Italo Svevo
Una Vita

The biography of Italo Svevo is, in summary, that of an "everyman" employee, without much importance within his office and society, eager to escape from the perceived nothingness of his ego and the emptiness of everyday life through literature, study, and the culture of an intellect that is otherwise alienated and drained. Svevo's process of escape is nonetheless curious and worthy of being counted among the intellectual geniuses produced during the last century: Aaron Hector Schmitz, the real name of the Triestine inevitably caught between Germanness, Italianness, and Slavic influences, transfers into his "liberating" production the dramas, passions, conflict, estrangement, and misery of the life he seeks to escape. Svevo, in short, grasps his nullified self and elevates it to literary dignity, without building distant worlds, crafting other fantasies, or dreaming of a positivist reality of verified facts, exact sciences, and incontrovertible data.

Svevo, like the alter duplicates in his works, struggled greatly to achieve success, fame, or, more simply, the slightest fulfillment of the self torn apart by the existential crisis of the hollow man. Una Vita, his first novel, published in 1892 under the famous pseudonym conciliating German and Italian culture, was almost ignored by Central European and Mediterranean intelligentsia, and the same fate was reserved for Senilità and La Coscienza di Zeno until the support of sacrosanct figures like Joyce, one of Svevo's greatest admirers, and Montale began to stir some paltry curiosity in the dull publishing houses, reluctant to promote the works of one of the most fascinating decadents of the early twentieth century. Fate was even more malicious for our Italo, who died in a car accident, a death that, at least in these recent years, is that of an "any man," an unnamed individual.

The plot of Una Vita is only seemingly simple. Alfonso Nitti, a young twenty-year-old who came to a never-mentioned Trieste from the Friuli countryside, works as a correspondent at a bank branch, subjugated by the dark and enigmatic director Maller and almost ignored by his colleagues. This young man's life changes suddenly when he is introduced to the "salon" of adepts who meet every Wednesday at the chief's residence, Maller, in fact: here Alfonso begins to awkwardly and carelessly court the daughter Annetta, a capricious young girl capable of heartlessly ensnaring and deceiving suitors. The relationship between the two is abruptly interrupted by Nitti's return to his childhood home, officially to care for his sick mother, a sort of escape that the beloved herself advises him to undertake in order to officially "fiscalize" the union and make it acceptable and bearable in the eyes of the Maller household. Alfonso’s holiday, extended due to his mother's illness and death (which he actually considered healthy and did not even remotely foresee such a quick and tragic death), instead becomes an opportunity for the wicked Annetta to break the bond with the young man and become engaged to the more affluent Macario. Nitti is thus interdicted, albeit without concrete manifestation, by the Mallers, "rewarded" by the former lover with unique hatred and distrust and estranged from the director's favor, who even intends to relegate him to accounting. Under the weight of these threats, overshadowed by Annetta's contempt, Alfonso finds in suicide the only remedy to a rejected and vacuous existence.

The character of Alfonso Nitti is interesting to analyze and understand, perhaps because of the multitude of aspects and nuances that insinuate themselves into his ego and psyche. "Inept" and "idiot" as in the best decadentist tradition, Nitti is a man devoid of courage, will, security, desire to act, determination, and decision. Counterweights to all this lack of "vital energy" are a deep, almost childish pride (typical his vague yet annoyed and emphasized answers to interlocutors) and a sort of mix of apathy, selfishness, and insensitivity: in the face of others' pain (that is not of people strictly dear to him), he seems to feel discomfort, likely fearful of showing inactivity already widely demonstrated in his daily actions. His relationship with Annetta, then, represents the culmination of this cauldron of inexpressiveness, the failed attempt to revive the myth of the nineteenth-century romantic gentleman. Maller's daughter indeed plays the role of a femme fatale ante-litteram, capable of alluring the callow lover, trapping him in a lustful web, and abandoning him in an ocean of false promises and renouncing him once ashore. And thus, the tragic solution that Alfonso devises to free himself from a hyper-decadent malaise, to rid himself of a comportment that, although with notable hitches, never strayed into pantomime and theatrical drama. It is the nearly agreeing finale of a life, one of many, neglected and rejected, the existence of a bumbler who perhaps does not know he is one and perhaps does not wish to be one.

Although far from the pinnacle of La Coscienza di Zeno, Una Vita forcefully announces Svevo’s arrival on the Italian-European literary scene, an arrival terribly muted that deserved a better reception and correct understanding by a bourgeois mass incapable of reflecting on the nothingness of cookie-cutter existences, deprived of the "surplus" inherent in the soul of the true Man and not of the Inept who is such without wanting to be.