Svevo, Italo

(pseud. Ettore Schmitz, 1861–1928)

   Born in Trieste, Italo Svevo was a neglected genius who, by bitter irony, was killed in a road accident just as he was winning European-wide fame for his dense, intellectually challenging novels. Svevo worked in obscurity for most of his career. Financial problems forced him to skip a university education and to work as a bank clerk from 1880 until 1899 (when he became a partner in his father-in-law’s business). He was accordingly self-educated, reading widely in German idealist philosophy and the French realists.

   Svevo’s first novel, Una Vita (A Life), was published in 1892 to general critical indifference. His second novel, Senilita (Senility, 1898), met the same fate. Yet both novels were remarkable and meticulously observed portrayals of ordinary middle-class individuals unable to escape their own deficiencies and the circumstances of their lives. After the critical disappointment of Senilita, Svevo was silent for over 20 years. In 1905, he met James Joyce, who was living in Trieste at that time. He became a close friend of the great Irish writer, and in 1925, after Joyce had achieved international renown, he was able to bring Svevo’s masterpiece, La coscienza di Zeno (The Conscience of Zeno, 1923), to the attention of the leading literary critics of the day. After years of anonymity, Svevo was suddenly recognized as one of the most insightful contemporary novelists. La coscienza di Zeno merited this extraordinary acclaim. The novel is the diary of Zeno Cosini, a middle-aged man who has been encour aged by his analyst to write down his memoirs as a way of curing himself of nicotine addiction. As the tale unfolds, it becomes obvious that Zeno’s compulsive smoking is only a symptom of a deeper malaise, a manifestation of his profound alienation from the structures of modern life. Like Joyce and Marcel Proust, Svevo concentrates on the depiction of his central character’s inner life, not, as in 19th-century fiction, upon the external events that constitute the story. Svevo’s novel is today recognized as one of the classics of literary modernism and one of the most successful literary representations of Freudian theories of the unconscious.

   See also Literature.