WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:02.220 Imagine growing up in a house where your parents 00:00:02.220 --> 00:00:05.559 are like absolute giants of logic and science. 00:00:05.820 --> 00:00:08.640 Oh, wow. Yeah, that sounds intense. Right. Strict 00:00:08.640 --> 00:00:11.619 secular botanists who treat life like this highly 00:00:11.619 --> 00:00:14.359 organized laboratory experiment. I mean, everything 00:00:14.359 --> 00:00:16.780 has a biological purpose. Everything has to be 00:00:16.780 --> 00:00:19.359 categorized and understood through the scientific 00:00:19.359 --> 00:00:22.800 method. Very analytical. Exactly. Yeah. But you. 00:00:23.000 --> 00:00:25.320 You're a kid who just wants to climb up into 00:00:25.320 --> 00:00:27.539 the branches of a massive grapefruit tree and 00:00:27.539 --> 00:00:30.399 daydream about fairy tales and adventure stories. 00:00:30.399 --> 00:00:33.039 That's true. You have zero interest in categorizing 00:00:33.039 --> 00:00:35.140 the world. You want to invent a completely new 00:00:35.140 --> 00:00:37.280 one. It really represents that classic tension. 00:00:37.479 --> 00:00:40.159 you know, between the environment we're born 00:00:40.159 --> 00:00:43.119 into and the mental landscape we so desperately 00:00:43.119 --> 00:00:45.380 want to inhabit. And that tension is exactly 00:00:45.380 --> 00:00:48.780 the spark that created one of the most unpredictable 00:00:48.780 --> 00:00:51.979 boundary pushing minds of the 20th century. Absolutely. 00:00:52.179 --> 00:00:54.880 Welcome to today's deep dive. We are drawing 00:00:54.880 --> 00:00:57.899 from a comprehensive biographical overview to 00:00:57.899 --> 00:01:01.179 map the life, the mind and the evolution of the 00:01:01.179 --> 00:01:04.099 legendary Italian author, Italo Calvino. And 00:01:04.099 --> 00:01:07.870 our mission today is to really trace Calvino's 00:01:07.870 --> 00:01:10.569 remarkable journey. We're going to look at how 00:01:10.569 --> 00:01:13.170 a reluctant agriculture student. Which is wild 00:01:13.170 --> 00:01:15.829 to think about. Yeah. How this reluctant student 00:01:15.829 --> 00:01:18.950 and wartime partisan fighter transformed into 00:01:18.950 --> 00:01:21.609 a master of experimental postmodern literature. 00:01:21.790 --> 00:01:25.230 It's quite a leap. It is. By tracking his evolution, 00:01:25.689 --> 00:01:28.150 we're exploring how someone navigates all these 00:01:28.150 --> 00:01:30.989 heavy expectations placed on them to finally 00:01:30.989 --> 00:01:34.290 uncover a highly unique authentic voice. Right. 00:01:34.510 --> 00:01:36.390 there is a profound amount you can learn from 00:01:36.390 --> 00:01:39.099 his journey. about how the constraints in your 00:01:39.099 --> 00:01:41.560 own life can become the ultimate fuel for your 00:01:41.560 --> 00:01:43.579 creativity. Okay, let's unpack this. We have 00:01:43.579 --> 00:01:46.040 to start at the beginning because honestly, Calvino's 00:01:46.040 --> 00:01:48.200 origin story feels like something out of a magical 00:01:48.200 --> 00:01:50.560 realist novel. It really does. He was born in 00:01:50.560 --> 00:01:53.760 Cuba in 1923, but his family moved back to Italy, 00:01:53.959 --> 00:01:56.379 specifically to the Ligurian coast in San Remo 00:01:56.379 --> 00:01:58.939 when he was just a toddler. And his parents were 00:01:58.939 --> 00:02:01.819 no ordinary people. Not at all. His father Mario 00:02:01.819 --> 00:02:04.519 was a tropical agronomist, a botanist, and a 00:02:04.519 --> 00:02:06.459 former anarchist. Which is a fun combination. 00:02:06.650 --> 00:02:09.949 Right. And his mother, Eva, was a botanist, a 00:02:09.949 --> 00:02:12.430 university professor, and a staunch pacifist. 00:02:12.530 --> 00:02:14.409 And we really need to emphasize Eva's worldview 00:02:14.409 --> 00:02:17.090 here, because it completely set the baseline 00:02:17.090 --> 00:02:19.969 for Calvino's entire childhood. How so? Well, 00:02:20.050 --> 00:02:22.310 she was raised in a completely secular family 00:02:22.310 --> 00:02:25.129 and educated in what she defined as the religion 00:02:25.129 --> 00:02:28.430 of civic duty and science. Wow, the religion 00:02:28.430 --> 00:02:32.050 of civic duty. Yeah. They were austere free thinkers, 00:02:32.449 --> 00:02:34.860 totally dedicated to empiricism. Which you have 00:02:34.860 --> 00:02:38.840 to remember, in 1920s and 30s, Italy was an incredibly 00:02:38.840 --> 00:02:41.460 bold stance to take. Unmassively. They raised 00:02:41.460 --> 00:02:43.860 Calvino entirely outside of the Catholic Church. 