SOURCE: "Pirandello in Retrospect," in Italian Quarterly, Vol. 1, No. 4, Winter, 1958, pp. 19-47.

Poggioli was an Italian-born American critic and translator. Much of his critical writing is concerned with Russian literature, including The Poets of Russia: 1890-1930 (1960), which is one of the most important examinations of that literary era. In the following excerpt, Poggioli discusses the Italian author Giovanni Verga as the literary progenitor of Pirandello.

During the period between the end of the last century and the first World War, two great Italian novelists, and one of them undoubtedly the greatest, were islanders: the Sicilian, Giovanni Verga, and Grazia Deledda from Sardinia. While the best known authors of their generation were striving, often in vain, to approximate universality either by withdrawing from life entirely or by offering their readers refined and frequently false quintessences of life, Verga and Deledda achieved universality almost without conscious effort, by turning toward...