The Spirit of the Letter : Essays in European Literature

## PREFACE ix serious risk of confusion. The Johannine phrase, with its Augustinian gloss, is one of the interpretative keys in his essay on Dante. It sums up his mastery in extracting the universal from the technical, poetics from metrics, the history of ideas at many periods from the explication des textes in many languages. Though the draft he left for a prefatory note is incomplete, the following sentences from it should be transcribed, since they are still relevant: It is apparent that there is no rationale in this volume, or even a pattern: in one sense the book is but a collection of random pieces. Yet, except for the presence of the opening essay, which appears here for the first time as translated from its Italian original, I might perhaps say that I have gathered between these covers most of the occasional writings I have composed or reworked within an American environment. Whatever their pretext or their source, these writings reflect some of the lines of work I have been pursuing since the time I chose America as my home, and English as my vehicle. This, by the way, is the reason why, despite some revision in matters of detail and the addition of a few postscripts, none of these pieces has been updated. NEW READINGS OF OLD TEXTS CONTENTS PREFACE NEW READINGS OF OLD TEXTS THE IGOR TALE TRAGEDY OR ROMANCE? PASCAL’S CLASSICISM CRITIQUES OF THE MODERNS TOLSTOY AS MAN AND ARTIST PIRANDELLO IN RETROSPECT A NOTE ON ITALO SVEVO LEO FERRERO’S ANGELICA THE ITALIAN SUCCESS STORY THE POETRY OF S T.–J. PERSE MYTHOLOGY OF FRANZ KAFKA TROTSKY’S DIARY IN EXILE OTHER LITERARY PAPERS THE DEATH OF THE SENSE OF TRAGEDY FOR A LITERARY HISTORIOGRAPHY BASED ON PARETO'S SOCIOLOGY THE ARTIST IN THE MODERN WORLD POETICS AND METRICS THE ADDED ARTIFICER PUBLISHER’S NOTE INDEX