His family’s did not deter him from his literary pursuits, but critical response did. In 1896, after a short but intense affair with a local working-class woman, Schmitz married Livia Veneziani, the daughter of his first cousin (a successful industrialist), with whom he had his only child, Letizia. Here for the first time Ettore Schmitz used the pseudonym Italo Svevo, meaning “Italian Swabian (or German),” to underline his mixed heritage. In 1892 Schmitz self-published his first novel, Una Vita (A Life), the tale of an inept bank clerk with literary aspirations. Although very unhappy in it, he kept the job for the next 20 years while continuing to write. His relatively carefree lifestyle ended in 1880, however his father’s business failed, and Schmitz felt compelled to take a job as a clerk at Union-bank, a Viennese bank with a branch in Trieste. He began to write short literary reviews for the local paper, L’Indipendente (The Independent), as well as some short stories and plays. Trieste had a very fine theater, which Schmitz attended regularly. Upon returning to Trieste, he enrolled at the Istituto Revoltella, the local business school for higher education, and during his tenure there read French, German, and Italian literary works in their original languages, and English and Russian texts in translation. At the age of 11 he was sent to an academy near Würzburg, Germany, where, for the next five years he studied business and commerce and improved his command of the German and French languages.

His father, Francesco Schmitz, a German Jew also born in Trieste, had by then managed to establish himself as a successful businessman.

His mother, Allegra Moravia, belonged to an Italian Jewish family’s.

Italo Svevo, whose real name was Ettore Aron Schmitz, was born in 1861 in Trieste to Jewish parents of mixed backgrounds. In the form of a personal diary, the novel narrates the adventures and comic misadventures of a Triestine businessman, Zeno Cosini: his failed attempt to quit smoking, the death of his father, his marriage, his unsuccessful business endeavors, and his problematic interaction with psychoanalysis.Įvents in History at the Time of the Novel 1900-1915 published in Italian (as La coscienza di Zeno) in 1923, in English m 1930.

Franz crisis of conscience