesque. The heroes are depicted with social masks, which they must discard in the course of the action. For example, in the short story "Some Obligations" the main character is cheated on by his wife. Her lover is an official from the municipality, to whom he comes to complain about his wife’s infidelity. And when he finds out the whole truth, he not only forgives his wife, but also helps her lover. In reality, as the reader understands, he was never jealous of his wife, only putting on the social mask of an insulted and deceived husband. The lover also wore a mask, but this time of a respectable official.

Pirandello very unobtrusively uses the grotesque in his works. For example, in the short story "In Silence" he reveals the tragedy of a young man who has learned all the cruelty of the world, which leads him to sadness and even tragic ending. He is forced to commit suicide and kill his younger brother.

In total for your literary career Pirandello wrote six novels. In Les Misérables, he criticizes social prejudice and society, portraying a woman who herself is trying to become an object of criticism from others.

And in his very famous novel"The Late Mattia Pascal" he demonstrates the emerging contradiction between true face a person living in modern society and his social mask. His hero decides to start life from scratch, arranging everything so that those around him consider him dead. But as a result, he only takes on a new shell, realizing that life outside society is impossible. He simply begins to be torn between the real and the fictional, which symbolizes the gap between reality and human perception.

Italian literature of the 21st century is represented by the famous writer, our contemporary Niccolo Ammaniti. He was born in Rome, studied at the Faculty of Biology, but never graduated. It is said that his thesis formed the basis of his first novel, called "Gills." The novel was published in 1994. It tells the story of a boy from Rome who is diagnosed with a tumor. Almost against his will, he finds himself in India, where he constantly finds himself in all sorts of, often unpleasant, situations. In 1999, the novel was filmed, but the film was not a great success.

In 1996, a collection of the writer’s stories was published under the general title “Dirt,” among which were such famous works as “The Last Year of Humanity” and “To Live and Die in Prenestino.” The story "There Will Be No Holiday" was also made into a film. main role in which Monica Bellucci performed. In general, many of Ammaniti’s works have been filmed several times.

In 1999, the modern Italian writer released another of his novels, “I’ll Pick You Up and Take You Away.” Its actions take place in a fictional city located in central Italy. But real fame came to him in 2001. His novel "I'm Not Afraid" thundered. Two years later, director Gabriele Salvatores filmed it.

The events of this work take place in the 70s of the 20th century. In a remote Italian province, 10-year-old Michele lives, who spends the whole summer playing with friends.

One day they find themselves near an abandoned house, where there is a mysterious pit covered with a lid on top. Without telling anyone about it, the next day Michele returns to his discovery, finding a boy sitting there on a chain. He supplies the mysterious prisoner with bread and water. The children get to know each other. It turns out that the boy's name is Filippo, he was kidnapped for ransom. Michele finds out that the crime was organized by a group of adults, including his own father.

Repeatedly, Ammaniti captivates readers with such captivating plots, illustrating what modern Italian literature can be. He writes not only books, but also scripts. So, in 2004, the film “Vanity Serum” was released, based on his story. In 2006, critics perceived it controversially new novel"As God commands." But at the same time, the work receives the approval of the reading community and even the Strega Award. In 2008, a film of the same name was released, again directed by Salvatores.

In 2010, Ammaniti wrote the novel “Me and You,” which was already brought to life on screen by Bernardo Bertolucci. Moreover, the maestro returns to filmmaking after a 7-year break, having become interested in the plot of Ammanity.

Among him latest works It is necessary to highlight the popular collection of short stories “A Delicate Moment” and the novel “Anna”, which became the seventh in his creative biography.

Italian literature inXX century

In the pan-European literary process of the 20th century, Italian literature plays a prominent role. The contribution of advanced literature and art of Italy over the last quarter of a century is especially significant: the Italian artistic genius is represented in modern world culture by such names as writers Alberto Moravia and Vasco Pratolini, playwright Eduardo de Filippo, artist Renato Guttuso, sculptor Giacomo Manzu, film directors Roberto Rossellini, Luchino Visconti, Federico Fellini and others.

However, throughout the 20th century. The place of Italian literature in the general panorama of Western European literatures has changed significantly more than once. The ups and downs of the Italian literary process were in close connection with those social historical events, which determined the general destinies of Italy.

There is reason to establish the following periodization of Italian literature of the 20th century: from the early 900s to the Great October revolution and the end of the First World War; 1918-1922; the period of the “black twenty years” of fascism (1922-1943); the era of the Resistance and the first post-war fifteen years; 60s of the XX century.

The paths of advanced Italian literature in the first half of the 20th century. were difficult. Long before the First World War, Italian prose and poetry began to experience symptoms of crisis. Since the beginning of the century, the tradition has gradually faded away social novel; the influence of Western European decadence is growing; the literature of imperialist reaction is born in the person of Gabriele D’Annunzio and his imitators. Italian avant-garde artists, who noisily declared themselves in the late 900s as renovators of dilapidated literary canons, turned out to be heralds of the cult of the machine, brute force, militaristic ideas, and heralds of fascism.

War 1914-1918 led to the collapse of many humanistic illusions and to the rampant chauvinist tendencies in Italian culture. The Italian creative intelligentsia emerged from this era confused, having lost faith in previous moral and cultural values, but without gaining new perspectives. The search for spiritual truths for bourgeois Italian writers in those years was limited to the narrow psychological and aesthetic sphere. Thus, the successful novel by the writer Italo Zvevo (1861-1928) “The Consciousness of Zeno” (1924) is entirely built on introspection, in it there is a break with the image of the real outside world.

In the most acute socio-political situation of the early 20s in Italy, when the forces of the revolutionary labor movement fought against the growing threat of fascisation of the country, leading Italian writers, united around the influential magazine "Ronda", called for moving away from the "topical issues", returning to the topic and forms of classical examples of literature of the 19th century. Therefore, fascism, having come to power in the fall of 1922, found Italian literature ideologically defenseless. Mussolini and his clique were not slow in launching persecution of the left-wing democratic intelligentsia. The fascist “emergency laws” of 1926 banned the young Communist Party of Italy, all opposition associations and press organs, and placed anti-fascist thought and culture in the position of criminal “subversives.”

Twenty years of fascism's dominance had a disastrous effect on Italian literature, isolated it from major social problems, which led to fragmentation and stagnation. The official fascist ideology with its reactionary demagoguery could not attract any talented creative forces. The intelligentsia of Italy did not want to serve fascism, but, being cut off from people’s life, they experienced a severe ideological and creative crisis. Not wanting to glorify fascism, many writers go into “art for art’s sake.” The so-called “artistic prose” of those years was characterized only by formal mastery. In poetry, at the end of the 20s, the so-called movement of “Hermeticism” arose. The name speaks for itself: “hermetic” poetry is closed in the circle of subjective lyrical experiences, encrypted in associative images. Among the “Hermetic” poets there were great talents: Eugenio Montale (born in 1896), Giuseppe Ungaretti (1883-1970), Umberto Saba (1883-1967). They created poems full of deep lyricism and a tragic sense of life, but inaccessible to the general reader due to the complexity of their means of expression. The very names of some poetry collections are characteristic: “The Fun of Shipwrecks” by Ungaretti, “Cuttlefish Shells” by Montale.

An illusory way of transforming “anti-poetic* real reality was the direction of “magical realism,” led by Massimo Bontemnelli (1878—■ 1960). "Magical realism" sought to eliminate the line between the real and the fantastic, combining the fantastic with realistic detail.

The veto imposed by fascism on the truthful depiction of people's life led to a break between the Italian literature of the Black Twenties and one of the most fruitful traditions of prose of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. - with the so-called school of “verism” (vero - truthful, true). “Verismo”, represented by its best representatives - Giuseppe Verga, Matilda Serao, Grazia Deledd, Luigi Capuana and others - realistically depicted the hard life of the working people of Italy. The most prominent follower of the "veristic" tradition in Italian literature of the 900s was Luigi Pirandello (1867-1936). However, in his work even before 1914 (the collection of short stories “Short Stories”, published since 1901, the novel “The Late Mattia Pascal”, 1904), gloomy, pessimistic moods and a feeling of hopeless loneliness grew.

The meaninglessness of life, of all human existence, sounds like a leitmotif in Pirandello’s novel “Spinning” (1916). In the painful atmosphere of fascism, the tragedy of Pirandello’s worldview intensifies: the writer comes

to the concept of the unknowability of life, the elusiveness of all truth. A person cannot even comprehend himself, because his inner world is a receptacle of contradictory passions and motivations. This agnosticism, combined with the writer’s hatred of the musty, sanctimonious bourgeois way of life, is revealed with enormous tension in Pirandello’s original plays, created in the period 1917-1929. The fame of Pirandello the playwright eclipsed the fame of Pirandello the prose writer.

Already in Pirandello’s first play of the new period (he turned to the theater during the First World War), the writer’s pessimistic credo was fully reflected. The title of this drama - “It is so - if it seems so to you” (1917, revised in 1925) - can be used as an epigraph to almost all of his subsequent dramas. Through the mouth of one of the characters, who plays the role of the author's mouthpiece, Pirandello shows that the relationships that have been created between the official Ponza, his wife and his mother-in-law cannot be clarified by real logic. Ponza and his mother-in-law consider each other crazy: his mother-in-law considers his wife to be her daughter, who, according to Ponza, died long ago. And the young woman does not seem to have a true “I” of her own, calling herself “the one that each of them considers me to be.”

