SOURCE: "Pirandello between Fiction and Drama," translated by Glauco Cambon, in Pirandello: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Glauco Cambon, Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1967, pp. 83-90.

Leo was a leading German scholar of Romance literature. In the following excerpt from an essay that was originally published in Romanistiches Jarbuch in 1963, he compares the short story "Mrs. Frola and Her Son-In-Law, Mr. Ponza" to its stage adaptation, Right You Are (If You Think So), while asserting that Pirandello's short fiction is more artistically powerful than his dramas.

. . . In . . . L'uomo, la bestia e la virtù (Man, Beast and Virtue) we [can see] how the poetical sense of a work of narrative fiction vanished once that work was adapted for the stage, to make room for theatrical animation: the play had not grasped in its essence the short story from which it was derived. In . . . "O di uno o di nessuno" ("Either...