Cycle

Natalia Goncharova - Velocipedist - 1913

Lyonel Feininger - Das Radrennen - 1912

Umberto Boccioni - Dinamismo di un Ciclista - 1913

Stripped Bare

Julio Romero de Torres - Nuestra Señora de Andalucía - 1907

Carlo Socrate - Vestizione della sposa - 1934

Emanuele Cavalli - La sposa - 1934

Samson

Lorenzo Viani - Le Parigine - 1908

Giorgio de Chirico - Portrait (prémonitoire) de Guillaume Apollinaire - 1914

Felice Casorati - Ritratto di Anna Maria de Lisi - 1918

Lemons

Felice Casorati - Natura morta, Limoni - 1930

Anton Räderscheidt - Zitrone mit Wasserglas - 1925

Karl Hofer - Stilleben mit Zitronen - ?

Forebearance

Sandro Botticelli - Mary with the Child and Singing Angels (detail) - ca. 1477

Gustave van de Woestyne - La paysanne - ca. 1925

Adolfo Wildt - Un rosario - 1915-7

Robert Wohl - The Generation of 1914 - 1979

“Let us imagine a rising generation with this fearless gaze, with this heroic attraction to what is monstrous, let us imagine the bold stride of these dragon-slayers, the proud recklessness with which they turn their backs on all the enfeebled doctrines of scientific optimism so that they may 'live resolutely', wholly and fully;” 

Friedrich Nietzsche, “An attempt at self-criticism” in The Birth of Tragedy, ed. R. Geuss & R. Speirs, Cambridge, 2007, 50

Robert Wohl, The Generation of 1914, Harvard University Press, 1979, 307

The book opens with a warning: “Historical generations are not born; they are made” (Wohl, 5) and this conception, quite different from the essentially essentialist one of the men he sets out to study, will inform much of Wohl's analysis. Beyond the personal but widespread experience of the strife between “Fathers and Sons” there is indeed no ground to delimitate a generation from another, as births like ages constitute an uninterrupted continuum. This was not, however, the opinion of a significant number of intellectuals born between the second half of the XIXth century and the first quarter of the XXth, which Wohl sets out to enumerate and study with varying degrees of attention, organizing them in five countries (France, Germany, England, Spain and Italy) all of which will be examined in sufficient depth thanks to the author’s command of both their respective languages and of the relevant literature and cultural history.
Although the concept of generation existed in various forms from the dawn of times (from the goliarderies at the dawn of the XIIth century to the association of youth and revolution going back at least to the 1789, with Joseph Bara and Joseph Viala for example) Wohl largely skips such a historical overview to address directly its modernist –and political– appropriation: its forefathers would be Maurice Barres and Miguel de Unamuno, heralding from the 1880s the coming of the generations to know themselves. 

Antanas Sutkus - Blind Pioneer - 1962

Wohl begins with France and more specifically with Agathon’s 1912 survey of French students, biased as is well known¹, but also highly symptomatic of French nationalism at the time: following a dubious methodology, the authors painted the picture of a youth (18 to 25) embracing wholeheartedly a voluntarist and irrational nationalism, longing desperately for the soon to come baptism of fire. Generational politics was to be largely dominated (as Wohl shows throughout this volume) by conceptions either emphasizing the role of the intellectual (Gramsci) or straightforwardly elitist (Papini, Ortega), and the analytical use of the notion of “generation” was rooted, since the XIXth century, in literary history and criticism². Thus it comes as little surprise to find the concept was mobilized by a largely literary contingent of intellectuals to claim their right to re-shape society. 

But not all generational theories were literary, impressionistic or openly biased: many of the more fleshed out theories which Wohl examines arose from the sociological quarter, as eager for autonomous periodization as artists were to slice up the Zeitgeist. Indeed already one half of Agathon was a sociologist, and after following the trajectory of the generational idea through many important writers (Montherlant, Barbusse, etc. some of whom will find the war an endearing experience, but all of whom will be disappointed with its inability to bring about radical change), the author turns to the sociologist Mentré.
First conceived as coherent and united organism by the early generationalists, proponents of a kind of naturalized party politics, the generation turned out to be rather fissiparous: In France as elsewhere, already at the end of the war it appeared clearly to many of them that the experience of the trenches was not that of one generation, but of two. In fact as time passes, the latest generation seem always to subdivide, as the continuously adjourned revolution had to be blamed onto the scapegoat of the past: this elean turtle was not to be overtaken, and this discovery (as in Massis’ meeting with Montherlant) could prove painful, leading some of those who found their youth suddenly questioned to find that new generations, already, pointed towards nihilism (a place-holder, if there ever was one). Marinetti wrote “When we are forty, other younger and stronger men will probably throw us in the wastebasket like useless manuscripts—we want it to happen!”. In fact, as he and his age-group felt pushed out of the historical limelight, there was no shortage of bitterness.

