"Il mio scrivere è sempre problematico": il dialogo epistolare tra Italo Calvino ed Elsa Morante

Abstract

A long and dense correspondence punctuates the long-distance dialogue between Elsa Morante and the Ligurian writer since 1947, declining in the intimate and profound forms of human and artistic ‘conversation’ until 1983, prelude for both of them of an epilogue of life, painful and controversial for her, premature and sudden for him. We will want to dwell in this talk on the centrality that, in this fervid correspondence, welcomed into the thick repertoire updated by Luca Baranelli, the 1950s hold, a biographical and literary crucible of cognitive and creative tensions, of compositional remeditations, of reciprocal exegesis. In different ways, both authors, each from their generational shore, from their personal formative bed, pour into the exchange of this decade the urgencies related to the predilection for the forms of the fantastic, of the fairy tale as keys of expression, capable of capturing, albeit from different peculiar figures, the unprecedented implications, the dissonances of a reality in which micro-stories intersect the 1958 epochalinaudian turns.