Editors’ Introduction to Stories for a Year

By Lisa Sarti and Michael Subialka

Luigi Pirandello is one of the most famous Italian writers of the twentieth century, both in Italy and across the world. Born in Agrigento, Sicily, in 1867 to a well-off family that invested in local sulfur mines, he ultimately spent significant time in major cities across Europe, including living abroad in Germany (first Bonn, later Berlin), and traveling worldwide. However, he spent most of his life working in Rome, where he died unexpectedly of pneumonia in 1936. While he had already traveled the great centers of European culture in the previous decades, making a name for himself, and had been affirmed as a leader of Italian culture in Mussolini’s Fascist state, his international fame was truly cemented when he won the 1934 Nobel Prize in Literature. [1] The Nobel citation recognized him “for his bold and ingenious revival of dramatic and scenic art,” emphasizing the source of Pirandello’s worldwide prestige: his paradigm-shifting experiments in modern drama. [2]

In fact, from the time of his first global hit, Six Characters in Search of an Author (Sei personaggi in cerca d’autore, first staged in Italy in 1921 and quickly taken on the road in capitals across Europe, and across the ocean on Broadway, as well), Pirandello became both a well-known name and directly associated with a challenging new style of metatheatrical, mind-bending modernism. In the decade-and-a-half that followed, Pirandello revolutionized the stage in a slew of thought-provoking and convention-breaking plays – questioning the nature of identity and truth in works like Henry IV (Enrico IV, 1922); the nature of artistic representation in pieces like Tonight We Improvise (Questa sera si recita a soggetto, 1930) and his final, unfinished play, The Mountain Giants (I giganti della montagna, 1937); the epistemological limits of science, religion, and political and social beliefs in works like Lazarus (Lazzaro, 1929) and The New Colony (La nuova colonia, 1928); and the confining roles we are assigned to perform in life and in art, a theme particularly prominent in the series of plays inspired by and written for his lead actress and muse, Marta Abba, including As You Desire Me (Come tu mi vuoi, 1930) and Finding Oneself (Trovarsi, 1932). [3] In the end, Pirandello’s theatrical production was prolific, including some 43 works in Italian (both full-length plays and one-acts) over a period spanning from 1910 to his death in 1936. [4]

It is unremarkable enough, then, that the Nobel Prize was awarded for his renovation of the stage and that Pirandello’s international fame has always been most closely tied to his success as a dramatist. And yet, to think of Pirandello only as a master of the modern stage is to miss a great deal. In fact, Pirandello’s creative life unfolded in practically every genre and medium imaginable: from early on he was an avid amateur painter (Di Lieto, Luigi Pirandello pittore; Alessio, Pirandello pittore; Di Lieto, Sarti, and Subialka, Scrittura d’immagini); he wrote several collections of poetry, including a translation of Goethe’s Roman Elegies (Pirandello, Saggi…; Pirandello, Selected Poems); in the last two decades of his life he was active in the nascent film industry, writing screenplays and working furiously to have major plays and novels adapted for the silver screen (Càllari, Pirandello e il cinema; daVinci Nichols and Bazzoni, Pirandello and Film); and across that entire span he was a prolific writer of prose works that were equally fundamental to the transformation of Italian literature in the period (Ganeri, Pirandello romanziere).

His seven novels – published between 1901 (The Outcast; L’esclusa) and 1926 (One, No One, and One Hundred Thousand; Uno, nessuno e centomila) – include some of the most famous works of Italian modernism – most notably, perhaps, the 1904 novel The Late Mattia Pascal (Il fu Mattia Pascal), and a work published in 1915 and then revised and republished with a new title in 1925, Shoot! (Si gira… in 1915, Quaderni di Serafino Gubbio operatore in 1925). The latter was among the first major “cinema novels” in Europe – a novel not only about but in many ways operating within the logic of the new artistic technologies of the film industry. [5] It shares with his earlier The Late Mattia Pascal a concern about the difficulties of asserting a fixed identity and the struggles of living in the modern urban landscape, among other key themes. Likewise, both use strategies of fragmentation, stream-of-consciousness writing, narrative irony, and playful experimentation to challenge the conventions of nineteenth-century realist fiction, speaking to the vicissitudes of Italian modernization, urbanization, and technological transformations. [6] Pirandello’s novels, which he wrote over the course of more than two and a half decades, are pillars of modernist literature, and reason enough for fame in their own right (cfr. Lucente, “Non conclude”).

But if all this wasn’t enough, there is another creative endeavor that occupied Pirandello even longer than all these others: his nearly-obsessive writing of short stories. Pirandello’s short stories span not only the longest period of any genre in his output, with the first, “Little Hut: Sicilian Sketch” (“Capannetta: Bozzetto siciliano”) published in a newspaper in 1894 (the same year that he would put together his first collection of stories, as well, Loveless Loves; Amori senza amore), when Pirandello was only seventeen, and the last stories still in the works at the time of his death in 1936. They also encapsulate a tremendous breadth in terms of content, style, and audience. His stories range from lifelike representations of the real social conditions in Sicily’s sulfur mines and naturalist interest in social and class relations to mind-bending explorations of bizarre events, including abnormal or even parapsychological states of existence. The former focus ties Pirandello’s short story production to the concerns typical of Sicilian verismo, a realist movement from the late 1800s spearheaded by Giovanni Verga and Luigi Capuana, who was a friend and mentor to Pirandello after he moved to Rome in 1892. [7] The latter type of story, on the other hand, draws Pirandello’s mature production closer to the ethos of a European avant-garde movement like Surrealism (cfr. Jewell; Petronio). We consider these different thematic and stylistic elements in more detail below (see “Style and Themes”). From Sicilian realism to European avant-gardism, Pirandello’s short stories not only reveal the multifaceted nature of his own background but also speak to the way Pirandello increasingly engaged international movements at the forefront of modernist cultural renewal.

