Habilitationsschrift--Hamburg. / Includes passages of Pavese's work in Italian. Includes indexes. Includes bibliographical references (p. 236-242).

Inaug. _ Diss.: Philosophische Fakultät I: Zürich: 1974. Bibliogr. p. 108-109.

Inaug. _ Diss.: Fachbereich Sprachwissenschaften: Hamburg. _ Bibliogr. p. 236-242. Index.

Cesare Pavese was born in Turin in 1908. After a lifetime of struggle he fell victim to the overwhelming complexity of his ambivalence; desiring, needing and fearing the world; desiring, needing and fearing his solitude. The two poles, in constant conflict, led him to take his own life in 1950 in the city of his birth. Throughout his career as poet, novelist, essayist and translator (he introduced American literature to Italy), his art was a constant expression of the fierce war he waged upon himself. Pavese's tragedy of solitude was too personal to call him an "existentialist" writer, even in the Camusian sense of a theorizer of one's own experiences. Camus could think of Sysiphus and be comforted. Not Pavese. He, himself, was the weak Sysiphus at odds with the elusive rock of life. For him the solution was eternally in the "finding". The tragedy was that to solve the problem of his rational self would be to annihilate his emotional self and vice versa. It is ultimately his life and his personality that are paramount to the understanding of his art. In the maze of "progressions" and "regressions" a certain linear movement is discernible. We witness the growth (youth), defense (maturity) and wearing down (later years) of a delusion of consciousness which led him to believe that the necessary integration with society could be realized. A widening undercurrent of doubt or repressed knowledge, that all is self-delusion, runs throughout. So we find in Pavese many dualities: naturalism vs. symbolism, machiavellism vs. idealism, country (his great love) vs. city (his great ambition), myth vs. anti-myth, etc. His art, following closely the undulation of his soul, is the unsuccessful attempt to harmonize those opposites. The early poetry (Lavorare stanca), in spite of its anxiously naturalistic start, coincides, in the span of Pavese's life, with a moment of greater subjectivity. He fails to preserve the "ultimate grip of reality" and leans towards a symbolic, imaginative conception. With poetry he only approaches reality, as he recreates it in subjective terms, through the filter of memory. Childhood, the country and myth, are the main themes of his Lavorare stanca. The controlling image is the young country hero who suffers a profanation of his god-like nature by coming in contact with the city. (Lavorare means work, i.e. the obligations, the prosaic of life, stanca means tiresome, wearing off the essence of life.) The universe recreated in the seventy-five loosely connected poems presents the conflict between the immanent and the transcendent world. The hill, the tree, the fence seen through the eyes of a child, are not any hill, or tree, or fence but the hill, the tree, the fence, as they are revealed to him for the first time in their absolute atemporal reality. Myth is the consecration of those "unique places" and "unique events" in which an act of life was first performed. The mystery of the past, which expands into a world of perhistory, fills the countryside. Lavorare stanca is therefore an exaltation of the primitive "savage", represented with violent images of orgiastic rites, of sex and blood. Among them the most powerful is the figure of II Dio Caprone, the great goat-god, Pan. (Inspired by Vico and Frazer). The universe of Lavorare stanca is full of drunkards, prostitutes, uprooted people who seek in vain to regain the lost paradise of the mythic age. They are the symbols of immanent life, of the stultifying routine of the city. In 1936, at twenty-eight, taking stock of his life and of his artistic creation, Pavese has to admit that what seemed immaturity is the mark of his life. He proceeds to a two-fold task of self-construction. "The lesson is this; to build in life and in art; to ban the voluptuous [his beloved subjectivity] from both". The man who was born a Proustian renounces his "temps rétrouvé" and plunges into the present, seeks identification through love and the ideal of a family. The purely lyrical man becomes a novelist bent on pursuing the "objective correlative". The short stories and the novels are a discourse about "the dramatic experiences of a man in his world". In Carcere (The Prison) Pavese deliberately avoids his countryside and childhood recollections to present in a naturalistic way the drama of solitude of an exiled man-solitude which imprisons man when he represses his charitable impulses and falls back on his sensuality. Charity ("Christ and Dostoievskij") is Pavese's answer to the hypocrisy of current morality which perpetuates the Machiavellian duality of strong and weak. Myth does not allow any longer a putting-off of the responsibilities of the historical present and a reversal to the "holy places" of a "private universe". But through the influence of American writers whose provincialism was, for Pavese, their merit, the Piedmontese countryside, even if it is made to embody the evil of the primitive against the goodness of city life, returns in Paesi tuoi (Your country). In those two novels a residue of symbolic construction and mythic conception escapes the control of the author. After a series of failures to bring himself to a normal behavior, Pavese regresses into himself. He does not try to justify himself in terms of the world, but only in terms of his own being. Charity is not an answer any more because it requires the annulment of one's personality. The only dialogue possible is that which man can have with his own subconscious, his deity. By exploring and clarifying his personal myths, man will know what he is "sub specie aeternitatis", explain his "total being", his destiny. In the light of this "total being" existence becomes irrelevant and can be disposed of when it is unendurable. The last novels, The Moon and the Bonfires and Among women alone, write off all alternatives of life. When man has lived his solitary adventure and understood his destiny, only one solution is possible: Men must endure their going hence even as their coming hither. Ripeness is all. / Arts, Faculty of / Central Eastern Northern European Studies, Department of / Graduate