Colonialism could seem like the designated pressure valve for the vitalist and imperialist impulses that constitute the subtext of much generationalism – however unlike in France (as with Psichari) or Italy (Papini), the reader is surprised when moving on to Germany to discover a very different picture, tinted, maybe, by a more romantic idealism and a centripetal Volkish tradition: the Jugendbewegung (Wandervogel and related) constitute a very early form of generationalism, and one directed more to teenagers than to the young adults courted by Agathon. Their secessionist utopianism was basked in that most peculiar mixture of Dionysian idealism and straight-laced biocentrism known as Lebensphilosophie, exemplified by Robert Musil under the traits of Meingast3. The resulting picture is of a somewhat less politicized movement, whether that should be read as epicurean and naturist, or as “third-positionist”, as when expressionist Pfemfert demanded “Be neither ‘radical’ in the sense of day-to-day politics nor ‘nationalist.’ Be young!” (45);

Alexander Rodchenko - Fizkul'turniks on parade in Red Square - 1937

via Charnel House

It is also in Germany however that Wohl finds one of his major case-studies: unlike the French Mentré, Mannheim was versed in Marxian thought and recognized that the generational flow was no long quiet river, but accelerated at the time of cultural or political upheavals. This was no doubt a first step towards understanding the construction of generations, but Mannheim stayed away from further questioning, leaving to classes their determination by material realities, and claiming, nebulously, for generations to have “values generated by the capacity of the human mind for new departures.”

England, often a late-comer to the field of cultural strife, might appear less puzzling than Germany and its Lebensphilosophie, but to a large extent we might ascribe this to the carefully preserved autonomy of its high culture where the generational debate was largely to take place: in other words, the undertones of social conflict were often muted by the limits imposed by literature –and poetry in particular– which favoured lyrical and introspective content to aesthetic-political theorizing.
And yet, it is there that arose the myth of the “lost generation,” to an extent synonymous with the titular “generation of 1914” in Anglophone scholarship. As somewhat of an apparté and using for once demographic data, Wohl takes the time to dispel this construction of a “generational tragedy” which seem to have largely been subsumed into the national “cult of the dead”.

Wohl’s account of Spain is centred on the figure of Ortega y Gasset, who showed more consistency in his dedication to the generational concept than he did to his progressive politics: we might regret that his thought take such a large proportion of the chapter, leaving little room for other exciting figures like Miguel de Unamuno, and none at all for South American nations which could have tied in with the French and Italian colonial experience, and probably constituted an important input for Iberic modernism (Vincente Huidobro for example) ; Ortega is nonetheless an interesting character, a moderate somewhat in the line of Prezzolini, and his vision of generation stand out as both highly articulated and “internal”, claiming none of that scientific neutrality common to Massis and Mannheim. His analysis outlines a particular use of the concept, where generationalism is used to retain the glitz of radicalism while in fact preaching parliamentary liberalism.

Konstantin Vasiliev - Parade - 1941

Last comes Italy, which Wohl surprisingly decides to open with the Papini of Un Uomo Finito: although the text does indulge in some powerful generational rhetoric, Papini seems to me too much of an individualist to constitute a convincing example: he was long dismissive of futurist modernolatry, and when he did reject the past he was careful not to pull any punches when it came to his contemporaries. His solipsistic “negation of the negation” left little room for his peers, and when he made some (as in his nationalistic writing) there certainly was no rejection of the past.
Similarly La Voce was careful not to run itself into a dead end, and its appeals for national renewal generally avoided the issue of generational conflict. Futurism certainly was listening more closely to its sirens, although with a pragmatism that its long life will make clear, and that is where the trace of Mussolini’s “cult of youth”4 might be followed. Whol did not have at his disposal when writing the rich culturalist historiography now available, thus we would be hard-pressed to blame him for overlooking many of its manifestations, although we might sometimes regret he is not more careful to dissociate “pure” generationalism from its mere influence on voluntarism, anti-academicism or vitalism. He offers us instead an examination of a very peculiar character, Omodeo, and a more predictable analysis of Gramsci’s generational thought. Both emphasize that, despite the relative discretion of pre-war generationalism, Italians across the political spectrum (liberals, Marxists, fascists…) identified together as a group, maybe more conceived of as “modernists” than as an age-group, and regrouped around common cultural icons like La Voce5.