00:02:44.300 --> 00:02:46.379 They went so far as to explicitly request he 00:02:46.379 --> 00:02:48.599 be exempted from religion classes at school. 00:02:48.740 --> 00:02:51.900 A move that immediately made him a huge target. 00:02:52.060 --> 00:02:55.180 I can imagine. His peers and his teachers constantly 00:02:55.180 --> 00:02:57.900 pressed him to justify his family's nonconformism. 00:02:58.340 --> 00:03:00.419 So he was forced to defend a philosophical stance. 00:03:00.659 --> 00:03:02.439 He was really just barely beginning to understand 00:03:02.439 --> 00:03:05.159 himself. I love how he reacted to that mockery, 00:03:05.479 --> 00:03:08.240 though. Later in life, Calvino noted that being 00:03:08.240 --> 00:03:10.879 the odd kid out, the one getting teased because 00:03:10.879 --> 00:03:13.120 he refused to follow the majority's beliefs, 00:03:13.719 --> 00:03:16.180 made him highly tolerant of other people's opinions. 00:03:16.199 --> 00:03:18.300 That makes a lot of sense. Yeah, he learned early 00:03:18.300 --> 00:03:21.620 on that truth isn't determined by a crowd. But 00:03:21.620 --> 00:03:24.319 still inside his own house, he felt entirely 00:03:24.319 --> 00:03:27.180 out of place. Yeah, totally isolated. It sounds 00:03:27.180 --> 00:03:30.580 like a childhood spent inside a strict practical 00:03:30.580 --> 00:03:33.139 laboratory while secretly he just wanted to live 00:03:33.139 --> 00:03:35.460 in a movie theater or like a Rudyard Kipling 00:03:35.460 --> 00:03:39.159 novel. He loved drawing. He adored American movies. 00:03:39.300 --> 00:03:42.060 He was just obsessed with cartoons. What's fascinating 00:03:42.060 --> 00:03:45.199 here is how he processed that disconnect. He 00:03:45.199 --> 00:03:47.460 openly referred to himself as the black sheep 00:03:47.460 --> 00:03:50.400 of his family because they held literature in 00:03:50.400 --> 00:03:53.030 much lower esteem than the hard sciences. Right, 00:03:53.169 --> 00:03:55.449 fiction wasn't useful to them. Exactly. He was 00:03:55.449 --> 00:03:58.330 a boy possessed by narrative, surrounded by adults 00:03:58.330 --> 00:04:01.169 possessed by facts. Even his given name felt 00:04:01.169 --> 00:04:03.509 like a mismatch. I mean, his mother named him 00:04:03.509 --> 00:04:06.270 Idello to remind him of his Italian heritage 00:04:06.270 --> 00:04:08.710 while they were living in Cuba. But Calvino later 00:04:08.710 --> 00:04:10.990 said he thought the name sounded belligerently 00:04:10.990 --> 00:04:14.370 nationalist. It just did not fit his evolving 00:04:14.370 --> 00:04:17.790 pluralistic worldview at all. Yet we cannot discount 00:04:17.790 --> 00:04:20.370 how deeply his parents' scientific environment 00:04:20.370 --> 00:04:23.290 imprinted on his imagination. Really? How so? 00:04:23.930 --> 00:04:26.470 Well, the family ran this sprawling working farm 00:04:26.470 --> 00:04:29.870 in the hills behind San Remo, and his father 00:04:29.870 --> 00:04:32.269 was pioneering the cultivation of exotic fruits 00:04:32.269 --> 00:04:35.149 there. Oh, right, like avocados and grapefruits. 00:04:35.250 --> 00:04:37.449 Yeah, crops that were totally alien to the Italian 00:04:37.449 --> 00:04:40.279 landscape at the time. So Calvino and his brother 00:04:40.279 --> 00:04:42.639 spent hours perched high up in the branches of 00:04:42.639 --> 00:04:45.560 those strange imported trees, just reading adventure 00:04:45.560 --> 00:04:48.079 stories. So the science didn't stifle his imagination, 00:04:48.199 --> 00:04:50.699 it actually gave him the physical architecture 00:04:50.699 --> 00:04:53.779 to build his fantasies? Precisely. The environment 00:04:53.779 --> 00:04:55.879 his parents cultivated became the scaffolding 00:04:55.879 --> 00:04:58.579 for his fiction. Oh, that's beautiful. When you 00:04:58.579 --> 00:05:00.600 read his later fantasy works, like his famous 00:05:00.600 --> 00:05:03.759 novel The Baron of the Trees, the vast, luxuriant, 00:05:03.899 --> 00:05:06.560 sprawling forests described in that book are 00:05:06.560 --> 00:05:09.639 a direct, meticulous legacy of his father's experimental 00:05:09.639 --> 00:05:12.079 farm. The analytical observation he learned from 00:05:12.079 --> 00:05:14.660 Botany gave his magical worlds this incredible 00:05:14.660 --> 00:05:17.060 sense of grounding. But the world outside that 00:05:17.060 --> 00:05:19.459 botanical haven was getting terrifyingly dark. 00:05:20.189 --> 00:05:22.230 Mussolini's black shirts were marching across 00:05:22.230 --> 00:05:24.410 the country. Yeah, things were escalating quickly. 