In fact, Pirandello’s oldest son, Stefano (born in 1895, a year after Pirandello’s marriage to Maria Antonietta Portulano), wrote of his father’s interest in short stories in no uncertain terms, stating that the famous playwright liked to think that in the end, his theatrical production would be viewed as a parenthesis in his career as a prose writer (Landi, 15). It is perhaps no surprise, then, that Pirandello made a habit of using his short stories as source material for many of his plays: no fewer than 16 of his plays are in fact adaptations of his own short stories. This tendency to self-plagiarize, adapt, or move characters or ideas or even paragraphs from one work to another was something that spanned Pirandello’s whole writerly career; but it was especially pronounced in the way that he used his short stories as a foundation for other works, making them into almost an experimental laboratory for the characters and settings that would populate his broader corpus (O’Rawe).

The lifelong interest Pirandello had in writing short stories was eventually channeled toward a massive, unfinished project. At the beginning he published his stories individually in a host of outlets, mostly newspapers and cultural journals where short stories or serially-published novels were a frequent presence, and then he collected them in short volumes to sell. But by 1919 Pirandello had begun to envision a larger structure that would collect together all of his short stories and arrange them into a multi-volume whole. The collection would be called Stories for a Year (Novelle per un anno). He began gathering together this multi-volume collection in 1922, but at the time of his death Pirandello had completed only 244 stories, falling short of his title’s aspiration by some hundred and twenty days/novelle. Nonetheless, the body of short stories he left behind him is intimidating, to say the least – not just to the translator but also, perhaps to the reader. For frame of reference, Giovanni Boccaccio’s famous medieval collection of stories, The Decameron (~1350-1353), which was the founding example for this genre in Italian literature, numbered a total of 100 – ten groupings of stories, “days” in the fictional frame of his collection, each featuring ten tales. Giambattista Basile’s 17th-century collection, the Pentamerone or the Tale of Tales (Lo cunto de li cunti, 1634-1636), was an even more modest fifty stories told over the course of five imagined “days.” Pirandello’s ambition, then, was daring: implicitly, he aimed to make himself the most prolific short story writer in the Italian tradition.

Reading Stories for a Year: Title, Structure, “Collections,” Style, and Themes

Perusing Pirandello's short stories may feel like leafing through the book of his life. From the very first story he wrote as a teenager, “Little Hut: Sicilian Sketch” (1884), to the very last one, “Effects of an Interrupted Dream” (“Effetti di un sogno interrotto,” 1936), published in the Corriere della Sera the day before his death, Pirandello’s tales map an intimate, and occasionally autobiographical, landscape through which the reader can journey. The sensation of traveling new lands coincides with the way in which art and life overlap in his short stories, a mixing of realms that is immediately palpable to the reader. His fictional worlds resound with the author’s conviction that life and fiction coincide, that continuous narration covers all spaces of existence. [8] In the end—for Pirandello—short stories revolve around the principle that life is really a tale in which the dynamics of reality are shaped by those of fantasy, validating his belief that the drama of daily life always encompasses imagination.

The project of the short stories thus realized Pirandello’s vision and desire to narrate life in all its facets, imaginary and real. He was dedicated to this task with remarkable perseverance until the very end of his life. His collected tales can in fact be compared to a puzzle whose pieces were tirelessly placed one after another at different stages of the author’s career. Quite predictably, however, the determination and speed with which the material multiplied in the writer's hands soon posed a problem. The vast material Pirandello was progressively collecting hardly made for an organic grouping, as it encompassed a wide span of inspirations and sources, from the local news and gossip of rural Sicilian life to the author’s personal emotions, family experiences, and poetic and philosophical ideas. Furthermore, Pirandello did not seem to be encumbered by the need to create a thematic flow or have the reader read the stories in any specific order. What he wanted was for his readers to read “a short story a day, for a whole year”— a wish that did not actually solve the problem of how to arrange the stories. How could the collection be presented to the public without causing bewilderment? And above all, how could unrelated pieces of prose be grouped so that they would be shaped into a coherent and meaningful whole?

Title and Structure

It is somewhat easy to frame Pirandello’s seven novels and dozens of plays in terms of their temporal and thematic criteria, but for the short stories the issue of classification and arrangement is complicated by their open structure. Looking something like an assortment of puzzle pieces mixed in a box into which the author continued to add material for almost four decades, Pirandello’s short stories can easily intimidate readers due to their multi-layered content and the seemingly endless narrative that allows each story to flow automatically into the others despite the fact that they are not actually continuations of one another. In an effort to help guide his readers through the complex web of stories, Pirandello wrote a “Note” (“Avvertenza”) introducing the 1922 volume of his collected tales. [9] In this document, Pirandello addressed precisely these doubts; he also focused on the dilemma of choosing the right title for his collection.

Initially, Pirandello meant to collect all the tales published up to 1922, along with others as yet unpublished or to be written, in a single volume aptly titled Stories for a Year. The project was certainly “ambitious,” as the author himself admitted in the 1922 “Note.” He also pointed out the collection’s obvious resemblance to key works in the established literary canon. Pirandello was referring to the “days” structuring Boccaccio's Decameron and to the one thousand and one “nights” Scheherazade spent narrating in order to save her life. Like his predecessors, Pirandello had in mind a collection that would allow his tales to live on and consolidate storytelling as a practice intrinsic to human nature.

The 1922 “Note” revealed the vast interpretative scope of the work while also alerting his audience that they were undertaking to read something exceeding a simple collection of entertaining tales. By presenting the reader with “a story a day for a year,” the author was implicitly tracing a guided path to follow, even suggesting a predisposed timeline to complete the task. By encouraging daily reading, Pirandello was hoping to get around the readers’ sluggish “temperament” with regard to books as well as his publisher’s unwillingness to commit to the titanic enterprise of printing a single volume encompassing a tale a day for a year. In fact, despite the author’s requests, the editor had decided to distribute the short stories in twenty-four volumes of about fifteen stories each, likely in an attempt to maximize the collection’s marketability and get around the public’s shrinking attention span.

