Those who knew Tommaso Landolfi from his student days in Florence and might be considered his closest friends, such as the literary critic Carlo Bo, confess to their inability ever to get to know him. He always shrouded himself in mystery, even as to his origins, and cultivated the image of the dandy and the disdainful recluse. Landolfi struck a romantic pose in his fiction as well as in his life. In some autobiographical essays he wrote in the 1960s he does vouchsafe some of the formative influences in his literary career. In a short piece titled "Morte di un amico" (Death of a Friend), which was included in Un paniere di chiocciole (1968), Landolfi recounts how his friend, Renato Poggioli, had introduced him to the secrets of the Cyrillic alphabet, which led him to major in Russian at the University of Florence and later to translate brilliantly many...