00:05:24.569 --> 00:05:27.329 One of Calvino's earliest memories was of a Marxist 00:05:27.329 --> 00:05:29.470 professor coming into their home during dinner, 00:05:29.910 --> 00:05:32.829 bleeding and beaten up by fascists, begging for 00:05:32.829 --> 00:05:35.490 sanctuary. God, that's harrowing for a kid. So 00:05:35.490 --> 00:05:38.189 how does a daydreaming kid hiding in an intellectual 00:05:38.189 --> 00:05:41.250 canopy survive when the brutal reality of fascist 00:05:41.250 --> 00:05:44.730 Italy literally chops down the trees? Initially, 00:05:44.930 --> 00:05:47.730 just by trying to conform and keep his head down, 00:05:47.990 --> 00:05:50.459 when World War II broke out, Calvino enrolled 00:05:50.459 --> 00:05:53.259 at the University of Turin in 1941. Did he study 00:05:53.259 --> 00:05:55.699 literature? No. To appease his parents, he actually 00:05:55.699 --> 00:05:57.819 hid his literary ambitions and studied agriculture. 00:05:58.100 --> 00:06:01.279 Wow, agriculture. Yeah. He passed exams in agronomy. 00:06:01.500 --> 00:06:03.899 But in secret, he was devouring anti -fascist 00:06:03.899 --> 00:06:06.300 literature, reading plays, and studying physics. 00:06:06.980 --> 00:06:09.680 He constructed this really rigid double life. 00:06:09.939 --> 00:06:12.779 But by 1943, playing the quiet student was no 00:06:12.779 --> 00:06:15.560 longer an option. The Germans occupied his region. 00:06:16.120 --> 00:06:18.339 Mussolini established a puppet republic in the 00:06:18.339 --> 00:06:21.860 North. And Calvino, who's now 20 years old, refused 00:06:21.860 --> 00:06:24.300 the military draft. Right. He went into hiding. 00:06:24.670 --> 00:06:27.629 And here is where his mother's fierce religion 00:06:27.629 --> 00:06:30.790 of civic duty takes over. She encouraged her 00:06:30.790 --> 00:06:33.430 sons to enter the armed Italian resistance in 00:06:33.430 --> 00:06:36.069 the name of natural justice. So Calvino joins 00:06:36.069 --> 00:06:38.490 the Garibaldi Brigades, which was a clandestine 00:06:38.490 --> 00:06:41.629 communist partisan group. He adopts the Nom de 00:06:41.629 --> 00:06:44.470 Guerre Santiago and spends 20 months fighting 00:06:44.470 --> 00:06:46.939 a guerrilla war in the maritime Alps. And this 00:06:46.939 --> 00:06:49.620 was a period of intense trauma for him. Oh, absolutely. 00:06:49.879 --> 00:06:52.459 Because he refused to be conscripted, the Nazis 00:06:52.459 --> 00:06:55.000 retaliated by taking his parents hostage. That 00:06:55.000 --> 00:06:57.240 is just an unimaginable level of guilt to place 00:06:57.240 --> 00:07:00.199 on a 20 -year -old. It is. His mother was forced 00:07:00.199 --> 00:07:03.540 to watch the fascist militia stage mock executions 00:07:03.540 --> 00:07:07.279 of his father. Wait, mock executions? Yes. Three 00:07:07.279 --> 00:07:09.660 separate times, they lined his father up and 00:07:09.660 --> 00:07:11.519 pretended to shoot him right in front of her, 00:07:11.519 --> 00:07:13.579 trying to break her spirit so she'd reveal her 00:07:13.579 --> 00:07:16.439 son's locations. That is horrific. But she never 00:07:16.439 --> 00:07:19.779 broke. Calvino later wrote about his mother's 00:07:19.779 --> 00:07:23.240 dignity during that ordeal, comparing her invincibility 00:07:23.240 --> 00:07:25.560 to a force of nature. OK, I have to pause the 00:07:25.560 --> 00:07:27.879 narrative here and ask a question about his motivations. 00:07:28.399 --> 00:07:31.360 He joins the Communist Garibaldi Brigades. Right. 00:07:31.699 --> 00:07:34.060 Given his strict, somewhat bourgeois upbringing, 00:07:34.660 --> 00:07:37.319 did he join the Communist Party to rebel against 00:07:37.319 --> 00:07:40.399 his parents? Was the black sheep finally acting 00:07:40.399 --> 00:07:43.459 out politically? Well, looking at the historical 00:07:43.459 --> 00:07:46.560 context and his own stated reasoning in the source 00:07:46.560 --> 00:07:49.100 material, it actually wasn't a teenage rebellion. 