Literary meeting at PEN Belgium on the occasion of the publication of the Correspondance Albert Camus – Nicola Chiaromonte (1945 1959) 

Categories: Literature
Date: 18/09/2019
Time: 18 h 30 - 21 h 00
Location: Au Palais des Académies
Links: iCal - Google Calendar

PEN Belgium is happy to invite you to the next literary meeting:

Paolo Grossi (Director of the Italian Cultural Institute of Brussels), Jacques De Decker (Permanent Secretary of the Royal Academy of French Language and Literature of Belgium) and Jean Jauniaux (President of PEN Club Belgium) are pleased to invite you at the meeting organized on the occasion of the publication of the Correspondance Albert Camus – Nicola Chiaromonte (1945 1959) – Edition: Gallimard.

The Istituto Italiano di Cultura of Brussels, the French-speaking Belgian center of PEN International and the Royal Academy of French Language and Literature of Belgium, are pleased to welcome Samantha Novello, Yves Hersant and Cesare Panizza for a literary meeting on the occasion of the publication of the Correspondence Albert Camus-Nicola Chiaromonte 1945-1959 published by Gallimard.

The meeting will be moderated by Jacques De Decker (Permanent Secretary of the Academy) and Jean Jauniaux (President of PEN Belgium) and the entrance is free.

The friendship between Albert Camus and Nicola Chiaromonte (1905-1972) was born of “a human relationship of the most beautiful and true: hospitality”. The young Camus connects with the exiled Italian intellectual during his stay in Oran in the spring of 1941. Anti-fascist and anti-communist militant, friend of André Malraux and Ignazio Silone, Nicola Chiaromonte is preparing to join the United States. In New York, reading the Myth of Sisyphus and The Stranger, he discovered a deep kinship of mind and concern with the French writer. It was after Hiroshima that Nicola Chiaromonte, having close relations with the anti-American neo-conformist left taking part in the founding of the magazine pacifist politics, aroused the intellectual collaboration of his French friend, eager to feed with him a necessary “trade social”.

Nicola Chiaromonte (1905-1972) is considered today one of the major figures of Italian intellectual life in the twentieth century. From the beginning of the Spanish Civil War, he joined the squadron of André Malraux who put him on stage in L’Espoir, under the features of Scali. In 1941, he emigrated to the United States, where he published numerous articles in politics, Partisan Review, The Nation, The New Republic and frequented Dwight McDonald, Mary McCarthy and Hannah Arendt. Returning to Italy after the war, he founded, with Ignazio Silone, the magazine Tempo presented then became a theatrical critic at Mondo and L’Espresso.

The guests of this meeting will discuss the friendship between the two writers:

Samantha Novello, Ph.D. in Political and Social Sciences, collaborated on volumes I and III of Albert Camus’ Complete Works in the Library of the Pléiade and established, presented and annotated the edition of Correspondence Ambert Camus-Nicola Chiaromonte 1945- 1959 (Gallimard, 2019). Holder of a postdoctoral fellowship in Political Philosophy at the University of Verona (Italy), teaches Philosophy and History in Florence. She has collaborated on the edition of Albert Camus’ Complete Works (Gallimard, 2006 and 2008); she is the author of a study on Albert Camus as Political Thinker (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010) and numerous articles on Camus’s ethical-political thinking.

Yves Hersant joined EHESS in 1981, where he became a director of studies at the Center for Research on Arts and Language, where he founded and directs the Research Group on Europe.

Cesare Panizza is the author of the most important biography of Nicola Chiaromonte, published in 2017 by Donzelli (Rome). He has also devoted studies to Piero Gobetti and Luigi Einaudi.