Pietro Citati died at 92. Writer and critic, he has been the signature of the cultural pages of for years Republic. He once told the historic editor-in-chief Paolo Mauri that he had calculated that all of his essays and articles occupied the same space as Balzac’s “Comédie humaine”, “a conclusion that he covered me with blush and shame,” he said.
Citati was born in Florence on February 20, 1930, but he soon moved with his family to Turin and then to Liguria. He completed his studies in Modern Literature at the Normale in Pisa. Since the 1950s he has dealt with most of the masterpieces of world literature, from Homer to Proust, passing through Cervantes, Goethe, Kafka, Leopardi, Manzoni, Tolstoj.
In him, who begins to collaborate on the magazine Comparison founded by Roberto Longhi, there are already all the elements that will lead him to become a great storyteller and extraordinary women and men in literature. In ’52 he publishes on the Jenève’s diary a review ai Twenty-three days of the city of Alba from Beppe Fenoglio and it is Citati to negotiate with Fenoglio for the passage from Garzanti. A few years later he became the literary critic of Day. It seems that Giorgio Bassani then reproached him for writing badly.
These are the years in which the partnership with Carlo Emilio Gadda, testified by the correspondence published by Adelphi. On behalf of Garzanti, he becomes the author of the trust man Pasticciaccio: between the two there is half a century of difference. Gadda, Citati once said, invariably telephoned him at half past one, making the dinner cold on the table. It is above all in these years that the militant critic Citati has made a comeback, attentive to outgoing books, also willing to slate. Certain positions were by no means taken for granted: Citati and Guglielmi supported Gadda at the time, but the old critics did not like him.
Leaving behind the militant criticism, the writer publishes biographies of authors that correspond to real canonizations, constellations of secular divinities. Here then Goethe (Mondadori); Images by Alessandro Manzoni (Mondadori); Short life of Katherine Mansfield (Adelphi). And then those that are the most famous titles of him: Tolstoy, Kafka e The stabbed dove. Proust and the “Recherche”, all today in the Adelphi catalog. Citati is also responsible for the work of the Valla Foundation, of which he was president, which over the years has re-proposed the great texts of the classical world in philologically very accurate editions. Because the real task of the critic and writer was to keep the literature of all times alive.
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