Giovanni Papini
Italian writer (1881–1956)
Giovanni Papini (9 January 1881 – 8 July 1956) was an Italian journalist, essayist, novelist, short story writer, poet, literary critic, and philosopher. A controversial literary figure of the early and mid-twentieth century, he was the earliest and most enthusiastic representative and promoter of Italian pragmatism.2
From Wikipedia’s article on Giovanni Papini (this version), CC BY-SA 4.0.
Born Jan 9, 1881, died Jul 8, 1956.1
About
Papini was admired for his writing style and engaged in heated polemics. Involved with avant-garde movements such as futurism and post-decadentism, he moved from one political and philosophical position to another, always dissatisfied and uneasy: he converted from anti-clericalism and atheism to Catholicism, and went from convinced interventionism – before 1915 – to an aversion to war. In the 1930s, after moving from individualism to conservatism, he finally became a fascist, while maintaining an aversion to Nazism.
As one of the founders of the journals Leonardo (1903) and Lacerba (1913), he conceived literature as "action" and gave his writings an oratory and irreverent tone. Though self-educated, he was an influential iconoclastic editor and writer, with a leading role in Italian futurism and the early literary movements of youth. Working in Florence, he actively participated in foreign literary philosophical and political movements such as the French intuitionism of Bergson and the Anglo-American pragmatism of Peirce and James. Promoting the development of Italian culture and life with an individualistic and dreamy conception of life and art, he acted as a spokesman for Roman Catholic religious beliefs.
Papini's literary success began with Il crepuscolo dei filosofi ("The Twilight of the Philosophers"), published in 1906, and his 1913 publication of his autobiographical novel Un uomo finito ("A finished man").
Due to his ideological choices, Papini's work was almost forgotten after his death, although it was later re-evaluated and appreciated again: in 1975, the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges called him an "undeservedly forgotten" author.
From Wikipedia’s article on Giovanni Papini, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.2
Companies
Early life and education
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 in secret by his mother 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 had a rustic, lonesome childhood. He 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 became enchanted with the idea of writing an encyclopedia wherein all cultures would be summarized.
Trained at the Istituto di Studi Superiori (1900–2), he taught for a year in the Anglo-Italian school and then was a 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" ("Everyday Tragic"), 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 philosophy 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.
From Wikipedia’s article on Giovanni Papini (this version), CC BY-SA 4.0.
Career
Occupation: biographer, poet, literary critic, journalist, writer, philosopher, science fiction writer.6
- Date not recordedFounded Lacerba3
- Date not recordedFounded Leonardo4
- Date not recordedFounded Vallecchi5
Known for: A Man — Finished.7
Personal life
Awards
Links
Sources
The numbers on this page point here. Each one links to the record it came from.
- 1WikidataGiovanni Papini on Wikidata
- 2WikipediaGiovanni Papini on Wikipedia
- 3
- 4
- 5
- 6
- 7
- 8
- 9
- 10
- 11
- 12WikidataVallecchi, Founder
- 13