The project "Pirandello's letters. Digital edition of the Collection of letters published and unpublished" fits inside of the works established by the National Committee for the Edition of the complete works of Luigi Pirandello, established by Decree of the The Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Tourism at 15/11/2016.
Coordinator of Correspondence in digital format: Beatrice Alfonzetti with the support of a team of scholars, Phd students, technicians of the Department and of other forums.
On the occasione of the 150. From the birth, has been set up an International Scientific Council which includes Alfonzetti v. http://pirandello.eu/international2017.
The project intends to prepare the first organic edition of the correspondence. It will be ordered chronologically unlike volumes so far appeared where the letters are collected by adressee, without any design to publish the entire corpus of letters.
Our project intends to fill this gap:
The letters will be built along two parallel activities:
a) transfer in digital format and publish, on a first step, in "Biblioteca Italiana", the letters published both in volume and scattered in magazines difficult to find, not reported in some cases in bibliographies;
b) found at archives and funds still unpublished letters and of which there are no news (es. Heirs Stefano Pirandello Papers now at the Library-Museum Luigi Pirandello in Agrigento).
The digital edition of the correspondence will be hosted on the platform Biblioteca Italiana.
The letters sent by Pirandello to family members, friends, editors, actors, cultural and theatrical operators, etc., they are of capital importance. To have an edition ordered chronologicaly ordered is essential for: writing intellectual biography of Pirandello (the last biography dates even back to 1960); rebuilding the Pirandello's numerous contacts and the genesis of his textes; studing of Pirandello's letters as a literary genre; supporting the works of National Edition (2017-2027).
Knowledge and study of letters sent by Pirandello to family members, friends, editors, actors, cultural and theatrical operators, etc., they are of capital importance. To have an edition ordered according to a strict chronological order is essential to write an up-to-date intellectual biography of Pirandello. It is a serious shortcoming within the studies about the author, which often, devoid of adequate tools, formulate theory not supported by data.
A biography that takes into account the correspondence of Pirandello will allow real progress of the research on the work of the writer, who arouse more and more interest in the Italianistics all over the world. The last biography, written by Gaspare Giudice, dates even back to 1960, when one did not have proper documentation for reconstruction of the personal, intellectuals and theatrical events of Pirandello that make it an international case.
The chance to look up the letters of Pirandello ordered according to a diachronic policy is also crucial in terms of new studies and research on his work. In addition, the horizontal comparison between letters written during the same days months or years to several adressee - course so far unfeasible - will allow to interlace data for a greater deepening into the genetic core of the individual texts designed and drafted.
The letters will be instrumental in rebuilding the Pirandello's numerous contacts with those in charge of periodicals and magazines, from "Corriere della Sera" where he published regularly interventions and especially short stories, often reducing the space (with Orvieto, Albertini, etc.), with publishers (from Treves to Bemporad to Mondadori), with friends writers (Cena, Bontempelli, etc.) with company directors and actors italians and foreigners (Martoglio, Talli, Ruggeri, Salvini, Melato, etc.), with directors and scene designers (Virgilio Marchi, etc.).
The Letters consultable in digital edition work in progress will be ready for internal use in an initial form within two years; it will offer support to critical-philological works of the scholars who have undertaken the editorial care of the texts for the National Edition. The latter foresee a period of ten years from 2017 onwards.
Search for unpublished letters will begin from the new acquisitions of the "Istituto di Studi pirandelliani e del Teatro Contemporaneo" of Rome and of the "Biblioteca e museo Luigi Pirandello" of Agrigento. The finding of letters not yet catalogued and the survey of all letters published must be conducted with the methodological criterion of critical-historical category of "network". The information that can be obtained for each text of Pirandello starting from the laudable edition by I Meridiani of the "Works of Luigi Pirandello" form a first platform. It must be divided into subsets to conduct archival research at Archives, Libraries, Funds, where it is thought they may be kept even letters of Pirandello. The archival search functional to the finding of unpublished letters will proceed by building a list of possible recipients and the ascertainment of the existence or not of unpublished papers and documents that concern them.
This work can be carried on only within a team that would operate in synergy.
The digital edition of the Correspondence, which can gradually be implemented, will start a deeper investigation of Pirandello's letters: it is a direction already undertaken by various contributions in the volume of 2018 "Pirandello, vita e arte nelle lettere". It's a stream of studies that in the last decades has had an increasing fortune, after fundamental works, especially of french area, regarding the XVI, the XVIII and XIX century (see for a concise bibliography the list of the paper "Studi sulla prassi epistolare" in www.cresverona.it/bibliografia).
A most comprehensive as possible Edition of the letters of Pirandello will let emerge the quantity of Pirandello's letters: a very important point that can insert his epistolary writing, characterized by different registers, in the "civilité de la correspondance" on which speaks Roger Chartier about the increase of the exchange of letters in the period from the end of the French Revolution to the Great War (v. "La correspondance. Les usages de la lettre au XIX° siècle", Paris, Fayard, 1991).