In Pirandello's drama “Six Characters in Search of an Author” (1921), which brought him worldwide fame, the theme of the unknowability of the inner world of man is combined with the theme of art. In a family of six people, the mental life of each of them is alien and incomprehensible to the rest. Everyone wears a certain “mask of feelings” that corresponds to the external forms of life. “Each of us in vain imagines himself to be invariably united, whole, while there are a thousand or more appearances in us,” says the father of the family. The family comes to the theater with a request to embody their drama on stage: perhaps then truth and plausibility will coincide, saving them from tragic misunderstanding. Before and art turns out to be powerless to show all the versatility of a person and prevent the gloomy denouement of a family drama.

The theme of disunity, the alienation of people from themselves and from others is inextricably linked in best plays Pirandello depicting cruel social reality. The illusions that Pirandello’s hero creates for himself turn out to be a futile attempt to hide from the falseness of bourgeois morality, from real poverty and injustice. Thus, in the play “The Naked Dress” (1922), the poor lonely girl Ersilia, deceived by people, confused and committed an ugly act for which she gravely repents, wants to die, leaving behind a legend of purity. However, the clothes of a beautiful lie are torn from her by the curious, trying to get to the bottom of the “truth.” At the same time, her accusers, also dressed in rags of noble feelings, are unwittingly exposed. But these more fortunate people maintain peace of mind, since each of them has already managed to adapt to life. And Ersilia, thrown to the sidelines, rejected, dies, “not being able to get dressed.”

In the tragedy “Henry IV” (1922), the hero, who has experienced a deep moral shock, pretends to be crazy, imagining himself to be the German Emperor Henry IV. He tries to hide under the mask of a medieval king, to live with his now non-existent worries and feelings. But this illusory way out was also taken away from him by his former enemies, who saw a reflection in his “madness.” real facts. In the play “The Life I Give to You” (1923), the mother, who has lost her Son, is powerless by the power of her own spirit to preserve for herself the incorruptible image of the deceased.

Thus, Pirandello’s hero remains a suffering, tossing man, deeply intertwined with the everyday routine of social existence. But for an idealist writer, this historically determined reality turns into an eternal philosophical category.

In search of overcoming human alienation, Pirandello returns again and again to the theme of art, to theater. He was deeply concerned with the very principles of acting, designed to reveal the internal contradictions of a person. Pirandello created a kind of “theater within a theater” trilogy, the first part of which was the play “Six Characters in Search of an Author.” In the next two plays about the theater, the playwright still finds in theatrical action that means of human communication that is capable of affirming moral truths. Thus, in the play “Each in His Own Way” (1924), theatrical characters helped the two true heroes of life’s drama to realize their feelings and accept for themselves the conclusion that was proposed by the actors on the stage. “They did what art anticipated,” says one of the “spectators” in the play.

In one of his most poignant and innovative dramas - “Today we improvise” (1929) - Pirandello returns from isolated psychological problems to living reality - the life of his native Sicily with its cruel morals and prejudices, a dilapidated “code of honor”. The heroine, a young woman Mommina, languishes in the locked house of her husband, who torments her with jealousy and reproaches for the immorality of the behavior of her sisters, who have become singers. He forbids Mommine herself to sing; but the power of art conquers this musty world - it conquers at the cost of Mom-mina’s life. The plot of the play is intertwined with Pirandello's general ideas about the goals and forms of art, set forth by one of the characters - the imaginary stage director. The actors, who supposedly improvise, breaking away from the author's text, introduce the viewer into the system of acting.

Pirandello radically updated the Italian theater and introduced deep universal human problems. Pirandello's best dramas are not philosophical and abstract schemes, but deep tragedies of suffering people.

Fascism tried in every possible way to claim “ownership rights” to Pirandello, who was the only Italian writer of the 20s and 30s who won world fame. However, the internal pathos of Pirandello’s work, his longing for humanistic values ​​trampled by cruel life, his faith in the cleansing power of art - all this belonged, of course, not to fascist demagoguery, but to the genuine high national culture of Italy.

Only very few Italian writers during the period of the fascist dictatorship broke through to the social theme, which in these cases invariably entailed an exposure of fascism. It was during these years that the main problems of the work of one of the most prominent contemporary writers in Italy, Alberto Moravia (born in 1907), were determined. He began his literary career with the novel “Indifferent” (1929), which immediately brought fame to its author.

In this novel, the mastery of psychological analysis inherent in Moravia's talent has already acquired a social, anti-fascist connotation. “Indifferent” are representatives of the privileged strata of Italian society, immoral, cynical, indifferent to good and evil. The main character of the novel, Gino, watches with complete apathy the fall of his sister, corrupted by his mother’s lover. Gino feels no resentment, no shame (he lives at the expense of this man), no impulse for revenge or rebellion. Having shown this loss of moral criteria among the bourgeois youth of the 20s, whom fascist scribblers praised at that time as the “generation of new Romans,” Moravia objectively acted as an exposer of the spiritual corruption that fascism brought with it.

In the 30s, Moravia did not, however, touch upon specific socio-political themes in his work, delving deeper and deeper into the psychology of the “indifferent” - the bourgeoisie, intellectuals, officials, branding their opportunism and spiritual coldness. During these years, in the cycle of allegorical stories by Moravia (collection “Epidemic”, 1944), skepticism, disbelief in social progress, and the motive of the absurdity of the world are heard. The writer is unable to escape from the surrounding stuffy atmosphere.

Anti-fascist sentiments were more clearly reflected in Italian literature of the late 30s under the influence of the struggle of the Spanish people against fascism and as a protest against the imperialist actions of Italy in Abyssinia. Moravia at this time created a sharply satirical novel “Masquerade”, in which a certain Latin American dictator was quite transparently ridiculed. The novel was published in France, where Moravia lived in the early 40s.

The highest achievement of Italian prose on the eve of the Second World War was the book of the writer Elio Vittorini (1908-1966) “Sicilian Conversations”, written in 1938-1941. In this work, original in its genre, the anti-fascist orientation is combined with a turn to a folk theme, although in many ways it is still conventional. “Sicilian Conversations” is a story about a half-real, half-allegorical trip of the author-narrator to his homeland, to Sicily, where he goes, vaguely hoping to free himself from the feeling of “abstract fury” that everyday life evokes in him.

Ordinary people met along the way become symbolic images accompanying the writer in his thoughts. An abandoned, starving Sicilian village turns into the personification of the homeland, desecrated, insulted, harboring latent anger. The image of the Mother is depicted with impressive force in the book, which also contains a symbolic generalization: the suffering peasant woman is a living protest against fascism, which sends peasant sons to death in an unjust war of conquest in Abyssinia.

The book is written in “Aesopian language”; the writer resorts to hints, omissions, and leaves a lot in the subtext, using Hemingway’s stylistic experience. Nevertheless, for the Italian reading public, the protest contained in the Sicilian Conversations against the fascist dictatorship, which equally suppresses the people's life and the spiritual life of the intelligentsia, was clear. The deep task of the book was, first of all, to solve the problem of the intellectual, to try to find a way out for it. And although the answer is given in the “Sicilian Conversations” in a conditional, symbolic form, its meaning is in gaining spiritual contact with the people.

In 1937, the founder and leader of the Italian Communist Party, Antonio Gramsci, died in a fascist dungeon after an 11-year hard prison sentence. Only after the end of the Second World War did the Italian people and the whole world become aware of Gramsci’s “Prison Notebooks” - the historical, philosophical, literary and aesthetic studies he created in prison. Gramsci's literary works, collected in the volume “Literature and National Life,” develop important problems of Marxist aesthetics for Italian culture in their national-historical refraction.

Gramsci introduces into his aesthetic theory the concept of “national-popular” (nazionale-popolare), understanding by it a culture closely related to the most important problems of national life. “A work of art is popular when its moral, cultural, psychological content is close to the morality, culture and feelings of the nation, understood not as something static, but as being in continuous development,” he wrote. Gramsci emphasized that Italy still faces the task of creating such a truly popular-national literature and art, for “the Italian intelligentsia is far from the people and is associated with caste tradition.”

From these positions, Gramsci criticized the Italian bourgeois culture of the period of fascism, castigating its skepticism, its separation from people’s life, and exposed the demagoguery of the fascist hacks with their immoralism and cult of strength as a “new value.” He linked the creation of an advanced Italian culture with the coming powerful popular movement, on the basis of which the gap between the intelligentsia and the masses would be eliminated.

The significance of Gramsci's ideas for the development of modern Italian culture is enormous; their growing influence affects the entire intellectual life of the country in the post-war period.

The truth of Gramsci's ideas was confirmed by history itself. The anti-fascist Resistance, which unfolded in 1943-1945, ended on April 25, 1945 with a nationwide uprising against the fascists and Nazi occupiers. The collapse of Mussolini's regime and the creation of a broad popular resistance front helped to the best forces Italian culture to come out of its spiritual tunic, to find a source of inspiration in the people and their struggle. In the anti-fascist struggle, barriers between the people and the intelligentsia, which overwhelmingly took part in the Resistance, were destroyed.

In the harsh everyday life of the people, illuminated by the flames of the anti-fascist struggle, Italian writers saw the true historical content. The depiction of reality, the people's environment, a return to social themes, liberation from the formalistic canons of “Hermeticism” - these are the major aesthetic changes that the epic of the Resistance brought to Italian literature. This turn found its artistic embodiment in those works that appeared in Italy in the first years after the end of the war, and then it deepened and consolidated during the 59s, mainly in the rich and varied Italian prose.

