Novelist, born in Trieste, NE Italy. He worked as a bank clerk, then turned to writing, encouraged by James Joyce, who taught him English. He had a considerable success with La coscienza di Zeno (1923, The Confessions of Zeno), a psychological study of inner conflicts which breaks all established patterns and where the outside world exists only in the character's mind..
| Aron Ettore Schmitz (Italo Svevo) | |
|---|---|
| Italian writer and businessman | |
| Born |
19 December 1861 Trieste, Austria |
| Died |
13 September 1928 Motta di Livenza, Italy |
Aron Ettore Schmitz (December 19, 1861 – September 13, 1928), better known by the pseudonym Italo Svevo, was an Italian Jewish businessman and author of novels, plays, and short stories, who converted to Roman Catholicism after marrying Livia Veneziani.
Born in Trieste (then in Austria-Hungary), Svevo wrote the classic novel La Coscienza di Zeno (rendered as Confessions of Zeno, or Zeno's Conscience) and self-published it in 1923.
The work might have disappeared altogether if it were not for the efforts of James Joyce. Joyce had met Svevo in 1907, when Joyce tutored him in English while working for Berlitz in Trieste. Joyce read Svevo's earlier novel Senilità, which had also been largely ignored when published in 1898.
Joyce championed Confessions of Zeno, helping to have it translated into French and then published in Paris, where critics praised it extravagantly.
Svevo was a citizen of the Austro-Hungarian Empire until the end of the First World War.
Confessions of Zeno never looks outside the narrow confines of Trieste, much like Joyce's work, which never left Dublin in the last years of Ireland's time as a British colony.
There is a final connection between Svevo and the character Cosini.
Svevo likewise smoked for all of his life.
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