Le promesse dell'anniversario: da Proust a Leopardi

The paper focuses on the topic of the anniversary, in which the philosophical issue of time and the anthropological one of the festival converge: a topic which, in different ages, has been object of similar reflections by the french novelist Marcel Proust and by the Italian poet and thinker Giacomo Leopardi. Marcel Proust invests Du côté de chez Swann and À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleur with his comprehensions, connecting the topic to the beloved figure of Gilberte Swann, in order to make the reader aware that the hopes of a new start and happiness promised by the anniversary – a festival or New Year’s day - will be met with disappointment, while Giacomo Leopardi theorizes the illusion of time restarting from the beginning on the anniversary day in the Zibaldone, and then corrodes the common folk belief about New Year’s day auspices in the Dialogo di un venditore d’almanacchi e di un passeggere. Even if no direct influence of Leopardi on Proust can be traced, their reflections are compared in the perspective of literary anthropology.