Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

ALFIERI AND THE CRITICS

1947; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 3; Issue: 3-4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1179/its.1947.3.3-4.195

1748-6181

Henry McAnally,

Italian Literature and Culture

In the last part of the nineteenth century Alfieri seems to have been somewhat forgotten, though in 1890 the Lettere edite e inedite were brought together and published. As the nineteenth century drew to its close Italians began to recall that in 1903 the centenary of Alfieri's death would be upon them. Early in 1902 the municipality of Asti decided to honour this by production of a centenary edition; the committee organizing it had as its president Carducci who laid out the scheme. Interest in the poet was that year sharply revived. By what was almost a coup de théâtre Alfieri entered into a rather tragic limelight. An eminent professor, Emilio Bertana, had for long been collecting biographical and critical material, and in 1902, in advance of the centenary celebrations which would be taking place the next year ‘avec toute la pompe imaginable,’ he published a book now, it seems, regarded as a landmark in Alfierian criticism. Some authorities divide this criticism into pre-Bertana and post-Bertana. Certainly anyone writing after 1903 would be censurable if he failed to take full account of Bertana. He was able to produce much hitherto unpublished matter. But it would be quite a mistake to leave his book—which is massive but rather amorphous and unindexed—as simply betraying what Pelissier, writing about the Donazion, refers to as ‘le plaisir d'utiliser largement documents nouveaux.’ The same critic who uses these words finds in Bertana ‘une absence de préjugé national, une netteté critique, un réalisme historique des plus remarquables,’ but he regards it as an original step on the part of Bertana to ‘lancer cette biographie critique et destructive d'Alfieri et sa légende’ on the eve of the centenary fêtes. Another, non-Italian, critic, the Russian Glivenko, speaks of Bertana combining il freddo intelletto dello scienziato (which no critic of his work would deny) with the ’caldo temperamento del publicista’ and as ‘critico minuzioso, severo, pungente.’