As Wohl note in his conclusion (Wohl, 230) and develop throughout the text, generationalism is not politically exclusive: he finds among its exponents communists (Gramsci), socialists (Brooke), liberals (Ortega), conservatives (Massis), extreme nationalists (Junger) and fascists (Drieu) as well as a host of others like Montherlant or TS Lawrence, who seem apolitical, but whom one could find to gravitate around individualist-anarchism. He goes on to point out that, nonetheless, there is a widespread sense among those theorists of living in an interregnum (an epicentre of that “time out of joint” haunting the modernist consciousness) leading often to demands for radical change and discontinuity: illiberalism and revolutionary politics.

Furthermore we could add that as an “imaginary community”, the generation, much like the nation in its contemporary constructions, is conceived of as a new and unifying ideal, allowing for departure from the perceived democratic stalemate opposing right and left: in other words, the generational idea is a vector of syncretic politics “beyond left and right”. But whereas the nation largely emphasized historical continuity, the generational struggle, with its naturalization of the conflict between the past and the present/future, adds a revolutionary element, which in my opinion shed important light to the sometimes puzzling forms taken by nationalist ideologies between the wars.

Both nation and generation, despite those differences, were far from mutually exclusive. The very fact that the focus of attention was often the “generation of 1914” shows that the formation of the generation was hardly conceived as concurrent with that of the nation: although some lingering elements of internationalism can be spotted here and there (Wohl points out that the trench experience was often conceived as transcending national boundaries, and that some communists used generation to differentiate themselves from the socialist parties) the two communities live largely in symbiosis.

Emmanuel Evzerikhin - Memories of a Peaceful Time - Stalingrad - 1943

Wohl’s book is not only unique in his tackling eloquently a phenomenon that is central to much of XXth century history and has rarely been studied on its own or in such depth. It is also, on a more general level, a startling portrait of an epoch: I only wish he had explored a little more the relationship of Europe and Asia or Africa, while others will regret it does not seize upon the opportunity to contrast its cultural history with actual statistical and demographic analysis to which the subject might have lent itself well – however, the very constructionist framework announced by the author would have likely reduced any such insights to his own subjectivity. The book already bridges the divide between the “spontaneous sociology” of the artists and that of the actual professional sociologists, so it would no doubt have been perilous to add one more layer to the edifice.

In fact, if anything, Wohl’s book suffer from the symptoms of many of the books exploring radical ideologies of the interwar period (and many of the Belle Époque too) beyond the verified scope of institutional fascism: the very proliferation of small groups and ideologies, which have a lot in common but nonetheless turned out to oppose each others. Although fascism recycled, among other things, elements of generational politics, most of their proponents and theorists remained long aloof from the parties. Wohl does not provide us with a convincing delineation of “extreme nationalism” (Junger’s) from “fascism” (Drieu) which somewhat frustrates or blurs the otherwise great clarity of the book.
He seems aware of this issue, pointing out, first, that “the strange mixture of idealism and biological determinism on which the generational interpretation was based obscures our understanding of the major movements of the period” (Wohl, 237) and that his idea of a “neoconservative revolution” (Wohl, 232) is a contradiction in terms to be blamed not on him but on those writers of the “generation of 1914”. This is unsatisfactory inasmuch as the very same blame could easily be levelled against the fascists, and to this day the relationship between the “non-conformist right” nebula (Jungkonservativen, planism, etc., in which fascisms in their movement phases I find to belong) remain problematic. Some historians, Wohl among them, attempted to define those non-conformists as “fascism minus populism”, and those sympathetic to those movements have often added “and minus racism”, but even a cursory examination of those groups shows a reality much more complex. The continuity and overlaps between ideologies belonging to conflicting movements (say the Nazis and the Stahlhelm for example) is still perplexing historians, leading Roger Griffin to call upon analogies of “cultic milieu” and “rhizomatic” or “groupuscular right”6; To my knowledge however, those insights in the group dynamics of those movements are yet to be fleshed out.

Wohl concludes that the general sense of frustration emerging from retrospective examinations of the XXth century by members of his “generation of 1914” is born not from their failure to live up to this renovative task handed out by History (as Ortega would have it) but from the concrete impossibility for them to realize the ideals they had largely inherited: the very XIXth century materialist ideal they had planned to replace emerged victorious after the American intervention in WW2, and, we might add, all the more so since the Perestroika.
The post-war “cult of youth” (Beat, X, Y, etc.) described by John Davis7 as instrumental to the rise of consumer-capitalism is likely to be in part an American appropriation of the generational idea. How much, however, does our own ongoing crisis of representative politics owes to the inter-war crisis of democracy, and how much does our own “post-political” condition stems from their spreading of syncretic and generational ideologies, remains to be seen. 

