Pepe-Lamartine Una polemica letteraria e un duello per il Risorgimento

Il saggio ricostruisce le reazioni provocate a Firenze dalla pubblicazione di Le dernier chant du pelerinage d’Harold di Alphonse de Lamartine (1825), ispirato all'opera incompiuta di Lord Byron. Il ritratto dell'assoluta decadenza dell'Italia contemporanea, con la definizione dei suoi abitanti di "polvere d'uomini", indignò gli intellettuali, che avrebbero voluto rispondere nell'Antologia di Vieusseux, il periodico più importante dell'epoca. Pietro Giordani intendeva anche rispondere a Lamartine pubblicando un saggio sulle Operette Morali del giovane (e ancora sconosciuto) Giacomo Leopardi, interpretato come un grande e vivente italiano. La censura ha impedito questa e altre risposte, ma non un aspro riferimento contenuto in un opuscolo dell'esiliiato napoletano Gabriele Pepe. Ferito nell'orgoglio, Lamartine (all'epoca responsabile dell'ambasciata francese a Firenze) sfidò Pepe a duello. La vittoria di Pepe suscitò un grande entusiasmo a Firenze e in tutta Italia. Il tema dell'onore offeso e vendicato con una prova di valore divenne una costante e fu imitato molte altre volte, nella realtà e nella letteratura, alimentando l'immaginazione di diverse generazioni.

Arguing with Europe: Eastern Civilization Versus Orientalist Exoticism

The French romantic poet Alphonse de Lamartine traveled to the East—namely, Syria, Palestine, and parts of the Balkans—in 1832–33, with his wife and daughter. His account of these travels, the Voyage en Orient, was published in 1835 and went on to become one of the major Eastern travel-narratives of the nineteenth century. Edward Said was scathing about it in Orientalism: “What remains of the Orient in Lamartine's prose is not very substantial at all … the sites he has visited, the people he has met, the experiences he has had, are reduced to a few echoes in his pompous generalizations” (179). I would not dissent from this assessment. But Said was not the first to remark on the nature of Lamartine's representations of the Orient. In 1859, twenty-four years after the French poet's visit to the East, a young Beiruti poet and journalist, Khalīl al-Khūrī, made an Arabic translation and commentary, with some sharp criticisms, of one of the poems included in Voyage en Orient.

Vilém Gabler’s Library and Alexander the Great

The article is divided into three parts. The first one aims to present the figure of Vilém Gabler, a close colleague of Karel Havlíček and František Ladislav Rieger, as a person important for the beginnings of Czech–French relations and for the spread of the knowledge of the Czech language and culture in the Czech milieu. The second part is devoted to the summary of previous research and the reconstruction of the personal library of Vilém Gabler, scattered in the central collection of the National Museum Library. The last, third part discusses Gabler’s article Alexander Veliký [Alexander the Great], written in reaction to the work Alexandre le Grand from the pen of Alphonse de Lamartine and under the impression of the events of 1859. Despite its thematic focus on the ancient commander, it provides abundant information on the author’s view of the recent Austrian-Czech past as well as present. It thus shows a man with his own world of opinion and moral schemes created based on his own experience from 1848 and strongly influenced by the study of French history, especially the period after 1789.