In the first post-war decade, a stream of new, young forces poured into Italian literature. This generation felt the need to tell, first of all, about the experience of the Resistance, about the inhumanity of the Nazis, about the life of the partisans. These themes took a leading place in post-war novels and short stories, in memoir prose and film scripts. These are “People and Inhumans” by Vittorsh (1945), which tells about the high sacrifice of anti-fascists opposing “inhumans,” evil and stupid Nazis. Such are the novels “Agnese goes to his death” (1949) by Renata Vigano, “Fausto and Anna” (1952) by Carlo Caesola, the story “The Path of Spider Nests” (1949) by Italo Calvino, short stories by Marcello Venturi and many others. Writers also turned to depicting the recent, past - the period of fascism, trying to show the plight of the people during the “Black Twenties” and the ongoing Resistance (“Christ Stopped at Eboli” by Carlo Levi, 1945, “Old Comrades” by Carlo Caesola, 1953, “Speranza” Silvia-Maggi Bonfanti, 1954, "The Lands of Sacramento" by Francesco Iovine, 1950, novels by Vasco Pratolini).

Since the beginning of the 50s, Italian literature has increasingly included the theme today, problems of life and work of the Italian common people, “issues of conscience” that concern the Italian intelligentsia in the post-war world. The lives of the poor people of Naples are devoted to the short stories and stories of Dome Daco Rea (“What Cummeo Saw”, 1956), plays by Eduardo de Filippo (“Naples the Millionaire”, 1945, “Filumena Marturano”, 1947, “Lies on Long Legs”, 1948, and etc.). K. Cassola writes about the fate of young people in “Post-War Marriage” (1957); The causes of the misfortunes of the peasantry and urban unemployed of Sicily are revealed by Danilo Dolci in the documentary reports “Bandits in Partinico” (1955), “Investigation in Palermo” (1956). K. Levy's essays “Words-Stones” (1955) show the growth of consciousness of ordinary people who rise to fight for their rights, overcoming frozen customs and prejudices. The acute moral and ethical problems facing the intelligentsia in the context of the stabilization of Italian capitalism are raised by I. Calvino in the stories “Building Speculation” (1957) and “Cloud of Smog” (1958).

Despite the difference in political views and artistic style, all these writers are united by a common aesthetic and civic position; the desire to realistically show Italian reality, to evaluate the present and past of their country based on the destinies common man, creator of history. This is how it was born in Italian literature and art at the turn of the Resistance and the First. post-war years, the direction of neorealism. Neorealism was at the same time a return to the realistic tradition from the modernist movements of the 20s and 30s, which were unable to bear the “load” of the Resistance; at the same time, he was a realism of new times, striving to show modern man and the reality that shapes him. Neorealist literature, cinema, and fine art in Italy were an important stage in the development of the national realistic tradition, a great achievement of Italian culture, which placed it in the vanguard of Western European culture in the post-war years.

Although Italian neorealism in literature was by no means homogeneous in either artistic manner, nor according to theoretical principles, yet the “common origin” gave this literary polyphony a certain general tone.

Italian neorealism of the 40s and 50s can be characterized as an anti-fascist, democratic movement, posing social problems in their national, Italian guise, imbued with a humanistic mood, faith in the power of popular solidarity, in the high spiritual qualities of the common man. Neorealist writers sought to free Italian literature from clerical obscurantism, from provincialism and imitativeness, from the obscurity of poetic language.

Neorealism is characterized by autobiography. Documentedly reliable episodes of the war, Hitler's occupation, and partisan struggle were colored by the lyrical intonation of the narrative. The story of the central character in the stories of Calvino and Cassola, Pratolini and Bonfanti in many ways embodied the life path and evolution of the authors themselves during the years of the Resistance. Such a “lyrical document” was a distinct methodological device of neorealism: the hero—and with him the author—“realizes himself,” chooses his path in the midst of real menacing events, socio-historical clashes, and not in a narrow circle of psychological experiences. “The Lyrical Document” is a kind of stamp of time in Italian neorealism, which sought to experience and pass through those events of people’s life that remained outside the literature of the “Black Twenties.”

Neorealism is characterized by an appeal to a new circle of heroes. These are ordinary people who are depicted not with sad pity, but with a sense of pride in their strengths and capabilities. At first, these images were given only in an external drawing, and then they began to acquire depth and versatility. Thus, the heroine of the novel by Renata Viganò, the old peasant woman Agnese, who came to the partisan detachment on a sudden impulse, gradually realizes the high goals of the liberation struggle and without hesitation gives her life to it. These are the “old comrades” from the story by K. Kassol - underground communists who have not lost faith in the coming victory in the most bleak years of fascism. The heroes of Levi's essays "Words-Stones" and the courageous Speranza from Bonfanti's story experience difficult character formation in the course of the dramatic events in which they are participants. True, the hero of a neorealist narrative does not always grow to the scale of a typical character.

Closely connected with the appearance of a new hero is another characteristic feature of neorealism - its humanism and optimism, the desire to show great power popular solidarity is a theme that runs through many books about guerrilla warfare and the struggle for a better future in post-war Italy. This motif sounds with great force in many Italian neorealist films of the 50s (“Road of Hope”, “Girls from Spanish Square”, “Bitter Rice”, “Two Pennies of Hope”).

Neorealism injected new life into all genres of literature. The novel has been resurrected as an epic narrative about the events and affairs of people, and not as a “stream of consciousness.” Eduardo de Filippo (born in 1900) in his comedies sought to combine the traditions of Italian dialectal theater with the psychological dramaturgy of Pirandello.

Poetry gradually freed itself from “hermetic” complexity. The poet Salvatore Quasimodo (1901-1970), who began as a “hermeticist,” turned to reality during the period of the Resistance (the collection “Day by Day,” 1947, which contains his anti-fascist poems from the period of the liberation struggle). Quasimodo glorifies the feat of the partisans, his poems contain a civic theme, he affirms faith in genuine living values ​​(collections “Life is not a dream”, 1949, “The Incomparable Land”, 1958). The poet Pier-Paolo Pasolini (born in 1922) draws from the life of the Roman working outskirts hope for the future liberation of working people, of all humanity (the poem “Gramsci’s Ashes”, 1957).

New children's literature, imbued with the spirit of life's truth, free from clerical morality and bourgeois sentimentality, is being created by the poet and storyteller Gianni Rodari (born in 1920). In the poetry of Rodari (“Book of funny poems”, 1951, “Poems in heaven and on earth”, 1960, etc.) there is a closeness to Italian children's folklore. His tales “The Adventures of Cipollino” (1951), “The Journey of the Blue Arrow” (1957) and many others combine playful humor, social satire and faith in a better future for all children of the world.

The great achievement of neorealism was the simplicity and clarity of language, the widespread use of folk speech in both prose and poetry. It was neorealistic works with all their advantages and disadvantages that determined the face of Italian literature in the second half of the 40s and 50s of the 20th century.

One of the most prominent representatives of neorealist prose is the writer Vasco Pratolini (born in 1913).

Pratolini was born in Florence, into a poor family, began his working life early, and studied in fits and starts. Pratolini began writing in the late 30s, but under fascism he almost never published. The talent of the writer, an active participant in the Resistance, was revealed after the end of the Second World War.

Pratolini’s work was based on autobiographical material: the life of the poor in his native quarter, hometown. During the period of Resistance, the writer’s horizons expanded: the “family chronicle”, covered in lyricism and poetry, is infused with the theme of the anti-fascist struggle, the song of friendship and solidarity acquires social pathos.

Pratolini strives to see the fate of his generation in historical perspective. In the novel “The Quarter” (1945) he paints life and difficult ways boys and girls of the working quarter of Florence in the 30s, in the poisoned atmosphere of fascism. The book is imbued with a deep faith in the vitality of these youth, in their future, which, as the characters in the book gradually begin to understand, they will have to “conquer on the barricades,” like air and the sun.

Pratolini's best novel, The Tale of the Poor Lovers (1947), which brought him European fame, tells the story of the fate of his native Florence during the dark period of open fascist terror in 1925-1926. The author depicts the everyday life of the inhabitants of the small street Via del Corno, inhabited by working people. In their sorrows and joys, feelings and actions, a living and beautiful image of the people emerges, a rich and multifaceted national character that combines human dignity, courage and kindness, optimism and perseverance. Via del Corno becomes, as it were, a collective hero, in which there are, of course, shadow sides generated by poverty and ignorance, but a high sense of justice and humanity prevails. It is precisely this that does not allow Via del Corno to accept fascism with its ideology of violence and corrupt morality.

But in Pratolini’s novel there are heroes of a higher plane, in whose personal fate the historical fate of the people is condensed. This is, first of all, the blacksmith Corrado, nicknamed Maciste (“strongman”), in whom the features of a folk, national character are combined with a high social ideal and the will to fight. Maciste is a communist, and his devotion to a great cause makes him capable of heroic action. The “Terrible Night” invades the daily life of Via del Corno: armed fascists roam the city, cracking down on progressive figures. Maciste races on a motorcycle from street to street, warning of danger. Blackshirts kill a courageous anti-fascist. The life and death of Corrado is an example for others, for young people from Via del Corno - Hugo and Gesuina, Mario and Milena, who after the “Terrible Night” understood whose side was right. Confidence in the final victory of the people, despite the temporary triumph of dark forces, is the ideological pathos of the novel. The epic of Resistance helped the writer gain the right perspective tragic events past and reach the artistic heights of realistic generalization.

