The Collected Writings of Renzo Novatore

273 Pages·2012·0.7 MB·English

by  Renzo Novatore

The
Collected Writings
of
Renzo Novatore
aabb
translated by
Wolfi Landstreicher
The Collected Writings of Renzo Novatore
translated by Wolfi Landstreicher
licensed under creative commons
2012
Ardent Press
Introduction i
Biographical Note iv
1917
Thoughts and Sayings 1
Cry of Rebellion 4
Intellectual Vagabonds 12
Toward the Conquest of New Dawns 17
Wild Flowers 21
Toward the Creative Nothing 24
Twilight Ballad 59
Weeping 67
1919
Anarchist Individualism in
the Social Revolution 73
The Great(?) Brains... in the Time that Turns 78
Returning 86
The Expropriator 88
Toward the Hurricane 91
1920
A Life 97
The Anarchist Temperament in
the Maelstrom of History 104
In the Circle of Life 110
Black Roses 117
Spiritual Perversity 121
De Profundis and Germinal! 125
My Iconic Individualism 127
I Am Also a Nihilist 137
My Maxims 142
Parabola 145
1921
In the Realm of Phantoms 149
The Revolt of the Unique 153
A Portrayal of Sorts 168
Introduction to the 1st Issue of Vertice 170
The Dream of My Adolescence 171
Beyond the Two Anarchies 176
The Mysterious 182
1922
Black Flags 189
Of Individualism and Rebellion 204
A “Female” 208
With Sincere Pity 213
Noontime Songs 219
Whip 230
1923
In Defense of Heroic and
Expropriating Anarchism 235
Posthumous
Eternity’s Song 249
Friendship and Friends 251
Renzo Novatore by Enzo Martucci 254
Renzo Novatore by Renzo Ferrari 259

Introduction
In reading through and translating the writings of Renzo
Novatore (a task that never felt like work, but always like
intense and passionate play), I found not only a poetic rebel-
liousness, but also the sort of coherence an egoist perspec-
tive can bring to the way an individual confronts life.
By the time he was eighteen, he considered himself an
anarchist and his practical conflict with the social order was
immediately evident in attacks on what society declared sa-
cred. But the earliest writings I was able to find are from 1917,
when he was about twenty-seven. Here his egoist and individ-
ualist perspective is already evident in his focus on immediate
rebellion in the here and now, in his hatred for the variations
on the social herd mentality in practice—democracy, social-
ism, fascism—and in his contempt for those willing slaves,
the “bourgeois toads” and the “proletarian frogs.” The way
most responded to government orders to go to the slaughter
of World War I deserved nothing but such contempt. At the
same time, the early writings also reflect the influence that
anarchist-communist ideas had on the youthful Novatore. In
Toward the Creative Nothing, Novatore expresses his hope for
a revolution that will “communalize material wealth” as it will
“individualize spiritual wealth.” And in this epic expression of
poetic rebellion, as well as in the much briefer “Toward the
Conquest of New Dawns,” Novatore imagines the coming of
a new dawn of freedom that will then lead to the Great Noon.
Here the influences of Oscar Wilde and Nietzsche on Nova-
tore are evident. In The Soul of Man Under Socialism, Wilde
calls for a form of anarchist-communism on the material level,
aib
precisely so that individuals could fully live out their unique-
ness. And Nietzsche never completely eradicated the idea of a
something higher for you and I to achieve... as ambiguous as
his “overhuman” (Übermensch) may be, he still seems to refer
it to the future, and certainly the Nietzschean “Great Noon” is
yet to come. So at this point in Novatore’s life perhaps he still
has too much faith in a future, and yet this may simply be a
response to social ferment that was stirring elsewhere. This
was, after all, the year of the Russian revolution.
Through much of 1918 and 1919, Novatore was on the
lam, because he had deserted the Italian army after being
drafted to fight in World War I and had been sentenced to
death. I could find no writings by him from 1918, and he
wrote a number of the writings from 1919 under a pseud-
onym. It seems that in his writings from this time on, No-
vatore stopped talking of any “communalization of material
wealth.” Instead, there is “the expropriator,” who is “a child
of the distant future fallen into the world by chance,” and
for whom “crime is the highest synthesis of freedom and
life.” Then in September 1920, when workers all over Italy
take over their workplaces in rebellion against their masters,
Novatore doesn’t speak of any positive vision of the future.
The only “hope” he expresses is for the destruction of the
current social order and all its values. What he finds worth-
while in this movement is that, at least for the time being, the
“stupid and deceitful idea that property is something ‘sacred
and inviolable’ has been swept away from the minds of the
masses...,” but one shouldn’t take this to mean that Novatore
had any faith in the masses. He explains his support of the
1920 rebellion: “The proletariat bowed and resigned under
the burden of enslavement disgusts me.... The proletariat in
aiib
revolt is quite a pleasure for me. And I enjoy seeing the idi-
otic bourgeoisie weeping and despairing because the sacred
table of the right to property has fallen broken under the re-
bellious fist of the new force.” But he recognizes that such
large-scale uprisings are moments, and that sooner or later
the “proletariat” will “stop to bow its tired head under the
lash of a new master or … let itself be ruled by the grotesque
and obtuse will of its utterly cowardly leaders...” And when
they stop? “... my revolution will continue to blaze even when
the collective one is extinguished under the spout of the red
pumps made available to the yellow bourgeoisie. But blend-
ing my fire a bit with that of the universe ‘when it is in flames’
is a fine caprice for me. Who isn’t aware that individualists
of my type are bizarre, capricious and strange?” So says this
darkly playful vagabond rebel.
If, in Novatore’s earlier writings (and the two or three
from the time of the workers’ rebellion and workplace oc-
cupations of 1920), hope for a world in which all individu-
als can spend their life in striving for their own realization
rather than serving a master is a major factor, nevertheless,
even here, what is central is the immediate expression and
fulfillment of oneself here and now in destructive rebellion
against everything that makes one a slave. This is the coher-
ent egoist thread that runs through all of Novatore’s writ-
ings presented in this volume. There are times when egoists
may take joy in a large scale rebellion, times when they may
even participate, but always with the awareness that these
rebellions will end, if not defeated, then in the creation of
new social arrangements, and in those arrangements, those
of us who prefer never to be arranged will continue to rebel,
and in our rebellion will mock those who let themselves
aiiib