As an indication of his commitment to the genre, Pirandello had resolved to write 365 stories. Unfortunately, his dream remained unfulfilled, despite the fact that he worked on his short stories until the very end of his life—making changes, rewriting plots, and continuing to add new materials in an effort to complete his cherished work-in-progress. Of the projected twenty-four volumes that were to constitute the full cycle of 365 stories, Pirandello only ever saw fourteen Collections in print, the fifteenth being published posthumously in 1937.

Starting with the first Collection of short stories printed by the Florentine publisher Bemporad in 1922, Pirandello decided to add a personal “Note” (“Avvertenza”) as a preface to his tales. The word ‘avvertenza’ could also be translated as a kind of cautionary notice or warning, and indeed William Weaver opted for ‘warning’ when he translated Pirandello’s novel Il fu Mattia Pascal as The Late Mattia Pascal in 1964, as the text ends with “A Warning on the Scruples of the Imagination” (“Avvertenza sugli scrupoli della fantasia” in Italian). In the 1922 edition, however, the “Note” serves primarily to inform his readers about the scope of his project and to alert them to the compromise he had been forced to make so as to see it in print. Indeed, Pirandello was still struggling to accept the editorial decision to break his envisioned Stories for a Year into many, shorter volumes. He saw this editorial decision, imposed on him by others, as hampering his dream of a “massive single volume,” one of those publication formats that “have not been used for literary works for a long time,” as he put it.

The 1922 “Note” was republished in all the subsequent Collections of Stories for a Year, up to the thirteenth, which came out in 1928. Then, in 1934 Pirandello crafted a different “Note” for inclusion with his fourteenth Collection, exploring the consequences of World War I and the intellectual tension the conflict created between Italy and Germany. In part a kind of biographical document reflecting on the impact the Great War had on Pirandello’s family, the 1934 “Note” also called the reader’s attention to the different structure of the fourteenth volume of Stories for a Year: in this Collection, one of the stories, “Berecche and the War” (“Berecche e la Guerra”), was a long narrative consisting of eight chapters and taking up a large portion of the book. In fact, only seven more stories were added to that collection, and in this way with the eight chapters and seven independent short stories, the volume added up to the customary number of fifteen tales.

In 1937, Manlio Lo Vecchio-Musti and Angelo Sodini edited a new volume of Stories for a Year for the Mondadori Omnibus special series. This edition was enriched with a new “Note,” this time authored by the editors and explaining the textual corrections and their effort to gather all Pirandello’s short stories in a single volume to respect the author’s will. In 1938, Lo Vecchio-Musti and Sodini completed the Mondadori Omnibus series with a second volume of Stories for a Year containing the 21 assorted stories that Pirandello originally excluded from both the first fourteen Collections, printed between 1922 and 1934, and the fifteenth Collection, which appeared posthumously in 1937 from Mondadori.

Together, these four “Notes” constitute a rich paratextual apparatus with historical information and guidance as to how the author, and then his editors, sought to present these short stories to the reading public. For that reason, we include them in translation here to assist our modern-day readers, as well.

Notes (Avvertenze)

Luigi Pirandello’s 1922 Note, added to volumes I-XIII, printed between 1922 and 1928

Luigi Pirandello’s 1934 Note, added to volume XIV, printed in 1934

Editorial Note added to volume I of the Mondadori Omnibus edition published in 1937

Editorial Note added to volume II of the Mondadori Omnibus edition published in 1938