After several works devoted to the popular life of post-war Italy, Pratolini, in the novel “Metello” (1955), returns to depicting the past, trying to show in Italian history the bearers of genuine progress. The hero of the novel is the young worker Metello, who led the general strike of construction workers in Florence at the beginning of the 20th century. Both the theme of the work and its central character were completely new material for Italian literature; The very concept of what was depicted was also innovative - to present the course of history through the struggle of the working class and the formation of its self-awareness. This idea found a convincing artistic embodiment in the novel as a whole. The image of the young working boy Metello, who goes through the school of life and labor solidarity on scaffolding, is charming. The strike he organizes shapes the character of himself, his wife Ersidia and many others. In this sense, Pratolini's novel is a novel of “education of feelings.” The social in him is inextricably linked with personal experiences, which brings richness and completeness to the inner world of the heroes. All these artistic successes based on vital material unusual for the Italian tradition made “Metello” a definite milestone in the literary development of the 50s. Reader and critical discussions flared up around the novel.

But at the same time, Pratolini’s book revealed some significant “innate shortcomings” of neorealism: its inability to enlarge events and move away from chronicle. Metello himself is more of an “average type” than a generalized typical character. His image is less significant than the image of Maciste, although, according to the author’s plan, it should have carried a greater burden.

“Metello” by Pratolini seemed to embody the “ceiling” of neorealism as a method, which in the second half of the 50s showed obvious symptoms of crisis. The changed socio-historical situation in Italy, the establishment of the dominance of monopoly capital in it, demanded clearer ideological positions from progressive writers. The general democratic mood, faith in popular solidarity and the strength of popular moral principles turned out to be insufficient for understanding new social processes. The vagueness of socio-political views led many neorealist writers to confusion and inability to master artistically new reality; notes of disappointment sounded in their work; some began to “enrich” their palette with modernist techniques; some people fell silent for a while.

Progressive Italian criticism rightly pointed out that the realistic vision of the world no longer fit within the framework of neorealism, that literature began to search for new means of reflecting a more complex reality.

Sixties of the XX century. showed that neorealism, which undoubtedly played a huge role in the literary development of Italy, no longer determines the main stream of literature.

The problem of the relationship between the so-called “neo-capitalist” society and man has become most acute in Italian literature of the last decade. This dilemma is revealed in literature primarily from the inside, in showing the inner world of the individual. This trend in literature is manifested in the transfer of interest to the moral and psychological complex of modern man. However, when considering spiritual human values Italian realism at the present stage remains emphatically social. This certainly reflects the “leaven” of the Resistance and neorealist experience.

Just as important for Italian literature of the 60s was the problem of a person’s moral responsibility to society, to his era. This ethical burden can be felt in all genres of modern Italian literature - be it reportage, philosophical and allegorical novel or journalistic poetry. There is a process of intellectualization of Italian realism, seeking new artistic media For. embodiment of this complex moral and social issue.

It is possible to outline in general terms several thematic and problematic nodes of Italian prose of the last decade.

The anti-fascist, anti-war novel deepens, calling not to forget about inhumanity, to make it impossible to return the past. The most interesting in this regard is the novel by the writer Marcello Venturi (born in 1925) “The White Flag over Cefallinia” (1963). It tells about the brutal reprisal of Hitler's troops against the Italian division, which refused to surrender in 1943, on a small island of the Ionian archipelago. Resurrecting real event past, the writer emphasizes the inextricable connection between the past and the present. That terrible psychology of the “superman”, supposedly having the right to violence and murder, which was brought up by the ideology of fascism and Nazism, should not be revived.

A whole group of writers with great power of satirical exposure shows another - more “modern” - form of distortion of the human psyche in the grip of “neo-capitalism” with its fetishization of technology and depersonalizing forms of managing people. Libero Bigzharetti’s psychological novel “Congress” (1964) sounds poignant, showing opportunism, the spiritual renegade of a former progressive journalist who joined the service of a large monopoly, losing his convictions in exchange for a secure existence.

Goffredo Parise's grotesque novel The Master (1964) shows how a large firm turns a young employee into a "robot with industrial ideas" who worships the brilliance of a prosperous monopolistic enterprise.

The moral and ethical problems of our time have arisen with particular sharpness in post-war creativity Alberto Moravia.

The events of the liberation struggle had a profound impact on the writer and largely changed his range of interests and themes in the 50s. In the collection of short stories “Roman Stories” (1953), he turns to the everyday life of ordinary people, depicting their feelings and experiences, misadventures and simple successes, revealing in a laconic psychological short story the spiritual world of folk characters - working guys and saleswomen, small shopkeepers, office workers and the unemployed " the eternal city." However, the heroes of Moravia are, as a rule, alone; no one will lend a helping hand to them. The motif of popular solidarity, so characteristic of neorealist literature, is absent in Roman Tales. "

A tribute to the Resistance, according to the author himself, was the novel “Chocharka” (1957). In the center of the book - simple woman, who survived the horrors of war and Nazi occupation. Moravia showed the strength of the people's character and condemned war, which distorts the very nature of man. A new hero for Moravia also appeared in the novel - an anti-fascist intellectual who dies at the hands of the invaders. Nevertheless, this image revealed the author’s obvious ignorance of such people in life: his Michele is again a loner.

However, already from the mid-50s, Moravia again returned to the same themes, with great sensitivity of psychological analysis, revealing new shades of moral decay in the Italian bourgeoisie of the post-war model. The novel Contempt (1954) combines an almost pamphleteering denunciation of modern bourgeois pseudo-art “for the masses” with the theme of the alienation of people as a result of the increasing power of monetary relations. This theme is even more alarming in Moravia's novel Boredom (1960). The artist Dino uses the word “boredom” to define his painfully felt isolation from real life, which deprives him of the opportunity to create and perceive the world artistically. His rich mother perceives such alienation as the norm: fetishized secular relationships replace natural human feelings, money becomes flesh and blood. However, the hero is looking for a way out exclusively in the sphere of Erotica. Tying sex and alienation into one knot, overloading the novel with descriptions of the erotic. scenes, Moravia significantly weakened the social and artistic sound of his book.

Here it is appropriate to say that in modern Italian literature it has become more difficult to find positive hero. The images of courageous and persistent people of neorealism, to whom so many hands reached out, who won by their very death, have disappeared. The new social reality has apparently not yet been sufficiently “mastered” by Italian literature of the 60s, which, with its sharply critical attitude towards the bourgeois order, cannot compensate for this loss.

One of the few exceptions in this regard is Vasco Pratolini's novel The Persistence of Reason (1963), written by the author after a long silence and several creative failures. In The Persistence of Reason, Pratolini seeks to combine several lines of his work: interest in the young hero, a look at reality from a historical perspective and showing the inner world of a man from the people.

This novel is an undoubted success of the author, who was able to artistically convincingly show the “spiritual formation of a working guy, moving from a kind of anarchic “communism of feeling” to an awareness of the harsh duty to life, to the constancy of reason. Shifting the sequence of time in the narrative, Pratolini intersperses the first-person narrative with memories. This technique recreates the picture of life in Italy in the post-war twenty years in the soul of a teenager. spiritual experience along with youthful passions and disappointments. Pratolini shows how the best part of the Italian working youth, by the very logic of life, by the very conditions of their existence, comes to the ideas of struggle, to the ideals of communism. Along with young Bruno, tossing about and inconsistent, the author brings out the communist of the “old guard” Millosky, who, without loud phrases, with his life and actions, gradually convinces the young man of the rightness of his cause.

Intransigence towards “neo-capitalism”, hostile to people’s Life and the free development of the individual, leads the progressive literature of Italy to the creation of truthful, socially rich works.

Italy's participation in the First World War on the side of the Entente intensified the already acute contradictions in a country with a backward socio-economic structure, centuries-old unresolved problems and poverty, which was Italy at the end of the 19th century. It stimulates revolutionary movement, the prestige of the socialist party. In 1921, the Communist Party was created in Italy. However, within a year, Mussolini came to power and established a fascist dictatorial regime in the country, which went down in Italian history as the “Black Twenty.” Culture was subordinated to politics and totalitarianism, which led to the polarization of the intelligentsia, most of whom did not accept fascism. During the long years of captivity, "Prison Notebooks" were created Antonio GRAMSCI(1891-1937), in which the foundations of people's democratic culture and Marxist aesthetics were developed.

Many writers who did not want to glorify fascism hid behind the concepts of “pure art,” the so-called “artistic prose” and the “Hermeticism” movement (Italian: poesia ermetica), which emerged in the late twenties. The "Hermetics" focused on intimate and subjective experiences, encrypted poetics. Their works are simple in form. They sought, first of all, to express feelings, not thoughts, to convey the hidden world of mental states. Adjacent to the "sealants" Eugenio Montale(1896-1981) - Nobel Prize laureate 1975, Giuseppe UNGARETTI(1888-1970), Umberto SABA(1883-1957).