1 - Philippe Bénéton, "La génération de 1912-1914 : image, mythe et réalité ?", Revue française de science politique, vol. 21, num. 5, 1971, 981-1009

2 - Marius Hentea, "The Problem of Literary Generations: Origins and Limitations", Comparative Literature Studies, vol. 50, num. 4, 2013, p. 567-588

3 - Robert Musil, L'homme sans qualité, tome premier, Points, 2011, 864.

4 - George Mosse, The Fascist Revolution: toward a general theory of fascism, Fertig, 1999, 230.
5 - Walter Adamson, Avant-Garde Florence: From Modernism to Facism, Harvard University Press, 1993, 352. 

6 - Roger Griffin, "From slime mould to rhizome: an introduction to the groupuscular right", Patterns of Prejudice, vol. 37, num. 1, 27-50.
7 - See John Davis, Youth and the condition of Britain: images of adolescent conflict, Althone Press, 1990, 259.

Move the world

"Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world."

Archimedes 

Koloman Moser - Sideboard and Fireplace for Moser’s Guest Room - 1902

Ivo Pannaggi - Casa Zampini - 1925 

Friedrich Kiesler - City in Space - 1925

What you intend to form

"Beauty will results from the form and correspondence of the whole, with respect to the several parts, of the parts with regard to each other, and of these again to the whole;that the structure may appear an entire and complete body, wherein each member agrees with the other, and all necessary to compose what you intend to form." 

Andrea Palladio, The Four Books on Architecture, Book I, Chapter I

Ottone Rosai - Case al Sole - 1956

Antonio Donghi - Convento - 1928

Telemaco Signorini - Via Torta Firenze - 1870

Coloured Crystallization

"A nation does not pick its flag at random. There would be much to say about this kind of coloured crystallization of the deepest instincts of a people."

Jean Bazaine, Comoedia, 30 January 1943,

Quoted in Michèle C. Cone, French Modernism, 192.

Otto Freundlich - Composition - 1935

Jules Olitski - Cleopatra Flesh - 1962

Pablo Echaurren - Waltfuturismo - 1995

Giovanni Papini - The Failure - 1912

"But I will here quote this one sentence of Novalis: 'The world shall be as I wish it!' There you already have in a nutshell the whole problem of Hitler, the central problem of the dedivinizing and dehumanizing."

Eric Voegelin, Hitler and the Germans, 1964

Papini, Giovanni. 2009. Un Homme Fini. 

trans. Y. Pelloso, Lausanne: L'Age d'Homme

In the words of Boris Groys, traditional mimetic art “was based on an adulation of Nature as the whole and consummate creation of the one and only God that the artist must imitate if his or her own artistic gift were to approximate the divine” (GROYS 2011, 14). In contrast avant-gardism wished no longer to imitate God, but rather to replace him, “by subjugating it [the world] to the single organizing and harmonizing will of the artist” (GROYS 2011, 16) ;
Hubris had long been central to the scathing diagnosis leveled against modernity, but it is not until the rise of modernism proper that culture embraced it as the legitimate ideology behind progress. Groys’ work, alongside that of James C. Scott (SCOTT 1998), is one of the few to have focused on this power-hungry dynamic of the movement, that runs a parallel and no less controversial path to the secularization of culture.
Papini’s book, “The Failure” (Un Uomo Finito in his 1912 original, and “Un Homme Fini” in the French I have been reading) is perhaps one of the most outspoken and unashamed exploration of what Groys has called the avant-garde’s “demiurgic” drive, as well a valuable (if biased!) document in early “Recall to Order”(POGGIOLI 1968, 93).
Giovanni Papini (1881-1956) entered the limelight with his publishing of the journal Leonardo (1903-1907) in Florence along with his close friend Giuseppe Prezzolini, introducing Italy to the thought of Bergson and William James, and setting the scene for the further development of avant-garde culture. Unlike those two fervent democrats, he would involve himself early on with Italian nationalism, promoting, with varying degrees of conviction, the end of Giolittian democracy (as editor of Il Regno), Italy’s involvement in WW1 on the side of the allies (as editor and futurist in Lacerba) and much later, from 1933 onward, half-hearted obedience to Mussolini. 

Un Uomo Finito intends to mark a turning point in his life, the end of his old ways and a turn from ruthless monadic individualism to rootedness and a cult of the Toscanità (ADAMSON 1993, 9) which will come crowning and terminate his futurist celebration of nationalism as a mean to cultural renovation. This new concern for “La Terre et les Morts” probably plays a large part in leading Papini to embrace the catholicism he had sometimes victimized to popular acclaim, writing in 1921 what remains his most famous work Storia di Cristo ; Somehow silenced by many of his sympathetic biographers, or wrongly reduced to “christian” anti-judaism, Papini was also a longstanding and vocal anti-semite, long before he was allegedly coerced into joining the Fascist Party in 1933¹. 

