By Sara Maria Collura.
Courtesy of the Author.
Pirandello’s works cannot be categorized within any contemporary literary movement. His political ideas were influenced by Bergson and his essay on laughter, in which the philosopher argues that irony is a form of detachment from the reality one faces.
Luigi Pirandello – A Brief Biography
Considered an unusual and hard-to-categorize writer, Luigi Pirandello was born on June 28, 1867, in Agrigento, Sicily. He came from a wealthy family (owners of a sulfur mine) and spent his childhood in Porto Empedocle and Villaseta, where they lived in a small house in the Caos district. Pirandello liked to call himself a “son of Chaos, and not allegorically.”
Living during the transition between the 19th and 20th centuries, between Naturalism and the beginnings of Decadentism, Pirandello did not attend school but was educated by a private tutor. In 1882, his family moved to Palermo, where he completed his classical high school studies. In 1887, he moved to Rome to study at the Faculty of Letters. Due to a disagreement with a professor, he had to leave the Roman university and finish his studies at the University of Bonn, where he graduated on March 21, 1891, with a degree in Romance Philology. His thesis focused on the sounds and developments of the dialect of Girgenti (now Agrigento). After completing his studies, he returned to Rome, where he settled permanently after marrying Maria Antonietta Portulano, with whom he had two sons and a daughter. The following years marked the beginning of his literary career.
In 1903, however, the flooding of his father’s mine caused a severe financial crisis for the family. This event changed Pirandello’s personal life, forcing him to work to make ends meet and to cope with his wife’s mental illness, which worsened after the financial collapse.
The period of World War I was particularly unhappy and dramatic for Pirandello: his eldest son, Stefano, went off to fight in the war, and his wife’s health deteriorated to the point that she had to be institutionalized in 1919.
In 1924, Pirandello joined the Fascist Party, although his relationship with the regime was never subservient to Mussolini. In 1929, Mussolini appointed him to the Accademia d’Italia, which contributed to his recognition as one of the world’s greatest playwrights. In 1934, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Pirandello died on December 10, 1936, after contracting pneumonia during the filming of a new adaptation of his novel Il fu Mattia Pascal. According to his final wishes, he was cremated, and his ashes were scattered near the “Villa del Caos” in Agrigento, where he was born.
Pirandello was one of the most prolific writers, producing not only novels but also numerous plays and even some poetry collections early in his career. His literary work is not divided into distinct creative periods; instead, he wrote poetry, short stories, novels, critical essays, and plays simultaneously. Pirandello sought to introduce new forms and structures into literature, not only in theater but also in narrative.
He began publishing as a poet: while studying in Palermo, he released his first poetry collection, Mal giocondo, in 1889. In Rome, he met Luigi Capuana, who encouraged him to write prose. Regarding novels, Pirandello aimed to move away from traditional forms, particularly the naturalist novel, which he believed had exhausted its purpose.
In 1901, he published his first novel, L’esclusa, the story of a woman unjustly accused of adultery. This novel, initially serialized and later published as a book, marked his transition from the verist narrative model to a “humoristic” style, blending tragic and comic elements, a hallmark of Pirandello’s work.
The following year, Pirandello wrote Il fu Mattia Pascal, which marked the beginning of his humoristic phase. Serialized in Nuova Antologia and later published as a book, it was quickly translated into multiple languages. Il fu Mattia Pascal brought Pirandello success, as it was recognized as the first Italian novel to break away from 19th-century ideology and embrace a new narrative form. This was followed by other novels, including I vecchi e i giovani (1913). At the same time, he began contributing short stories to Corriere della Sera.
However, Pirandello’s true passion was theater. He incorporated elements of futurism, the grotesque, and surrealism into his plays. After achieving success with Pensaci, Giacomino! and Liolà (both from 1916), he continued his dramatic ascent with works like Così è (se vi pare), Il berretto a sonagli, and Il piacere dell’onestà.
1921 saw the staging of Sei personaggi in cerca d’autore (Six Characters in Search of an Author), a complex and innovative “theater within theater” that initially puzzled Roman audiences but later achieved great success in Milan. This was followed by Enrico IV, which solidified Pirandello’s international reputation. His plays were performed on Broadway, and his novels began to be adapted into films.
In 1925, encouraged by his son Stefano and other young writers, Pirandello founded the Teatro d’Arte, with Marta Abba and Ruggero Ruggeri as leading actors. The company began touring, and in 1926, Pirandello published his last novel, Uno, nessuno e centomila. In 1929, Mondadori published his collections Maschere nude and Novelle per un anno.
In 1930, Come tu mi vuoi was performed, followed by Questa sera si recita a soggetto. In 1936, Pirandello fell ill with pneumonia during the filming of a new adaptation of Il fu Mattia Pascal and passed away, leaving his final play, I giganti della montagna (The Giants of the Mountain), unfinished.
Pirandello’s works cannot be easily categorized within any contemporary literary movement. His political ideas were influenced by Bergson and his essay on laughter, in which the philosopher argues that irony is a detachment from the reality one faces.
In all of Pirandello’s humoristic texts, the tragic and the comic are intertwined. He moved beyond Verismo, which viewed reality as objective and autonomous. For Pirandello, reality is life—a continuous flow, and anything detached from this flow begins to die. Reality has multiple facets and cannot be understood rationally. Human identity is also multifaceted, leading to the concept of the mask: beneath the mask, there is no one, or rather, there is an incoherent flow of ever-changing states.
This lack of unity results in the annihilation of the person, who becomes, as paraphrased from one of his novel titles, “one” because we claim to have a form, “no one” because we lack a definitive personality, and “a hundred thousand” because we appear differently to each observer. Each of these forms is a fictional construct, a “mask” imposed by society. The only escape from this situation is through imagination, irrationality, or madness.
Pirandello’s rejection of social life gives rise to a new character who “has understood the game” and isolates himself, observing with humor those trapped by the mechanisms of reality.
Pirandello’s theater is revolutionary, both in its narrative techniques and its content. He exposes the fiction of theater, asserting that it is a “double fiction” because it simulates life, which is already, in itself, a fiction—a performance.
Sara Maria Collura
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