Italo Svevo

For more information on Italo Svevo, visit Britannica.com.

Italo Svevo (1861-1928) was one of the first Italian novelists to consequentially apply psychoanalytical discoveries to literature.

Italo Svevo was born Ettore Schmitz on Dec. 19, 1861, in Trieste, one of eight children of a businessman. The pseudonym he later chose reflects his mixed origins: his paternal ancestors had come from the German Rhineland, whereas his mother was of Italian descent. At 12 Svevo was sent to Germany to complete his secondary education in Segnitz, Franconia. At this time he became acquainted with the German classics, developing later special predilection for Arthur Schopenhauer.

After Svevo's return to Trieste at the age of 17, he studied economics for 2 years at a local institute. In 1880 the failure of his father's business forced him to take a job at the Triestine branch of the Viennese Unionsbank, which he held until he began working full time for his father-in-law's business in 1902. From the time of his return to Trieste he contributed for some 10 years to the local Italian paper L'Indipendente. His first two novels, Una vita and Senilità, were published in 1892 and 1898 but received scant attention. In 1896 he married Livia Veneziani, the daughter of a well-to-do industrialist. After his second novel Svevo seemingly devoted all his time to business and published nothing for 25 years until La coscienza di Zeno (The Confessions of Zeno) appeared in 1923.

Svevo's friendship with James Joyce goes back to the early years of the century when he took English lessons from Joyce, who then taught English in Trieste for a living. The friendship continued after Joyce had moved to Zurich and then Paris, where he was instrumental in making the Italian known. Svevo died in an automobile accident at Motta di Livenza on Sept. 13, 1928.

His Works

For a long time Svevo had doubts of his own talent, yet he turned out to be one of the best Italian novelists of the century. In a loose form and a low-keyed style imbued with irony, he adopted forms of narration and a treatment of the time element that definitely ranked him among the avant-garde and proved him to be one of the early representatives of the psychoanalytical novel. Svevo, who could equally well have written in German, detested rhetoric and was not interested in artistic prose and a refined style. What some critics referred to as "Pidgin-Italian" indicates only a use of language in conformity with the psychological situation it represents: as there are no consequential heroes, there is no consequential style.

To Svevo, writing, in a sense, represented a therapeutic catharsis for all sorts of "diseases, " real or imaginary, from cigarette smoking to senility. Lending itself by definition to - retroactive - introspective analysis, senility indeed became one of the dominant motives of Svevo's narrative: old age and youth, "the old man and the pretty girl."

Svevo's first novel, as most of his writing, is to a large degree autobiographical. Una vita (1892), published at his own expense, bore the original title Un inetto - the story of a young man "incapable" of mastering life. The analytical and introspective modes already visible in this first novel become more prominent in the second: Senilità (1898). Again, the perennial indecision and incapacity to face the facts of life characterize the actions of the central character. His feelings are being analyzed with supreme irony, and in true Schopenhauerian fashion life's realities are being dissolved before the all-important reality of the hero's mind and imagination.

The corrosive play of contrapuntal irony is brought to perfection in La coscienza di Zeno (1923), the "story of a disease." In a series of loosely knit episodes - concerning his cigarette-smoking habit of which he wants to be cured, his father's death, his marriage - Zeno Cosini writes down his case history for his psychoanalyst. Svevo's relationship to Freud, whose ideas he deliberately applied, was not very different from those of his characters to their "diseases" which they both hate and love. Svevo always ended up reading Freud again after having laid the books aside out of true antipathy.

The theme of senility - and the implication of a possible distant review of things - is also predominant in a volume of short stories that was published posthumously: La novella del buon vecchio e della bella fanciulla (1929). It contains the fragment of what was to be Svevo's mature masterpiece: Il vecchione. Corto viaggio sentimentale (1949) is a collection of short stories and fragments of stories left unfinished. Saggi e pagine sparse (1954) presents various articles and essays. Svevo's dramatic production was collected in Commedie (1960).

