Neorealist Authors: P.Levi

Primo Levi was born in Turin in 1919 and he had a youth of regular studies and readings: even if he belongs to a Jewish family, the racial laws of 1938 partly striked him and he can continue his studies. He takes a degree in chemistry and in 1941 he finds a Job in Milan in a medicius factory. He gets in touch with supporters of antifascism, in 1942 he enters in Action Party and after the fall of fascism he was partisan in Val d’Aosta, where in the December 1943 he was captured and deported to Auschwitz, where he remained from February 1944 to January 1945.
Went back to Turin after a journey of about five months that he will describe in "La Tregua", Levi finds job in a paint factory of varnish and he tries to have a normal life, after the inhuman experience of the lager, in the meantime he writes "Se questo è un uomo" (1947) that is refused by Einaudi and published by De Silva from Turin.
The success, scarce at the beginning, will come in 1958 when the book was published in the series of "Saggi" by Einaudi. Encouraged, he takes again his activity of writer, he publishes La tregua (1963), La Chiave a stella (1978), Se non ora quando (1982), I sommersi e i salvati (1986) and he works as journalist in meetings and conferences.
In his works his traumatic experiences of lager return, to which it is not right to link is end, he suicides in Turin in 1987.

The same Levi furnished us indications to understand his production: "I remember to have lived my year in Auschwitz in a condition of long live spirit. [...] Really I never stopped recording the world and the men around me, just to keep in me today a detailed image of them.. I had a strong wish to understand, I was constantly invaded by a curiosity that seemed cynic to somebody, that of the naturalist that is transported into a monstrous but new environment, monstrously new".

This cognitive vocation and this scientific habitus are fundamental aspects of his Se questo è un uomo: Levi tries to read and to discover the laws of the human behaviors, the mechanisms through which the overcoming or brutalization, which is not physical but also interior, are manifested: "the characters of these pages are not men, their humanity is buried, or they themselves buried it under the suffered or inflicted offense". Cesare Cases wrote: "... the man unjoustly suffers, but he saves himself understanding. To understand is an essential dimension in Levi’s chemistry and philosophy."
But there is another component in the first Levi’s book: the promise of testimony, with all the implications that this involves: pity for the victims, anxious admonishment for the future, because what happened once can still happen again ("You meditate that this has been / I order you these words", this is can be read in the epigraph of Se questo è um uomo); and twenty years later, to whom asked him to what factors he attributed his survival in the lager he answered: "perhaps the wish not only to survive, but to survive with the purpose to tell the things we have seen, we have beared".
By the light of these factors, we must consider Se questo è un uomo together with the Diary of Ann Frank and The inquiry of Peter Weiss, a fundamental book to understand and to remember the holocaust.
After Se questo è un uomo, that can be considered a sort of descent to the hell, to the dark and first step of the vocation of death, La tregua (1963) appears as the reconquer, the recovery of individuality and life , infact it often takes tones of amiableness. And nevertheless in the Levi recalling this return to life there is always a shadow that prevents the complete identification with the companions and with their re-born hopes; there is "the consciouness that is only a truce and that the shame of the past cannot be cleared " (Cases); and there is the ruthless truth that a companion, the Greek, repeats to him: "War is always". These are therefore the motives that constitute La tregua: the regained sense and love of life and the dark awareness that nothing can be anymore integrally lived, because there have been Auschwitz.
But to circumscribe the importance of Primo Levi to his memorialistic production is wrong. There are at least two texts of great interest linked to his scientific formation and to his professional activity in industry: Il sistema periodico (1975) and La chiave a stella (1978).
The first one is a work composed of stories inspired each one to a chemical element - the hydrogen, the carbon etc. -, but it is at the same time, with various original themes and tones, the recalling of a nostalgically felt past: the Jewish communities of the old Piemonte, the died friends and companions. As a consequence Il sistema periodico is the history of a generation, or at least of those people who were able to deny themselves to the rhetoric of fascism, to racial laws, to the mortification of the human dignity.
The stories of La chave a stella have instead as object the concrete experiences of a technician, the customs, the language - and from this a linguistic experimentalism -, the rituals of the site and the factory.
From the scientific vocation of this writer, and from his persistent wish to understand, it is necessary to start for understanding his last work, I sommersi e i salvati (1986). Suggested, partly, by the revisionist theories culture that from the Eighties spreaded through the German culture, these essays still throw light with unusual sincerity on the lager experience, on the loss of humanity of the oppressors and oppressed. But they go over the individual experience, setting ethical, philosophical, eternal problems. Mengaldo wrote with good synthesis: "Levi always stayed between two interpretations of the Nazi folly: as a horrible episode, yes, but circumscribed and concluded, of the modern history, or instead as a result of the tendencies of the contemporary world, between dirty development of technique and totalitarian vocation of the power"


