Who's italo calvino?

Italo calvino (Italo Calvino 192310 October15-1985 September19) is an Italian contemporary writer. His major works include the novel The Viscount in Two, The Baron in the Tree, The Non-existent Knight and so on.

Calvino was born in Havana, Cuba, and moved to Italy with his parents. Graduated from the Department of Literature, University of Turin, and actively participated in the anti-fascist struggle during World War II. Literary creation began after the war. 1947 published the first long article "The Road to the Spider's Nest". Since the 1950s, he has been writing novels in an absurd way, or reflecting the alienation of people in reality, or satirizing the absurdity and absurdity of reality. Viscount in Two is his masterpiece. This novel, together with the baron in the tree (1957) and the nonexistent knight (1959), is a trilogy of our ancestors. In the 1960s and 1970s, Calvino wrote Invisible City (1972) and Cosmic Comedy (1965). He also collects Italian fairy tales. 1985 In September, Calvino died of a sudden cerebral hemorrhage in pescara, Italy, at the age of 62, and was buried in Castilla, a small town on the Mediterranean coast.

Chinese name: italo calvino.

Mbth: Italy

Nationality: Italy

Place of birth: Havana, Cuba

Date of birth: 1923 65438+ 10 65438+May.

Date of death:1September 1985 19.

Occupation: writer, journalist

Graduate School: Department of Literature, University of Turin

Masterpieces: The Road to the Spider's Nest and Our Ancestors trilogy.

Character experience

192310 June 15, italo calvino was born in Las Vegas, a small town of San Diego near Havana, Cuba. My father was originally from San Remo, Italy, and later settled in Cuba. He is an excellent gardener. My mother is a botanist in Sardinia. In order to make her son born in a foreign country never forget his hometown, she specially named him Italo (Italian) to express her nostalgia for her hometown.

1925, calvino just turned 2, and his family moved back to his father's hometown of San Remo. The villa where they live is not only an experimental station for cultivating flowers, but also a research center for tropical plants. Therefore, Calvino has formed an indissoluble bond with nature since childhood. He not only learned a lot of natural science knowledge from his parents, but also became familiar with all kinds of exotic flowers and plants and the habits of various animals in the forest. He often goes hunting and fishing with his father. This unique childhood left a deep imprint on Calvino's later literary creation, making his works full of fables and fairy tales and unique.

1942, Calvino studied in the Department of Agriculture of the University of Turin after graduating from high school. 1943 during world war ii, calvino and his younger brother took an active part in the resistance movement organized by Italian guerrillas, and calvino's parents were taken hostage by the Germans. The first novel, The Road to the Spider's Nest, was published in 1947. It was based on the guerrilla activities in Liguria that the author was familiar with since childhood, when Calvino was only 24 years old.

1945 The Calvino family moved to Turin. After the war, he studied literature at the University of Turin. 1947 After graduating from university, he worked as a literary consultant in Aina Udi Publishing House in Turin. This year, he finished his graduation thesis on Conrad and published The Road to the Spider's Nest. During this period, he joined the Italian Production Party and often wrote articles for the Party's central organ, Unity.

1949, a collection of short stories with diverse themes, The Crow Comes Last, came out. The collected works not only contain fairy tales and legends, but also contain specific practical significance; It is both lyrical and philosophical. 1952, Calvino successfully completed the popular novella The Viscount in Two. The hero of the work is an aristocratic officer who was blown in half by artillery shells in the Austrian-Turkish war in the17th century, and it is a portrayal of modern people who were blown in half by the "cannon" of capitalist economic development in modern society.

1954, another collection of short stories by Calvino, Entering the War, came out, which reflected the incurable trauma left by the war to Calvino who entered his thirties. Italian fairy tales known as "Italian grimm's fairy tales" and "treasures in the treasure house of world literature" were published in 1956. Calvino spent two years writing and collected nearly 200 traditional folk stories and fairy tales from all over the world.

1957 also published two novels, Baron in the Tree and Real Estate Speculation. The protagonists of these two novels are both "losers" and "villains" in real life. The hero of the Baron in the Tree is a descendant of 18 and 19 centuries. He lives in a tree and refuses to live in the world. The protagonist of real estate speculation is a literati living in a bustling city. In the modern society with highly developed capitalism, he tried to rearrange the reality and hit a wall everywhere.

