Svevo, Italo (redirected from Ettore Schmitz)

Svevo, Italo (ē`tälō zvā`vō), 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).

Bibliography

See biographies by P. N. Furbank (1966) and B. Weiss (1987); studies by B. Moloney (1974 and 1977), and L. G. Subrizi (1984).

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Svevo, Italo

 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.

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Svevo, Italo 

(pen name of Ettore Schmitz). Born Dec. 19, 1861, in Trieste; died Sept. 13, 1928, in Motta di Livenza, in the region of Venice. Italian writer.

Sevevo’s life and works were associated with Trieste. After his autobiographical novels A Life (1892) and As a Man Grows Older (1898) went unnoticed, he did not publish for 25 years. The realistic novel Confessions ofZeno (1923; Russian translation, 1972), which is permeated with an occasionally grotesque irony, revealed his talent for psychological self-examination. It satirizes both the hero’s own milieu of clever Trieste operators and bourgeois society in general. Svevo foresaw that technological progress would prove to be a mixed blessing for this society. It was only after the publication of Confessions of Zeno that Svevo gained recognition. In Western European literary studies he is regarded as a precursor of Joyce and Proust and a founder of the stream-of-consciousness literary method. However, his work is based on the traditions of the 19th-century realistic novel.

WORKS

Opera omnia, vols. 1–3. Edited by B. Maier. Milan [1966–68].

REFERENCES

Gramsci, A. “‘Otkrytie’ Italo Svevo.” In O literature i iskusstve. Moscow, 1967.
Khlodovskii, R. “Bolezn’ Dzeno.” Inostrannaia literatura, 1973, no. 6.
Lunetta, M. Invito alla lettura di Italo Svevo. Milan, 1972.
Spagnoletti, G. Svevo. Milan, 1972.

G. D. BOGEMSKII