Giovanni Papini
| Giovanni Papini | |
|---|---|
Papini in 1921
|
|
| Born |
January 9, 1881 Florence |
| Died | July 8, 1956 (aged 75) Florence |
| Occupation | Essayist, journalist, literary critic, poet, novelist |
| Nationality | Italian |
| Period | 1903–1956 |
| Genre | prose poetry, fantasy, autobiography, travel literature, satire |
| Subject | political philosophy, history of religion |
| Literary movement |
Futurism Modernism |
| Notable awards | Valdagno Prize (1951), Golden Quill Prize (1957) |
|
|
|
| Signature |  |
Giovanni Papini (January 9, 1881 – July 8, 1956) was an Italian journalist, essayist, literary critic, poet, and novelist.
Born in Florence as the son of a modest furniture retailer (and former member of Giuseppe Garibaldi's Redshirts) from Borgo degli Albizi, Papini was baptized secretly to avoid the aggressive atheism of his father and 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 (which he saw as connected to religion); he also became enchanted with the idea of writing an encyclopedia wherein all cultures would be summarized.
Trained at the Instituto di Studi Superiori (1900–2), 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 ("The Tragic Everyday"), in 1907 Il Pilota Cieco ("The Blind Pilot") and Il Crepuscolo dei Filosofi ("The Twilight of the Philosophers"). 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 (Papini is the character in several poems of the period written by Mina Loy).
...
Wikipedia