1956 After the "Hungarian Incident", Calvino published an open letter in the 1957 newspaper Tuanjie, announcing his formal withdrawal from the Italian * * * production party. The turmoil in the international situation and the drawbacks of the consumer society have caused many literati to have a mental crisis and painfully see the disintegration of their own values. However, Calvino closely combined the writer's mission, the role of literature and his political responsibility to society. He never imprisoned himself in an "ivory tower". Shortly thereafter, Smoke Clouds (1958), Non-existent Knight (1959) and other works that deeply exposed the ills of the real society came out one after another.

1962, calvino published a series of essays in the literary magazine Menapo, such as challenging the maze, the age of doubt, and the ocean of the material world. And discusses the new relationship between intellectuals and literati and the real society in the new stage of capitalist development in the 1960s, pointing out that "people who surrender to the' material world' have become commercialized people. .

From 65438 to 0963, the collection of short stories Kyle Waldo came out, which marked that Calvino's literary creation reached a new height. In the style of fable, the novel reveals the degenerate human society from the perspectives of sociology, psychology and physiology, and describes the loneliness, fear, strangeness and uneasiness of contemporary people.

In 1970s, Calvino wrote three novels in the post-modernist writing style: Invisible City (1972), Castle with Crossing Fates (1973) and Traveler on a Cold Winter Night (1979).

1980, lived in Paris 15 years later, Calvino returned to live in Italy. In those years when he lived in Paris, he had a close relationship with the great thinkers of the time, Levi Strauss and Laurent Barthes. Ideologically, it was obviously influenced by Saussure, Plop, Gremas, Todorov, Foucault, Lacan, Derrida, Deleuze and Gudari. 1983, Calvino published his last novel Paloma (1983).

1September, 985, Calvino suffered a sudden cerebral hemorrhage during his vacation (when he was going to give a lecture in the United States) and was immediately taken to the hospital for rescue. After the anesthetic passed after the operation, he looked at the plastic catheters and intravenous syringes and said humorously, "I feel like a chandelier." 1September 1985 19 Calvino finally died in pescara at the age of 62.

Calvino was nominated as the Nobel Prize in Literature Prize winner in 1985, but missed the prize because of his sudden death that year.

Main work

Creative characteristics

Theme of the work

Compared with the alienation of modern people in Kafka's works, Kafka's "castle" is a symbol of authoritarian system, and ordinary people can only accept the rule of an invisible but powerful system outside the system. The law and emotion of the bourgeoisie are Kafka's specific criticism objects. As a sensitive writer, Calvino deeply felt the cruelty of alienation, but although the alienated modern people in his works have entered the "castle of civilization", they still can't realize their own values, are still so lonely and even doubt their existence. "Castle" became an inescapable barrier, and Calvino went further in denying the social system.

However, Calvino's contribution lies not only in negation, but also in "reconstruction". This is not only reflected in the attitude towards modernist literature, but also in the attitude towards alienation. Modernist literature has made many innovations in content, form and expression, but it is accompanied by heavy language and structure. Whether the reality is heavy or the literature is heavy, it has become the content that Calvino tries his best to avoid, so he chooses the traditional genre of fable and gives it new form and content. Between continuing the literary tradition and the post-modern literary experiment, he expressed the alienation of modern people with a brisk brush stroke, but avoided making readers feel heavy. Such aesthetic pursuit will not weaken his ideal expression, that is, the pursuit of anti-alienation: calling for a complete personality and a solid existence.

The fable in Calvino's life works refers to the pursuit of order, which has been reflected in his early The Road to the Spider's Nest, and the post-modern experimental novels have different forms of expression. This sense of order combines Calvino's curiosity about the physical science of the universe, and rises to an epistemological level about the existing form of the world, forming his unique concept of time and space, reflecting the fragmented, complex and interrelated world relations in Calvino's eyes.

