Dino Buzzati

Biography

Buzzati first called his best novel The Fortress. The title The Tartar Steppe was suggested by the publisher Leo Longanesi, and the book came out on 9 June 1940, the very day when its author was already a journalist on military service.

He was born on 16 October 1906 in the family villa at San Pellegrino, on the edge of Belluno. His father taught international law in Milan at the newly founded Bocconi University, and the family spent its summers in Belluno. After his father’s death in 1920, Dino entered the Giuseppe Parini lyceum in Milan. There he became interested in Egyptian culture (in letters to a school friend he signed himself “Dinubis”) and in the drawings of Arthur Rackham. From childhood he drew and played the piano and violin, and he loved the mountains so much that later, in Milan, he dreamed almost every night of climbing. In the Dolomites he followed rock routes, and his favourite peak was Croda da Lago.

In 1924, yielding to his family’s wishes, he enrolled in the law faculty and took his degree on 10 October 1928. That summer he joined Corriere della Sera, the Milan daily, as a trainee. Reporter, special correspondent, editor and, later, art critic: he never left the paper for the rest of his life. In 1935–1936 he ran its monthly supplement La Lettura. Crime reporting remained his favourite genre, and a later edition collected those pieces in a separate book.

His first novel, Barnabo of the Mountains, appeared in 1933, and The Secret of the Old Woods in 1935. In 1940 the paper sent him to Addis Ababa as a war correspondent. Aboard ships of the Italian Royal Navy he wrote reports that were collected in a book only in 1992. The Seven Messengers, a collection of stories, came out in 1942. The second half of the 1940s and the 1950s went to short stories: Fear at La Scala (1949), The Collapse of the Baliverna (1954) and Sixty Stories, which won the Strega Prize, an Italian literary award, in 1958.

From 1950 to 1963 Buzzati was deputy editor of La Domenica del Corriere. Formally the second man, in practice he directed the contributors and looked after the layout, headlines and subjects of each issue, and the circulation more than once came close to a million copies.

In 1953 came the play A Clinical Case, based on his story “Seven Floors”. A few years later it was staged in Paris in a translation by Albert Camus. His other plays had no such success. He wrote librettos, four of them for operas by Luciano Chailly, designed the productions of his own plays himself, and made sets and costumes at La Scala. With Federico Fellini he worked on the screenplay of The Voyage of Mastorna, which was never filmed.

He regarded painting as a second trade and once declared that he was a painter who also wrote books “as a hobby”. His pictures were divided into frames, like a comic-book page, sometimes with captions. The best known, “Piazza del Duomo, Milan” (1952), turns the cathedral into a Dolomite mountain among green meadows. He painted regularly from 1957. The early works are close to Symbolism, Rackham, De Chirico’s metaphysical painting and Surrealism; in the 1960s crime, eroticism and Pop Art entered them. In 1962 he reached a more mature level with “The Murder in Via Calumi” (1962). I think his own sentence explains him best: “For me, painting and writing are the same thing.”

In 1960 came the novel Larger than Life, and in 1963 A Love Affair, his last novel. In 1965 he published his only books of poetry. In 1967 he became art critic of Corriere, although he said himself that he wrote not criticism but reports on new developments, in plain language. In 1969 came Poem Strip: 208 colour plates telling the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice in a pop style. The book is regarded as the first Italian graphic novel, and in 1970 it received the Paese Sera Prize. His last book in his lifetime was The Miracles of Val Morel (1971): paintings with short captions about invented miracles of Saint Rita.

Buzzati died in Milan on 28 January 1972. In the summer of 2010 his ashes were scattered on Croda da Lago.