History and chronology of the text

The section Storia e cronologia del testo (Storia di un romanzo mai finito) traces, in chronologically ordered paragraphs, the tormented vicissitudes of an autobiographical work to which Giorgio de Chirico had initially entrusted – much more than he had done in 1929 with Hebdomeros – an ironic, yet profound introspection of himself, as well as an explicit confession of his fears, his taboos and his most secret nightmares, including those of a sexual nature.

It was precisely because of this frank sincerity, which was probably opposed by his partner Isabella Pakszwer, that the ‘novel’ never found its final form. Around 1941-42 de Chirico abandoned it, and when he took it up again, around 1953-54, he was no longer in the right frame of mind to continue along the path he had so brilliantly begun. Under the complete domination of his wife, he then took the ill-advised decision to turn it into a sort of “didactic novel” in which Isabella Far enters as a new character in the grotesque role – perhaps also dense with intentional and vindictive irony – of the “great thinker and philosopher” who rattles off the anti-modernist rosary of the late “pictor optimus” in tedious and interminable sermons. The extent to which de Chirico no longer believed in either his “novel” or the form it had taken is demonstrated both in the 1973 interview (see History and Chronology: 1973. June) to Umberto Allemandi, in which the Maestro states: “I still have a lot of work to do, I should devote myself to it”, and by the fact that in the passages sent to Maria Evangelisti for a critique (see History and Chronology: 1963. June) the character of Far is deleted. For this reason, and above all to transmit the freshness of the original, albeit unfinished, text, we have highlighted the passages featuring Isabella Far as well as other insertions from the early 1950s in green, so that one can easily skip over these passages and move on to the next text.