Curzio Malaparte Research Articles

Proust before Fascism

Abstract This article analyzes readings of Proust from the 1930s to the 1950s, a period when his work was supposedly forgotten. The first section examines passages by Céline, Kurt Wais, and Curzio Malaparte, for whom Proust’s fiction was symptomatic of the dissipation of the dominant classes. The second part of the essay turns to Benjamin, Bataille, and Blanchot, for whom his novel altered conventional notions of justice, desire, figural language, and the structure of time through the experience of writing. Across the political spectrum, readings of Proust pit the rhetoric of decadence against experience and experiment. The essay concludes that although the Recherche records political, social, and historical events—from the Dreyfus affair and a morphing class structure to the onset of the war—none of these readers saw it as an announcement of disasters to come.

Performing the self: the construction of Casa Malaparte as living images

The paper discusses architectural design as a transdisciplinary practice that interlinks architecture, performance, and the moving image through a building example: the Casa Malaparte, the house of Italian writer Curzio Malaparte (1898–1957) built in Capri, Italy, between 1938 and 1942. Malaparte stated many times that he considered his house the best portrait of himself and he called the Casa Malaparte ‘A House Like Me’. Through theoretical, archival, and fieldwork research, the paper argues that the house performs Malaparte's autobiography. Unlike the conventional architectural design process, the Casa Malaparte was built by its owner Curzio Malaparte in collaboration with a master builder in an improvisational manner that incorporated methods of cinematic framing, material collage, and assemblage. The house is discussed as a self-portrait of its inhabitant questioning what could be architecture's role in mirroring the self and theorises Casa Malaparte's creation as a practice that works in between architecture, performance, and the visual arts. By drawing on Bertolt Brecht's ‘alienation effect’, Antonin Artaud's ‘theatre of cruelty’, and Denis Diderot discussion of the ‘tableau vivant’ which literally means ‘living pictures’, the paper provides theoretical frameworks that bring together spatial and performance theories. The Casa Malaparte as a tableau vivant is discussed as an alternative performative device that can potentially expand architectural design and render it as a living practice.

Due “M” al Nord: Montanelli e Malaparte in Finlandia

Indro Montanelli (1909–2001) and Curzio Malaparte (1898–1957) were in Finland during World War II, the former as a witness (and envoy) of the “winter war” fought against the Soviet Union by Finland (which had won independence from Russia in 1917), the latter in the years of the “war of continuation”, when hostilities between the two countries continued in the more complex picture of the second phase of the conflict, that is, after Germany had attacked the Soviet Union. Most of their correspondence and annotations, collected in volume, immediately became, for many readers, the representation of an unequal clash between the small but well-prepared army of Finland (David) and the populous ranks of the Red Army (Goliath). In this article, Antonio Sciacovelli highlights, on the basis of his analysis of their writings, how their images of the Finns, the environment and the particular situation of those years were conveyed to Italian readers, in the “story” of the war events.

The Russian Movie T-34: a duel between soldiers and their tanks.

The aim of this essay is to exploratory analyze the Russian film Russian War T. 34, by Alexey Sidorov, as a symbolic duel between two individuals, a Nazi German and the other one Soviet, employing their tanks, their backgrounds, their industrial cultures, and ideologies. The Dominant Explain Comes from the Curzio Malaparte reports that, at the beginning of Operation Barbarossa of 1941, advocated Nazi defeat. We use the works of Steve Zaloga to analyze the use of tanks as a combat machines. John Erickson, Brandon Schechter's reading, explains the victory of the Red Army and the USSR, mobilizing industrial, human, and cultural means employing, according to Lewin, the memory of the Russian victory over Napoleon in 1812. Our Findings indicate that the consolidation of an accelerated industrial mindset produced a new ethics where Tank Crews were soldiers and mechanically inspired and, like an elite, along with industrial technique, employed tricks as a tactic weapon, according to Michel de Certeau. Narrating the dynamic plastic of the battle between tanks, Sidorov's film holds the viewer's attention by employing the narrative aesthetics of silent cinema and visualizing his scenes dispensing with the reading of Russian subtitles. The film puts the tank, the top product of the 1930s and 40s celebrated industrial development, as a complex war tool whose employment requires exceptional individuals endowed with cunning and technique of fighting, simultaneously soldiers and mechanical.

