«Memory plays strange tricks». Adelphi publishing house and the myth of origins

Abstract

The Adelphi publishing house was founded in Milan in 1962, but its origins can be traced back to the late 1930s. This is what emerges from Anna Ferrando's book, Adelphi. Le origini di una casa editrice (1938-1994), (Carocci, 2023), in which the author analyses a project that matured over time and cannot be traced back to a single founder, but to different souls linked by a fruitful dialogue, initiated in anti-fascist circles, in which Luciano Foà, Roberto Bazlen, known as Bobi, Alberto Zevi and, from the early 1960s, Roberto Calasso participated. The catalogue produced by Adelphi since 1962 shows, right from the first decade of activity, a strong focus on the Central European world, the search for works in which the importance of individual experience was exalted, the discovery of psychoanalysis thanks to the contribution of the Jungian psychoanalyst Ernst Bernhard, and again the publication of Nietzsche's opera omnia, as well as the many ‘unique’ books, as Bobi Bazlen defined them. But many of those shrewd and innovative choices had to do with years before 1962, and their humus of origin emerges precisely from the archives of Foà, Zevi and other Adelphi collaborators, calling into question the mythical narrative of an enterprise that Roberto Calasso, over the years, had made coincide with his own person, as emerges from his autobiographical works, starting with Impronta dell'editore (2013).