Filippo Tommaso Marinetti

Born Dec. 22, 1876, in Alexandria, Egypt; died Dec. 2, 1944, in Bellagio. Italian writer. Founder and theoretician of futurism in European literature and art.

Marinetti began as a poet of free verse, for example his narrative poem The Conquest of the Stars (1902). In 1909 he published the Manifesto of Futurism, the first such document to proclaim an avant-garde aesthetic program that contained a number of reactionary ideas, such as the liberation from the “dead culture” of the past and from humanist ideals, and that promoted the creation of a “dynamic literature of the future” celebrating machine technology and glorifying war as the “only [means of] world hygiene.”

Marinetti organized futurist groups among nationalistic young people and traveled abroad giving propaganda lectures (he made trips to Russia in 1910 and 1914). He extolled colonial expansion in Africa in his poetry and prose, for example, in the novel Mafarka the Futurist (1910; Russian translation, 1916). In the collection of poems Zang-tumb-tuum (1914), a futuristic montage of disconnected printed lines and mathematical and telegraphic symbols, Marinetti glorified the Italo-Turkish war. He agitated for Italy’s entry into World War I and fought in the war as a volunteer. In 1919, Marinetti became an adherent of Mussolini and proclaimed the kindred nature of Italian futurism and fascism.