Primo Levi and Italo Calvino

Abstract

Contemporary Italian scholarship has matched up Italo Calvino with a number of Italian writers of his time: Cesare Pavese, Elio Vittorini, Franco Fortini, Leonardo Sciascia, Carlo Emilio Gadda, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and even Benedetto Croce, to name just a few. The same cannot be said of Primo Levi: both during his lifetime and after his death Levi cut a solitary figure in the current critical and scholarly discourse—let alone in the eye of the common reader—standing out as unique and extraordinary within the Italian literary scene. An anomalous author who is considered an “outsider to literature,” Levi is unique because of his overtly claimed “hybrid” and amphibious nature: witness to the Holocaust, but also professional writer of fiction; writer and poet, but also chemist and scientist; Jew, but also Italian—and one might go on with a fairly lengthy list of oxymora very familiar to every scholar of Levi. His appartatezza in the literary establishment during his lifetime had as a consequence his belated and posthumous acclamation as a full-fledged writer by most Italian literary critics. His “uniqueness” among the established classics of the Italian literary canon is still reflected by his uncertain position as outsider in current textbooks and general Italian reference works on the Italian Novecento.