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Alberto Moravia

  • Occupation: Writer, Actor
  • Active: '50s-'60s, '80s
  • Major Genres: Drama, Comedy
  • Career Highlights: The Conformist, Ossessione, Contempt
  • First Major Screen Credit: Ossessione (1943)

Biography

Alberto Moravia was a popular, prolific Italian writer, essayist, and short story writer. Much of his work has been adapted to the screen. Moravia, born Albert Pincherle, also wrote original screenplays either alone or in collaboration with others. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

 
 
Biography: Alberto Moravia

Alberto Moravia (1907-1990) was one of the most important, and certainly the most prolific, of modern Italian authors. His keen moralistic approach focuses mainly on the iniquities of bourgeois society.

Alberto Moravia was born Alberto Pincherle on November 28, 1907, in Rome, the son of a well-to-do architect. Stricken with osteomyelitis at the age of nine, he was in a hospital in Cortina d'Ampezzo until 1925. During these years he studied French, English, and German, became a voracious reader, and started writing fiction at the age of 11.

Moravia's first published novel, Gli indifferenti (1929; The Time of Indifference), was an immediate success. The following year he went abroad as a journalist for various newspapers, an activity which thereafter always accompanied his creative writing. He lived in Paris and London and visited the United States and Mexico (1935), China (1937), and Greece (1938). In the early 1940s he lived on Capri with his wife, the novelist Elsa Morante. Since his relations with the Fascist regime had more and more deteriorated over the years, Moravia went into hiding after Mussolini's return to power in July 1943, and he spent some nine months among peasants and shepherds near Fondi. After the war he returned to Rome.

Moravia held several literary awards, including the Strega (1952) and Viareggio (1961) prizes. In 1952, the year his collected works began to appear, the Roman Catholic Church put all his writings on the Index. Moravia's works have been translated into 27 languages.

His Works

After the appearance of his first novel, Moravia worked toward broadening the spectrum of his moralistic canvas without any discernible evolution, and his works may be called variations on one theme, the caustic portrayal of the disintegration of middle-class mores as revealed through the prism of sex. His critics called him to task for being a novelist who not only believes in simply representing a given reality without any pretense of modifying it but also does not entertain the slightest thought of an interpretation. For Moravia, "an intellectual is nothing else than a witness of his time."

At the root of the modern malaise of alienation, Moravia sees a complete lack of rapport with reality. Of the two possible approaches to objectify this crisis of rapport, critical realism and experimentalism, as he calls them, he opts for the former and its "objective and in a sense scientific representation of the phenomena of the crisis in all its psychological and social aspects."

Gli indifferenti is characteristic of his approach, recording with impassibility two days in the life of a Roman family. As a rather candid and unfavorable picture of certain strata of Roman society, it originated a social polemic, albeit unintended by its author, and after a fifth edition the publisher was advised not to undertake a sixth.

The long novel Le ambizioni sbagliate (1935; The Wheel of Fortune) in a sense depicts the same subject matter within the framework of a precise structure. The story is divided into three parts, each representing a single day in the life of its characters seen at intervals of one month. Against the desolate background of accepted defeat, ambition is analyzed as one of the basic and destructive drives behind human egoism.

L'imbroglio (1937), a collection of five long stories, centers on the familiar theme of man's incapacity to achieve love. La mascherata (1941; The Garden Party), written in the satirical and surrealist vein of the stories contained in I sogni del pigro (1940), and L'epidemia (1944) satirize dictatorial government.

The short novel Agostino (1944) belongs to the best of Moravia's fiction. Its subject matter being the discovery of evil and sex, the novel minutely analyzes the feelings of a young boy who discovers sex in his mother. La romana (1947; The Woman of Rome), a novel in first person narrative that established Moravia's fame abroad, is an absorbing inquiry into the psyche of Adriana, a Roman prostitute. At the center of the plot stands the existentialist issue of choice. La disubbidienza (1948), treating the discovery of sex by a 15-year-old, pursues the issues raised in Agostino on a higher level (these two novels were published in English as Two Adolescents).

