Elias Canetti

Origins and early life

Elias Canetti was born into a Sephardic Jewish family in the Bulgarian town of Ruse on the Danube on 25 July 1905, the eldest of three sons of the merchant Jacques Canetti and Mathilde Arditti.

Work and career

His father's people had come to Ruse from Ottoman Adrianople and the family name was originally Cañete, after a village in the province of Cuenca in Spain; his mother's, the Ardittis, were among the oldest Sephardic families in Bulgaria and had helped found the Jewish community of Ruse in the late eighteenth century. The household moved to Manchester in 1911; his father died suddenly the next year, and his mother took the children to Lausanne and then to Vienna, insisting that he learn German — by which age he already had Ladino, his mother tongue, along with Bulgarian, English and some French.

He went back to Vienna in 1924 to read chemistry, took a doctorate in it in 1929 and never worked as a chemist; his subject by then was philosophy and literature, and the day that marked him most was the July Revolt of 1927, when he found himself near a burning Palace of Justice and watched a crowd become a single thing. That is the material of both his major books: the novel Auto-da-Fé, published in 1935 before he escaped to Britain, in which a scholar is destroyed by the world outside his library; and Crowds and Power, twenty-five years in the making and published in 1960, a study of how masses form, what they fear, and how rulers feed on them.

He also wrote plays and several volumes of memoirs on his own many-tongued childhood. He received the 1981 Nobel Prize in Literature, spent his last twenty years in Zurich, and died there in 1994.