Despite this change in planned distribution, Pirandello did not alter the title. To him, Stories for a Year still represented how in his collection the tales were “not expected to respectively resemble either a season, a month, or any day of the year,” but rather conceived as “a short story per day for a whole year, without its qualities being influenced by days, months, or seasons.” [10]

Indeed, the new arrangement followed neither a chronological nor a thematic order. The publisher provided Pirandello the freedom to decide which stories should be added to each section of the collection, and the author naturally ended up indulging his antipathy for classification. Following a premeditated design would have made the stories seem inextricably connected when his idea was to get around the constraint of form.

Thus, while Boccaccio counted on a frame narrative to unite the tales in the Decameron and highlight their allegorical meaning, Pirandello’s short stories lack the cohesive scaffold that would have allowed them to fit together clearly and represent a coherent theme—which is precisely why he rejected an organized, traditional arrangement for his work. Pirandello looked at the reader as the maker of a creative order where the stories would not be arranged based on how the narrator viewed or presented the events. [11] Even though the collection’s title might seem to suggest a temporal unfolding that would allow for growth—in characters and in the reader— the random arrangement decided by the author defies any such conceptualization. The characters live out the events of their present life and emotions in a way that is unrelated to how those in other stories live out their own. [12]

The lack of a conceptual order, a framing narrative, and more importantly, the voice of fixed narrators all ensure that Pirandello’s collection of short stories is ultimately distant and very distinct from Boccaccio’s. In Pirandello’s vision, the narrator is not to be conceived as a storyteller who is allowed to freely draw from a selection of stories as in One Thousand and One Nights or the Decameron. His ideal narrator would overcome the framing stratagem to connect readers to the reality external to their everyday existence that is presented in the stories. Indeed, Pirandello’s readers must deal with characters who are masters of their own domain—both as narrators and protagonists of their own stories.

However, to fully understand the freedom Pirandello was giving his characters, one should not forget the status he had already achieved as a playwright by the time he decided to collect together his short stories. In 1922, Pirandello was internationally recognized for plays exploring the contradictory dyad of appearance and reality. Six Characters in Search of An Author (1921) and Henry IV (1922) had by then set the parameters of metatheatre, whose impact on modern drama would be long-lasting, while his novels, such as The Late Mattia Pascal (1904), The Old and the Young (I vecchi e i giovani, 1913), and Shoot! (1916), had already revealed the ways in which truth and identity are constructed concepts.

In a way, the arrangement of Pirandello’s short stories in the collected volumes thus intertwined with the principles shaping his narrative and theatrical works—and not just because the tales blatantly foreshadow the themes and psychologically nuanced characters of his novels and plays. In the short stories, like his other literary works, characters are given the opportunity to speak in their own voices. In this respect, it is not a surprise that many of the characters Pirandello claimed were haunting him, urging their drama to be lived through the truth of art, migrated from short stories to novels and plays. He gave his fictional creatures a free hand to present themselves and talk out the hardships of their tragic existence. It is, in fact, their actions and feelings that represent and define the characters realistically, along with their inner drama. Through these representations, the readers are able to connect and relate to them. The characters inhabit a narrative space that recalls the actors’ space precisely as a metaphor for their engagement with an audience. Free in their action and speech, the characters enact a presentness expressing the continuous flux of life, resembling the way in which movie actors perform the presentness of events through gesture. Pirandello’s narrative form in Stories for a Year could not be constrained by the fixed boundaries of a chronological or thematic arrangement, its goal being a broader conceptualization of temporality involving real-life, emotional time rather than past-tense representation. [13]

The Fifteen “Collections” (“Raccolte”) Constituting Stories for a Year [14]

As a collection of heterogeneous tales without the constraints of a set cast of predetermined narrators, themes, or time frames, Stories for a Year presents all the challenges and characteristics of a work in progress. In 1922, when Pirandello started compiling his tales with the idea of eventually collecting 365 of them, he was already a middle-aged, overburdened artist who had likely contemplated the possibility of never being able to pull off such a daunting task.

And indeed, he was destined to never see the whole project in print, as only fourteen out of the twenty-four collections he had envisioned were published before his death in December of 1936. The fifteenth collection, titled A Single Day (Una giornata), was printed posthumously in May of 1937 and included all the stories Pirandello composed during the last years of his life, which stand out from the others for their surreal, fantastic tone. A sort of authorial testament, this last collection proves Pirandello’s ongoing devotion to this project until the very end, despite his health problems and the burden of other pressing commitments. The publisher even added a personal “Note” of their own to this edition, remarking how the author had worked untiringly on his project “until his strength no longer lasted.” Readers, they thought, should be aware of his “willingness to keep his promise entirely.” [15]

The process by which these fifteen Collections were finally printed, however, was anything but smooth or swift. Between 1922 and 1928, the Florentine editor Bemporad published the first thirteen, while Mondadori printed the fourteenth and fifteenth in 1934 and 1937, respectively. Interestingly, only twelve out of the fifteen short stories in the 1937 collection were selected by Pirandello; the other three were added by the publisher. This was because Pirandello had previously included fifteen stories in each Collection, and so this addition was needed to reach the customary number. These three short stories were chosen from among a group of works Pirandello had deliberately decided not to include in the volumes. They were: “When You’ve Understood the Game” (Quando s’è capito il gioco”), which was the source for the 1918 play The Rules of the Game (Il gioco delle parti); “Mrs. Frola and Mr. Ponza, Her Son-in-Law” (“La signora Frola e il signor Ponza, suo genero”), an anticipation of the 1917 “grotesque” drama on the relativity of truth Right You Are (If You Think So); and “God My Master” (“Padron Dio,” 1901), which was previously a poem contained in a different sort of collection, Zampogna, a volume of verse Pirandello had composed in 1901.

