The Victim     by Gabriele D’Annunzio, Translated by Georgina Harding Original title: L’innocente Original language: Italian Published by Dedalus Pub. Date: 1991 Pub. Place: UK Format: 356 pages ISBN: 0946626642 List Price: £7.99 Buy online from Amazon.co.uk for £7.99 Published by Hippocrene Books Pub. Date: February 1992 Format: Paperback Dimensions: 0.50 x 7.75 x 5.00 in. ISBN: 0781800064 List Price: $14.95, £9.51 Buy online from Amazon.co.uk for £9.51

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This is a confessional novel whose protagonist, Tullio Hermil, recounts the crime he has committed. Believing himself to be an exceptional man, a rare spirit, he allows himself, by virtue of this presumed uniqueness, to indulge in a series of marital infidelities. But on discovering that his wife Giuliana is expecting a child (the consequence of a moment of weakness on her part) he is forced to confront a breakdown in the normal order of his life and marriage. His resulting frame of mind, a combination of wounded pride and phony repentance, leads him to devise a ‘great plan’ to eliminate the fruit of sin and feminine transgression, eventually driving him to cause the death of the newborn baby. His futile hope is to regain his commanding position (which Giuliana’s deed has compromised, in spite of her overwhelming remorse) through the restoration of a self-love which overcomes all sense of guilt and aspires to a reciprocal purification. In fact, the crime only sets the final seal on a more drastic and hopeless guilt in both parties, consigning both to a deep grief without hope of atonement.


This book, made into an exquisite film by Lucchino Visconti, shifts the themes of the great Russian novels to an Italian environment, with alternating backdrops of fin-de-siècle cityscapes and untainted rural life as symbol of purity. D’Annunzio’s meditation on the guilt ravaging Hermil’s selfish soul could have been inspired by Dostoevsky, while from Tolstoy came the Christian vision of life, out of reach of these protagonists but shared by the minor characters and countryfolk, witnesses to the goings-on in the country mansion.

‘We both turned towards the garden and listened. The garden had melted into a confused dim mass of violet, broken only by the dull gleam of the pond. There still remained a band of light on the extreme edge of the sky: a broad tricoloured zone, blood-red below, then orange, then dead-leaf green. Through the silence of the twilight, a voice rang clear and liquid like the first notes of a flute.

It was the nightingale... We listened with our eyes fixed upon the distant band of colour fading slowly behind the impalpable veil of evening. My soul hung suspended on that sound as if I looked for some great revelation of love from it. And the poor creature at my side — what were her feelings during those moments of listening? To what depths of anguish did she descend?’ p125