Cesare Pavese

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Cesare Pavese bigraphy, stories - Literary

Cesare Pavese : biography

9 September 1908 – 27 August 1950

Cesare Pavese ( 9 September 1908 – 27 August 1950) was an Italian poet, novelist, literary critic and translator. He is widely considered among the major authors of the 20th century in his home country.

Arrest and conviction; the war in Italy

Pavese moved in antifascist circles. In 1935 he was arrested and convicted for having letters from a political prisoner. After a few months in prison he was sent into "confino", internal exile in Southern Italy, the commonly used sentence for those guilty of lesser political crimes. (Carlo Levi and Leone Ginzburg, also from Turin, were similarly sent into confino.) A year later Pavese returned to Turin, where he worked for the left-wing publisher Giulio Einaudi as editor and translator. Natalia Ginzburg also worked there.

Pavese was living in Rome when he was called up into the fascist army, but because of his asthma he spent six months in a military hospital. When he returned to Turin, German troops occupied the streets and most of his friends had left to fight as partisans. Pavese fled to the hills around Serralunga di Crea, near Casale Monferrato. He took no part in the armed struggle taking place in that area. During the years in Turin, he was the mentor of the young writer and translator Fernanda Pivano, his former student at the Liceo D’Azeglio.Pavese gave her the American edition of Spoon River Anthology, which came out in Pivano’s Italian translation in 1943.

Books

  • Lavorare stanca (Hard Labor), poems 1936; expanded edition 1943.
  • Paesi Tuoi (Your Villages), novel 1941.
  • La Spiaggia (The Beach), novel 1941.
  • Feria d’agosto (August Holiday) 1946.
  • Il Compagno (The Comrade), novel 1947.
  • Dialoghi con Leucò (Dialogues with Leucò), philosophical dialogues between classical Greek characters, 1947.
  • Il diavolo sulle colline (The Devil in the Hills), novel 1948.
  • Prima che il gallo canti (Before the Cock Crows), two novellas. La casa in collina (The House on the Hill) and Il carcere (The Prison), 1949.
  • La bella estate (The Fine Summer), three novellas including Tra donne sole (Women on Their Own), 1949.
  • La luna e i falò (The Moon and the Bonfires), novel 1950.
  • Verrà la morte e avrà i tuoi occhi (Death Will Come and Have your Eyes), poems, 1951.
  • Il mestiere di vivere: Diario 1935–1950, The Business of Living: Diaries 1935-1950 (published in English as The Burning Brand), 1952
  • Saggi Letterari, literary essays.
  • Racconti, – two volumes of short stories.
  • Lettere 1926-1950, – two volumes of letters.
  • Disaffections: Complete Poems 1930-1950, translated by Geoffrey Brock. (Copper Canyon Press, 2002)

Work themes

The typical protagonist in the works of Pavese is a loner, through choice or through circumstances. His relationships with men and women tend to be temporary and superficial. He may wish to have more solidarity with other people, but he often ends up betraying his ideals and friends; for example in The Prison, the political exile in a village in Southern Italy receives a note from another political confinato living nearby, who suggests a meeting. The protagonist rejects a show of solidarity and refuses to meet him. The title of the collection of the two novellas is Before the Cock Crows, a reference to Peter’s betrayal of Christ before his death.

The Langhe, the area where he spent his summer holidays as a boy, had a great hold on Pavese. It is a land of rolling hills covered in vineyards. It is an area where he felt literally at home, but he recognised the harsh and brutal lives that poor peasants had making a living from the land. Bitter struggles took place between Germans and partisans in this area. The land became part of Pavese’s personal mythology.

In The Moon and the Bonfires, the protagonist tells a story of drinking beer in a bar in America. A man comes in whom he recognizes as being from the valleys of Le Langhe by his way of walking and his outlook. He speaks to him in dialect suggesting a bottle of their local wine would be better than the beer. After some years in America, the protagonist returns to his home village. He explores Le Langhe with a friend who had remained in the area. He finds out that so many of his contemporaries have died in sad circumstances, some as partisans shot by the Germans, while a notable local beauty had been executed by partisans as a fascist spy.