GRAF, ARTURO. — Man of letters and poet, born in Athens on 19 January 1848, died in Turin on 30 May 1913. The son of a German father and an Italian mother, he lived until the age of fifteen in Greece and Romania. After coming to Italy, he graduated in law in 1870 at Naples, where he was also a student of Francesco De Sanctis. In 1871 he returned to Romania, where he took charge of his brother’s commercial enterprise. 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 served as co-editor until 1890. His soul, tormented by the problem of suffering and the purpose of life, passed from a bitter positivism to a more confident rationalistic spiritualism: “The religion that suits me must be an open, free, changing religion, without immutable dogmas; the soul of religion is faith, not the precise content of faith” (Per una Fede, 1906). His religious thought is also documented by 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 volume Ecce homo: aforismi e parabole (1906). He had a very keen sense of the moral value of teaching; this is attested by his university addresses: La crisi letteraria (1888); Per la nostra cultura (1898); L'università futura (1906). But his poetic production (Poesie, complete edition, Turin 1922) is marked by a troubled inner perplexity, often expressed in images of nightmare, terror, and desperate defeat, with decadentist overtones; the sense of mystery, felt as bitter and horrifying, always remained vivid, though ultimately accompanied by some indication of greater confidence.
His critical works are not free of anti-Catholic prejudices: 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). The following are on the Index: Miti e leggende e superstizioni del medioevo (decree of 16 January 1893) and Il diavolo (decree of 16 July 1892).