On April 11, , the concierge in the apartment building where Primo Levi had lived for most of his life before and after the war found him dead at the bottom of the stairwell.
The coroner ruled that his death was a suicide, and many people who knew him believed it to be as well—the end result of the suffering he had endured decades earlier and had lived with since. However, others have maintained that the death was an accident, pointing to the fact that he had suffered from dizzy spells. The question is a controversial one and remains the subject of some debate. Besides the body of work that Levi himself left behind, which has made him one of the most important of all Holocaust writers, he has also been the subject of numerous documentaries and biographies.
We strive for accuracy and fairness. If you see something that doesn't look right, contact us! Subscribe to the Biography newsletter to receive stories about the people who shaped our world and the stories that shaped their lives. Levi Strauss started an enduring fashion empire, which he launched by making one of the world's most durable and popular clothing items — the blue jeans.
He was killed in A leading figure of Italian High Renaissance classicism, Raphael is best known for his "Madonnas," including the Sistine Madonna, and for his large figure compositions in the Palace of the Vatican in Rome.
Galileo was an Italian scientist and scholar whose inventions included the telescope. His discoveries laid the foundation for modern physics and astronomy. His effort to make sense of a phenomenon that is devoid of sense by civilized standards was a lifelong project that began, in effect, the moment he entered the camp.
Before his deportation, in the transit camp, it is elegiac, noble. A large extended family prepares for the journey from which they know they will never return:. But the instant Levi passes underneath the infamous sign, arbeit macht frei , that wise and cultivated voice departs. The man who possessed it is no longer with us. My name is At last he starts to get his bearings. Levi asks himself whether there is anything to be learned from all this—about human nature, about the world outside the camps.
Here we feel the scientist come to the fore. Interpreting the results of that experiment would occupy him, at intervals, for the rest of his life: in essays and speeches; in countless appearances at schools; in correspondence with German and other readers; in a voluminous reading of Holocaust memoirs and studies, many of which are reviewed in the pages of The Complete Works.
Above all, at the end of his life, in The Drowned and the Saved , a pendant, some 39 years later, to If This Is a Man and an intellectual and moral triumph. There and elsewhere, Levi does battle against the myths, stereotypes, and pieties that have accreted around the Holocaust. The event is not incomprehensible; it yields its mechanisms, most of them composed of ordinary human motivations, to meticulous analysis.
Its victims were not saintly; oppression corrupts the oppressed, a process for which the Nazis had a special knack. The survivors experienced shame not only for surviving, but also for witnessing acts that indict the entire species. Yes, the Holocaust was unique, but it must not be cordoned off from the rest of history.
He wants to know precisely how we got from here to there, and how we might get back. It is a summons to thought. Understand, in order to judge. Through it all he keeps his preternatural judiciousness and objectivity. I f this is a man was initially published, in , to scant attention. Levi had returned to his career as a chemist and wrote little over the next few years.
Republished in , the book began to find its audience, and its author felt encouraged to attempt another full-length work. If the earlier book was Inferno , this one is The Odyssey , a tale of prodigies and marvels, adventures and idleness, Homeric storytelling and Homeric reunions.
Judged purely as narrative, it is the best writing Levi ever did. The war is over, or at least as the book begins, the front has passed. Levi was given a grotesque, surreal examination by the head of the Polymerisation Laboratory by one Doktor Pannwitz, the archetype of the tall, blond, icy Nazi.
There he worked until the war drew to a close. The Germans abandoned the camp, marching most of the prisoners out of it before sending them on to the Buchenwald concentration camp or shooting them. Levi survived because he was left behind in the sick ward with a fever. From there he was transported by the Russians in cart and train eastwards to Krakow and then through Ukraine to Russia itself — the start of a circuitous journey through the postwar devastation of eastern Europe back to Turin, a tale told in his book The Truce.
In October he returned to the house in which he had been born. And now this introverted man found that he had an irrepressible urge to tell people about his experiences — on the train, on the street, whether he knew them or not. Scarcely weeks after his return he began to write it down: on scraps of paper and in school exercise books, at home and on travel.
The account became If This Is a Man. In calm, measured but far from dispassionate prose, he described the unimaginable with towering moral authority. But the three or four publishers to which he sent it all turned it down. That seems inconceivably foolish now, but perhaps the wounds and trauma of the war were still too fresh and painful.
The book did, however, eventually find an Italian publisher. He needed to rebuild his own life too, and he took a job in the research laboratory of the lakeside factory of Duco Avigliana, a branch of Dupont that made paints and varnishes, just outside Turin. It was poorly paid but it brought him back to chemistry, and he stayed a chemist for another 30 years. This is characteristic of the tales that make up The Periodic Table , which he published in They are versions of the truth, rearranged and ordered to turn life into literature while retaining the essence that makes these chemical anecdotes vehicles for exploring humanity in all its rich strangeness, wonder, passion and horror.
In summer he left the factory to set up a chemical consultancy with his friend Alberto Salmoni. That was unlike his cautious nature, all the more because he was about to get married to Lucia Morpurgo. If This is a Man was published towards the end of that year, just after Levi married Lucia. The Periodic Table was even more successful than If This Is a Man : it won prizes, sold tens of thousands, and made Levi a literary superstar.
It is written in controlled prose, but it is dense with the energy of detail, voice, reflection, and complexity. It also explains, perhaps, why the short form—chapter, story, essay, poem, report—is the most natural vessel for his writing, like that of Borges or Calvino.
When he tried his hand at a novel, If Not Now, When? One of the signal achievements of these Complete Works is to give us the full range of that complexity, to show us Levi probing and reflecting, inventing and telling stories across a spectrum of fascinations that goes from Auschwitz to chemistry to mechanical engineering, from sci-fi to submarines to rock-climbing, from language games to animal poems to virtual reality machines, from Job to Rabelais to Conrad.
Not only did these things really happen, they may happen again; they may be happening again. Not all his readers will be willing to follow the thread along all its meanderings; indeed, responses to the Complete Works have already divided somewhat between those willing to listen to the modulated, lighter, more elfin tones in some corners of this volume and those who, perhaps understandably, prefer to split the work into his greater and lesser achievements and pass over his forays into occasional writing, science-fantasy, zoomorphic poetry, and the rest.
If This Is a Man was published in its second and more widely read Italian edition in the late s, just as it was being translated for the first time.
In , Levi completed his second book, The Truce previously titled in the US translation The Reawakening , a buoyant, if haunted, account of his nine-month journey home from a liberated Auschwitz through the postwar European maelstrom to Turin. In and came two collections of science-fiction stories, Natural Histories initially under a nervous pseudonym and Flaw of Form the heavy alliteration is almost, but not quite, there in the original, Vizio di forma.
In he published The Periodic Table , an autobiography loosely structured according to the chemical elements Levi had encountered or imagined throughout his life, education, and career as a chemist. The book is perhaps his greatest literary invention and is steeped in the values of friendship, the drudgery but also the rewards of lab work, the creativity and magic of science, and also, intertwined with these, anti-Fascism, anti-Semitism, survival, and memory.
His next, ostensibly very different book, The Wrench , followed the construction and engineering tales of an industrial rigger, Libertino Faussone, who, in his odd mixture of Piedmontese dialect and technical jargon making this the greatest of technical challenges for the translator, Nathaniel Rich , tells of his epic and intimate struggles with bridges, dams, and cranes.
Levi, however, saw The Wrench and The Periodic Table as closely related, as twins: both hymned the value of hands-on, problem-solving, quick-thinking, bridge-building work: work that really does set you free.
Back in Italy, a stream of new work appeared: essays, stories, poems, articles.
0コメント