Italo Calvino
In 1940, the year Mussolini decided to side with Germany in World War II, Calvino was 17 years old, a high school student in his hometown of San Remo, who looked just right. The reason why he says "look" is because as early as two years ago, when the war was imminent, he had already felt that his youth had begun to end prematurely. War, which changed everything, also changed Calvino. Fortunately, at that time, the war on the Western Front had not yet spread to northern Italy, so that he could write novels, write poems, write film reviews, and dream of becoming a playwright by his own nature, and some of his juvenile works were published in newspapers such as "Betordo" and "Geiana Daily", and some of them remained in the depths of his memory. In any case, in the first year or two of the 1940s, although Calvino dealt with agronomy in Turin and florence, he had a natural passion for literary creation and showed his first talent. So, what kind of educational experience shaped Calvino at that time?
Calvino's father, a horticulturist from an ancient family in Sanremo, had been running a floral studio near his ancestral home after living in Central America for more than 20 years and traveling the world. Her mother graduated in natural sciences and worked as a teaching assistant in botany at the University of Pavia. Although the parents came from two places in Italy with completely opposite climates, they shared the same social ideals, and they both had a certain affinity for Gandhi and the Bolsheviks of the Soviet Union, and were staunchly pro-Soviet people. Although the tutor was strict and Calvino often "rebelled", he continued to fondly recall his father in his later creations, and in The Way of St. John, he said, "The path my father took was in the depths of a completely strange world, in a human transcendent world." Calvino's childhood was shaped by his parents and solid family circumstances, and he later recalled, "My childhood was uneventful, I lived in a comfortable and peaceful world, I imagined the world full of colorful and endless imaginations, but had no concept of fierce conflicts." It is conceivable that the "colorful and endless imagination" comes from both Calvino's childhood and the magical reality of Central America told by his father, while "no concept of fierce conflict" is later deeply engraved in all his creations, even if he once fought in the brutal jungle guerrilla warfare in northern Italy. Of course, Calvino also received a good literary education in his early years, and when he was twelve or thirteen years old, he first read the British writer Kipling's "Jungle Story", and he was very interested in it, and the various animals in the novel and the rich plants that Calvino heard around his parents later formed a part of the fantasy natural world in his creation, and the fairy tale writing throughout his life could also find a looming source in Kipling's writings. In addition, Calvino reads humor magazines such as Bertoldo, Marc Aurelio, and Setbello, and there is reason to believe that the witty humor in Calvino's novels originates from this.
If Kipling's Jungle Tales, the gardener father who traveled north and south, and the natural objects that he heard about constructed Calvino's childhood and his initial literary attainments, the reading and interaction of the early 1940s shaped him on a deeper level. This brings us to Montale and Vittorini. A Genoese, The Most Eminent Italian Lyric poet of the 20th century, Calvino was the winner of the 1975 Nobel Prize in Literature, and at the age of 18, Calvino had already learned about Montale's poems through the Squid Bones and Circumstances published by Aegina Uddi Press, and was able to recite some of them, because they were from Liguria, Calvino felt that he could read their "memories of the common home" from Montale, and he later analyzed Montale's "Why Read the Classics" specifically. Maybe early one morning." Born in Sicily and later moved to Florence, Vitorini was a famous Italian novelist, translator and literary critic of the 20th century, as well as a pioneer of foreign literary translations, and made many contributions to the spread of American literature in Italy, and his novels are full of lyricism and symbolism. The lyricism in Montale and Vitorini's creation became a more important value orientation in later Calvino novels, from which the influence on him can be seen. In addition to the literary creators, they also have a common identity, both are anti-fascist, during the anti-fascist movement in the boom years, Montale was active in the resistance movement, and Vitorini also joined the political movement after the Spanish Civil War, so that their influence on Calvino was not limited to literature. Coupled with the fact that his good friend of the time, Eugeño Safari, who later became a writer and politician, led his continued interest in culture and politics, calvino, in addition to his love of literature, was also interested in politics during the war years, which was a natural thing.
The history of Italy in 1943 gradually transformed Calvino's political interests into political ideas and accelerated the establishment of such ideas. He transferred to the Faculty of Agriculture and Forestry of the Royal University of Florence at the beginning of the year, and returned to his hometown of SanRemo in July after hearing the news of Mussolini's removal and arrest, unexpectedly, Mussolini was rescued from the top of The Grand Sasso Mountain by the airborne special forces of the SS and once again "established" the "Italian Social Republic" and took control of northern Italy. Karl Vino refused to join the fascist army and began to hide in Tibet, and he later recalled that although he was lonely during that time, he was able to read a wide range of books, which had a great influence on his ambition to become a writer. Some historians and military historians believe that the war began in 1943 into a new phase, and that the italian war provided a footnote to the "new phase" and changed Calvino's life.
