Verga, Giovanni

VERGA, GIOVANNI. - Writer, b. at Catania on 31 Aug. 1840, d. there on 27 Jan. 1922.

While still very young he wrote historical novels of patriotic inspiration: I carbonari della montagna (1861-62), Sulla laguna (1863). The following output, more personal but still of modest value, shows the influence of the French novel in its effort to represent the decline of ideal love-passion in its clash with reality; in the protagonist, more or less ideally autobiographical, is glimpsed the figure of the artist immoderately thirsting for indefinite, passionate, confused ideals: the language is still rather artificially agitated and approximate. Such is: Una peccatrice (1866). From 1869 he stayed in Florence and there wrote Storia di una capinera (1871), a tearful epistolary novel, intended to condemn the sacrifice of a young girl relegated 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 fell under the spell of a cosmopolitan and brilliant scenography.

With the novella Nedda (1874) V. began the composition of short, incisive novellas, following a new theme and a new language, the one that would truly be "his" theme: village life, with elementary feelings, situations and language. V. tries to strip himself of his intellectualizing, bookish imagination in order to invest himself with the elementary imagination of the people, with growing lucid artistic sympathy, obtaining effects of powerful, restrained epic quality. This is V.'s verismo. In the collection in which Nedda finds a place, Primavera e altri racconti (1876, later entitled Novelle), the two themes and the two manners still alternate. With the novellas Vita dei campi (1880) and with most of the following output (not without some less happy returns to the first manner) V. settled into his new and mature art, which bears its greatest fruits in the cycle conceived around 1880 under the general title I vinti. These were to be five novels in which V. wanted to give artistic form to a social study of the restlessness and the defeat provoked by the desire for well-being and honor in successive social ranks: in a family of fishermen: I Malavoglia (1881); in a laborer enriched and allied by marriage with nobles, Mastro Don Gesualdo (1880); in a noble lady, Duchessa de Leyra; in a politician, Onorevole Scipioni; in an aristocrat, Uomo di lusso. Of these last three novels only the first chapter of the first was written. V.'s expressiveness seems to have exhausted itself in the discovery of the elementary tone of the humble village world, finding nothing similarly new and convincing in returning to the old intellectualizing and exquisitely passionate themes. Meanwhile he wrote another novel, rather uncertain between the two poles of his artistic experience, Il marito di Elena (1882); but more happily insistent on themes of elementary life in the Novelle rusticane (1883), and in the collections of novellas Per le vie (1883), Vagabondaggio (1887), I ricordi del capitano d'Arce (1891), Don Candeloro e C. (1894). He also wrote for the theater, sometimes adapting some of his novellas 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 most mature and meditated works, a moved admiration for tenacious labor, for uprightness, for goodness. V. detaches himself with difficulty from the passionateness of the most generic romanticism (tinged at times with mocking notes, e.g., Certi argomenti in Novelle) in order to reach, in his two masterpieces, I Malavoglia and Mastro Don Gesualdo, an impassively tragic vision, yet wholly vibrant with secret emotion. V.'s living discovery is this elementary but essential vision of a life without God and without joy, where every attempt at happiness ends in pain; a vision made of living and "spoken" language but without effusiveness and without dialectal flourishes, a vision in which the impassive but not cynical acknowledgment of tragedy has the power of an implicit appeal to the unknown. V. takes his stand in an ideally pre-Christian world, where Revelation is effectively ignored, even if some rite of it is externally recalled. The result is the tragedy of a world without Revelation, but also without any pretense of substitutes for it.

Fausto Montanari