Further Reading

Most works on Svevo are in Italian. In English, P. N. Furbank, Italo Svevo: The Man and the Writer (1967), gives an account of Svevo's life and an intelligent analysis of his work. Recommended for general historical background is Sergio Pacifici, The Modern Italian Novel: From Manzoni to Svevo (1967).

Additional Sources

Gatt-Rutter, John, Italo Svevo: a double life, Oxford: Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.

Veneziani Svevo, Livia, Memoir of Italo Svevo, Marlboro, Vt.: Marlboro Press, 1990.

Svevo, Italo (pseudonym of Ettore Schmitz, 1861–1928), Italian writer of novels, short stories, plays, and essays, born in Trieste. He introduced the psychological novel in Italy with his first novel Una vita (A Life, 1892), followed by Senilità (As a Man Grows Older, 1898). Both novels were greatly admired by James Joyce, whom Svevo met in 1905, and whose influence was visible in the stream of consciousness of La coscienza di Zeno (Zeno's Conscience, 1923). Svevo had read and translated Freud's Interpretation of Dreams, which had a direct impact on his novels of introspection and interior monologues, and which fuelled his fascination and cultivation of fairy tales and short stories. During his lifetime Svevo published only seven stories and left many unpublished. His fairy tales have been collected in Racconti, Saggi, pagine sparse (Stories, Essays, Sparse Pages, 1968). His earliest story, ‘Una lotta’ (‘A Contest’, 1888), is a parody of chivalric romances peopled with names such as Arturo, Ariodante, and Rosina, a character keep out of Don Quixote. This was followed by ‘L'assassinio di via Belpoggio’ (‘Murder on Belpoggio Street’, 1890), a psychological thriller, and ‘La tribù’ (‘The Tribe’, 1897), a political allegory about the life of a nomadic tribe and its leader Hussein.

Svevo had a predilection for fairy tales and wrote La madre (1910, rev. 1927), a tale about chicks who are very upset because they were hatched in an incubator and do not have a mother. One of them is named Curra (Roller or Runner), for he was the first to run for food. This fairy tale symbolically depicted Svevo's relationship with ‘mother’ Italy who had ignored him for a very long time before his literary recognition. ‘Una burla riuscita’ (‘A Successful Hoax’, 1926) is the story of a 70‐year‐old author whose novel Giovinezza has had no recognition, thus forcing him secretly to write tales about sparrows. Another very short tale is ‘Un eroe salvò una fata’ (‘A Hero Saved a Fairy’). In general, fairy‐tale motifs can be found in most of his works and were always endowed with unique meanings.

— Giuseppe Di Scipio

Quotes:

"God gave us memory so that we might have roses in December."

Aron Ettore Schmitz (Italo Svevo)
Italian writer and businessman
Born	19 December 1861(1861-12-19) Trieste, Austria-Hungary
Died	13 September 1928 (aged 66) Motta di Livenza, Italy

Aron Ettore Schmitz (December 19, 1861 – September 13, 1928), better known by the pseudonym Italo Svevo, was an Italian businessman and author of novels, plays, and short stories.

Contents 1 Biography 2 Selected works 3 References 4 External links

Biography

Born in Trieste (then in Austria-Hungary) to a Jewish family, Svevo wrote the classic novel La Coscienza di Zeno (rendered as Confessions of Zeno, or Zeno's Conscience) and self-published it in 1923. The work, showing the author's interest in the theories of Sigmund Freud, is written in the form of the memoirs of one Zeno Cosini, who writes them at the insistence of his psychoanalyst. Schmitz's psychoanalyst was Ottocaro Weiss, who had been trained by Freud in Vienna. Schmitz's novel received almost no attention from Italian readers and critics at the time.

The work might have disappeared altogether if it were not for the efforts of James Joyce. Joyce had met Schmitz in 1907, when Joyce tutored him in English while working for Berlitz in Trieste. Joyce read Schmitz's earlier novel Senilità, which had also been largely ignored when published in 1898.