Взаимодействие «русского» и «советского» мифа в итальянских травелогах о Советском Союзе второй половины 1950-х годов

The article analyzes travelogues about the USSR of the second half of the 1950s written by Italian authors Carlo Levi, Alberto Moravia, Curzio Malaparte, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Goffredo Parise and Guido Piovene. We draw the conclusion that the reception of the Soviet Union of that period is determined by two mythological paradigms: the “Russian” one, dating back to the 18th and 19th centuries, and the “Soviet” one, which was formed in the epoch of Stalin. A complex interaction of the “Russian” and “Soviet” myths generates certain concepts concerning the USSR: first of all, the USSR as a basically rural society and, second, the USSR as a land of childhood (meaning both individual childhood of the authors and collective “childhood” of Europe and of the whole world). These motifs play a key role in Italian perception of Soviet society of the second half of the 1950s. By the 1960s the influence of both paradigms on Italian travel prose is sharply reduced, but getting rid of mythological schemes in travelogues of the 1960s and 1970s comes at a price: the authors start avoiding broad conclusions and prefer to focus on local issues and descriptions of their private contacts with Soviet people.

"The ʻMalapartism ̓ – A Musicalized «Pleuresement»: Curzio Malaparte, Alberto Moravia, Adalberto Libera and the Architectural Structures of the ʻBeingnessʼ "

"Starting with Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s vision, who acclaimed that ‘Music is liquid architecture; architecture is frozen music’ , this is an investigation that touches subthemes as a psychological analysis of the characters from the film « Le Mépris » (by Jean-Luc Godard, 1963), made after the eponym novel «Il disprezzo» by Alberto Moravia (1954); an analysis into the music of the film composed by Georges Delerue (1925-1992) – « Thème de Camille », an investigation in George Delerue’s music and other iconic songs from the decade’s atmosphere; a short philosophical introduction into the universe of the architect Curzio Malaparte (1898-1957) and ʻCasa Malaparteʼ from Capri Island. Said so, ʻCasa Malaparteʼ is bought into analysis through the aesthetical-architectural filter of some nowadays epic mansions/residences from Laval, Montréal, Las Vegas, Atlanta, Los Angeles, Bucharest-Kiseleff-Aviatorilor area, which are included in the architectural research-portfolio. More than this, we try to check how architectural structures sculpture the musicalized Being’s essences using examples such as Belle Abri, Villa Cèdres, Villa Astor, Palazzo di Amore, Villa Leopolda, Villa D. Ionescu, Bel-Air, and other magnifiques villas that seem aesthetically very close to Casa Malaparte. In addition, this paper answers the following fundamental questions: Why, sometimes, the music saves/repairs the architectural existentialism? And why is it so important for architecture to create and re-create permanent music? The paper opens and enriches a collaborative research niche between architecture, music, analysis-methods from philosophy field, and the applied philosophies ʻbehindʼ the real estate portfolios; This paper is an exploration of the beautiful universe of some representative mansions, outlining the ineluctable liaison between sonorous structures and architectural structures, highlighting that the vision of Wolfgang Goethe is still alive in the buildings that surround our cities. This paper is a research realised between 2021 and 2022, and it combines observations from philosophy, architecture, literature, music, and real estate’s domain. Keywords: ʻMalapartism ̓, Georges Delerue, “Camille”, Curzio Malaparte, Alberto Moravia, Mohamed Hadid, sun’s phenomenology, light, architectural structures, musical structures, Adalberto Libera, Casa Malaparte, Belle Abri, Bel-Air, Hadid’s architectural structures, Villa Cèdres, Villa Astor, Palazzo di Amore, Villa D. Ionescu. "

«Русский миф» в произведениях Курцио Малапарте

The work of Italian writer Curzio Malaparte was greatly influenced by the “Soviet” theme. He visited the USSR for the first time as a journalist in 1929, worked as a war reporter on the Eastern front in 1943 and visited the Soviet Union again in 1956. In Malaparte’s numerous fictional and non-fictional works dedicated to his Soviet experience (The Intelligence of Lenin; Coup D’etat: The Technique of Revolution; Lenin the Good Fellow; The Volga Rises in Europe; The Kremlin Ball; Me, In Russia and In China) the author widely used various elements of the European “myth of Russia”. The article studies the influence of the “myth of Russia” on the writer’s views and describes how various components of the myth transform depending on political situation and on the evolution of Malaparte’s beliefs.

