Italo Svevo: A Double Life

Abstract

The Italian writer Italo Svevo, author of Confessions of Zeno and A s a Man Grows Older was in everyday existence the Triestine paint-manufacturer Ettore Schmitz. An Austrian-Italian and anticlerical Jew, a man of socialist sympathies who lived as a bourgeois capitalist, an Italian nationalist who in war-time supplied Italy's enemy, Svevo led a double life. This new biography describes Schmitz's boyhood and youth; his marriage to the engaging Livia, and his experiences as a businessman working for the family firm, including the trips to London which left him with vivid impressions of the English. It attempts also to trace Svevo's ambiguous relationship to the complex political situation in Trieste; and it relates the development of the writer within a culture that ignored him: his intellectual formation, his discovery of Freud, and his friendships with the painter Veruda and with James Joyce, who `discovered' him. Readers of Svevo; all those interested in Italian literature, the twentieth century novel, and James Joyce, and students of the history and cultu re of post-Garibaldi Italy will find this biography of great interest.

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