"Cher maître et ami" : edizione critica delle lettere di Eugenio Montale a Valery Larbaud e altri documenti Montaliani (1925-1939)

Abstract

This dissertation is centred on the critical study of the correspondence of Eugenio Montale (1896-1981) with the French writer Valery Larbaud (1881-1957). The epistolary documents - several of which hitherto unpublished - cover a crucial period in Montale's double development, as a leading Italian critique et ecrivain. The years in question, 1926-1937, mark the "transition" - or «laborious metamorphic transit», as one of Montale’s prominent critics, Lanfranco Caretti, defined it - from Ossi di seppia (1925) to Le occasioni (1939). From the existential anxiety or male di vivere voiced in his debut collection, Montale "moves" his poetics to the hermetic lyricism of his second book, written during the equally anxious years of Fascist and Nazi regimes and published on the eve of World War II. These dates - 1925 and 1939 - are immediately recognisable as poignantly significant in Montale's life as well as in Italian and European history, not only from a literary point of view (many critics consider them as the final high point of the Modernist movement). In view of this, the following study documents and maps two distinct yet intertwined "profiles" of Montale; as a profoundly Italian and intrinsically European modernist writer.