It is worth noting that before his passing, Pirandello embarked on the comprehensive and time-consuming revision of all his short stories in the hopes of collecting them into a permanent edition split into two large volumes. Unfortunately, he only managed to revise the stories contained in five random Collections: III, A Prancing Horse (La rallegrata); IV, The Lonely Man (L’uomo solo); V, The Fly (La mosca); IX, Donna Mimma; and XII, The Journey (Il viaggio). He also managed to revise his favorite tale, “Such Is Life” (“Pena di vivere così”), which was first published in the literary journal Il nuovo romanzo mensile, on December 15, 1920, and later included in the collection In Silence (In silenzio) in 1923.

Pirandello’s two-volume edition was printed by Mondadori after his death. Volume I (1937) and Volume II (1938) were enriched with an Appendix listing all the revisions the author had made and the twenty-one short stories he had left out. Of these, only nine had been included in previous collections of short stories from before 1922, while eleven were discovered by Manlio Lo Vecchio-Musti as he was perusing journals of the time, and one was an unpublished story, “All Passion Spent” (“Sgombero”), originally written in 1933.

This 1937 two-volume Mondadori Omnibus edition thus shed light on a lesser-known body of Pirandello’s works. “All Passion Spent,” for example, was only one of the many unpublished works Pirandello had been trying to locate from among his scattered papers (Pirandello, Novelle per un anno, 1937 and 1938). Before his death, the playwright spent years trying to retrieve old works, especially The Dialogues, a group of writings that was particularly close to his heart. Pirandello was not in the habit of keeping a copy of his contributions to journals, and he often drafted ideas and possible plots on scattered papers that he did not store in a systematic manner. In a way, the Mondadori edition fulfilled Pirandello’s desire to retrieve his lost works. They were all published in their original form, in full respect of Pirandello’s style and how he had composed them; although, it is likely the playwright would have wanted to revise them.

The list of these twenty-one retrieved works is long and tangled, but its value as a document attesting to the origin of some of these stories and their connections to other future works is remarkable. For example, the list includes “The Cooper’s Roosters” (“I galletti del bottajo”), composed in 1894, which is the only children’s story Pirandello ever wrote; the seminal “Dialogues Between the Big Me and the Little Me” (“Dialoghi tra il Gran Me e il piccolo me”) I (1895) and II (1897); and the 1900 short story “Urban Trees” (“Alberi cittadini”) whose passages were reworked in Book II, Chapter 2 of One, No One and One Thousand. Among the titles in the list, it is worth mentioning that “Mrs. Speranza” (“La Signora Speranza,” 1903) inspired the short story “It’s Nothing Serious” (“Non è una cosa seria”), which was later turned into the three-act comedy But It’s Nothing Serious (Ma non è una cosa seria, 1918); also of note, “Stefano Giogli I and II” (“Stefano Giogli I e II,” 1909) provided the first-draft plot for his final novel, One, No One and One Thousand (1926).

Interestingly, the Appendix included in the sixth edition as a part of the Mondadori special collection I Classici Contemporanei (1966) was enriched with a group of six rediscovered short stories that were labelled “extravagant” (“estravaganti”). These included “Little Hut: Sicilian Sketch” of 1884, Pirandello’s very first short story, which critics have seen as a testament of his early predilection for verismo. Also included in the Appendix was another quite long verista story, the 1895 “The Nest” (“Il nido”), which Pirandello adapted in 1899 into the play The Kite (Il nibbio), and then changed in the same year into the three-act comedy If Not Like This (Se non così), which he kept for years in a drawer. Only in 1915 was the comedy finally staged in its final version, Other People’s Reason (La ragione degli altri) at the Teatro Manzoni in Milan by the company directed by Marco Praga and starring the renowned theater-diva Irma Gramatica.

Style and Themes

The “Collections” constituting Stories for a Year thus evolved over time, remaining incomplete and representing a compromise position that Pirandello was forced to adopt when his publisher refused to issue the full collection as a single, massive volume. Despite these frustrations, though, Pirandello remained devoted to the genre, for in the short story he found the possibility of focusing on the character more than on the plot—a principle he wanted to honor as central to his creative purpose. Willing to reject the clutches of both rhetoric and tradition, Pirandello was determined to grant his characters freedom and create a space for them to blossom. For this reason, he saw it as his mission to develop a narrative based on the material his characters themselves brought forth. [16]

After 1926, when he published his last novel, One, No One, and One Thousand, the short story became the preferred prose medium for Pirandello. As early as 1908, in his theoretical essay Subjectivism and Objectivism (Soggettivismo e oggettivismo), he had conceded a natural affinity between the novel and short story related to the lack of a rigid demarcation in their artistic purpose. They were both expressions of narrative art, he pointed out, regardless of the plot’s length. Yet, the short story could deploy a synthetic expressivity crucial to a direct representation, unlike the novel whose lack of objectivity is precisely due to excessive descriptions, often at the hand of an omniscient author/narrator or a character narrating in the first person (Pirandello, “Soggettivismo…,” 186-7).

