Giancarlo Vigorelli

Milan, 1913–Pietrasanta, 2005

Vigorelli with Giacomo Manzù and Carlo Mattioli. © Archive DUfoto.

Giancarlo Vigorelli was a writer, journalist and literary critic. He graduated from the Catholic University of Milan with a thesis on André Gide and became assistant to prof. Luigi Sorrento. From the mid 1930s he collaborated with various magazines including: “Il Frontespizio”, “Corrente”, “Letteratura”, “Primato”, “Campo di Marte” and “Prospettive”, edited by Curzio Malaparte. From this time, he was in contact with Vittorio Sereni, Carlo Emilio Gadda, Carlo Bo and the hermetic poets. During the war, having been accused of anti-fascism, he was stripped of his academic position, and in September 1943 fled to Lugano in Switzerland, where he collaborated with the newspapers, “Corriere del Ticino” and “Giornale del Popolo”. He reviewed the works of Montale and Angioletti.
After the war, on returning to Milan, Vigorelli founded “Il Corriere Lombardo”, as well as working for “Oggi”, “L’Europeo” and “Costume”. From the 1950s–1970s he lived in Rome, working as a journalist and literary critic.  He wrote pieces on a wide range of writers and public figures such as Manzoni, Prezzolini and in 1956 the President of the Republic in the article Gronchi: battaglie di ieri e di oggi (Gronchi: battles of yesterday and today). In these years he received numerous awards.  Among his friends was Pier Paolo Pasolini whose early career Vigorelli supported.  He edited the final writings of Curzio Malaparte, Io in Cina e in Russia (I, in China and Russia) (1958), the Italian translation of the travel notebooks by Viktor Nekrasov, Sovietico in Italia (A Soviet in Italy) (1960). He was editor of magazines and newspapers including “Giovedì”, “Momento”, “Settimana Incom” and “L’Europa letteraria”, which he also founded.
In 1958 he greeted with enthusiasm Giovanni Battista Angioletti’s idea of founding a European community of writers (COMES), with the aim of overcoming the political and ideological divisions preventing exchange between European literary cultures. As an editor, reviewer and promoter of contemporary art and cinema, Vigorelli played a fundamental role in building diplomatic bridges among Europe’s writers and artists. In 1956 he became vice president of Istituto LUCE and in 1965 president of ILTE (Industria libraria tipografica editrice) (Industry of books, typography and editing). Between 1960 and 1965, Vigorelli’s main focus was “L’Europa letteraria” (Literary Europe), the official press organ of COMES. The magazine succeeded in giving voice to both official and dissenting writers from behind the Iron Curtain.
After Angioletti’s death in 1961, Vigorelli’s role as general secretary of COMES, working alongside Giuseppe Ungaretti, was key. He shared the editorship of “L’Europa letteraria” with Domenico Javarone, until at least 1963 and, subsequently, with Davide Lajolo. Vigorelli managed to forge close relations with Aleksei Surkov and Konstantin Fedin, representatives of the Union of Soviet Writers (cf. Vettori 1960), opening an important channel of communication with “Novyi mir”, the liberal literary journal edited by Aleksandr Tvardovskii. He organised COMES conferences in various European cities including Florence in March 1962, Leningrad in August 1963 and Belgrade in April 1965.
Among the writers reviewed and translated in “L’Europa letteraria” were: V. Khlebnikov, V. Maiakovskii, M. Tsvetaeva, B. Slutskii, B. Akhmadulina, E. Evtushenko, A. Voznesenskii, V. Aksenov, V. Nekrasov, L. Martynov, D. Granin, M. Sholokhov, I. Ėrenburg, B. Pasternak, A. Solzhenitsyn and A. Akhmatova.  Literary critiques were published on the work of: K. Chukovskii, M. Bazhan and K. Zelinskii. Many of the translators were emerging Slavists, such as A. M. Ripellino, V. Strada, P. Zveteremich and C. Riccio. The magazine’s importance can be seen in its role in presenting and defending the works of Pasternak, Solzhenitsyn and Anna Akhmatova. In 1963, Vigorelli published an exclusive piece by Akhmatova, I miei incontri con Modigliani (My meetings with Modigliani) (cf. Akhmatova 1963) and succeeded in persuading Khrushchëv to grant the poet a visa so that she could travel to Italy to receive the Etna-Taormina prize in 1964. Anna Akhmatova’s trip to Italy was a significant media success for COMES (cf. Sabbatini 2012-2013: 63-69).
Vigorelli attempted to repeat this success 1965-66 by intervening in the Siniavskii-Daniėl’ case (cf. Vigorelli 2014). However, his trip to Moscow did not have the desired effect and instead of conferring on the writers the prestige of international support, sparked bitter disagreement between COMES and the Union of Soviet Writers. Vigorelli’s role and sincerity in defending dissident writers was at times questioned. Iurii Galanskov, writing for Feniks 66 claimed: “unfortunately, in the West, there are people, for example, the excellent Secretary of the European Union of Writers, Giancarlo Vigorelli, who are inclined to think that clandestine literature in the USSR […] has no value; […] Vigorelli should deal with subjects he knows about and understands. The Union of Writers and the official publications of Russia today are offensive to writers and literature, they ruin public taste and make fools of readers” (cf. Galanskov 1968: 77). The ambiguous position of COMES could not last long. In 1968 Vigorelli was in Prague when Warsaw Pact troops invaded; COMES interrupted its attempts at mediation as an act of protest and Vigorelli resigned as Secretary General. In 1969 he wrote the preface to Praga non tace (Prague is not silent) (Guanda, Parma), an anthology of the Prague Spring a year after Soviet occupation.  In the same year, in the magazine “Il Dramma”, Vigorelli published Pasternak’s La bellezza cieca (Blind beauty) as a world exclusive and oversaw its adaptation for cinema with his daughter, Vivalda. He signed the, COMES manifesto in defence of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn with the president, Giuseppe Ungaretti and 120 other writers, provoking an attack from the Soviets, published in “Literaturnaia gazeta” in November 1970.  The article’s condemnation of Vigorelli and the Community of European writers marked the end of communications with Soviet institutions (cf. Ansa 1970).
In the following decades Vigorelli focused on figurative arts in Socialist countries. During the Gorbachev era, he turned again to literature, meeting authors such as Chingiz Aitmatov and Iurii Nagibin.  At the end of the 1980s Vigorelli made plans to reform the Community of European writers, but the project was never realised. His various collections of essays Il gesuita proibito (The Forbidden Jesuit) (1963), La terrazza dei pensieri (The terrace of thoughts) (1967), Diario europeo (European Diary) (1977), Carte d’identità (Identity Card) (1989) and Manzoni pro e contro (For and Against Manzoni) (1976), give only a partial view of Vigorelli’s work of analysis, reception and dialogue with diverse literary phenomena (cf. Vigorelli 1977). The decades long work and dedication of Giancarlo Vigorelli makes him one of the most important cultural mediators of his time (cf. Magris 2007). Vigorelli left a private library of over 40.000 volumes, including over 3000 in Russian.

