Alberto Asor Rosa passed away in Rome at the age of 89. The Roman professor – whose work was consecrated among the Great Classics of Literature with the anthological volume “Scritture critical e d’educazione”, published in the Meridiani mondadoriani – was one of the last great Marxist ideologues, the theorist of a close relationship between politics and literature. The scholar had been ill for some time. «Asor, the man who hurt me the most in my life», Pier Paolo Pasolini stigmatized him after being fired upon in the essay «Scrittori e popolo» released in 1965 for the small but authoritative editions Samonà and Savelli which gave him great notoriety to Professor d Asor Rosa.
Among the critic’s polemical targets were authors such as Vasco Pratolini, Carlo Cassola and Antonio Gramsci. The professor centered his examination on the image of the working people that these authors returned in their works and at the same time analyzed the formation of the literary and national tradition, the genesis of Italian Marxist historicism, left-wing fascism and militant anti-fascism. After the exploits of “Scrittori e popolo” Asor Rosa became the essayist-guru, the master able to indicate roads and paths for contemporary storytellers.
Among his monumental literary undertakings we recall the contribution entitled «La cultura» in «Storia d’Italia» (vol. IV, “From Unity to today”, volume II Einaudi, 1975) to continue with the commitment always for the editor Einaudi of direction and coordination of «Italian Literature» (which includes 3 sections: the first in 6 volumes, of which the third in 2 volumes, the second, in 3 volumes, of which the second in 2 volumes, the third in 4 volumes, the last of which in 2 volumes). His essays were brought together in «Genus Italicum», which was then followed in 3 volumes by the «European history of Italian literature».
In the last years of his life he moved to the other side of the literary barricade: he tried his hand at narrative writing (“The dawn of a new world“, “Stories of animals and other living”, “Assunta and Alessandro”, “The stories error», «Amori sospesi», the latter dedicated to the erotic experiences of men in old age, all published by Einaudi). He returned to his old loves and 50 years after his debut, he published «Scrittori e popolo» (1965). «Scrittori e massa» (2015) in which he retraced the history of Italian intellectuals up to the present day, encapsulated in a form of «individualistic atomism». A critical exercise that of Asor Rosa devoted to civil commitment and which, today, in the history of literature and in almost disappeared militant criticism, does not seem to have heirs worthy of the great scholar who never forgot the political struggle.