II problema centrale di questa tesi è il suicidio di Cesare Pavese. L'indagine si concentra intorno alle sue opere: le poesie, i racconti e i romanzi che forniscono le risposte alle seguenti domande: quali sono i dati biografici dello scrittore che troviamo rispecchiati e intrecciati nella trama della sua opera? Possiamo scoprire l'evidenza sufficiente del suo turbamento psicologico che ci porterà finalmente ad una decisione conclusiva sul suicidio di Pavese? II mio metodo di ricerca segue una specie di studio psicologico che si basa per la maggior parte sulle prove che II Mestiere di Vivere (il diario) e le Lettere provvedono. Scoperta la sua disposizione suicida, che porta con essa delle tracce profonde di sentimenti ambivalenti, Pavese verrà classificato subito fra una specifica categoria di suicidi. Cerco non solo di esaminare le teorie e gli elementi psicologici che contribuiscono a determinare un caso suicida, ma anche di confrontare queste affermazioni espresse da esperti nel campo psicologico ( ad esempio, quelle che si basano su fattori come angoscia, paura, ostilità) con quello che risulta dall’opera pavesiana. Cerco di stabilire quale sia l'orientamento, cioè l'atteggiamento dello scrittore verso la "cessation"; di vedere se per lui il suicidio sia stato un atto compiuto in piena coscienza (cioè intenzionato). Vorrei appurare quale sia il significato di temi più ricorrenti: quelli principali del suicidio-omicidio, della comunicazione-possesso, dell’odio-amore, del sadismo-masochismo, del sesso, e quelli secondari delle donne, della violenza (sangue), del ritorno al paese nativo, dell'infanzia e dell'egocentrismo. Molto pertinenti al caso pavesiano sono gli aspetti più astratti che ricorrono nel suo carattere disperato e frustrato; ad esempio l'atteggiamento verso l'arte e la vita, e il mezzo del comunicare) il mito. Cosa gli offre la 'via’ più adatta per giungere alla maturità: la realtà storica psicologica o la realtà mitica? La realtà della sua vita e il mito della sua arte lottano dentro di lui per perpetuare il suo angoscioso conflitto psicologico. L'analisi delle opere pavesiane mi porta a fare qualche osservazione e ad arrivare a certe conclusioni. Che la vita e l'arte di Pavese siano strettamente legate non c'è dubbio. Curioso è il fatto che benchè il diario e le lettere rivelino molti dati pertinenti alla scoperta della sua personalità, (segni di estremo egocentrismo e di preoccupazione del proprio rapporto cogli altri) essa si manifesta ancor meglio nelle poesie, nei racconti e nei romanzi, che rivelano una personalità molto depressa, piena di conflitti e sentimenti contrastanti, un carattere che sente il desiderio di sfogarsi a volte tramite atti violenti, a volti tramite morbosi e pietosi momenti di riflessione. II problema principale nella sua vita fu uno di comunicazione; la risposta al problema della sua incapacità di fondare un rapporto sincero con un altro essere umano si trova negli anni giovanili quando le dure esperienze - la morte del padre, la severità della madre, il proprio rinchiudersi nei libri - suscitarono in lui sentimenti di inferiorità e un forte tentative di superarli. II maggior conflitto psicologico che gli rodeva l'animo fu quello tra l'io vero, che rispecchiava il suo carattere ipersensibile, egoistico ed inferiore e l'io idealizzato che rappresentava un carattere superiore, virile e capace di tutto. Questo conflitto, che quindi significo in essenza un tentativo vano di trovare un'altra realtà (quella mitica) per sfuggire a quella presente, fu la ragione del suo suicidio che non costituiva un gesto del tutto negativo. Per l'io idealizzato segnò un atto eroico, quindi positivo; per l'io vero fu un atto disperato. In entrambe i casi, però, lo scrittore raggiunse la maturità. Fu lui stesso a scegliere il giorno e il modo della sua morte. In conclusione il mio scopo è di mostrare che esistono nelle opere di Pavese prove significative e sufficienti per concludere che egli ha inteso il proprio suicidio come atto intenzionato. / Arts, Faculty of / Central Eastern Northern European Studies, Department of / Graduate

The present work is divided in two parts: the first part contains analysis of some writings from Feria d'agosto among which "Il nome", narration that opens the series in the book, has retained our particular attention and its analysis brings us to discover "classic" origins not yet identified by critics. / "Il nome" is the key to finding out about the essence of Pavese's poetics. / In the second part we approach the Croce-Pavese's affinities. The relation arises from Pavese's controversial writing on Proust. We also give an idea of reviews which reflected various tendencies of the Arts during the 20th century. We are trying to place Pavese in his "time" and we are searching out how many of those ideological aspirations are in our writer's poetics.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 1975. / Includes vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 426-460). Available online via OhioLINK's ETD Center.

Diss.--Fakultät für Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaft--Universität Mannheim, 2001. / Bibliogr. p. 263-300.

No description available.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, Dept. of Romance Languages and Literatures, August 2002. / Includes bibliographical references. Also available on the Internet.