Editors’ Note to the 1938 Edition of Stories for a Year on the Twenty-One Short Stories Added in the Appendix

How to cite this work:

Luigi Pirandello. “Editors’ Note to the 1938 Edition of Stories for a Year on the Twenty-One Short Stories Added in the Appendix.”  Translated by Lisa Sarti and Michael Subialka. In Stories for a Year, eds. Lisa Sarti and Michael Subialka, Digital Edition, www.pirandellointranslation.org, 2025. [1]

To complement this new two-volume edition (Omnibus I, Omnibus II) of the complete corpus of Stories for a Year, twenty-one stories are included here that the Author had not incorporated in the previous collection. Nine of these are taken from early volumes published before 1922, one is never-before published, and eleven—originally printed in literary magazines and newspapers—were rediscovered by Manlio Lo Vecchio-Musti during a meticulous review of all the periodicals to which Luigi Pirandello contributed, which was carried out on behalf of the Mondadori publishing house.

It appears that, in his final years, Pirandello himself had been trying to track down some of these stories, particularly the “Dialogues,” which he held especially dear. Completing that search has thus meant, in a sense, fulfilling one of his own wishes.

Luigi Pirandello certainly would not have reprinted any of these writings without revising them, and he would have suppressed many. However, given their historical significance—especially for the study of the development of the narrative prose of such a great writer—and since no one, after his death, could rightly claim the authority to decide what to include or exclude, it was deemed appropriate to republish them all in full.

The reader will thus find the complete volume Loves Without Love (Amori senza amore; Rome: Bontempelli, 1894), including “The Wave” (“L’onda”), “The Signorina” (“La signorina”), “The Wives’ Friend” (“L’amica delle mogli”); “The Cooper’s Cockerels” (“I galletti del bottajo”), the only children’s story Pirandello ever wrote; “Fear” (“La paura”), which became the basis for the play The Vise (La morsa); “Mrs. Hope” (“La signora Speranza”), from which the short story “It’s Nothing Serious” (“Non è una cosa seria”) and the play But It’s Nothing Serious (Ma non è una cosa seria) were derived; “Stefano Giogli, One and Two” (“Stefano Giogli, uno e due”), an early outline of the novel One, No One and One Hundred Thousand (Uno, nessuno e centomila); “The Choice” (“La scelta”); the “Dialogues Between the Big Me and the Little Me” (“Dialoghi tra il Gran Me e il piccolo me”); “Interviews with Characters” (“Colloqui coi personaggi”); “A Christmas Dream” (“Sogno di Natale”); “Who Did It?” (“Chi fu?”); “All Passion Spent” (“Sgombero”), previously unpublished; and several others of lesser significance.