If on a winter’s night a traveler Study Guide

Although he is of Italian heritage, Italo Calvino was born in a suburb of Havana, Cuba, because his father worked for the Mexican government in the Ministry of Agriculture and later moved to Cuba to continue his botanical research. Calvino’s mother was also a botanist and a university professor. Soon after Calvino’s birth, the family moved back to Italy. In his early life, Calvino’s interest in stories made him different from his scientifically inclined parents, but he sympathized with his family’s hatred of Italy’s fascist government. During World War II, Calvino studied agriculture at university to please his family, but his true interest was writing plays. After going into hiding to avoid fascist military service and later joining the Italian Resistance to fight Nazis and their Italian collaborators, he began writing more seriously. His early novels were realistic and unlike the experimental works he would later become famous for. The Cloven Viscount (1952) was Calvino’s first novel to include elements of fantasy, and he achieved even more success in 1957 with The Baron in the Trees and in 1959 with The Nonexistent Knight, which together make up a trilogy called Our Ancestors. Over the course of his career, Calvino wrote a variety of short fiction, essays, poems and even opera librettos, but he remains best known for two novels that he published relatively late in his life: Invisible Cities (1974) and If on a winter’s night a traveler (1979). Calvino died suddenly after a stroke in September 1985 while preparing to give a series of lectures, and his lecture notes were published posthumously, along with some of his other autobiographical works.

Calvino’s disdain for censorship and government oppression stemmed from his experience living under the National Fascist Party in Italy, which ruled the country from 1922 until 1943, shortly after the Allied Invasion in World War II, when the Fascist leader Benito Mussolini was deposed and imprisoned. Soon after, German special forces rescued Mussolini and installed him as the leader of a state in northern Italy, where he ruled a Nazi puppet state for a couple years until finally a group of Communist and antifascist partisans managed to capture and execute him. Calvino’s strong opposition to Mussolini led him to embrace Communist and Marxist views. He began to reject some of his previous Communist views after the Soviet Invasion of Hungary, when the Soviet Union violently invaded Hungary to stop protesters. Nevertheless, Calvino maintained an interest in leftist political views, meeting with the Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara in Cuba in 1964 and living in Paris during the cultural revolution of May 1968, when student-led protests evolved into nationwide strikes and the near-collapse of the government. Additionally, Calvino himself was experiencing perhaps his greatest period of international fame after the publication of Invisible Cities in 1972, and so his constant references to translation in If on a winter’s night a traveler may have been inspired by the increasing number of readers who were encountering his books in languages other than his native Italian (as well as the fact that both Calvino and his wife worked at various times as translators).

Calvino credited the Italian writer Cesare Pavese (The Moon and the Bonfires) as one of his earliest influences that inspired him to write. Pavese’s works are generally more realistic than Calvino’s, but the two writers shared similar political views, and Pavese also managed to avoid service in the fascist army during World War II. Another major influence on Calvino was Franz Kafka (The Metamorphosis, Amerika, The Trial), who was famous for writing paranoid stories about ordinary people facing the crushing power of bureaucracy. Kafka’s influence is most noticeable in the parts of If in a winter’s night a traveler involving government censorship of books. For this novel in particular, Calvino cited the influence of Vladimir Nabokov (Lolita, The Pale Fire), who was famous for writing books that playfully broke the conventions of the novel to tell stories in new and unusual ways. The novel also directly mentions One Thousand and One Nights (also called Arabian Nights), a collection of Middle Eastern folktales that is one of the most famous examples of a frame story in literature. Calvino’s fragmentary and occasionally surreal style has continued to be an influence on contemporary writers, including David Mitchell (Cloud Atlas), Ayşegül Savaş (Walking on the Ceiling), and Helen Oyeyemi (Mr. Fox).