DELEDDA, Grazia. Writer, born in Nuoro on 27 Sept. 1871, died in Rome on 15 Aug. 1936. An island soul, even during her more than thirty years in Rome she surrounded herself with solitude, interrupted only to nurse Sardinian soldiers during the First World War and in 1927 for a trip to Sweden after receiving the Nobel Prize. She endured her sufferings with manly resignation, which led her to an edifying end, and wished to be buried in a common grave. She wrote short stories, four stage works, and numerous novels (Elias Portolu, 1903; Canne al vento, 1913; Marianna Sirca, 1915; Il Dio dei viventi, 1922; Annalena Bilsini, 1927; etc.). From the novel Cenere (1904), Eleonora Duse gave a cinematic interpretation in 1913.
Her literary activity spanned from the age of sixteen (Amore regale, short stories, 1891) to her death (Cosima, a recollection of her sad and dreamy adolescence, left unfinished and published posthumously in 1937), and, without concessions to literary fashions, drew nourishment from the writer’s inner life. After a “Sardinian” phase, in which the island finds exemplary expression in a narrator of opulent Oriental flavor, a deliberate representational attenuation emerges (La madre, 1920; Il segreto dell’uomo solitario, 1921) along with a broadening of spiritual interests. Her characters, of every age and condition, are shaken by passion like a storm, harmonizing their spiritual ruin with the harsh and hallucinatory landscape: an unleashing of primal forces, over which the voice of conscience and of God sometimes prevails. In this epic, a fundamentally religious inspiration—though not confessional—has been discerned, one that seeks in religion one of its highest expressions: piety (Cosima, chap. 7).
Yet in Deledda’s work there remains a blend 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 inscribed 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, she later found solace in a more trusting conception of a nature friendly to man, of a life in which “all things may balance out, love with glory, just as sorrow with joy” (letter of 1 Jan. 1891 to Stanisla Manica), of a God more in keeping with the Christian concept, of a Redeemer who is a friend and faithful guide, who would console her at the approach of death with his sacraments.
This spiritual substratum finds expression in an art that, situated at the transition from verismo to symbolism, is marked by intense expressiveness, made up of immediacy and elemental construction, bold metaphors, fresh and at times popular diction, the perfect immersion of characters in their environment, and a near-magical care that envelops and transfigures men and events.