page_title: Italo Svevo
section_title: Literary career
hierarchical_section_title: Italo Svevo / Literary career
caption_attribution_description: English: Blue plaque erected in 1999 by English Heritage at 67 Charlton Church Lane, Charlton, London SE7 7AB, London Borough of Greenwich
context_page_description: Aron Ettore Schmitz, better known by the pseudonym Italo Svevo, 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, a work that had a profound effect on the movement.
context_section_description: In 1923, Italo Svevo (literally Italian Swabian) wrote and published the psychological novel La coscienza di Zeno (rendered as Confessions of Zeno, or Zeno's Conscience). The work, showing the author's interest in the theories of Sigmund Freud, is written in the form of the memoirs of Zeno Cosini, who writes them at the insistence of his psychoanalyst. Svevo's novel received almost no attention from Italian readers and critics at the time.
  The work might have disappeared altogether if it were not for the efforts of James Joyce. Joyce had met Svevo in 1907, when Joyce tutored him in English while working for Berlitz in Trieste. Joyce read Svevo's earlier novels Una Vita and Senilità, which had also been largely ignored when published in 1898.
  Joyce championed Confessions of Zeno, helping to have it translated into French and then published in Paris, where critics praised it extravagantly. That led Italian critics, including Eugenio Montale, to discover it. Zeno Cosini, the book's hero and unreliable narrator, mirrored Svevo himself, being a businessman fascinated by Freudian theory.
  Svevo was also a model for Leopold Bloom, the protagonist of Joyce's seminal novel Ulysses.
  Confessions of Zeno never looks outside the narrow confines of Trieste, much like Joyce's work, which rarely left Dublin in the last years of Ireland's time as part of the United Kingdom. Svevo employed often sardonic wit in his observations of Trieste and, in particular, of his hero, an indifferent man who cheats on his wife, lies to his psychoanalyst, and is trying to explain himself to his psychoanalyst by revisiting his memories.
  There is a final connection between Svevo and the character Cosini. Cosini sought psychoanalysis, he said, in order to discover why he was addicted to nicotine. As he reveals in his memoirs, each time he had given up smoking, with the iron resolve that this would be the "ultima sigaretta!!", he experienced the exhilarating feeling that he was now beginning life over without the burden of his old habits and mistakes. That feeling was, however, so strong that he found smoking irresistible, if only so that he could stop smoking again in order to experience that thrill once more.
caption: Blue plaque at 67 Charlton Church Lane, Charlton, London SE7 7AB, London Borough of Greenwich
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