La coscienza di Zeno

The father of modern Italian novel, Italo Svevo (pseudonym of Ettore Schmitz) was an Italian novelist, playwright, short story writer, essayist, critic and business man. Svevo (whose pseudonym means "Italian Swabian") was the son of a German-Jewish glassware merchant and an Italian mother. At 12 he was sent to a boarding school near Wü rzburg, Germany. He later returned to a commercial school in Trieste, but his father's business difficulties forced him to leave school and become a bank clerk. He continued to read on his own and began to write. Svevo's first novel, A Life (1892), was revolutionary in its analytic, introspective treatment of the agonies of an ineffectual hero (a pattern Svevo repeated in subsequent works). A powerful but rambling work, the book was ignored upon its publication. So was its successor, As a Man Grows Older (1898), featuring another bewildered hero. Svevo had been teaching at a commercial school, and, with As a Man's failure, he formally gave up writing and became engrossed in his father-in-law's business. Ironically, business frequently required Svevo to visit England in the years that followed, and a decisive step in his life was to engage a young man, James Joyce, in 1907 as his English tutor in Trieste. They became close friends, and Joyce let the middle-aged businessman read portions of his unpublished Dubliners, after which Svevo timidly produced his own two novels. Joyce's tremendous admiration for them, along with other factors, encouraged Svevo to return to writing. He wrote what became his most famous novel, Confessions of Zeno (1923), a brilliant work in the form of a patient's statement for his psychiatrist. Published at Svevo's own expense, as were his other works, this novel was also a failure, until a few years later, when Joyce gave Svevo's work to two French critics, Valé ry Larbaud and Benjamin Cremieux, who publicised him and made him famous. While working on a sequel to Zeno, Svevo was killed in an automobile accident. Svevo has been recognised as one of the most important figures in modern Italian literary history and his three novels, A Life, As a Man Grows Older and Confessions of Zeno, are all recognised as masterpieces of Italian literature.