Strumenti critici | 2019 | N. 2

This contribution pieces together the author’s long friendship with Vincenzo Consolo, the writer of many great novels, going through the painful detachment from him, the silent reconciliation, and his death.

The essay deals with ‘Part Two’ of Torquato Tasso’s lyric poems as published by the author himself in 1593. After an introductory section analysing the collection as a whole and its connections with the other books of Tasso’s poems, it focuses on the opening triptych of sonnets dedicated to Barbara Sanseverino, Countess of Sala, by pointing out the climactic strategy chosen by Tasso to introduce the reader to his collection of encomiastic poems.

The essay provides new insights into Carlo Emilio Gadda’s various experiments with short story writing through an examination of his manuscripts held at the Biblioteca Trivulziana in Milan. A number of handwritten notes reveal the author’s continuous attempts at producing short fiction from the late 20s onwards and include a series of still largely unknown projects and lists of themes for future development, such as that of a satirical dialogue on misogyny. The main focus of the essay then shifts to an unpublished incomplete short story dating to the late 40s, whose protagonist Amedeo meets his demise in the Battle of Cape Matapan during the Second Wold War (1941) after falling in love with a mysterious girl seen in a park accompanied by another woman. The relationships between these tentative and unfinished drafts, “Prima divisione nella notte”, and other published texts are highlighted as well as the theme of lesbian love underpinned by Gadda’s reading of Radclyffe Hall’s novel “The Well of Loneliness” (1928).

Due to its content and composition, “La cognizione del dolore” is the most complex of Gadda’s novels. Based on the early tripartition of the text – witnessed by the autograph diagram mentioned in Emilio Manzotti’s studies – and the philological analysis of the manuscripts held at the Biblioteca Trivulziana in Milan, this essay proposes a different chronological sequence of the drafts and the backdating of the eighth and ninth sections.

Following the publication of Pasternak’s Doktor Zivago in Italy, a hitherto unexplored critical and ideological debate takes place on the journal «Tempo Presente» regarding the meaning and the literary value of Pasternak’s work. This essay aims to highlight the positions of each critic, especially that of the Argentine writer Juan Rodofo Wilcock, in relation to the different types of literary analysis and critical approaches of the time.

This essay considers Michelangelo’s work in the context of the affirmation of the new category of the “artist”, typical of the high Renaissance and leading to a modern view of artistic creation. The process producing a work of art, initially conceived exclusively in terms of imitation of nature, acquired the status of act of creation (with the artist thus turning from being an artisan to being a gifted “artista divino”). The influence of Platonism and Neoplatonism on this transition, in which Michelangelo played an eminent role, is analysed in detail. On the other hand, as the Neoplatonist Benedetto Varchi supposed, the Aristotelian theory of potency and act is crucial in Michelangelo’s artistic theory, based on viewing matter as a source of potencies which is only revealed by the artist’s mind, illuminated by divine grace. This sheds new light on Michelangelo’s concept of “non finito” as the technique which allows an artist to catch the passage from the possible to the real without exhausting the pure potency in the act.

Carlo Dossi’s books stand out due to their original solutions in language and narrative structures. Among the most unusual features are such elements as prefaces, epigraphs, inscriptions, covers, notes, and warnings to the readers. This paratextual overgrowth acts as a bait to catch the interest of qualified readers and belies the conviction that publishers must comply to their authors’ instructions.

The genesis of Germano Lombardi’s first novel “Barcelona” (1963) was complex as documented by a large number of drafts held in the author’s Archive (Centro Manoscritti, Pavia). This essay focuses on the experimental techniques used by the author (flashbacks and omissions in a spy story without events) by illustrating the textual history of the novel and its structural evolution from the superabundant preparatory materials to the final version.