II conformista (1951; The Conformist), which some critics consider Moravia's worst novel, is on the surface the story of a man who embraces fascism to become "normal." In a deeper sense, however, it should be seen as a comment on the modern tendency to abandon rationalistic and individual positions and to seek the protection of great collective myths. L'amore conjugale (1951; Conjugal Love) and II disprezzo (1954; A Ghost at Noon) portray a relationship between husband and wife that falters because of the husband's excessive concern with his profession. The short-story collections Racconti romani (1954; Roman Tales) and Nuovi racconti romani (1959; More Roman Tales) represent a specific aspect of Moravia's approach to reality. La ciociara (1957; Two Women), considered his contribution to neorealism, depicts the violence of war as he experienced it during the time of his hiding.

La noia (1960; The Empty Canvas) is a tightly constructed work that harks back to the topic of Moravia's first book. It is a tribute to the existential malaise as well as a sum total of his other fiction. L'attenzione (1965) is perhaps his most differentiated and intricately constructed novel. Besides being concerned with the problem of "authenticity" of man's being and his actions, it is a novel about the inability to write a novel which - in the end - is written nevertheless in the form of a diary.

Moravia's plays include II mondo è quello che è (1966), in which a professor divulges his language therapy during a holiday in a country villa that ends with the death of one of his "pupils"; L'intervista (1966), representing an interview between an envoy from the moon and the minister of propaganda of an imaginary state on earth; and II dio Kurt (1968), laid in a German concentration camp in Poland in 1944. Throughout his career Moravia also wrote travel literature, such as Un'idea dell'India (1961), and criticism, the most important of which was collected in L'uomo come fine (1964; Man as an End).

Despite the negative criticism Moravia received in his later years, he continued to write. He wrote 1934 (1982), a story set in the middle of the Fascist era. The novel La Cosa (released in Italy in 1983), was released in the United States a few years later under the title Erotic Tales. Two of his better known works were Time of Desecration (1980) and The Voyeur (1987). He died in Rome at the age of 82, on September 26, 1990.

Further Reading

Discussions in English of Moravia's work are Dego Giuliano, Moravia (1966), and Donald W. Heiney, Three Italian Novelists: Moravia, Pavese, Vittorini (1968). Recommended for general background is Sergio Pacifici, A Guide to Contemporary Italian Literature from Futurism to Neorealism (1962). His obituary appeared in the September 27, 1990 edition of the New York Times.

 
Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: Alberto Moravia

(born Nov. 28, 1907, Rome, Italy — died Sept. 26, 1990, Rome) Italian journalist, novelist, and short-story writer. He worked as a journalist in Turin and as a foreign correspondent in London. Time of Indifference (1929), his first novel, is a scathing study of middle-class moral corruption. His works were censored by Benito Mussolini's fascists and placed on the Index librorum prohibitorum. Later important novels, many of them portrayals of social alienation and loveless sexuality, include The Conformist (1951; film, 1971), Two Women (1957; film, 1961), and The Empty Canvas (1960). His books of short stories include Roman Tales (1954) and More Roman Tales (1959). He was married to the writer Elsa Morante (1918 – 85).

For more information on Alberto Moravia, visit Britannica.com.

