Zeno has made up his mind to marry one of the girls, their names linked like “a bundle, to be delivered all together.” The first he meets is Augusta, who is immediately scratched off the list. “The first thing you noticed about her was a squint so pronounced that if someone tried to recall her after not having seen her for a while, that defect would personify her totally”; and in his inventory he remarks upon her dull hair and a figure “a bit heavy for her age.”

He falls in love with Ada, the beautiful Ada, and pursues her with comic vigor scene after scene, chapter after chapter. But Ada is in love with a lout named Guido, a compulsive gambler on the bourse. At last Zeno proposes to her sister Alberta. “Listen, Alberta! I have an idea: Have you ever thought that you’re at an age to take a husband? … A short while ago I made Ada the same proposal I’ve made to you. She refused, with scorn. You can imagine the state I’m in … But I believe that if you would agree to marry me, I would be most happy, and with you I would forget everybody and everything else.” Alberta does not wish to marry anyone, and by a series of contretemps and follies Zeno and the homely Augusta will wed, have children, and go on. Go on with the help of a mistress, Carla, a singer with a large, loud voice without musicality. Zeno, conscience-stricken now and then, will attempt to break with Carla, make a last visit, and so on. At her door one day, he hears someone playing “Schubert’s Abschied, in the Liszt transcription.” It is her new lover, her fiancé, playing on a piano Zeno has paid for. Still, the hapless Zeno will always have the last word. Time will pass, and he does not fail to note that the beautiful, rejecting Ada has grown older, fat, and not improved by a goiter.


There is much more to Zeno’s Conscience than the amorous wanderings, the forgiving self-analysis, the talent for describing diseases and deathbed dramas. An ironical voice is sustained throughout, but in the end the novel is a rich and detailed study of Trieste families just before the outbreak of the First World War. It is a novel of money and an idle, introspective man’s way of hanging on to it. It is a brilliant psychological document about procrastination, beginning with the denied and then embraced cigarette, and the love and neglect of the once-spurned Augusta, who will at last define his life.

The Italian poet Montale wrote about Svevo: “La coscienza di Zeno is a strange book, stagnant and yet continually in motion.” In the demand for bold actions, self-awareness may be a crippling burden, but with Zeno’s Conscience the compensation is a cool, stinging dive into the days and nights of a gentleman from Trieste. Svevo-Schmitz was killed in an automobile accident in his sixty-seventh year of age. He could not have wished his sudden end, but it was more suitable to his nature than the doctors and nurses that probably awaited him.

Elizabeth Hardwick


TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION



Take a look at the author’s name (his real name): Ettore Schmitz. The first half is Italian and, significantly, it is the name of a Greek hero, not of a Catholic saint. The surname is German. Then consider the birthplace: Trieste, a city that has had many masters, from ancient Romans to Austrians to Italians. In 1861, when Ettore Schmitz was born there, Trieste was an Austrian city, a vital one, the great empire’s only seaport and a focus of trade between central Europe and the rest of the world. In this place of encounters and frontiers, young Ettore grew up to appreciate ambiguity, even contradiction; and, when he seriously began his career as a writer, he chose a pen name that reflected his complex background: Italo Svevo: Italus, the Italian; and Svevus, the Swabian (a duchy in medieval Germany, Swabia was also known as Alamannia).

His father, Francesco Schmitz, was a German Jew, born in Trieste but closely linked to the German-speaking world. Ettore’s mother was also Jewish and also from Trieste, but from an Italian family: her name was Allegra Moravia. Since the late eighteenth century Trieste had been a relatively serene place for its Jewish citizens, who were allowed to conduct business, accumulate wealth, occupy public office: some were even ennobled.

Francesco Schmitz was in the glassware business, and for much of Ettore’s childhood that business went well. The boy, like his seven brothers and sisters, lived in comfort, if not affluence. Their father was something of an autocrat, and—like most other fathers in Trieste—he assumed his sons would follow him into the world of commerce. Francesco was a man of firm convictions, and one of these was the belief that success in affairs was dependent on a total mastery of the German language. So when Ettore was twelve he was sent with his older brother Adolfo to board at the Brussel’sche Handels und Erziehungsinstitut, a trade and education academy at Segnitz-am-Main, near Wurzburg. Ettore did well there, but his real interest was reading, not commerce: he devoured Goethe, Schiller, Heine, Schopenhauer, and other classics, including Shakespeare in German translation.

In 1878 Schmitz returned to Trieste and for two years studied, in a somewhat random fashion, at the Istituto Revoltella, the closest thing Trieste then had to a university. At this time he also began writing, chiefly plays, evidence of an enduring passion for the theater that he was able to feed by attendance at the Teatro Comunale.