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| Nobel per la letteratura |
Elias Canetti (Rustschuk, 25 Luglio 1905 - Zurigo, 14 Agosto 1994), scrittore ebreo di lingua tedesca, premio Nobel per la letteratura 1981. E' considerato l'ultima grande figura della cultura mitteleuropea.
- passato remoto
Biografia
L'infanzia
Elias Canetti nacque a Rustschuk in Bulgaria, primo dei tre figli di Jacques Canetti, commerciante, e di Mathilde Arditti, proveniente da una ricca famiglia ebrea sefardita. La lingua della sua infanzia fu il ladino o giudeospagnolo parlato in famiglia, ma il piccolo Elias fece presto esperienza con la lingua tedesca usata in privato dai genitori (che la consideravano la lingua del teatro e dei loro anni di studio a Vienna). Dopo avere appreso il bulgaro, si trovò ad avere a che fare con l'inglese quando il padre decise di trasferirsi per lavoro a Manchester nel 1911. La decisione fu accolta con entusiasmo da Mathilde Arditti, donna colta e liberale, che potè sottrarre Elias all'influenza del nonno paterno che lo aveva iscritto alla scuola talmudica. Nel 1912, con la morte improvvisa del padre Jacques, cominciarono le peregrinazioni della famiglia, che si spostò prima a Vienna e poi a Zurigo, dove Canetti trascorse, tra il 1916 e il 1921, gli anni più felici. In questo periodo, e nonostante la presenza dei fratelli più piccoli, il rapporto di Canetti con la madre (che dal 1913 soffriva di periodiche crisi depressive) diventò sempre più stretto, conflittuale e segnato dalla dipendenza reciproca.
Germania e Austria
La tappa seguente fu Francoforte, nella cui università Canetti si laureò in chimica nel 1921, e dove ebbe modo di assistere alle manifestazioni popolari a seguito dell'assassinio del ministro Walter Rathenau, prima esperienza di massa che gli lasciò un'impressione indelebile. Nel 1924 Canetti fece ritorno con il fratello Georges a Vienna, dove rimase quasi ininterrottamente fino al 1938. Canetti si integrò velocemente nell'élite culturale viennese, studiando con avidità le opere di Otto Weininger, Sigmund Freud (che gli suscitò diffidenza sin dall'inizio) e Arthur Schnitzler, e assistendo alle conferenze di Karl Kraus, polemista e moralista. In uno di questi incontri culturali, conobbe Venetiana (Veza) Taubner-Calderòn, che sposò poi nel 1934, nonostante l'avversione della madre. Sotto l'influenza del ricordo delle manifestazioni viste a Francoforte, nel 1925 cominciò a prendere forma il progetto di un libro sulla massa. Nel 1928 andò a lavorare a Berlino come traduttore di libri americani (soprattutto Upton Sinclair): lì conobbe Bertolt Brecht, Isaak Babel e Georg Grosz. Due anni dopo, conseguì il dottorato in chimica, professione che però non praticò mai, e verso la quale non mostrò comunque alcun interesse. Tra il 1930 e il 1931 cominciò a lavorare al lungo romanzo Die Blendung (L'accecamento), pubblicato nel 1935, e, tornato a Vienna, continuò le frequentazioni dell'ambiente letterario: Robert Musil, Fritz Wotruba, Alban Berg, Anna e Alma Mahler. Nel 1932 uscì il suo primo lavoro teatrale, "Nozze". Due anni dopo fu la volta di "La commedia della vanità".