 
Fairy Tale Companion: Alberto Moravia

Moravia, Alberto (pseudonym of Alberto Pincherle, 1907–90), Italian novelist, playwright and essayist. He achieved immediate success with his first novel Gli indifferenti (The Time of Indifference, 1929). The popularity of his novels—many of which were made into films—has somewhat obscured the merits of his remarkable production of short stories and tales. Some of the very best, written between 1935 and 1945, now appear in Racconti surrealistici e satirici (Surrealistic and Satirical Tales, 1982). Here the abstract, the metaphysical, the absurd, the grotesque, and the fantastic are used to pose important questions for the reader to ponder. Whether he draws sketches of Roman life, as he does in Racconti romani (Roman Tales, 1954), Nuovi racconti romani (More Roman Tales, 1959), or writes tales of sex and eroticism as he does in Il paradiso (Paradise and Other Stories, 1971), and Racconti erotici (Erotic Tales, 1983), Moravia probes aspects of reality and reveals them as a multitude of kaleidoscopic images that are as varied and mutable as human experience.

— Maria Nicolai Paynter

 
Columbia Encyclopedia: Moravia, Alberto
(älbĕr'tō mōrä'vyä) , 1907–90, Italian novelist born as Alberto Pincherle; husband of Elsa Morante. Moravia is considered one of the foremost 20th-century Italian novelists. He employs taut prose in realist narratives that shed light on such disturbing issues as the relation of the individual to society. His first novel, The Indifferent Ones (1929, tr. 1932), is a powerful and pitiless portrayal of the Italian bourgeoisie at the beginning of fascism. Novels such as The Empty Canvas (1960, tr. 1961) grimly depict the conflict and interaction between the creative and the sensual, while the underlying theme is the apathy and despair of modern people. Moravia's characters have lost faith in the values on which moral foundations are based. Two Women (1957, tr. 1958), a compelling story of wartime flight, was superbly filmed in 1961. His other works include Disobedience (1948, tr. 1950), The Conformist (1951), Two: A Phallic Novel (tr. 1972), the short-story collection Bought and Sold (1970, tr. 1973), and the essay collection Which Tribe Do You Belong To? (tr. 1974).

Bibliography

See biography by J. Cottrell (1974); studies by L. Rebay (1970) and J. Ross and D. Freed (1972).

 
Wikipedia: Alberto Moravia
Alberto Moravia.
Enlarge
Alberto Moravia.

Alberto Moravia, born Alberto Pincherle, (November 28, 1907 – September 26, 1990) was one of the leading Italian novelists of the twentieth century whose novels explore matters of modern sexuality, social alienation, and existentialism.

or his anti-fascist novel Il Conformista (The Conformist), the basis for the film The Conformist (1970) by Bernardo Bertolucci; other novels of his translated to the cinema are Il Disprezzo (A Ghost at Noon or Contempt) filmed by Jean-Luc Godard as Le Mépris (Contempt) (1963), and La Ciociara filmed by Vittorio de Sica as Two Women (1960).

Biography

Early years

Alberto Pincherle (the pen-name "Moravia" is the surname of his maternal grandfather) was born on Via Sgambati in Rome, Italy, to a wealthy middle-class family. His Jewish father, Carlo, was an architect and a painter. His Catholic mother, Teresa Iginia de Marsanich, was from Ancona, but of Dalmatian origin.

Moravia did not finish conventional schooling because, at the age of nine, he contracted tuberculosis of the bone that confined him to bed for five years. He spent three years at home, and two in a sanatorium at Cortina d'Ampezzo, in northeastern Italy. Moravia was an intelligent boy and devoted himself to reading books: some of his favourite authors included Dostoevsky, Joyce, Ariosto, Goldoni, Shakespeare, Molière, Mallarmé. He learned French and German, and wrote poems in both languages.

In 1925 he left the sanatorium and moved to Brixen, where he wrote his first novel, Gli Indifferenti (Time of Indifference), published in 1929. The novel is a realistic analysis of the moral decadence of a middle-class mother and two of her children. In 1927, Moravia met Corrado Alvaro and Massimo Bontempelli, and started his career as a journalist with the magazine 900, which published his first short stories, including "La cortigiana stanca" (in French as "Lassitude de courtisane", 1927), "Delitto al circolo del tennis" (1928), "Il ladro curioso" ("The Curious Thief") and "Apparizione" ("Apparition") (both 1929).

