Alberto Savinio

Alberto Savinio, pseudonym of Andrea de Chirico (1891-1952), was an Italian writer and eclectic artist, the younger brother of “pictor optimus” Giorgio de Chirico. Born in Athens, he formed himself in piano and composition. In 1910 he settled in Paris for artistic purposes and in 1913 he began his association with Guillaume Apollinaire and his friends, poets, cubist and futurist artists. In 1914 he created a new musical concept and exposed its theoretical principles. On the basis of those theories, he composed and published music and text of a dramatic poem, Les Chants de la mi-mort: this short text anticipates one of the recurring subjects Savinio’ s narrative (the mi-mort that is an imaginary state between life and death) and introduces the language of the unconscious of the author’ s writing. Until 1918, he devoted himself to a search for new modes of expression and to linguistic experimentalism. Written in Italian, with a short French section, with words in Spanish, German and slang, Hermaphrodito (1918) is made of different genres: drama, narrative, poetic, historical, autobiographical. The book succeeds in shaping a space of compromise between conscious and unconscious, real and unreal, reason and imagination. After 1918 he shifted toward a different artistic ideal and disavowed the European avant-garde. He opted for an art prose without abandoning, however, to investigate the threshold between waking and sleeping, conscious and unconscious, real and unreal, in tales that highlight already in the titles his interest in childhood, dream and fantasy: Tragedia dell’infanzia, Infanzia di Nivasio Dolcemare, Alla città della mia infanzia dico, Vita dei fantasmi, Il sogno meccanico. Despite several common aspects with French Surrealism, Savinio never joined Breton.