Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso

Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso (fēlēp`pō tōm-mä`zō märēnĕt`tē), 1876–1944, Italian poet, novelist, and critic. He is best known as the founder of futurism (1909), on which he wrote and lectured, and as an advocate of Fascism; he was one of the first members of the Fascist party. He wrote in both French and Italian; among his works are Le Roi Bombance (1905) and Mafarka il futurista, published (1910) simultaneously in French and Italian.

Bibliography

See his writings ed. by R. W. Flint (tr. 1972).

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Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso (Emilio)

(born Dec. 22, 1876, Alexandria, Egypt—died Dec. 2, 1944, Bellagio, Italy) Italian-French writer, the ideological founder of Futurism. In early poetry such as Destruction (1904), he showed the vigour and anarchic experimentation with form that would characterize his later work. Futurism officially began with the 1909 publication of his manifesto in the Paris newspaper Le Figaro. His ideas were quickly adopted in Italy, and he later elaborated on his theory in a novel and several dramatic works. Arguing that fascism was Futurism's natural extension, he became an active fascist and lost most of his following in the 1920s.

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Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso 

Born Dec. 22, 1876, in Alexandria, Egypt; died Dec. 2, 1944, in Bellagio. Italian writer. Founder and theoretician of futurism in European literature and art.

Marinetti began as a poet of free verse, for example his narrative poem The Conquest of the Stars (1902). In 1909 he published the Manifesto of Futurism, the first such document to proclaim an avant-garde aesthetic program that contained a number of reactionary ideas, such as the liberation from the “dead culture” of the past and from humanist ideals, and that promoted the creation of a “dynamic literature of the future” celebrating machine technology and glorifying war as the “only [means of] world hygiene.”

Marinetti organized futurist groups among nationalistic young people and traveled abroad giving propaganda lectures (he made trips to Russia in 1910 and 1914). He extolled colonial expansion in Africa in his poetry and prose, for example, in the novel Mafarka the Futurist (1910; Russian translation, 1916). In the collection of poems Zang-tumb-tuum (1914), a futuristic montage of disconnected printed lines and mathematical and telegraphic symbols, Marinetti glorified the Italo-Turkish war. He agitated for Italy’s entry into World War I and fought in the war as a volunteer. In 1919, Marinetti became an adherent of Mussolini and proclaimed the kindred nature of Italian futurism and fascism.

WORKS

Les Mots en liberte futuristes. Milan, 1919.
Teatro, vols. 1-3. Rome [I960].
Teoria e invenzione futurista .… [Verona] 1968.
In Russian translation:
Futurizm. [St. Petersburg, 1914.]
Manifesty ital’ianskogo futurizma. Moscow, 1914.

REFERENCES

Lunacharskii, A. V. “Futuristy: Sverkhskul’ptor i sverkhpoet.” Sobr. soch. v 8 tomakh, vol. 5. Moscow, 1965.
Altomarre, L. Incontri con Marinetti e il futurismo. Rome [1954].

Z. M. POTAPOVA