Berecche and the War (Berecche e la guerra, 1934)

Berecche and the War is an unusual Collection in Stories for a Year due to the fact that the primary story included in it, “Berecche and the War,” is really less a short story and more a novella, as it is made up of eight chapters each the length of a short story. Pirandello thus added only seven additional stories to bring the total number of chapters plus independent stories to the customary fifteen.

In 1919 an edition of short stories with the same title, Berecche and the War, was published by Facchi in Milan. Prior to that, in 1915, the short story “Berecche and the War” was included in the volume Weeds from Our Garden (Erba del nostro orto; Milan: Studio Editoriale Lombardo).

All eight of the stories that were included in this Collection had already been published in newspapers or other periodicals: “Berecche and the War” first appeared with the title “Another Life” (“Un’altra vita”) in the Rassegna contemporanea (September 25, 1914); “One More” came out in La lettura (February 1931); “A Breath” appeared in Pegaso (July 1931); “Lucilla (Now that She’s Argued with the Nuns)” was printed in the Corriere della Sera (June 26, 1932); “Cinci” was also first published in La lettura (June 1932); and “The Soft Touch of Grass” (April 20, 1934), “At Night, A Geranium” (May 6, 1934), and “An Idea” (June 2, 1934) all appeared in the Corriere della Sera.

“Cinci” was one of the sources for the comedy One Does Not Know How (Non si sa come), which also adapted material from two other short stories (“The Reality of the Dream” and “In the Whirlpool”). It premiered in 1935.

Chapters in the short story “Berecche and the War” are composed of material from other, independent short stories, namely “Another Life,” which was first published in 1915, and “Fragment of the Chronicle of Marco Leccio and His War on Paper at the Time of Europe’s Great War” (“Frammento di cronaca di Marco Leccio e della sua guerra sulla carta nel tempo della grande guerra europea”), which was collected in the Appendix posthumously.

The Collection Berecche and the War consists of the following eight stories:

“Berecche and the War” (“Berecche e la guerra”)
“One More” (“Uno di più”)
“A Breath” (“Soffio”)
“An Idea” (“Un’idea”)
“Lucilla (Now that She’s Argued with the Nuns)” (“Lucilla (ora che s’è guastata con le monache)”)
“The Soft Touch of grass” (“I piedi sull’erba”)
“Cinci” (“Cinci”)
“At Nightfall, A Geranium” (“Di sera, un geranio”)