MAIN EVENTS
22 February 2016
Iniziative (EN) -
Maison de la Paix (EN)
Admirers and friends write Academy of Sweden for Predrag Matvejevic candidates for Literature. The Croatian writer, also an Italian citizen, is recovering in a hospital in Zagreb.
A Nobel nomination who is also a hymn to a Mediterranean different than we see, we hear, we fear today. The nomination is for Predrag Matvejevic, the writer and academician also Italian with Croatian citizenship. To propose, contrary to launch it almost like a message in a bottle, is a group of his admirers and friends: journalists, writers, academics, ocean enthusiasts and writings of the sea. Among these Pino Aprile, Folco Quilici, Giulia D'Angelo and Michele Capasso: cofounder with Matvejevic 25 years ago of the Fondazione Mediterraneo and "brother" of life.
Predrag not even know it yet, maybe. Octogenarian, he is recovering in a hospital in Zagreb, tried physically and in spirit. Having taught Comparative Literature at the Sorbonne in Paris and Slavic Studies at the University of Rome, is back on the Adriatic shore, in the Croatia in 2005 sentenced him to five months in prison for having defined "Christian Taliban" those Serbian and Croatian writers who supported the war the former Yugoslavia (who denounced him). "Guilty of" metaphor, he defended Kundera, Gotovac, Solzhenitsyn, Brodsky arguing that "socialism with a human face can not close people behind bars for a verbal offense"; who wrote the exodus of Italian and spoke Foibe during Tito's regime; who has railed against nationalism. And when the sentence has become enforceable (in 2010, has never appealed to not legitimize the process), Predrag has slipped in the shadow. Relegated to the periphery of the intellectual world - out of the loop, no longer called, the most sought -; abandoned in his country.
Now, he will also die one day. But not so. And not his ideas. "Predrag is the synthesis of Europe, including Eastern Europe, which is recognized in the Mediterranean and in its history: in his life, in his family, in his literary work and political and literary, to the times of the Iron Curtain, are found almost all ethnicities, religions, nationalities and cultures that today as yesterday, someone wants to turn into a conflict reason. Throughout his work, but especially its incomparable Mediterranean Breviary, recounts the alleged differences, showing how our, of all; changing their, well, in coexistence reasons, enrichment, exchange, "reads the letter of application.
Already, the Mediterranean Breviary, a book translated into several languages, published in 1987, a time when you looked to the East forgetting to direct their gaze to the south, which for Europe is the Mediterranean. To Matvejevic was a warning. He spoke of the "sea of closeness", putting us on guard, inviting us to know and appreciate "ways of being and ways of life common or approachable, despite the divisions and conflicts". Careful, he said, that the borders of the Mediterranean are not state, nor historical, but the real ones are olive, almond, fig. That closeness, he insisted, not to be confrontational must practice listening and accepting coexistence in diversity. For this, he had to say in Brussels too, to those bureaucrats and politicians "too continental, who fail to understand the essentials of the Mediterranean," who want to reduce the Mediterranean to its past, "not recognizing what it is today and that it could become tomorrow. " Predrag, in truth, he saw the present and even the future, and it was prophetic.
"It may be just a book for candidacy for the Nobel author? We think so, "write the promoters of his investiture. If that were not enough, there are his other texts - not least our bread, who had already approached the orbit of the Academy of Sweden - the literary and cultural value, anthropological and historical of his books, which summarize the moral tension . "For all that we advance the candidacy for the Nobel Prize for Literature Matvejevic’ Predrag, born in Mostar and raised on the shores of the Mediterranean"...
You will also die one day. But not so his ideas.
The first signatories
Cesare Accetta, Filippo Angelucci, Laura Angiulli, Massimo Angrilli, Pino Aprile, Monica Ardemagni, Pier Paolo Balbo, Anna Mahjar Barducci, Donatella Bianchi, Maurizio Bizziccari, Michele Capasso, Pietro Caricato, Nicolò Carnimeo, Thomas Casadei, Alessandro Cassinis, Luisa Chiodi, Antonio Alberto Clemente, Giulia D’Angelo, Fabio Fiori, Maurizio De Giovanni, Giuseppe De Tomaso, Antonio Di Natale, Matteo di Venosa, Jaime L. Enseñat Benlliure, Silvio Ferrari, Marco Firrao, Luigi Fozzati, Giuliano Gallo, Lanfranco Genito, Raffaele Giannantonio, Rosalba Giugni, Cristina Giussani, Davide Gnola, Ennio Grassi, Elvio Guagnini, Mimmo Jodice, Helena Kaloper, Tiziana Krause-Jackson, Oscar Iarussi, Cosimo Lacirignola, Valeria Li Vigni, Claudio Magris, Stefano Manferlotti, Giuliana Manfredi, Stefano Medas, Rosario Pavia, Silvio Perrella, Andrea Plebe, Fabio Pozzo, Folco Quilici, Sergio Romano, Enrica Simonetti, Maurizio Scaparro, Giovanna Scianatico, Pietro Spirito, Ercole Sori, Luca Tamagnini, Stasa Tensek, Alexandra Toesca, Sebastiano Tusa, Alberto Ulisse, Antonio Felice Uricchio, Lucio Zazzara.
