Scivere, ovvero nascere a sé stesso. Saggio su Luigi Pirandello.

This article reviews Dominique Budor’s 2022 study on Luigi Pirandello’s poetics and the role of writing in his work and worldview. Budor presents a detailed and comprehensive analysis that intertwines biographical context with conceptual inquiry, arguing that writing for Pirandello serves both as a means of escaping personal suffering and as a creative act that fuses life with poetry to express universal truths. The book is organized into four chapters exploring Pirandello’s evolving views on writing, its function in self-exploration, its psychological dimensions linked to themes like madness and death, and its significance at the end of his life. Central to Budor’s approach is a close reading of Pirandello’s recurring phrase “la vita o si vive o si scrive” (“life is either lived or written”), which she traces across various texts to reveal its rhetorical and propagandistic role in shaping interpretations of his work.