Artistic feature

Calvino's early works originated from neo-realism, describing a large number of Italian social realities, especially the social state during the resistance movement. In his early works, Calvino has shown some clues of later allegorical novels, such as the split characteristics of characters and plot settings in his works, the tendency of simplicity in narrative and the sense of geometric order in structure, which are typical characteristics of Calvino's subsequent works. In the middle period, influenced by political agitation, Calvino turned to study Italian traditional folk stories, from which he was inspired by a lot of folk literature and created some fantasy literature works, which indicated the maturity of his world-renowned fable writer. Among them, the Miracle of the Universe and other works even hinted at his later structuralist text turn, which has begun to have postmodern characteristics, and as Calvino's first novel with the theme of love, it is popular in the novel world. Calvino's later creation was influenced by post-modern theories such as structuralism and semiotics, and he created many post-modern classic texts with advanced stylistic means and abundant references. The fragmentation and metaphor of the present embodied in the novel fully embodies all the narrative advantages of postmodern fables.

The Road to the Spider's Nest by Calvino has the color of Italian neo-realism: describing the anti-fascist struggle and expressing personal freedom and ability, but at the end of the novel, he shows doubts about this trend and shows his post-modern turn. In 1950s and 1960s, with the publication of Our Ancestors, Italian Fairy Tales, Kyle Waldo and other works, the style of Calvino's scholar writer began to appear. He absorbed a lot of nutrition from traditional literature and folk literature, examined the life world of contemporary people, and wrote modern fables about human nature, existence, violence and life world in modern society with a calm and calm style. After the 1970s, Calvino's representative works, Invisible City, Traveler on a Cold Winter Night and Castle with Crossing Fates, are full of postmodern colors.

However, unlike many post-modernist writers, Calvino abandoned the traditional writing techniques, but constantly searched for new narrative possibilities and new construction methods, and found new combinations and references in the traditional narrative, so his works were deconstructed without disintegration and depression. He skillfully combines tradition with reality, which makes his novels full of great tension and metaphor. All these make him a master of postmodern literature.

Calvino is knowledgeable. As a writer, he is familiar with European ideological and cultural traditions, especially those classic historical and philosophical works. From 1960s to 1970s, Karl Marx's novels added a lot of science fiction. When space exploration, genetic engineering and communication technology flourished, Calvino was able to combine the modern universe with ancient mediums, showing infinite imagination. The works published by Calvino during this period, such as Cosmic Comics (1965) and Time Zero (1967), fascinated Italian readers.

Calvino has made it clear that he doesn't think his works have any "comprehensive intention", but he creates "all possible books". However, looking at the road of his novel creation, all his works show traces of lightness and integrity fracture. It's just that different creative periods and different works have different emphases and expressions. The early Calvino did not explore the formal structure of the text deeply enough, but absorbed the color of fairy tales and reflected its fantasy characteristics from the fantasy images of people and things. Calvino gradually turned to explore the form of works, but the novels of this period still did not break away from this fantasy characteristic, and Calvino deepened his understanding of fantasy characteristics through formal exploration. In Calvino's last work, he even infiltrated this fantasy feature into the inner thinking world of the characters.

Personality influence

Italo calvino's works have exerted a great influence on modern novel art with unique and exquisite thoughts and profound and meaningful ways of thinking. Throughout his life, he constantly surpassed himself in his novel creation until the end of his life. Although he died suddenly and missed Nobel Prize in Literature, he and Borges enjoyed the reputation of "writers' writers". He is not only a pioneer in the history of world literature, but more importantly, his works have a far-reaching impact on the creation of contemporary world novels.

Personality assessment

Calvino is a "master of fable and fantasy literature". (Comments by critic Herbert Mitgen)

One of the best fable writers in the world. (Comments by American novelist john gardner)

Calvino's imagination is like a delicate balance of the universe, placed between Voltaire and Leibniz. (Comments by Eco, a contemporary Italian symbologist)

"Calvino's book is worth reading again and again. He used his creative practice to show the infinite possibilities of novel forms. " (Mo Yan comments)

Calvino's book is written for readers with excessive intelligence. His novel is worthy of the word "weird". When a story comes to his pen, there will always be some tossing. He escaped from the so-called objective description as he was afraid of loneliness and mediocrity. Of course, first of all, he is a writer with solid sketching skills, and then he plays tricks. Kind of like Picasso. Calvino uses words, and his novels often use fables, fairy tales and science fiction. The plot is often unexpected. (Comment by writer Chen Cun)