Italo Svevo

Italo Svevo (literally “Italian Souabe”, pseudonym of Ettore Schmitz ) is a Italian writer , born the December 19th 1861 with Trieste, and dead the September 13rd 1928 with Motta di Livenza, close to Trévise. Across a limited fame, he is regarded as the father of the psychoanalytical novel, a precursor of Marcel Proust.

Childhood and studies

Svevo is born in Trieste in 1861, of a Jewish father German and of an Italian mother, resulting from the Jewish community of Trieste. This city forms then part of the Empire Austro-Hungarian and until the end of the First World War will remain it. To the 12 years age, it is sent with his brothers Adolfo and Elio in a boarding school to Segnitz, close to Würzburg, in Bavaria. Their father estimated indeed that it was necessary to know German well to become trader. Ettore assimilates the German language quickly and discovers the large German thinkers, of which Arthur Schopenhauer (see on this point Mario Fusco, Italo Svevo, Conscience and reality , Gallimard, 1973, p.18-22). In 1878, it gives up its studies and goes back to Trieste to work in a bank.

Bibliographical career

In 1892, it publishes Una vita (the first title, a inetto , i.e. an incompetent, inapt, having been refused by the editor) and in 1898, Senilità but vis-a-vis the failure met, Svevo ceases the writing during nearly twenty years.

It then meets James Joyce, which will be a time its professor of English at the Berlitz School. It makes him read Senilità , that Joyce will appreciate at the point to know long passages of them by heart, and this one encourages it to take again the writing and to undertake the drafting of a new novel (it will be the Conscience of Zeno ). He also discovers the Psychanalyse of Sigmund Freud in 1910, of which he undertakes to translate the Science of the dreams .

In 1923, it knows the Célébrité, in particular in France (via Valery Larbaud and Benjamin Crémieux, enthusiastic defenders of his work) and in Italy with its work entitled the conscience of Zeno (“ Coscienza Di Zeno ”), a newspaper comprising of many autobiographical references , such as its love for the cigarette or its experiment of the trade.

He dies in September 1928 of the continuations of an car accident.

Quotations

“The life resembles the disease in what it proceeds by crises and progressive wear, as it comprises also its daily improvements and aggravations. But, unlike the other diseases, the life is always mortal. ” conscience of Zeno

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