Calvino, Italo

(1923–1985)

   The son of two expatriate Italian university botanists, Calvino was born in Havana, Cuba, although his parents returned to Italy in 1925. Calvino began his university studies in the same field as his parents in 1941, but the war intervened. Calvino was called up by the Republic of Salo, but rather than serve he went into hiding. In 1944, he joined the Partito Comunista Italiano/Italian Communist Party (PCI) and took part in intensive partisan fighting. As for so many Italians, this was an experience that shaped the rest of his life.

   After the war, Calvino returned to the university, this time to study literature, and worked for the PCI and the publishing house Einaudi. His first political articles were published by the magazine Il Politecnico, and, in 1946, he completed his first novel, Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno (The Path to the Nest of Spiders), a work in the neorealist idiom that described the partisan struggle through the eyes of a child. It was the first novel in what would prove to be an extremely prolific career as a writer, critic, translator, and social theorist. Unlike his close friends Cesare Paveseand Elio Vittorini, Calvino evolved into a writer of favole (fables). Fiabe italiane (Italian Fables, 1956) and Marcovaldo (1963) are perhaps the high points of his literary output. Calvino also showed notable political independence. In 1956, he broke with the PCI after the party condoned the Soviet Union’s brutal suppression of the Hungarian workers’movement. While he never renounced his progressive sympathies, Calvino himself admitted that he became more detached from politics after 1956. This did not stop him, however, from joining in the intense debate over communism in the literary magazines of the Italian left or from being an outspoken opponent of the Vietnam War. By the 1970s, Calvino had become an internationally recognized writer, especially in France, which awarded him the Legion d’honneurin 1981, and in the United States, where he was invited to conferences and to give lectures. Calvino was preparing to give the Norton lectures on poetry at Harvard University when he died of a stroke in September 1985. He would have been the first Italian to perform this most prestigious of academic tasks.