Svevo, Italo, 1861-1928, Italian novelist, whose real name was Ettore Schmitz, b. Trieste. A businessman, he wrote several works of fiction, but remained practically unknown until discovered by James Joyce. His fiction is psychological and introspective, his characters mainly narcissistic, and his style witty. His best-known work, which has been called Italy's first modernist novel, is La coscienza di Zeno (1923, tr. The Confessions of Zeno, 1930, and Zeno's Conscience, 2001); also translated are Una Vita (1892, tr. A Life, 1963), Senilità, (1898; tr. As a Man Grows Older, 1949, rev. tr. 1977, repr. 2001; tr. Emilio's Carnival, 2001), and Una burla riuscita (1928, tr. The Hoax, 1929).

orig. Ettore Schmitz

(born Dec. 19, 1861, Trieste, Austrian Empire—died Sept. 13, 1928, Motta di Livenza, Italy) Italian writer. Though family financial difficulties forced him to leave school and become a bank clerk, he read on his own and began to write. A Life (1892), revolutionary in its analytical, introspective treatment of an ineffectual hero, was ignored on publication, as was As a Man Grows Older (1898). He gave up writing until, encouraged by James Joyce (then living in Trieste), he produced his most famous novel, Confessions of Zeno (1923), a brilliant work in the form of a patient's statement for his psychiatrist. He died in an auto accident. Two short-story collections, essays, dramatic works, correspondence with Eugenio Montale, and his unfinished Further Confessions of Zeno (1969) were published after his death. He is regarded as a pioneer of the psychological novel.

Learn more about Svevo, Italo with a free trial on Britannica.com.

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.

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 beliefs.

Schmitz was a citizen of the Austro-Hungarian Empire until the end of the First World War. He spoke Italian as a second language 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 home, 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).

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)
• A Perfect Hoax

References

• Svevo, Italo. Zeno's Conscience. Trans. William Weaver. New York: Vintage International, 2001.
• Furbank, Philip N., Italo Svevo: The Man and the Writer (1966)
• Gatt-Rutter, J., Italo Svevo: A Double Life (1988)
• Moloney, Brian, Italo Svevo: A Critical Introduction (1974)

External links

• Novels and stories of Italo Svevo
• Italo Svevo
• Works by Svevo: text with concordances and frequency list
• 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