Curzio Malaparte

Curzio Malaparte , of its true name Kurt-Erich Suckert , (born the Tuscan June 9th 1898 with Prato in , dead the July 19th 1957 with Rome) was a writer, journalist and diplomatic Italian.

Youth

Born in Tuscan from German father, Kurt-Erich Suckert was, very young person, distant from his/her parents to be high by the country poor. Kurt gives up his German name and adopts that of Curzio Malaparte. In spite of brilliant studies and its young age, it chooses to be endangered and engages, as of 1914, in the French Army. He escapes from the Cicognini college where he made his traditional studies, crosses to foot the border to Vintimille and engages like volunteer in the French Army at only 16 years, thus cheating on its age.

He is wounded in Argonne and is decorated with the Military Cross with palm. He fights then on the Italian face where he is wounded with the lungs. Its period of post-war period tumultuous, is intersected with loves and duels (in particular with the Socialist Pietro Nenni and futuristic the Mario Carli). Thereafter, it starts a diplomatic career which will lead it to Warsaw, but that it forsakes for the Journalisme and the Littérature.

It changed its civil statue into 1925 for Curzio Malaparte after having read a lampoon of 1869 entitled “I Malaparte E I Bonaparte”.

Literary and political career

The words will enable him to express its political ideas - Viva Caporetto and the Revolt of the cursed saints are censured besides. The convictions of Malaparte are so deep that it is persuaded that the Russian collectivism and Italian individualism are not paradoxical and that, together, they will lead to a new company.

It adheres then to the fascistic left and becomes for a time a theorist of Fascism whereas within the movement, the partisans of the current strapaese (return to nature) and the current Stracittà (futuristic and technological) are opposed. Malaparte does not take party and while writing articles strapaese for the newspaper It Selvaggio , it founds simultaneously the review 900 (books of Europe and Italy), re-examined intellectual and of avant-garde in which collaborate as well Pablo Picasso as James Joyce or of the dadaists like Soupault.

Its relationships to Fascism worsen when he asserts revolutionary Fascism of 1919 and that he denounces the drifts reactionaries of Mussolini, in particular in Italy against Europe (1923), Mr Caméléon (1929) and the sun is blind (1941), where he condemns the Italian aggression against France.

The change of civil statue is officialized in 1929. Its identity papers will not make any more mention of Kurt Suckert, but of Curzio Malaparte.

In its book, " Technique of the blow of Etat" that it publishes in 1931 in France at Grasset, it also denounces the rise with the capacity of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. It will pay its freedom of writer to the full price. Not only its book is interdict of publication in Italy and Germany (where it is used by the socialist electoral campaign against Hitler), but Malaparte is confined in the islands Lipari, during five years.

To the beginning of the Second world war, it is sent in report as war correspondent of the Axis on the Face of the East in 1941. Malaparte sends its articles in Italy, but their content polemizes makes it stop and assign with residence by the Germans. It then hides the manuscript of Kaputt in sure friends, through all Europe. As from this time the writer breaks definitively with Fascism and does not turn over to Italy that to the fall of Mussolini in 1943, where it takes part in the engagements for the release of his country within the division of partisans " Possente".

It makes publish Kaputt in 1943, shortly after the allied unloading of Salerno. This book tells, with a wild humor, its experiment of war correspondent in the East. It constitutes a cruel and realistic testimony of this period. With the Skin (1949), Malaparte puts in scene the release of famished Italy vis-a-vis the American armies which discover Europe. One finds humanism desperate baroque and of the author and the broad topics malapartiens: shame, dislike and pity.

End-of-life

Malaparte was often announced by all kinds of originalities. With Capri, against the general opinion, the writer makes build in 1937 his villa far from any terrestrial transportation route: it is famous the Villa Malaparte. As an ultimate provocation, in 1957, on its bed of hospital, at the dawn of its death of a cancer, it adheres to the Communist party and bequeaths its famous house to the Popular republic of China.

Malaparte said, in connection with its pseudonym: “ Napoleon was called Bonaparte, and it badly finished: I am called Malaparte and I will finish well. ”

Works

  • Sodome and Gomorrhe (1931)

  • the technique of the coup d'etat (1931)
  • a woman as me (1940)
  • Kaputt (1944)
  • the ball in the Kremlin (1945)
  • the sun is blind (1947)
  • Christ prohibited (film left in 1951)
  • the skin (1949) (adapted to the cinema in 1981 by Liliana Cavani).
  • These crowned Toscans (1956)
  • It of rotted there something (1959, posthumous)
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