The chapter focuses on a controversial element of Pirandello’s life and career, namely, his relationship to Italian Fascism and its head of government, Benito Mussolini. Taking Pirandello’s outspoken and loyal adhesion to the Fascist government as a matter of historical fact and arguing that true “faith” in its ethos and professional opportunism on Pirandello’s part were not mutually exclusive, the essay focuses on the personal, cultural, and professional reasons for Pirandello’s membership in the party and then moves on to discuss how contemporaries viewed the author’s work in relation to Fascism’s ideological precepts. Because he was so famous, regime intellectuals were keen to claim Pirandello as their own, but whether they read his work as compatible with their world view had much to do with its philosophical bent, as interpreted through the formulations of Adriano Tilgher. If they perceived Pirandello as nihilistic, they tended to doubt his Fascism, but if they read his work as celebrating the victory of life over form, they judged it as representative of the spirit of the so-called new era.

This chapter explores a key aspect of Pirandello’s relationship with the Fascist regime. In 1926, Benito Mussolini created the Royal Italian Academy (the Academy), to rival the prestigious national academies of other European countries such as France and Britain. Pirandello was the most famous appointee amongst the first thirty nominations of accademici in March 1929. The chapter traces Pirandello’s ambivalent attitude toward the Academy. On the one hand, he considered it just recognition of both his fame as an author and his early support of Fascism. On the other, he was skeptical of the usefulness of a national academy, especially if it bent to the will of the Fascist regime. The chapter reconstructs several episodes showing how Pirandello’s status as an accademico was related to his hopes of taking a leading role in the renewal of Italian theatre. His correspondence with his son Stefano and his confidant and muse Marta Abba reveals Pirandello’s low opinion of the rhetoric and emptiness of Fascist cultural policies, of which the Academy was a prime example.