1934 by Alberto Moravia

First published: 1982 (English translation, 1982)

Type of work: Philosophical realism

Time of work: 1934

Locale: Capri, Italy

Principal Characters:

• Lucio, the twenty-seven-year-old narrator, a writer
• Beate, /
• Trude Muller, a nineteen-year-old actress
• Alois Muller, her middle-aged husband
• Paula, an actress, Beate/Trude’s lover
• Shapiro, an art collector
• Sonia, a Russian emigre, Shapiro’s curator

The Novel

As the book opens, Lucio is sailing toward Capri from Naples. On the island he intends to complete a translation of Heinrich von Kleist’s novella Michael Kohlaas (1810) and work on a story of his own in which the hero, like Kleist, commits suicide. By disposing of his character in this way, Lucio hopes to “stabilize” his own despair and so avoid killing himself. Among his fellow passengers on the boat is a German couple. The woman captures his interest, for in her eyes he reads a mood similar to his own. Without exchanging a word, they seem to carry on a conversation; by the time the boat docks, Lucio is in love.

He wonders how he will be able to continue this romance, since he knows neither the woman’s name nor her destination. Fate favors him when the husband tells him that they are staying at the Pensione Damecuta on Anacapri. Lucio follows them and continues his silent wooing at dinner by showing the woman two lines from Friedrich Nietzsche’s Also sprach Zarathustra: “But every pleasure wants eternity—/—wants deep, deep eternity.” Shortly afterward she replies silently with another book, Kleist’s letters, with a bookmark indicating Henriette Vogel’s last communication to Ernest Friedrich Peguilhen, dated November 21, 1811: “The loyal friendship you have always shown me till now awaits a wonderful test, for the two of us, namely Kleist, whom you know, and I, find ourselves here at Stimmung, on the Potsdam road... shot,” the victims of a double suicide.

Lucio believes that Beate Muller, whose name he learns from the concierge, intends for the two of them to make love and then kill themselves just as Kleist and his mistress did. In the course of their one brief conversation, she virtually confirms these suspicions when she promises to come to his room after midnight, if he in turn will do something for her, something she has already told him with the Kleist book. Although he does not want to die, he resigns himself to carrying out Beate’s plan. In the end, though, she never appears and he thus survives.

Beate has told Lucio that she is returning immediately to Germany but that her twin sister, Trude, will soon take her place on the island. That very evening Trude appears at the hotel with her supposed mother. While she looks exactly like Beate, they are otherwise total opposites. Beate, who grew up in Germany, is an ascetic: She hardly eats, and she shuns Lucio’s advances.Trude, who was reared in Italy, is an aesthete, gorging herself and practically throwing herself at Lucio. She seems unable to get enough of life and frequently repeats pleasurable experiences. Soon she, like Beate, promises to come to Lucio’s room, following a late-night radio speech by Adolf Hitler that she wants to hear.

Like Beate, however, Trude disappoints her would-be lover and does not come to his room. Instead, Paula, who has merely pretended to be Trude’s mother, tells him that Beate and Trude are one person and that the Mullers contrived with her to play a joke on Lucio as a way of teaching Italian men that they are not as irresistible to women as they believe.

Lucio leaves the island the following day. A month later Lucio learns that the joke played on him had its serious side. On the night of Hitler’s speech, Alois Muller was killed by the Nazis. Beate/Trude and Paula learned of his death the next day and left the hotel together. A peasant found them on a beach overlooking the sea, victims of a Kleistian double suicide.

The Characters

In 1934, the twenty-seven-year-old Alberto Moravia was living on Capri with his wife, Elsa Morante, who was also a writer. Like Lucio, he abhorred the Fascist regimes in Italy and Germany and faced an uncertain future. While the first-person narrator derives in part from Moravia’s autobiography, he also resembles the many effete middle-class intellectuals who appear in Moravia’s fiction. Lucio is working on a translation and a novel, but he finishes neither. He wants to make love to Beate and then to Trude, but neither relationship is consummated. He contemplates sex with Sonia, who would willingly go to bed with him; again, nothing comes of his desire. Lucio remains aloof, and the reader last sees him hiding at his parents’ home in the Italian countryside.

