and extraordinary success ofCavalleria Rusticana. Certainly the advance publicity given to the debate over its probable failure and a newspaper article appealing for openness and objectivity on the part of the audience, published the day before the opening, contributed to an atmosphere of tense expectation.

According to a newspaper critic’s eyewitness account, the beauty and distinction of the set significantly contributed to the positive attitude with which the audience then received the play. For whatever reason, the enormous success of Cavalleria Rusticana opened the door to Verismo and contemporary realism in the theater. The traditional historical themes, the exaggerated gestures, the rhetorical language, the spectacular, and the marvelous would be increasingly replaced by the contemporary, the sincere, the vivid, the humble, and the straightforward. A successful playwright such as Guiseppe Giacosa would attempt to change from historical themes to contemporary middle-class themes. More important, Verga’s theatrical revolution would have a direct effect on fellow Sicilian Luigi Pirandello, from whose theater most important contemporary European theater derives.

The published works of Giovanni Verga are of only two kinds, fiction and drama. Since he considered his primary vocation to be that of novelist, all his earliest publications are novels. His first play, written when he was twenty-nine, was never produced and remained unpublished until after his death. Eventually he wrote seven plays, all of them derived from his own works of fiction. He first turned to short fiction with a relatively lengthy story called Nedda. It was long enough, at any rate, to be accorded separate publication in a tiny volume in 1874 but was clearly not of standard novel length. This publication is generally regarded as the start of his interest in the short story as a literary form.

Two years later he published his first collection of short stories, and that volume also included the previously published Nedda. Thereafter, he practiced this new literary form assiduously enough to make his short stories as important a part of his total achievement as were his novels. Verga is a rarity among writers of fiction in that he published no poetry—not even in his youth—and no literary criticism or travel books. Aside from his novels, short stories, and plays, only selections from his personal letters have ever appeared in print.

As a socially conscious writer, Giovanni Verga is considered the most determined spokesman of the conditions in which the poor of his native Sicily lived. A master writer of novels and short stories and the leader of an innovative realistic and naturalistic literary current known as Verismo, Verga in his works explored the struggle of humankind to survive in adverse circumstances. He emphasized the importance of family, work, and basic moral and religious values, and he focused on the fundamental role these values play in overcoming difficult times. To enrich his highly humanitarian themes, Verga developed an intense dramatic expression characterized by detailed descriptive features and original linguistic solutions. Along with being widely recognized as one of the best Italian writers, Verga was bestowed with several official honors by the Italian government, while his works continue to endure lasting success as modern classics.

Giovanni Verga (VAYR-gah) was a writer of short stories and a playwright as well as a novelist. “Nedda” is the story of a Sicilian peasant girl who harvests olives and suffers the buffets of bad fortune until at length she thanks the Virgin Mary that her baby has been taken and will no longer suffer on earth. This story, written in 1874, prompted Luigi Capuana to predict that Verga had opened “a new seam in the mine of Italian literature.” In Primavera ed altri racconti (1876; springtime and other stories), Verga attempts a certain realism by occasionally reproducing the Milanese dialect of his characters. Vita dei campi (1880; Cavalleria Rusticana, and Other Stories, 1928; also known as Life in the Country, 2003) contains some of his finest stories, such as “La lupa” (“The She-Wolf”), in which a woman drives her son-in-law to kill her as the result of her continual sexual prodding. Verga transformed this story into the play La lupa (1896).

Also notable in Cavalleria Rusticana, and Other Stories is “Fantasticheria” (“Reverie”), in which a man and a woman compare the merits of the world of high society with the unsullied world of the peasant, and the man in the story argues eloquently for the superiority of the latter. The collection also includes Verga’s “Cavalleria rusticana” (literally meaning “rustic chivalry” but known in English only by its Italian name), the tragedy of Turiddu at the hands of the cuckolded Alfio, each one cooperating with fate to work out the other’s destruction.

