Talk:Luigi Pirandello
From Academic Kids
(brushes away cobwebs) Well, Right You Are is doing a run in NYC as I write this (from elsewhere) and there might be some visitors coming.
My impression is that financial need drove him to study hard to get a good job as a professor of literature; that need was aggravated or caused by earthquake, by related ill fortunes of family business, and by another related factor, his wife's madeness; that an earthquake in Sicily in fact did initiate enormous disruption in his life; so that the earthquakes and their psychological victims in Right You Are as well as in As You Desire Me are reflections of the types of events that actually did happen.
On the fascism issue, I would like to know why does the article say that he expressed "enthusiasm" for fascism. Desire for patronage is possible; it's my impression that he had to look internationally for money; and that in any country, he could have faced challenges making his vision of theater real. I would also like to know what evidence he left indicating his true attitude--My impression is that The Mountain Giants and The New Colony make veiled or ambiguous critiques of fascism.
It might be worth noting that after his death it came to light that Pirandello left instructions for cremation, naked in a sheet. This was not only a slap in the face to the Church, which abhors cremation, but also to the fascists, who "did not want a world-famous fascist to slip off naked--i.e., without his black shirt" (Naked Masks, Eric Bentley ed., Appendix II, Biographical and Historical; p380 in ISBN 0-525-47006-9) I have an idea that Pirandello was in fact given a fancy funeral by Mussolini's government, in contradiction to his own wishes.
Would be nice to mention who he influenced/was influenced by. I speculate there's influence in one direction or another between LP and Kafka, Borges, and Ryunosuke Akutagawa--the parallel seems clear to me between LP's Right You Are and RA's In A Grove (popularly called Rashomon because that's what Kurosawa named the movie). Akutagawa definitely studied western literature. I would like to know what Pirandello knew of eastern literature. (In Pirandello, witnesses differ on who died; in Akutagawa, on how death occurred; Alternatively, perhaps both men were influenced by Robert Browning's The Ring and the Book)
-MunGe
