He died at 89 years old Alberto Asor RosaItalian literature historian and essayist: he was born in Rome in 1933. Professor of Italian literature at the Sapienza University of Rome, PCI deputy, he was one of the great scholars of our literature and of the relationship between literature and political ideologies. He directed the Italian literature Einaudi (1982-91).
Italian literature, the study of a lifetime
Alberto Asor Rosa, more often referred to only as Asor, has been a protagonist of the cultural and political discourse of the last half century.
Pupil of Natalino SapegnoAsor had graduated by discussing a thesis on Vasco Pratolini with Sapegno and Ungaretti, a thesis that later became a book. With Writers and peoplethen republished many times, it analyzed the anthropological change of recent decades, the passage from the people to the masses, and the relationship of the intellectual left with the proletariat. An interest, that of the relationship between intellectuals and power, which has remained constant in his life, as he said interviewed on Repubblica by Paolo Mauri a few years ago and in one Talking loudwith Antonio Gnoli, on the occasion of his eightieth birthday.
For fifty-two years a lecturer at the Sapienza University of Rome, he believed that Italian literature should be studied as a whole. And he has dedicated his existence to the history of literature: from the one conceived in the 1970s for New Italy to European history of Italian literature (Einaudi, 2009): in the middle the direction of the great work entitled Italian literature published in 20 volumes between 1982 and 2000 and the collaboration with the Italian literature Laterzadirected by Carlo Muscetta.
Political commitment
Engaged in politics from a young age, he left the PCI in 1956 after the Hungarian tragedy and returned only in 1972: several times a parliamentarian (elected in ’79), after the fall of the Wall he was a member of the PDS leadership. He contributor to periodicals such as Working world and New worldhe directed counter plan, Political laboratory and, in ’90/91 he was director of the new one Rebirthwho under his guidance, however, distanced himself from Togliatti’s past from the very first issue of the magazine.
The works: non-fiction, memory and short stories
Despite being an Italianist, immediately afterwards Writers and people wrote an essay on Thomas Mann. And starting from The ultimate paradox (1985) devoted himself to nonfiction, memoirs and fiction in a more liberal manner. Neither The dawn of a new world (2002) returned to his family history: he was born in Rome, in 1933, into a petty bourgeois family, with his father employed by the railways, and he grew up in Piazza Tuscolo. After The sunrise he wrote Stories of animals and other living things (2005) all about non-human characters and again in 2010, with Assunta and Alessandrohe went back to telling about his parents. There are, again, two volumes of short stories. The tales of the error (2013) E Suspended loves (2017), in which many of the situations narrated have an autobiographical background.
In 2019, an essay on Machiavelli and Italy entitled Report of a defeat.
His collaboration with our newspaper should not be forgotten: su Republicin addition to political and civil interventions (Asor Rosa fought several battles for the environment) he always continued to write about literature, as a militant critic. The Meridian (Mondadori) dedicated to him is edited by Luca Marcozzi, with introductions by Corrado Bologna and Massimo Cacciari.
