Giovanni Papini


Giovanni Papini was an Italian journalist, essayist, novelist, short story writer, poet, literary critic, and philosopher, is considered one of the controversial Italian literary figures of the early and mid-twentieth century and the earliest and most enthusiatic representative of Italian pragmatism. Among the founders of the journals Leonardo and Lacerba, he conceived literature as an "action" and gave his writings an oratory and irreverent tone. Though self-educated, he was considered influential iconoclastic editor and writer, leading in Italian futurism, he participated in the early literary movements of youth. A living part of the literary, foreign philosophical and political movements, such as the French intuitionism of Bergson and the Anglo-American pragmatism of Peirce and James, which at the beginning of the twentieth century promoted the aging of Italian culture and life from Florence, in the name of an individualistic and dreamy conception of life and art, and a spokesman in Roman Catholic religious belief. Papini's literary success began with his known works include Il Crepuscolo dei Filosofi, published in 1906, and his 1913 publication of his auto-biographical novel Un Uomo Finito.
Papini was born into a lower-middle-class family in Florence, the capital of Tuscany. Controversial and discussed intellectual, admired for his writing style, he was a scholar of philosophy, religion, literary critic and heated polemicist, narrator and poet, popularizer of pragmatism and historical avant-gardes such as futurism and post-decadentism. He went from one position to another on the fronts, always dissatisfied and uneasy, he converted from the anti-clericalism and atheism that turned catholicism on; went from cursing and convinced interventionism to aversion to war.
In the 1930s, after moving from individualism to conservatism, he finally joined fascism, while maintaining an aversion to nazism.
Almost removed from the great literature after its disappearance mainly due to its ideological choices, it was later appreciated and re-evaluated; in 1975, the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges called him an "undeservedly forgotten" author.

Early life

Born in Florence as the son of a modest furniture retailer from Borgo degli Albizi, Papini's mother baptized Papini secretly to avoid the aggressive anti-clericalism of his father. Almost entirely self-educated, he never received an official university degree, and his highest level of education was a teaching certificate.Papini lived a rustic, lonesome childhood. At that time he had felt a strong aversion to all beliefs, to all churches, as well as to any form of servitude ; he also became enchanted with the idea of writing an encyclopedia wherein all cultures would be summarized.
Trained at the Istituto di Studi Superiori, he taught for a year in the Anglo-Italian school and then was librarian at the Museum of Anthropology from 1902 to 1904. The literary life attracted Papini, who in 1903 founded the magazine Il Leonardo, to which he contributed articles under the pseudonym of "Gian Falco." His collaborators included Giuseppe Prezzolini, Borgese, Vailati, Costetti and Calderoni. Through Leonardo's Papini and his contributors introduced in Italy important thinkers such as Kierkegaard, Peirce, Nietzsche, Santayana and Poincaré. He would later join the staff of Il Regno, a nationalist publication directed by Enrico Corradini, who formed the Associazione Nazionalistica Italiana, to support his country colonial expansionism.
Papini met William James and Henri Bergson, who greatly influenced his early works. He started publishing short-stories and essays: in 1906, Il Tragico Quotidiano, in 1907 Il Pilota Cieco and Il Crepuscolo dei Filosofi. The latter constituted a polemic with established and diverse intellectual figures, such as Immanuel Kant, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Auguste Comte, Herbert Spencer, Arthur Schopenhauer, and Friedrich Nietzsche. Papini proclaimed the death of philosophers and the demolition of thinking itself. He briefly flirted with Futurism and other violent and liberating forms of Modernism.
In 1907 Papini married Giacinta Giovagnoli; the couple had two daughters, Viola and Gioconda.

Before and during World War I

After leaving Il Leonardo in 1907, Giovanni Papini founded several other magazines. First he published La Voce in 1908, then L'Anima together with Giovanni Amendola and Prezzolini. In 1913 he started Lacerba. From three years Papini was correspondent for the Mercure de France and later literary critic for La Nazione. About 1918 he created yet another review, La Vraie Italie, with Ardengo Soffici.
Other books came from his pen. His Parole e Sangue showed his fundamental atheism. Furthermore, Papini sought to create scandal by speculating that Jesus and John the Apostle had a homosexual relationship. In 1912 he published his best-known work, the autobiography Un Uomo Finito.
In his 1915 collection of poetic prose Cento Pagine di Poesia, Papini placed himself face-to-face with Giovanni Boccaccio, William Shakespeare, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, but also contemporaries such as Benedetto Croce and Giovanni Gentile, and less prominent disciples of Gabriele D'Annunzio. A critic wrote of him:
Giovanni Papini is one of the finest minds in the Italy of today. He is an excellent representative of modernity's restless search for truth, and his work exhibits a refreshing independence founded, not like so much so-called independence, upon ignorance of the past, but upon a study and understanding of it.

He published verse in 1917, grouped under the title Opera Prima. In 1921, Papini announced his newly found Roman Catholicism, publishing his Storia di Cristo, a book which has been translated into twenty-three languages and has had a worldwide success.
After further verse works, he published the satire Gog and the essay Dante Vivo.

World War II And Collaborations With Fascism

He became a teacher at the University of Bologna in 1935, when the Fascist authorities confirmed Papini's "impeccable reputation" through the appointment. In 1937, Papini published the only volume of his History of Italian Literature, which he dedicated to Benito Mussolini: "to Il Duce, friend of poetry and of the poets", being awarded top positions in academia, especially in the study of Italian Renaissance. In 1940 Papini's Storia della Letteratura Italiana was published in Nazi Germany with the title Eternal Italy – The Great in its Empire of Letters. Papini was the vice president of the Europäische Schriftstellervereinigung, which was founded by Joseph Goebbels in 1941/42. When the Fascist regime crumbled, Papini entered the Franciscan convent in La Verna, with the name Fra' Bonaventura.

Final Years Of Life

Largely discredited at the end of World War II, he was defended by the Catholic political right. His work concentrated on different subjects, including a biography of Michelangelo, while he continued to publish dark and tragic essays. He collaborated with Corriere della Sera, contributing articles that were published as a volume after his death.
Papini had been suffering from progressive paralysis and was blind during the last years of his life.
in Florence.
According to art historian Richard Dorment, Francisco Franco's regime and NATO used Papini's series of imaginary interviews as propaganda against Pablo Picasso, to dramatically undercut his pro-Communist image. In 1962, the artist asked his biographer Pierre Daix, to expose the pretend interview, which he did in Les Lettres Françaises''.
He was admired by Bruno de Finetti, founder of a subjective theory of probability and Jorge Luis Borges, who remarked that Papini had been "unjustly forgotten" and included some of his stories in the Library of Babel.

Publications

Posthumous