Italo Svevo

(pen name of Ettore Schmitz). Born Dec. 19, 1861, in Trieste; died Sept. 13, 1928, in Motta di Livenza, in the region of Venice. Italian writer.

Sevevo’s life and works were associated with Trieste. After his autobiographical novels A Life (1892) and As a Man Grows Older (1898) went unnoticed, he did not publish for 25 years. The realistic novel Confessions ofZeno (1923; Russian translation, 1972), which is permeated with an occasionally grotesque irony, revealed his talent for psychological self-examination. It satirizes both the hero’s own milieu of clever Trieste operators and bourgeois society in general. Svevo foresaw that technological progress would prove to be a mixed blessing for this society. It was only after the publication of Confessions of Zeno that Svevo gained recognition. In Western European literary studies he is regarded as a precursor of Joyce and Proust and a founder of the stream-of-consciousness literary method. However, his work is based on the traditions of the 19th-century realistic novel.