PIRANDELLO, LUIGI (1867-1936), Italian dramatist and novelist, was born on June 28, 1867, on a country estate near Gir genti (Sicily). He first went to Rome at the age of 19, staying there until 1891, when he went to Germany and graduated in philosophy at the University of Bonn. He subsequently returned to Rome and taught at the girls' high school until 1923. His first literary essays were in verse, a volume entitled Mal giocondo published in 1889, followed by a poem Pasqua di Gea (1891) and Elegie renane (1895). Another Sicilian writer, Luigi Capuana, persuaded him to devote himself to fiction, and in 1894 he pub lished his first novel, L'esclusa, in which his somewhat bitter realism already finds expression. Besides the novel, 11 turno, he began to publish short stories : Amori senza amore (1894) Quando ero motto (1903), Beffe della morte e della vita (1902, 1903), Bianche e nee (1904), etc. In 1904 his most celebrated novel, 11 fu Mattia Pascal, appeared, the story of a man, who having shammed being dead, tries in vain to begin his life anew in a different atmosphere and under another name. Other collections of short stories followed: Erma bifronte (1906), La Vita Nuda (Iwo), Terzetti (1912). He set forth his artistic creed in two volumes entitled Arte e scienza (1908). In 1913 his novel, I vecchi e i giovani, describing the drama of Italian life after the Risorgimento, was published in the Rassegna contemporanea. Other volumes of short stories appeared between 1914 and 1926, such as La trappola (1915), Un cavallo nella luna (1918), 11 carnevale dei morti (1919), Tu ridi (192o), and another novel Uno, nessuno e centomila was published in the Fiera letteraria.
In 1920 he said of his own art : I think that life is a very sad piece of buffoonery ; because we have in ourselves, without being able to know why, wherefore or whence, the need to deceive ourselves constantly by creating a reality (one for each and never the same for all), which from time to time is dis covered to be vain and illusory . . . . My art is full of bitter corn passion for all those who deceive themselves ; but this compassion cannot fail to be followed by the ferocious derision of destiny which condemns man to deception.
This despairing outlook attained its most vigorous expression in Pirandello's plays. In his youth he had shown a certain contempt for the drama, but in 1912 he was persuaded by the Sicilian play wright, Nino Martoglio, to dramatize one of his own short stories, La Morsa, as a one-act piece. His first three-act comedy, Se non cosi (1917), was produced by Marco Parga at Milan in 1913; and then many plays—dramas and comedies—of which the most celebrated are 11 berretto a sonagli; Liola (1917); Cosi e se vi pare (1918) ; L'uomo, la bestia e la virtu (1918) ; Ma non e una cosy seria (1918) ; Come prima, meglio di prima (1920) ; Sei per sonaggi in cerca d'autore (1921) ; L'imbecille; Enrico IV V. (1922) ;
Vestire gli ignudi (1922); La vita the ti diedi; L'altro figlio; Ciascuno a suo modo; La sagra del signore della nave; La giara.
Pirandello's dramatic art was at first criticized for being too "cerebral," for not seeing life as it really is and for arbitrarily deforming it. The Roman critics first discovered the real meaning of Pirandello's ideology and the human sense of his plays. His main themes are : the necessity and the vanity of illusion, the multiform appearances, all of them unreal, of what is presumed to be the truth, man is not what he thinks he is, but he is "one, no one and a hundred thousand," accordingly as he appears to this person or to that, and is always different from what he creates himself in his own mind. Hence the supreme catastrophe, when a moral looking-glass suddenly reveals to him the image of him self which others see, i.e., what he is to others. Most of Piran dello's plays deal with a lower middle class milieu, peopled with clerks, teachers, lodging-house keepers, etc., from whose modest vicissitudes he draws conclusions of vast human significance. Typical is Cosi e se vi pare, in which he proves that it is impos sible to know the real truth. Enrico IV. develops in a broader sense ; that is, a drama in which we have a man who renounces his changing, empty and vain existence to play the part of a mad man, and pretends to believe himself an historical personage, Henry IV. All this might be merely theatrical trickery if it were not seared by a deep anguish, characterizing a philosophy which has destroyed all faith in the absolute, in reality, in any fixed limits outside individual personality.
Pirandello's plays have rapidly achieved success throughout Italy and abroad, and have been translated into some 15 languages. In 1925 he created an art theatre of his own in Rome, where new Italian and foreign plays are performed, and in the summer of the same year he brought his company on a tour to England to produce his own plays in London (at the New Oxford theatre), to Paris, Basle and 18 theatres in Germany. He died from pneu monia on Dec. Io, 1936. (S. D'A.) See W. Starkie, Luigi Pirandello (1926) and F. Pasini, Luigi Piran dello (1927, bibl.).