PIRANDELLO, LUIGI. – Writer of short stories, novels, and dramas, b. in Agrigento on 28 June 1867, d. in Rome on 1 December 1930. Nobel Prize 1934. While still a secondary-school student he wrote poetry, and a few years later wrote and published more. He studied philology at the University of Rome and then at that of Bonn, where he took his degree with a thesis on the dialect of Agrigento. On returning to Rome, he became a friend of Luigi Capuana, who advised him to write short stories and novels. A mining disaster in the sulphur mines belonging to his father and wife left him impoverished and led him also to take up teaching. He subsequently held the chair of Italian literature at the Faculty of Education in Rome.
He was also saddened and weighed down by his wife’s illness and increasing mental alienation. Having devoted himself to the theatre as well (with bitter dramatic comedies often developed from earlier short stories), he achieved sudden worldwide fame with Sei personaggi in cerca d'autore. He later had his own company, with which he also travelled abroad, and devoted himself almost exclusively to the theatre. He also wrote critical essays: in the one entitled L'umorismo (2nd ed., Florence 1920), he seeks to outline his sense of life, which emerges more clearly, however, from his narrative and dramatic works. In the latter, an abstract dialecticism is often developed in exaggerated forms, eventually appearing to be an end in itself. Thus, while P.’s fame during his lifetime seemed to be linked rather to his dramas, the passage of time has once again given 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 his narrative works, in fact, and more particularly in those of shorter compass (more convincing because less overtly dialectical), there appears the image of his desolate inner world: a world dominated by a gloomy and mocking destiny, which touches the very intimacy of the human being, who appears necessarily egoistic, without the possibility of redemption, and divided within himself, without personal unity: a bundle of sensations and states of mind in perpetual dissociation. A theme pursued to the point of exasperation is the impossibility of attaining a universal truth: each person and each thing appears in as many different ways as the person judging it and the moment at which it is judged. Speech and judgment are crystallized and inert forms, incapable of expressing the actual subconscious reality, which is always in motion; nor is that reality exalted as the effective reality precisely because it is unknowable. The sole possible escape from this torment is a detachment of superior indifference: acceptance of death or madness as a transcendence of sterile problematization. The situations artistically
The whole 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. But often the persuasiveness of his expressions is compromised by an evident, exaggerated taste for demolishing everything through a dialectical virtuosity that ends up turning fruitlessly on abstract data. This does not preclude the occasional emergence of figures and voices of a sorrowful and even gentle compassion for human suffering.