At the time, Calvino considered himself an anarchist, but he was increasingly aware that in an era of action-oriented, the Communists were the most active and organized force, especially when he learned that the local guerrilla leader, the Communist Férizi Cassione, had died in the battle against the Germans on Monte Aalto in February 1944, and he resolutely joined the Italian Communist Party and became a guerrilla and engaged in guerrilla warfare. In the process, Calvino's mother played an important role as "a firm and courageous example in resistance aimed at natural justice and family virtues", a hard-line anti-fascist mother who showed dignity, determination, wisdom and forbearance in the face of her long-term hostage detention and her husband's three pretend shots by the "Black Brigade", persuading her two sons to join the guerrilla armed struggle. So, in the jungles of the Coastal Alps, Calvino and his 16-year-old brother crossed the river into the forest and joined the guerrillas in the most brutal battles of the Nazis until the end of the war in 1945. Thirty years later, Calvino wrote an article titled "Memories of a War," recalling in a way that seemed to be forgotten and vaguely remembered, recalling the Battle of Bayardo on March 17, 1945, with many details, such as the task at the time, "Cut off telephone lines as soon as the offensive begins, and block the road if you find a fascist soldier trying to escape into the field below, and always be ready, as soon as you receive the order, climb the hillside into the city and support the attack", At that time, the war was urgent, and the front village wall of the bullet hole was broken."
Nothing affects a person more than becoming a guerrilla at the age of 20 and literally taking part in battle. The influence of the guerrilla identity on Calvino, one is human nature, in the war, Calvino saw a variety of people and their souls deep superficial and profound, noble and humble; the second is politics, during the military, he strengthened his faith in political justice, became a more active Communist Party member; the third is the spirit, he saw in his comrades-in-arms courage, pride, self-satisfaction and magnanimity, these heavy spirits that have been precipitated by the war have not only affected Calvino, but also affected the generation that experienced war. As Calvino put it, "I have been imprisoned and displaced, and how many times have I been on the brink of life and death." But I am satisfied with what I have done and the experience I have accumulated, and I am willing to experience more." More importantly, human nature, politics, spirituality, and war together became important literary materials for Calvino's novels. In addition, as an active member of the Italian Communist Party in the province of Imperia, he also wrote articles for communist organ publications such as Voice of Democracy, Our Battle, and Garibaldi. In September 1945, Calvino entered the Faculty of Letters of the University of Turin and has been living there ever since.
From 1946 onwards, Calvino worked for the Einaudi Publishing House, while publishing short stories in journals such as Unity and The Cultural Review, which formed the prototype of "The Last to Come is the Crow". First published in 1949, The Last Raven came two years later than Calvino's long debut, The Path to the Spider's Nest, but many of the short stories in this collection were written between 1946 and 1947 and can be seen as the writer's first attempt at postwar fiction.
In The Last To Come the Crow, Calvino's short story presumably includes two aspects: childhood and war. In novels such as "The Boat With crabs", "The Enchanted Garden", "Father's Inheritance", "Lazy Son", "Lunch with a Shepherd", etc., the child-based childhood fun is presented. Calvino has no intention of telling stories about childhood, but more about using language and imagery to create specific scenes, such as the father and son fighting rabbits in "The Man on the Wasteland", and the two children in "Enchanted Garden" "staring" at the lives of others, all of which are similar to a certain shot in the film without emphasizing the continuity of the story, rather than saying that the writer is telling the story, but rather tempering the language. In experiments with language and rhetoric, the depiction of natural scenes became an important means for Calvino to construct situations, and bergamot trees, calla lilies, dahlias, mushrooms, ants, agaves, eucalyptus trees, persimmon trees, arbutus bushes, butterflies, beetles, frogs, lizards, glass snakes, rabbits, crabs, bees, and snails appeared in his pen, creating a quiet and peaceful atmosphere. In novels such as "Anxiety in the Barracks", "Going to the Headquarters", "One of the Three Is Still Alive", "Minefield", and "The Adventure of a Soldier", the war scenes centered on the characters are presented. Combining his own experiences, Calvino recorded what he saw, heard, and felt in an extraordinary way, forming another theme of the early short story. Compared with his childhood past, Calvino pays more attention to the shaping of the character image in the creation of the theme of war, often portraying multiple characters in a short story, and can make it have its own characteristics, so that the living image jumps on the paper. Emphasizing the characters and weakening the war has become the universality of the novel, and it is rare to see the confrontation and violent battle scenes between the two armies in the novel, and the war only exists as a foil and background for the characters. But this is not to say that Calvino did not think about war, on the contrary, writers sometimes discuss the nature and meaning of war in novels, such as "Anxiety in the Barracks" deals with the question of "the end of war and death, which of these two will come first", which makes Calvino's novels of this period full of ideas about the concept of war.
