PIRANDELLO, LUIGI. - Writer of short stories, novels and plays, b. in Agrigento on 28 June 1867, d. in Rome on 1 Dec. 1930. Nobel Prize 1934. While still a high-school student he wrote poems, and he wrote and published others 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. Back in Rome he was 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 of his wife left him poor and led him to take up teaching as well. He later held the chair of Italian literature at the Faculty of Education in Rome.
He was saddened and oppressed also by the illness and the growing mental alienation of his wife. Having devoted himself also to the theater (with bitter dramatic comedies often developed from earlier short stories), he achieved sudden worldwide fame with Six Characters in Search of an Author. Subsequently he had his own company, with which he also traveled abroad, and he devoted himself almost exclusively to the theater. He also wrote critical essays: in the one entitled L'umorismo (2nd ed., Florence 1920) he seeks to outline his sense of life, which however emerges better from his narrative and dramatic works: in the latter an abstract dialectalism is often developed in exasperated forms that end up appearing as an end in itself. Therefore, whereas the fame of P. during his lifetime seemed tied rather to the plays, the passing of time brings back artistic prominence to many of the short stories (collected under the title Novelle per un anno) and to his best novel: Il fu Mattia Pascal. In the narrative works, in fact, and better in those of shorter breath (more convincing because less openly dialectalized), there appears the image of his inner desolate world: a world dominated by a gloomy and mocking destiny, which touches the very intimacy of man, who appears necessarily egoistic without possibility of redemption, and divided within himself without personal unity: a bundle of sensations and states of mind in perpetual dissociation. An insistent theme, to the point of exasperation, is the impossibility of attaining a universal truth: each man and each thing appear in many different ways according to the person who judges them and according to the moment in which he judges them. Discourse and judgment are crystallized and inert forms that cannot express the actual subconscious reality, always in motion, which on the other hand 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 of madness as an overcoming of a sterile problematism. The situations artistically
The most artistically successful situations seem to remain those in which is expressed the feeling of a dark evil power that dominates desolate inner and outer landscapes of ruin and absurdity.
The whole of his work seems to bear witness to the failure of a world of psychological and relativistic culture, and of the nineteenth-century ideal of a rationalistic and positivistic humanism. But often the persuasiveness of his expressions is compromised by an evident exaggerated taste for demolishing everything with a dialectical virtuosity that ends up spinning its wheels, on abstract data. Which does not detract from the fact that at times figures and voices emerge of a sorrowful and even gentle pity for the suffering of men.
Bibliography9 works
Fausto Montanari