Pirandello’s defense of the short story was coming at a time when he felt the medium was being underestimated because of its brevity, which was seen as an impediment to detailed characterization. He believed that when a plot is inspired, either by real life or imagination, it is the author’s decision whether to turn it into a synthetic piece or a lengthy, slow-paced narrative. In his view, the novel was not to be considered a literary medium but “a manner of making art,” due to the predominance of exposition and the stretched-out passage of time in the novel form. On the other hand, the short story resembles classic tragedy, thanks to its respect for the unity of time and a condensed sequence of events. As Pirandello put it:

The short story and classic tragedy condense in a small space facts and sentiments that nature presents as broadened or scattered. They both seize the fact by the tail, so to speak, and are happy with this tail. They do not intend to depict the origins or the degrees of passions in this tail, nor its relation to the many objects that surround man and are useful to sustain it, affect it and inform it in a thousand different ways, but rather just the very last steps, the excess, in other words. [17]

Pirandello identified in the concise nature of the short story an opportunity to isolate different aspects of reality and represent them as if they were refracted through the many “fragments of a broken mirror,” as he explained in the 1922 “Note.” Each piece frames the human experience in modern terms by representing the character’s mental and emotional struggles with a contradictory and unstable reality. The readers get to know the events from the character’s point of view and are capable of processing them as if they were the expressions of their own disjointed emotions. The objective representation the short story allows, for Pirandello, is the depiction of a mental state, the impact reality has on the character’s thoughts, feelings, and reactions. The narrative structure looks like a prism radiating the self’s many personas in their struggle to conform to societal rules. In other words, it is a narrative structure that paraphrases the dilemmas of modernity.

Indeed, in his short stories Pirandello asked readers to confront a new realism that required both the power of observation and the ability to grasp the relativity of life, while putting the author in the ideal condition to be in dialogue with his own imagination. Characters could simply speak for themselves, without needing the mediation of actors and directors as in a drama presented on a stage. As Pirandello wrote to his son Stefano in a letter from New York in July 1935, only in the short story could he savor “the taste of narrative art, that which speaks with no voice from the written page, directly to the reader.” Infatuated with the genre more than ever, Pirandello was swearing his most heartfelt allegiance to it, “I have written five short stories […]. I don’t want to hear a thing about anything else.” [18]

Through the immediacy of the short story, Pirandello was gradually setting off the omniscient narrator’s demise, while involving readers and characters in the storytelling process. In a way, the medium attests to his stylistic evolution as a writer, displaying his transition from an earlier, impersonal realism to a more intimate use of first-person narration—a change that coincided with his theoretical reflections on subjective representation. In the essays he eventually gathered in the critical collection Art and Science, Pirandello foregrounded a philosophical reading of reality, one that inevitably influenced his writing as well. Knowledge and truth, he said, could not be asserted in absolute terms but had to be seen as concepts relative to the observer’s perspective and the socio-cultural context shaping them.

This shift towards relativity explains why over fifty out of the 244 total short stories were written in the first person— an impressive sum, particularly considering other examples in the genre. For instance, in Boccaccio’s Decameron personal narration is limited to the frame narrative, where he defends his work from the accusation of being frivolous. Writers of Sicilian verismo like Verga and Capuana preferred a “choral” voice that captured the experience of the collective using the third person. Even Manzoni, whom Pirandello deeply admired as a “humorous” observer of reality, told his stories from the perspective of an omniscient narrator. By allowing his short stories to be told from the character’s first-person perspective, Pirandello was able to present the reader with a more personal view of the events and the chance to tap directly into the protagonists’ thoughts. His first-person stories stand out for their subjective narrative style, which makes the distance between author and characters more directly perceivable. Characters appear as if they had lives of their own—so much so that their stories develop out of a narrative only they can control. On the other hand, the author finds himself dealing with a twofold dilemma: either take on the role of transcriber of their drama and put it into words, or become a character himself within the story, as we see in “Characters” (“Personaggi,” 1906), “A Character’s Tragedy” (“La tragedia di un personaggio,” 1911), and “Interviews with Characters” (“Colloquii coi personaggi,” 1915)—the three stories that were the source for his most famous play, Six Characters in Search of An Author (1921).

More often than not, for Pirandello point of view is the result of a flexible choice and the willingness to switch between characters’ perspectives. This is the case when the author toys with the point of view by alternating first- and third-person narration, zooming in and out from complete to limited omniscience. The narrating “I” might happen to be split among two leading storytellers who take on the task of introducing the backstory and living it out. But there are also instances of overlapping narrators whose perspectives intertwine with the author’s, as one can see in tales such as “The Jar” (“La giara,” 1909), “It’s Nothing Serious” (1910), and “The Train Whistled” (“Il treno ha fischiato,” 1914). When this happens, storytelling revolves around a crowded chorus where main and minor characters, along with the author, directly speak to the reader. In “The Trap” (“La trappola,” 1915), for example, the reader is invited to take part in a conversation concerning life’s deception in the form of a long monologue addressed to an imaginary audience.

An interesting case of polyphonic narration is also visible in the story “Wedding Night” (“Prima notte,” 1900), whose fragmented plot seemingly develops through a collective perspective offered by multiple characters (the mother and her neighbors, the villagers, and the many relatives). Interestingly, their voices and points of view intertwine with the protagonist’s as well as her husband’s monologues. What, on a superficial level, might look like a chaotic, overlarge cast is actually a long narrative subdivided into multiple chunks whose subjective point depends entirely on the individual perspective each character brings to the story. At this stage, Pirandello was clearly still influenced by Verga’s stylistic devices, like a choral narration and the authorial “invisibility” that made events appear as if they were told through the characters’ comments and feelings.

Along similar lines, in several stories Pirandello directs his attention to one single character so as to present most of the action from his or her perspective. Cases in point are tales such as "Think It Over, Giacomino!" (Pensaci, Giacomino!”, 1910) which is told through Professor Toti’s eyes, and “Sicilian Limes" (“Lumie di Sicilia,” 1900) which is told mainly from the point of view of Micuccio, a humble musician who moves to the big city to marry the poor country girl he helped turn into an accomplished singer. However, there are stories like "Mrs. Frola and Mr. Ponza, Her Son-In-Law" (1917) where the narrator does not have insight into the characters’ minds—a limit that is actually pivotal in framing the story’s theme. In this short story, for example, one of the characters is apparently deluded and possibly insane, but nobody knows which one. Pirandello withholds his authorial omniscience and leaves the question open by taking an external point of view.

