Giovanni Verga
Giovanni Verga, (b. Sept.
2, 1840, Catania, Sicily—d. Jan. 27, 1922, Catania),
novelist, short-story writer, and playwright, most important
of the Italian verismo (Realist) school of novelists (see
verismo). His reputation was slow to develop, but modern
critics have assessed him as one of the greatest of all
Italian novelists. His influence was particularly marked on
the post-World War II generation of Italian authors; a
landmark film of the Neorealist cinema movement, Luchino
Visconti’s Terra trema (1948; The Earth Trembles), was based
on Verga’s novel I malavoglia.
Born to a family of
Sicilian landowners, Verga went to Florence in 1869 and
later lived in Milan, where the ideas of other writers much
influenced his work. In 1893 he returned to Catania.
Starting with historical
and patriotic novels, Verga went on to write novels in which
psychological observation was combined with romantic
elements, as in Eva (1873), Tigre reale (1873; “Royal
Tigress”), and Eros (1875). These sentimental works were
later referred to by Verga as novels “of elegance and
adultery.” Eventually he developed the powers that made him
prominent among the European novelists of the late 19th
century, and within a few years he produced his
masterpieces: the short stories of Vita dei campi (1880;
“Life in the Fields”) and Novelle rusticane (1883; Little
Novels of Sicily), the great novels I malavoglia (1881) and
Mastro-don Gesualdo (1889), and Cavalleria rusticana (1884),
a play rewritten from a short story, which became immensely
popular as an opera (1890) by Pietro Mascagni.
Verga wrote with terse
accuracy and an intensity of human feeling that constitute a
distinctively lyrical Realism. His realistic representations
of the life of the poor peasants and fishermen of Sicily are
particularly notable, and indeed, his strong feeling for
locale helped start a movement of regionalist writing in
Italy. His stories most commonly treated man’s struggle for
material betterment, which Verga saw as foredoomed. D.H.
Lawrence translated several of his works into English,
including Cavalleria rusticana and Mastro-don Gesualdo.
Another notable English translation is The House by the
Medlar Tree (1953), Eric Mosbacher’s version of I
malavoglia.
