Per una vita che sia vita: studi su Carlo Michelstaedter by Ilvano Caliaro

Abstract

 Reviews is is a very interesting book not only for scholars of d’Annunzio and Pascoli, but for anyone interested in fin-de-siècle Italian culture and in the ways in which philosophical debates impact on artists’ aesthetics. U  Z S B Per una vita che sia vita: studi su Carlo Michelstaedter. By I C. Florence: Olschki. . vii+ pp. €. ISBN ––––. [e following review was inadvertently printed in an uncorrected state in the April issue of this volume, and is here repeated with the required alterations in place.] e starting point for this book is the idea that Carlo Michelstaedter (Gorizia, –) represents at the same time a solitary voice, speaking ‘a se stesso e per se stesso’ (p. ), and an original synthesis of many voices coming from the past, some very ancient and some more recent. ese voices resonate in La persuasione e la rettorica, but also in a vast mass of diverse materials which the premature and tragic death of the author le in various stages of incompleteness. Among these voices, Ilvano Caliaro identifies in particular those of Socrates, Jesus, Petrarch, and Tolstoy as being more salient in the composite polyphony of Michelstaedter’s thought. Within the cohort of the philosophers, a privileged place is reserved for Socrates, whose teaching is fundamentally a reawakening of the consciousness, aimed at achieving not only a new capacity to understand, but also a transformation of the way of living itself. It is the role of the (true) philosopher to lead the interlocutor to become aware of himself, to generate his own wisdom, and to identify the individual value on which a life worth living may be built. is is the meaning of ‘persuasion’ for Michelstaedter: that is, the state of someone who, first of all, refuses to create or accept for reality a meaning that it does not have, and then—guided by reason— pursues the absolute good, namely justice. ‘Man is, as opposed to merely existing, when he is “just”’ (p. ). e genuine philosopher is in unavoidable antithesis to the ‘professional’ philosophers (best represented by Aristotle), the ‘builders of systems’ or encyclopedias who, by pursuing a false and mercenary semblance of wisdom, create a model of a man who does not ask why, does not reason, but obeys, and avoids the challenge of truth. Tolstoy represents for Michelstaedter, at the same time, the ultimate proof that there should be no difference between art, life, and thought, and the example of someone who slowly and painfully manages to free himself from all social, ideological , and emotional constraints to reach a state of personal freedom, coinciding with universal love for the whole of humanity. For Tolstoy what made this transformation possible was the encounter with Jesus, not a figure of transcendence but a ‘maestro di vita’, an educator on the path from ‘rettorica’ to ‘persuasione’. Similarly profound is the impact of Jesus on Michelstaedter, probably mediated via the reading of Tolstoy (in particular What I Believe); the message that he extracts from Christ’s teaching, and even more from his life, is uncompromising: only those who are prepared to lose their (inauthentic) life will find their (true) life. MLR, .,   Petrarch is, for the Goritian, above all the author of the Triumphi, and primarily a philosopher, whose fundamental preoccupation is to locate the ubi consistam: the stable place where authentic ‘persuasion’ can be achieved. e difference between Petrarch and Michelstaedter (according to Caliaro) is that, for the former, stability can be projected only in the dimension of religious transcendence, whereas for the latter it is only in the complete possession of the present that absolute value can be found. e fih and final chapter of the work is devoted to a thematic comparison between Michelstaedter and the Triestine writer Scipio Slataper (–). It is not known whether the two knew each other, although both attended, in partially coinciding years, the Istituto di Studi Superiori in Florence, and the latter reviewed the first volume of Michelstaedter’s writings when it was published in . One point of contact between the two is, once more, the interpretation of Christianism and, in particular, of the figure of Jesus and his teaching, seen as attributing value to...