Albert Weisgerber - Pfauentanz - in Jugend magazine - 1902

But at the time of writing Un Uomo Finito, in 1911, we have no reasons to believe he held antisemitic views: he had indeed penned the nationalist program for Corradini and voiced his hostility to socialism, but neither Corradini nor his Nationalist Association seem to have supported this ideology (TALMON 1991, 484). In fact, much more than nationalism, the ideology that permeates Papini’s writing up to and including this book, is that of a radical individualism of Stirnerian inspiration: Close to anarchism as a youth, he quickly shed those political commitments in favour of the de facto anarchy of a monadic celebration of the self, in the spirit of Stirner’s “I do not demand any right, therefore I need not recognize any either” (STIRNER 1995): such “might is right” attitude will remain largely theory as he was deemed too myopic and ill-built for serving in WW1 (despite his best efforts) but following the Great War he will have mustered enough clairvoyance to realize it was nothing to be celebrated.
Since it was not with deeds he was to prove his strength, he went early for sarcasm and solitude: at first because his ugly face and thankless character but soon after as an intransigeant discipline and defense against a hostile and mediocre world. For long the young Papini has no friends, and even when he has some, he seems to find it difficult to reconcile this commitment with his egotic worldviews.
With age, those will become somewhat muted, but to the end he remains fond, despite his pestering of all déracinés, of his self-image as an intellectial vagrant, a discreet recalling of his self-education: “Me, I always remained a bit of that  drifting and fanciful nomad from this distant era: (…) I don’t have a fraction of the world I could demarcate with a wall and claim: this is mine!” (PAPINI 2009, 74)

Papini will even eventually find his own “union of egoists” (STIRNER 1995, 161) who share his passion and some of his outlooks, and who will soon get to work and produce first Leonardo, followed by an unsteady stream of other publications some of which will gain national and international recognition: “It was for us, as divine youth, intoxication without wine, orgy without women, a party without women nor dances. It was, everyday, the exultant exhumation of our self, of our deepest and truest self; the discovery, the perpetual reconstruction of our intelligence of poets of the concepts and probers of the abyss.” (PAPINI 2009, 78). At first Papini seems as close as it gets to a leader, but neither does he seem to exhibit an authoritarian personality, nor does his circle really try to wrestle his authority from him. When clashes do happen those seem to be largely motivated by diverging ideals:
His best friend Prezzolini, once a “sworn enemy of all discipline” will eventiually follow Benedetto Croce’s idealism, rooted less in the soil than in reason. While they had run Leonardo together, they depart in the age of La Voce, Papini then founding the incendiary and war-mongering paper “Lacerba,” that will for a time represent in Florence the interest of the Marinetti’s futurists (ADAMSON 1993).
Ardengo Soffici on the other hand, maybe more involved in painting than in philosophy, will remain closer to the vehemence of his early days:
Others yet, like Giovanni Amendola (few in fact…) who partook in both Leonardo and La Voce, would turn to defending democracy against the rise of Fascism and eventually loose his life to the cause.

Hugh Ferris - Lure of the City - 1925

Among this blossoming avant-garde, all opposed to the decadent sensuality of the previous generation (most of all embodied in the Florentine D’Annunzio) we find the foundations of Papini’s poetics, which unlike off his ideas will remain somewhat consistent throughout his life: corollary to their activism is rejection of the unnecessary, of the refined, of all aristocracy but that of action. Aside from emerging populism this expresses itself in a rich, often visual imaginary of earthy metaphors rooted in the quotidian, generally celebrating firmness, simplicity and authenticity.
In Papini this take the form of a fascination for inhospitable nature, for the “the nakedness of the earth and the purity of altitude” (PAPINI 2009, 76) no doubt rousing his “passion for naked thought” (PAPINI 2009, 72) ;
It is hard not to think of a Mediterranean Adolf Loos² when we hear Papini condemning effete prose and demand “return to the nakedness of our souls, innocent as Adam was naked of body” but right away he adds “Reason must be our reason, and history starts today. Year one of our era. Incipit vita nova.” (PAPINI 2009, 94)

This new era shall not be one of positivism nor rationalism: his monadic individualism happily sidestep into solipsism and Papini’s pursuit of emancipation through the negation of determinism rapidly turn to a kind of gnostic liberation atheology: alienating conditioning, pathological self-deprecation, short-sighted materialism all conspire to rob man from “the divine liberty of the self” (PAPINI 2009, 74) and the awareness of his divine omnipotence.
What is proposed instead is the recognition that “I am the world” (PAPINI 2009, 83) and the negation of “the pretentious puppets of my inner theatre” (PAPINI 2009, 85).