00:07:49.160 --> 00:07:52.139 Really? No. Calvino approached the decision with 00:07:52.139 --> 00:07:55.660 the exact analytical scientific mindset he inherited 00:07:55.660 --> 00:07:57.740 from his parents. Oh, that's interesting. He 00:07:57.740 --> 00:08:00.019 evaluated the various partisan groupings operating 00:08:00.019 --> 00:08:02.560 the mountains and concluded that the communists 00:08:02.560 --> 00:08:05.139 simply have the most convincing political line. 00:08:05.759 --> 00:08:08.819 and the superior organizational structure required 00:08:08.819 --> 00:08:11.939 to mount an effective resistance. I see. It was 00:08:11.939 --> 00:08:15.120 a practical life or death calculus to find the 00:08:15.120 --> 00:08:17.379 best tool to fight fascism. We're just reporting 00:08:17.379 --> 00:08:19.360 the historical record here, but that was his 00:08:19.360 --> 00:08:21.639 rationale. Right. He treated political ideology 00:08:21.639 --> 00:08:24.100 the way his father treated botany, like looking 00:08:24.100 --> 00:08:26.500 for the strain that would yield the most resilient 00:08:26.500 --> 00:08:29.439 crop under harsh conditions. Exactly. And that 00:08:29.439 --> 00:08:32.679 raw traumatic war experience forged his early 00:08:32.679 --> 00:08:36.360 identity as a writer. After the war, he settles 00:08:36.360 --> 00:08:39.539 in Turin, drops the agriculture degree, switches 00:08:39.539 --> 00:08:42.240 to the arts faculty, and starts working for the 00:08:42.240 --> 00:08:45.200 famous Inaudi publishing house. And he writes 00:08:45.200 --> 00:08:48.100 his first novel, The Path to the Nest of Spiders, 00:08:48.639 --> 00:08:50.860 drawing heavily on his time as a partisan in 00:08:50.860 --> 00:08:53.100 the mountains. Which was a huge hit, right? It 00:08:53.100 --> 00:08:55.340 was a significant success in post -war Italy, 00:08:55.779 --> 00:08:58.200 yeah. And it placed him firmly in the near -realist 00:08:58.200 --> 00:09:00.279 movement. For those who don't know, near -realism 00:09:00.279 --> 00:09:03.720 was the dominant artistic style of the era. gritty, 00:09:04.039 --> 00:09:06.539 unvarnished, documentary -like storytelling meant 00:09:06.539 --> 00:09:09.659 to strip away decades of bloated fascist propaganda. 00:09:09.840 --> 00:09:12.080 Right, to show the raw truth of the working class 00:09:12.080 --> 00:09:15.340 in the war. But Calvino's take on Urielism was 00:09:15.340 --> 00:09:18.240 entirely unique. His mentor at the time, the 00:09:18.240 --> 00:09:21.120 brilliant writer César Pévez, wrote a perceptive 00:09:21.120 --> 00:09:23.460 essay dubbing Calvino a squirrel of the pen. 00:09:23.580 --> 00:09:25.759 A squirrel of the pen, I love that. It's perfect, 00:09:25.899 --> 00:09:29.080 right? Pévez noted that Calvino essentially climbed 00:09:29.080 --> 00:09:31.659 back into the trees to observe partisan life. 00:09:32.039 --> 00:09:36.000 He didn't write a dry political manifesto. He 00:09:36.000 --> 00:09:39.820 framed the horror of war as a fable of the forest. 00:09:40.320 --> 00:09:42.620 So even when operating within the strict confines 00:09:42.620 --> 00:09:45.340 of gritty realism, Calvino was viewing the world 00:09:45.340 --> 00:09:48.679 through the mechanics of a fairy tale. Yes. Precisely. 00:09:48.860 --> 00:09:51.559 So he had mastered the camera of near -realism. 00:09:52.019 --> 00:09:54.360 He proved he could write serious, culturally 00:09:54.360 --> 00:09:57.480 relevant war literature. Everyone expected him 00:09:57.480 --> 00:10:00.320 to become the definitive, serious voice of post 00:10:00.320 --> 00:10:03.299 -war Italian reality. They did. So why, just 00:10:03.299 --> 00:10:05.460 a few years later, does he throw that camera 00:10:05.460 --> 00:10:07.440 away and start writing stories about medieval 00:10:07.440 --> 00:10:09.360 knights and severed viscounts? Look at the cameras 00:10:09.360 --> 00:10:11.279 after working for him. He hit a severe creative 00:10:11.279 --> 00:10:13.730 wall. Yeah, the deep dive sources show that in 00:10:13.730 --> 00:10:16.090 the early 1950s, he attempted to write three 00:10:16.090 --> 00:10:18.490 different realist novels over a seven -year period. 00:10:19.090 --> 00:10:21.309 By his own admission, they were all defective. 00:10:21.309 --> 00:10:23.450 He was totally paralyzed. Yeah, just completely 00:10:23.450 --> 00:10:26.090 stuck. But then he experiences this massive epiphany. 