Son of a weaver and a small landowner, he soon lost his father and mother in the earthquake that destroyed a large part of Marsica in January 1915. After interrupting his high school studies, he devoted himself to politics as an active socialist and ...
Son of a weaver and a small landowner, he soon lost his father and mother in the earthquake that destroyed a large part of Marsica in January 1915. After interrupting his high school studies, he devoted himself to politics as an active socialist and took part in the struggles against the war and in the revolutionary workers' movement; in 1921 he participated in the foundation of the Communist Party in Livorno (which he represented in Moscow, with Togliatti, in the Comintern), but broke away from it in 1930, in disagreement with Stalin's purges. An anti-fascist, he remained in exile in Switzerland from 1930 to 1945, years during which he matured his vocation as a writer. Published in German translation in Zurich in 1933, "Fontamara" is his debut novel, which brings him to general attention: in addition to being an extraordinary analysis of central-southern culture, "a document on a civilization now definitively dead" (Fofi), it is also in all probability the most beautiful book on Italian peasants that has ever been written. The following "Bread and Wine" of '36 takes up, in a more sentimental, less ironic key, the themes of its successful predecessor, where "The seed under the snow" (1942) seems to be stationed between mannerism and rituality. In the meantime, in the period 1932-34 he was editor of the German-language monthly magazine "Information", published in Zurich, with the collaboration of artists and intellectuals of the calibre of Thomas Mann, Bertolt Brecht and Robert Musil. His essay-cultural activity is also flourishing, which includes the essay "Fascism, its origins and its development" (1934) and the treatise on political philosophy "The school of dictators" (1938). In 1944, back in Italy, he settled in Rome, where he joined the Italian Socialist Party of Proletarian Unity. His literary production continued with the theatrical work "Ed lui si nascose" (1944) and with the novels "A handful of blackberries" (1952), "Il segreto di Luca" (1956), "La volpe e le camelie" (1960): less original than the previous ones, more linked to a model of late-nineteenth-century literature, they express a sort of conversion of ours, which arrives here on the shores of a socialism hybridized with Christianity. Of great interest, however, are "Uscita di sicurezza" (1965), a collection of political essays in which he recounts the painful travails that finally led him to detach himself from communist ideology, and "The adventure of a poor Christian" (1968), his last work that appeared during his lifetime, an intriguing novel-essay focused on the figure of Pope Celestine V, later transformed into a theatrical text. Albert Camus said of him: "Look at Silone. He is radically attached to his land, yet he is so European."
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