Existing Within and Beyond Time: «Capri—the Island of Fugitives» by Krystian Lupa

The proposed article ponders upon Krystian Lupa’s Capri—the Island of Fugitives (2019), an original production staged at the Powszechny Theatre in Warsaw that brings together two of Curzio Malaparte’s prose books: Kaputt (1944) and The Skin (1949). By focusing on the parts of the production that adapt Kaputt, the article scrutinizes scenes produced by the live performance and the virtual projections in order to describe and explain how theatrical expression is enriched by such a juxtaposition. This analysis uses the theoretical frameworks of unnatural narratology (Jan Alber et al.), postdramatic durational aesthetics (Hans-Thies Lehmann), and the idea of the virtual double (Matthew Causey). The primary argument relies on the specific temporality emerging from the Lupa’s performance that enables spectators to feel existence within and beyond time. Furthermore, the study investigates the overarching idea of the performance, recognized by the strategy of foregrounding the thematic that oscillates within the problematics of human cruelty.

РУССКИЕ ИСТОЧНИКИ В ИСТОРИЧЕСКОЙ ПУБЛИЦИСТИКЕ К. МАЛАПАРТЕ (НА МАТЕРИАЛЕ БИОГРАФИИ ЛЕНИНА)

The article analyzes the Russian sources used by Curzio Malaparte in his biography of V. Lenin (1932). In particular, the Italian writer attracted the historical journalism of L. Trotsky and also compared Lenin with the heroes of the Russian classic novel (F. Dostoevsky, I. Goncharov, L. Tolstoy). The purpose of the appeal to Russian sources was not only to find facts, but also to create an original image of Lenin – as a representative of the national character and as a typical European bourgeois.

Vladimir Lenin in the “Soviet” Works by Curzio Malaparte

Vladimir Lenin in the “Soviet” Works by Curzio Malaparte

Tra ucronia e fantapolitica: Storia di domani di Curzio Malaparte

Storia di Domani (1949) is one of Curzio Malaparte’s most original and unclassifiable works. In some ways this novel can be considered an ‘uchronia’, given that it is based on an alternative historical hypothesis: the invasion of Europe by the Soviet Union in the aftermath of the Second World War. On the other hand, the novel is (Contro)storia e satira politica similar to the genre of political fiction, given that the characters are mostly real Italian politicians who were still alive at the time the work was published. The article will focus on the interweaving of historical memory, political satire and literary fiction, showing how Malaparte’s book had anticipated in many ways more recent and better-known counterfactual novels such as Morselli’s Contro-Passato Prossimo and Biancardi’s Aprire il Fuoco.

El Cine y la Villa Malaparte de Capri.

La Pelle, novel or autobiographical story by Curzio Malaparte and La Pelle, film by Liliana Cavani. Written hypotext and visual hypertext in terminology of literary and interartistic theory. On the other hand there are Il disprezzo, novel by Alberto Moravia and Le Mépris, film by Jean-Luc Godard, in a similar condition. There is always an intermediate step: it is the script, written but already prefiguring moving images. We can consider it both hypotexts of the novel and hypertext of the film. In Liliana Cavani’s film, the Malaparte house is necessarily the same as in the novel, where it appears and is explicitly described. However in the case of Le Mépris it is a choice of Godard, since the reference to the house in the novel only prefigures that the house is in Capri and has nice views to Punta Campanella. As we will see some of the locations, when adapting to the configuration of the Malaparte, extract from the house specific original possibilities of the film and in some way they bring new approaches of greater plasticity to the scenes while, however, the dialogues between the characters remain almost intact. One example is the way in which a singular element such as the upper terrace of the house replaces the beach where Molteni, the screenwriter, finds his wife Emilia. The same terrace appears as well as the set of the Odyssey version that begins to be shoot precisely at the end of Le Mépris.

