Alberto Asor Rosa, 1933–2022

Abstract

at the age of 89. He was an astonishingly prolific, capacious literary critic and historian, a militant Marxist cultural operator and essayist (and latterly a novelist), whose influence over close on 60 years of intense debate around literature, politics and their role in Italian history was second to none. At his height, he was a formidable presence, immediately recognisable with his baffi and gruff manner, at the heart of several intersecting networks of influence centred on the Roman left (and its outpost at Capalbio in the Maremma area of Tuscany), the PCI, the Turinese publisher Einaudi and La Sapienza university, leading to the nickname 'il barone rosso'.The scale of his published work was prodigious: his contemporary and friend, the linguistician Tullio de Mauro, in a tribute written for his eightieth birthday, jokingly calculated that Asor Rosa had produced, from his impeccably neat handwritten drafts, somewhere in the region of 200,000 printed pages, or 70 million 'battute' (De Mauro 2013, 75). 1 And he continued to write and publish for nearly a decade more, up to his final book, L'eroe virile (Asor Rosa 2021), an elegant essay on an author of emblematic power for his generation, and for a whole idea of modern literature, Joseph Conrad.Few other figures shaped the Italian literary-intellectual field of the late twentieth century with such vigorous and frequently polemical forcefulness, or indeed embodied, for good or ill, the so-called 'cultural hegemony of the left' that was characteristic of much of the postwar period in Italy; a hegemony which was, however, propelled by furious internal clashes, factional arguments, and sometimes surprising intersections between the establishment and radical margins. Over the course of his career, Asor Rosa occupied both of these poles, at times simultaneously, and always fought his corner with clarity and conviction.Amongst his dozens of books and hundreds of essays, two works, two projects in particular, stand outand indeed encapsulate the dual poles of the radical Asor Rosa and the establishment Asor Rosaand they are by far the most significant contributions he made over his long career. First, there was Scrittori e popolo (Asor Rosa 1965), the explosive critical broadside that made his name in 1965, tearing strips off the pious aspirations of a century of post-Risorgimento Italian literature somehow to capture in literary form the authentic life of the poor, of the people and therefore of the nation; and secondly, the 20 years and more that he spent from the late 1970s onwards as lead editor of the vast, collaborative and notably innovative grande opera produced by Einaudi, the 17-volume Letteratura italiana (Asor Rosa 1982-2000.