Londra
Nel 1938, a seguito dell'annessione dell'Austria alla Germania nazista, Canetti emigrò prima a Parigi e poi a Londra. Nei vent'anni successivi, si dedicò esclusivamente al grandioso progetto sulla psicologia della massa, il cui primo e unico volume, "Massa e potere", fu pubblicato nel 1960. Nel 1952 prese la cittadinanza britannica. La prima del suo dramma "Vite a scadenza" a Oxford (1956). Veza Canetti morì suicida nel 1963. Nel 1971 sposò la museologa Hera Buschor, dalla quale ebbe l'anno seguente una figlia, Johanna. Nel 1975 le Università di Manchester e di Monaco gli conferirono due lauree honoris causa. Nel 1981 ricevette il premio Nobel per la letteratura, "per opere contraddistinte dalla visione ampia, dalla ricchezza di idee e dalla potenza artistica"
Bulgarian-born German novelist, essayist, sociologist, and playwright, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1981. Canetti's best-known works is Crowds and Power (1960), an imaginative study of mass movements, death and disordered society which drew on history, folklore, myth, and literature. The book was inspired by the burning of the Palace on Justice in Vienna in 1927. Canetti started publishing in the 1930s but it was not until the 1960s and especially after the Nobel price that his work started to gain sustained critical attention. Most of his life he was resident in London, but he did not actively associate with English writers or German language colleagues.
"Die charaktervollsten gelehrten sein um Bücher willen schon zu Verbrechern geworden. Wie gross sei die Versuchung erst für einen intelligenten und bildungshungrigen Menschen, die zum erstenmal Bücher mit all ihren Reizen drückten!" (from Die Blendung, 1935) Elias Canetti was born in Ruse, a small port in Bulgaria on the river Danube, into a Sephardic Jewish family. The family were well-to-do merchants, who spoke old Spanish. German was the fourth language Canetti acquired - after Ladino, an archaic Spanish dialect, Bulgarian, and English. He eventually chose to write in German and retained a lasting love of German culture. When Canetti was six, his family moved to Manchester, England. After the sudden death of his father, his mother took the family to Vienna, where he learned German.
From 1916 to 1921 Canetti studied in Zürich, and produced his first literary work, JUNIUS BRUTUS, a verse play. During a visit to Berlin in 1928 he met Bertolt Brecht, Isaak Babel, and George Grosz, and started to plan a series of novels on the subject of human madness. The idea resulted in the novel DIE BLENDUNGEN, (translations into English in 1947 and 1964), which was well received after WW II among others by Thomas Mann and Iris Murdoch, and considered to have been ahead of its time.
Canetti graduated in 1929 with a Ph.D. in chemistry at the University of Vienna. In the early 1930s he translated works by the American writer Upton Sinclair. While in Austria he had an experience that would affect all his future work: angry protesters burned down the Palace of Justice and the author was caught up in the crowd, later describing how he felt himself becoming part of the mob. In 1934 Canetti married Veza Taubner-Calderón, who died in 1963. In the 1930s he wrote two plays, DIE HOCHZEIT (The Wedding), a comedy of manners, and DIE KOMÖDIE DER EITELKEIT, forerunners of the theater of the absurd. DIE BEFRISTETEN, produced in Vienna in 1967, asked the question what happens if one knows the exact date of ones death. To escape the systematic persecution of Jews, Canetti fled to Paris in 1938 and next year he immigrated to England, where he mostly lived for the rest of his life, also maintaining a home in Zürich from the 1970s. In 1971 he married Hera Buschor; they had one daughter. Hera Buschor died in 1988.
Canetti's breakthrough work Die Blendung (Auto-da-Fé) apperared in 1935. It was banned by the Nazis, but beside this acknowledgment Canetti did not gain much attention as a writer before the 1960s when the book was reprinted. The protagonist is Peter Klein, a forty-year-old philologist and sinologist. He knows much of ancient languages but is unable to decipher contemporary voices. "He himself was the owner of the most important private library in the whole of this great city. He carried a minute portion of it with him wherever he went. His passion for it, the only one which he had permitted himself during a life of austere and exacting study, moved him to take special precautions. Books, even bad ones, tempted him easily into making a purchase. Fortunately the great number of the book shops did not open until after eight o'clock." Klein feels safe with his 40 000 characters of the Chinese alphabet and 25 000 books. He fears social and physical contacts, and his inhumane view of the world contradicts his learning. However, he allows himself to get into the clutches of his ignorant and grasping housekeeper Therese Krummholz, nearing 60, whom he marries, and who robs him of everything. In this she is helped by Benedikt Pfaff, the proto-fascist caretaker of the apartment block. Klein descends to the lower, surrealistic depths of society. His brother Georges, who is a psychiatrist, tries in vain to cure him. Doomed Klein dies in apocalyptic self-destruction amidst his books.