Encrypted associative images are characteristic of “The Fun of the Castaways” (1932) and “The Sense of Time” (1933) by Ungaretti, “Accidents” (1939) of Montale. Ungaretti owns the lines that convey the “hermetic feeling of the world”:

But my screams hurt like lightning the hoarse bell of the sky and collapse in horror. (Translated by E. Solonovich)

The poetry of Umberto Saba, the only great artist who escaped avant-garde searches, belongs to the classical national tradition. He is faithful to reality, to the happy dimensions of what he experienced in childhood. The poet’s bright, cloudless verse is a unique form of protecting man, joy and beauty from the “abyss” of despair:

Words in which the human heart was once reflected - naked and surprised. I wish I could find a corner in the world, a blessed oasis, where I could cleanse you with tears from all-blinding lies. And then, like snow in the sun, the sadness that is forever alive in memory would melt away. (Translated by E. Solonovich)

At the origins of mature Italian lyricism - "Orphic Songs" published in 1914 Dino CAMPAIGNS(1885-1932), the only collection of the poet, called the “Italian Rimbaud” for his vagrancy and chaotic life.

Poet Salvatore QUASIMODO(1901-1968), Nobel Prize winner in 1959, entered poetry in the thirties, following both Hermeticism and Hellenistic poetry, which he translated (the collections Water and Earth, Erato and Apollo). A sharp change was recorded by his poems from the period of the Resistance, reflecting the new pathos of the partisan struggle (“And suddenly the evening came,” 1942; “Life is not a dream,” 1949). Quasimodo's poems are laconic and expressive:

The night is over, and the moon dissolves in the azure, floating behind the canals. September is tenacious here on the flat land, and its autumn meadows are green, like the southern spring valleys. I left my comrades and buried my heart in an ancient wall, so that I could remember you alone. Oh, how far further away you are than the moon, now that hooves are clattering along the pavement on the eve of dawn! (Translated by L. Martynov)

The culture of the beginning of the century is overcoming a crisis of moral, spiritual and aesthetic values. On the ruins of the romantic ideals of the Risorgimento and the collapse of positivist foundations, idealistic philosophy, intuitionism, and agnosticism gained popularity. The assimilation of Nietzsche's ideas on Italian soil has its own specifics. Nationalist ideology penetrates culture and colors the Italian avant-garde, especially futurism. The aesthetic concept of Benedetto CROCE (1866-1952) was of great importance in the reorientation of the entire Italian culture. Based on the postulate “art is pure intuition,” it was located between intuitionism and positivism.

Italian decadence, replaced by avant-garde, is developing quite intensively, as if trying to catch up with other European countries. It interweaves contradictory tendencies: “the poetry of blood and iron” as a reaction to the 20th century and the desire to hide from the chaos of the century and the thunder of guns in a quiet provincial life. The main myths and masks of decadence in Italy were created by Gabriele D'ANNUNZIO (1863-1938), poet, prose writer, playwright. His short stories, which appeared at the end of the century and later published under the general title "Pescari Novels" (1902), are characterized by eclecticism; they you can recognize the experience of verism and naturalism of Zola, the psychological analysis of Maupassant and the moral and psychological collisions of Dostoevsky; in them there is a lot of cruel fanaticism and a strong craving for refined feelings.

D'Annunzio's novels "The Triumph of Death" (1894) and "Flame" (1900) emphasize the myth of the superman and the conqueror, which previously found a place in his poetry collections ("Roman Elegies", 1892). The best poetic creation of the writer contains excellent examples of lyrics - the cycle “Songs of Praise to Heaven, Sea, Earth, Heroes” (1903-1912), consisting of five books. In the last novel by D. Annunzio, written before the war, “Perhaps - yes, perhaps - no” (1910), rather weak in artistic terms, but significant for understanding the evolution of the writer, admiration for technology and speed is expressed. From the “superman”, reveling in a torpedo attack, it is not far from the official poet of fascism, to whom Mussolini’s government granted the title of prince in 1924, and to the idol of nationalist-minded youth.

The content of the article

ITALIAN LITERATURE developed quite late, because the strong influence of the Latin language prevented the manifestation in literature of the gradually developed new vernacular language. At the same time, political and trade relations with France facilitated the penetration of Western literary models into Italy, as a result of which, naturally, the first period of Italian literature began with imitation.

From the end of the 12th century, and perhaps earlier, mainly after the Albigensian wars, troubadours appeared at the small princely courts of Upper Italy, where the Provençal language was understood, and soon independent poets began to write in the Provençal language in Italy. In Central Italy at the beginning of the 13th century. There were no brilliant courtyards, and in the South the Provençal language was incomprehensible. Therefore, here we first turned to vernacular, and therefore Italian poetry began in Sicily, at the court of Emperor Frederick II.

These poetic works are for the most part only pale reflections of Provençal models, without individual character, and only a few of them were original. With the fall of the Hohenstaufens, Tuscany became the new center of poetry, where Guittone d'Arezzo (Guittone D'arezzo, c. 1215–1294), one of the largest Italian poets of the 13th century, who was still under strong Provencal influence in his education, became the head of the poetic school , which represented a transitional stage in Italian literature.And here, along the way, a more recent realistic movement arose, especially in the person of Chiaro Davanzati (d. 1304), one of the most prolific Italian authors before Dante: at least 122 of him are known sonnets and 61 ballads.

Finally, the Sicilian school from Tuscany moves to Bologna, and here, in contrast to it, a school arises that did not adhere to the popular realistic movement, but was under scientific influence and acquired a symbolic-allegorical character. Its head was Guido Guinizzelli (d. 1276). Soon this trend reached its highest development in Florence, where among its followers were Guido Cavalcanti (1259–1300) and Dante.

Along with this, comic and satirical poetry developed. In Upper Italy, Provençal poetry continued to exist and the French language acquired significant influence. Many Italians wrote their works in French: Brunetto Latini (c. 1220–1294) his encyclopedic work Great Treasure (Le Tresor), Marco Polo about his travels, etc.

In Upper Italy, under the influence of wandering French singers, a fairly extensive Franco-Italian literature arose. Prose literature finally also begins in this century. Several examples of letters in the Bolognese dialect have survived, as have many translations of French “adventure novels” and translations from Latin.

In the 14th century Florence became the political center of Tuscany, and the Tuscan dialect took a dominant place in Italian literature. At the turn of this century, one of the greatest personalities of this time appears in Italian literature - Dante. Following Dante, other writers of the early Renaissance appeared - Francesco Petrarca, author of lyric poems and sonnets. The story (short story), which has always been a strong point of Italian literature, found at that time an outstanding representative, Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–1375), who earned worldwide fame with his collection of short stories Decameron.

See section ITALIAN LITERATURE in the article RENAISSANCE LITERATURE

Other literature of the 14th century, partly adjacent to the works of the 13th century, partly imitative, is rather insignificant in comparison with the works of these three writers.

In fact, the tradition of classical culture has never been interrupted in Italy. In the era of Dante, a particularly zealous desire to resurrect the artistry of the Latin classics was manifested. In the 15th century Italian nobility and scholars are actively searching for ancient Greek and Latin manuscripts. Thus, it is clear that educated people who left Greece after the capture of Constantinople by the Turks met with a warm welcome in Italy. The invention of printing and the desire of a large number of petty princes to advance one another in their patronage of the sciences greatly contributed to the spread of newly acquired classical knowledge.

Folk literature in the 15th century. At first she was almost completely suppressed by this scientific movement. However, in Venice, folk erotic poetry was imitated in excellent canzonettas and strambottos, which he also set to music, by the Venetian patrician and humanist Leonardo Giustiniani (c. 1388–1446).

Moreover, religious poetry appears in Umbria in the form dramatic plays Devozione, in Florence - under the name Sacra Rappresentazione– spiritual dramas, similar to mysteries based on plots from the Old and New Testaments, apocrypha and lives of saints. The plays were didactic, with mandatory punishment for vice and reward for virtue in the finale.

From the second half of the century, national poetry again penetrated and became widespread in noble and court society. Three literary centers are formed: Naples, Ferrara and Florence. In Florence, Lorenzo de' Medici (1448–1492) patronized literature and himself wrote poems in imitation of Dante and Petrarch. Among his like-minded people and friends were Luigi Pulci (1432–1484) from Florence and Agnolo Ambrogini, nicknamed Poliziano (1454–1494), who form a kind of triumvirate of Florentine Quattrocento poets.

Almost at the same time as Pulci, Matteo Maria Boiardo, Count of Scandiano (1434–1494), wrote the first true Italian epic poem in Ferrera Orlando in Love (Oriando innamorato).

Among the lyric poets of this period we should mention the Neapolitan Cariteo (d. ca. 1515), Serafino d'Aquila (1466–1500), Bernardo Accolti of Arezzo, the famous improviser, called "L'unico" (d. ca. 1534), and etc.

Of the comic and satirical poets, we should especially note Antonio Cammelli from Pistoia (Antonio Cammelli, 1440–1502). The drama was dominated by imitation of the ancients. Among the most significant prose writers is Leon Battista Alberti (1404–1472), universal genius The Early Renaissance, who left his mark in almost all areas of science and art of his time - philology, mathematics, cryptography, cartography, pedagogy, art theory, literature, music, architecture, sculpture, painting - and Matteo Palmieri (1406–1478 ). The famous Girolamo Savonarola from Ferrara, who exposed the licentiousness of morals at the Medici court, wrote treatises, sermons and laudas.

By the end of the 15th century. a prose writer appears in Naples, creating a new literary movement; Jacopo Sannazzaro (1458–1530), in addition to a large number of poems in vernacular Italian, wrote a fantastic bucolic novel Arcadia(Arkadia), which aroused the admiration of his contemporaries and had a significant influence on European literature.

