Le idee dello scrittore: idee, miti e ideologie nell’opera di Curzio Malaparte

This thesis situates itself within the field of studies exploring the thought and works of Curzio Malaparte from the perspective of the ideas and ideologies that shaped his intellectual development. The analysis focuses on three dimensions that structured his worldview and found expression in his essays and literary works. The thesis is organized into three autonomous sections—titled Ideologies, Myths, and Ideas—united by a common method of textual analysis and discursive organization, based on a systematic examination of Malaparte’s readings and a historical contextualization of his ideas and ideological formations. The first section reconstructs Malaparte’s revolutionary ideology during the years 1919–1921, in the context of the post–World War I crisis. Through an analysis of the Manifesto of Oceanism and other writings of the period, it offers a comprehensive reading of this initial phase of the author’s cultural activity, highlighting the main features of his revolutionary prophetic thought and its theoretical foundations, particularly in relation to the ideas of Thomas Carlyle and other authors he engaged with at the time. Specific attention is given to The Wedding of the Eunuchs, a text of marked allegorical-symbolic ambiguity, which is examined through Carlyle’s doctrine of symbols. These elements are ultimately interpreted through the category of “revolutionary Gnosticism,” providing a unifying lens for understanding this early phase of Malaparte’s intellectual work. The second section is devoted to Malaparte’s political myths. It first reconstructs the theoretical framework of the political myths he developed during the fascist years, and then traces their intellectual genealogy, identifying key sources for his theories on the crisis of civilization. A dedicated chapter examines the author’s engagement with the problem of the political myth, analyzed in light of Georges Sorel’s thought and the oscillation between a ‘technical-mythical’ and a ‘genuine-mythical’ stance. Particular attention is paid to Malaparte’s sustained reflection on the problem of ‘mythical men’ and, finally, to the demythologizing analysis of revolutionary and totalitarian aristocracies undertaken in his novelistic trilogy of the 1940s–1950s. From this section emerges an overall interpretation of Malaparte as an intellectual who consciously assumed, for three decades, the role of both ‘destroyer of idols’ and creator of new myths. The third section focuses on the idea of the ‘character’ of peoples, a category pervasive in Malaparte’s work and central to his worldview. After surveying the main theoretical sources of this notion, the thesis examines how it is employed as a tool for interpreting European history and culture, particularly in relation to the nature of fascisms and the advance of ‘technology’ in the modern world. Finally, the appendix presents a chapter that could not be accommodated within the main body of the thesis: an investigation aimed at highlighting the striking similarities between the conceptual elements of Carlyle’s Philosophy of Clothes and Malaparte’s literary imagination, focusing on the reconstruction of a possible Malapartean “philosophy of clothes” (or of the “skin”) of the world.