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Dino Buzzati was an Italian experimental writer, poet, playwright, painter, and journalist. His fiction stories and plays rely on the absurd to bring misery upon its characters. One of his most known novels is ‘Il deserto dei Tartari’ (The Tartar Steppe).
Background
Ethnicity:
Dino Buzzati’s father came from the old Bellunese family with Hungarian origins and his mother was born in Venice.
Dino Buzzati was born on October 16, 1906, Belluno, Veneto, Italy. He was a second of four children of Giulio Cesare Buzzati, a jurist specialized in international law, and Alba Buzzati (maiden name Mantovani), a daughter of the doctor Pietro Mantovani. One of Buzzati’s brothers, Adriano Buzzati Traverso, became a prominent geneticist.
Dino spent his childhood at the family villa of San Pellegrino and in Milan where his father worked at Bocconi University and sometimes taught at the University of Pavia. As a child, Buzzati had access to the huge library of the family which played an important role in his formation as a writer. To develop his early interest to figurative arts and music, he took piano and violin lessons at the age of twelve. Raised in a mountain region, he was also fascinated by them. The mountains remained his passion for the entire life and career.
Education
Dino Buzzati received his general education at the Liceo Classico Parini (Parini High School) in Milan where he entered in 1920. While there, Buzzati became fascinated by Egyptian culture and the works of an illustrator Arthur Rackham.
Soon after he finished school, he made a decision to become a writer. Although to satisfy the will of his jurist father, Buzzati enrolled at the University of Milan in 1924 to obtain a degree in jurisprudence. He graduated four years later.
Dino Buzzati embarked upon a career in journalism at the age of twenty-two when he joined the staff of one of the Italy’s top newspapers, II Corriere della Sera. He remained there for much of his career except for a brief stint after World War II when he became one of the founders of another Milan-based paper, Corriere Lombardo in 1945. During his decades at II Corriere della Sera, Buzzati served as editor and special correspondent for the established paper. One of its features is a “third page” of in-depth articles on philosophical or literary matters. Some of Italy’s outstanding men and women of letters were regular contributors but Buzzati also wrote frequently for it.
Although he was a journalist by trade, Dino Buzzati began to publish his fiction in the 1930s. The first of his works to garner attention was the novel ‘Barnabo della montagne’, which appeared later in English-language collections of his writings. Its original 1933 version, however, appeared in print during the Mussolini regime, which enforced a stringent censorship over anything considered remotely anti-Fascist (writers often used allegory to express sentiments that could be considered dangerous). The mountainous, snow-capped landscape of northern Italy was also the setting for another early work, ‘II segreto del bosco vecchio’ (The Secret of the Old Wood), a novel first published in 1935.
What became perhaps Buzzati’s most famous work, ‘II deserto dei Tartari’, appeared first in the Italian language in 1940. In the story, Buzzati returns to the theme of a lonely soldier at a remote outpost. The novel was well accepted by critics. In 1952 it appeared in English translation as ‘The Tartar Steppe’.
At the outbreak of the Second World War, in 1940, Buzzati was attached to the Italian navy, the Regia Marina, as a journalist. He completed his service in Addis Ababa, Africa.
Another acclaimed work which appeared in the post war period was ‘La famosa invasione degli orsi in Sicilia’ (The Bears’ Famous Invasion of Sicily), which first published in Italian in 1945. This children’s allegorical tale was illustrated by the author as many of his other works.
In addition to his long career as a journalist, Dino Buzzati also painted, and wrote opera librettos and plays. One well-known work from this last genre was ‘Un caso clinico’ (A Clinical Case), based on his 1943 short story ‘I sette messaggeri’. During the 1950s the play enjoyed a string of successes in several European cities, in a production arranged by a French novelist Albert Camus. In 1958, Buzzati’s paintings and illustrations were demonstrated to the public at an exhibition in Milan.
The tales of ordinary people trapped in bizarre, inexplicable circumstances were a trademark of Buzzati’s short fiction throughout his career. Many of them were quite brief. In one of such stories, a giant fist – the hand of God and a sign of the apocalypse – appears over the sky and lapsed Catholics inundate priests with their confessions. Buzzati lived most of his life in Milan and many of these short works were set there.
Buzzati wrote no novels for nearly two decades, but returned to the genre with the 1960s ‘II grande ritratto’. It appeared seven years later in English translation as ‘Larger Than Life’. Many reviewers disparaged the book as overly sensual at the expense of substance, and found the charters, like their creation, too far removed from reality to be believable.
Buzzati’s novel of 1963 named ‘Un amore’, appeared a year later in English translation under the title ‘A Love Affair’. The subject matter of this work reflects the changing mores of the era as a result of the sexual revolution.
Even relatively late in his life Dino Buzzati was showing progressive tendencies and an affinity with the new. In 1969, he wrote and illustrated a comic-strip version of a Greek legend entitled ‘Poema a fumetta’ (Poem Strip). The classical love story of Orpheus and Euridice was translated here into that of Orphi, a nightclub musician in Milan, and his beloved Eura.
Many of Buzatti's works, never published while alive, were collected from his original copies and issued posthumously, including ‘Bestiario’ of 1991, ‘Le cronache fantastiche di Dino Buzzati’ (Fantastic Chronicles of Dino Buzzati) in 2003, ‘I fuorilegge della montagna’ (Outlaws of the Mountain) in 2010 and ‘Il Bestiario’ of 2015.
Quotations:
"Fantasy should be as close as possible to journalism."
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
"[Buzzati is] perhaps the most gifted of all because of the variety of themes discussed in his compressed and passionate prose. He touched on every subject of modern man’s interest.” Times Literary Supplement critic
Connections
Dino Buzzati married Almerina Antoniazzi on December 1966.