GRAF, ARTURO. - Man of letters and poet, b. in Athens on 19 Jan. 1848, d. in Turin on 30 May 1913. Of a German father and an Italian mother, he lived until the age of 15 in Greece and Romania. Having come to Italy, he took his degree in law in 1870 in Naples, where he was also a pupil of Francesco De Sanctis. In 1871 he returned to Romania, where he attended to his brother's commercial business. In 1874, having moved to Rome, he devoted himself to investigations into the history of medieval customs and culture.
From 1876 he was professor of Italian literature at the University of Turin; in 1883 he was among the founders of the Giornale storico della letteratura italiana and its co-editor until 1890. His soul, haunted by the problem of suffering and of the purpose of life, passed from a bitter positivism to a more trusting rationalistic spiritualism: «The religion that will do for me must be an open, free, mobile religion, without immutable dogmas; the soul of religion is faith, not the precise content of faith» (Per una Fede, 1906). Further documents of his religious thought are the Lettere confidenziali a una giovane allieva (in Nuova Ant., 442-44 [1948], pp. 406-18), the article Non è cosa nostra il Cristianesimo? (in Il Rinnovamento, 2 [1907, II], p. 453) and the vol. Ecce homo: aforismi e parabole (1906). He had a most vivid sense of the moral value of teaching; his university addresses bear witness to it: La crisi letteraria (1888); Per la nostra cultura (1898); L'università futura (1906). But his poetic output (Poesie, complete ed., Turin 1922) is marked by a tormented inner perplexity that often translates into images of nightmare, of anguish and of desperate defeat, with decadentist intonations; always most vivid is the sense of mystery felt as bitter and horrible, but at the last with some hint of greater trust.
His critical works are not free of anti-Catholic preconceptions: Studi drammatici (1878); Roma nella memoria e nell'immaginazione del medioevo (1882-83); Attraverso il Cinquecento (1888); Il diavolo (1889); Miti, leggende e superstizioni nel medioevo (1892-93); Foscolo, Manzoni, Leopardi (1898); L'anglomania e l'influsso inglese nel sec. XVIII (1911). Placed on the Index are: Miti e leggende e superstizioni del medioevo (decree of 16 Jan. 1893) and Il diavolo (decree of 16 July 1892).
Bibliography3 works
Fausto Montanari