VERGA, GIOVANNI. — Writer, born in Catania on 31 August 1840, died there on 27 January 1922.
While still very young, he wrote historical novels inspired by patriotism: I carbonari della montagna (1861–62), Sulla laguna (1863). His subsequent production, more personal but still of modest value, reflects the French novel in its effort to represent the decline of ideal love-passion in its collision with reality; in the protagonist, more or less ideally autobiographical, the figure of the artist is dreamt of, disjointedly thirsting for
a praiseworthy and good sense, insofar as it does not tend directly to avoiding guilt, but rather to avoiding disesteem, and only indirectly to avoiding guilt. V., however, according to its common modern meaning, is that feeling whereby one blushes at and shuns ugly and less than honest things. It approaches modesty (v.) and, like it, always has a good sense; and just as chastity is a deliberate will, it is the habit of
indefinite, impassioned, confused ideals: the language is still rather artificially impetuous and approximate. Such is Una peccatrice (1866). From 1869 he stayed in Florence, where he wrote Storia di una capinera (1871), a tearful epistolary novel intended to condemn the sacrifice of a young girl confined to a convent, far from the joys of family and love. In 1873 he moved to Milan, where he frequented the group of the “Scapigliati”: in this climate he wrote other novels: Eva (1873), Tigre reale (1873), and Eros (1875), insisting on themes of romantic passion; while, on the other hand, he was captivated by the fascination of a cosmopolitan and brilliant scenography.
With the novella Nedda (1874), V. began composing short and incisive stories, following a new theme and language, the one that would truly be “his” theme: village life, with its elementary feelings, situations, and language. V. sought to strip himself of his intellectualistic and bookish imagination in order to invest himself with the elementary imagination of the people, with a growing lucid artistic sympathy, producing effects of powerful, restrained epic force. This is V.’s verismo. In the collection in which Nedda appeared, Primavera e altri racconti (1876, later entitled Novelle), the two themes and the two manners still alternate. With the stories Vita dei campi (1880), and with most of his subsequent production (not without some less successful returns to his first manner), V. art, which yielded its greatest fruits in the cycle conceived around 1880 under the general title I vinti. It was to comprise five novels in which V. wished to realize artistically a social study of the restlessness and defeat provoked by the desire for well-being and honor at successive social levels: in a family of fishermen, I Malavoglia (1881); in an artisan who had grown rich and married into the nobility, Mastro Don Gesualdo (1880); in a noblewoman, Duchessa de Leyra; in a politician, Onorevole Scipioni; and in an aristocrat, Uomo di lusso. Of the last three novels, only the first chapter of the first was ever written. V.’s expressiveness seems to have been exhausted in the discovery of the elementary tone of the humble village world, finding nothing comparably new and convincing when he returned to the old intellectualistic and refinedly passionate themes. In the meantime he wrote another novel, Il marito di Elena (1882), rather uncertain between the two poles of his artistic experience; but he treated themes of elementary life more successfully in Novelle rusticane (1883), and in the collections of stories Per le vie (1883), Vagabondaggio (1887), I ricordi del capitano d’Arce (1891), and Don Candeloro e C. (1894). He also wrote for the theater, sometimes adapting some of his stories for the stage.
V.’s world is dominated by a sense of fatality—the defeat of every illusion of happiness—which does not exclude, in his more mature and carefully considered works, a deeply moved admiration for tenacious work, rectitude, and goodness. V. laboriously detached himself from the more generic passionate character of Romanticism (occasionally tinged with mocking observations, e.g., Certi argomenti in Novelle) in order to attain, in the two masterpieces I Malavoglia and Mastro Don Gesualdo, an impassively tragic vision, yet one all vibrant with secret emotion. V.’s living discovery is this elementary but essential vision of a life without God and without joy, in which every attempt at happiness ends in sorrow; a vision composed of vivid, “spoken” language, but without affectations and without dialectal turns of phrase, a vision in which the impassive but non-cynical observation of tragedy possesses the power of an implicit appeal to the unknown. V. is established in an ideally pre-Christian world, where Revelation is effectively ignored, even if some rite externally recalls II. The result is the tragedy of a world without Revelation, but also without any pretense of substitutes for II.