Dino Buzzati

Dino Buzzati (born October 16, 1906, Belluno, Italy—died January 28, 1972, Rome) was an Italian journalist, dramatist, short-story writer, and novelist who became internationally known for his fiction and plays.

Buzzati’s father was a law professor, and his mother was descended from a noble Venetian family. To please his family, he studied law at the University of Milan but never practiced as a lawyer. Buzzati began his career as a correspondent and editor at the Milan daily Corriere della Sera in 1928. He stayed with the newspaper for the rest of his life, although during World War II he served in Africa as a journalist with the Italian navy.

Buzzati’s two novels of the mountains, written in the style of traditional realism, Barnabò delle montagne (1933; “Barnabus of the Mountains”) and Il segreto del bosco vecchio (1935; “The Secret of the Ancient Wood”), introduced the Kafkaesque surrealism, symbolism, and absurdity that suffused all of his writing.

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The novel generally considered Buzzati’s finest, Il deserto dei Tartari (1940; The Tartar Steppe, also translated as The Stronghold), is a powerful and ironic tale of garrison troops at a frontier military post, poised in expectancy for an enemy who never comes and unable to go forward or retreat.

His collections of tales include Sessanta racconti (1958; “Sixty Tales”), which features the previously published novellas I sette messaggeri (1942; “The Seven Messengers”) and Paura alla scala (1949; “Panic at La Scala”). Among his other works are the science fiction novel Il grande ritratto (1960; Larger Than Life, also translated as The Singularity) and Un amore (1963; A Love Affair), the story of a middle-aged man who is captivated by a devious young vixen.

Of Buzzati’s extremely popular plays (some of which were taken from his short stories), the most important is Un caso clinico (performed and published 1953; “A Clinical Case”), a modern Kafkaesque horror story in which medical specialists and machinery destroy a perfectly healthy man. Buzzati’s other plays include Il mantello (performed 1960; “The Overcoat”), a supernatural drama in which a soldier who has been declared missing mysteriously returns and is discovered to be a spirit, and L’uomo che andrà in America (performed and published 1962; “The Man Who Will Go to America”), the story of an old painter who realizes, on being told that he has won a coveted American prize, that the news also means the end of his life work and his death.

Though Buzzati was influenced by Franz Kafka, his writing expresses his own uniquely devastating skill and detached sense of irony and humor. English translations of some of his stories include Catastrophe: The Strange Stories of Dino Buzzati (1966), Restless Nights (1983), and The Bewitched Bourgeois (2025). Cronache terrestri (1972; “Earthly Chronicles”) and an autobiography (1973) were published posthumously.

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