In "La Coscienza di Zeno", Svevo inscribes himself within the Habsburg literary tradition: A Habsburg subject writing in Italian more than an exclusively Italian national. Zeno’s behaviour towards Italian nationalism could be read as indifferent, while his allegiance is towards Trieste’s metropolitan identity under the Austrian empire. Svevo’s own pen name was culturally hybrid: it placed a strong emphasis on his identification with both Italian and German communities, seen as a merging of two equal cultures and their literary traditions.
The essay focuses on the fact that Zeno challenges the Italian cultural nationalism of Irredentist Trieste by means of an epistemology of the vernacular, thus it discusses the tension between Italian standard and dialect in Svevo’s earlier novels. The analysis then concerns "La Coscienza", where the protagonist’s autobiographical account springs from a seminal Ur-memory: the clandestine smoking of an Austrian brand of cigarettes that displayed the Habsburg coat of arms. Finally the author proposes a closer reading of the confessions presented as a diary. This last study might reveal a set of rhetorical strategies that aim at undermining the very cultural politics of Italian nationalists to which Zeno allegedly subscribes.
