Pietro Citati he died at 92. As a writer and critic, he has been the figurehead of Repubblica’s cultural pages for years. He once told historical editor-in-chief Paolo Mauri that he had calculated that all his essays and articles occupied the same space as Balzac’s Comédie humaine, “a conclusion that covered me with blush and shame,” he said.
Citati was born in Florence on February 20, 1930, but soon moved with his family to Turin and then to Liguria. He graduated in modern literature from the Normale di Pisa. Since the 1950s he has dealt with most of the masterpieces of world literature, from Homer to Proust, through Cervantes, Goethe, Kafka, Leopardi, Manzoni, Tolstoy.
In him, who begins to collaborate with the magazine Paragone, which he founded Roberto Longhi, all the elements are already in place that will make him a great storyteller and an extraordinary man and woman in literature. In 1952 he published a review of the 23 Days of the City of Alba in the Journal de Jenève Beppe Fenoglio and it is Citati to negotiate with Fenoglio for the passage of Garzanti. A few years later he became the literary critic of the day. Giorgio Bassani then seems to have accused him of writing badly.
These are the years when the partnership with Carlo Emilio Gadda, attested by the correspondence published by Adelphi. On behalf of Garzanti, he becomes the confidant of the author of pasticciaccio: there is a half-century difference between the two. Gadda, Citati once said, always called him at half past twelve and let the food on the table get cold. Especially in these years, the militant critic Citati made a comeback, alert to outgoing books, also ready to slate. Certain positions were by no means self-evident: Citati and Guglielmi supported Gadda at the time, but the old critics did not like him.
Leaving behind the militant criticism, the writer publishes biographies of authors corresponding to real canonizations, constellations of secular deities. Here then Goethe (Mondadori); Pictures by Alessandro Manzoni (Mondadori); Brief Life of Katherine Mansfield (Adelfie). And then what are his most famous titles: Tolstoy, Kafka and The stabbed pigeon. Proust and the “research”, all in the Adelphi catalog today. Citati is also responsible for the work of the Valla Foundation, of which he was president, which over the years has reproposed the great texts of the classical world in philologically very accurate editions. For the true task of the critic and writer was to keep literature alive at all times.