Born: Ettore Aron Schmitz in Trieste (then part of Austro-Hungarian Empire), 19 December 1861. Education: Educated at Jewish schools in Trieste to 1873; Brusselische Handels-und Erziehunginstitut, Segnitz-am-Main, 1873-78; Istituto Superiore Commerciale Revoltella, Trieste, 1878-80. Family: Married Livia Veneziani in 1896, one daughter. Career: Clerk, Trieste branch of Unionbank of Vienna, 1880-99; instructor in French and German commercial correspondence, Istituto Superiore Commerciale Revoltella, 1893-1900; partner in Ditta Veneziani (his wife’s family’s manufacturing firm), from 1899. Took English lessons from James Joyce in Trieste, from 1907. Died: 13 September 1928.
Publications
Collections
Opere di Italo Svevo, edited by Bruno Maier. 1954.
Opera omnia, edited by Bruno Maier. 4 vols., 1966-69.
The Works. 5 vols., 1967-80.
Edizione critica delle opere di Italo Svevo, edited by Bruno Maier. 1985-.
Fiction
Una vita. 1892; as A Life, translated by Archibald Colquhoun, 1963.
Senilita. 1898; as As a Man Grows Older, translated by Beryl de Zoete, 1932; as Emilio’s Carnival, translated by Beth Archer Brombert, 2001.
La coscienza di Zeno. 1923; as Confessions of Zeno, translated by Beryl de Zoete, 1930; as Zeno’s Conscience, translated by Dalya M. Sachs, 2001.
The Hoax, translated by Beryl de Zoete. 1929.
La novella del buon vecchio e della bellafanciulla. 1930; as The Nice Old Man and the Pretty Girl and Other Stories, translated by L. Collison-Morley, 1930.
Corto viaggio sentimentale e altri racconti inediti, edited by Umbro Apollonio. 1949; as Short Sentimental Journey and Other Stories, translated by Beryl de Zoete and others, 1967.
The Further Confessions of Zeno, translated by Ben Johnson and P.N. Furbank. 1969.
Il vegliando. 1987.
Plays
Terzetta spezzato (produced 1927). In Commedie, 1960.
Commedie (includes Terzetta spezzato; Un marito; L’avventura di Maria; Una commedia inedita; La verita; Inferiorita; Le ire di Giuliano; Le teorie del conte Alberto; Il ladro in casa; Primo del ballo; Atto unico; Con lapenna d’oro; La rigenerazione), edited by Umbro Apollonio. 1960.
Un marito (produced 1961). In Commedie, 1960.
L’avventura di Maria (produced 1966). In Commedie, 1960.
Una commedia inedita, La verita Inferiorita (produced 1967). In Commedie, 1960.
Other
James Joyce (lecture), translated by Stanislaus Joyce. 1950.
Corrispondenza con Valery Larbaud, Benjamin Cremieux e Marie Anne Comnene. 1953.
Saggi e pagine sparse, edited by Umbro Apollonio. 1954.
Diario per la fidanzata, edited by Bruno Maier and Anita Pittoni. 1962.
Lettere alla moglie, edited by Anita Pittoni. 1963.
Lettere: Eugenio Montale—Svevo. 1966.
Saba, Svevo, Comisso: Lettere inedite, edited by Mario Sutor. 1968.
Carteggio con gli scritti di Montale su Svevo, edited by Giorgio Zampa. 1976.
Carteggio con James Joyce, Valery Larbaud, Benjamin Cremieux, Marie Anne Comnene, Eugenio Montale, Valerio Jahier, edited by Bruno Maier. 1978.
Scritti su Joyce, edited by Giancarlo Mazzacurati. 1986.
Critical Studies:
Italo Svevo: The Man and the Writer by P.N. Furbank, 1966; Essays on Italo Svevo edited by Thomas F. Staley, 1969; Italo Svevo: A Critical Introduction, 1974, and Italo Svevo and the European Novel, 1977, both by Brian Moloney; Italo Svevo by Naomi Lebowitz, 1978; Italo Svevo, The Writer from Trieste: Reflections on His Background and His Work by Charles C. Russell, 1978; Italo Svevo by Beno Weiss, 1987; Italo Svevo: A Double Life by John Gatt-Rutter, 1988; Memoir of Italo Svevo by Livia Veneziana Svevo, translated by Isabel Quigly, 1989; Origin and Identity: Essays on Svevo and Trieste by Elizabeth Schachter, 2000.
The first Italian novelist who tackled such typical 20th-century themes as psychoanalysis and investigation into the self-obsessed modern anti-hero, Italo Svevo makes telling use of autobiography in order to depict the problems faced by his anti-heroes. His experience as a clerk in his father’s bank in Trieste provided him with the raw material for his first interesting, though artistically uneven novel, Una vita (A Life). The protagonist, Alfonso Nitti, is an inept young man unable to come to grips with the reality around him that does not match his grandiose dreams. This inability leads to an increasingly irreconcilable hiatus between his meaningless existence and his lofty aspirations, as a result of which he commits suicide.
Svevo’s second novel, Senilita (As a Man Grows Older), has as protagonist Emilio Brentani, a rather older version of Alfonso Nitti, who in spite of a minor literary success, finds himself at the age of 35 essentially a failure in art as well as in life. His senility is depicted as a psychological condition which, as in the case of Alfonso Nitti, prevents him from coming to terms with the reality of everyday life. His abortive attempt at self-fulfilment through a relationship with an exuberantly sexual working-class girl, Angiolina, serves merely to bring out his basic inability to cope with the most vital aspects of human experience. He ultimately renounces life and takes refuge in a self-contained dream world of his own making in which even the memory of his sister, neglected by Emilio in life and abandoned by him on her death (she dies of alcoholism), becomes distorted and merges with his idealized memory of Angiolina.
Svevo’s reputation as a major Italian novelist was secured with La coscienza di Zeno (Confessions of Zeno), the novel of his maturity. Zeno Cosini, the protagonist, is an older and wiser Brentani who has come to terms with his basic ineptitude and lack of direction in life. With the help of psychoanalysis he has learned to diagnose his own weakness and ”sickness” and to face the challenges of the ”healthy” everyday life of the generally corrupt and unthinking bourgeoisie of which he is a member. Thus he can look forward to a relatively comfortable old age—the reward of an almost Darwinian struggle to survive. The originality of Svevo’s view of the survival of the fittest lies in the fact that his anti-hero Zeno, although to all intents and purposes a perfect example of a vacillating, weak-willed, inept man, survives and prospers precisely because of his ability to cope with his shortcomings, and even to exploit them to his own advantage. His account of his efforts to overcome his fear of illness (deriving, according to him, from his addiction to cigarettes), his sense of guilt (for having desired the death of his father and for his infidelity to his wife), his feelings of jealousy (provoked by the manifestly virile behaviour of his initially successful brother-in-law) are recounted and analysed with an unfailing sense of humour and irony which elicit from the reader something like the indulgent sympathy one shows to a naughty but endearing child. It is, perhaps, a mark of Svevo’s originality that he was long neglected in Italy as a writer. Part of the reason for this neglect was undoubtedly his rather unstylistic Italian; and part was because of the fact that his anti-heroes were too far removed from the cult and ideal of the superman that a writer like D’Annunzio had done so much to propogate in Fascist Italy.
