Luigi Pirandello (1867 - 1936) was an Italian dramatist, novelist, short-story writer and poet, awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1934. His plays, above all Six Characters in Search of an Author and Henry IV, dismantled the conventions of realist theatre and made the instability of identity and truth their central subject. [1]
Early life and education
Pirandello was born on 28 June 1867 near Agrigento in Sicily, into a prosperous family whose wealth came from sulphur mining. He studied at Palermo and Rome before moving to Germany, where he took a doctorate in Romance philology at the University of Bonn in 1891 with a dissertation on the dialect of his native district. [1]
Returning to Rome, he taught Italian literature at a teachers' college and began publishing poetry and short stories. In 1894 he married Antonietta Portulano in a match arranged between the two families. [2]
Early writing and personal crisis
In 1903 a flood destroyed the sulphur mine in which both families' capital was invested, ruining them. His wife's mental health collapsed under the shock, and she spent many years in a condition of severe delusional jealousy before being institutionalised in 1919. Pirandello wrote intensively through this period to support the household, and the experience marked his preoccupation with the boundary between sanity, performance and self-deception. [1]
His novel The Late Mattia Pascal (1904), in which a man presumed dead assumes a new identity only to find it unliveable, brought him wider recognition. He also produced several hundred short stories, later collected as Novelle per un anno, and the essay On Humor (1908), on the comic as inseparable from the perception of suffering. [3]
Theatre
Pirandello turned decisively to the stage from about 1916. Right You Are (If You Think So) (1917) constructs a situation in which the truth about a family cannot be established and concludes that it need not be. Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921) brings six unfinished fictional figures onto a stage where a company is rehearsing, demanding that their story be played; its Rome premiere ended in uproar, but the play was quickly recognised internationally as a decisive break with realist drama. [1]
Henry IV (1922) followed, portraying a man who may or may not still believe himself to be a medieval emperor. From 1925 Pirandello directed his own company, the Teatro d'Arte di Roma, touring Europe and the Americas, and worked with the actress Marta Abba, for whom he wrote several later plays. [2]
Politics, Nobel Prize and death
Pirandello joined the National Fascist Party in 1924 and accepted state support for his theatrical company, an association that has complicated his posthumous reputation, though his plays contain no propagandistic content and his relations with the regime were often strained. [1]
He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1934 for what the Swedish Academy called his bold and ingenious revival of dramatic and scenic art. He died in Rome on 10 December 1936, leaving the play The Mountain Giants unfinished, and directed in his will that his funeral be conducted without ceremony. [4]
Legacy
Pirandello's techniques, the play within the play, the unreliable frame, the refusal of a single authoritative account of events, were absorbed by the theatre of the absurd and by later dramatists including Samuel Beckett, Jean Anouilh and Tom Stoppard. The adjective "Pirandellian" is used for works that expose their own fictional machinery. [2]