Calvino's original creation was encouraged and helped by Cesare Pavese. Born in the province of Cuneo in the Piedmont region, Pavisé graduated from the Faculty of Literature of the University of Turin, became a writer and later joined the Italian Communist Party. He was 15 years older than Calvino, became Calvino's closest friend after the war, and was a classic writer of Calvino's writings, not only as the first reader of many of his novels, but also as a moral role model, as Calvino once said, "Every time I finish writing a novel, I will run to him and let him be my reader." After his death, I felt that I could no longer write good works without the guidance of a perfect reader", which shows the influence of Pavisé on him. It was also with the encouragement of Pavese and Jensero Ferrata that he began to work on his first novel, The Path to the Spider's Nest.
Looking back at "The Path to the Spider's Nest" with subsequent historical experience, this novel is not Calvino's masterpiece, far less than the 1970s "Invisible City" and "Winter Night Walker", nor as wonderful as the 1950s "Viscount in Half" and "The Baron in the Tree", but as the debut of a fledgling 23-year-old author, this novel was already quite unusual at the time. The novel takes a naughty boy as the central character and his point of view as the logical starting point, telling the story of the protagonist Pine who grew up from a ichijing boy to an anti-fascist guerrilla during World War II, he first stole the gun of the "German sailor" and was imprisoned, and then successfully escaped from prison with the "red wolf" and joined the guerrillas, seeing sacrifice, marching, fighting, betrayal and escape, interspersed with topics such as sex, heroism, and the concept of war. Overall, it was a novel that deserved the author's later fame, but Calvino wrote a long preface to the new edition of the novel in 1964, reflecting conclusively on his own work 17 years ago. This preface not only provides the reader with the writer's reflections on the original intention and art of the novel creation, but also presents the fluidity of the writer's own thoughts in the time distance. Calvino believed that the reason for writing this novel at that time was politically due to "the exhilarating passion and encouragement at the end of the war, and felt that he was the exclusive custodian of the legacy of the war"; in literature, he responded to the "neorealism" that was popular at that time and developed a new paradigm of novel writing on this basis. But in fact, the writer also admitted that this is indeed an "accidental" work, so when he started writing from the naughty boy, he found that to complete the "jump from the naughty boy story to the collective hero epic" needs to overcome many difficulties, which will inevitably have flaws in the plot. In addition, Calvino also analyzed the childish diseases of his creations in his youth. For example, he argues that it was both premature and inappropriate to forcibly mix themes of violence, sexuality, and ideology into the depths of the text. For example, he felt that there was a problem with the way he portrayed the guerrillas, "transforming the characteristics of these characters into grimace masks, into grotesque characters, fictionalizing their chiaroscuro past", which also made Calvino feel deeply guilty years later.
Of course, regretting his lack of work may be the regret of every writer, so it is not possible to deny the previous work because of Calvino's "guilt" and "childishness", without "The Path to the Spider's Nest", how can "Our Ancestors" come from? Moreover, "The Path to the Spider's Nest" and "The Last To Come the Crow" are the logical starting point for the formation of his literary style from the history of literature, and it was the early style of the 1940s that laid the literary foundation of Calvino.
First, in the late 1940s, Calvino's fairy tale tone began to take shape. Although he read "Jungle Story" and "Treasure Island" very early, and began to consciously imitate literary creation, but this way of creating was completely conscious, so the writer himself did not find the fairy tale color in his creation at first, it was Pavese who first discovered and talked to Calvino about the tone of fairy tales, so that since then Calvino "began to pay attention to and try to confirm its definition" and gradually formed a style. On the one hand, many of the novels in "The Path to the Spider's Nest" and "The Last to come is the Crow" are children or teenagers as the central characters, observing the world from this perspective, and using exaggeration, metaphor, irony, defamiliarization and other techniques to strengthen the protagonist's immature understanding of the world, presenting a different world, even if Pine in "The Path to the Spider's Nest" presents himself as an adult, its narrative perspective is still childlike, and the creation of children and teenagers has become the basis of the fairy tale tone. On the other hand, in both novels, Calvino creates a fairy tale, and the natural writing of animals and plants such as animals and plants in "The Last To come is the Crow" is needless to say, and there are also light children's situations in war novels such as "The Path to the Spider's Nest", such as "When Pine wakes up, he sees the scattered sky from between the branches, and it is a little dazzling." It was dawn, and it was a clear and free day, and the birds were singing"; for example, "They continued to walk, adults and children, in the night, in the flying fireflies, holding hands", such examples abounded in his early novels, becoming a symbol of the formation of fairy tale tones.