00:10:26.429 --> 00:10:30.110 He realizes, and to paraphrase his revelation, 00:10:30.809 --> 00:10:32.850 instead of making myself write the book I ought 00:10:32.850 --> 00:10:35.210 to write, the novel that was expected of me by 00:10:35.210 --> 00:10:37.730 the critics, I conjured up the book I myself 00:10:37.730 --> 00:10:40.039 would have liked to read. That is the defining 00:10:40.039 --> 00:10:42.960 pivot of his intellectual life. He stops performing 00:10:42.960 --> 00:10:45.580 for the literary establishment and starts trusting 00:10:45.580 --> 00:10:48.100 his own curiosity. It's like a musician trained 00:10:48.100 --> 00:10:50.960 in classical symphony suddenly realizing they're 00:10:50.960 --> 00:10:53.220 allowed to just play jazz. That's a great way 00:10:53.220 --> 00:10:55.419 to put it. It's like he was trying to paint a 00:10:55.419 --> 00:10:58.440 portrait of a fractured, traumatized post -war 00:10:58.440 --> 00:11:01.940 society using a standard canvas. And he realized 00:11:01.940 --> 00:11:04.899 standard realism couldn't capture the sheer absurdity 00:11:04.899 --> 00:11:07.419 of the modern world. So instead, he broke a mirror 00:11:07.419 --> 00:11:09.779 and used the jagged pieces to show the distortion. 00:11:09.980 --> 00:11:11.899 Right. Once he takes the pressure off to be a 00:11:11.899 --> 00:11:14.240 serious realist, he sits down and writes The 00:11:14.240 --> 00:11:16.519 Cloven Viscount in just 30 days in the summer 00:11:16.519 --> 00:11:20.299 of 1951. 30 days. And it's a novel about a 17th 00:11:20.299 --> 00:11:22.639 century Viscount. who is blown completely in 00:11:22.639 --> 00:11:25.519 half by a cannonball and both halves, one purely 00:11:25.519 --> 00:11:28.860 evil, one purely good go on living independently, 00:11:29.440 --> 00:11:31.820 wandering the countryside. That is so wild. And 00:11:31.820 --> 00:11:34.480 at the exact same time, he dives headfirst into 00:11:34.480 --> 00:11:37.830 regional folklore. He spends two grueling years 00:11:37.830 --> 00:11:41.129 collating and translating 200 Italian folktales 00:11:41.129 --> 00:11:44.590 from obscure, dying dialects into modern Italian. 00:11:44.889 --> 00:11:46.789 He essentially aimed to do for Italy what the 00:11:46.789 --> 00:11:49.610 Brothers Grimm did for Germany. Compiling 200 00:11:49.610 --> 00:11:52.250 fairy tales must have completely rewired his 00:11:52.250 --> 00:11:54.470 brain regarding how stories are built. It really 00:11:54.470 --> 00:11:57.350 did. Working with folktales taught him the fundamental 00:11:57.350 --> 00:12:00.340 mechanics of narrative. Folk tales are incredibly 00:12:00.340 --> 00:12:03.019 logical. They are stripped down, cause and effect 00:12:03.019 --> 00:12:05.220 engines. Okay, I see. If we connect this to the 00:12:05.220 --> 00:12:08.080 bigger picture, Calvino's pivot into fantasy 00:12:08.080 --> 00:12:11.220 wasn't an escape from reality. It was the discovery 00:12:11.220 --> 00:12:13.700 of a more precise tool to process reality. How 00:12:13.700 --> 00:12:16.039 so? Like with the viscount? Exactly. Take the 00:12:16.039 --> 00:12:18.360 cloven viscount. The image of a man sundered 00:12:18.360 --> 00:12:21.320 in two is not mere whimsy. It is a razor -sharp 00:12:21.320 --> 00:12:24.679 allegory. Oh, for the Cold War? Yes. It perfectly 00:12:24.679 --> 00:12:27.240 incarnated Calvino's own growing political doubts 00:12:27.240 --> 00:12:29.399 and the terrifying, divisive turbulence of the 00:12:29.399 --> 00:12:31.980 Cold War. The world was split in half by the 00:12:31.980 --> 00:12:33.980 Iron Curtain. Of course, his protagonist had 00:12:33.980 --> 00:12:36.600 to be split in half, too. Calvino realized that 00:12:36.600 --> 00:12:39.039 when reality becomes too absurd or traumatic 00:12:39.039 --> 00:12:42.120 to face directly, fantasy is the most accurate 00:12:42.120 --> 00:12:44.480 way to tell the truth. That is a brilliant insight 00:12:44.480 --> 00:12:47.080 for you, the listener. If you are feeling stuck 00:12:47.080 --> 00:12:50.259 in your career or your creative output, Calvino's 00:12:50.259 --> 00:12:52.879 pivot demonstrates that leaning into your strangest, 00:12:52.899 --> 00:12:56.019 most authentic interests might be the exact solution 00:12:56.019 --> 00:12:58.559 to a