		PRIMO LEVI (Freely Drawn from S. Guglielmino, Guida al Novecento Principato Editore 1998 Pag. 320-323) Primo Levi was born in Turin in 1919 and he had a youth of regular studies and readings: even if he belongs to a Jewish family, the racial laws of 1938 partly striked him and he can continue his studies. He takes a degree in chemistry and in 1941 he finds a Job in Milan in a medicius factory. He gets in touch with supporters of antifascism, in 1942 he enters in Action Party and after the fall of fascism he was partisan in Val d’Aosta, where in the December 1943 he was captured and deported to Auschwitz, where he remained from February 1944 to January 1945. Went back to Turin after a journey of about five months that he will describe in "La Tregua", Levi finds job in a paint factory of varnish and he tries to have a normal life, after the inhuman experience of the lager, in the meantime he writes "Se questo è un uomo" (1947) that is refused by Einaudi and published by De Silva from Turin. The success, scarce at the beginning, will come in 1958 when the book was published in the series of "Saggi" by Einaudi. Encouraged, he takes again his activity of writer, he publishes La tregua (1963), La Chiave a stella (1978), Se non ora quando (1982), I sommersi e i salvati (1986) and he works as journalist in meetings and conferences. In his works his traumatic experiences of lager return, to which it is not right to link is end, he suicides in Turin in 1987. The same Levi furnished us indications to understand his production: "I remember to have lived my year in Auschwitz in a condition of long live spirit. [...] Really I never stopped recording the world and the men around me, just to keep in me today a detailed image of them.. I had a strong wish to understand, I was constantly invaded by a curiosity that seemed cynic to somebody, that of the naturalist that is transported into a monstrous but new environment, monstrously new". This cognitive vocation and this scientific habitus are fundamental aspects of his Se questo è un uomo: Levi tries to read and to discover the laws of the human behaviors, the mechanisms through which the overcoming or brutalization, which is not physical but also interior, are manifested: "the characters of these pages are not men, their humanity is buried, or they themselves buried it under the suffered or inflicted offense". Cesare Cases wrote: "... the man unjoustly suffers, but he saves himself understanding. To understand is an essential dimension in Levi’s chemistry and philosophy." But there is another component in the first Levi’s book: the promise of testimony, with all the implications that this involves: pity for the victims, anxious admonishment for the future, because what happened once can still happen again ("You meditate that this has been / I order you these words", this is can be read in the epigraph of Se questo è um uomo); and twenty years later, to whom asked him to what factors he attributed his survival in the lager he answered: "perhaps the wish not only to survive, but to survive with the purpose to tell the things we have seen, we have beared". By the light of these factors, we must consider Se questo è un uomo together with the Diary of Ann Frank and The inquiry of Peter Weiss, a fundamental book to understand and to remember the holocaust. After Se questo è un uomo, that can be considered a sort of descent to the hell, to the dark and first step of the vocation of death, La tregua (1963) appears as the reconquer, the recovery of individuality and life , infact it often takes tones of amiableness. And nevertheless in the Levi recalling this return to life there is always a shadow that prevents the complete identification with the companions and with their re-born hopes; there is "the consciouness that is only a truce and that the shame of the past cannot be cleared " (Cases); and there is the ruthless truth that a companion, the Greek, repeats to him: "War is always". These are therefore the motives that constitute La tregua: the regained sense and love of life and the dark awareness that nothing can be anymore integrally lived, because there have been Auschwitz. But to circumscribe the importance of Primo Levi to his memorialistic production is wrong. There are at least two texts of great interest linked to his scientific formation and to his professional activity in industry: Il sistema periodico (1975) and La chiave a stella (1978). The first one is a work composed of stories inspired each one to a chemical element - the hydrogen, the carbon etc. -, but it is at the same time, with various original themes and tones, the recalling of a nostalgically felt past: the Jewish communities of the old Piemonte, the died friends and companions. As a consequence Il sistema periodico is the history of a generation, or at least of those people who were able to deny themselves to the rhetoric of fascism, to racial laws, to the mortification of the human dignity. The stories of La chave a stella have instead as object the concrete experiences of a technician, the customs, the language - and from this a linguistic experimentalism -, the rituals of the site and the factory. From the scientific vocation of this writer, and from his persistent wish to understand, it is necessary to start for understanding his last work, I sommersi e i salvati (1986). Suggested, partly, by the revisionist theories culture that from the Eighties spreaded through the German culture, these essays still throw light with unusual sincerity on the lager experience, on the loss of humanity of the oppressors and oppressed. But they go over the individual experience, setting ethical, philosophical, eternal problems. Mengaldo wrote with good synthesis: "Levi always stayed between two interpretations of the Nazi folly: as a horrible episode, yes, but circumscribed and concluded, of the modern history, or instead as a result of the tendencies of the contemporary world, between dirty development of technique and totalitarian vocation of the power"