Gli indifferenti and Fascist ostracism

In 1929, he published the novel Gli indifferenti, at his own expense of 5,000 Italian lira. Literary critics welcomed the novel as a noteworthy example of contemporary Italian narrative fiction. [citation needed] The next year, he started collaborating with the newspaper La Stampa, then edited by author Curzio Malaparte. In 1933, together with Mario Pannunzio, he founded the literary review magazines Caratteri ("Characters") and Oggi ("Today"), and started writing for the ewspaper, La Gazzetta del Popolo.

The years leading to World War II were problematic;the Fascist regime seized La mascherata ("Masquerade") (1941), prohibited reviews of Le ambizioni sbagliate (1935), and banned publication of Agostino (Two Adolescents) (1941). In 1935 he travelled to the United States to give a lecture series on Italian literature.

Oction titled L'imbroglio ("The Cheat") published by Bompiani in 1937. To avoid Fascist censorship he wrote mainly in the surrealist and allegoric genres, among the works is Il sogno del pigro ("The Dream of the Lazy"), however, the Fascist seizing of the second edition of La mascherata, in 1941, thereafter forced him to write under a pseudonym. That same year, he married the novelist Elsa Morante, whom he had met in 1936; they lived in Capri, where he wrote Agostino.

After the Armistice of 8 September 1943, Moravia and Morante took refuge in Fondi, on the border of Ciociaria; the experience inspired La ciociara ("The Woman of Ciociara") (1958).

Return to Rome and national popularity

In May of 1944, after the liberation of Rome, Alberto Moravia returned and began collaborating with Corrado Alvaro, writing for important newspapers such as Il Mondo ("The World")and Il Corriere della Sera (The Courier of the Evening); the latter published his writing until his death.

At war's end, his popularity steadily increased, with works such as La Romana (The Woman of Rome) (1947), La disubbidienza (Disobedience) (1948), L'amore coniugale e altri racconti ("Conjugal Love and other stories") (1949) and Il conformista ("The Conformist") (1951). In 1952 he won the Premio Strega for I racconti, and his novels began to be translated abroad. That same year "La provinciale" was cinematically adapted by Mario Soldati; in 1954 Luigi Zampa directed La romana, and in 1955 Gianni Franciolini directed I racconti romani ("The Roman Stories") (1954) a short collection that won the Marzotto Award. In 1953, Moravia founded the literary magazine Nuovi Argomenti ("New Arguments"), which featured Pier Paolo Pasolini among its editors.

In the 1950s, he wrote prefaces to works such as Belli's 100 Sonnets, Brancati's Paolo il caldo and Stendhal's Roman Walks. From 1957 onwards, he also reviewed and criticised cinema for the weekly magazine L'Espresso; it is collected in the volume Al cinema ("To the Cinema") (1975).

La noia and later life

In 1960, he published one of his most famous novels, La noia (The Empty Canvas), the story of the troubled sexual relationship between a young, rich painter striving to find sense in his life and an easygoing girl, in Rome. It won the Viareggio Prize and was filmed by Damiano Damiani in 1962. An adaptation of the book is the basis of Cedric Kahn's the film L'ennui ("The Ennui") (1998).

In 1960, Vittorio De Sica cinematically adapted La ciociara with Sophia Loren; Jean-Luc Godard filmed Il disprezzo (Contempt) (1963); and Francesco Maselli filmed Gli indifferenti (1964).

In 1962 Moravia and Elsa Morante parted; he went to live with the young writer Dacia Maraini. Increasingly, he concentrated on theatre; in 1966, he and Maraini and Enzo Siciliano founded the company called "Il Porcospino", which staged works by Moravia, Maraini, Carlo Emilio Gadda, and others.