professional block. Absolutely. You do not 00:12:58.559 --> 00:13:00.899 have to build what the industry expects. Build 00:13:00.899 --> 00:13:03.500 what you want to consume. So he found his fabulous 00:13:03.500 --> 00:13:06.740 voice, but the geopolitical landscape was about 00:13:06.740 --> 00:13:09.129 to fracture again. which would test how long 00:13:09.129 --> 00:13:11.250 he could balance his imaginative fables with 00:13:11.250 --> 00:13:14.590 his strict political commitments. Right. In 1956, 00:13:14.769 --> 00:13:17.190 the Soviet Union invaded Hungary to violently 00:13:17.190 --> 00:13:20.269 suppress a democratic uprising. Around the same 00:13:20.269 --> 00:13:23.190 time, the horrifying extent of Joseph Stalin's 00:13:23.190 --> 00:13:26.269 purges and crimes became public knowledge. And 00:13:26.269 --> 00:13:28.649 again, just impartially reporting from his biography 00:13:28.649 --> 00:13:31.590 here, these events completely shattered Calvino's 00:13:31.590 --> 00:13:33.629 alignment with the Communist Party. Yeah. In 00:13:33.629 --> 00:13:37.120 1957, he officially resigned. even publishing 00:13:37.120 --> 00:13:39.460 his letter of resignation in a major newspaper. 00:13:40.220 --> 00:13:42.799 He stated he retained a firm confidence in democratic 00:13:42.799 --> 00:13:45.679 perspectives, but he completely withdrew from 00:13:45.679 --> 00:13:48.840 active politics and never joined another political 00:13:48.840 --> 00:13:51.580 party for the rest of his life. The disillusionment 00:13:51.580 --> 00:13:54.220 was profound. The political structures he had 00:13:54.220 --> 00:13:56.799 relied on since his time as a partisan in the 00:13:56.799 --> 00:14:00.120 mountains had failed him. And just as he did 00:14:00.120 --> 00:14:02.659 with the Cold War, he channeled this specific 00:14:02.659 --> 00:14:05.460 crisis into his fiction. writing the barren in 00:14:05.460 --> 00:14:08.240 the trees. That's the story of a young nobleman 00:14:08.240 --> 00:14:10.820 who rebels against the rigid rules of his family 00:14:10.820 --> 00:14:13.580 by climbing into the oak trees on their estate, 00:14:14.100 --> 00:14:15.960 vowing never to touch the earth again. Right. 00:14:16.220 --> 00:14:18.779 Yet from the branches, he still tries to participate 00:14:18.779 --> 00:14:21.139 in the political and social life of his community. 00:14:21.559 --> 00:14:23.519 It is a direct exploration of the intellectual 00:14:23.519 --> 00:14:25.980 dilemma. How do you remain committed to improving 00:14:25.980 --> 00:14:28.679 society when all your political illusions have 00:14:28.679 --> 00:14:31.379 been destroyed? You stay engaged, but you maintain 00:14:31.379 --> 00:14:34.139 a necessary elevated distance. He's the squirrel 00:14:34.139 --> 00:14:37.059 in the trees again. But this time, he takes that 00:14:37.059 --> 00:14:39.580 perspective global. He starts traveling extensively. 00:14:40.000 --> 00:14:42.600 He goes to the United States on a forward foundation 00:14:42.600 --> 00:14:45.279 grant, spending months absorbing the energy of 00:14:45.279 --> 00:14:47.980 the country, famously declaring, my city is New 00:14:47.980 --> 00:14:50.559 York. Yeah, he travels to Cuba, visits his birthplace, 00:14:50.580 --> 00:14:54.019 meets Che Guevara. Moving from a local Italian 00:14:54.019 --> 00:14:57.519 partisan to a global observer profoundly shifts 00:14:57.519 --> 00:14:59.799 his worldview. And eventually, he and his family 00:14:59.799 --> 00:15:02.960 settle in Paris. And Paris, in the late 1960s, 00:15:03.039 --> 00:15:06.159 is where Calvino completely reinvents his mental 00:15:06.159 --> 00:15:08.659 models. Oh, Paris was an absolute intellectual 00:15:08.659 --> 00:15:12.139 cauldron. Calvino is invited to join an exclusive, 00:15:12.659 --> 00:15:14.899 highly experimental group called the Ulipo. The 00:15:14.899 --> 00:15:17.779 Oulipo. Yes, this was a gathering of avant -garde 00:15:17.779 --> 00:15:19.620 writers and mathematicians, people like Raymond 00:15:19.620 --> 00:15:22.399 Cano and Georges Perrec, and he frequently interacts 00:15:22.399 --> 00:15:25.039 with heavyweights like Roland Barthes. I want 00:15:25.039 --> 00:15:26.779 to spend some time here because the methodology 00:15:26.779 --> 00:15:28.620 of the Oulipo is mind -bending. They weren't 00:15:28.620 --> 00:15:30.679 just writing novels, they were