Amos Chiabov e la poesia Morte di un pettirosso di Umberto Saba

Abstract

My paper offers a detailed biography of Amos Chiabov, a so-far unknown and very interesting figure among the many who peopled Umberto Saba’s life. I have recently published, in a critical edition, 15 unpublished letters that in 1950 Saba wrote to Chiabov, his personal psychiatrist in Trieste. After that, I decided to focus on Chiabov himself, who was not only a physician but also a partisan during WWII and an important member of the Italian ‘Resistenza’ against Nazi-fascism. I reconstructed his story through a first-hand research in public archives and through some oral memories collected in interviews with his descendants. In this paper I report Amos Chiabov’s full biography and I provide more details on his relationship with Umberto Saba, that I argue are necessary to contextualize and interpret the poem Morte di un pettirosso (Death of a robin) that the poet dedicated to him.