DELEDDA, GRAZIA. - Writer, b. at Nuoro on 27 Sept. 1871, d. at Rome on 15 Aug. 1936. An island soul, even in her more than thirty-year residence in Rome she surrounded herself with solitude, interrupted only to assist, as a nurse, the Sardinian soldiers in the First World War, and in 1927 for a journey to Sweden after the awarding of the Nobel Prize. She bore with virile resignation the sufferings that led her to an edifying end, and she wished to be buried in the common grave. She wrote short stories, four works for the theater and numerous novels (Elias Portolu, 1903; Canne al vento, 1913; Marianna Sirca, 1915; Il Dio dei viventi, 1922; Annalena Bilsini, 1927; etc.). Of the novel Cenere (1904) Eleonora Duse gave, in 1913, a cinematic interpretation.
The literary activity of D. runs from her sixteenth year (Amore regale, short stories, 1891) to her death (Cosima, a evocation of her sad and dreamy adolescence, left unfinished and published posthumously in 1937), and, without concessions to the various literary fashions, it feeds on the inner life of the writer. After a "Sardinian" phase, in which the island finds exemplary configuration in a narration sumptuous with an Oriental flavor, there emerges a deliberate representational attenuation (La madre, 1920; Il segreto dell'uomo solitario, 1921) and a widening of spiritual interests. Her creatures, of every age or condition, pass shaken by passion as by a storm, attuning their spiritual collapse to the harsh and hallucinatory landscape: an unleashing of primordial forces, over which the voice of conscience and of God sometimes ends up prevailing; an epic in which, therefore, a fundamentally religious inspiration has been seen, even if not confessional, and which pursues one of the highest expressions of religion: pity (Cosimo, ch. 7).
There remains, however, in D.'s work a mixture of religiosity and superstition, a spirit of grave misunderstanding of Christianity and its rites, the reprehensible choice of certain themes and characters and the passionately vivid crudeness of not a few representations. From a fatalistic vision of nature and of the "terrible book of life," watched over by an inflexible punishing God, D. then settles into the more trusting conception of a nature friendly to man, of a life in which it is possible that "everything be balanced, love with glory, just as sorrow with joy" (letter of 1 Jan. 1891 to Stanis Manca), of a God more in keeping with the Christian concept, of a friendly and faithful Redeemer, who will console her as death approaches, with his sacraments.
This spiritual substratum finds expression in an art which, inserting itself in the moment of transition from verism to symbolism, is characterized by an intense expressiveness, made of immediacy and constructive elementariness, of bold metaphors, of a fresh and, at times, popular diction, of a perfect immersion of the characters in their environment, of an almost magical aura that envelops, transfiguring them, men and events.
Illum.: Opera: Romanzi e novelle (selection, with preface by E. Cecchi), 2 vols., Milan 1941-45. - Studies: A. Bocelli, In morte di D., in Nuova Antologia, 5 (1936), pp. 88-95; A. Manca, Sogni di gloria a vent'anni. Dalle lettere di G. D. a Stanis Manca, ibid., 5 (1937), pp. 241-50; L. Falchi, L'opera di G. D., 2nd ed., Milan 1937; E. De Michelis, Il motivo religioso nell'arte di G. D., in Nuova Italia, 8 (1937), pp. 129-36, 271-273; id., G. D., Milan 1938; R. Branca, Bibliografia deleddiana, ivi 1938 (supplemented by A. Vallone in Quadrivio, 24 Sept. 1939); N. Zaja, G. D., 2nd ed., ivi 1939; R. Branca, Testimonianza a G. D., ivi 1940; B. Croce, Letteratura della nuova Italia, VI, Bari 1940, pp. 317-26; P. Pancras, Scrittori d'oggi, ivi 1946; I, pp. 68-76; III, pp. 49-55; M. Mundula, Ricordo di G. D. Nel decennale della morte, in Nuova Antologia, 2 (1946), pp. 370-88; for the same occasion, commemorative issue of Convegno, 7-8 (1946), with articles by various; G. Titta Rosa, Secondo Ottocento, Milan 1947, pp. 179-84; A. Momigliano, Storia della letteratura italiana, 7th ed., Milan-Messina 1948, pp. 572-82.
Enzo Navarra