Luigi Pirandello: life, plays, and the 1934 Nobel Prize

A childhood in a hamlet called Chaos

Luigi Pirandello was born on June 28, 1867, in Girgenti, today’s Agrigento, into a well-off family with major investments in sulfur mining. Even the exact spot of his birth has a strange charm to it: a rural hamlet named Caos, “Chaos,” where his mother had taken refuge from the cholera epidemic sweeping Sicily that year. The house, originally a late-18th-century farm building that belonged to his mother’s family, the Ricci-Gramitto, is a museum today.

As a young man he also worked in the family mines; he studied in Palermo and Rome before moving on to Bonn, Germany, where in 1891 he defended a dissertation on the dialect of his hometown. Back in Italy, he married Antonietta Portulano in 1894, a match arranged by the two families, and from 1897 to 1922 he taught aesthetics and stylistics at an institute in Rome.

A financial collapse that turned him into a professional writer

1903 was a turning point. His father’s mining business collapsed financially, and the family fortune took a serious hit. It was at this point that Pirandello began writing not just out of vocation but out of necessity: from then on, his literary output became almost relentless, spanning novels, short stories, and, later, theatre.

His personal life grew more complicated in the same period. His wife Antonietta developed increasingly severe nervous disorders, rooted in obsessive jealousy, and was permanently hospitalized in a Rome clinic in 1919, where she remained until her death, never accepting a separation or seeing her husband again. From 1925 onward, Pirandello had an intense and lasting relationship with the actress Marta Abba, who would become his muse and the leading interpreter of his later plays.

From The Outcast to One, None and a Hundred Thousand

Over the course of his life Pirandello wrote seven novels. The Late Mattia Pascal (1904) is considered his narrative masterpiece: the story of a man who exploits a bureaucratic mix-up to be presumed dead and start over elsewhere, only to discover that escaping your own identity is harder than it looks. Before and after it came The Outcast (1901), Her Husband (1911), The Old and the Young (1913), Shoot! (1916), and, in 1926, One, None and a Hundred Thousand, which pushes the theme of identity to its furthest extreme: how many different people are we, depending on who’s looking at us?

Alongside the novels runs an enormous body of short fiction, over a hundred stories eventually gathered under the collective title Short Stories for a Year, running from Love Without Love (1894) all the way to Berecche and the War (1919). The title states the plan: one story for every day of the year, three hundred and sixty-five in all — a project that remained unfinished.

On Humor: the mask and life

In 1908 Pirandello published the essay On Humor, the theoretical text that explains where the rest of his writing comes from. The basic idea is that everyone builds a “form” for themselves, a mask made of roles and habits used to face the world; but life, which never stops changing, eventually exposes that form as false, revealing its contradiction. Humor, for Pirandello, grows out of this gap between what we believe ourselves to be and what reality forces us to see: a bitter irony, far removed from any light laugh, born from recognizing life’s contradictions.

The essay draws the distinction precisely, and it’s the one every test asks for. Faced with an elderly lady clumsily made up and dressed like a young woman, the first reaction is laughter: that is the comic, which Pirandello calls the “perception of the opposite” — instinctively noticing that something is off. But if reflection leads us to ask why she does it — perhaps in the painful illusion of holding on to the affection of a younger husband — the laughter mixes with understanding: that is the “feeling of the opposite”, true humor. No longer just seeing the dissonance, but feeling the pain behind it. It’s the thread running through his novels, short stories, and plays alike.

From bourgeois comedy to theatre within the theatre

Pirandello’s theatre falls into two broad phases. The first, closer to traditional bourgeois comedy, includes titles such as Sicilian Limes (1910), Think It Over, Giacomino! (1916), Right You Are (If You Think So) (1917), Cap and Bells (1918), and The Rules of the Game (1918). The second phase, that of tragedy, carries the same obsessions (identity, the mask, the relativity of truth) to the point of openly breaking stage conventions: this is where the drama Henry IV (1922) belongs, along with the so-called “theatre within the theatre” trilogy made up of Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921), Each in His Own Way (1924), and Tonight We Improvise (1930).

Practical example: in Six Characters in Search of an Author, six figures left without a finished story burst into a theatre where a troupe is rehearsing a different play, and ask the stage manager to give them the dramatic form that the author who imagined them never got around to finishing. The audience watches the attempt, staged right in front of it, to build a story that’s still unfinished: the actors, the director, and the wings all remain visible, and stage illusion stops pretending to hide itself. It’s in this gap, between characters demanding to exist and the machinery of the performance that gives them a stage, that Pirandello invents “theatre within the theatre.”

A flop that turned into a triumph

The premiere of Six Characters in Search of an Author, on May 9, 1921, at Rome’s Teatro Valle with Dario Niccodemi’s company, was a disaster. The audience openly turned against the play, which upended stage conventions that had until then seemed untouchable; the production limped through just four nights in Rome. But opinion shifted quickly: later runs in Bologna and then Milan, on September 27, 1921, were met with growing attention, building to a triumph that defined the entire 1921-1922 season. From that point on, Pirandello’s fame grew abroad too, to the point of drawing caricaturists in newspapers across Germany, France, and Argentina.

The 1934 Nobel Prize

In 1934 the Swedish Academy awarded Luigi Pirandello the Nobel Prize in Literature, with a citation that named no single book but rather his body of work as a whole: “for his bold and ingenious revival of dramatic and scenic art.” The ceremony was held in Stockholm on December 10, 1934, with the prize presented by King Gustav V of Sweden. Five years earlier, in 1929, Pirandello had already been named a member of the Accademia d’Italia; in 1924 he had instead joined the National Fascist Party, a move that caused public scandal at the time.

Pirandello died in Rome on December 10, 1936: the very same date, exactly two years on, as the Stockholm ceremony.

A legacy that reshaped 20th-century theatre

For much of his career, critics dismissed him as an eccentric writer with weak prose; real fame arrived through the theatre only once he was already past fifty. From then on, his experimentation went on to shape playwriting for decades afterward: reacting against the verbal and musical virtuosity that had dominated Italian literature in the preceding years, Pirandello pushed for a plainer, more anti-literary language, paving the way for writers such as Alvaro, Moravia, and Brancati.

Today the house where he was born, in the Caos hamlet outside Agrigento, is a House Museum: declared a national monument in 1949, damaged in 1943 when a nearby munitions depot exploded, and acquired and restored by the Sicilian Region starting in 1952. Since 1987 it has formed a single institution with the Luigi Pirandello Library in Agrigento. The pine tree under which his ashes rest, as he had asked, is gone: a whirlwind struck it hard in 1997, and a tombstone carved by sculptor Marino Mazzacurati now marks the spot, holding the urn. The museum reopened on December 10, 2021, the anniversary of the writer’s death, with a multimedia tour narrated by actor Leo Gullotta.