Итальян жазушысы және кинорежиссері Курцио Малапарте өмірі мен шығармалары

Italian writer and filmmaker

Curzio Malaparte (; 9 June 1898 – 19 July 1957), born Kurt Erich Suckert, was an Italian writer, filmmaker, war correspondent and diplomat. Malaparte is best known outside Italy due to his works Kaputt (1944) and The Skin (1949). The former is a semi fictionalised account of the Eastern Front during the Second World War and the latter is an account focusing on morality in the immediate post war period of Naples (it was placed on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum). During the 1920s, Malaparte was one of the intellectuals who supported the rise of Italian fascism and Benito Mussolini, through the magazine 900. Despite this, Malaparte had a complex relationship with the National Fascist Party and was stripped of membership in 1933 for his independent streak. Arrested numerous times, he had Casa Malaparte created in Capri where he lived under house arrest. After the Second World War, he became a filmmaker and moved closer to both Togliatti's Italian Communist Party and the Catholic Church (though once a staunch atheist), reputedly becoming a member of both before his death.

Born Kurt Erich Suckert in Prato, Tuscany, Malaparte was a son of a German father, Erwin Suckert, a textile manufacturing executive, and his Lombard wife, née Evelina Perelli. He was educated at Collegio Cicognini in Prato and at La Sapienza University of Rome. In 1918 he started his career as a journalist. Malaparte fought in World War I, earning a captaincy in the Fifth Alpine Regiment and several decorations for valor. His chosen surname Malaparte, which he used from 1925 onward, means "evil/wrong side" and is a play on Napoleon's family name "Bonaparte" which means, in Italian, "good side".

In 1922, he took part in Benito Mussolini's March on Rome. In 1924, he founded the Roman periodical La Conquista dello Stato ("The Conquest of the State", a title that would inspire Ramiro Ledesma Ramos' La Conquista del Estado). As a member of the Partito Nazionale Fascista, he founded several periodicals and contributed essays and articles to others, as well as writing numerous books, starting from the early 1920s, and directing two metropolitan newspapers. In 1926, he founded with Massimo Bontempelli the literary quarterly "900". He later became a co editor of Fiera Letteraria (1928–31), and an editor of La Stampa in Turin. His polemical war novel essay, Viva Caporetto! (1921), criticized corrupt Rome and the Italian upper classes as the real enemy (the book was forbidden because it offended the Royal Italian Army).

In Coup d'État: The Technique of Revolution, first published in French in 1931 as Technique du coup d`Etat, Malaparte set out a study of the tactics of coup d'etat, particularly focusing on the Bolshevik Revolution and that of Italian fascism. Here he stated that "the problem of the conquest and defense of the State is not a political one it is a technical problem", a way of knowing when and how to occupy the vital state resources: the telephone exchanges, the water reserves and the electricity generators, etc. He taught a hard lesson that a revolution can wear itself out in strategy. He emphasizes Leon Trotsky's role in organising the October Revolution technically, while Lenin was more interested in strategy. The book emphasizes that Joseph Stalin thoroughly comprehended the technical aspects employed by Trotsky and so was able to avert Left Opposition coup attempts better than Kerensky. For Malaparte, Mussolini's revolutionary outlook was very much born of his time as a Marxist. On the topic of Adolf Hitler, the book was far more doubtful and critical. He considered Hitler to be a reactionary. In the same book, first published in French by Grasset, he entitled chapter VIII: A Woman: Hitler. This led to Malaparte being stripped of his National Fascist Party membership and sent to internal exile from 1933 to 1938 on the island of Lipari.

He was freed on the personal intervention of Mussolini's son in law and heir apparent Galeazzo Ciano. Mussolini's regime arrested Malaparte again in 1938, 1939, 1941, and 1943, imprisoning him in Rome's jail Regina Coeli. During that time (1938–41) he built a house with the architect Adalberto Libera, known as the Casa Malaparte, on Capo Massullo, on the Isle of Capri. It was later used as a location in Jean Luc Godard's film Le Mépris. Shortly after his time in jail he published books of magical realist autobiographical short stories, which culminated in the stylistic prose of Donna come me (Woman Like Me, 1940).

After the war, Malaparte's political sympathies veered to the left and he became a member of the Italian Communist Party. In 1947, Malaparte settled in Paris and wrote dramas without much success. His play Du Côté de chez Proust was based on the life of Marcel Proust and Das Kapital was a portrait of Karl Marx. Cristo Proibito ("Forbidden Christ") was Malaparte's moderately successful film—which he wrote, directed and scored in 1950. It won the "City of Berlin" special prize at the 1st Berlin International Film Festival in 1951. In the story, a war veteran returns to his village to avenge the death of his brother, shot by the Germans. It was released in the United States in 1953 as Strange Deception and voted among the five best foreign films by the National Board of Review. He also produced the variety show Sexophone and planned to cross the United States on bicycle. Just before his death, Malaparte completed the treatment of another film, Il Compagno P.

After the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949, Malaparte became interested in the Maoist version of Communism. Malaparte visited China in 1956 to commemorate the death of the Chinese essay and fiction writer, Lu Xun. He was moved and excited by what he saw, but his journey was cut short by illness, and he was flown back to Rome. Io in Russia e in Cina, his journal of the events, was published posthumously in 1958. He willed his house in Capri to the Chinese Writers Association as a study and residence center for Chinese writers. But at the time of his death in 1957 there were no diplomatic relations with the People's Republic, so the transfer could not take place, and the family succeeded in changing the will. Malaparte's final book, Maledetti toscani, his attack on middle and upper class culture, appeared in 1956. In the collection of writings Mamma marcia, published posthumously in 1959, Malaparte writes about the youth of the post World War II era with homophobic tones, describing it as effeminate and tending to homosexuality and communism; the same content is expressed in the chapters "The pink meat" and "Children of Adam" of The Skin. He died in Rome from lung cancer on 19 July 1957.

Malaparte's colorful life has made him an object of fascination for writers. The American journalist, Percy Winner, wrote about their relationship during the fascist ventennio (twenty year period) and the Allied Occupation of Italy, in the lightly fictionalized novel, Dario (1947) (where the main character's last name is Duvolti, or a play on "two faces"). Recently, the Italian authors Rita Monaldi and Francesco Sorti published Morte Come Me (Death Like Me, 2016). Set on Capri in 1939, it gives a fictionalized account of a mysterious death in which Malaparte was implicated.