Curzio Malaparte's La pelle. Extreme Experience and the Rhetoric of Interruption

Abstract This essay proposes a reading of Curzio Malaparte's La pelle (1949) grounded in a comparison with Georges Bataille's conception of a “limit-experience” as a source of literary intensity, the pathetic force able to undo the author's ideological dominance on the work. Taking into consideration the traumatic reality of war and degradation from which the novel originates, my essay examines the contradictions between Malaparte's self-absolutory strategy throughout the book, and the disruptions to the mimetic flow of his prose, where the anxiety generated by the author's personal situation within that historical condition produces what I call a “rhetoric of interruption.” Key to my interpretation of Malaparte's text is the use he makes of the medieval iconography of the Triumph of Death and of the literary topos of the plague, both of which play an important role in the construction of La pelle.

The Future of Man is to be an Animal.

This paper examines the role of the dog in the work of two modern Italian writers Curzio Malaparte and Carlo Levi and the writings of a notable Italian philosopher of our times, The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, in several works he assures the importance of animals in tne human life, and the dog, in particular, in the redefinition of the future of the human being. Taking their assertions as analysis tools for the mentioned authors, we analize in the texts, where they formulate a peculiar way of central role represented by the animal. In Levi he is capable to be the key able to open the door to a fantastic world. For Malaparte the dog becomes the essential counterpart to the humanity being capable to harbor huge feelings that he is able to teach man . Finally, for Agamben, men and animals are part of the same natural creation and, eschatologically, walk together until, at the end of time, when humans will reconcile with their half animal nature.

Fascist Revolution, Futurist Spin: Renato Bertelli’s Continuous Profile of Mussolini and the Face of Fascist Time

For ten years now, the prospect of undertaking a portrait of Mussolini has formed the undying dream of artists the world over, renowned and obscure, old and young. Seeing up close this man endowed with extraordinary power, capturing in his visage the signs of the highest and most universal individuality in existence: this is the necessary point of departure and daunting aspiration for he who trusts to marble or bronze those human features touched by the spark of divinity. - Francesco Sapori, ‘Ritratti del Duce’, Emporium, November 19321 Lavishly illustrated in the journal Emporium, Francesco Sapori’s survey of portraits of Benito Mussolini helped mark a decade of the Duce’s rule – an anniversary celebrated more comprehensively with this same year’s Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution (Fig. 1). One of the most active critics of the day, Sapori had recently published Art and the Duce, followed two years later by a more ample tome on aesthetics under Fascism. The subject was not without controversy. Since the regime’s establishment in 1922, Fascist propaganda – and its attendant imagery – had oscillated among a range of subjects and styles, without settling on any unifying aesthetic imperative.2 Would the regime’s culture stake itself upon the example of antiquity or a technophilic future? Upon an idiom duly classical or boldly contemporary? It would take a new World War and its various preludes – autarchy and empire chief among them – to shore up that identity crisis. In the meantime, a survey of prominent intellectuals on the subject of ‘Fascism and Culture’ in 1926 prompted some fittingly conflicted replies. ‘Surely you jest?’ responded the journalist and novelist Curzio Malaparte: ‘A Fascist art? Just what might that mean, a Fascist art?’3 Others expounded – often at cross-purposes – upon the relative merits of ancient or modern styles and themes. One subject, however, already offered a means of figuring Fascism’s abidingly equivocal essence. ‘For the moment’, Malaparte writes, ‘the only original and powerful artistic expression of fascism is Mussolini himself’.4

“The way up is the way down”: Curzio Malaparte’s “Il Cristo Proibito” and Krzysztof Kieślowski’s “Three Colours: Red”

