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Svevo

Italo Svevo
Svevo.jpg
Portrait of Svevo
Born Aron Ettore Schmitz
(1861-12-19)19 December 1861
Trieste, Austrian Empire
Died 13 September 1928(1928-09-13) (aged 66)
Motta di Livenza, Italy
Nationality Italian
Occupation Novelist, short story writer, playwright, businessman
Notable work La Coscienza di Zeno
Spouse(s) Livia Veneziani

Aron Ettore Schmitz (19 December 1861 – 13 September 1928), better known by the pseudonym Italo Svevo (Italian: [ˈiːtalo ˈzvɛːvo]), was an Italian writer, businessman, novelist, playwright, and short story writer.

A close friend of Irish novelist and poet James Joyce, Svevo was considered a pioneer of the Psychological novel in Italy and is best known for his classic Modernist novel La Coscienza di Zeno (1923), a work that had a profound effect on the movement.

Born in Trieste (then in Austrian Empire, after 1867 Austria-Hungary) as Aron Ettore Schmitz to a Jewish German father and an Italian mother, Svevo was one of seven children and grew up enjoying a passion for literature from a young age, reading Goethe, Schiller, Shakespeare and the classics of Russia.

Svevo was a citizen of the Austro-Hungarian Empire until the end of the First World War. He spoke Italian as a second language (as he usually spoke the Triestine dialect). Due to his germanophone ancestry by his father, he and his brothers were sent to a boarding school near Würzburg, Germany, where he learnt fluent German.

After returning to Trieste in 1880, Svevo continued his studies for a further two years at Istituto Revoltella before being forced to take financial responsibility when his father filed for bankruptcy after his once successful glassware business failed. This 20-year period as a bank clerk at Unionbank of Vienna served as inspiration for his first novel Una Vita.


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