Archivio d’Annunzio | 2021 | N. 8

Luigi Pirandello wrote in a review about d’Annunzio’s La città morta that “no one, today fortunately, speaks like the characters in this tragedy”. However, indirectly replying to him as to other detractors, d’Annunzio observed that those who criticised his work showed that they “did not understand what tragic art is”. In support of his poetics, d’Annunzio cited the Sophocles models of Agamennone and Antigone. But there is more. D’Annunzio founded a theatre of ‘high’ speech, which was counterpointed by the silences of the characters and an action that took place mainly in the ‘interiors’. This choice made it possible to propose a peculiar furnishing philosophy related to sepulchral aspects and an intense idea of death. Above all, it was the notion of time that was deeply traversed by d’Annunzio’s experience of the tragic, a sign that the discovery of the tombs of the Atrides – the central topic of the work – on the one hand cancelled the “errors of time“ suspended between a remote past and an inert present, but on the other hand it exhumed a world of terrible passions like incestuous drives. This was intended to be the profound meaning of the tragic theatre founded by d’Annunzio with La città morta.

The article informs about the variation in Francesca da Rimini’s explicit between the printed edition (1902) and the autographed manuscript written in the summer of 1901. The reasons of this variation are reconstructed thanks to the documents kept in the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale of Rome, in the Archivio Eleonora Duse of the Istituto per il Teatro e il Melodramma of the Fondazione Giorgio Cini in Venice and in the Georges Hérelle collection of the Médiathèque Jacques-Chirac of Troyes.

The pastoral drama La figlia di Iorio (1904) is a concentrate of musical and linguistic experiments. Incipit and explicit have a very important function in it. In fact, they characterise the ‘stacchi’ or ties that characterise this text with a complex and undulating architecture, similar to a symphony. In this essay, these very important moments in the economy of tragedy are analysed.

The textual incipit of the second Abruzzo tragedy by Gabriele d’Annunzio, La fiaccola sotto il moggio (1905), defines its character in close relationship with three literary references: the Vangeli (of Luca, Matteo and Marco), the Coefore of Eschilo and La figlia di Iorio (1903; ed. 1904) by the poet himself. The analysis of the first portion of the dramaturgical text shows how, starting from the initial atmospheres, the author loves the game of antiphrastic references with those works, which constitute the filigree of the poetic construction through thematic and conceptual references. Above all, the inverse morality that animates Gigliola, the protagonist, emerges in relation with the evangelical premises contained in the title, as well as the subversion of the tragic order of the classical matrix which also inspires the text.

This paper focuses on the incipit of d’Annunzio’s plays written in French and first staged on French theatres. It analyses on one hand the thematic and structural link between the first scene of the play and the dramatic development and, on the other, the correspondences with French theatrical poetics.

The essay examines the peculiarities, both formal and of content, of Giovanni Episcopo (1891), considering its incipit – a mimetically connoted space, compared to those of d’Annunzio’s novels that frame him. Particular attention was paid to the debate that was dedicated to the genre of the novel, in its various formulations, also related to the writings of the self (confession, memory, autobiography). This happens in a season marked by restless research, measuring itself against theoretical and aesthetic horizons determined to reread in dialectical terms the lesson already imparted by French Naturalism.

The short novel Giovanni Episcopo represents an exception in d’Annunzio’s fictional production. The beginning and the end of this work are particularly relevant for their innovative technique that points out a deep authorial engagement in literary experimentation. Critics discussed the innovative attitude of Giovanni Episcopo and its importance for a complete understanding of d’Annunzio’s production. In this article we are going to discuss this work analysing its textual thresholds to demonstrate its relevance for the authorial searching of new expressive ways.

The essay is about the film L’innocente by Luchino Visconti based on the novel by Gabriele d’Annunzio (1892). Accused of immorality, the literary text, decisive for the work of the Italian writer and dramatist, narrates – in the movie – the story of Tullio Hermil, a refined but restless man with a marked sensuality, and his infidelity towards his submissive wife Giuliana who, after a short love story with the writer Arborio, gets pregnant and decides to keep the baby. After the baptism, the jealous and upset Tullio kills the baby exposing him to the elements of Christmas night. Oppressed by the remorse, he commits suicide by gunshot. This essay intends to compare the two texts according to the poetic horizon of the director Luchino Visconti in the light of his contradictory attraction/rejection relationship with the Vate.

The aim of this paper is to investigate the first chapter of Forse che sì forse che no (1910). D’Annunzio’s last novel brings together the myths of the technical age, celebrated by Futurism, and the conflicting forces of forbidden desire, debilitating eros, madness and fascination with the past. The structure of the chapter, after the beginning dedicated to the challenge of speed and the taste for danger, finds its centre of gravity in the long sequence of the visit to Palazzo Gonzaga, a scene from which variations on the themes of the double, incest, the decline of humanistic civilisation and a dense network of intertextual references unfold. Particular prominence is given to the comparison with Vernon Lee’s writings dedicated to Mantua and the labyrinth.

Through a path of analysis on the Notturno and its creation process, d’Annunzio’s artistic ability is highlighted in the management of fundamental details relating to the very structure of the text. This essay offers a reading that can refer to the practice of the fragment, which characterises the early twentieth century, in a dialectical tension between the pole of lyric prose – which manages the fragment as a privileged material of a refined stylistic preciousness – and the pole of worship of the word as an announcement of truth, the esoteric and the sapiential.

The essay proposes a selective reading of the beginnings and the endings of the four prose texts of Contemplazione della morte (1912), in their connections, according to the different typologies and functions. Attention is given to the two dedicatees, Pascoli and Bermond, together with natural landscapes and atmospheric notations, as well as to the importance given to silence and to the vitalistic image of the “cagna”, which in the finale imposes itself on that of the drowned man.

As a journalist, Gabriele d’Annunzio covered the high life of the élite in the fin de siècle Rome through thousands of pages. This overwhelming and multifaceted body of work conceals aspects of d’Annunzio’s early ideological choices that can be traced in the articles. In admiring Baudelaire’s Fleurs du mal and the Spleen de Paris while in the meantime positioning himself as the anti-flâneur of the umbertine Rome, d’Annunzio reveals much of his complex literary persona and the early strata of his even more layered poetics.

Gabriele d’Annunzio was frequently excluded from the generative matrix of the Italian poetical twentieth century. It is time to restore the truth free of any ideological biases. In order to do that, it is necessary to retrace the studies conducted by d’Annunzio’s successors who tried to explore different ways to reckon with his work. Studies of that kind would make it possible to hypothesise a methodology to use for a systematic investigation aimed at revealing the entity of the qualitative and quantitative impact d’Annunzio’s work has had on much of the Italian poetry. It would subsequently be possible to draft a rough analytic route to use as starting point for more substantial future investigations.

The Tursi Fund, kept at the Cini Foundation and the Marciana Library in Venice, largely unpublished, preserves an important and unexplored heritage referring to the ‘Venetian period’ of d’Annunzio and to the political and military commitment in aviation during the first world conflict. The essay presents an integral and chronologically reconstruction of the entire collection with particular attention to the letters sent by d’Annunzio to Virginio Avi, director of the Gazzetta di Venezia between 1916 and 1918.