Farewell to Pietro Citati, the literary critic who challenged genius
He was 92 years old, his production from Proust to Tolstoy is immense
Per restare aggiornato entra nel nostro canale Whatsapp
Pietro Citati died at the age of 92.
Italian writer, essayist, literary critic and biographer, he was born in Florence on February 9, 1930 and graduated from the Normale di Pisa in Modern Literature.
"Rigorous intellectual and never banal", as the Minister of Culture Dario Franceschini greets him today, in 1984 he won the Strega prize with the biography "Tolstoj" and before that the Viareggio prize in 1970 with his "Goethe" and numerous awards at 'abroad. For a long time he directed the prestigious Greek and Latin Writers series of the Lorenzo Valla Foundation.
"I would like to have a direct relationship with the reader , I would like my book to be read like a novel or a poem", he said, explaining that for him "every critical work is born from an identification with the literary work".
From Homer to Tolstoy, from Katherine Mansfield to Proust, from Leopardi to Goethe, from Manzoni to Kafka, passing through Zelda and Francis Scott Fitzgerald, not to mention his "friends", Carlo Emilio Gadda or Giorgio Bassani, was not afraid to compete with the great ones, indeed, because his writing was at the same time identification and challenge, intellectual, creative: "The best of writing is after breaking the distances, when one has the impression of being one with the writer who law".
He never stopped writing for newspapers , half a century of journalism to be collected on the cultural pages first of magazines such as Paragone, then of newspapers such as Il Giorno, Il Corriere della Sera and Repubblica.
His literary production is immense, to name just a few works: “Tolstoj” (1983); "Kafka" (1987); "Portraits of women" (1992); "Leopardi" (2010); "Don Quixote" (2013).
(Unioneonline / D)