Crowds and Power (1960), brought together material from many disciples, and avoided such names as Marx or Freud, who is mentioned once in a note. It started from the assumption that crowd instinct is as fundamental as the passion to survive. "The lowest form of survival is killing." The first half analyses the dynamics of different types of crowds and of 'packs'. The second part focuses on the question how and why crowds obey rulers. Canetti presented Hitler as the paranoiac ruler of crowds, fascinated by the size of the crowds he commands. The persecution of the Jews he connects with the German experience of inflation - they needed to pass this humiliation on to something else which would be reduced to worthlessness. "Our most pressing need, as Canetti very movingly and convincingly argues at the end, is to control the 'survivor mania' of our rulers, and the key to this is 'the humanisation of command'. But how is command to be humanised? Canetti has not given us a psychology with which to picture the humanisation of command." (Iris Murdoch in The Spectator, September 1962)
Kafka's Other Trial: The Letters to Felice (1969) examined Kafka's struggle between comfortable middle-class life and individual isolation. As an essayist Canetti became known with The Conscience of Words (1976). With one exception, these essays date from the 1960s and 1970s and deal mostly with literary topics. Canetti sees that writers are responsible of the preservation, revivification, and invention of the life-sustaining myths and their meaning. Tolstoy is rejected as a model for having "struck a kind of pact with death" in his late turn to religion, and Kafka emerges "among all writers as the greatest expert on power". "Canetti has a very acute ear for colloquialisms and the banalities of everyday speech, creating what he term as "acoustic mask" for each figure, a core vocabulary of a few hundred words that marks out a character's habits of thoughts and behavior. Canetti's penetration of his various social representative's linguistic habits is quite remarkably sustained, creating a world of complete self-absorption, vanity, and personal and public insanity." (Anna.Marie Taylor in Contemporary World Writers, ed. by Tracy Chevalier, 1993)
Before the Nobel Prize made Canetti world- famous, he lived modestly in Hampstead. The German literature critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki met him for the first time in the mid-1960s and already noted his charisma and his greats skills as a conversationalist (see Mein Leben, 1999). Canetti admitted that he did not have patience to listen to others. He had written most of his diary in cipher so that intrusive critics would not understand it. When Reich-Ranicki asked him to write a short essay on Heinrich Böll, the writer refused. Reich-Ranicki's impression was that Canetti did not place much value much on Böll's books.
Among Canetti's several awards were Foreign Book Prize (1949, France), Vienna Prize (1966), Critics Prize (1967, Germany), Great Austrian State Prize (1967), Bavarien Academy of Fine Arts Prize (1969), Bühner Prize (1972), Nelly Sachs Prize (1975), Order of Merit (1979, Germany), Europa Prato Prize (1980, Italy), Hebbel Prize (1980), Kafka Prize (1981), Great Service Cross (1983, Germany). He had also honorary degrees from two universities. Canetti died on August 13, 1994 in Zürich. His autobiographical works include DIE GERETTETE ZUNGE (1980), in which the author returned to the traumatic experience of his father's death, DIE FACKEL IM OHR (1982), and DAS AUGENSPIEL (1985). DIE STIMMEN VON MARRAKESCH (1967), a travel book, dealt also with death.
Nel 1937, morì a Parigi la madre, Mathilde Arditti. Nel 1938, si trasferì a Londra.
