Pellico, Silvio

He was originally from Piedmont , the son of the lyric poet Honorato Pellico. He spent his early years in Pinerolo and Turin . He wrote his first tragedy at the age of ten. He spent four years in Lyon , where he studied French literature, returned to Milan in 1810. Early had the opportunity to personally meet with Mrs. Steel , Byron , Schlegel , Monti , Foscolo .

In 1810, having received the position of a teacher of French at a military school, he made his debut with tragedies from ancient Greek life (“Laodicea”) and from the era of the Guelph and Ghibellines (“Francesca da Rimini”, 1815, Russian translation - 1861); he soon removed the former himself from the stage as unsuccessful, and the latter brought him loud fame and went around all the scenes in Italy; it was translated by Byron into English (while Pellico translated Manfred into Italian).

Francesca da Rimini (the second Russian translation by Academician Bredikhin was published in No. 11 of the Russian Review for 1897) was written in the spirit of extreme romanticism and contains heroic and patriotic motifs. The plot is somewhat reminiscent of Romeo and Juliet , but the theme is different. Here, too, a passionately loving girl is placed between a sense of her love for her lover and a duty to her father, separated by political hostility. In the second half of the 1810s, he was a mentor, first the son of Count Briche, and then the two sons of Count Poppo Lambertenji.

In 1819, Pellico, together with Manzoni and Count of Confalonieri, was one of the founders and chief executives of the magazine Conciliatore, which was banned by Austrian censorship the following year. In the same 1820, Pellico’s new tragedy “Eufemio di Messina” hardly saw the light, but was not allowed on the stage. At the end of the year, Pellico was arrested in Milan. The reason for the arrest was his careless letters to a friend Maroncelli, in which he expressed interest in the society of carbonarians . However, he himself was not a carbonarium.

In February 1821, Pellico was transferred to the Venetian “piombi” (lead-roof prison) from Santa Margherita prison. After a long investigation and trial, he was sentenced to death in February 1822 with the replacement of her with 15 years of carcere duro in Spilberg (near Brunn , in Moravia), where he was sent in 1822. The exposed carcere duro legally performed various kinds of work, wore shackles on their feet, slept on bare boards; but in fact, Pellico, like all his comrades - political prisoners, was deprived of any work at first, and only later, at their request, they were assigned a job - tedious and especially harmful in stuffy cells, tweaking lint and knitting stockings. The cells were disgusting, the food too, and at the same time in extremely insufficient quantities. The books that they brought to prison were taken from them, not excluding the Bible, which Emperor Franz directly declared particularly harmful to the prisoners; for several years in a row prisoners were not even allowed into the church, which for most of them, people who were deeply religious, was extremely difficult.

The emperor himself constantly watched their life with particular interest; he had a prison plan, himself ordered the transfer of prisoners from cell to cell, went into all the little things in prison life. The prisoners were deprived of any contact with the outside world, but occasionally, according to the personal order of the emperor, they were briefly informed about the death of one or another of their relatives, refusing any details. At first, the prisoners were in solitary confinement, but then they were imprisoned in pairs; it was a special blessing for Pellico that he was connected with his friend Maroncelli. The situation of the prisoners was facilitated by the fact that most of the guards assigned to them turned out to be more or less kind people; sometimes they shared a piece of bread with them, through their fingers looked at ordinary prison tricks that brightened up the life of prisoners; Thus, even during solitary confinement, they actually had the opportunity to talk and correspond with each other.

In 1830, Pellico was pardoned and sent abroad, that is, to his parents in Turin , where he lived from then until his death. In 1832, he published his memoirs, Le mie prigioni, which brought him immortal fame; the book was immediately translated into all languages, including Russian (St. Petersburg, 1836). In some ways, it can be compared to the Robinson Crusoe . The author, according to his own statement, wrote it “not out of a vain desire to talk about himself”, but to “help maintain cheerfulness in the unlucky person by telling about joys (religious) that are accessible to a person even among the greatest adversities” and to show that a person is far from nature not as bad as they think. Pellico did not touch on his process at all and devoted relatively little space to describing the prison regime; he talked about him only insofar as it was necessary for his philosophical and religious considerations; in order to thoroughly familiarize yourself with the situation of prisoners in Austria in the 1820s, it is necessary to replenish Pellico’s story with information from more detailed stories of his unfortunate comrades, Maroncelli (“Addizioni alle mie prigioni”, 1834; reprinted in many editions of Pellico’s works) and in particular Andriana (“Mémoires d'un prisonnier d'état” (Paris, 2nd ed., 1849). The prison life of Pellico himself reaches the reader through the prism of the author’s religious mood, but the whole story breathes so deep sincerity, written with such artistic talent that reader, even owls rshenno alien dogmatism Pellico, feels as if captured and experiencing together with the author of all his joys and sorrows. This book helped to intensify the Italian national liberation movement, it praised Alexander Pushkin . Metternich said that she had brought the Austrian Empire more harm than all cannons. Stendhal placed Pellico above Walter Scott .

The years of the prison not only broke Pellico’s physical health, but left him with the seal of mysticism , which adversely affected his future activities. Literary works written after "My Dungeons" have little meaning. He most cherished most of all his Discorso dei doveri degli uomini (1834; Russian translation - “Human Responsibilities”, St. Petersburg, 1892) - but this pamphlet is an empty argument about love for the homeland, for the neighbor, for the woman, for respect to human dignity, about marriage and celibacy. For political reasons, Pellico remained the same as he used to be, that is, a moderate and cautious progressive, striving for the unity of Italy, but Catholicism gave these aspirations a clerical connotation: the unity of Italy under the authority of the pope - this is Pellico's ideal, very close to the ideal of his friend Joberty. The fiction works of this period, imbued with mysticism, have no special meaning; the best of them is the drama Tommasso Moro. Compiled back in Spielberg, but for the inability to record the drama Leoniero da Dertona, memorized by the author and subsequently written, is no exception. In 1837, Cantiche and Poesie inedite were released. The first edition of Opere Pellico was published in Padua in 1831, the next and best in Milan, in 1886 Epistolario (Florence, 1856) and Lettere famigliari inediti (Turin, 1877-1878) were also printed. Of the several Russian translations of “My Dungeons,” the best is V. Stein (St. Petersburg, 1894).

After his release, Pellico made friends with the Marquise de Barolo, who advocated prison reform in Turin and in 1834 granted the writer a pension of 1,200 francs. In 1838, when his parents died, Pellico became an assistant to the Marquise in charity affairs and wrote mainly on religious topics. Buried in Santo Campo in Turin.

• V. Water carriers. Pellico, Silvio // Brockhaus and Efron Encyclopedic Dictionary : in 86 volumes (82 volumes and 4 additional). - SPb. , 1890-1907.
• Pellico Silvio // Great Soviet Encyclopedia : [in 30 vol.] / Ch. ed. A.M. Prokhorov . - 3rd ed. - M .: Soviet Encyclopedia, 1969-1978.

• This article (section) contains text taken (translated) from the eleventh edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica , which went into the public domain .