The statement ‘the way up is the way down’ may imply that the spiritual way to perfection lies through humility. It may however also apply to the physical world that is the source of such spiritual metaphors, and within which the actions play out of fictional characters who themselves serve as metaphors for real ones. I will argue that both meanings apply to both of these films, with a comparison between the two films enabling one to employ Malaparte’s explicit prohibition of a Christ-like position to make apparent a similar prohibition that is only implicit in Kieślowski’s film. Such physical movements provide an appropriate topography for the concern with judgment, knowledge, revenge, isolation and humiliation embodied in the male protagonists of the two films. In each case, the protagonists’ eventual divestment from programmes of judgment and revenge may be related to the prohibition Malaparte formulates explicitly: that upon human re-enactment of the Christ-like position that is the one of judgment. Here a destructive and self-destructive movement downwards, in the sense of dehumanization and extreme isolation, is countered eventually by a downward one that, in fact, leads upwards through an embrace of the humiliation of inaction. The paper examines various ways in which the object of both texts is to rediscover a ‘we’ that is rather one of solidarity than complicity.

Forgotten Communication: Humans and Dogs in Curzio Malaparte’s and Carlo Levi’s Literature

This paper analyzes the role of the dog in the work of two modern Italian writers, selecting from each of the texts in which they formulate a peculiar role for the animal represented in their works. The dog is sometimes capable of being the key that opens a magical world and becomes the counterpart to humanity, harboring the feelings that modernity and fascist politics displaced during the crucial time between 1922 and 1945.

Różne twarze Kurta Suckerta - o twórczości Curzia Malapartego w Polsce

Various faces of Kurt Suckert – Curzio Malaparte’s works in PolandAbstractThe article aims at showing the presence of Curzio Malaparte’s prose in Poland, mainly bycharacterizing subsequent Polish translations of individual works of the writer, as well as reactions to them exhibited by critics and interest of the readers. Out of necessity, the articleis only an outline, however, it can be a base for further analysis of reception of Malaparte’swriting in Poland. From the information gathered on publications of the Italian authors aninteresting model emerges. It links the changes in popularity of Malaparte in Poland withhistoric events and political situation.Keywords: Curzio Malaparte, Kaputt, Polish press, reception, translation

The Holocaust – the Border of Pragmatic Language

The theme of the paper is observing and revealing non-pragmatic language that, when dealing with deliberately chosen texts about acts of violence, leads to productive aesthetic disturbance. In its substance, this language refers to the gulf between intensity of representation and ideological intention towards a reader declared in a complicated manner. The paper discusses five texts with the theme of the Holocaust. Three of them deal with the Holocaust as with a recent experience, namely Curzio Malaparte’s Caput (1944), Žofia Nalkowska’s Medallions (1945), and Leopold Lahola’s Last Thing (1949–1956, published in a book in 1968); whereas two other ones deal with the Holocaust after some time in a form of belles-lettres memoirs or testimony, namely Juraj Špitzer’s I Did Not Want to Be a Jew (1994) and Jerzy Kosiński’s Painted Bird (in English in 1965, Czech translation was published in 2011). All interpreted texts are marked by specific language situated beyond the border of traditional literary representation. This language is either extremely subjective, expressive and periphrastic – in this case it borders on with absurd Realism or nonsense (in case of C. Malaparte, J. Kosiński, and L. Lahola) – or, in its neutral representation (in case of Ž. Nalkowska, and J. Špitzer), it borders on with a melancholic self-referential document on limits of cultural humanism or of normal, common humanity.

La casa Malaparte: espacio fílmico y arquitectura de autor

Hay una rica y variada interrelación entre la arquitectura y el cine. Algunas casas y edificios singulares adquieren personalidad y casi la condición de personajes en determinadas películas, tanto en el cine de género -la “casa encantada” en el cine de terror- como en filmes de autor. La casa Malaparte de Capri responde a una arquitectura muy personal y se ubica en un espacio singular que ha servido, en distintos rodajes, para un espacio fílmico que trasciende el mero marco o contenedor de historias; forma parte de una tipología de casa que desafía la gravedad. La adaptación de la novela del propio Curzio Malaparte emplea esta casa como escenario de algunas secuencias, más por su pertenencia al escritor que por el espacio en sí mismo o su lugar en el relato. A partir de una novela, Godard crea en El desprecio un texto rico en capas y evocaciones que remite a la mitología de Ulises al tiempo que reflexiona sobre la imposibilidad del amor y la supervivencia de la pareja.