Papini claims that following his encounter with Max Stirner’s idiosyncratic philosophy, he moved from “cognitive solipsism” to “moral solipsism” (PAPINI 2009, 89) : as if from his early suspicion the world at large may only exist in his mind, he came to merely doubt the actual individuality of those around him. This seems rather dubious given that down to the writing of Un Uomo Finito, Papini will retain the certainty that sheer will should suffice to bend the laws of the real. It could be argued that Papini takes up Stirner’s diagnosis that “we are the mere servants of our thoughts” (STIRNER 1995, 11) but can only allow the self, transcendent but in his case unconstructed (save by himself) to be so worshiped

What does seem to constitute a genuine transformation, though, is his shift from personal to messianic and collective liberation: His erstwhile rejection, negation even, of all men took his decadent elitism to its paroxysm, the one-man elite relentlessly attacking the rest of the world as unworthy of his attention. This phase came to an end when Papini discovered or acknowledged the significance of mass movements in his metaphysics, gaining maybe enough confidence and recognition to venture proposals not only for himself but for those willing to hear: “No longer a victim: I found myself dominant and superior – the only quick in a world filled with shades.” (PAPINI 2009, 86)
The impact of anarcho-individualism on the development of fascist ideologies has not been, to our knowledge, adequately studied, but this “populist turn” in Papini’s voluntarist political religion suggests a possible articulation: if we are, as Deleuze (DELEUZE & GUATTARI 1980, 281) or Leo Strauss (STRAUSS 1999) do, to speak of fascism as rooted in nihilism, there comes a point when the incipient negation of the world makes room for a conception of the real as popular consensus. 

Laszlo Moholy-Nagy - Wie bleibe ich jung und schön - 1925

The life of Papini is littered with what we could call “performative terminations”: spectacular declarations that mark the end of a period, and sometimes the birth of another, or that of an angsty interregnum. His early life is recounted through his successive abandoning of all sorts of megalomaniac scholarly projects, and in his Il Crepuscolo dei Filosofi (1906) he proclaims the end of that “anguished cabal of signs around oblivion” (PAPINI 2009, 164), philosophy itself, which he sees as masturbatory contemplation removed from all utility and praxis. The last issue of Leonardo is trumpeting Papini’s editorial infanticide and some five years later in Un Uomo Finito, his acerbic autobiography constitutes a lengthy drumroll for his announcing a new turn in his intellectual life, abandoning nihilistic individualism in favor of rootedness and a more vital austerity. This new Papini will shed once and for all his old self  in 1919.

Where does this need to demarcate distinct phases, as if beating the rhythm in his life, arises from? Purely in terms of style, there is no doubting that Papini enjoyed playing the apocalyptic prophet, with a keen ear for the grand poetics of ill omen. But beyond style there is of course more than one answer:
One of those could be his consistent pursuit of radical extremity, notably difficult to conjugate with the shifts and changes a real life brings about. He feels the need to dramatize his own changes of opinion (no doubt felt as lacking virility), to turn them from failure into changes of heart of metaphysical significance (cf. the first of the “five unpublished chapters” in addendum to the French editions of L’Age d’Homme - see PAPINI 2009, 263) ; 

A large amount of Papini’s self-flagellation and relentless criticism seems to result from this strategy of his, consisting in first pointing out, and eventually embracing his own shortcomings, turning them from weaknesses into badges of “badness” (MAO & WALKOWITZ 2010)

Yet all this was a mere gesture towards real badness – in fact, towards the absolute badness – which Papini openly aspired to: in 1903, the Austrian Otto Weininger, and in 1910, the Italian Carlo Michelstaedter, had each killed themselves aged 23, right after finishing their respective philosophical testaments. We know Papini had been influenced by Weininger’s extolling  virile asceticism (ADAMSON 1993, 91) and that Papini brought public attention to Michelstaedter’s death in an article titled “Un suicida metafisico³“

That peculiar form of nihilism, which demands the author’s death as a correlative and confirmation of their philosophical indictement of the world, had a profound resonance with Papini’s own pessimism: he longed for “sacrifice, great and dignified because absurd, and sacrifice because absurd” (PAPINI 1912, 254) but, for reasons we can only speculate about, he choose to live.

Instead of an actual suicide, which might, at times, have seemed the appropriate full stop to his life conceived as a coherent work of art (WILSON SMITH 2007, 134) Papini concludes Un Uomo Finito with a rebirth: “The best is yet to come: I was only born today” (PAPINI 2009, 253) and “The child is born nine months old, but the man only starts at thirty” (PAPINI 2009, 255). 

