Vasco Pratolini was born in Florence the 13th of October 1913 from a family of common people who lived in a typical city neighbourhood which was often the centre of his novels. Orphaned of his mother and once his father remarried, he spent a lot of time with his grandparents until he became a typography worker. During his apprenticeship, he alternated work with the study of classic writers: Dante, Dickens, Manzoni. Later he worked towards arts prose. When he became ill with tuberculosis, he spent two years in a sanatorium.
In 1934 he met Elio Vittorini who increased in him the need for an anti-fascist ideological commitment. He collaborated with Letteratura (1937-47) and directed with Alfonso Gatto the magazine Campo di Marte (suppressed by Fascism after a year, 1939). He moved to Rome, in the environment of the Resistance, and matured his realistic vocation which he was faithful to in the following years. He did in Rome in 1991.
Pratolini's life had a different human experience compared to middle class Italian literacy, with a regular course of studies behind. For this reason his narration debut was marked by the temptation to recuperate, on the wave of memory, situations and figures linked to his biographical reality, thus centring his belief on the concept of common participation to literature.
The witness of a great historical-literary passage, the death of the thirties' Realism and the insurgency of post-war Neo-realism, the writer acquires his own intellectual awareness. He is convinced of being able to fill in the gap existing between the common people, intellectuals and the historical-social situation. The search towards a rationalistic root brings him, inevitably, to clash with fascist irrationality. Literature thus becomes a defence weapon for Pratolini, a refuge from every day anguish.
The aim is to become the common people, recognising and fusing himself in them. In his youth novels there is a common thread: fear of death and the effot to exorcise it telling others about it, trying to describe it with a cool mind. His recurring keywords are: "Cold, Dark, Free oneself, Find oneself". His characters love and hate with the same intensity - through hate they reach resentment which doesn't allow them to love, just to suffer. The writer disappears, he becomes the voice of the humble and the defenceless, he becomes history (chronicle) himself.
The prose, typically Florentine, is simple and a little extenuated and effusive, it works as an anaesthetic, so that pain is felt less. The use of synaesthesia, the postponement of the verb to the noun, are all artifices that give the novel a touch of realism and immediacy. Florence is no longer just a place of the soul, it becomes a city alive and real with its toponymy, its inhabitants and the stories that are lived there.
Concerning this critics have spoken of poetry of small things, crepuscular approach: probably not wrongly, providing the human richness evident in these pages is felt: richness in a subjective and objective sense, as a richness of feelings and affections that the author manifests while retracing the stages of his painful childhood, and still, the richness of human elements that appear in every direction with a concerted nature and a collectiveness which are the most interesting prerogatives of this Tuscany author, who is unfortunately often forgotten.
Chronology of Vasco Pratolini's works:
1956 - Diario sentimentale (includes Magazzini, Le amiche)
1944 - Il quartiere
1946 - Cronache di poveri amanti
1947 - Cronaca familiare
1947 - Un eroe del nostro tempo
1949 - Le ragazze di San Frediano
1952 - Metello
1960 - Lo Scialo
1963 - La costanza della ragione
1966 - Allegoria e derisione
1967 - La cittą dei miei trent'anni
1981 - Raccoglie i testi inediti in Il marmello di Natascia
Vasco Pratolini
Pratolini among others
