by ANTONIO CARIOTI
In 1984 he won the Strega Prize for his biography of Tolstoy. As a versatile and brilliant literary critic, he managed the balancing act between the most diverse epochs, genres and authors
What was most striking about Pietro Citati, who died at the age of 92, was the versatility with which he was able to move between the most diverse epochs, genres and authors in his work as a literary critic. From the works of the Greco-Roman classics to the sacred monsters of 19th-century Russia, from evangelical texts to Giacomo Leopardi and Franz Kafka. One of his specialties were the biographies of the great writers in narrative form: it was not by chance that on the cultural pages of the Corriere della Sera, where he had written extensively in two different phases, he had begun to anticipate part of his fundamental essay Images by Alessandro Manzoni (Mondadori 1973).
He was a very good interpreter of the authors with whom he dealt, exemplary for his ability to combine absolute philological rigor and astute psychological introspection. Not surprisingly, Citati had received prestigious awards for two biographies: Viareggio in 1970 with Goethe (Mondadori, 1970; Adelphi, 1990) and Lo Strega in 1984 with Tolstoy (Longanesi, 1983; Adelphi, 1996). He has also received other awards abroad, for example in France, Spain and Brazil.
Citati was born in Florence on February 20, 1930 into a Sicilian family of aristocratic descent, graduated from the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa and had not pursued a regular academic career. His own passion for reading was spontaneous and not the result of systematic study when his family moved from Turin to Liguria in 1942 during World War II to escape bombing. Then, at the age of twelve, he began to teach and study everything himself: novels, poems, but also Plato’s dialogues. Later, after graduating from high school, he spent some time teaching Italian at vocational schools and then embarked on a career as a literary critic, following in the footsteps of masters such as Emilio Cecchi, Giovanni Macchia and Mario Praz. From the mid-1950s he was in frequent contact with the writer Carlo Emilio Gadda, for whom he had developed a sincere admiration.
The many articles in magazines such as Il Punto, L’approdo and Paragone were followed in the 1960s by Citati’s organic collaboration with the daily newspaper Il Giorno, about which he sometimes wrote solemn insults. 1970 the first Goethe book, immediately awarded. Then, three years later, the debut on the third page of Corriere. Aside from the anticipation of the essay on Manzoni, it is striking that Citati’s first article was devoted to the immaturity of Italians. He noticed that so many young talents in all fields of activity were lost due to a lack of intellectual passion or concentration. And the spectacle of people, once established, sleeping on their laurels, enchanted by their own narcissism, saddened him even more. His interest in Italian social life and its shortcomings was no stranger to him, even as he sipped on the usually very sharp, if ironic, interventions on political events towards the ruling class.
In an interview published in 1984 after winning the Strega, Citati stated that he hated two homeland fathers who were always honored: the communist Palmiro Togliatti for his pedantic cynicism and the Christian Democrat Aldo Moro for his spirit of compromise.
The world Citati was most sympathetic to was literature, especially the most famous works, which he liked to explore with the attitude of a caver delving into the depths of the underground: a great book – he said – composed of many layers: it is to discover the most hidden. He also believed that the classics had the gift of transmitting new sensations and messages to each generation that approached and approached them: I think that books move in time. They are not always the same, they have different aspects depending on the century. While we are silent and must try to understand the movement of the books.
The value of Citati’s ingenuity was also recognized with the publication in 2006 of Meridiano Mondadori, composed of his writings entitled The European Literary Civilization, edited by Paolo Lagazzi. But he was not a type who loved honors too much, on the contrary, he felt essentially alien to literary society, the world of prizes and conferences.
He defined himself as precise and pedantic when it came to devoting himself to a work, but also as an absolute dilettante when it came to many subjects. After all, the critic is nothing more than a leaf or a small branch of a huge pine forest. He was very fond of ancient culture and for a long time headed the prestigious set of Greek and Latin writers of the Lorenzo Valla Foundation. He was fascinated by the antinomies found in this immense legacy on humanity’s most vital issues. For example, the bipolarity between determinism and freedom: Homeric destiny, at least apparently, is not rigid or iron-clad, but double, oscillating, and always on the verge of being conquered. Sometimes it seems more a possibility than fate, we read in his book The colored mind (Mondadori, 2002; Adelphi, 2018), in which he deals with the Odyssey.
Another gift from Citati was the ability to bring that depth and breadth of reflection to the newspapers as well, with the times and spaces that this place entails. In 1988 he moved from the Corriere to the Repubblica, then returned to via Solferino from 2011 to 2017, finally writing again for the newspaper founded by Eugenio Scalfari. Always fully aware of the challenge he faced and which seemed to uplift him: a reviewer’s culture – he noted – feverish, improvised, threatened by time and by the editor’s impatience to have the article for a particular one Day.
His prose was clear and flowing. He knew how to attract attention even with very complex subjects and multifaceted characters, which allowed him to address a wide audience, as evidenced by the success with the readers of some of his books, such as that dedicated to Franz Kafka in 1987. Even at an advanced age he did not stop producing works with great commitment. Recent include: Leopardi (Mondadori, 2010); The Gospels (Mondadori, 2014); Silence and the Abyss (Mondadori, 2018).
July 28, 2022 (Change July 28, 2022 | 09:49)
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