It is fairly clear the possibility of his suicide did cross his mind, and he is aware that it probably crossed that of his readers too. “under the guise of trying to do more than others, one does less than all and prepare oneself a glorious defeat: he had proposed things so great his forces were not enough” (PAPINI 2011, 185) – yet the emptiness of life, the lack of a legacy maybe, and no doubt a part of fear too, lead him to live. He dedicate a certain amount of energy to justify this survival: “With this nobility, this grandeur, this ultimate and desperate heroism, I escape both death and mediocrity at the same time” (PAPINI 2009, 238) – But beyond those sorry claims to doing one better than Mishima, the death and rebirth his autobiography heralds displaces the author’s death from the realm of the factual to that of the performative: In the crucial, conclusive chapter XLVII, “Who I am”, Papini paints his portrait as the unlikely cohabitation of two conflictual drives, a destructive one, bent on annihilating all illusions, extinguishing all pretense of hope and celebrating oblivion, and one playful, illusory, creative:

“But after this devouring fury, comes back the dreamer who imagines Impossible stories, distorts reality, projects in the convenient mirror of his imagination his baddest instincts, his most frenzied desires, which makes larger than nature the men he hates and those he loves, drawing from life itself the real point of departure from which to prolongate and widen the dream.
Then I am assaulted by all absurd stories, bizarre projects, incredible adventures, the mad men and the criminals who have never lived and want to live in me, the loves factitious and unreasoned, the singular deaths, incredible.” (PAPINI 2009, 247)

And indeed after this death and rebirth, and his “admitting crudely to the feebleness and of fiction of life” (PAPINI 2009, 186) Papini will embrace more and more his creative side: he will take up poetry, the tales that had sprung up after his “philosophical death” of 1906 will grow into fully fledged novels, and most importantly he will “leap over” his scepticism to embrace catholic faith in 1919. 

Boris Ignatovich - Hermitage - 1931

The papinesque automyth⁴ depicts him setting to work on his magnum opus, the “Storia de Cristo” as an atheist, and warming up to the faith as his close reading of the gospels ignited the embers of his idealism. A recurrent concern in Papini’s work, as with many of his time and milieu, is with the potency, the impact, of art on life: here writing itself operate the conversion, granting it the thaumaturgic qualities Papini had long demanded.

It would be wrong to depicts Papini’s conversion as one more publicity stunt, or just another contrived provocation, as some of his contemporaries have done (LOVREGLIO 1975, 227) – it is in fact precisely in the most inflexible nihilism of his youth we should look for that mystical disposition that has led him from early on to gravitate around religion (PAPINI 2011, 37). He himself writes in the foreword to his Storia de Cristo, “The author of this book once wrote another one, many years ago, to tell the sad life of a man who wanted, at one point, to become God. Now, in the maturity of age and consciousness, he attempts to write the life of a God that made itself man.” (PAPINI 2010, 51);

But more than a contortion to find some continuity in his variegated existence, there is no doubt some some truth in this parallel. The failure to reach godhood must have played its part in his later choosing the more humble and gemütlich path of merely partaking in the divine. This said, to my knowledge, his future writing as a catholic superstar do not engage with origenian or other “authorized” discussions of deification.

His need to act on the world, to make a durable mark on his age, lure him out of his ivory tower: he comes to admit that acting upon men demand “sympathy and love,” demands “a direct and quotidian contact with all, with men of the city and men of the country, with school children and factory workers, with the women who hope and those who suffer”  (PAPINI 2009, 204) – already by then, the program of his strapaesian populism contains the words and seeds of his future Catholicism.

And to justify his old habit of boisterous indictments, he gives it an unexpected twist: 
“Men, I love you, as few loved you. All my inner life is filled with the profound love.” Never mind the fact that a few pages earlier he had claimed his writing was the honest portraiture of that inner life. He goes on: “I would like to see you greater, happier, purer, nobler and more powerful. And my greatest dream would be to be your true and greatest redeemer.” (PAPINI 2009, 206). Hence his blasphemous project to dethrone God is reconstructed into a messiah complex somewhat more sympathetic to the christian values.

