"1934": vedere la bellezza attraverso gli occhiali della melancolia. Moravia e l'influenza di Thomas Mann

In his works, Moravia refers to the melancholic condition by using different names: despair, boredom, emptiness, nothingness, unreality. In this regard, particularly interesting is the idea expressed in his novel of maturity, entitled 1934, which consists in stabilizing despair in order to consider melancholy as a normal condition of existence thanks to the creative and therapeutic function of writing. In the novel, the twenty-seven years old protagonist, Lucio, an aspiring writer, who indeed shares many similarities with the young Moravia, needs to wear ‘melancholic glasses’ to be able to see beauty around him. The lenses of these glasses show the world filtered by the German cultural tradition, from which Moravia draws fully, especially from Goethe, Dürer, Kleist and Nietzsche. However, even more fascinating is the network that Moravia intertwined with a great master of the representation of melancholy, Thomas Mann. The present paper aims to point out this dialogue, hidden among the folds of the most ‘German’ text ever written by Moravia.