On the Representations, Publishing Legacy, and Posthumous Writings of Roberto Bazlen
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University of Pennsylvania ScholarlyCommons Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations 2017 The Art Of Dying Every Second: On The Representations, Publishing Legacy, And Posthumous Writings Of Roberto Bazlen Marco Lepore University of Pennsylvania, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations Part of the Italian Literature Commons Recommended Citation Lepore, Marco, "The Art Of Dying Every Second: On The Representations, Publishing Legacy, And Posthumous Writings Of Roberto Bazlen" (2017). Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations. 2772. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/2772 This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/2772 For more information, please contact [email protected]. The Art Of Dying Every Second: On The Representations, Publishing Legacy, And Posthumous Writings Of Roberto Bazlen Abstract My dissertation aims to describe and investigate the influence and legacy of the intellectual and cultural work of Roberto Bazlen. Interlocutor and consultant of many of the major writers and intellectuals of his time, highly valued publishing adviser, and author of few posthumously published writings, Bazlen, as Eugenio Montale recalled, “spent his life with the desire of leaving no tangible traces of his own transit”. He is nevertheless regarded today as a key figure of twentieth-century Italian literature. Still, because of the very nature of his intellectual activity, his figure and work have been studied only recently, and partially. In the first part of my dissertation I analyze the critical and novelistic representations of Bazlen, whose persona, in spite of his notorious discretion about his life, rose to a legendary status while he was still alive. In the second part of my study I focus on Bazlen’s collaborations with writers such as Italo Svevo, Pier Antonio Quarantotti Gambini, and Eugenio Montale, and I analyze the nature of his work and interventions in their writings. I subsequently address Bazlen’s publishing activity and the criteria and praxis behind his editorial opinions. In the third and final section of my dissertation I finally examine Bazlen’s writings as posthumously collected fragments of a post-humanistic thought deliberately and necessarily articulated in a non-organic fashion. Through the study of the traces collected in the partial and inevitably unfaithful realizations of Bazlen’s legacy, I aim to better comprehend the reasons behind his refusal of literary production and the characteristics of his primarily maieutic intellectual activity. Degree Type Dissertation Degree Name Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Graduate Group Romance Languages First Advisor Kevin Brownlee Subject Categories Italian Literature This dissertation is available at ScholarlyCommons: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/2772 THE ART OF DYING EVERY SECOND: ON THE REPRESENTATIONS, PUBLISHING LEGACY, AND POSTHUMOUS WRITINGS OF ROBERTO BAZLEN Marco Lepore A DISSERTATION in Italian For the Graduate Group in Romance Languages Presented to the Faculties of the University of Pennsylvania in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2017 Supervisor of Dissertation _______________________ Kevin Brownlee, Professor of Romance Languages Graduate Group Chairperson _______________________ Eva Del Soldato, Assistant Professor of Romance Languages Dissertation Committee Kevin Brownlee, Professor of Romance Languages Mauro Calcagno, Associate Professor of Music Timothy Corrigan, Professor of English, Cinema Studies, and History of Art Eva Del Soldato, Assistant Professor of Romance Languages ii ABSTRACT THE ART OF DYING EVERY SECOND: ON THE REPRESENTATIONS, PUBLISHING LEGACY, AND POSTHUMOUS WRITINGS OF ROBERTO BAZLEN Marco Lepore Kevin Brownlee My dissertation aims to describe and investigate the influence and legacy of the intellectual and cultural work of Roberto Bazlen. Interlocutor and consultant of many of the major writers and intellectuals of his time, highly valued publishing adviser, and author of few posthumously published writings, Bazlen, as Eugenio Montale recalled, “spent his life with the desire of leaving no tangible traces of his own transit”. He is nevertheless regarded today as a key figure of twentieth-century Italian literature. Still, because of the very nature of his intellectual activity, his figure and work have been studied only recently, and partially. In the first part of my dissertation I analyze the critical and novelistic representations of Bazlen, whose persona, in spite of his notorious discretion about his life, rose to a legendary status while he was still alive. In the second part of my study I focus on Bazlen’s collaborations with writers such as Italo Svevo, Pier Antonio Quarantotti Gambini, and Eugenio Montale, and I analyze the nature of his work and interventions in their writings. I subsequently address Bazlen’s publishing activity and the criteria and praxis behind his editorial opinions. In the third