In the 16th century both directions - Italian folk literature and humanism - merge into one harmonious whole, giving rise to a surge of Italian literature. It begins with the heroic romantic epic of Lodovico Ariosto (1474–1533) Furious Roland (Oriando furioso), which gave rise to a whole stream of heroic poems. However, a reaction is soon noticed that contrasts the description of the romantic world with unvarnished, sharp comedy. The head of this school was the Mantuan Teofilo Folengo (1492–1544). Girolamo, Amelunghi, Grazzini belong to the same direction.

At the same time, another group of writers gave Italian literature a new direction, which required it to completely imitate the ancients, and was represented by long heroic epics based on the Aristotelian heritage. The head of this trend was Giangiorgio Trissino from Vicenza (1478–1550), who wrote a poem in blank verse Italia liberta dei Goti based Iliad Homer and tragedy Sofonisba(1515). This also includes Luigi Alamani from Florence (1495–1556), Bernardo Tasso (1493–1569), father of Torquato Tasso, who wrote in 1575 one of the last brilliant works of the late Renaissance, an epic poem Liberated Jerusalem (Gerusalemme liberata).

In this century, the didactic poetry of the ancients was often imitated. For the most part, the model was Georgica Virgil. Lyrics again approach Petrarch, leaving aside his mannered imitators of the 15th century. This direction was led by Cardinal Pietro Bembo (1470–1547). Bembo, in addition, argued the advantages of the Tuscan dialect, in which he saw the basis of literary Italian language(Discourses in prose about the folk language).

Michelangelo Buonaroti (1475–1564), more original than other Petrarchists, Luigi Alamanni, the Venetian Bernardo Cappello, Torquato Tasso, Bernardo Baldi and many others formed some kind of opposition to the poets who wrote in classical meters.

Literature after the Renaissance.

The bright sun of the Renaissance, although sometimes cold, dimmed in the 16th century. There were reasons for this, and quite historical ones. The Renaissance did not just fade, it suffocated. Italy lost its independence, and Spanish rule was established in the country. In Spain itself, absolutism was characterized as extremely reactionary, the economy was exhausted by constant campaigns of conquest. Spain began to influence Italy, imposing its model of existence on it, which naturally led to disastrous consequences in the political and social sphere and could not but affect intellectual life. Along with the Counter-Reformation, orthodoxy, stubbornness in philosophical thought and rigid moral standards returned, which was almost fatal for the Italian genius, who by nature needed freedom and even skepticism to flourish.

In the period between Ariosto and Tasso, the Council of Trent took place, which is very symbolic; no better illustration of the impact of the Counter-Reformation can be imagined than the contrast between Furious Orlando And Liberated Jerusalem. Tasso's knights are under spiritual oppression, Crusades are performed very seriously - they are more religious than epic. And this - with a generation that already knew what the institution of the papacy and the Ottoman Empire, united against Christian countries, were; Ariosto’s carefree fantasies are no longer there, and the narrative moves forward with difficulty, and only sometimes relief comes in literary digressions, but they are also carefully planned to fit within the framework of what is permitted. And only due to the fact that Torquato Tasso was a brilliant and sincere man, in Liberated Jerusalem there is a melancholy, sad beauty, and there are passages interspersed with sensual and luxurious scenes, but with their subsequent condemnation prescribed. In the atmosphere of the late 16th century, and even more so in the 17th century, it was impossible for an Italian writer to be sincere even with himself if, as in the case of Tasso, he was vaguely aware of the duality of his position.

As for the genre of pastoral drama of shepherd masks, which originally belonged to escapist literature, there was no problem there, and therefore Tasso could create harmonious beauty Aminty– graceful, technically perfect and winning drama. Pastor Fido (Faithful Shepherd, 1590) Giovanni Batista Guarini is another creation in the same genre and of approximately the same level of literary skill.

Chief representative classical school was Count Giacomo Leopardi (1798–1837). Giacomo Leopardi, an important literary figure of this period, was first and foremost an excellent exponent of lyrical pessimism. He was characterized by intellectual power, depth and acuity of feelings and erudition, which can fairly be compared only with Dante. Leopardi, a poet with a special personal emotionality, was an exponent of his time, therefore much more understandable and exciting for the contemporary reader than Dante. Cycle of poems Songs(Canti) is the most clearly formulated expression of a person’s protest against his fate that existed in the literature of this period. Leopardi reflects in some of his Songs a true longing for the period of the Risorgimento, when there was a struggle for national liberation and unity. In his canzonas he achieved unsurpassed perfection of form and depth of thought, both in comparison with his contemporaries and with the latest Italian poetry. Leopardi also expressed his philosophy in sharp and energetic prose.

Many poets grouped around him: Giovanni Torti (1774–1858), lyricist Giovanni Berkete (1783–1851), Tomaso Grossi (1791–1853), who wrote in addition to short stories in verse Ildegonda, Ulrico and Lida and poems Lombards in the First Crusade (I Lombardi alla prima crociata) novel Marco Visconti; Silvio Pellico (1789–1859), who wrote many tragedies and poems, but is especially famous for his description of his imprisonment ( Le mie prigioni); Giuseppe Nicolini (1788–1855); Luigi Carrere (1801–1850); the brilliant political satirist Giuseppe Giusti (1809–1850), who gave a number of magnificent satirical portraits of aristocrats, bankers, bourgeois and even the pope; Gabriele Rossetti (1783–1854); Turin Massimo d'Azeglio (1798–1886), who also wrote two novels: Ettore Fieramosca and Niccoló de'Lapi; Francesco Domenico Guerazzi (1804–1873); Cesare Cantu (b. 1805) wrote a novel Marherita Pusteria; Genoese Giuseppe Mazzini (1808–1872), critic romantic school and etc.

Historical novel by Alessandro Manzoni Engaged (I promise) is one of the finest examples of all romantic literature. However, the intonation of this outstanding work- patriotic, the same theme is repeated in his plays, which are clearly influenced by William Shakespeare, as well as in his lyrics, in which the theme of deep and all-encompassing Christianity is felt. The Betrothed is still considered one of the best Italian novels; it shows the influence of Walter Scott, but Manzoni adds his deep and calm realism to Scott's formula. Genre historical novel cultivated by a number of talented writers, such as Francesco Domenico Guerazzi (1804–1873), Tomaso Grossi (1791–1853) and Massimo d'Azeglio (1798–1866), author of a historical novel that was very widely read in its time Memories (I Miei Ricordi).

After the exploits of Giuseppe Garibaldi (1807–1882) and the inventive maneuvers of Cavour (1810–1861), the struggle for independence entered a triumphant phase, and the capture of Rome in 1870 completed the unification of Italy, which the country's patriots had dreamed of for so long.

After the unification of Italy, all genres of Italian literature flourished.

Paolo Giacometti (1817–1882) wrote a number of tragedies and comedies that were successful, e.g. Poet and dancer (Il poeta e la ballerina); Leopoldo Marenco wrote tragedies, dramas, chivalric plays and comedies of manners, which dominated the stage for some time and had many imitators. Leading place in the tragedy rightfully belongs to Pietro Cosa (1830–1881): Nerone, I Borgia etc. Cavalotti’s tragedy was well received by viewers and readers Alcibiades (Alcibiade).

Comedy featured two directions: comic and social. The most significant representative of the first is the lawyer Tomaso Gherardi del Testa (1815–1881). Paolo Ferrari (1822–1889), who dominated the stage throughout his life, belonged to the direction of social comedy. Of the lyricists of this era, the most famous are the following: Giovanni Prato (1815–1884), the lyric-epic poet Luigi Mercantini (1821–1872), a patriotic poet who wrote the widely known and popular song Inno di Garidaldi; Giacomo Zanello (d. 1888); Carducci, Giosue (1835–1907) was the greatest literary figure of the new Italy built as a result of the triumph of the Risorgimento. Carducci is a historian at heart, although it cannot be said that his poems are without feeling, but they were clearly created under the influence of epic rather than lyrical inspiration. His work is worth noting not only for its sensitive themes, but also because he adapted many poetic forms from the classical ancient period into modern Italian. He was not the first experimenter of this style, but he perfected it, made it his own, and filled it with content worthy of this form. From his lyrical and satirical works allocate Luvenilia, Levia gravia, Poesie, Nuove odi barbare, Terze odi barbare.

Novels and stories were written by Antonio Bresciani (1798–1862), Nicolo Tomasseo (1802–1874); The author of the novel of characters is Ippolito Nievo.

In the last decades of the 19th century. Italy produced a number of remarkable literary talents. Much attention was paid to the novel, story and lyric poetry, but the drama also showed a desire for independence and liberation from the all-powerful influence of the French theater.

The realistic direction of the novel and story, which was at one time the favorite, was increasingly replaced by psychological analysis. In chronological order, first mention should be made of a beautifully written psychological novel L'anima E. A. Butti (1893). Interesting novels by women writers Matilda Serao ( Castigo, 1893) and Emma Perodi ( Suor Ludovica, 1894).

Novel by Gabriel D'Annunzio Triumph of Death (Il trionfo della morte) (1894) describes the psychological state of the hero, the poet Giorgio Aurispa, during the last months of his life, with which he ends due to a hereditary attraction to suicide. D'Annunzio's next novel Le vergini delle Rocce(1895), first of the series Romanzi del Giglio, built on misunderstood ideas of Nietzsche.