engineering them. 00:15:30.940 --> 00:15:33.179 Exactly. The Oulipo focused on what they called 00:15:33.179 --> 00:15:35.899 potential literature. Their core philosophy was 00:15:35.899 --> 00:15:39.019 that severe arbitrary constraints actually breed 00:15:39.019 --> 00:15:42.019 supreme creativity. Arbitrary constraints? Yeah, 00:15:42.399 --> 00:15:45.019 so they would place complex mathematical structures 00:15:45.019 --> 00:15:47.639 or strict rules on their writing to force new 00:15:47.639 --> 00:15:50.940 ideas onto the page. For instance, an Oulipo 00:15:50.940 --> 00:15:53.179 writer might challenge themselves to write an 00:15:53.179 --> 00:15:56.120 entire novel without ever using the letter E. 00:15:56.299 --> 00:15:59.019 Wait, really? An entire novel without E? Yes. 00:15:59.289 --> 00:16:02.190 Or they might plot the movements of their characters 00:16:02.190 --> 00:16:04.429 strictly according to a night's tour on a chessboard. 00:16:04.730 --> 00:16:07.529 It's the ultimate fusion of his mother's rigorous 00:16:07.529 --> 00:16:10.690 scientific logic and his own boundless imagination. 00:16:11.190 --> 00:16:13.990 He's treating literature like an agronomy experiment. 00:16:14.029 --> 00:16:16.889 It really is. And he develops an almost punk 00:16:16.889 --> 00:16:19.429 rock attitude toward the traditional literary 00:16:19.429 --> 00:16:22.809 establishment during this period. In 1968, he 00:16:22.809 --> 00:16:25.450 famously turned down the prestigious Viraggio 00:16:25.450 --> 00:16:28.070 Prize. Yeah, his reasoning was uncompromising. 00:16:28.190 --> 00:16:30.710 He stated the award was given by institutions 00:16:30.710 --> 00:16:33.470 emptied of meaning. He was rejecting the old 00:16:33.470 --> 00:16:36.230 forms of validation because he knew the old forms 00:16:36.230 --> 00:16:38.809 of literature were dead. This raises an important 00:16:38.809 --> 00:16:41.809 question for any creator or professional. How 00:16:41.809 --> 00:16:44.289 do you continue to invent when you feel that 00:16:44.289 --> 00:16:46.970 the traditional forms of your industry are completely 00:16:46.970 --> 00:16:49.409 exhausted? Right. When the standard novel format 00:16:49.409 --> 00:16:52.690 beginning middle and linear plot simply cannot 00:16:52.690 --> 00:16:55.070 capture the complexity of the modern world anymore. 00:16:55.360 --> 00:16:57.820 Calvino's answer was to stop playing with the 00:16:57.820 --> 00:17:00.460 plot and start playing with the fundamental structure 00:17:00.460 --> 00:17:04.180 of reading itself. And this era birthed his postmodern 00:17:04.180 --> 00:17:08.339 masterpieces. Consider invisible cities. It isn't 00:17:08.339 --> 00:17:11.200 a traditional narrative. It is a mesmerizing, 00:17:11.660 --> 00:17:15.319 highly structured catalog of 55 imaginary cities 00:17:15.319 --> 00:17:18.539 described by the explorer Marco Polo to the emperor 00:17:18.539 --> 00:17:21.319 Kublai Khan. But the structure is a strict mathematical 00:17:21.319 --> 00:17:23.920 grid, right? Exactly. The cities are divided 00:17:23.920 --> 00:17:26.960 into 11 thematic groups, and the chapters follow 00:17:26.960 --> 00:17:29.660 a precise, descending combinatorial pattern. 00:17:30.279 --> 00:17:32.880 It reads like a hypnotic poem, but underneath 00:17:32.880 --> 00:17:35.099 it is built with the precision of a Swiss watch. 00:17:35.380 --> 00:17:38.319 Wow. Then he takes it a step further with, if 00:17:38.319 --> 00:17:40.400 on a winter's night, a traveler... Oh, this one 00:17:40.400 --> 00:17:42.859 is amazing. The protagonist of that book is you, 00:17:43.019 --> 00:17:45.039 the reader. You go to a bookstore to buy the 00:17:45.039 --> 00:17:47.240 new Italo Calvino novel, but due to a printing 00:17:47.240 --> 00:17:49.420 error, the story breaks off after the first chapter. 00:17:49.480 --> 00:17:51.539 So frustrating. You try to find the rest of the 00:17:51.539 --> 00:17:53.700 book, but every time you start a new manuscript, 00:17:54.180 --> 00:17:56.299 it's a completely different story written in 00:17:56.299 --> 00:17:58.400 a completely different genre, which also breaks 00:17:58.400 --> 00:18:01.400 off. Yeah. The act of trying to read the book 00:18:01.400 --> 00:18:05.059 becomes the plot of the book itself. He was engineering 00:18:05.059 --> 00:18:08.980 literary puzzle boxes. He systematically dismantled 00:18:08.980 --> 00:18:11.500 the machinery of fiction, laid all the gears 00:18:11.500 --> 00:18:14.160 out on the table, and basically invited the reader 00:18:14.160 --> 00:18:16.809 to help him put it back together. It is brilliant. 