From Calvino to Scalfari: Letters from His Youth and the Genesis of a Humanist

Abstract

In the early 2000s, an epistolary of Italo Calvino that covers more than 40 years of his letters in its various nuances, namely, Lettere 1940-1985, was published. They are letters intended for his family, friends, literary friends, colleagues, other men and women of letters, author seeking publication, in other words, letters that present different ways of working with the language because they also often present themselves as letters-essay or letters-story. We are interested, precisely, to analyze how these letters translate themselves as a hybrid genre, of poetic and essayistic nature. On that basis, the chosen frame for this work is that of Calvino’s letters to Eugenio Scalfari, which comprise a timeframe from 1941 to 1947, and in which we see some of the first written reflections of a still very young Calvino, although already thinking of literature, and the writing processes of the literary text. The letters will be analyzed in comparison with the author’s essays. Italo Calvino’s essays and epistolary writing can expand our understanding of the relationships between literature and society, literature and humanities, literature and critical thinking, especially if studied from the perspective of polysystem, a theoretical approach developed by Even-Zohar (1990). We seek in the essays of Lezioni americane (1988) and Perché leggere i classici (1981) notions developed by Calvino on the categories of author, narrative, and reader, to put them in dialogue with early reflections on such categories on his letters. For this purpose, we rely on the epistolary studies, such as works by Brigitte Diaz (2016) and Geneviève Haroche-Bouzinac (2016), among others.