Novelle rusticane (1883; translated by D. H. Lawrence in 1925 as Little Novels of Sicily) explores in its twelve stories the peasant’s struggle to survive and his victimization by nature and society. In “La libertà” (“Liberty”), for example, in which the peasants rebel and slaughter their oppressors, they are immediately cowed by the enormity of their vengeance and are soon made into willing victims by those who execute the law. “Pane nero” (“Black Bread”), more a short novel than a story, is striking for the contrast its peasants provide to the idealism of the Malavoglia family; the fear of poverty in these peasants drives them to ignore all scruples in their search for material necessities. In Per le vie (1883; through the streets), Verga writes of the struggles of the urban Milanese poor; these stories seem to lack the brilliance of his stories set in Sicily. In “Camerati” (“Buddies”), Verga takes a dim view of the Socialist ideas that were coming into vogue in Northern Italy on the grounds that they merely complicate the problems that they are out to solve.

All of his life, Verga dreamed of being a successful playwright; although he did not write many plays, some of them were successful. In 1883, he rewrote “Cavalleria rusticana” as a one-act tragedy, which was performed the next year in Turin with Eleanora Duse, Cesare Rossi, and Tebaldo Checchi, the finest actors in Italy at the time. It was published the same year and marks the greatest success of Verga’s career as a writer; in 1889, the play was transformed into an opera by composer Pietroc Mascagni. The play was translated into English and published in 1893. “The She-Wolf,” rewritten into a two-act tragedy, premiered as La lupa in Turin in 1896 with some success, and for a time Mascagni considered using it also as the basis of an opera. In portineria (pb. 1884; the porter’s lodgings) is a stage adaptation in two acts taken from a story in Per le vie; when it premiered in Milan in 1885, it was a failure. La caccia al lupo (pr. 1901; The Wolf Hunt, 1921) and La caccia alla volpe (pr. 1901; the fox hunt) are companion pieces that explore instances of marital infidelity among the poor and among the rich; predictably, Verga is more successful portraying the story set in the world of the Sicilian peasant than the one set in the empty world of high society. Dal tuo al mio (pr. 1903; what’s yours is mine), which deals with a confrontation between sulfur miners and the barons who own the mines, and which puts forth the self-interest motive as the source of all actions, was later reconstructed by Verga as a less effective short novel in 1906. There is no complete edition of the plays of Verga, although the one-volume Teatro, published by Mondadori in 1912, is a valuable collection of the better ones.

Giovanni Verga is generally viewed as the second greatest novelist Italy has produced, after Alessandro Manzoni. His objectivity, his efforts to infuse new life into the petrified, tradition-shackled Italian language, his compassion for humanity, and his conception of society as controlled by immutable economic laws have made an indelible impression on the Italian writers who followed him, especially on the neorealists. One of the landmark works of the neorealist cinema is Luchino Visconti’s La terra trema (1948), based on Verga’s novel The House by the Medlar Tree. The tragic vision elaborated in his best novels, however, has less appeal than his short stories.

Abroad, Verga is best known as the source of the libretto Cavalleria rusticana (1884), and his stories, such as “The She-Wolf,” “Conforti” (“Consolation”), “Black Bread,” “Liberty,” and “Cos’è il re” (“So Much for the King”), are frequently anthologized. Furthermore, he is among the few modern Italian writers included with any regularity in textbooks of literature published in the United States.

Although his dramatic works were not many, Verga was the only fully successful writer of tragedy in Italian theater between Count Vittorio Alfieri and Luigi Pirandello. Cavalleria rusticana is a work of monumental importance in the history of Italian theater, for it ushered in a new age of realistic drama dealing with contemporary problems after centuries of plots based on medieval themes.

In his best novels, Verga achieved a perfect synchronization of style and story and created a language capable of conveying the feelings of his Sicilian peasant characters that his Italian readers could understand. Verga steeped himself in the customs and the psychology of Sicily and then proceeded to convert the Sicilian dialect of his characters into a crystalline and “unartificial” Italian. Generally remaining within the bounds of standard Italian, Verga preserved successfully syntactic features of his native dialect, such as the tendency to repeat the verb at the end of a sentence, as in “Per voi tirerei tutta la casa, tirerei” (“For you I would lift the whole house up, I really would”) from “Cavalleria rusticana.” Gabriele D’Annunzio would later imitate this feature of Verga’s language in his own short stories.