Cesare Pavese: Life, Works and the Myth of the Countryside

Origins and education

Cesare Pavese was born on 9 September 1908 in Santo Stefano Belbo, in the province of Cuneo, to Eugenio and Consolina Mesturini. He grew up between his home village and Turin, where he completed his studies.

He attended the Massimo D’Azeglio classical lyceum from 1923, where one of his teachers was Augusto Monti, the figure who, according to ANPI, introduced him to Turin’s anti-fascist circles. After finishing school in 1926, he enrolled in the Faculty of Letters at the University of Turin, and in 1930 he defended his degree thesis on the American poet Walt Whitman.

Anti-fascism and internal exile

Pavese never joined the National Fascist Party, and made a living from private lessons and translations from English. For years his anti-fascism stayed quiet rather than militant, but it was still enough to cost him dearly, in the same repressive climate described in The Mussolini Myth: How Fascist Propaganda Built the Duce.

On 15 May 1935 Pavese was arrested as editor of the magazine la Cultura, for possessing coded letters tied to a network of anti-fascist contacts. He was sentenced to internal exile and, after arriving in Brancaleone Calabro on 4 August 1935, stayed there until March 1936, when he was granted a pardon.

The publisher Einaudi and American literature

In 1938 Pavese joined the publishing house Einaudi, where he became a highly respected editorial director, remaining active there until his death. Among other things, he was behind the so-called “collana viola”, a series on ethnology and myth studies that included works by Carl Gustav Jung, Lucien Lévy-Bruhl and Karl Kerényi.

He was also a tireless translator: he brought Herman Melville (Moby Dick, Benito Cereno), Sherwood Anderson, John Dos Passos, John Steinbeck, William Faulkner, James Joyce and Gertrude Stein into Italian, helping Elio Vittorini introduce North American literature to Italian readers. According to the Treccani Encyclopedia, his realism owes a double debt to this work: to the lesson of Giovanni Verga and Verismo: Life, Works and Key Traits, and to the American literature he had made himself a translator of. The novel Paesi tuoi, published in 1941, was described by the Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani as a work “meant to renew Italian narrative prose”, for its dry, near-brutal storytelling drawn from American models.

The myth of the countryside and his style

A recurring movement runs through Pavese’s novels: the search for human contact and a return to the rural world he came from, as a defence against the mechanical nature of city life, according to the Treccani Encyclopedia. It is a memory that, centred on childhood, rises to myth or spills into symbol.

Practical example: in Prima che il gallo canti (1948) and in La bella estate (1949, winner of the Premio Strega), these approaches converge: the landscape is not just the backdrop to the story but a constant counterpoint of meaning and feeling, in what the Treccani Encyclopedia points to as the artistic high points of his fiction.

Pavese in twentieth-century Italian literature

According to the Treccani Encyclopedia, Pavese played an essential role in the passage between the culture of the 1930s and the new democratic culture of the postwar years. Around him, other authors were reshaping Italian fiction in those same decades from different angles: Luigi Pirandello: life, plays, and the 1934 Nobel Prize on the side of theatre and the crisis of identity, Italo Svevo: life, works and thought on the side of the psychological novel.

Three books, in particular, capture the different directions his writing took. The Moon and the Bonfires, his last novel, follows an emigrant’s return to his native village in the Langhe. Verrà la morte e avrà i tuoi occhi (Death Will Come and Will Have Your Eyes) collects his final poems, written in March 1950 and dedicated to the actress Constance Dowling. Il mestiere di vivere (The Business of Living) is the diary Pavese kept from 1935 to 1950, published after his death.

The final years and death

1950 was both the year of success and the year of the end. Pavese saw The Moon and the Bonfires published, and around the same time wrote the poems that would become Death Will Come and Will Have Your Eyes.

On 26 August 1950, in the early afternoon, he went to the Albergo Roma in Turin; he took his own life with a sleeping draught and was found dead the evening of the next day, 27 August. After the war he had joined the Italian Communist Party and worked on the Piedmont edition of the newspaper l’Unità. In 2002 his remains were moved to the cemetery of Santo Stefano Belbo, under the epitaph “Ho dato poesia agli uomini” (“I gave poetry to mankind”).