Biblioteche dell'Alto Adige

Abstract: Un'infanzia solitaria e pensosa; un'adolescenza di sogni tormentosi, illuminata dalle letture; e una giovinezza rivoluzionaria, tra battaglie, giornali, illusioni e disillusioni. Un uomo finito (1913) è il romanzo-autobiografia intellettuale nel quale Papini racconta i primi trent'anni di vita di un giovane "nato con la malattia della grandezza". Affascinato da Bergson e dal titanismo di Nietzsche, lo spirito inquieto e geniale dell'autore, alla perenne ricerca della verità, rivive in un racconto sincero animato da una prosa ricca e brillante, con accenti di profonda poesia. Un'opera imprescindibile per cogliere la temperatura ideale, l'entusiasmo e la delusione della generazione di intellettuali che inaugura il Novecento.

Abstract: Giovanni Papini, journalist, essayist, novelist, writer, poet, literary critic and philosopher, was a controversial literary figure of the early and mid-twentieth century and the earliest and most enthusiastic representative and promoter of Italian pragmatism.Due to his ideological choices, Papini's work was almost forgotten after his death, although it was later re-evaluated and appreciated again: in 1975, Jorge Luis Borges called him an "undeservedly forgotten" author.In 1913 he published his essay Ventiquattro cervelli ("Four and Twenty Minds"), in which he reviewed, with a critical slant and with great philosophical scrutiny, the life and works of great personalities of history and literature such as Dante Alighieri, Leonardo Da Vinci, George Berkeley, Herbert Spencer, Friedrich Nietzsche, and, finally, himself!From Four and Twenty Minds, translated into English in 1922 by Ernest Hatch Wilkins, we have drawn the study Don Quixote, which today we propose to modern readers, a short essay dedicated to the adventurous and epic literary protagonist of the most famous novel by Miguel de Cervantes, widely regarded as the greatest Spanish writer.According to Papini, "Don Quixote is not mad. He does not go mad in spite of himself. He belongs to the common type of the Brutuses and the Hamlets: he pretends that he is mad. He fashions an extravagant career for himself in order that he may escape the deadly monotony of Argamasilla. In the invention of his difficulties and misfortunes he is quite without fear, because he knows that he is the moving agent, conscious of what he is doing, and ready at any time to put on the brake or turn aside. That is why he is neither tragic nor desperate. His whole adventure is a deliberate amusement. He may well be serene, for he alone knows the truth of the game, and his soul has no room for veritable anguish. Don Quixote is not in earnest".

Abstract: Giovanni Papini, journalist, essayist, novelist, writer, poet, literary critic and philosopher, was a controversial literary figure of the early and mid-twentieth century and the earliest and most enthusiastic representative and promoter of Italian pragmatism.Due to his ideological choices, Papini's work was almost forgotten after his death, although it was later re-evaluated and appreciated again: in 1975, Jorge Luis Borges called him an "undeservedly forgotten" author.In 1913 he published his essay Ventiquattro cervelli ("Four and Twenty Minds"), in which he reviewed, with a critical slant and with great philosophical scrutiny, the life and works of great personalities of history and literature such as Dante Alighieri, Leonardo Da Vinci, George Berkeley, Herbert Spencer, Friedrich Nietzsche, and, finally, himself!From Four and Twenty Minds, translated into English by Ernest Hatch Wilkins and published in the United States in 1922, we have drawn the study Hamlet, which today we propose to modern readers. It's a short essay dedicated to the controversial Prince Hamlet of Denmark, protagonist of one of the most famous William Shakespeare's tragedy, written in 1916, for the third centenary of Shakespeare's death.