In 1967 Moravia visited China, Japan, and Korea. In 1971 he published the novel Io e lui (["I and He"]The Two of Us) about a screenwriter and his independent penis and the situations to which he thrusts them, and the essay Poesia e romanzo ("Poetry and Novel"). In 1972 he went to Africa, which inspired his work A quale tribù appartieni? ("Which Tribe Do You Belong To?"), published in the same year. His 1982 trip to Japan, including a visit to Hiroshima, inspired series of articles for L'espresso magazine about the atomic bomb. The same theme is in the novel L'uomo che guarda ("The Man Who Looks") (1985) and the essay L'inverno nucleare ("The Nuclear Winter") including interviews with some contemporary principal scientists and politicians.

The short story collection, La cosa e altri racconti ("The Thing and other stories"), was dedicated to Carmen Llera, his new companion (forty-five years his junior), whom he married in 1986. In 1984 he was elected to the European Parliament as member from the Italian Communist Party. His experiences at Strasbourg, which ended in 1988, are told in Il diario europeo ("The European Diary"). In 1985 he won the title of "European Personality".

In September of 1990, Alberto Moravia was found dead in the bathroom of his Lungotevere apartment, in Rome. In that year, Bompani published his autobiography, Vita di Moravia("Life of Moravia").

Themes and literary style

Moral aridity, the hypocrisy of contemporary life, and the substantial incapability of people finding happiness in traditional ways such as love and marriage are the regnant themes in the works of Alberto Moravia. Usually, these conditions are pathologically typical of middle-class life; marriage, in particular, is the target of works such as Disobedience and L'amore coniugale ("The Conjugal Love") (1949). Alienation is the theme in works such as Il disprezzo ("Contempt" or "A Ghost at Noon") (1954) and La noia ("The Empty Canvas"), from the 1950s, despite observation from a rational-realistic perspective. Political themes are often present: an example is La Romana ("The Woman of Rome")(1947), the story of a prostitute entangled with the Fascist regime and with a network of conspirators. The extreme sexual realism in La noia ("The Empty Canvas") (1960), introduced the psychologically experimental works of the 1970s.

Moravia's writing style was highly regarded for being extremely stark and unadorned, characterised by very elementary, common words within an elaborate syntax. A complex mood is establish by mixing a proposition constituting the description of a single psychological observation mixed with another such proposition. In the later novels, the inner monologue is prominent.

Bibliography

  • "La cortigiana stanca" (1927)
  • Gli indifferenti (Time of Indifference, 1929)
  • Le ambizioni sbagliate (1935)
  • La bella vita (1935)
  • L'imbroglio (1937, novellas)
  • I sogni del pigro (1940)
  • La mascherata (1941)
  • La cetonia (1943)
  • L'amante infelice (1943)
  • Agostino (Two Adolescents, 1944)
  • L'epidemia (1944, short story collection)
  • La romana (The Woman of Rome, 1947)
  • La disubbidienza (Disobedience, 1947)
  • L'amore coniugale (1947, short story collection)
  • Il conformista (The Conformist, 1947)
  • L'amore coniugale (1949)
  • Racconti romani (Roman Tales, 1954)
  • Il disprezzo (A Ghost at Noon or Contempt, 1954)
  • La ciociara (Two Women, 1957)
  • Nuovi racconti romani (1959)
  • La noia (The Empty Canvas, 1960)
  • L'automa (The Fetish, 1962, collection of short stories)
  • L'uomo come fine (1963, essay)
  • L'attenzione (1965)
  • La vita è gioco (1969)
  • Il paradiso (1970)
  • Io e lui (Him and Me, 1971)
  • A quale tribù appartieni (1972)
  • Un'altra vita (1973)
  • Al cinema (1975, essays)
  • Boh (1976)
  • Una vita interiore (1978)
  • Impegno controvoglia (1980)
  • La cosa e altri racconti (1983, short story collection)
  • L'uomo che guarda (1985)
  • L'inverno nucleare (1986, essays and interviews)
  • La villa del venerdì e altri racconti (1990)

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