Nel 1938, dopo l'Anschluss, emigra a Londra rimanendovi fino al 1971 quando decide di tornare a vivere a Zurigo, il "paradiso perduto" della sua adolescenza, in cui morirà il 14 agosto 1994.
1954 - viaggio a Marrakesh
Sempre "mitteleuropeo", nonostante le molte peregrinazioni, ebbe molte lingue madri, ma scrisse sempre in tedesco. Vinse il Premio Nobel per la letteratura nel 1981.
La famiglia, dopo la morte del padre, si sposta in diverse città: Zurigo, Francoforte, Vienna. Nel 1938, si reca a Londra, dove vi rimane per 33 anni, sino al 1971. Successivamente torna a Zurigo, la “sua” città idealizzata nel periodo dell’adolescenza, dove muore il 14 agosto 1994.
I viaggi, le relazioni e le numerose lingue praticate, costituiscono il corposo patrimonio culturale di Canetti. Le peculiarità delle sue opere scaturiscono dalla sua concezione del sapere, visto come propedeutico alla possibilità di essere liberi.
Del 1931 è il suo unico romanzo "Auto da fè", che esplora il rapporto tra intellettuale e cultura, tra idealità e realtà. Il soggetto principale del libro è però la solitudine e la tristezza da essa causata. Il libro anticipa metaforicamente le tristi vicende totalitaristiche europee (Hitler salirà al potere solo due anni dopo) e annuncia pessimisticamente il disfacimento del razionalismo occidentale.
In "Massa e potere" (1960), analizza a tutto tondo la psicologia delle masse e del potere. Questa è un opera di difficile gestazione, impiega trent’anni a scriverla e lui stesso la definisce come l’opera “di una vita. Le tematiche presenti nel libro sono in parte riconducibili a ”Autodafé".
Scrive anche una autobiografia, divisa in più volumi ("La lingua salvata", "Il frutto del fuoco" e "Il gioco degli occhi"), che viene pubblicata fra il 1977 e il 1985. E’ proprio quest’opera, una delle più intense della letteratura contemporanea, che fa di lui uno degli scrittori più importanti del Novecento.
Opere
L'opera di Canetti, oltre ad essere incentrata sulla metamorfosi, è essa stessa una metamorfosi continua: un solo romanzo, un solo libro di "antropologia", pochi testi teatrali, alcuni saggi, degli aforismi, un diario di viaggio e un'autobiografia, ma si tratta quasi sempre di capolavori.
When surveyed, Elias Canetti's literary work may seem split up, comprising as it does of so many genres. His oeuvre consists of a novel, three plays, several volumes of notes and aphorisms, a profound examination of the origin, structures and effect of the mass movement, a travel book, portraits of authors, character studies, and memoirs; but these writings, pursued in such different directions, are held together by a most original and vigorously profiled personality.
The exiled and cosmopolitian author, Canetti has one native land, and that is the German language. He has never abandoned it, and he has often avowed his love of the highest manifestations of the classical German culture. He has warmly emphasized what Goethe, for instance, has meant to him as medicina mentis.
His foremost purely fictional achievement is the great novel, Die Blendung, (Auto da Fé ) published in 1935 and praised then by Thomas Mann and Hermann Broch. But it can be said to have attained its full effect during the last decades: against the background of national socialism's brutal power politics, resulting in a world conflagration, the novel acquires a deepened perspective.
Die Blendung was part of an originally planned series of novels which was to take the shape of a "comédie humaine of the madmen". The book has such fantastic and demoniacal elements that associations to Russian 19th century writers like Gogol and Dostoievsky - to whom, by the way, Canetti himself has declared he owes a debt of gratitude - are apparent. The main scene of the macabre and grotesque events that the novel discloses is an apartment house in Vienna. It is an aspect of key importance when Die Blendung is regarded by several critics as a single fundamental metaphor for the threat exercised by the "mass man" within ourselves. Close at hand is the viewpoint from which the novel stands out as a study of a type of man who isolates himself in self-sufficient specialization - here, the sinologist Peter Kien surrounded by his many books - only to succumb helplessly in a world of ruthlessly harsh realities.
