Pietro Citati

Pietro Citati (30 February 1930 – 28 July 2022) was an Italian writer, essayist, literary critic and biographer.

Biography

Pietro Citati was born in Florence into a noble Sicilian family, he spent his childhood and adolescence in Turin, where he attended the Social Institute and, later, the Liceo Classico Massimo d'Azeglio. In 1942, during the war, he moved with his family to Liguria. After the war, he returned to Tuscany and graduated in 1951 in modern literature at the University of Pisa as a student of the Scuola Normale Superiore. He began his career as a literary critic collaborating with magazines such as Il Punto — where he met Pasolini — L'approdo and Paragone.

From 1954 to 1959, he taught Italian in the professional schools of Frascati and on the outskirts of Rome. In the sixties he wrote for the newspaper Il Giorno. From 1973 to 1988, he contributed to the cultural section of Corriere della Sera and has been the literary critic for la Repubblica between 1988 and 2011, before returning to write for Corriere della Sera.

A multifaceted writer, he successfully ventured into essay writing and literary biography of great writers (Alessandro Manzoni, Kafka, Goethe, Tolstoy, Katherine Mansfield, Giacomo Leopardi, etc.). Several of his works were also dedicated to the myths of ancient peoples and of Greece (Homer above all) and to religious and philosophical doctrines such as hermeticism. In 1992 he dedicated a book to several female figures: Teresa of Ávila, Jane Austen, Lou Andreas-Salomé, Virginia Woolf.

Married to the Tuscan Elena Londini, he spent a lot of time in his villa in Roccamare, in the municipality of Castiglione della Pescaia, where he died at the age of ninety-two. He is buried in the Mercy Cemetery in Grosseto.

Thought

Citati did not used a preconceived method of interpretation in the exegetical approach: he was influenced more by narrative than by mere literary criticism. He declared: "Goethe, Kafka, Gadda, Pessoa, Musil and Borges influenced me a lot. They were different forms of irony: literary and metaphysical, Borges; vertiginous and multiform, Pessoa; and that of Musil is infinitely complex. They are three forms of irony by three great writers, who then have infinite other facets".

He considered the reading of the literary work susceptible to variations, depending on the time and moment in which it is read: "In my books there is always a fusion between life and interpretation of the work. I tell about life, but not the whole life: I follow it until the moment an ordinary person changes and becomes a writer, the moment something clicks inside him. I try to understand the secret of this metamorphosis of an ordinary man — hitherto a socialite, an officer or a clerk — who at a certain point turns into a writer: from that moment on, my book becomes an interpretation of the books they wrote".

Citati vigorously rejected the "unfortunate choice" of the Swedish Academy designating Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio as the winner of the 2008 Nobel Prize in Literature, qualifying him even as a “very mediocre author”.

He contributed to the renewal of the biography genre which, starting from the seventies, was marked by the mixture of fictionalized biography and biographical novel until arriving at a mutation of the nature of biographical work, in which the author himself becomes a character of a literary work. He specifies in the final note of The Stabbed Dove: "Although it contains pages on the life of Proust, The Stabbed Dove does not intend to be, and is not, a biography".

Works

• Goethe (1970; 1990)
• Il tè del cappellaio matto (1972; 2012)
• Immagini di Alessandro Manzoni (1973)
• Alessandro. Con i diari e le lettere (1974; 1996)
• La primavera di Cosroe (1977; 2000; 2006)
• I frantumi del mondo (1978)
• La regina Marmotta (1979)
• Il velo nero (1979)
• Vita breve di Katherine Mansfield (1980; 2001; 2014)
• Manzoni (1980; 1991)
• I racconti dei gatti e delle scimmie (1981)
• Il migliore dei mondi impossibili (1982)
• Tolstoj (1983; 1996; 2007)
• Cinque teste tagliate (1984)
• Alessandro Magno (1985; with Francesco Sisti; 2004)
• Il sogno della camera rossa (1986)
• Kafka (1987; 2000; 2007)
• Storia prima felice, poi dolentissima e funesta (1989; 2002)
• Ritratti di donne (1992)
• La colomba pugnalata. Proust e la Recherche (1995; 2008)
• La luce della notte (1996; 2000; 2009)
• L'armonia del mondo. Miti d'oggi (1998; 2015)
• Il Male assoluto. Nel cuore del romanzo dell'Ottocento (2000; 2013)
• La mente colorata. Ulisse e l'Odissea (2002; 2018)
• Israele e l'Islam. Le scintille di Dio (2003; 2019)
• La civiltà letteraria europea. Da Omero a Nabokov (2005; with introduction by Paolo Lagazzi)
• La morte della farfalla. Zelda e Francis Scott Fitzgerald (2006; 2016)
• La malattia dell'infinito. La letteratura del Novecento (2008)
• Leopardi (2010)
• Elogio del pomodoro (2011)
• Il Don Chisciotte (2013)
• I Vangeli (2014)
• Sogni antichi e moderni (2016)
• Il silenzio e l'abisso (2018)
• Dostoevskij: senza misura. Saggi russi (2021)
• La ragazza dagli occhi d'oro (2022)

Translations

• Pierre de Marivaux, Il villan rifatto ovvero le memorie del signor *** (1955; 1998)

As editor

• Gli umoristi moderni (1961; with Attilio Bertolucci)

Filmography

• Dans la peau d'Italo Calvino (2012), documentary by Damian Pettigrew with Pietro Citati and Neri Marcorè in the role of Italo Calvino.

References

• Andreotti Ravaglioli, Serena (1991). "Citati, Pietro." In: Enciclopedia Italiana, V Appendice. Roma: Istituto dell'Enciclopedia Italiana.
• Lagazzi, Paolo (2018). Il mago della critica: la letteratura secondo Pietro Citati. Roma: Alpes.
• Fera, Chiara (2018). Il libro invisibile di Pietro Citati: Racconto di un'analisi. Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino.

External links

• Works by Pietro Citati at Open Library
• Pietro Citati at the Internet Movie Database
• Pietro Citati at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database