This is how Pirandello builds dramatic momentum in his stories—by leaving the reader either to become frustrated with creeping doubts about the storyline or to make peace with the impossibility of knowing the truth. But often the climax in his stories reaches peaks of suspenseful fiction thanks to the tension the narrator creates. In short stories like “The Other Son” (“L’altro figlio,” 1905), “Fear of Being Happy” (“Paura d’esser felice,” 1911), “Death Is Upon Him” (“La morte addosso,” 1908), and “If …” (“Se …”, 1894) readers are challenged to play the role of truth-seekers and solve the riddles presented to them.

As the humorist he was, Pirandello tended to mix comedy and tragedy by creating tales within tales, exactly as he did with his “theater-in-the-theater” plays, to explore the complexity of the relationships between fiction and life. Characters in these embedded narratives engage in inner and outer stories that eventually relate to one another. Examples include “Professor Earthquake” (“Il Professor Terremoto,” 1910) and “Truth” (“La verità,” 1912), whose different narrative planes end up encapsulating one other like Chinese boxes. Interestingly, this literary device sometimes makes it hard to separate the main text from its inner counterpart, especially when the narrator engages in thinking rather than speaking. This happens, for instance, in “Tight Waistcoat” (“Marsina stretta,” 1901), a short story revolving around the burden of social conventions and the desire to get rid of them.

Local gossip and public curiosity, along with a judgmental provincial environment always have a disquieting impact on the Pirandellian character to the point that these elements often define the fictional space. The chosen setting can often be representative of the tension between city life and country living. Pirandello’s lucid narratives seize the rupture between the modern world, characterized as the space where technological and industrial progress constitute a central problem, and the natural world, viewed as the primigenial place where human actions are guided by simpler values. The evident lack of harmony between these two spaces is the cause of the individual’s anguish and the consequent desire to return to an ideal state of nature. Many short stories from different time periods speak to the consolation characters find in the countryside: “God My Master” of 1901, “Tanino and Tanotto” (“Tanino e Tanotto”) of 1902, “Like Twin Sisters” (“Come gemelle”) of 1903, “Victory of Ants” (“Vittoria delle formiche”) written in 1911, “The Annuity” (“Il vitalizio”) of 1915, “The Luck to Be a Horse” (“La fortuna d’esser cavallo”) composed in 1935, and “The Nail” (“Il Chiodo”), one of Pirandello latest short stories (1936), which was published only after his death (1937). But characters may also lose themselves in the transition to urbanized reality, as exemplified by the tragic plot of “Donna Mimma” (1917), which explores the loss of identity experienced by a naïve, provincial midwife who left the country for the city in her quest for self-elevation.

A constant element in Pirandello’s narrative is how the landscape breaks with traditional descriptive representation to take on the function of a rhetorical device. Settings are loaded with personal experience in a way that transforms landscape into a narrative tool shaped by the interconnection of space with emotions. Standing at the crossroads between a positivist and spiritual approach, Pirandello offers a variegated array of landscapes in his short stories, each representing one of reality’s many facets. He loved to depict Rome and his native Sicily—the places closest to his heart—as overdetermined landscapes that then become the story’s real protagonist, as it is the case with “Urban Trees.” But landscape may also be personified as a character’s antagonist, as in “Horse in the Moon” (“Un cavallo nella luna,” 1907), or deliberately overlooked, as in “Bitter Waters” (“Acqua amara”) of 1905.

Functioning as part of a metaphorical representation, the landscape in the short stories often frames a tangibly troubled space that the characters want to flee. The trope of the train, for example, is recurrently linked to the protagonists’ emotional states and the way they try to cope with their inner demons, as shown by tales such as “War” (“Quando si comprende,” 1918), “A Dirge” (“Nenia,” 1901), “The Rose” (“La Rosa,” 1914), “Yesterday and Today” (“Jeri e oggi,” 1919), and “Between Two Shadows” (“Tra due ombre,” 1907). It is worth noting, however, that the journey does not always correspond to a coming-of-age experience for the character, who sometimes remains emotionally and physically defeated by the hardships of life, like in “The Journey” (“Il viaggio,” 1910), “The Train Whistled,” and “A Single Day” (“Una giornata,” 1935).

The pessimism typical of many of the short stories may at times seem to be counterbalanced by gashes of solace that are generally connected with images or themes of nature and the imagination. Animals, for example, are depicted as the happy few thanks to their privileged detachment from human suffering. Inspired by Aesop’s storytelling, Pirandello turned many animals into protagonists (cfr. Zangrilli, Pirandello…; Zangrilli, Il Bestiario…). Beasts in fact are often a metaphor for man’s longing for freedom, as in “The Luck to Be a Horse” and “The Crow of Mizzaro” (“Il corvo di Mizzaro,” 1902). At other times, they mimic man’s final defeat as in “To Fly” (“Volare,” 1907), “Another Lark” (“Un’altra allodola,” 1902), and “Swift and Little Swallow” (“Rondone e Rondinella,” 1913).

As a mysterious force dominated by unpredictable circumstances, life challenges individuals with a reality that cannot be controlled. Many of Pirandello’s short stories in fact problematize the characters’ incapability to stand their ground against the tricks life plays on them. This is the moment when the author indirectly jumps into the narrative by offering his fictional creatures the key to their imagination. In “The Train Whistled,” a frustrated accountant consoles himself thanks to the train’s whistle, which awakens his dreams of freedom. By evoking an imaginary world, the character offers himself the momentary reward of vicariously living life in the shoes of a new self. Imaginative escapism, however, is at times counterbalanced by an actual stratagem the character enacts to break free from an asphyxiating existence; this happens, for instance, in the 1923 short story “Flight” (“Fuga”). Here, the character’s escape represents his heartfelt act of rebellion against the existential trap of his confined life, but this is mistakenly interpreted as a sudden burst of madness by bystanders.