00:18:17.410 --> 00:18:19.750 But tragically, his constant evolution was cut 00:18:19.750 --> 00:18:22.369 short just as he was preparing to synthesize 00:18:22.369 --> 00:18:25.630 all these ideas. In the summer of 1985, he was 00:18:25.630 --> 00:18:28.470 at his villa in Tuscany, intensely working on 00:18:28.470 --> 00:18:30.450 a series of lectures he was scheduled to deliver 00:18:30.450 --> 00:18:32.190 at Harvard University. Right, they were meant 00:18:32.190 --> 00:18:35.299 to look forward. titled Six Memos for the Next 00:18:35.299 --> 00:18:38.119 Millennium Exploring the Literary Values He Felt 00:18:38.119 --> 00:18:41.059 Must Survive into the 21st Century. But in September, 00:18:41.299 --> 00:18:43.680 he suffered a severe stroke and passed away from 00:18:43.680 --> 00:18:46.319 a cerebral hemorrhage at the age of 61. He died 00:18:46.319 --> 00:18:48.259 quite literally while looking toward the future, 00:18:48.579 --> 00:18:51.279 attempting to decode what the next millennium 00:18:51.279 --> 00:18:53.960 of human communication would require. So what 00:18:53.960 --> 00:18:56.240 does this all mean for you listening to this 00:18:56.240 --> 00:18:59.660 deep dive? Think about Calvino's incredible adaptability. 00:18:59.819 --> 00:19:03.200 It's unmatched. He began as the secular scientific 00:19:03.200 --> 00:19:05.859 black sheep who felt out of place in his own 00:19:05.859 --> 00:19:09.119 home. He morphed into a partisan fighter surviving 00:19:09.119 --> 00:19:12.059 in the mountains. He became a gritty neorealist. 00:19:12.200 --> 00:19:16.099 He compiled dying folklore. And finally, he emerged 00:19:16.099 --> 00:19:18.460 as one of the world's most structurally inventive 00:19:18.460 --> 00:19:21.279 postmodern fabulists. He lives so many lives. 00:19:21.400 --> 00:19:23.799 His life is absolute proof that you do not have 00:19:23.799 --> 00:19:26.019 to choose between having a highly analytical, 00:19:26.019 --> 00:19:29.440 logical intelligence and harboring a wild. tamed 00:19:29.440 --> 00:19:32.220 imagination. They are not enemies. In fact, his 00:19:32.220 --> 00:19:34.400 legacy proves that constraint and logic are the 00:19:34.400 --> 00:19:36.839 vital forces that allow imagination to soar without 00:19:36.839 --> 00:19:39.480 collapsing. Well said. There is a specific quote 00:19:39.480 --> 00:19:41.880 from Invisible Cities that perfectly encapsulates 00:19:41.880 --> 00:19:44.579 his worldview. Calvino wrote, When the forms 00:19:44.579 --> 00:19:46.720 exhaust their variety and come apart, the end 00:19:46.720 --> 00:19:50.279 of cities begins. That is a deeply haunting thought. 00:19:50.400 --> 00:19:52.559 The idea that when our structures can no longer 00:19:52.559 --> 00:19:56.009 adapt, we face collapse. It is haunting, but 00:19:56.009 --> 00:19:58.450 I want to reframe it as a final provocation for 00:19:58.450 --> 00:20:01.329 you. Calvino was writing survival memos for the 00:20:01.329 --> 00:20:03.930 next millennium, right before he died. He was 00:20:03.930 --> 00:20:05.750 always looking past the current horizon. Right. 00:20:05.910 --> 00:20:07.950 So examine the structures of your own life, your 00:20:07.950 --> 00:20:10.789 own career, or your own industry today. The world 00:20:10.789 --> 00:20:13.470 is changing rapidly. When the forms you rely 00:20:13.470 --> 00:20:16.309 on exhaust their variety and come apart, when 00:20:16.309 --> 00:20:18.369 the old standard ways of doing things simply 00:20:18.369 --> 00:20:22.049 stop working, how will you react? Will you see 00:20:22.049 --> 00:20:24.930 it as an end? Or, like Calvino shattering the 00:20:24.930 --> 00:20:27.589 mirror of realism to invent something entirely 00:20:27.589 --> 00:20:30.049 unprecedented, will you see that collapse as 00:20:30.049 --> 00:20:33.130 a blank page to invent a completely new fable? 00:20:33.630 --> 00:20:35.450 That is the perfect question to leave you with. 00:20:35.490 --> 00:20:37.470 Thank you for joining us as we map the incredible 00:20:37.470 --> 00:20:39.630 mind of Idleco Calvino. We will catch you on 00:20:39.630 --> 00:20:40.509 the next deep dive.