Vite scritte, personaggi vissuti

This essay focuses on the change of aesthetic and ethical perspectives in the evaluation of the relationship between life and literature in works of two major representatives of Italian fiction at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth century – Italo Svevo and Luigi Pirandello. While both authors start as heirs of nineteenth-century naturalist poetics and Italian verismo, however, they tend to revise mimetic function of literature and traditional narrative topoi, because they make efforts to give their works a metafictional character and to claim autonomy for fiction. Their literary characters struggle with writing of memories and they assume a narrative function. For Svevo’s Zeno Cosini writing becomes a liberating and self-confirming gesture: he is the man, whom he described. By contrast, for Pirandello’s character to write means giving up life, but in both cases, we see that the dimension of fiction appears to them truer and even more authentic. In the concept of literary work, Svevo and Pirandello refuse to accept the criterion of verisimilitude. The supposed border between life and fiction (literature) has been violated, the wall between the two dimensions collapsed.