and final section of my dissertation I finally examine Bazlen’s writings as posthumously collected fragments of a post-humanistic thought deliberately and necessarily articulated in a non-organic fashion. Through the study of the traces collected in the partial and inevitably unfaithful realizations of Bazlen’s legacy, I aim to better comprehend the reasons behind his refusal of literary production and the characteristics of his primarily maieutic intellectual activity. iii Table of Contents Abstract ii Introduction. The “Bobi Experience” (and Its Sources) 1 I. On an Unreliable, Papery Legend 1. In the Outpost of the Crisis of Culture and the Culture of Crisis 24 2. Kill the Bourgeois! Voilà 39 3. The Most Nineteen-Twenty-Five Man in Italy 51 4. Like the Lilies of the Field 62 5. Via Margutta 7 79 6. The (Alleged) Writer Who (Allegedly) Did Not Write 93 7. Some Final Notes on the Representations and Interpretations of Bazlen's Figure 105 II. Bobi’s Books 1. The Cultural Operator, the Secret Editor, the Unwilling Pedagogue 1.1. The “Svevo Bomb” 116 1.2. The First Reader of Montale and Quarantotti Gambini 127 1.3. Secret Literary History 134 2. The Publishing Work 2.1. Frassinelli, NEI, ALI, Astrolabio, Guanda, Bompiani, and Bocca 142 2.2. Einaudi 155 3. The Publishing Legacy: Adelphi 165 4. The Critical Criteria: Against the Love, the Art, and the Immortal Principles 191 III. Shipwrecks and Footnotes 1. The Posthumous Writings 1.1. The Manuscripts 223 1.2. Note senza testo 226 1.3. Il capitano di lungo corso 231 1.4. Phantom-Writings 235 2. Anti-Odyssey 2.1. Sailings 240 2.2. Close to Death, but Terribly Learned 251 2.3. The Shipwreck of the Enlightenment Ego 264 2.4. The Boundary between Song and Life 281 3. The Art of Dying Every Second 289 Conclusion 306 Bibliography 310 1 Introduction The “Bobi Experience” (and Its Sources) A forza di esclusioni t'era rimasto tanto che tu potevi stringere tra le mani; e quello era di chi se n'accorgeva. T'ho seguito più volte a tua insaputa. […] Ho assaggiato la pleiade dei tuoi amici […]. Erano i tuoi primi amici, altri ne seguirono che non ho mai conosciuto. S’è formata così una tua leggenda cartacea, inattendibile. Ora dicono ch’eri un maestro inascoltato, tu che n’hai avuto troppi a orecchie aperte e non ne hai diffidato. Confessore inconfessato non potevi dare nulla a chi già non fosse sulla tua strada. A modo tuo hai già vinto anche se hanno perduto tutto gli ascoltatori. Con questa lettera che mai tu potrai leggere ti dico addio e non aufwiedersehen e questo in una lingua che non amavi, priva com’è di Stimmung. – Eugenio Montale, “Lettera a Bobi” Roberto Bazlen (Trieste, 1902 – Milan, 1965) wrote very little and published close to nothing. Almost all of his writings appeared posthumously and against his will. As the poet Eugenio Montale recalled, Bazlen in fact “spent his life with the desire of leaving no tangible traces of his own transit”1. Nevertheless, the cultural legacy of his subterranean cultural work is enormous, and literally inestimable. Described as an infallible “literary hound”2 or, in the words of the publisher Valentino Bompiani, as the man “who seemed to have read everything”, who seemed “to contain within himself 1 Eugenio Montale, “Variazioni”, in Montale, Prose e racconti, ed. Marco Forti (Milano: Mondadori, 1995), 1118. All uncredited translations are ours. 2 Giani Stuparich, Trieste nei miei ricordi (Milano: Garzanti, 1948), 17. 2 nothing but culture”3, Bazlen is a key figure of Italian twentieth-century literature4. If Bazlen is usually remembered for the central role he had in the rediscovery and subsequent revaluation of Italo Svevo's work, and as friend, interlocutor, and consultant of many of the major Italian writers and intellectuals of his time (such as Umberto Saba, Carlo Emilio Gadda, Giacomo Debenedetti), his greatest legacy is probably to be recognized in his editorial work. Expert in German, French, and Anglophone literatures, as a publishing consultant he had the merit to introduce to Italy many authors and perspectives otherwise excluded from the Italian intellectual debate. His editorial work is in fact one of the major expressions of “modernity” in the Italian culture of the first part of the Twentieth Century – conservative, and not receptive, also for nationalistic reasons, of the new perspectives that were developing abroad. Among the many works that Bazlen contributed to introduce to Italy, we can here anticipate that between 1947 and 1950 he suggested and translated into Italian for Astrolabio Freud's Introduction to Psychoanalysis and The Interpretation of Dreams, and Jung's Psychology and Education and Psychology and Alchemy; that, in the Thirties, he had a fundamental role in the publication of Kafka's works in Italy; that, in 1951, he discovered for Einaudi Musil's The Man without Qualities. Central was also his role in the birth of the publishing house Adelphi, for which, at the beginning of the Sixties, he conceived the initial program, and which, in addition to introducing to Italy many fundamental Central European authors, 3 Valentino Bompiani, Vita privata (Milano: Mondadori, 1973), 238-239.