Abstract: Giovanni Papini, journalist, essayist, novelist, writer, poet, literary critic and philosopher, was a controversial literary figure of the early and mid-twentieth century and the earliest and most enthusiastic representative and promoter of Italian pragmatism.Due to his ideological choices, Papini's work was almost forgotten after his death, although it was later re-evaluated and appreciated again: in 1975, Jorge Luis Borges called him an "undeservedly forgotten" author.In 1913 he published his essay Ventiquattro cervelli ("Four and Twenty Minds"), in which he reviewed, with a critical slant and with great philosophical scrutiny, the life and works of great personalities of history and literature such as Dante Alighieri, Leonardo Da Vinci, George Berkeley, Herbert Spencer, Friedrich Nietzsche, and, finally, himself!From Four and Twenty Minds, translated into English by Ernest Hatch Wilkins and published in the United States in 1922, we have drawn the brief, polemical and ironic intellectual self-presentation of the great Italian writer. About himself he wrote, with subtle irony: "Giovanni Papini does not need to be introduced to our readers. Every one knows, his friends with even more certainty than his enemies, that he is the ugliest man in Italy, so repulsive that Mirabeau would seem in comparison an academy model, a Discobolus, an Apollo Belvedere. And since the face is the mirror of the soul, as the infinite wisdom of the race informs us in one of its proverbial condensations of experience, no one will be surprised to learn that this Papini is the scoundrel of literature, the blackguard of journalism, the Barabbas of art, the thug of philosophy, the bully of politics, the Apaché of culture, and that he is inextricably involved in all the enterprises of the intellectual underworld".

Abstract: For five hundred years those who call themselves free spirits because they prefer prison life to army service have been trying desperately to kill Jesus a second time—to kill Him in the hearts of men.The army of His enemies assembled to bury Him as soon as they thought they heard the death-rattle of Christ's second death. Presumptuous donkeys mistaking libraries for their stables, top-heavy brains pretending to explore the highest heavens in philosophy's drifting balloon, professors poisoned by the fatal strong drink of philology and metaphysics, armed themselves. Paraphrasing the rallying-cry of Peter the Hermit to the crusaders, they shouted "Man wills it!" as they set out on their crusade against the Cross. Certain of them drew on their boundless imaginations to evolve what they considered proof positive of a fantastic theory that the story of the Gospel is no more than a legend from which we can reconstruct the natural life of Jesus as a man, one-third prophet, one-third necromancer, one-third demagogue, a man who wrought no miracles except the hypnotic cure of some obsessed devotees, who did not die on the cross, but came to Himself in the chill of the sepulcher and reappeared with mysterious airs to delude men into believing that He had risen from the dead.

Abstract: Giovanni Papini, journalist, essayist, novelist, writer, poet, literary critic and philosopher, was a controversial literary figure of the early and mid-twentieth century and the earliest and most enthusiastic representative and promoter of Italian pragmatism.Due to his ideological choices, Papini's work was almost forgotten after his death, although it was later re-evaluated and appreciated again: in 1975, Jorge Luis Borges called him an "undeservedly forgotten" author.In 1913 he published his essay Ventiquattro cervelli ("Twenty four brains"), in which he reviewed, with a critical slant and with great philosophical scrutiny, the life and works of great personalities such as Dante Alighieri, Leonardo Da Vinci, George Berkeley, Herbert Spencer, Friedrich Nietzsche, Jonathan Swift and, finally, himself!"He is a pagan ascetic, a purified mystic, who chose to ascend the heights of intellectual ecstasy by the two great paths of art and knowledge. His paintings are but memories of visions he sought to fix in color that he might rise still higher. His observations and his speculations are but doors through which he passed to behold the secrets of nature to discover throughout the world the pulsing of that life which he perceived, and thus to satisfy the perpetual desire of souls that are incomplete".

Abstract: Giovanni Papini, journalist, essayist, novelist, writer, poet, literary critic and philosopher, was a controversial literary figure of the early and mid-twentieth century and the earliest and most enthusiastic representative and promoter of Italian pragmatism.Due to his ideological choices, Papini's work was almost forgotten after his death, although it was later re-evaluated and appreciated again: in 1975, Jorge Luis Borges called him an "undeservedly forgotten" author.In 1913 he published his essay Ventiquattro cervelli ("Twenty four brains"), in which he reviewed, with a critical slant and with great philosophical scrutiny, the life and works of great personalities such as Dante Alighieri, Leonardo Da Vinci, George Berkeley, Herbert Spencer, Friedrich Nietzsche, Jonathan Swift and, finally, himself!"In Spencer, monist and positivist, the individualists cannot find a sure defense. If they still share the common desire to win a metaphysical fortress for themselves, with the unconfessed purpose of justifying their instinct for personal life, they must turn not to Spencer, but to some pluralistic doctrine. And if they do not find the right doctrine, they will have to invent it".