These themes highlight an imaginative aspect of Pirandello's late writing, which anticipates the more lyrical and evocative register of the so called “surreal” short stories of the thirties, such as “All Passion Spent,” “At Night, a Geranium” (“Di sera, un geranio,” 1934), “A Single Day,” and the “Effects of an Interrupted Dream” (“Effetti di un sogno interrotto,” 1936). In these tales, Pirandello's almost symbolist representations depict characters struggling with their emotions. At times they find themselves acting on the edge of unconsciousness. The narrative’s dreamlike atmosphere is intensified by the shifts in register as if it were signaling the absurdity and unpredictability of human actions. In these later stories, Pirandello was experimenting with a stylized approach to storytelling that seemed to evoke his own passions and fears. After all, he wrote his last short story, “Effects of an Interrupted Dream,” just the day before his passing.

Pirandello’s Poetics: Humor and the (Modern) Purpose of Art

Even if by the time of his death Pirandello had only completed 244 stories, not all of which he had collected together in the volumes of the Stories for a Year that were already being published one Collection at a time, he nonetheless had achieved something remarkable. Clearly one result of this vast span of stories is that it is hard to identify a set of ideas, styles, or types governing the whole collection. The topics are diverse and wide-ranging, and even if certain themes have tended to capture the imagination of readers, translators, and editors, they hardly account for the whole, or even majority, of what Pirandello was writing. Thus, Tales of Madness or Tales of Suicide (both titles of selections translated by Giovanni Bussino) might stand out as particularly gripping to some, but together they are just a handful of the stories from his massive collection.

What can we highlight, then, as the common threads holding this capacious collection together? Unlike Boccaccio’s Decameron, the Stories for a Year lack any framing narrative device to explain how/why they have been collected. Instead, what creates commonality might be identified in Pirandello’s critical essays, where he developed a distinctive theory of humor, what he terms umorismo – humorism, to transliterate, though we simply translate it as ‘humor’ here, bearing in mind that the term has a special “Pirandellian” meaning. Humor, he contends, is different from the “comic” as it is traditionally understood, and his theorization of humor provides a window into the kinds of concerns that animated his production. It will be worth highlighting a couple of key dynamics of Pirandello’s theory to help us see some of the “red threads” that weave together the vast and sometimes disparate collection of his short stories.

Pirandellian humor mixes emotions and reflective states into an aesthetic experience. Often identified as a kind of “tragicomic” feeling, where tragedy and comedy merge, umorismo is in fact even more particular than that. Fiora A. Bassanese’s focuses on the particular duality of Pirandellian humor (29), while other scholars like Alberto Godioli have considered the role of laughter and humor in Pirandello’s work as it relates to other forms of comedy. What Pirandello has in mind is a special mode of feeling and reflection that he identifies with a key phrase, the “feeling of the opposite” (“sentimento del contrario”). When we are confronted by Pirandellian humor, we find ourselves simultaneously inhabiting a split space. On the one hand, we are compelled to laugh; but at the same time, as we reflect on the nature of what we are laughing at, we also find ourselves moved to compassion. He gives an example that has since become famous among his readers as the most memorable instance of what he has in mind: imagine, Pirandello says, that we are confronted with the spectacle of an old woman who has dressed herself up elaborately, doing her face with copious makeup to the point that she looks like a kind of exotic bird—all in an effort to look young. When we see someone like this, our first reaction will likely be laughter in response to the obvious incongruity in her appearance. But, if at the same time we also are compelled to reflect on that woman’s experience in a compassionate way—he imagines that we realize she does not want to dress up like that but rather feels forced to because she is desperately trying to maintain the interest of a younger husband, who she worries she is losing—then our laughter will be mixed together with a somber sadness (Pirandello, On Humor, §II, 2, 113). Our awareness of this split experience is the “feeling of the opposite,” and it dislodges us from our everyday reality or the simplicity with which we might otherwise take things at face value in our life. It is this sense of disquieting distance from one’s own experience that makes humor interesting from Pirandello’s perspective.

Why is taking us out of ourselves so important to Pirandello, though? The answer has to do with two main features of what Pirandello sees as the purpose of artistic production. On the one hand, Pirandello envisions his writing as confronting a fundamental problem with how we experience the world: we believe that we can understand things by categorizing them, using words to ascribe fixed identities to entities in the world, ranging from objects like trees to subjects like ourselves or others. But this belief is false, in Pirandello’s view, because life is never stable but rather continuously transforming as the fluid flux of becoming. [19] We thus find ourselves always running up against the insufficiency of our language and the conceptual apparatus we use to “fix” the world in place, as it is unable to adequately capture the reality it is meant to define (Di Lieto, Sarti and Subialka, 99). One function of humor, then, is to uproot this misplaced belief in our own certainties, the words and categories that we use to try and pin down and control a world that is always evolving and changing. It unmasks our misconceptions about the world—and ourselves. In this respect, Pirandello’s artistic practice can be seen as having an important epistemological dimension: it attempts to jar us out of our complacency so that we come to recognize that what we think we know may not, in fact, be true.

At the same time, there is another function of artistic production that Pirandellian humor also aligns with, one less focused on exposing the limits of our everyday conception of truth and instead focused on transforming our understanding of artistic truth. For Pirandello, the quandary posed by the conflict of fixed form and fluid life exceeding it carries over into the broader modernist struggle against traditional forms of artistic representation. Across Europe, artists were challenging what has been called the “mimetic paradigm” of art, the model that had been dominant for centuries and taught in academies (Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics; cfr. Rancière, Aisthesis). Where these conventions held that the task of art was to provide a (beautiful) reproduction of the world, modernists sought new ways of using artistic form to convey the true experience of existence. From visual artists like the Impressionists, the Cubists, or the Futurists, to Dadaist performance artists, to writers like James Joyce, TS Eliot, Virginia Woolf, and so many others, the push to deconstruct the very principles of artistic representation was in full force.

