In chapter VI of the Don Quixotethe friends of thehidalgo (lying in bed in a bad way), the curate and the barber, in collusion with his niece and the housekeeper, break into his library. They have decided that it must be those “cursed books”, mostly dedicated to cavalrythe cause of his madness. And after a cursory examination, they believe that almost all of them “deserve to be burned as heretical books”. No sooner said than done, they are thrown out the window to make a nice pile to set on fire.
These pages inspire one of the most significant scenes of the beautiful Don Quixote to burn delle Albe/Ravenna Teatro, seen at the end of June at the Ravenna Festival and built with the now well-tested method of “public call”The chorus, composed of citizens of Ravenna of all ages, decrees the condemnation of a series of “dangerous” works, chosen from among the most “heretical” authors of the contemporary age, with Dostoevsky, Simone Weil and Don Milani at the head, and throws them into space in front of the spectators.
In fact, the book has always enjoyed bad press, if I may use a pun. If it is true that the same Gutenberg was put on trial for his “occult art” and other printers, despite having published the Bible, were accused of witchcraft. In this persecutory work the Church, needless to say, has always been at the forefront, with its infamous Index of books prohibitedwhich debuted in 1559. To the point that, sometimes, he preferred to burn the authors directly rather than their works: like Giordano Bruno, burned at the stake on 17 February 1600 in Campo de’ Fiori in Rome, while Cervantes had already begun writing his masterpiece. And we know what Galileo Galilei was forced to do a few years later to save himself.
Later, it will be above all totalitarian regimes that will distinguish themselves in this regard. And if we all, rightly, remember the book burnings decided by the Nazis in the 1930s (which Ray Bradbury reinvented in a dystopian key in the beautiful Fahrenheit 4511953), we must not forget the many poets and writers persecuted by Stalinism and its followers: from Mayakovsky to Mandelstam, to Babel, up to the dissidents of the Sixties and Seventies, starting with Solzhenitsyn.
Today things seem to have improved at first glance, at least in the West, but writers continue to risk their lives with their books, if they write them in countries oppressed by illiberal and obscurantist regimes, which are also capable of hunting them down and attacking them even outside their borders. As the case of Salman Rushdie. And even in the very civilized and democratic Italy, an author like Roberto Saviano he has been forced to live under escort for years for having published books on the Camorra.
It is true, however, that the constant persecution of the book in modern Europe has never managed to stop its impetuous rise, thanks to the progressive diffusion of the press. And I believe (I hope?) that this will also happen in the future, whatever medium it will be entrusted to. The reason is basically simple and Antonin Artaud he explained it with his usual effectiveness in the preface to The theatre and its double: “The Library of Alexandria can be set on fire. Above and outside the papyrus there are forces; we may temporarily lose the ability to recover these forces, but nothing will be able to extinguish their energy.”
It is this kind of irreducible conviction that feeds (and feeds us) the pessimistically optimistic show created by Mark Martinelli And Ermanna Montanaribringing together the first two stages of the project. Ultimately, it is about continuing stubbornly, despite everything, to believe in Man (here Don Quixote, but it could be Hamlet, a contemporary of the hidalgo, by the way), even when humanity seems to be everywhere torn apart in its soul and flesh.
We await with great curiosity, for next year, the third and final stage of this theatrical journey into the novel-world of Cervantes.
