PIRANDELLO, LUIGI. - Writer of short stories, novels, and dramas, born in Agrigento on 28 June 1867, died in Rome on 1 December 1936. Nobel Prize 1934. While still a high school student he wrote poems, and others he wrote and published a few years later. He studied philology at the University of Rome and then at that of Bonn, where he graduated with a thesis on the dialect of Agrigento. Returning to Rome, he became a friend of Luigi Capuana, who advised him to write short stories and novels. A mining disaster in the sulfur mines of his father and wife reduced him to poverty and induced him also to take up teaching. He later held the chair of Italian literature at the Faculty of Education in Rome.
He was also saddened and oppressed by his wife’s illness and growing mental alienation. Devoting himself to the theater as well (with bitter dramatic comedies often developed from earlier short stories), he suddenly achieved world renown with *Six Characters in Search of an Author*. Later he had his own company with which he traveled abroad and devoted himself almost exclusively to the theater. He also wrote critical essays: in the one entitled *Humor* (2nd ed., Florence 1920) he attempts to outline his sense of life, which is better conveyed, however, by his narrative and dramatic works. In the latter, an abstract dialecticism is often developed in exaggerated forms that ends up appearing as an end in itself. Thus, while Pirandello’s fame during his lifetime seemed tied rather to his dramas, the passage of time has restored artistic prominence to many of his short stories (collected under the title *Short Stories for a Year*) and to his best novel: *The Late Mattia Pascal*.
In his narrative works, and best in those of brief scope (more convincing because less openly dialectical), there appears the image of his inner desolate world: a world dominated by a lugubrious and mocking fate that touches even the intimacy of man, who appears necessarily selfish without possibility of redemption, and divided within himself without personal unity— a bundle of sensations and states of mind in perennial dissociation. A theme insistently pushed to the point of exasperation is the impossibility of attaining universal truth: each man and each thing appears in so many different ways according to the person who judges it and the moment in which it is judged. Discourse and judgment are crystallized and inert forms that cannot express the effective subconscious reality, always in motion, which in turn is not exalted as actual reality precisely because it is unknowable. The only possible escape from this torment is a detachment of superior indifference: the acceptance of death or madness as a transcendence of sterile problematizing.
The situations most artistically successful seem to be those in which there is expressed the feeling of an obscure evil power that dominates desolate interior and exterior landscapes of ruin and absurdity.
The totality of his work seems to testify to the failure of a world of psychological and relativistic culture, and of the nineteenth-century ideal of a rationalistic and positivistic humanism. Yet often the persuasiveness of his expressions is compromised by an evident exaggerated taste for demolishing everything with a dialectical virtuosity that ends up going in circles on abstract data. This does not prevent the occasional emergence of figures and voices of a sorrowful and even gentle pity for human suffering.
PIRANESI, GIOVANNI BATTISTA - View of St. Peter’s Square. Copper engraving.