Pirandellian humor can be read as a part of this modernist push to transform the paradigms of aesthetic representation. We see this in passages throughout On Humor, where he repeatedly draws a contrast between the way in which a humorist composes a work of art and the way a “traditional” artist would compose it. The traditional model is characterized by its concern with exterior form and conventional beauty in a way that Pirandello believes is artificial and contrived: writers create “well-made” plots and then force their characters into them, or they develop an elaborate whole that rings false the way a mask fails to reveal the true person underneath. [20] In contrast, a humorist begins in the space of split consciousness described above. Having seen through the appearance of things, the humorist dwells in the contradiction of “the feeling of the opposite,” and so in the process of creating a work the humorist simultaneously deconstructs it. [21] Pirandello argues that the humorist’s double-vision results in a work of art that is distorted, where the perfect form of a simple reality is interrupted and disfigured by the presence of its own opposite within. The result is ultimately a work of art that is less realistic (less verisimilar, to speak in terms of the standards of the mimetic regime of art) yet for precisely that reason truer to the spiritual core of what it represents.

There are thus two senses in which Pirandellian humor is a way of accessing truth. On the one hand, in what we called its epistemological dimension, Pirandello’s outlook insists on the necessary flux of life as becoming and thus on the need to see beyond the pretense of fixity, capturing the vital current underneath our concepts and words. On the other, in what we could call its aesthetic dimension, we see that the epistemological outlook of umorismo results in a very different form of artistic creation, as well: the work of art no longer seeks to trace the exterior contours of a beautiful semblance but instead takes on the distorted inner shape of the humorist’s own double-vision as its creative principle, resulting in a less traditionally beautiful, whole, well-shaped work in the end.

What does this mean in practice, and how does it guide us in our assessment of Pirandello’s vast corpus of short stories? The first thing to note is that it would be artificial to think of this theory of humor as an aesthetic philosophy that precedes or is in some way separate from Pirandello’s creative writing. In fact, even in his theoretical essay On Humor, Pirandello goes to considerable lengths to insist that it is a mistake to approach aesthetic criticism from the outside, so to speak; and he boldly proclaims the priority of his fiction in the development of the theory itself. [22] It is for this reason that the essay is dedicated, on its title page, to Mattia Pascal—the title character of his novel published four years earlier, The Late Mattia Pascal. [23] His theory of humor thus gives us a valuable example of an aesthetic theory that emerges from poetic practice, and not the other way around. And just as in the case of his short stories, where the character often precedes the plot and serves as the true source of things, here it is precisely the protagonist of his earlier novel who is the embodiment of the theory of humor itself. It is no surprise, then, if this special humor and its double-vision are integral elements of Pirandello’s short stories—indeed, that is where they started.

There are different ways that we might see Pirandellian humor in the stories, of course. In some cases, the story may indeed induce a strange and uncomfortable combination of laughter and tears —the two-faced vision of “tragicomic” humor where the very fact that we are moved to sadness by the story is itself a cause of laughter. In many of his best-known stories, like “The Jar,” “Think it Over, Giacomino!”, and “You Laugh” (“Tu ridi,” 1912), this dynamic combination of humorous feelings and reflection is recurrent and central. Likewise, in many cases a story reveals some aspect of the epistemological truth at the core of Pirandellian humor, unmasking the superficial truths we accept in life, or the exterior roles we are confined to by society. Perhaps the most famous example of this is the short story “Mrs. Frola and Mr. Ponza, Her Son-in-Law,” the story which, as we noted above, Pirandello adapted into one of his most well-known plays from the early, “grotesque” phase of his theatre, Right You Are (If You Think So). And of course, in many cases, the humorist’s double-vision has been integrated into the structure of the story itself. In the most extreme instances of this, we see Pirandello’s short stories take on the same kind of metarepresentational dimensions that made theatrical works like Six Characters so famous, like the trilogy of stories about characters that precede and give rise to the play. In these stories, we see the representation of the creative process itself, the workings of the artist’s own mind, as well as the humorous situations that the would-be characters present and the author’s own humorous responses to them.

This is a very partial list of but a few examples, and all the same it is already clear how multifaceted Pirandello’s theory of humor is; likewise, its practical instantiation in his short stories runs the gamut, so to speak, touching on all of its many dimensions. Of course, as we have noted in the previous section of this introduction, Pirandello was writing short stories well before he undertook any critical essays or developed this theory of humor as an explicit idea. His first short story, “Little Hut,” predates On Humor by more than a decade. It is thus worth reiterating that, just as On Humor is explicitly developed out of the fictional model of The Late Mattia Pascal, it is also rooted in the dozens of short stories that Pirandello had already published in the years between 1894 and 1908. This included his first metafiction about characters coming to visit him in his study, “Characters,” which was published in 1906 in the years between Mattia Pascal and On Humor.

A massive project spanning his whole career, various artistic styles, movements, and themes, Stories for a Year is more than just a varied and complex (incomplete) puzzle, although it is surely also that. It is likewise a testament to the distinctive outlook that Pirandello had, one rooted in a particular theory of humor but also, more broadly, his own sense of what artistic practice means in the age of modernity. This, again, reaffirms the fact that even if Pirandello was to become an international celebrity thanks to his theatrical accomplishments, he was also a short story writer to the core. And in his unfinished collection, he captured more than just the days of a year or the dramas of his Sicilian or Roman compatriots—Stories for a Year is nothing short of an attempt to encapsulate the indeterminate, chaotic, contradictory, and humorous experience of modern life itself.