Abstract: Giovanni Papini, journalist, essayist, novelist, writer, poet, literary critic and philosopher, was a controversial literary figure of the early and mid-twentieth century and the earliest and most enthusiastic representative and promoter of Italian pragmatism.Due to his ideological choices, Papini's work was almost forgotten after his death, although it was later re-evaluated and appreciated again: in 1975, Jorge Luis Borges called him an "undeservedly forgotten" author.In 1913 he published his essay Ventiquattro cervelli ("Twenty four brains"), in which he reviewed, with a critical slant and with great philosophical scrutiny, the life and works of great personalities such as Dante Alighieri, Leonardo Da Vinci, George Berkeley, Herbert Spencer, Friedrich Nietzsche, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and, finally, himself!"The two great merits of Hegel, according to his latest champion, are these: that he demonstrated the existence of a method peculiar to philosophy and different from the methods of art or the physical and mathematical sciences; and that he formulated that dialectic (the co-existence of contraries or the identity of opposites) which was already implicit in certain earlier philosophers, and was indeed foretokened in a general way by the whole course of philosophy. Philosophy, then, differs from all other products of the human mind in that it concerns itself with concepts which are universal and concrete, unlike the intuitions of art, the ecstasies of mysticism, or the representative generalities of science".

Abstract: La modernità, per i suoi critici, genera mostri: Gog è uno di questi. Un "cervello" dalla curiosità insaziabile, prodotto di un'America opulenta e barbara, che col suo materialismo sta invadendo l'Europa. Gog fornisce a Papini l'occasione per costruire una galleria di personaggi reali o immaginari sui quali esercitare la sua fantasia visionaria, macabra e surreale. Dietro il suo sorriso ironico e beffardo affiora la convinzione, comune a non pochi intellettuali europei degli anni Venti e Trenta del Novecento, che la catastrofe della Grande Guerra, annuncio di nuove future apocalissi, abbia smentito tutte le illusioni del progresso e riportato il caos in un mondo che ha perso di vista i suoi valori più autentici. È ancora possibile una via di uscita?

Abstract: "Dio conceda che un po' del mio affetto per lui si trasmetta anche a coloro che leggeranno queste pagine".Pochi anni dopo la firma dei Patti Lateranensi, il convertito Papini dà alle stampe un libro sul più illustre dei fiorentini, "più moderno di tanti moderni, più vivo di tanti morti che si credon vivi". A settecento anni dalla morte, Papini trova che le aspirazioni e le speranze di Dante sono le medesime dei cattolici moderni del ventesimo secolo: una Chiesa non implicata nella politica e negli affari, ma impegnata ad insegnare "agli uomini ad essere perfetti sì da meritare la pace sulla terra e la beatitudine in cielo". Chiesa e Impero debbono cooperare per "il trionfo della pace".Negli anni in cui Papini scrive il secondo conflitto mondiale non era all'orizzonte, ma il timore per la pace in bilico era di certo sentito. Ai suoi occhi di convertito ed ex interventista la pace può essere garantita soltanto dalla restaurazione di un Impero, non nel senso dantesco, ma nel senso di un "organismo molteplice, retto da una legge unica, da una medesima autorità": tale impero dovrebbe mettere fine alle mai sopite rivalità fra gli Stati. Nel 1933 Papini, sulle orme del suo grande concittadino eletto a guida spiritale del proprio secolo, auspica l'unità politica almeno dell'Europa. Quattro anni dopo, nel 1937, si farà promotore in un celebre discorso per l'appunto di un'Europa unita.

Abstract: Nel 1911, qualche anno dopo aver detto addio alla filosofia con Il Crepuscolo dei filosofi, Giovanni Papini pare farvi ritorno operando un'inversione di tendenza e pubblicando L'Altra Metà. Saggio di filosofia mefistofelica. Ma questa volta si tratta, come indica il sottotitolo, di una filosofia paradossale, che prende le parti del diavolo al fine di risvegliare e illuminare.Ogni cosa vive del suo contrario; ogni cosa richiama la sua altra metà. Occorre un Mefistofele perché possa esserci un Faust, come occorre svelare il male per conoscere il bene.