'Giovanni Episcopo' is a brief, painful tragedy of low life, written under the influence of Russian evangelism, and full of reminiscences of Dostoïevsky's 'Crime and Punishment.' Giovanni is a poor clerk, of a weak, pusillanimous nature, completely dominated by a coarse, brutal companion, Giulio Wanzer, who makes him an abject slave, until a detected forgery compels Wanzer to flee the country. Episcopo then marries Ginevra, the pretty but unprincipled waitress at his _pension_, who speedily drags him down to the lowest depths of degradation, making him a mere nonentity in his own household, willing to live on the proceeds of her infamy. They have one child, a boy, Ciro, on whom Giovanni lavishes all his suppressed tenderness. After ten years of this martyrdom, the hated Wanzer reappears and installs himself as husband in the Episcopo household. Giovanni submits in helpless fury, till one day Wanzer beats Ginevra, and little Ciro intervenes to protect his mother. Wanzer turns on the child, and a spark of manhood is at last kindled in Giovanni's breast. He springs upon Wanzer, and with the pent-up rage of years stabs him. 'L'Innocente,' D'Annunzio's second long novel, also bears the stamp of Russian influence. It is a gruesome, repulsive story of domestic infidelity, in which he has handled the theory of pardon, the motive of numerous recent French novels, like Daudet's 'La Petite Paroisse' and Paul Marguerite's 'La Tourmente.' In another extended work, 'Il Trionfo della Morte' (The Triumph of Death), D'Annunzio appears as a convert to Nietzsche's philosophy and to Wagnerianism. Ferdinand Brunetière has pronounced it unsurpassed by the naturalistic schools of England, France, or Russia. In brief, the hero, Giorgio Aurispa, a morbid sensualist, with an inherited tendency to suicide, is led by fate through a series of circumstances which keep the thought of death continually before him. They finally goad him on to fling himself from a cliff into the sea, dragging with him the woman he loves. The 'Vergini della Rocca' (Maidens of the Crag), his last story, is more an idyllic poem than a novel. Claudio Cantelmo, sickened with the corruption of Rome, retires to his old home in the Abruzzi, where he meets the three sisters Massimilla, Anatolia, Violante: "names expressive as faces full of light and shade, and in which I seemed already to discover an infinity of grace, of passion, and of sorrow." It is inevitable that he should chose one of the three, but which? And in the dénouement the solution is only half implied. D'Annunzio is now occupied with a new romance; and coming years will doubtless present him all the more distinctively as a writer of Italy on whom French inflences have been seed sowed in fertile ground. The place in contemporary Italian of such work as his is indisputably considerable. THE DROWNED BOY From 'The Triumph of Death'