Worth mentioning Sulla breccia(1894) by Antoinette Giacomelli, not a novel in the proper sense of the word. This book, which attracted the attention of contemporaries, was written by a devout Catholic with a sincere and deep intention to convert humanity to morality and religion. Gerolam Rowett wrote a wonderful novel of morals La Baraonda(1894), which mercilessly exposes the dark sides of the world of businessmen, financiers and speculators; Rowetta remained true to his direction in the novel L'idolo(1898). His latest work is a simply and vitally written novel La Signorina, telling about the life of high society in Milan. A realistic description of morals was given by Frederico de Roberto in the novel I Vicere (1894). Il figlio(1894) by Arthur Coluati describes the underbelly of ministerial and banking circles in Rome and the scandals that erupted there. On the contrary, unresolved problems and injustice reigning in the lower strata of Italian society become the theme of the novel by writer Bruno Sperani La fabbrica (1895).

The novels of Neera (the pseudonym of Anna Zuccari-Radius) have a completely different character: a wonderful work Anima sola(1895), where a deep confession appears in the form of a written confession inner life a painfully sensitive famous artist, in whom many tried to recognize Eleanor Duse; about the suffering of a woman's heart and her last novel La vecchia casa(1900). Antonio Fogazzaro published the novel in 1895 Piccolo mondo antico from the time of the formation of the kingdom. The novel also did not go unnoticed by contemporaries Ave(1896) Alfonso Albertazzi, imbued with the ideas of socialism. These years gave the literature of Italy a number of names also worthy of mention. These are Amalcare Lauria, Olivieri Sangiacomo, Sofia Bisi Albini, Jane della Quercia, Matilda Serao. In 1900, D'Annunzio's highly acclaimed novel appeared Flame (Il Fuoco), which caused both boundless admiration and harsh criticism.

Of those that appeared in the 90s of the 19th century. collections of short stories and stories, it is worth noting thirteen wonderful, lovingly written short essays by the already mentioned Matilda Serao: Gli amori(1894), three of her stories Donna Paola(1897) and sad Storia di una monaca the same year.

Luigi Capuana wrote Le appasionate(1893), collection Il braccioletto(1897) and seven short, artistically powerful stories Anime a nude(1900). Among other authors of novels and stories of this period, the stories of Giovanni Verga deserve mention. Don Candeloro e compagni(1893), Antonio Fogazzaro with story Racconti brevi(1894), Farina with entertaining stories written in simple language Il numero tredici(1895) and Che dirá il mondo?(1896). Marco Prague paints with deep knowledge and fidelity the lives of Italian actors in Story di palcoscenico(1896). The works of Edmond de Amichise are interesting: essays about impressions after visiting the Italian colonies in Argentina, In America, ending with a tragic story, and psychological sketches, the plots of which are played out in a horse-drawn railway carriage La carozza di tutti(1898). Eduardo Scarfoglio wrote a beautiful description of a trip to Abyssinia that reads like a novel Il cristiano errane (1897).

From the vast mass of lyrical poems of this period, the collection of poems by d'Annunzio entitled Poema paradisiaco(1893). Here his mastery of the musicality of verse, his dominance over language, rhythm and form, is manifested.

The works of another poet, Arthur Grafe, Doro il tramonto(1893) and Medusa imbued with hopeless pessimism. Count, who subtly understands Leopardi's psychology, belongs to the most powerful poets of Italy of that period.

The poems of Giovanni Morradi, collected under the title Ricordi lirici (1893) – beautiful paintings nature, love songs, elegies full of sorrow. They were followed by more Ballate moderne (1895).

Mario Rapisardi delivered a satirical poem Atlantide(1894), written in octaves and considered a failure of the author, but giving a picture of the author's contemporary science, literature and morality. The work of Alfredo Baccelli seems more successful - a social poem Vittime e ribelli(1894) and Iride umana(1898) – history human soul and a look into the future. The poet Giuseppe Carducci, who was inclined towards moderate verismo, published several odes in 1896–1897, in particular Per il monumento di Dante And La chiesa di Polenta. Giovanni Pascoli published in 1897 Poemetti, where he mainly glorifies Tuscan nature. In 1898, inspired and idealistic Poesie scelte Antonio Fogazzaro and almost simultaneously Vecchie e nujve odi tiberine Domenico Gnoli. Other poets of this time: Vittorio Aganoore, Severino Ferrari, D.M. Witteleski. They wrote in various local dialects: Sarfatti - in Venetian, A. Sindici, Trilussa, A. Sbrishia - in Roman, in Peruginian - R. Torelli, in Neapolitan - Saltore di Giacomo and others.

In the field of dramatic literature, the work of Italian writers of this period is poorer and more limited. It is enough to name four main playwrights, around whom less significant authors were grouped. These are representatives of the realistic movement in literature: Gerolamo Rovetta, Giuseppe Giacosa, Marco Prague and Giovanni Verga.

Rovetta in 1893 wrote a comedy in two acts La cameriera nova and a drama in three acts I disonesti (published in 1894). The comedy La realtà (1895) was a great success, and in Principio di secolo Rovetta returns to a historical drama forgotten in Italy. A comedy was written in 1897 Il poeta; subtle psychological sketch - comedy Il Ramo d'ulivo and finally in 1900 a comedy Le due coscienze.

Giuseppe Giacosa published a collection of his dramatic works in 1900. Best – One Act Drama I diritti dell'anima, and comedy Come le foglie- an apt picture of social mores, which had great success with the public.

M. Praga wrote a lot, but none of his works survived the test of time.

D’Annunzio’s dramatic experiments were extremely interesting, in particular his five-act tragedy La città morta(published in 1898), first performed with E. Duse in Paris in 1897 in a French translation. However, critics noted that, despite the perfection of the form, the characters in the tragedy are lifeless and sketchy. The same year a one-act drama was published Il sogno d'un tramonto d'autunno, second in the series I sogni delle stagioni, rather a monologue, a lyrical epilogue to a drama with excellent psychological development and brilliant form.

Among other writers of the late 19th century. stand out are the romantic poet Giovanni Prati (1815–1884), the gentle Silvio Pellico (1789–1854), who is the author of sublime works in which heroic-patriotic motifs were heard, like My dungeons (Le mie prigioni) and Francesca da Rimini - all of them are not the most famous writers and poets of the 19th century. Giuseppe Niccolini (1782–1861) went down in history as a playwright of the Risorgimento, an exponent of the views of the advanced part of the emerging bourgeoisie in the first decades of the 19th century. Niccolini's work is imbued with hatred of political and religious despotism and the dream of creating a united independent Italy.

Italian literature of the early 20th century.

reflected problems common to Europe. With the passage of time, it is possible to make a retrospective critical assessment of both movements and individual authors for the period starting from the end of the 19th century. and before the outbreak of the First World War.

In the field of poetry, Carducci's direct successor was Giovanni Pascoli (1853–1912), because a number of his poems were written under the influence of the muse of history, which also inspired his famous contemporary. But at the core of Pascoli's inspiration lies a melancholy reminiscent of Leopardi and even Petrarch. More impressive and comprehensive was the contribution of Gabriele D'Annunzio (although perhaps his influence was not very lasting), who by that time had become the main voice of Italian literature. The personality and creative life of D'Annunzio added magic and a mysterious flair to his fame, he produced impressed both as a poet, playwright, and writer. To subsequent generations, D'Annunzio seems artificial, false, and yet, thanks to how many writers drew their inspiration from his work and even from criticism of his works, he must be considered as a source of life-giving force in Italian literature even today.

The Futurist movement of 1909–1914, represented by poets such as Corrado Govoni, expressed an anti-rhetorical position, and had many similarities with D'Annunzio.

Crepuscolari, i.e. the twilight poets, Guido Gozzano (1883–1916) and Sergio Corazzini (1886–1907) can be seen as a reaction against the phenomenon of d'Annunzianism; while Dino Campana (1885–1932) is now considered the forerunner of the modern school, and he also felt the influence of D'Annunzio.

This period can be characterized as the time of maturity of the Italian novel. Sicilian Giovanni Verga (1840–1922), whose work depicts social and literary position, which has much in common with French naturalism, but at the same time is not a copy of it. Verga's literature was distinguished both in technique and in inspiration, which felt fresh and powerful. The work of the writer Italo Svevo (1861–1928) from Trieste stands out. His highly intellectual works were far ahead of their time. Other leading novelists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. - this is Matilda Serao (1856-1927) from Naples, the Tuscan Federico Tozzi (1883-1920), Grazia Deledda (1878-1936) from Sardinia - all of them are classified as writers of a provincial direction; the somewhat sentimental Antonio Fogazzaro (1842–1911), Alfredo Panzini (1863–1939), writing in a light ironic style; Massimo Bontempelli (1878–1960) and Aldo Palazzeschi (1885–1974), both endowed with an unusual sense of fantasy, are both associated with Futurism; G. A. Borghese (1882–1952), subtle critic of literature and politics; Bruno Cicognani (1879–1971); and Riccardo Bacchelli (1891–1985), author of the famous great historical trilogy The Mill on the Po.

The most prominent theatrical playwrights of the period are the bourgeois moralist Giuseppe Giacosa (1847–1906), the disillusioned but clear-eyed Marco Prague (1862–1929), the shallow but very popular Dario Nicodemi (1874–1934), and the charming Sabatino Lopez ( 1867–1951). All of them, in general, were representatives of social drama, and the spiritual enthusiasm with which their works were written made them very French. Another talented playwright was the Neapolitan Roberto Bracco (1862–1943), who began by imitating the superficial, cheerful and elegant French comedy, and subsequently, under the influence of Ibsen, wrote plays full of realism and melancholy, as well as Sam Benelli (1877–1949), whose plays in verse were distinguished by romanticism.