In fact shortly after, Papini reveals (maybe unwittingly) a paradox of his metaphysics – or lack of thereof: from his earliest writings but increasingly after Il Crepusculo (1906) he articulates his own creativity in terms of inspiration: nothing very original there, Papini had read Carlyle and there is little doubts he sees himself on the side of Great Men. Describing the ecstatic fervor of such inspirations he write: “And what have I not done, and what would I not do to be shaken and woken up for one instant, to receive suddenly the mysterious dictation of a revelation!
Be it God that inspires me or the Demon, I do not care: but mat someone greater than me, saner than me, more clairvoyant than me, madder than me, speak through my mouth, write through my hand, think through my thoughts.” (PAPINI 2009, 209)
Indeed the reader does wonder, when the early Papini spoke of inspiration à la Boccacio, where did he imagine those sacred thoughts came from? Not from the empty sky, surely, and not from the demon either, in whom, for all his talk, Papini believe no more than he did in God? His artistic activity, and subsequently his quriks, were justified from his status as a chosen among men, his belonging to an elite – who watches the watchers and chose the chosen? Here we might well have the roots of Papini’s faith stretching back into his old life of unbelief… 

Ivan Kliun - Unknown title - Omsk - 1910'

via Avant-Garde Foundation

Altogether we have a book of great significance which does not seem to have received in the English language (or French, for that matter) the attention that it is due: an increasing number of books explore the connection between the avant-gardes and the radical right, and Papini provides us with a crucial testimony of how to pass from the one to the other. It is both exceptionally biased and clear-headed, in that it was written precisely at the time of the transition, and does not yet attempt to re-write history as to ease the fit between the pieces of the puzzle.
For all his flaws and eccentricities it is easy to relate to, if not to like, Giovanni Papini: the existential questions he is asking, in his exotic dialect, were becoming all pervasive at his time, and haunt most of us to this day. His answers, though, are significantly less satisfying.

1 - On Papini being forced into joining the Party, see LOVREGLIO 1973, 141. Despite the sheepish sympathy of the biographer, this account is not to be dismissed as many a catholic writer found actually existing fascism not conservative enough to support it officially. Concerning Papini’s anti-semite activities long before Fascism turned officially to this ideology in 1938, see GUNZBERG 1992, 254. On the same subject, in Italian, see this article.

2 - See Adolf Loos' 1908 "Ornament is Crime". 
3 - in "Il Resto del Carlino", 5th of November 1910.
4 - François Livi , in the French preface, calls the book an "autobiographical myth" - the concept is developed by Westerhoff (in French). 

Adamson, Walter L. 1993. Avant-Garde Florence. From Modernism to Fascism. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Deleuzes, Gilles & Guattari, Félix. 1980. Mille Plateaux. Capitalisme et Schizophrénie. Paris: Les Editions de Minuit.

Gunzberg, Lynn M. 1992. Strangers at Home : The Jews in the Italian Literary Imagination. Berkeley : University of California Press.

Groys, Boris. 2011. The Total Art of Stalinism. Avant-Garde, Aesthetic, Dictatorship and Beyond. London: Verso Books.

Lovreglio, Janvier. 1973. Giovanni Papini. Un odyssée Intellectuelle entre Dieu et Satan. 4 volumes. Paris : Editions P. Lethielleux.

Mao, Douglas, and Walkowitz, Rebecca L. 2010. Bad Modernisms. Durham: Duke University Press. 

Papini, Giovanni. 2009. Un Homme Fini, trans. Yseult Pelloso. Lausanne : L’Age d’Homme. 

Papini, Giovanni. 2010. Histoire du Christ. Trad. Gerard Genot. Lausanne : L’Age d’Homme. 

Scott, James C. 1998. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. London: Yale University Press.

Stirner, Max. 1995. The Ego and its Own. London : Cambridge University Press.  

Strauss, Leo. “German Nhilism”. Ed. Janssens D. & Tanquay D. in Interpretation 26, 3 (1999) 353-78.

Talmon, Jacob L. 1991. Myth of the Nation and Vision of Revolution: Ideological Polarization in the Twentieth Century. New Brunswick: Transaction publisher

Wilson Smith, Matthew. 2007. The Total Work of Art. From Bayreuth to Cyberspace. New York: Routledge. 

Quirino De Giorgio

"The utter antithesis between the modern world and the old is determined by all those things that formerly did not exist. Our lives have been enriched by elements the possibility of whose existence the ancients did not even suspect. Men have identified material contingencies, and revealed spiritual attitudes, whose repercussions are felt in a thousand ways."

Antonio Sant'Elia, Manifesto of Futurist Architecture, 1914

...

 Quirino De Giorgio - Project for a stone lighthouse, 1931

Quirino De Giorgio - Project for a lighthouse with a 

luminous beam for the Yugoslavian border, 1931

 Quirino De Giorgio - Memorial to the dead at Sea, 1931

 Quirino De Giorgio - House near the sea with helicopter, 1931

Quirino de Giorgio

...

"5. That, just as the ancients drew inspiration for their art from the elements of nature, we—who are materially and spiritually artificial—must find that inspiration in the elements of the utterly new mechanical world we have created, and of which architecture must be the most beautiful expression, the most complete synthesis, the most efficacious integration"

Antonio Sant'Elia, Manifesto of Futurist Architecture, 1914