Secondly, in the depths of the fairy tale tone, lurking is Calvino's comic writing of history. War and death are objectively extremely bloody and violent, but the fairy tale tone invisibly obscures these relatively cruel images and situations, and for Calvino, as the victor of the war, he did not feel defeat, frustration and suffering in the war, so he "concentrated his pen and ink, in a magnificent and comical style to tell the hesitation, mistakes, misinformations, and the misfortunes of a young capitalist who was politically unprepared, had no life experience, and had been living in the family before". So there was no danger, anxiety, choice, or death in the novels of the time. In his famous book Metahistory, the American thinker Hayden White divides the writing of history into four episodic modes of romance, tragedy, comedy and satire according to the logic of Frye's "Anatomy of Criticism", and believes that human beings in comedy "gain a brief victory in conquering their world, so that people maintain hope", in White's view, comedy is one of the ways of writing history. From this point of view, Calvino wrote war and history in a comedic way, which explains why his early novels often had exaggerated and grotesque expressions, obscure grimaces and dark deep psychological scars. Coincidentally, fairy tales as a literary genre may not all be comedies, but at least not tragedies, and the endless tension that combines this warm, peaceful and slightly comedic tone with the suffering experienced by the author can even be said to be Calvino's lifelong pursuit, "The Path to the Spider's Nest" and "The Last Crow" are both adult fairy tales and historical comedies.
As for the way to present adult fairy tales and historical comedies, it is not something that can be summarized in two words. In Calvino's posthumous publication of the American Lecture Notes, he used lightness, speed, precision, vivid imagery, diverse content, and the beginning and end to summarize the need for a good novel to have poetic characteristics, which can actually be seen as a summary of his life's creation. At the beginning of this lecture, the author points out that "the millennium that is about to pass is a thousand years of the emergence and development of modern language and literature in the West, and modern literature makes full use of the expressive, cognitive and fantasy functions of modern language." In fact, as early as the late 1940s, Calvino's novel creation seems to have begun to follow this principle, pure and funny rhetoric constitutes the function of expression, rational and warm view of history constitutes cognitive function, complex and wonderful imagination constitutes fantasy function. Therefore, in the 1940s, when "neorealism" was prevalent in Italy, Calvino had quietly "detached" from "neorealism", but he did not belong to any neo-"ism", and it was difficult to even summarize Calvino simply with "postmodernist writers", and his uniqueness beyond the self-expression of 20th century literature had begun to take shape as early as the late 1940s.
The Path to the Spider's Nest was a huge hit when it was published and won the Riccione Prize. After that, Calvino worked in the press office and advertising at the Einaudi Publishing House, until 1948 he worked for the Turin branch of the newspaper "Unity", also wrote for "Rebirth", worked part-time as an editor for the drama column of the "Carinian Pioneer", and returned to the Aegina Udi publishing house in September 1949 to compile literary volumes of the "Series of Scientific Literature". During this time, Calvino also went north to Stresa with the famous Italian post-war playwright Natalia Ginzberg to visit Hemingway, who was on vacation there. Hemingway was Calvino's favorite writer, attracted "by both poetic and political appeal, an inexplicable impulse to actively participate in anti-fascism", and even though Hemingway's novels were banned in wartime Italy, Calvino was able to find and use the foreign language version of Hemingway's "underground literature" smuggled to Italy. For Whom the Death Knell Tolls gives Calvino "seeing himself" early in his end as a guerrilla, prompting him to translate his guerrilla life into the theme and language of the novel. Although in 1954 Calvino also spoke of the limitations and shortcomings of Hemingway's literary creation, he always knew clearly, "What Hemingway once meant to me and what he is now; what keeps me away from him, and what I continue to find in his work rather than in the works of others".
When he visited Hemingway, Calvino was not yet regarded as an important novelist, and his 1949 White Sails was not published, but had to split the plot and implant it into many of the novels he later wrote. But all the accumulation of the 1940s has begun to shape Calvino, as evidenced by The Path to the Spider's Nest and The Last To Be the Crow, a summary of Calvino's life and creation over the past decade, written into novels as a guerrilla, and as an author, he wrote endless pasts. From partisan to the author of "The Last Here Comes the Crow," Calvino completed the transition and transformation from a political man to a literary man, and without the life and literary accumulation of the 1940s, Calvino's literary path would have been different. History, however, does not assume that after the successful publication of The Last Raven in 1949, time, history and Calvino came together to the 1950s.