Die Blendung leads over to the big examination of the origin, composition and reaction patterns of the mass movements which Canetti, after decades of research and study, published with Masse und Macht (Crowds and Power, 1960). It is a magisterial work by a polyhistor who knows how to reveal an overwhelmingly large number of viewpoints of men's behaviour as mass beings. By going in particular to the primitive peoples, their myths and fairytales, Canetti tries to pinpoint the character of the mass movements. In his field of research he introduces not only the actual masses but also the imaginary ones: the masses of "the spirits", "the angels" and "the devils", which are such important elements in many religions. He explores the nature and significance of the national mass symbols; with acumen he illustrates the psychological problems of commands and obedience. Like Gustave Le Bon, he sees the archaic components in the mass movements of the new age. In his basically ahistorical analysis, what he wants to expose and attack by scrutinizing the origin and nature of the mass is, in the end, the religion of power. According to Canetti, deep down behind every command, every exercise of power, is the threat of death. Survival itself becomes the nucleus of power. At the last, the mortal enemy is death itself: this is a principal theme, held to with an oddly pathetic strength, in Elias Canetti's literary works.
Apart from the intensive work on Masse und Macht, Canetti has written strongly concentrated, aphoristic notes, issued in several volumes. They usually emanate from concrete situations which can be regarded as metaphors for something generic. A satirical bite in the observations of people's behaviour, a loathing of wars and devastation, bitterness at the thought of life's brevity are characteristic features of the continuous notes. By virtue of his abundant wit and stylistic pithiness, Canetti stands out as one of the foremost aphorists of our time, a man who, in his phrasing of life's ironies, is sometimes reminiscent of great predecessors like La Bruyère and Lichtenberg.
The plays Canetti has written are all of a more or less absurd kind: Hochzeit (Wedding), 1932, Komödie der Eitelkeit (The Comedy of Vanity), 1950, Die Befristeten (The Deadlined), 1956. In their portrayal of extreme situations, often depicting human vulgarity, these "acoustic masks", as Canetti calls the plays, are of decided interest.
With Die Stimmen von Marrakesch (The Voices of Marrakesh ), 1967, Canetti published a travel book which shows his keen eye for life in the poor outskirts of existence; with Der Ohrenzeuge (Earwitness) , 1974, he presented a collection of "characters" in the spirit of Theophrastus. Among his literary portrait studies, special mention can be made of Der andere Prozess (Kafka's Other Trial) , 1969, in which, with intense involvement, he examines Kafka's complicated relationship to Felice Bauer. The study forms itself into a picture of a man whose life and work meant the relinquishing of power.
Finally, standing out as a peak in Elias Canetti's writings are his memoirs, so far in two large volumes: Die gerettete Zunge (The Tongue Set Free), 1977, and Die Fackel im Ohr (The Torch in the Ear), 1980. In these recollections of his childhood and youth, he reveals his vigorous epic power of description to its full extent. A great deal of the political and cultural life in Central Europe in the early 1900s - especially the form it took in Vienna - is reflected in the memoirs. The peculiar environments, the many remarkable human destinies with which Canetti was confronted, and his unique educational path - always aiming at universal knowledge - are seen here in a style and with a lucidity that have very few qualitative equivalents in the memoirs written in the German language this century.
