Feltrinelli (publisher)  

From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia

Jump to: navigation, search

Related e

Wikipedia
Wiktionary
Shop

Featured:

Feltrinelli is an Italian publishing house founded by Giangiacomo Feltrinelli in 1954 in Milan; an icon of the Italian avant-garde. Feltrinelli published Italian translations of controversial novels by Henry Miller and Borís Pasternàk, as well as original language work by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa (Il Gattopardo). Most recently, they published work by Isabella Santacroce.
[edit]

History

Near the draw of 1954, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli established a reputable publishing company, Feltrinelli Editore. The first published book from the Milan publishing house was the autobiography of the first Indian minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. In the late 1950s Feltrinelli accidentally came across the manuscript of the novel Doctor Zhivago by the Russian writer Boris Pasternak. Set in Russia, the novel follows a multitude of characters from 1903 to 1943, the period of revolution and Stalinist degeneration. At once, Feltrinelli saw a masterpiece. Joseph Stalin and the PCI leaders saw it entirely differently, they could not abide any criticism whatsoever, implied or explicit, of the Moscow regime. Feltrinelli was soon effectively expelled from the PCI.

Senior Service, a book by Carlo Feltrinelli (son of Giangiacomo), records the fascinating correspondence between Feltrinelli and Pasternak, as they successfully resisted clumsy attempts by the Stalinist bureaucracy to stop publication. Doctor Zhivago immediately became a bestseller internationally, to be followed by a hugely popular film version. (Unfortunately, the literary merits of the novel and its use as an anti-communist propaganda weapon by reactionaries in the West are important issues not treated in any depth by Carlo Feltrinelli.)

Feltrinelli Editore scored another coup in 1958 and became the first to publish The Leopard, by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa. Described as the greatest novel of the century, The Leopard centres on the Prince of Salina in the 1860s during Risorgimento, a movement for Italian unification (the capitalist democratic revolution).

Whatever his own reading tastes, Feltrinelli was always keen to promote the avant-garde, including the works of the influential Group 63 literary circle. He also took the risk of illegally publishing and distributing novels banned under obscenity laws, such as Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer.

[edit]

Early publications

1955

1957

1958

1959

1960

1961

1962

1963



Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "Feltrinelli (publisher)" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.

Retrieved from "http://artandpopularculture.com/Feltrinelli_%28publisher%29"
Personal tools
Metas