Marco Sabbatini
[30th June 2021]

Translation by Tammy Corkish

Bibliography

• Ansa [agenzia], La ‘Literaturnaja gazeta’ contro la Comunità europea degli scrittori. Dietro il pretesto della Comes il vero bersaglio è Solgenitsin, “La voce repubblicana”, 19.11.1970: 8.
• Achmatova A., I miei incontri con Modigliani, “L’Europa letteraria”, 27 (1963): 5-13.
• Galanskov Ju., Feniks ’66. Rivista sovietica non ufficiale, Jaca Book, Milano 1968.
• Magris C., Giancarlo il Grande, in C. Tolomeo, G. P. Serino, L. Butti (eds.), Così tante vite. Il Novecento di Giancarlo Vigorelli, Mattioli 1885, Milano 2007: 4-8.
• Sabbatini M., Dicembre 1964. Anna Achmatova in Italia, Un caso di diplomazia culturale, “eSamizdat”, 9 (2012-2013): 63-76, http://www.esamizdat.it/ojs/index.php/eS/issue/view/4 online (last accessed: 30/06/2021).
• Vettori V., Scrittori europei e funzionari sovietici, “Il Nazionale”, 03.07.1960: 6.
• Vigorelli G., Diario europeo, 2 voll., 6, Milano 1977.
• Vigorelli G., Diario moscovita. Appunti sul dispotismo russo, ed. by G. Giannelli, Mimesis, Milano 2014.