Introduction

      THE MAN AND HIS WORK

      A towering figure among early twentieth-century writers, winner of the 1934 Nobel Prize for literature, Luigi Pirandello (1867–1936) stood aloof from the literary currents of his day—Futurism, Surrealism and other more local movements—and was particularly hostile to the estheticism, self-heroization and political adventurism of Gabriele D’Annunzio. Nevertheless, recent Italian literary historians group Pirandello’s work with that of his adversaries, classifying his oeuvre as one aspect—a major one—of the so-called Decadent period: the era in which the solid middle-class values and the ultimate appeal to human rationality typical of the late nineteenth century were being challenged and assailed from many directions and in many ways.

      Pirandello’s personal contribution, based on his belief that the progressive ideals of the liberators and unifiers of Italy in the 1860s and 1870s had been betrayed by the complacent bourgeois now entrenched in power, was to point out social inequalities (not through muckraking or sociological analysis, but by shedding sympathetic light on numerous individual cases) and, even more significantly, to dethrone reason by questioning the most basic assumptions about the way that people perceive the outside world and themselves. His writings are concerned with failure to communicate, disintegration of personality and the impossibility of arriving at a definitive truth.

      These goals were accomplished in a vast oeuvre of poems, essays, short stories, novels and plays. Once Pirandello’s career was under way, he never fully abandoned any of these genres, although the general progression of emphasis was: poetry (in his youth), short stories and novels (particularly in his thirties and forties) and plays (the best dating from his fifties, and bringing him international fame). The same ideas and subject matter interpenetrate all the genres. There is hardly a play of which all or part is not based on an earlier short story or segment of a novel. The short stories (which are of particular concern in the present volume) exhibit many traits of poetry (refrain-like verbal repetitions used structurally, highly colored descriptive passages), of essays (theoretical considerations of psychology or the writer’s craft expounded at length, with the “plot” sometimes acting merely as an illustrative anecdote) and especially of plays (long stretches of lively dialogue, with the connecting narrative often serving as “stage directions”). Humor is never lacking, though it can become acrid.

      All of Pirandello’s works are indissolubly linked to his own life and experiences. Born in 1867 near Girgenti (now Agrigento), Sicily, he studied at Palermo, Rome and Bonn (where he learned German well and received his degree in Romance philology). He settled in Rome, and Rome (with its huge variety of walks of life and its urban sophistication) and his native Sicily (with its parched landscape, poverty and its kaleidoscope of fixations and repressions) became the two poles of his mental world. In 1897 he began a decades-long career as instructor of Italian literature at a women’s teachers college. Already known for his poetry, Pirandello was encouraged by Luigi Capuana, one of the deans of the Italian naturalist movement, to try his hand at stories and novels, and was immediately successful.

      The flooding of his father’s Sicilian sulphur mine in 1903 had far-reaching repercussions. Not only was Pirandello’s income from home permanently cut off (so that he had to undertake extra tutoring and to rely even more heavily on income from authorship), but in addition his wife, whose dowry had been invested in the mine, suffered a nervous breakdown. In six months she recovered from the paresis in her legs, but her mind was never again completely balanced, and she embittered Pirandello’s life with her morbid jealousy, even suspecting him of incest with their daughter. She had to be institutionalized in 1919; she lived until 1959. The author later found a steady companion in the actress Marta Abba. By 1917 his work for the stage became paramount, and his 1921¹ play Sei personaggi in cerca d’autore (Six Characters in Search of an Author) made him world-famous. He later directed his own troupe (with Abba as leading lady) and undertook global tours. He was also involved to varying degrees with film versions of his stories and plays.

      In 1924, to his own public fanfare, he joined the Fascist party; he became a member of Mussolini’s Italian Academy and supported the regime even in some of its most