A huge Italian contribution to the development of the theater were the works of the so-called. grotesque playwrights created in the second decade of the 20th century. in an ironic and paradoxical manner, developing various topics, from personal, everyday to social. Luigi Chiarelli (1884–1947) explored the eccentric and strange behavior of heroes in his dramatic works. His play The Mask and the Face (1916) was a pioneer in this genre, Rosso di San Secondo (1887–1957) dealt with the same issues, his theater combined symbolism and social criticism. The most important figure of the grotesque, however, was Luigi Pirandello (1867–1936). His dramatic works masterfully constructed and marked by clear and clear presentation, non-standard situations and many new techniques, which attracted the attention of the whole world to his work. The main difference between his works is that they all raised very important and significant philosophical problems and brought them to the stage, such as the polysemy of personality, the problem of truth as opposed to illusion, the contrast between conventions and sincerity, the definition of identity and the nature of hallucinations. Pirandello's psychological, highly intellectual theater, with the sometimes shocking content of his plays, not only attracts, but also involves the viewer in the theatrical action. The originality of Pirandello's plots, his discoveries in the field of staging performances, and his caustic and pessimistic outlook have left their mark on the world theater; something of Pirandello can be seen in writers as diverse as Sartre, Giraudoux, Beckett, Wilder and Ionesco.

More than half a century in all directions literary activity was created by the famous Benedetto Croce (1866–1952), an outstanding historian, philosopher and literary critic. Croce's literary criticism, partly reflecting the influence of Francesco De Sanctis (1817–1883), author of the history of Italian literature, which became a classic, and partly Croce followed his own strict philosophical standards, and thus he performed a disciplinary and purifying function, running like a red thread through the following one after another literary schools and fashion trends that appeared in the first decades of the 20th century. In this regard, special mention should be made of the group formed around two periodicals: La Voce, founded in 1910 by Giuseppe Prezzolini (1882–1982) and Giovanni Papini (1881–1956); and "La Ronda", founded in 1922 by Vincenzo Cardarelli. The general style of the Voce was experimental and did not reject the influence of foreign literature, mainly French; and Rhonda magazine adhered to conservative views. In reality, however, both groups contributed enormously by stimulating the creative impulses of writers who found the ideas of these two periodicals important and inspiring. Such famous writers as Riccardo Bacchelli, Antonio Baldini, Piero Iaghier, novelist and poet Aldo Palazzeschi collaborated with Voce; poets such as Corrado Govoni and Giuseppe Ungaretti; the literary critics Giuseppe De Roberti (1888–1963), Emilio Cecchi (1884–966), Pietro Pancrazi (1893–1952), and Renato Serra (1884–1915), who were enormously influential in the 1910s–1930s; as well as philosophers such as Croce himself, Giovanni Gentile, who became famous in particular for his participation in the reform of school education during the fascist regime, and Guido de Ruggiero (1888–1948).

Vincenzo Cardarelli (1887–1959) founded theoretical basis magazine "La Ronda". E. Cecchi, R. Bacchelli, A. Baldini, B. Barilli were the key figures of this new literary review; they considered their main goal to rediscover the real Italian tradition, but to shift the main emphasis to style. Another Italian thinker, after Croce, who greatly influenced European political and social sciences was Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937), who is considered one of the most important theorists of Marxism in the West.

Modern literature.

In the modern period (strictly speaking, the modern period begins from the Second World War to the present day) one can note the power of the Italian novel, the emergence of significant figures in poetry, the predominance of social themes and problems over purely academic ones, and the significant American influence, especially in prose. Some of the writers who have made significant contributions to modern literature, appeared in the post-war period; others began writing during the war, although fascist censorship existed. Ignazio Silone (1900–1978) published his anti-fascist novel Fontamara(a typical work of the provincialism movement with political overtones), while in exile. In the pre-war period, writers such as D. Borgese worked, who published the novel Filippo Roubaix (Filippo Rubè); Corrado Alvaro (1895–1956), a significant influence on the younger generation of Italian writers, wrote an anti-fascist novel Man is strong (L'uomo è forte); Alberto Moravia (1907–1990) – Indifferent(Gli indifferenti); Elio Vittorini (1908–1966) – Sicilian conversations(Conversazione in Sicilia).

They had to work in the atmosphere of either an emerging or already established fascist regime. Alberto Moravia is the best known and most prolific Italian writer of his time. It explored new territory and portrayed middle-class life in rather dark and bleak tones. He, Vittorini, Vasco Pratolini (1913–1991), who began his career under the fascist dictatorship, and Cesare Pavese (1908–1950), whose works were simply imbued with American influence, can all be considered the vanguard of modern Italian literature.

Other famous writers who gained fame outside the country are Dino Buzzati (1906–1972); Giuseppe Marotta (b. 1957), - his theme is the revival of interest in the problems of southern Italy; Vitagliano Brancati (1907–1954), ironic Sicilian; P.A. Quarantotti Gambini (1910–1965) from Trieste, whose works continue the distinguished tradition of Italo Svevo, expressed in the novel Svevo Self-Knowledge of Zeno. The original work of Guido Piovene (1907–1974), Carlo Emilio Gadda (1893–1973) and Elsa Morante (1918–1985), whose most significant works, full of unique inspiration, appear in the post-war period.

A particular strain of psychological interest, somewhat in the Proustian spirit, was cultivated by Giorgio Bassani (1916–2000), and in the complex stories of Mario Soldati (1906–1999) there is a kind of decadent cosmopolitanism. The most famous writers of that period are Alba De Cespedes (1911–1997), her early work occurred during the period of fascism; Natalia Ginzburg (1916–1991) and Gina Manzini (1896–1974).

The next generation of this period are the prose writers of Italo Calvino (1923–1985), in particular his novel If one winter night a traveler (Se una notte d"inverno un viaggiatore); Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922–1975) and Carlo Cassola (1917–1987). Their works reflected fiction and fantasy, social and political motives, as well as the new naturalism of the provincial genre.

Southern Italy received special attention from writers. Naples alone produced a solid school of talented prose writers, such as Michele Prisco (1920–2003), Domenico Rea (1921–1994), Mario Pomilio (1921–1990), and Raffaele La Capria (b. 1922). Sicily is represented in the densely written prose of the writer Leonardo Sciascia (1921–1989), as well as in the works of Giuseppe Tomasi de Lampedusa (1896–1957), whose novel Leopard(Il Gattopardo) is known abroad much better than any other Italian novel recent years. Writers such as Fortunato Seminara (1903–1984) and Saverio Strati (1924–2014) represent Calabria, and Giuseppe Dessi (1909–1977) from Sardinia was so sensitive to and depicted his island that it was to him that the mantle of Gracia Deledda passed, only his creative method was designed for a more demanding and sophisticated reader.

In the post-war period, a number of Italian writers sought to reconstruct the style of the traditional novel (to introduce revolutionary notes into it). Writers such as Oreste Del Buono (1925–2003), Goffredo Parise (1929–1986), Tommaso Landolfi (1908–1979) and Alberto Arbazino (b. 1930) tried new and sometimes stunning techniques. Yet, paradoxically, the most able prose writer in this very young group was probably Fulvio Tomizza (1935–1999), whose works combine historical and personal themes, and there are hints of similarities with Pavese and Svevo, and the structure and treatment are within the concept of a traditional novel.

The novelists of this period include other prose writers who are engaged in literary creativity in a different way; they are more likely to speak out on social and political topics: superficial and cynical commentator Curzio Malaparte (1898–1957); Carlo Levi (1902–1975), author of the insightful and innovative novel Christ Stopped at Eboli; Danilo Dolci (1924–1997), who dedicated his life crusade against social injustice and the plight of ordinary people in Sicily and Primo Levi (1909–1987), who very vividly described his life in a German concentration camp and created one of the best examples of literature on this topic. Luigi Barzini's The Italians (1908–1984), a very popular dissection of the national character of his compatriots, and, on the other hand, the works of the political martyr Antonio Gramsci also belong to this group.

In the post-war period, Italian poetry entered the European mainstream (European mainstream). The “hermetic” trio, i.e. adherents of the Hermetic movement, which included Eugenio Montale (1896–1981), Giuseppe Ungaretti (1888–1970), and Salvatore Quasimodo (1901–1968), had its origins in the pre-war period. “Hermeticism” emphasizes the formal perfection of the poem—the poem as an independent object. But representatives of this group received wide recognition after the war (for example, Quasimodo in 1959 was awarded Nobel Prize). Perhaps, Umberto Saba (1883–1957) can be attributed to the same direction. The second generation of sealants is represented by Alfonso Gatto (1909–1976) and Mario Luzi (1914–2005); more independent tendencies are represented in the works of P.P. Pasolini and Cesare Pavese.

The most original, unique and powerful playwright of the modern period is Eduardo de Filippo (1900–1984), whose works are more Neapolitan than Italian.

During the same period, there was a revival of interest in the intellectual symbolic theater of playwrights Ugo Betti (1892–1953), and Diego Fabbri (1911–1980); the latter wrote several promising plays. Although a figure equivalent to Croce’s personality did not appear in criticism, some revival was observed in this area. Francesco Flora (1883–1962), Emilio Cecchi (1884–1966), Luigi Russo (1892–1961), and Attilio Momigliano (1883–1952).