Italo Calvino

Calvino, Italo 

Born Oct. 15, 1923, in Santiago de las Vegas, Cuba. Italian writer; member of the Italian resistance during World War II.

Calvino’s neorealistic works—the novella on partisan life The Path to the Nest of Spiders (1947) and his collection of short stories The Raven Comes Last (1949)—express antifascist, democratic ideas. During the 1950’s, Calvino intensified his social criticism, unmasking the antihumanitarian quality of modern capitalist society in the novellas A Building Speculation (1957; Russian translation, 1965) and The Cloud of Smog (1958) and in the cycle of short story-parables about the poor man Mar-covaldo (1953-56).

Calvino is the creator of an original philosophical and allegorical prose genre, in which he poses acute contemporary ethical problems: the novellas The Cloven Viscount (1952), The Baron in the Trees (1957; Russian translation, 1965), and The Nonexistent Knight (1959) and the satirical, imaginative short stories Cosmi-comics (1965; Russian translation, 1968). Calvino collected and reworked folk tales (the collection Italian Fables, 1956; Russian translation, 1959).

WORKS

Ti con zero. Turin, 1967.
Il castello dei destini incrociati. Parma, 1970.
In Russian translation:
Kot i politseiskii: Izbrannoe. Moscow, 1964.
[“Rasskazy.”] In the collection Ital’ianskaia novella XX veka. Moscow, 1969.

REFERENCES

Potapova, Z. M. Neorealizm v italianskoi literature.Moscow, 1961.
Pescio Bottino, G. Calvino. Florence, 1967.

G. D. BOGEMSKII