In a Late Empire Vienna, which was in a flurry of speculative activity, amazingly alive from an artistic and literary point of view, overwhelmed with a glorious past but cast into the future and into the new century, lived Arthur Schnitzler.

Born in 1862 from a well-to-do Jewish family, as the son of a physician and university professor, Schnitzler followed in his father’s footsteps and successfully graduated in medicine in 1885, even though, in his early years he wrote novels and one-act plays in parallel with his medical career.
His literary experience touched on different genres, including fiction, plays and lyric poetry, although his literary production always displayed continuity. Between 1910 and 1915 the author reached the peak of his artistic career, always spent in search of an existential balance and inner peace, whilst otosclerosis, from which he had been suffering for some time, gradually continued to progress.
Schnitzler died in Vienna in 1931, following sanguineous apoplexy. Among his plays some proved to be among the most effective in providing a comprehensive picture of the complex German language literary scene of the late 19th and early 20th century. In the 1875-95 period, Schnitzler explored the formation and fulfilment of the ego, both in its personal reality and within its surrounding historical environment. The work entitled Anatol (1889-91) is a cycle, of one-act plays.
The main character leads an episodic existence made up of isolated phases which however gradually become linked to each other, thus generating cyclical situations which inevitably recur. An ego that is unable to go beyond the limits of its own life (which it deems monotonous and boring), that has deliberately withdrawn into itself and is obsessed by a dominating phobic status.
This is a man who is tormented by his present, owing to his awareness as to the fleetingness of the contingent time, but also by his memories of the past, which are dominating and overhanging. One of Schnitzler’s recurring themes is the past, as well as the inability by the male character to accept his woman’s past affairs.
The main character is the sort of person that bends with the breeze, torn as he is between understanding others and the obsession that others may not understand him, because often the things which have not occurred give no respite, whilst what has actually been experienced cannot be changed, but only borne. Schnitzler obtained good renown from the drama “Amoretto” (1984), a three-act play which met with fair success. The play describes the vicissitudes of Christine, a poor Viennese woman disappointed by her love affair, having discovered that her own fiancée, the first man she had known in sexual terms – a well-off student who had flirted with her only for fun – has miserably died in a duel for another woman.
Christine’s emotions are viewed as their compare with the personality of the young man of the world. Estranged and frustrated, the young woman is unable to accept a reality which is completely different from the one that she had built with her own imagination.
So, desperate as she is, Christine decides to put an end to her life by drowning herself. In “Round dance” (1897) the circular structure reappears. This work is made up of 10 two-people dialogues, where the various episodes interlace with one another: in each scene the second character of the previous scene appears, which explains the reason for the title. Five male characters and an equal number of female characters represent the various typologies, where the various egos are dominated by passions and sensual pleasure, which caused the author to be strongly criticised and blamed.
On the other hand, the text “The Green Parrot” (1898) distinguishes itself for its grotesque style; it offers “the theatre within the theatre”, while stressing the dualism between reality and fiction. The story is set in the late 18th century in a tavern, where nobles get together to watch people staging pretend fights. One day, one of these people play-acts jealousy for his own wife against a duke. However, when he realises that the woman is really the nobleman’s mistress, he kills him. “Professor Bernardi” (1912) contains the themes of truth and moral courage. Faced with the choice between revealing to a young woman her cruel fate, that is her impending death, we have the opposite views of a catholic priest, who would rather tell the women the truth and then hear her confession, and that of a Jewish professor, who is against this solution, in order for her to live her last days with serenity.
The three one-act plays of “The Comedy of Words” (1913.14), that is “The Crucial Moment of Truth”, “The Crucial Scene” and “Bacchanal”, deal with the problems of middle-class couples, conflicts, the world of falsehood and hypocrisy, the masks worn while awaiting for the utopia to materialise. a utopia on the prevalence of truth. The author says that two individuals need to find an element in common to succeed as a couple. This may have also resulted from Schnitzler’s unsuccessful experience with his marriage, which was to lead to divorce from his wife in 1921.
When the crucial moment comes, Eckold decides to separate from his wife Klara, after the woman has been unfaithful to him because of her love for Ormin, a family friend.
However, he waits for ten years before telling his wife, and for the whole time he conceals his pain, continuing life as a couple in spite of everything, putting on every day the solicitous husband and father act.
The one-act plays “The Comedy of Seduction” (1923) and “In the Play of Summer Breezes” (1928) also deal with themes and characters that crave for that intimate inner peace, denied and sought for till the end of his days by Schnitzler as a man.
Traslated by Interpres