In the history of Italian and international literature there are numerous names, and many are the characters that are still talked about today. Italy, without false modesty, has given the world the greatest minds that have ever been seen! Thanks to the works of these brilliant artistsin fact, it was possible to reach the highest possible levels of perfection. Retracing the lives and deeds of these men and women is a must, and today we want to do it by remembering a very special date: the birthday of Luigi Pirandello!
Luigi Pirandello, the son of Chaos
"I am the son of Chaos", the great Luigi Pirandello asserted not long ago. In reality son of Chaos it really was. He was born in a wood called Cavusu, a name that the inhabitants of Girgenti (his native country) had roughly translated from the Greek Kaos. Pirandello saw the light for the first time, therefore, in a sunny Sicily, in 1867. His family was of middle-class extraction, and always had a very complex relationship with his parents, in particular with his father. This lack of communication led Pirandello to withdraw into himself, and to devote himself to constant introspection. With such a sensitive soul, the passion for literature did not take long to manifest itself. He enrolled at the University of Palermo in 1886, and then went to Rome, where he continued his studies in Romance philology. The spirit of Pirandello, at the time a bit fatal, caused him the aversion of the rector, so he had to complete his studies in Bonn.
Germany offered the enterprising Luigi the opportunity to take courses in philology, and to graduate with a thesis on the phonetic characteristics of the dialect of his Girgenti. In 1894 Pirandello he married Maria Antonietta Portulano, the daughter of a wealthy partner of her father. Although the marriage had the connotations more of a financial agreement than a love story, the passion between the two spouses broke out in a short time. Moreover, thanks to his wife's dowry, Pirandello lived in a very comfortable situation, which allowed him to move to Rome. In this golden picture, despair soon came forward: the couple lost their belongings, and Pirandello's wife fell into a profound psychotic crisis, from which he never recovered. Only after several convincing attempts, Pirandello agreed to have her hospitalized in an institute.
Luigi Pirandello's birthday: the memory of man and his masks
Certainly the life of Luigi Pirandello was full of pleasant moments, but above all difficult ones. Often a man's genius is his condemnation, and Pirandello knew it well. Being able to see the contradictions of the human soul is the art of a few, and Luigi was among these few. He was a philosopher, Pirandello, before he was a man of letters. He was a man before he was a philosopher. His introspective gifts were able to conceive the immense abyss that separates form from life, identity from appearance. Men are born free, but Chance upsets their lives, precluding any possibility of revenge. Society orders man how to behave, and in these constant orders, his ego gets lost, vanishes. Everyone does his part, and is obliged to follow the role and rules that this tyrant mother imposes on him. The ego, for its part, would like to manifest itself in a different way.
Only the intervention of chance can free it from its form, to assume another. To this other form, however, the ego becomes a slave again. This vicious circle with no exit is retraced by one of Pirandello's greatest works, The late Mattia Pascal. Man therefore cannot understand either others or himself, since everyone lives wearing a mask, behind which a thousand hide people different. These reflections are manifested even more clearly in another novel by the genius of Agrigento: One, none and a hundred thousand. In this work Pirandello touches the most sublime peaks of psychoanalytic introspection. While man struggles to find his own personality, all those that are hidden behind the mask make it no.
Pirandello and the ironic - humorous reaction
How much power in Pirandello's works! His reflections are current, lashing, decisive. Then as now, Pirandello was able to capture a snapshot of human society, full of hypocrisy and false myths. Despite postulating a profound lack of communication between men, Pirandello decided to try to have his say also with the theater. Here too, with Six characters in search of an author, Pirandello expresses the meaning mental of the scene: Fantasy takes possession of his mind, to introduce him to characters who want to live, without him looking for them. The paradox of life, the paradox of the will to be there. Therefore, once the reassuring but fallacious veil of respectability has fallen, there is nothing left to do of necessity, virtue, as they say. This is the case of The patent, where the jester (harassed by everyone because he is a bearer of bad luck) decides to embrace his condition, and to make it a profession, complete with a license.
As an investigator of man's weaknesses, Pirandello was also awarded the prestigious Nobel Prize for literature. Unique and inimitable, Luigi Pirandello, many years after his death, still knows how to surprise for the contemporaneity of his ideas. Paying homage to it becomes a duty, rediscovering it ... a pleasure!