«Ognuno vuole amici potenti. Ma loro ne vogliono di più potenti.» «I veri scrittori incontrano i loro personaggi solo dopo averli creati.» «Chi è veramente intelligente nasconde di avere ragione.» «Il successo ascolta solo l'applauso. È sordo a tutto il resto.» «Il comportamento degli uomini è così equivoco che basta mostrarsi come si è per vivere completamente occultati e sconosciuti.» «Il progresso ha i suoi svantaggi: di tanto in tanto esplode.» «Un elemento pericoloso dei divieti è che ci si fida di essi e non si riflette su quando sarebbero da cambiare.» «L'uomo ha raccolto tutta la saggezza dei suoi predecessori, e guardate quanto è stupido.» «Gli uomini non hanno più misura, per nulla, da quando la vita umana non è più la misura.» Un elemento pericoloso dei divieti è che ci si fida di essi e non si riflette su quando sarebbero da cambiare. Il progresso ha i suoi svantaggi: di tanto in tanto esplode. Nei libri che ricordiamo c'è tutta la sostanza di quelli che abbiamo dimenticato. Ognuno vuole amici potenti. Ma loro ne vogliono di più potenti. Ha gli occhi spietati di chi ha amato sopra ogni cosa. Leggendo i grandi autori di aforismi si ha l'impressione che si conoscano tutti bene fra loro. L'uomo ha raccolto tutta la saggezza dei suoi predecessori, e guardate quanto è stupido. I veri scrittori incontrano i loro personaggi solo dopo averli creati. Chi è veramente intelligente nasconde di avere ragione. Non esiste massacro che protegga dal prossimo massacro. Gli uomini non hanno più misura, per nulla, da quando la vita umana non è più la misura. Una noia mortale emana da quelli che hanno ragione e lo sanno. Il successo ascolta solo l'applauso. È sordo a tutto il resto.
La giovinezza
Massa e potere
Saggi e aforismi
L'autobiografia
NOTE: Irish Murdoch dedicated her novel The Flight From the Enchanter (1956) to Canetti
Bibliografia
Le opere complete di Elias Canetti sono pubblicate in 10 volumi dall'editore tedesco Hanser. Tutti i titoli usciti singolarmente sono disponibili in edizione italiana.
Narrativa e teatro
(DE) Die Blendung. Roman - Vienna: Reichner (1935)
(DE) Dramen (Hochzeit. Komoedie der Eitelkeit. Die Befristeten) - Monaco: Hanser (1964)
- (IT) Teatro - Torino: Einaudi (1982)
Autobiografia e diari
(DE) Die gerettete Zunge. Geschichte einer Jugend - Monaco: Hanser (1977)
(DE) Die Fackel im Ohr. Lebensgeschichte 1921-1931 - Monaco: Hanser (1980)
(DE) Das Augenspiel. Lebensgeschichte 1931-1937 - Monaco: Hanser (1980)
(DE) Die Stimmen von Marrakesch. Aufzeichnungen nach einer Reise - Monaco: Hanser (1968)
(DE) Party im blitz - Monaco: Hanser (2002)
Saggi e aforismi
(DE) Masse und Mach - Amburgo: Claassen (1960)
(DE) Die Provinz des Menschen. Aufzeichnungen 1942-1972 - Monaco: Hanser (1973)
(DE) Das Gewissen der Worte. Essays - Monaco: Hanser (1976)
(DE) Das Geheimherz der Uhr. Aufzeichnungen 1973-1985 - Monaco: Hanser (1987)
(DE) Die Fliegenpein. Aufzeichnungen - Monaco: Hanser (1992)
(DE) Nachtraege aus Hampstead. Aus den Aufzeichnungen 1954-1971 - Monaco: Hanser (1994)
(DE) Aufzeichnungen 1992-1993 - Monaco: Hanser (1996)
(DE) Der Ohrenzeuge; Fünfzig Charaktere
Libri su Elias Canetti
La bibliografia critica su Elias Canetti è vasta e in continua evoluzione. Tuttavia, in italiano esiste una sola monografia critica, tradotta con quindici anni di riatardo:
(IT) Youssef Ishaghpour, Elias Canetti - Torino: Bollati Boringhieri (2005)
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