Biography of Elias Canetti

Intellectual fire

July 25, 1905
August 14, 1994
Elias Canetti was born on July 25, 1905 to Ruscuk, in Bulgaria, from a Sephardic family who speaks Spanish in the 15th century. After his father's death, along with two brothers, follows her mother in different cities in Europe: Zurich, Frankfurt, Vienna. In 1938, after the Anschluss, emigrated to London and remained there until 1971 when he decides to return to live in Zurich, "paradise lost" of his youth, where he dies on August 14, 1994.
During his youth, relationships and travel help to form his thinking, to refine his spirit, open to the world, as well as to make him aware of the role of knowledge as a driver of liberty. In 1931, two years before the rise to power of Adolf Hitler, makes his entrance into the literary scene with the stunning "de-Fe", his first and only novel, crossed by veins melancholy and able to fully explore the depths of loneliness, central theme of the book. The protagonist is an intellectual who is metaphorically devoured by the fire of his one hundred thousand volumes, inevitable nemesis of the world of ideas against reality, punishment for the man who chooses to be "all head and no body": the intellectual fact. But the focus of the novel is also clear, as concerned as visionary anticipation allegorical of totalitarianism, premonition of self-destruction of Western reason. On the level of expression, instead, there is no better illustration of that "saved" language represented by German, language that his mother had taught him to love of Imperial Vienna, and that for them it was the center of European culture and that Canetti will try to revitalize in the light of "disfiguration" of the same which he said was operated over time.
Of considerable thickness is even "mass and power" (1960), an essay on the psychology of social control, in this very similar, although in thirty-five years apart, some issues of "auto de Fe". Of note is then the extraordinary autobiography, one of the most intense twentieth-century documents that, divided into multiple volumes ("the tongue set free", "fire" and "the play of the eyes") and exit between 1977 and 1985 made him permanently as one of the highest items of literature of all times. Jurors in Stockholm knows and in 1981 the award more than deserved Nobel Prize for literature. Receiving the award, in the acceptance speech, he tells how his "territory" Europe by four writers of German language who lived in Austria for a time: Karl Kraus, Franz Kafka, Robert Musil and Hermann Broch, recognizing the large debt, as well as against all tradition. Also openly confesses that the passion for reading, a taste for Greek tragedies and great authors of European literature had a decisive influence on his work.
Article contributed by the team of collaborators.