Italo Svevo: A Psychoanalytical Novelist

Among the increasing number of literary figures to make marked use of psychoanalytical implications, one of the most important is Italo Svevo. Although up to the time of his premature death in a motor accident in 1928 but five years of recognition had been his, he is at present in the way of being regarded as the greatest modern Italian novelist. His friendship with James Joyce, dating from 1906, paved the way for the introduction of his work to other lands, for Benjamin Crémieux and Valéry Larbaud, to whom he called its attention, in 1926 translated extracts from Svevo's last and most deliberately psychoanalytical novel into French. It was Daudet who provided the connecting link between Proust and the Italian writer, whose Coscienza di Zeno he hailed as a work of genius. In London The Living Age hazarded mention of it in the same breath with A La Recherche du Temps Perdu and Ulysses, while its English translation, by Beryl de Zoete, was greeted with unstinted praise by Arnold Bennett, Frank Swinnerton, and the critics of The Nation and Athenaeum and The New Statesman. In France and Germany it has long since gone into several editions, and even Hungarian and Polish translations are either in preparation or already out.

Published in 1923, the last and most involved of Svevo's three novels, La Coscienza di Zeno is formally the least perfect of them, although it has been prophesied the one by which the author will be best known. It consists of a series of loosely connected autobiographical episodes in the life of the eponym, written at the instance of a psychoanalyst on whom he has fixed a negative transference. Its method elicited the designation, “laboriously analytical,” from Giulio Caprin in the Corriere della Sera, and yet” casually analytical” might be more accurate. The nature of the author's acquaintance with psychoanalysis we are not now in a position to know definitively. He appears to have set out to use a background of psychoanalytical knowledge, with an abs