Lucio is a spectator rather than a participant in life. This attitude is most clearly revealed when he rows out to an island and the Mullers follow. While Lucio watches from behind a rock, Alois takes nude photographs of Beate. Since Lucio’s boat is plainly visible, the Mullers know that he is nearby, and at length Alois invites him to photograph the two of them. Throughout the scene, Lucio merely observes from behind a screen, whether that screen is a boulder or a camera lens. His aloofness may save his life, but without passion is he truly alive?

Sonia suggests that the answer is no. In a lengthy interpolated story, she tells Lucio about her life in Russia before the Revolution. A member of the Revolutionary Socialist Party, she fell in love with Evno Azev, ostensibly a fellow revolutionary but in fact an agent provocateur. When the central committee discovered Azev’s identity, it ordered Sonia to kill him, thereby eliminating a traitor and demonstrating her own loyalty to the cause. She refused to obey. Instead, she fled Russia by herself, disgusted by the behavior of her party and Azev. Though she survived, she tells Lucio that when she left her homeland at the age of twenty-seven, which is, significantly, Lucio’s age, she died spiritually, because she had lost everything she had believed in and loved.

Her employer, Shapiro, is also spiritually dead. Modeled on Bernard Berenson, he looks at and purchases pictures, but he does not create art. Whatever passion he once had for beauty seems to have evaporated. When Lucio asks Shapiro for advice, the best he can offer echoes William Shakespeare’s arch-villain Iago’s statement, “Put money in thy purse.” Shapiro is more concise: “Get rich.” For companionship, he recommends Sonia to Lucio, even though he knows that she is incapable of a serious relationship.

In contrast to this detachment from life exhibited by Lucio, Sonia, and Shapiro, is the German hypersensitivity of Beate/Trude and Paula. Both are actresses who stage an elaborate charade to teach Lucio a lesson about vanity. They are also deeply in love. Beate/Trude kills herself because she does not want to exist without her husband, and Paula joins in the suicide because she cannot live without Beate/Trude. Whereas Sonia chose separation in life, the two Germans prefer union in death. Neither alternative is happy, but Moravia offers no other.

Critical Context

Increasingly, the modernist answer to this query is negative. As R.W.B. Lewis has remarked, “sadness is...the supreme emotion in the Moravian universe,” and that emotion certainly pervades 1934. The historical setting lends credence to the dominant feeling of despair, as the world seemed increasingly to be falling under the domination of ruthless dictators. Personally, too, the 1930’s were bad for Moravia, who has said that “the years between 1933 and 1943...were, from the point of view of public life, the worst of my life; and even today, I cannot remember them without horror.” Moravia also noted that the book reflects the time of its composition in the early 1980’s, commenting in a 1983 interview, “Communism is going badly, and so is capitalism.”

1934 suggests, then, that uncertainties are less the product of an age or political system than of the human condition. For Moravia, as for his contemporary existentialist writers, that condition is one of isolation, of an inability to relate to any reality outside oneself. Lucio has trouble finding Beate/ Trude’s message in the volume of Kleist’s letters; a month passes before he discovers the suicide note she left for him during their final night on Capri. In an effort to overcome their loneliness, people will huddle around a radio to listen to a familiar language and voice, even if the speaker is Adolf Hitler, or they will consent to lovemaking even at the cost of life itself. Like Lucio during his last night on Capri, they think they are waking up to reach out in the dark to embrace reality, but instead they find that they clasp the void.

Sources for Further Study

Brose, Margaret. “Alberto Moravia: Fetishism and Figuration,” in Novel. XV (Fall, 1981), pp. 62-75.

Harper’s. CCLXVI, April, 1983, p. 65.

Heiney, Donald. Three Italian Novelists: Moravia, Pavese, Vittorini, 1968.

Lewis, R.W.B. “Alberto Moravia: Eros and Existence,” in From Verismo to Experimentalism: Essays in the Modern Italian Novel, 1969.

Library Journal. CVIII, March 1, 1983, p. 517.

National Review. XXXV, September 2, 1983, p. 1084.

New Statesman. CVI, November 4, 1983, p. 27.

The New York Review of Books. XXX, June 30, 1983, p. 25.

The New York Times Book Review. LXXXVIII, May 8, 1983, p. 11.

Pacifici, Sergio. The Modern Italian Novel: From Pea to Moravia, 1979.

Publishers Weekly. CCXXIII, February 4, 1983, p. 363.

Time. CXXI, May 30, 1983, p. 80.

West Coast Review of Books. IX, July, 1983, p. 27.

World Literature Today. Autumn, 1982, p. 669.