Luigi Pirandello [antikvár]

Introduction to the Third Edition, 1965 When I arrived in Italy for the first time in 1918 during World War I Gabriele D'Annunzio had reached the pinnacle of his fame, and I hero-worshipped the poet-condottiere, but preferred to listen to his impassioned oratory in the piazza in Venice and in Rome than to his works in the theatre. Within the short space of three years (1919-1922) I was to witness the ascendance of Pirandello as a new constellation at the precise moment when the star of the Archangel (as he was known to his legionaries) was beginning to set. Luigi Pirandello was only four years younger than D'Annunzio, who was born in 1863. Both authors lived in the same spiritual atmosphere, and the publication of their works followed a parallel course. D'Annunzio had been for forty years the most celebrated of all Italian writers and a figure of world significance as poet as well as man of action, whereas Pirandello's lortely art had grown to maturity apart from the main currents of the Italian literature of his day, which followed the vogue of Car-ducci's cult of Pagan antiquity and D'Annunzio's By-zantinism mixed with Nietzsche and Wagner. Pirandello deliberately shunned the D'Annunzian world like the plague, and continued in his secluded life to worship Alessandro Manzoni and Giacomo Leopardi. From the author of I Promessi Sposi he extracted a little of the boundless tolerance of Don Abbondio, but to this he added a liberal dose of wormwood which he drew from the desolate pessimism of Leopardi. Nature in