Joyce championed Confessions of Zeno, helping to have it translated into French and then published in Paris, where critics praised it extravagantly. That led Italian critics, including Eugenio Montale, to discover it. Zeno Cosini, the book's hero, mirrored Schmitz, being a businessman fascinated by Freudian theory.

Schmitz was a citizen of the Austro-Hungarian Empire until the end of the First World War. He spoke Italian as a second language (as he usually spoke the Triestine dialect, similar to Venetian) and, according to some critics, wrote it badly - though some have pointed out that it is not bad Italian, but rather the official Tuscan dialect in a Triestino mouth.

Confessions of Zeno never looks outside the narrow confines of Trieste, much like Joyce's work, which never left Dublin in the last years of Ireland's time as part of the United Kingdom. Schmitz brings a keenly sardonic wit to his observations of Trieste and, in particular, to his hero, an indifferent man who cheats on his wife and lies to his psychoanalyst and who is trying to explain himself to his psychoanalyst by revisiting his memories.

There is a final connection between Schmitz-Svevo and the character Cosini. Cosini sought psychoanalysis, he said, in order to discover why he was addicted to nicotine. As he reveals in his memoirs, each time he had given up smoking, with the iron resolve that this would be the "ultima sigaretta!!", he experienced the exhilarating feeling that he was now beginning life over without the burden of his old habits and mistakes. That feeling was, however, so strong that he found smoking irresistible, if only so that he could stop smoking again in order to experience that thrill once more.

Svevo likewise smoked for all of his life. After being hit by a car while crossing the street, he was brought into hospital at Motta di Livenza, where his health rapidly failed. As death approached he asked one of his visitors for a cigarette, telling everyone that this really would be the last one (the request was denied).

Svevo lived for part of his life in Charlton, south-east London, while working for a family firm. He documented this period in his letters^[1] to his wife which highlighted the cultural differences he encountered in Edwardian England. His old home at 67 Charlton Church Lane now carries a blue plaque.

Selected works

• Una Vita, 1892 (A Life)
• Senilità, 1898 (As a Man Grows Older/Emilio's Carnival)
• La Coscienza di Zeno, 1923 (The Confessions of Zeno/Zeno's Conscience)
• Una burla riuscita, 1929 (A Perfect Hoax)

References

1. ^ "This England is so different" - Italo Svevo's London Writings" John Gatt Rutter & Brian Mulroney Troubador ISBN1 899293 59 0

• Svevo, Italo. Zeno's Conscience. Trans. William Weaver. New York: Vintage International, 2001.
• Furbank, Philip N., Italo Svevo: The Man and the Writer (1966)
• Livia Veneziani Svevo , Memoir of Italo Svevo, Preface by P. N. Furbank, Trans. by Isabel Quigly, ISBN1 870352 53 X, London: Libris, 1991
• Gatt-Rutter, J., Italo Svevo: A Double Life (1988)
• Moloney, Brian, Italo Svevo: A Critical Introduction (1974)
• Gatt-Rutter, J & Mulroney, B, 'This England is so different' - Italo Svevo's London Writings Troubador ISBN1 899293 59 0

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Italo Svevo

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Italo Svevo

• Novels and stories of Italo Svevo
• Italo Svevo
• Works by Svevo: text with concordances and frequency list
• Images referred to Italo Svevo on Immaginidistoria.it
• Senilità Concordances from the first original Italian Edition
• Concordances of Una vita, and La Coscienza di Zeno
• Listen to some chapters of La Coscienza di Zeno on audio mp3 free download

Persondata
NAME	Schmitz, Aron Ettore
ALTERNATIVE NAMES	Svevo, Italo (literary pseudonym)
SHORT DESCRIPTION	writer
DATE OF BIRTH	December 19, 1861
PLACE OF BIRTH	Trieste, Austro-Hungarian Empire
DATE OF DEATH	September 13, 1928
PLACE OF DEATH

This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)