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Sergio Solmi. La letteratura italiana contemporanea: Scrittori, critici e pensatori del Novecento. Giovanni Pacchiano, ed. Milan. Adelphi. 117 pages. L.90,000. ISBN 88-459-1350-3.
If we added the word poet, the subtitle of the present volume would aptly describe Sergio Solmi, himself a writer, critic, thinker, and poet, which few Italian critics in this century, after Croce, can claim to be. In fact, in much of what Solmi has written, all four of these roles intermingle subtly and fruitfully. From the outset of his career as a critic, in evaluating literature Solmi was closely involved in evaluating the thought underlying it as well, and equally involved in evaluating the literary, and stylistic qualities of a thinker, while examining his thought as such. His earlier books Id pensiero di Alain (1930) and La salute di Montaigne e altri saggi (1942) are cases in point. In La letteratura italiana contemporanea, an extremely rich miscellany of essays, articles, and reviews dating from 1925, Solmi deals with the diverse aspects of Guido Gozzano, Pirandello, Svevo, Saba, Vittorini, Ungaretti, Bacchelli, and Croce, among others, as well as with such general themes as "Letteratura e vita nazionale," "Esperienza e teoria," "Stile e romanzo," "Neorealismo lirico moderno," "Pseudo-marxismo," and "Nietzsche e D'Annunzio."
But informing and motivating what Solmi writes on people who were more or less his contemporaries is his own sense of modernity and contemporaneity, together with what he attributes to his fellow critic Giacomo Debenedetti: "appassionata serieta morale," which eludes "ogni sterile giochetto teorico." Another quality that distinguishes Solmi from other Italian critics, especially the academic ones, is the way he combines thought and imagination, critical...